This post is contributed by Barnaby Porter from his archives. Read the previous post here.

There once was a man who worked every day deep down in the bowels of a great city building. His name was Mr. Trudgeworthy. Though he had done this job for years, he had never fully adjusted to his daily surroundings; they got him down, and he was not a very happy man any more.

The walls around him and the floor under his feet were concrete, everywhere concrete, and the spaces they created were filled with an endless maze of steam pipes and boilers, water mains with great big valves, electric boxes and cables, churning and clanking elevator shafts and all those things found in the basements of big buildings: push brooms and trash cans, the tools to do with, cans of paint and oil and boxes of rags. The air down there was city air, heavy with manmade odors, and it hummed with the drone of urbanity. Light existed only here and there in pools directly beneath bare lightbulbs.

Mr. Trudgeworthy’s world, day after day, was missing all the colors, the sights and sounds and even the smells of the world he knew existed above ground. Yet there seemed to be little he could do to change his lot in life. It was his job to keep the building running in good order, plain and simple, and except for occasional rides up the service elevator to the humdrum of the floors above, his presence was ordinarily required down at that level where the life blood and essential workings of that immense structure lay exposed for the purposes of tinkering, adjustment and periodic repair.

Mr. Trudgeworthy was the “maintenance engineer,” but he had come to think of himself more as a worker ant, a slave not only to the burgeoning social colony above and without, but to the mountainous mass over his head as well. His sole job was to do his unquestioning best to toil his life away at the hopelessly interminable task of preserving operational harmony in a system much bigger than he was and largely beyond his control.

Then one day he sat on a park bench to have a good think. He sat there for a long time, pondering the hand that fate had dealt him. How different things might have been, he thought, if only he had chosen a line of work that afforded him the simple luxury of the light of day. How nice it would seem if his eyes could be treated to the color green, grass green, down there in the bowels of that building. And to hear a bird sing every once in a while. How much was that to ask?

“Ask who?” he asked himself. “Who can make things right?” And then it dawned on him: I’m the engineer after all! I CAN FIX THINGS!” And with that, Mr. Trudgeworthy got up from his park bench with great vigor, resolved to remedy his dissatisfaction with his workday world.

The very next day, he set about emptying a large storage room of all the junk that had been taking up valuable space for years. He then installed a bank of powerful lights, “grow lights,” and created sunlight. Under them he placed plants; every day, for two weeks, he brought in a ficus or an orange tree or pots of ferns and bamboo – something new each time.

But Mr. Trudgeworthy felt his new space needed more; it needed sound and movement. So, he found a big old bathtub and surrounded it with artfully laid brickwork and filled the tub with fresh water. Even better, he rigged up a spouting frog fountain to splash into his pool and added twelve fancy goldfish.

It was so much better than before… but still, even still, something was missing – excitement, flashes of movement and a rich, active involvement with life – ZEST! That was it!

So, our good man decided to build an aviary, making a big wire enclosure around all he had created, and he brought in six very busy and cheerful little finches and a pair of canaries, one yellow and one orange. Now his underground world had zest with the added dimension of sweet birdsong all day long. He added three more trees with lots of branches for the birds to perch on.

At last, Mr. Trudgeworthy had created for himself a real basement paradise, in the middle of which he placed an old folding chair and a small table to set his lunchbox on. For the first time in years, he actually looked forward to going to work. True, his job was every bit the same as it had always been, but down into that clanking, concrete world, the maintenance engineer had at last brought the dimension of life.

The moral of this story, if there has to be one: Thrust a man down into a dark, dank hole, and he will waste away and his spirit will die. But give him just a glimpse of the green, green grass and the light of day… and he will soar.

Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. In October 2021, Barnaby completed his tenure on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees after six years of service.