So I was at church the other night, serving time in the younger kid wing of the penitentiary. I think it was the five and six-year-olds that I was tasked with wrangling that evening, together with my wife and another couple that pulled the short straw. The evening was going well for the most part. Pretty uneventful. I was swapping war stories with a kid that had a fresh forehead scar from a tangle with a piano. He had graduated to second coolest kid in his house with that one (I think he said one of his brothers had already been out of the ER twice with stitches).
I noticed another kid asking about the snack situation. Sunday evenings we don’t provide snacks to the minimum security inmates. I had already told him that. He was spreading the bad news around in the general population, stirring up discontent. I’d been in situations like this before. We were minutes away from peak riot unless somebody did something. I had an idea.
“Anybody ever drilled a hole in the floor of your own house?”
A line like that is sure to get the attention of those serving fifteen minutes to life in the children’s church. They’re always looking for a way to escape, and the too often used “I have to go to the bathroom” tactic quit working thirty minutes ago.
With their attention off the snack shortage I jumped into a story. It wasn’t exactly a great escape story as the hook implied. Quite the opposite in fact. I proceeded to tell them about a time when I had somebody trying to tunnel into my house. And that somebody went by the name of Old Man Pin Oak.
Here’s the story in a nutshell: I noticed some strange stuff going on in my house. Strange tapping noises coming from the walls. Voices echoing up out of the drains. And whenever I’d run the shower or flush a toilet, curses would come up from below. Not sure what it was, I proceeded one night to put my ear to the ground for a closer listen. Voices…
“We’ll never make it inside at this rate. The blasted people keep washing us further down the pipe. Curse them. Wicked water wasters.”
I raised my head. Huh? What in the world—? Back to the floor.
“Stop your whining. What’d you expect, crawling in through the bloody drain. It’s you that didn’t want to dig. So much faster this way, you said. Har.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How’d somebody get inside my drain pipes? Who’d be able to fit?
“I knows what’ll fix ‘em. We can get ‘him’ to help us, har har.”
“Who’s ‘him’? How’re we gun get anybody to help us down here?”
“Oh hush up. We’ll get the Old Man to help us. He’s just the one for this job.”
“The Old Man? You mean that old Pin Oak? I heard he’d recently been licked by this lot. How’s he supposed to help us?”
“Licked indeed, har. All the more reason he’ll be wantin’ some payback. He’ll stop the water. He’ll even help us with the tunneling. We’ll be inside in no time.”
The last time I had a run in with Old Man Pin Oak I’d had to saw off several lengths of his greedy fingers and toes that were reaching into my plumbing pipes. He’s a massive old tree that for the most part sits harmlessly spread out across the majority of my backyard. He’s a thirsty bugger, though.
I held my breath, thought about it for a minute, and then flushed the toilet, holding the handle down until the tank was good and empty.
“What’s that? Water incoming! Not again. Hold onto your hat—”
A couple bubbles gurgled up mixed with the frustrated screams. I clapped my hands together, hoping that was the end of whatever that was.
Unfortunately it wasn’t long before signs made me remember this nefarious plumbing plan. It started with bubbling. Then gurgling. Then everything clogging.
I proceed to describe to the child inmates how I sprang into action, wielding a concrete discombobulator, a recommissioned Soviet sonar system pulled off a submarine at my local pick-and-pay junkyard, and my trusty spinny-sparky-wheel of death. I chipped through miles of concrete, prehistoric strata of dirt, and inches of solid cast iron to find myself finally inside of the tunnel these crooks were hoping to use to break into my house.
I found their entry hole. I hacked off the hundred fingered tentacles of Old Man Pin Oak, only to see three new tendrils sprout up from where ever I struck. The spinny-sparky-wheel of death did nothing. Luckily I had been listening to some Brian Sauve while preparing for this, and my trusty axe was plenty sharp. If it be good enough for Donar’s Oak, Old Man Pin Head didn’t stand a chance.
His greedy roots were hacked back in no time, and after a proper pipe repair to this weakened part of my house’s defenses, I sent enough water down the drains to flush a whole army of Neptune’s henchmen back to the abyss from which they crawled.
I clapped off the memory of the dirt from my hands, expecting the kids to join me with raucous applause. Crickets. And then—
“You didn’t really shrink down and go inside your pipe. You’re lying.”
I’m telling you the polkadotted truth, if we’d been in a Western saloon instead of children’s church that kid would have found himself thrown out the front window for that one.
I’d showed them photographic evidence of everything I’d said. The pipe. The hole chiseled through the floor. The hacked off remains of Old Man Pin Oak. The spinny-sparky-wheel of death. And to be called a liar in spite of all of that.
I felt like I had found myself standing face to face with one, Eustace Scrubb.
Now if you don’t know who Eustace Scrubb is, then it is very likely that you either are him or are in the process of raising him. He’s the sort of kid that “liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.”1 He wasn’t the sort for stories that involved the imagination, that organ of the intellect that stands astride one’s reason and emotions as if they were two dolphin-sized goldfish swimming in a jade green ocean with a piebald man akimbo on top piloting them around Venus (and if you already don’t know who Scrubb is, you’ve no chance of placing this ridiculously Lewisian metaphor).
This kid, by wrongly combining the picture of a four inch drain pipe together with the gnawing hunger of his goldfish-free stomach, couldn’t see the sense of my story. Like Scrubb, he “had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons. That is why he was so puzzled…”2
His mind couldn’t reconcile facts about drains versus stories about them. One was true, but the other was even truer true.
I felt bad for the kid. So I didn’t threaten him or challenge him to a duel or anything. But maybe I should have. Reepicheep did.
And if you’re the sort of parent that doesn’t know that part of the story of Eustace Scrubb, then please may I recommend that you pick up a copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Read it to your five or six-year-old (or thirteen-year-old for that matter). And while you’re undragoning the poor kid with that, may I recommend you read Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child so that you can begin the undragoning of yourself.
Eustace Scrubb is one of the greatest characters ever imagined, whose arc is arguably the greatest in Narnian history. And even though he is, in fact, a figment of someone’s imagination, He is one of those truer than true kinds of people. And what happened to him is the truest thing that can happen to a real person, the kind which begins as a figment of the imagination of God.
The imagination is something greater than both the rationality of one’s head and the emotions of one’s stomach. It’s a component of the chest. It connects and controls the others, and I join Lewis in wishing the world were fuller of men with such well-formed faculties. And such people have the beginnings of their character arcs somewhere around the same place as Eustace Scrubb. Or sometimes in the minimum security wing of your local church.
Here’s to your eventual undragoning. Godspeed.
Lewis, C.S. “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” p. 2.
ibid., p. 91.
Goes on easy but in the end only Aslan can get it off?