One Girl, One Barrel

It's all fun and games until someone gets stuck in a barrel...

My dad was a welder so we moved a lot when Mike and I were growing up. Whenever it was time to pack up and move somewhere, Dad would come home with a load of big barrels that were made of some kind of indestructible, thick cardboard with a metal bottom, a metal ring around the top and a metal lid that snapped down onto the ring to close the barrel. The barrel was about four feet tall and approximately twenty inches across—big enough to hold the few valuables that managed to survive each successive move. As long as our “stuff” was in those barrels, it was safe because the barrels were indestructible. There was virtually nothing that would destroy them.

When I was ten years old, we moved to a tiny Texas Panhandle town with the unlikely name of Dimmitt. Once again, Mom and Dad left us to our own devices while they went out. Most of our stuff was still packed, so we were bored. I decided to dress Mike up like a girl. This was one of my favorite pastimes when we were children. As much as I loved my brother, I always wanted a sister too. We went into Mom’s room and found her wigs. I picked out the most flattering style (a very nice swingy pageboy with bangs), put it on Mike and then talked him into letting me put some makeup on him. He made a great looking girl, but he resisted my wardrobe suggestions and insisted on sticking with the shorts and cowboy boots he was wearing. However, I did talk him into a wide belt with a lovely gold buckle to complete his ensemble.

He found his play guitar (one of the few safe toys my parents bought for him) and began serenading me, wearing that wig and the wide belt. We both screamed with laughter and the more we laughed, the funnier he got. I guess the giggles got the best of me because for some reason I'll never understand, my eyes lit upon one of those empty barrels and I said to Mike, “Hey, I bet you I can crawl in that barrel backward.” He took me up on the bet. I made a big production of laying the barrel over on its side and then ceremoniously knelt down in front of it with my legs tucked up beneath me. I leaned forward and started to inch my way backward into the barrel, giggling all the while. Mike was jumping around, strumming his guitar, giggling and shouting “Go, Kim, go.”

As it turned out, going into the barrel was fine—no problem at all. Mike and I were yucking it up—ha, ha, how funny is this, Kim fits in the barrel. Mike pushed the barrel and rolled me around the room for a while until I started to feel a little queasy and decided that was enough of that. It was all fun and games until I tried to come out of the barrel. I thought it would be as easy as going in, but I could not have ben more wrong.. I tried to wriggle forward the way I had wriggled backward to get in there in the first place. That didn’t work. I tried moving one arm at a time. Nope. I tried pushing forward; wriggling and moving my arms all at the same time which only made things worse. I was wedged in there like a rock in a hard place. No matter how I tried to move, it didn’t work. I could not get out; I couldn’t move even an inch. I tried to be calm. There had to be an answer and, after all, I was the one who always had the answers. Mike kept reaching into the barrel trying to find my hands to pull me out, but my hands were stuck about halfway inside on the ends of my, by this time, totally numb arms. Every time he tried to grab my hands to pull me out, it irritated me. It wasn’t long before I completely lost it. The realization that I was trapped hit me like a sledgehammer. I freaked out. “Get me out of here! Help me! I’m stuck! I have to get out of here! I can’t breathe!”

I could actually breathe just fine, the barrel wasn’t compressing my lungs or anything like that, but I was so freaked out I was starting to hyperventilate. Mike was still calm up to this point and was trying to help, but all of his suggestions irritated me to the point that if I could have moved my arms, I would have reached out of that barrel and snatched that pageboy wig off his head and slapped him with it. I had to think of something to say to him that would convey my sense of urgency, so I started screaming, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying!” That was not a good idea.

Mike started crying and scurrying back and forth around the room looking for something he could use to help me. I knew I had to calm him down or I would still be in that barrel when Mom and Dad got home. I told him I had a great idea. “If you can set the barrel upright, I can just stand up and climb out.” Mike was so scared by this time that he had a good amount of adrenaline going so setting the barrel up with me inside was no great feat. He ran over clop, clop, clop in his cowboy boots, his pageboy wig swinging wildly, grabbed the sides of the barrel and started pushing it and me to a standing position. I realized about a fourth of the way up that this was not a good idea. It had the effect of packing me in—sort of like tapping the flour canister on the counter to make room for more flour. Suddenly my panic matched Mike’s. I knew we had made a grave mistake. “Lay me back down I can’t breathe get me out of here I said lay me back down help get me out of here do something.”

Mike nervously tilted the barrel over to lay it back down on the floor, ran around to the front of it, leaned over and with a fear-crazed twinkle in his eyes told me, “Don’t worry. I will get you out of there right now.” I watched his cowboy-boot shod skinny legs recede in the direction of the kitchen. I felt almost calm, thinking to myself;finally, someone other than me has an answer to something!

I heard him open a drawer in the kitchen, then rummage around in the drawer. What is he doing? What is he looking for? Then it hit me—OHMYGOD A KNIFE HE IS GETTING A KNIFE. He was so proud of his idea. He came scurrying back into the room and stood with his little cowboy boots in front of my barrel. He leaned down to see my face and, sure enough, he had a knife. “I can cut you out.” His brown eyes were gleaming almost as much as the enormous knife he held in his hand. For a brief moment, I just stared at him thinking to myself; He cannot be serious. Suddenly he disappeared from view and I knew he was indeed serious. He really thought he had hit upon the answer.

I started screaming for all I was worth, “No, you’ll cut me in half! Don’t do it. No, Mike, no. Listen to me! You’re going to cut me!” He didn’t answer me at all. In my mind’s eye, I could picture him with the knife poised high in the air, ready to strike down at any moment. I let out an ear-splitting NOOOOOOOOOO! (in a surprisingly deep voice--fear-induced, I'm sure) and suddenly made the startling discovery that there is indeed a type of fear which causes an adrenaline surge powerful enough to turn a ten-year old girl into a power-lifter—or in this case, a power-bender. As I waited for the fatal blow of the knife, I arched my back into the shape of a U, while pushing down with my knees hard enough to nearly shatter my kneecaps. This had the effect of bending the two-inch thick metal ring into an oval, allowing me to scurry like a trapped animal out of the barrel.

Mike was still standing poised with the knife, not quite sure about what he had just witnessed. We just stood there looking at each other, Mike in his pageboy wig and cowboy boots, me drenched in sweat with my arms hanging numbly at my sides. I don’t remember what story we concocted about how the barrel got bent into that shape, but it didn’t include anything about a knife or me inside the barrel.