Each September would bring the beginning of Fall, the cooler air and the turning of the leaves on the huge trees standing in the front yards of most every home along the avenue. September also brought the beginning of the great cardboard box adventure.

I think I love Halloween so much because it brings back so many memories of my best friend and I and the adventures we had while building our own haunted maze inside his old, multi-room garage.

Our quest would begin with our carefree hunt for the biggest and best cardboard boxes in town. We were both in junior high and couldn't drive so we relied on our trusty old bicycles. You know the ones, bright colored paint, banana seats, chopper style handle bars, goofy white grips and chrome fenders. Real junior high nerd bikes straight out of the seventies.

My bike was multi-colored with reds, oranges and blues while my best friends was mostly green. We would ride these modes of monster transportation all over town searching out appliance stores, furniture stores, dumpsters and the most coveted place of all, the funeral homes. You see, couch boxes were good, refrigerator boxes were great, but coffin boxes were the pièce de résistance of our haunted maze.

There was one slight problem when finding these magnificent boxes. Getting them back to the garage on our bikes became a small adventure in itself.

With most boxes, we could unstaple them and fold them up like pancakes. We would stick as many as we could under one arm and pedal like heck while steering with the other arm. I remember dropping boxes along the way and having to make several stops just to rest and get a new grip.

The funniest sight I'm sure was seeing a couple of junior high boys toting a coffin box balanced between their two bikes, pedaling down the street. Coffin boxes were virtually impossible to tear apart and fold like a pancake but we sure weren't going to have a haunted maze without at least one genuine cardboard coffin box.

This ritual of box hunting would continue well into October. The ground would be covered with dry, crunchy leaves in different hues of red, orange, brown and yellow. The air would be cooler and the skies would become a little grayer.

The timing was perfect which meant we could kick my best friend's dad out of the garage and make it our own. We could shut the doors, flip on the heater and start creating our masterpiece.

Creating the maze was the second part of the adventure. We spent hours pieceing boxes together just so they would create the perfect turn, deadend or straight away. Our only tools were box cutters and duct tape. With the radio blaring we would work day and night creating holes in the boxes for hand grabbing, dangle things from the top and scatter slimy things all along the floor.

All of this preparation would continue up until the very day of Halloween itself. Of course we would have our friends over to do a run through before we would allow any stranger to enter our maze of horror.

Once Halloween was upon us we would go out onto the cold cracked sidewalk, in costume, and lure the neighborhood kids down the long dark driveway to the old tattered garage. Each kid, brave enough, would then enter the maze and crawl for his life to the end. There was no escape once you entered and most kids left running and screaming out the exit.

We would laugh so hard that we would make ourselves cry. Seeing the scared little rug rats running for their lives was all we needed to see to know that we had accomplished what we had set out to do. We were the best of friends and we enjoyed creating things together that entertained others. Those memories I'll never forget and I can only hope that every kids finds his own great cardboard box adventure.


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