Childish Fears

Photo of a vintage box containing a Res-Q-Ladder a chain link ladder that hooked over a window ledge to help you escape from a second story window.

Recently a family in a neighboring town lost everything in an early morning house fire, and I was reminded of one of my childhood fears.

I spent a not insignificant portion of my childhood thinking about something that lived forever under my parents’ bed. I am talking about the Res-Q-Ladder. It looked very similar if not identical to the picture of this box that I managed to unearth through some internet searching.

While I lived in a few different houses as a kid, pretty much all of them were two story homes with the bedrooms upstairs meaning if a fire broke out in our kitchen while everyone was asleep, escaping would be no easy feat.

I should point out that my fire fears were not entirely unfounded. I have wrote previously about my family’s fiery misadventures with small appliances.

Thankfully for us, we did take some precautions. We had smoke detectors and those big stickers on the windows of my bedroom and my sister’s bedroom to let the firemen know where the kids slept, and, of course, we had the Res-Q-Ladder.

Like the box pictured above ours also had a photo of people in outdated clothing using the ladder to escape from their burning home. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, and in my case seeing that picture always made me picture the day my family would have to make use of our Res-Q-Ladder. I had concerns. Big ones.

As the box above points out the Res-Q-Ladder is a lifesaver when seconds count. And therein lies the whole problem. Our ladder might have been in a box identical to this one with one very key difference. Our box was wrapped and thoroughly sealed with packing tape.

As I mentioned we lived in a few different houses when I was a kid, and that ladder made the move with us each time. To help it survive the move the box got wrapped excessively with tape, and then still taped up to within an inch of its life it would be shoved beneath my parents bed where it lived beside and behind shoes my parents hadn’t worn since before I was born.

My childhood fear was that we would someday be in a situation where we had to use the Res-Q-Ladder, and while the flames licked at our feet we would be there trying to break into the sealed box to get at the salvation inside. This was not a minor thing, I really gave this ladder and my family’s safe escape from our burning home a LOT of thought.

The good news is that the scenario I feared so much never came to pass, and I kind of feel silly having worried about it so much.

I hope that you too have no need for a Res-Q-Ladder and that your big fears seem silly in hindsight. Though also remember to plug your space heater directly into a wall outlet and maybe consider unplugging your toaster, just click on this link about the small appliances to find out the dangers of toasters.