Behind that sealed wall was a stairway. Narrow, steep, concrete. It went down about ten feet into the ground under the house. At the bottom was a steel door with a big wheel handle, like on a ship.
I turned the wheel. The door swung open with a groan.
It was a room. Concrete walls, a concrete ceiling, maybe twelve feet by fourteen. Four metal bunks. Shelves floor to ceiling, stocked with cans of food, jugs of water, a first aid kit, a hand crank radio, board games, and a stack of books for children. Everything covered in a thin layer of dust. The cans had dates from 1962.
It was a fallout shelter.
The young couple, Derek and Mia, came down behind me with their flashlights. Mia picked up a can of peaches. She said, is this from the Cuban Missile Crisis?
It was. On the wall above the bunks was a calendar still turned to October 1962. And a note, taped to the steel door on the inside. It said, If you are reading this, the world did not end. Thank God. We built this for our children. We prayed we would never need it. We never did. Love, the Harper family.
A family had built a whole room to survive the end of the world, and then sealed it up and went on living, because they were grateful they never had to use it.
Derek and Mia found the family through the county deed office. Dan Harper and his wife built the house in 1958. He was an engineer at the glass plant in Bridgeport. They had three kids. The youngest, a man named Jim Harper, was seventy two and lived in Morgantown.
Mia called him. He laughed out loud on the phone. He said he forgot all about it. He said his dad dug it by hand over two summers, and the kids used to play in it when their mother was not looking. He said they sealed it up in 1975 when his mother got tired of worrying somebody would get trapped down there.
Jim drove over that weekend. He walked down those stairs slowly, holding the rail. At the bottom, he stood in the doorway a long time. He pointed at the bottom bunk on the left and said, that was mine.
Then he picked up one of the board games, a battered box of Candy Land, and opened it. Inside, stuck to the lid, was a note in crayon. Jimmy wins every time. He always cheats.
Jim laughed so hard he had to sit on the bunk.
Derek and Mia closed on the house the next week. They cleaned out the old cans and kept everything else. They turned the shelter into a game room for their kids.
The note from the Harpers is still taped to the inside of the door. So is the old calendar.
Jim comes by every few months. He brings his grandkids. They play Candy Land on his old bunk.
Twenty years inspecting houses. That is the first room I ever found that nobody ever needed, and everybody was glad of it.