the gas mask

In the fifties, our parents worried about screen time as much as parents these days. The screens, our little imaginations, the influences mostly comic books. WWII popular, and we were always playing army, dad went down to the surplus store and came home with army helmets. We dug foxholes and throw kindling wood grenades at each other.  The old man didn't know about throwing the wood at each other but we felt safe under the helmets. 

One place we lived the foxhole bunker seemed to dig out almost too easy, then we realized the outhouse used to stand on that spot.  What's this white stuff? Oh, No! Gag, fill in this hole.  Out behind the garage, Mom never found out about that you can be sure.   

A year or two before that incident and in another town, a bleak winter day, cold and clear and it's always windy in that place. Across the street and partway up an alley and some kids have dug a good-sized hole, probably the filled-in outhouse pit. Three foot deep and maybe a little longer and wider. Most of it covered with some old wood planks that they had shoveled dirt over to seal the bunker below. By the time I came along, big kids were fooling with a gas mask one of them had cut from an old milk carton and six feet of garden hose.  Got the idea from comic books.

No duck tape in those days, and I halfway remember the hose attached to the face mask, but maybe the victim who had to go in the hole to test it just held things in place with his hands.  I'm littlest, so in the hole I went with the face mask, hose leading to the surface, the last board put over my head, dirt shoveled on top.  

I'm in there and don't seem to have suffered claustrophobia although I can't imagine why.  At first, I'm telling the guys above where I see light so they can shovel more dirt over me, make sure I'm breathing only through the gas mask. Big kids, third grade and I'm in kindergarten, handled the hose on the surface while I'm sealed into the bunker. 

The gas mask. Wouldn't be a gas mask without some gas now would it?  Easy enough. Get the lawnmower gas from the garage, pour a little down the breathing tube.  

I remember choking when the fumes came down the tube, can't figure why it's not working.  Lucky someone didn't come walking by, toss a burning cigarette, and ...  gasoline splashed all over the place.

The planks and dirt over me were pretty flimsy and I come out about that time or I wouldn't be here to tell the story.  Just one of the things free-range kids used to do for fun.  

These days someone would go to prison for allowing their children to bury some kid and pour gasoline down his throat. Probably make the papers.  "Mom says she didn't know what the boys were up to way out by the alley.

When I came up the kids' creed started with "what the parents don't know won't hurt us ' Do they have pre-teen kid culture like that anymore or has it been killed by a different way of treating childhood these days?