Free I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

by.
    The most exciting event with a garbage disposal, of course, is when it jams and you have to reach in and unclog it, knowing that at any moment it might spring to life and abruptly convert your arm from a useful grasping tool into a dibber. Don’t try to tell me about living life on the edge.
    Equally satisfying in its way, and certainly no less ingenious, is the little-known fireplace ashpit. This is simply a metal plate—a kind of trapdoor—built into the floor of the living room fireplace above a deep, brick-lined pit. When you clean the fireplace, instead of sweeping the ash into a bucket and then trailing the dribblings through the house, you maneuver it into this hole and it disappears forever. Brilliant.
    In theory the ashpit must eventually fill up, but ours seems to be bottomless. Down in the basement there’s a small metal door in the wall that allows you to see how the pit is doing, and occasionally I go down to have a look. It isn’t really necessary, but it gives me an excuse to go down in the basement, and I always welcome that because basements are, after the garbage disposal and the ashpit, the third great feature of American life. They are wonderful chiefly because they are so amazingly, so spaciously, unnecessary.
    Now basements I know because I grew up with one. Every American basement is the same. They all have a clothesline that is rarely used, a trickle of water from an indeterminable source running diagonally across the floor, and a funny smell—a combination of old magazines, camping gear that should have been aired and wasn’t, and something to do with a guinea pig named Mr. Fluffy that escaped down a central heating grate six months ago and has not been seen since (and presumably would now be better called Mr. Bones).
    Basements are so monumentally surplus to normal requirements, in fact, that you seldom go down there, so it generally comes as something of a pleasant surprise to remember that you have one. Every dad who ever goes down in a basement pauses at some point to look around and think: “Gee, we really ought to do something with all this space. We could have a wet bar and a pool table and maybe a jukebox and a Jacuzzi and a couple of pinball machines . . .” But of course it’s just one of those things that you intend to do one day, like learn Spanish or take up home barbering, and never do.
    Oh, occasionally, especially in starter homes, you will find that some young gung-ho mom and dad have converted the basement into a playroom for the children, but this is always a mistake as no child will play in a basement. This is because no matter how loving the parents, no matter how much the child would like, deep down, to trust them, there is always the thought that they will quietly lock the door at the top of the stairs and move to Florida. No, basements are deeply and inescapably scary—that’s why they always feature in spooky movies, usually with a shadow of Joan Crawford carrying an axe thrown on the far wall. That may be why even dads don’t go down there very often.
    I could go on and on cataloging other small, unsung glories of American household life—refrigerators that dispense iced water and make their own ice cubes, walk-in closets, central heating that works—but I won’t. I’m out of space, and, anyway, Mrs. B. has just gone out to do some shopping and it has occurred to me that I have not yet seen what the disposal can do with a juice carton. I’ll get back to you on this one.

Just over a year ago, in the depths of a snowy winter, a young college student left a party in a village near the small town in New Hampshire where I live to walk to his parents’ house a couple of miles away. Foolishly—for it was dark and he had been drinking—he decided to take a shortcut through the woods. He never made it.
    The next day, when his disappearance became known, hundreds of volunteers took to the woods to search for him. They hunted for days, but without success. It