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A Series About Childhood Memories |
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finally reveals the sordid truth with the confession: TEENAGE CAVEMAN! |
 A 17-year-old Caveman emerges from his cave. |
MOM: Don't go in that cave!
Ron: Sure, Mom; I Promise!
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
| I'M BETTING my childhood pal Dougie Mansfield still lives in mortal fear that when he dies, the local paper will record the event under the headline: |
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Pals haven't forgotten |
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As far as I know, Dougie, left the mainland U.S. about 40 years ago to live on a South Sea island and hasn't been back since. I imagine it's a great relief to him to be living his life out on a remote Pacific island where the natives never heard of the 'Cave Boy' and his humiliating ordeal in the early 1950s. But some of us still remember how Dougie got stuck in the mouth of a limestone cave and, for awhile, neither all the king's horses nor all the king's men seemed likely to ever pull him out again. Dougie was the first Teenage Caveman I ever knew about, but he wasn't the last. In fact, I, too, became a Teenage Caveman--even though my vibrant memory of Dougie's catastophe in the very same cave made me very, very unwilling to leave the surface of the earth and go...down below...for many years. Here's the story about
some California boys of the 1950s, including Dougie and me, and
how they became Teenage Cavemen: "Neat-0!" said Dougie Mansfield, who lived down the block from me. Dougie longed to be the radio operator on my Cyclotram, whenevre I decided to head for the Earth's core--or whatever vehicle we pretended to be piloting in our after-school games of imagination. He always insisted on being called "Sparks," no matter what sort of game we were playing, because he figured we would have to communicate with mission control and the natural guy to do that would be a radio operator named "Sparks." Dougie happened to be a bit on the tubby side, so he probably figured his feelings wouldn't be hurt if he volunteered to be the radio operator instead of losing out to me or somebody else when time came to pick the "captain," our usual name for the leader of the pack, who never was a fat kid. In other words, he always cast himself in a supporting part. Ironically, though, Dougie soon became something of a neighborhood leading man because he really did become a radio operator and kids used to line up to watch him twisting dials and throwing switches to bring in foreign countries and ships at sea on his ham radio. Anyway, Dougie and I got interested in exploring caves before we actually became teenagers, but we never worked up the nerve to do it then. Our reason: We lived on the East Side of Santa Cruz and the caves were way to the west. Too young to drive, we couldn't get over there without taking a really long bike ride--and we weren't really sure where the good caves were located. Real Reason: We were too scared to go through the round hole at the opening of a cave and drop into the "unknown world." When we got to junior high school, Dougie and I went in different directions. We stopped playing the old military-style games because they were sort of "un-neat" for teenagers and we made new friends from outside the neighborhood. After awhile, I didn't see him much anymore. Then one afternoon my mom met me at the door as I came home, saying "Ronnie, you've got to hear this!" She dragged me into the living room and plunked me down in front of the console radio. It was tuned to the main local station, which was, in fact, the only radio station in town. They were doing a very unusual--maybe even unheard of--live news report. It was about a boy who was stuck in a cave. "It's like that Floyd Collins thing," she said, which meant nothing to me. She was referring to a famous news story of the past about a man who was trapped in a collapsed mine. Coverage of that event mesmerized the nation as rescuers desperately tried to save him. They ultimately failed. It sounded to me a lot like that movie "Ace in the Hole" with Kirk Douglas, which had just played the local theater. Then we both almost fell into the radio when they announced the name of the boy they were trying to get out of the cave: Dougie Mansfield! It seemed Dougie had backed into the cave entrance and slid down inside the first chamber. To go further, you had to inch your way under a huge slab of rock, then drop over a ledge into a much bigger chamber. Dougie had done all that, but when it came to leaving and his pals had gotten out okay, he ran into a little trouble. To get out, he had to pull himself up by musclepower--which bunched up his muscles and his fat and turned the middle of his body into a huge cork. Which became stuck in the mouth of the bottle--the cave entrance. For hours we listened to this fascinating live drama. Firemen tried to grease Dougie's stomach so he'd pop out, but he just laughed because it tickled so much. It didn't work anyway. They tried all kinds of devices to tug him out, but they had to stop because Dougie started wailing and they were afraid they were dislocating his arms. A bold reporter finally wiggled down to Dougie and asked him for his reaction to his dilemma. As I recall, Dougie said, "I'm starving to death!" By that time my dad was home from work and listening, too. "Maybe they oughta leave Dougie down there for a week or so," he said. "He could stand to lose some of that fat." Normally, I would have laughed, but I guess I was starting to worry about Dougie ever getting out. Finally, the radio guy said they were considering using a jackhammer to bust up the rock around Dougie, even though there was a chance that might collapse the whole cave entrance. Then somebody else got a bright idea. They asked Dougie if he could wiggle enough to drop back into the cave. "I wanna get out!," he whined. "You're not gonna seal me up in here, are you?" They assured him that wasn't the plan. So, Dougie reluctantly tried to push himself backwards and it worked. He dropped out of sight into the cave. That's when they brought in Melody Whitaker. Melody was a slender little Girl Scout who knew Dougie. She had volunteered to slide down the cave entrance and try to push Dougie from behind. I knew Melody from school and I can tell you she was a very pretty little girl--and was good at sports. The radio guy must have been impressed, too, because he made her sound like Wonder Woman. In just a few minutes, Melody got things organized and Dougie was back in the cave opening, struggling to get out again, with Melody pushing on his butt. Still nothing gave. Melody's mom got panicked because she knew Dougie's fat gut was shutting out all the light in the cave, not to mention the air. That's when one of the firemen got the brilliant idea that Melody should pull Dougie's pants off. "Oh, no!" Dougie moaned. "No, please, no!" But everybody was getting worn out and it was night already. They insisted on trying anything that wasn't totally stupid. So Melody tugged and grunted and finally yanked Dougie's pants down. Then she started pushing on his ample butt at the same time the firemen grabbed him by both arms and pulled real hard. Suddenly, it was over. Dougie popped out of the cave, said the radio guy, "like the cork from a champagne bottle." When the radio reporter got to Dougie and asked him for another reaction, I believe he said, "I'm hungry. Does anybody have a sandwich?" "That's Dougie, all right," said my dad. I got most of this detail
about the rescue from the newspaper coverage the next day. It
was all over page one. Then, a month or so later, I ran into
Dougie, who hadn't been talking to anyone much since he became
known all over town as "The Cave Boy." Dougie assured me that was nowhere near the most embarrassing part. He said the real humiliation came when Melody pulled his pants down. "Gee, Dougie,"
I said, "wasn't it like a matter of life or death? Who cares
if a girl saw you in your underpants at a time like that?" "I was pushing so hard I had a brown-out in my pants," he said. "Who wants a girl like Melody to see that?" Well, he had a point there. Anyway, Dougie took it as a major hint to go on a diet and the last time I saw him he was looking tall and in pretty good shape. In fact, if we'd still been playing make believe games like before, I think he could have made the rank of "captain" pretty easily.
Of course, Dougie's little mishap caused the town to think seriously about closing down the cave entrances. They were afraid the next kid might go cave-exploring alone and nobody would ever get him out. But the local spelunkers raised hell, so the town just dynamited the really risky caves and left the others alone. Oddly enough, Dougie's cave remained open. "I don't want YOU ever going near that cave," my mom told me. "Don't worry," I told her. "I wouldn't go down there for a million bucks." Well, that was that year--long before I started running around with Dave Lumpkin, cave explorer, who was slim and athletic and reckless and loved slithering down caves in search of lost worlds. He lived on Cave Gulch Road, the Amazon river basin for limestone caves, and so he'd been doing it forever. Around that time there was a limerick going around that went like this:
Naturally, the guys who knew Dave was a teenage caveman started calling hm "Hermit Dave." He teased us back about being "kissies," the 1950s term for a wuss. That got to me and clouded my better judgment. By the time I was 17 I was pretty lean and mean myself and was interested in doing athletic things that didn't involve throwing, batting or kicking balls--at least not the inflatable kind. So I took up his dare. "Let's do it," I finally said, so off we went one day with coils of rope and little miner hats equipped with carbide lamps. When we got to the cave mouth, I got this uncanny feeling like I'd been there before. "This isn't Dougie Mansfield's cave, is it?" I asked. "We're not fat," said Dave. "Just do what I do and you'll be all right." Dropping backward into the cave was easy, although I had this phobia about stepping on a rattlesnake in the dark. The hard part was sliding under that huge chunk of rock. When you feel there are tens of tons of rock pressing down on you, it's a creepy feeling. All at once I had this real appreciation of Dougie's dilemma. How the heck did he ever squeeze his butt through that narrow space? But once I got through, I dropped into a huge chamber with stalagmites and stalagtites all around us. They all looked like giant wax candles that had melted, then been frozen into rock. We started to explore. We used our ropes to climb up "chimneys" of rock. Much of the way it was easy because earlier explorers had wedged iron bars into the tops of the chimneys, so you could loop your ropes over them and climb without much effort. There was one chimney, though, that we had to go up by stretching our legs across the shaft and edging ourselves up gradually. Though I was way too mature to expect to find artifacts of a lost civilization down there, any prehistoric beast remains from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar or signs of those horror movie goblins called "The Mole People," I did hope to find something. As it turned out, I found used condoms and cave drawings that were a bit more explicit than the Cro-Magnons would have left. That was a bit of a letdown. When it came time to leave, Dave went up first and left me in the hole. As I approached the narrow space under the giant lip of rock, I couldn't help thinking of Dougie. My muscles bunched up, too, as I lifted myself into the aperture, but I didn't have any fat to bunch up with it. Once I relaxed and started to pull myself upward, I slid through the gap easily. Once we were out of the cave and breathing the fresh, clean air of the forest around us, we pulled bottles of pop out of our packs and toasted the experience. "Here's to adventure!"
said Dave. © 2001 by Ron Miller. This story is largely true, but Dougie Mansfield, Melody Whitaker and Dave Lumpkin aren't the real names of the people involved. The photos are from Ron Miller's collection. |
You can comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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