Laundry Chutes
My parents didn't have a laundry chute in their house. We experienced our indoor slides through the grace of my Aunt Jenny. By 'we' I mean me and my younger brother. We had access to her slide, or at least our cousins did. I wanted to try it so much I may have peed my pants a little while thinking about it. My parents didn't care.
As soon as we arrived to see my aunt's new home, I heard from my cousins about how great it was to play on the indoor slide. The metal ducting led down to a basket in the laundry room. When my Aunt Jenny gave her brother and the rest of us a tour, we followed her to every room, to the bathrooms, even to the attic. Jenny had a sparkling smile, great perfume, and the warm manners of a natural hostess. Her dark, auburn hair was beautiful. Everything she showed us was beautiful. A couple of my cousins lived in the attic and I envied the huge and weirdly segmented space they had. But the only place where I stopped and sighed was the tan-brown flip door to the laundry chute. I think the adults noticed.
After the tour, my cousin Annie took me aside.
"We can't play in the laundry chute while guests are here," she told me. "My momma says."
Her younger brother, Gary, nodded. He had heard the same orders. Gary was my age and one of my best friends. Annie was the voice of wisdom to us both. I slumped in disappointment. One of my older cousins, Bobby, was standing nearby. He saw my reaction.
"Maybe when the adults all go outside," he allowed.
"They might smoke on the back patio." Annie added thoughtfully. She was a rule-keeper. However, she was sharp about how adults worked.
Even when my understanding was limited, I knew enough to realize Annie was the best guide I had to the ineffable world of social rules. If she said grown-ups wouldn't care about us using the laundry chute if we didn't bother them about it, then she was right.
Although the adults did eventually walk out onto the patio to smoke, we didn't get to use the slide on our first visit to Aunt Jenny. The timing didn't work out. I got to romp around the house with Gary, though, so I wasn't too disappointed. Plus we played board games with my older cousins, who were understanding about my age and lack of understanding, hence fun. As we left their house, I closed my eyes. In my car seat, I pictured myself next time, sliding down the inside of Aunt Jenny's house. The idea burned me so much I felt it in my arms and belly.
But we didn't even get to look at the laundry chute in our second, brief visit. We had to follow a grown-up agenda. It was our third trip when, finally, we were granted sleepover privileges. The adults wanted to do their unknowable (or just unmemorable) things, whatever they were. I wanted to play with Gary, maybe Annie, maybe even Bobby or Jim or the neighborhood kids. With luck, we could read comic books at night. I'd almost forgotten about the slide.
In the morning after the sleepover, the adults abruptly drove off. They wanted breakfast out. Gary was the first to see the opportunity.
"Their car just pulled out of the driveway," he whispered as he approached me in the hall. Even when he was trying to be sly and conspiratorial, Gary had a wistful, abstracted smile. He was already looking forward to something. "We could slide down to the laundry for a while."
Gary organized it, so he went first. He laughed when he hit the basket in the basement garage. He clambered out, made some unseen adjustments, and called to me up through the ductwork.
"Okay, it's your turn!"
As I scrambled in, I held my breath. The space was smaller than I'd realized. The slide down shocked me. The laundry chute ductwork was big enough - and it was fast - but this was the first time I'd descended in pitch darkness. It was also my first experience with claustrophobia in a slide. The thrill of fear lasted a couple seconds. I popped out into the bright lights of the garage and plopped into the laundry.
I laughed until I held my sides. They really hurt. The panic, the relief, and then the fun of sailing through the air into the pile of laundry made me hyperventilate.
"Wanna do it again?" Gary asked. He leaned down to check on me.
"Yeah!" My body went from lying down, gasping, to springing up on my toes, ready.
"Let's go!" He raced through the garage side door and into the house. I hopped over the canvas-covered basket wall and thundered after him.
After a couple more trips down the slide, my younger brother discovered us. Naturally, he demanded a turn. And immediately after that, Annie found us all. She didn't approve. In fact, she worried about us, especially about my brother. Nevertheless, she agreed this was the right time to play. The adults had gone. Annie took over playtime and became our slide supervisor. She decided whose turn it was and if the laundry at the bottom was piled deep enough.
"You are not allowed to stop," she told my brother after he playfully halted himself in the middle of the laundry chute. He let himself fall again a few seconds later but the pause worried Annie. She focused on me because it was my turn next. "You, either."
She glared at Gary and her older brother Bobby, who had joined in, on the basis those two had likely given my brother the idea. (She was correct.) I was totally in awe of all three cousins. They didn't just have the best slide in the world; they had advanced themselves to the point where they did tricks while using it.
My younger brother raced up the stairs and announced, "This is the most fun I've had in a house!"
I knew what he meant. I felt like I could have ridden the laundry chute all day and all night. I would have happily slept in the laundry basket at the bottom. It would have been the best way to wake up early and slide again in the morning. We kept taking turns.
"I hear tires," Annie said eventually.
"They're here." Bobby spied out the window. "Hurry up, hurry up!"
Gary had been the last to slide down to the garage. That was good because he knew how to put the laundry basket back where it belonged. My three cousins skittered frantically in different directions all at once.
There's a classic cartoon in which Donald Duck panics and dashes around trying to fix all the messes he's made in a room before he's discovered. This was the same sort of thing but with three ducks quacking and hopping with worry. In the end, though, the cousins succeeded. Mostly under Annie's supervision, they restored the house to a reasonable level of neatness for adult approval.
My brother and I didn't get to visit again for nine months. The next time we arrived, I found the laundry chute door sealed. Amazingly, my aunt and uncle seemed to be working to remove it.
"What happened?" I asked Gary.
"Bobby got stuck." He waved impatiently at the laundry chute door. "It was kind of a big thing. The firemen came."
Gary liked firemen. He loved fire trucks, too, so he should have looked happier. As it turned out, the problem had been bigger than he admitted at first. He didn't want to talk about it. I had to get the details from Annie.
Bobby, my second oldest cousin, had hit a growth spurt. During it, he started to find it hard to fit down the laundry chute. But the laundry chute was fun. He ignored the rug burns (really, metal joint burns) he started to get from the slide. He ignored the two shirt buttons that one trip ripped off him.
After a couple more close calls, he resisted the impulse to go sliding for a month. But then he did it again. And he got stuck.
This was not a matter of getting caught in a cute way. Bobby wasn't left with his legs kicking comically in the air. He didn't get pinched by his fat like Winnie the Pooh and with his head poking out in the hallway at the top of the stairs. No, Bobby had no fat. He was a skinny guy, just grown too big for the ducts, which formed a kind of S shape within the wall. On the day he jammed, he made it through the curve at the top. Where it bent near the bottom, toward the garage, is where he got stuck.
1. Picture a tight space where you can't move your arms or legs.
2. Make it utterly dark.
3. And you're jammed so hard in the stomach and chest, you can barely breathe.
No, it didn't sound like a cute sort of accident. Bobby panicked. He yelled. His brothers tried to rescue him. They lowered knotted towels to let him grab on. They tried to pull him up. No success. They tried to pull him the rest of the way down, instead. Even worse. He jammed tighter.
Bobby's parents arrived and tried to rescue him. Again, they made it a little worse. At least they felt secure enough in their understanding of a nearly dire situation to call the fire department. Even the emergency crew, though, felt flummoxed by the situation. While they tried to figure out how to get the job done - cutting into the wall and the duct meant possibly cutting into Bobby - the young teen spent another hour stranded in a dark, narrow space. Eventually, the rescue team poured grease on him and pulled on his feet. Success!
"My momma says it's off limits," Annie concluded. After her story, I wasn't tempted.
Well, I wasn't tempted for about half an hour. My younger brother, the smallest of us at the time, felt the rule shouldn't apply to him. I sort of felt the same. When my brother learned the slide was getting blocked off and removed, he panicked. He begged me, got me to take his side, stomped his feet over the unfairness of the house rules, and appealed to Annie.
Later in the day, I trotted in through the garage taking a break from a game of freeze tag. My little brother popped out of the laundry chute and fell into a mound of laundry.
My mouth opened in outrage. When I advanced on Annie, ready to make my case about how unfair this was, she turned her back and disappeared.
I never did get to try the laundry chute again.
#
Laundry chutes were common features in multi-story homes between 1920 and 1970. Since then, most buildings have done away with them. Although children getting stuck was a factor in putting them out of style, the more important reason turns out to be house fires. Flames travel between floors faster when a house has a laundry chute.
There's no reason modern laundry chutes can't have safety features like their own sprinklers in case of a fire. It's probably easier to make people carry their laundry downstairs, though, so here we are.
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