In the spirit of Everyday Life, we explored the underworld at our feet. That is, the crawl space and basement of our own house.

I go into our basement all the time to do laundry and park my bicycle. However, that is the light side of the basement. In the dark side of the basement are piles of damp and decaying junk. I usually avoid setting foot there, and try to ignore it as much as possible. Then there's the crawl space. We've had this house about ten years, and I've been in the crawl space once, to clean it out in preparations for having it fixed up and animal-proofed. (Which we never got around to doing, much to our regret.)

Because about five days ago, there started to be a bad smell in the basement and kitchen area. I had a variety of theories - there was that batch of extreme laundry, maybe the S-bend pipe in the bathroom had dried out, the compost bucket needed emptying, or perhaps there was old food in the garbage disposal. And then there started being a plague of flies, and the smell was turning into an outright stench. It became clear that something had died, and that a trip to the underworld to find and remove the remains would be required. Mythologically speaking, people often need to fetch something out of the underworld, but usually the item is a bit more desirable than what we'd be going for.

I suspected a raccoon, because last year one had broken into our basement. One of the basement windows opens into the crawl space, and he had popped in for a short tour of destruction. We'd screwed the window shut and barricaded it with a concrete block to prevent further intrusions. But I suspected that our former intruder was now deceased and decaying.

A quick internet search for helpful tips turned up the reassuring news that raccoon ringworm can cause anything from blindness to neurological damage to liver failure due to a horde of parasites running rampant through your innards. So, contact with raccoon poop was definitely to be avoided.

We suited up in protective gear and went into the crawl space. It is only 1-2 feet high, with dirt, rocks, and pieces of fiberglass insulation on the ground. This time, it was dark, damp, littered with raccoon poop, full of flies, and smelling like something had died. Bunny Dragon spotted a telltale concentration of flies near the window. We decided that rather than continue to belly crawl over there to deal with the carcass, we would try reaching through from the basement window.

This was not simple, because the dark side of the basement is a nearly solid pile of remnants. We moved lots of LARPing gear, old collectible card games, ancient wrapping paper, discarded boxes, expired glow sticks, and unpopular CDs. Everything was slightly moldy. After about an hour of shuffling vast amounts of bits and pieces to clear an area below the window, we managed to get a 3 ft by 5 ft area free of junk. And indeed, there was a large former raccoon right outside the window. At this point, the flies and stench were thick, but there was nothing to be done except proceed. Bunny Dragon held up a big box, and I shoveled the body in. It took quite a few tries, because there are is a pipe in front of the window, and it was rather awkward trying to scoop up a 25 pound rotten thing with a shovel held horizontally. I was also trying very hard not to look at the maggots.

Encounters with the underworld are often disturbing. Aeneas and Odysseus went to the underworld and spoke to people they had known in life, yet their primary impression was that an unhappy fate that awaits us all. Some say that our fear of the dead is some primal reaction to avoid disease. That's certainly a big part of why I didn't enjoy this raccoon encounter, but there was also some other fears mixed in there. Dying is bad enough, but it's worse to die alone and unnoticed until someone is trying to track down a bad smell.

It reminded me of a time some years ago, when a person we knew committed suicide by running a car in her garage until she suffocated. No one noticed for days. When the authorities were called in, they had to break a window to get into the garage. We went by later to help board up the window. The smell was the worst thing. Because this person weren't just dead and gone, she was dead and lingering as an overpoweringly horrible sensation. We didn't know her very well, but I wanted to remember this person for her talents - a confidence and joy in striking up conversations with strangers, a creative way of seeing daily life, and a flair for the beautiful. But instead, it's the distinctive smell that triggers memories of her death rather than how she lived.

So having explored this underworld, I don't know yet what it all means, but here's the bullet points. (1) We need to get the crawl space fixed up so that another raccoon doesn't move in. (2) The dark side of the basement desperately needs to be cleaned out, but maybe we'll just keep avoiding it. (3) I don't want to die, even though it happens to everyone eventually. But if I have to die, I really hope someone notices right away. (4) Fly-swatters and fly-paper are good inventions. (5) Raccoon ringworm sounds completely unpleasant. (6) It's good to have someone at your side when you face an ordeal with the infernal realms.