Fish in The Basement

When I was about a year old, my parents decided that their family of five was growing fast, and space had become limited. They bought a very cheap house in a rural farm town in southwest Minnesota. The house had been broken into and badly vandalized before they purchased it, but that was not an issue, as my father was a master carpenter and saw that the house had good bones. After the house was made livable, our family moved in.

The two-bedroom, one-bathroom house was still not adequate. We all made due, though. While my parents had their small bedroom, my two older brothers shared the smaller second bedroom. I had the luxury of sleeping in the hallway that connected the two rooms and staircase.

The congestion eased over time. My parents, relatives, friends, and community members helped by adding a massive addition to the house. On the main floor, another two bedrooms, a bathroom, and laundry were added, yet some of the addition remained closed off and under construction for many years after. Below the main floor was what we referred to as the addition basement. It didn’t connect to the main basement and wasn’t much more than a hole.

The addition basement floor, or lack thereof, was dirt and clay covered in a foot of pea rock and various plywood offcuts. Timber of all shapes and sizes was stacked here and there as the addition basement was a makeshift storage area. The large area above remained unfinished, with no subfloor or supports, for most of my childhood. Beside the open space, a simple wood staircase led down to the pea rock from a small landing on the main floor. As kids, we loved to jump from the stairs into the pea rock, each turn testing our bravery to jump from the next highest step, landing hard, feeling our feet tingle from the impact, and spraying pea rock everywhere.

Since the addition basement was nowhere near complete, the closing of long Minnesota winters would pose a new element as the snow would melt, and the water would find its way into the addition basement. The pea rock would soon become a basin as puddles formed in the low parts of the clay foundation. Sometimes, it would get so bad that the entire basement would fill with water over two feet deep.

One year, my oldest brother, Travis, had gone fishing with friends on the nearby Minnesota River. Travis had leftover minnows that he didn’t want to do away with. To save money on his upcoming fishing trips, he kept the minnows by releasing them into the flooded basement with the intent to catch and use them on later fishing trips.

Every day, Travis would sneak downstairs and feed them bread without anyone’s knowledge. One day, while my parents were at work, my other brother, Shane, and I couldn’t help but notice that Travis was messing around in the addition basement. No one usually went down there alone; if they did, it wouldn’t be long. Typically, we wouldn’t go down there unless our dad was home. Travis’s unusual behavior caught our attention, and we had to investigate. Since Travis realized he was busted, he had to tell us his secret. Like most of our bizarre adventures, Travis opened up with, “Hey guys! Wanna see something cool?” Of course, we did! Everything Travis did was cool in our eyes. Travis was now a teenager in high school, where Shane and I were still in middle school. We wanted so badly to be part of anything that teenagers did. With the quick warning, “You can’t tell Mom and Dad!” he ushered us downstairs to what had become an indoor fish farm. The minnows had thrived! They were no longer the inch-long speedy swimmers you got at the bait shop. They were fish! They were fully grown fish!

A week or so had gone by, and secretly feeding the fish had become our daily group activity. We had earned his trust; we got to hang out with our cool teenage brother without getting made fun of or copping arm-numbing punches to the shoulder. There was no way we wanted to lose this opportunity.

One day, Travis’s friend, Brian, came over, and we invited him to join our daily ritual. After handfuls of torn-up bread were delivered to hungry mouths, we lost interest and started getting other ideas. Some nearby lumber had proven buoyant enough to stand on, and we hastily began building two makeshift rafts. Before long, it had become a competition. We fought for any bit of scrap wood that could prove seaworthy. Travis and Brian, being older and stronger, teamed up and took their lion’s share of everything good, while Shane and I did our best with what remained.

Since I was the lighter of the two of us, I captained our vessel while Shane awkwardly pushed and steered as best he could. Travis, a lean yet athletic high school track star, commanded their ship as Brian, a stout lineman on the high school football team, easily muscled it around.

In that moment, we were foul-mouthed, unsupervised pirates, taking turns cruising back and forth through the water, slinging insults at the opposing crew along the way. Name-calling and trash-talking quickly escalated as Travis got the idea to remove his T-shirt, drench it in icy basement water, and swung it around at his side before snapping it toward Shane and me. Like the towel-snapping shenanigans that go on in every boy’s locker room, the T-shirt did just the same.

On the offensive, I matched my opponent by hastily removing my top. Shane and I knew we were completely outmatched, but we charged on regardless. With a quick whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, Travis’s T-shirt met the side of my body with a loud and painful snap! My body reeled in pain as I screamed and cursed. Travis and Brian exploded into triumphant laughs. Shane worked with all of his strength to reposition our battleship. As we neared again, I swung my shirt around a few times as hard as my skinny, prepubescent arms could muster and projected the loose end toward Travis. My attack had little to no effect on him as he fired a counterattack that connected with my body with even greater precision and force than the previous hit. He had refined his strike and asserted his dominance as the Pirate King. I, on the other hand, had failed to add the one key element that would make my weapon as lethal as his: water. The dry shirt had little effect and opened us up for even greater embarrassment.

I screamed louder as Shane pulled our raft back in a hasty retreat. Travis and Brian laughed harder. I was angry and unwilling to let them get the best of me. By then, Travis and Brian were screaming and laughing wildly, while Shane and I were screaming in fear but too proud to give up.

By round three, I was determined to hit Travis with everything I had. He wasn't letting up, either. As their opponents, Travis and Brian’s triumphant joy only angered us more.

Unready to back down, Shane realigned our raft while I wet my shirt, and we charged. Angry and embarrassed, I was determined to make my shot count. Travis showed no signs of letting up, either.

Brian pushed the raft forward in the same way he would drive weighted sleds around at football practice. With a rush of adrenaline, both parties surged forward. Travis bolstered his determination to make this round hurt even more by letting out a battle cry and, this time, swinging his shirt over his head. The rotation of his shirt was even louder than before.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! POP!

Everything went black. We went silent. Broken glass sprayed in every direction. The extension cord and lightbulb that, moments before, were suspended by a nail in one of the support beams above our heads had been struck by Travis's wet shirt, shattering the bulb and sending the live extension cord into the water. At that moment, the fate of four boys and a dozen fish came into question.

“GET OUT OF THE WATER!” exploded Travis.

He switched from our greatest fear to our protector. In the pitch black, our bare feet searched blindly for higher ground that wasn’t laden with broken glass and exposed nails as Travis pulled Shane and me toward safety. The boards below us would sink under our weight, and the concrete lip that protruded from the foundation's edge was only good enough to stand on if our hands could gain a secure grip on the wall and support beams. Our feet slipped from the lip into the slick clay surrounding the foundation's edge. Although unstable, stepping in the clay kept us out of the water so long as we kept moving our feet up to the concrete lip of the foundation. In the darkness, it was unavoidable as we found ourselves accepting anything to stand on.

Trailing slick clay and pea rock, we worked our way to the light of the upstairs and onto the main floor of the house. Then, we hurried outside to clean ourselves with a garden hose in the yard before cleaning up the mess inside. In the meantime, we made a pact never to mention our near-death experience to our parents.