Don’t Dig a Hole and Climb in It

I had a friend named Leonard who used to say, when adversity threatened, “I feel something crawling up my leg.”

He would get a wary look in his eyes, hunch down and head in that bent-over position for the backyard, looking a little like a panic-stricken Groucho Marx.

What he was doing in the backyard was digging a bomb shelter. It was during the Cold War, and he, along with many others, was preparing for an impending apocalypse.

When we kidded him about it, he would laugh grimly and say we would all be turned into French fries in a nuclear holocaust while he, like the gopher and the prairie dog, would emerge from his hole unscathed.

But that just wasn’t to be. They found poor Leonard one day at the bottom of the trench he had dug to a depth of about 5 feet, dead of a heart attack. I guess you could say that the laugh was rather on him.

I mention this today by way of welcoming you to the year 2002 and pointing out that bomb shelters are once more in vogue.

Anticipating a new market, manufacturers have taken to the Internet to warn us that Armageddon is in the air and that we had better start thinking about ways to protect ourselves, our family, our DVD players and whatever else of value we can cram into a small underground space. Saving the cat is optional.

The reason for all the preparation, shelter hucksters say, is obvious. India and Pakistan are bumping bellies over Kashmir, the Palestinians and Israel have firmly established violence as a Mideastern tradition, Syria is sneaking in nuclear triggers, terrorists are planning bad things for everyone and God knows what’s going on in Latin America.

To paraphrase the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, this has made us all as nervous as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis.

Those who remember the Cold War will recall a similar doomsday feeling that occupied our thoughts in the 1950s. Schoolchildren were told to duck and cover, plans for the mass evacuations of large cities were formulated, and 40% of all Americans were thinking about building fallout shelters.

A shelter could cost up to $5,000 when equipped with toilets, telephones, air filters and enough food and water to last for two weeks. Wall Street investors speculated at the time that the shelter business could gross up to $20 billion and, salivating more fiercely than Pavlov’s dog, joined in the shrill warning that the end of the world was near.

Skeptics scoffed that shelters would serve only to turn their occupants into tandoori chicken because of the intense heat of an atomic blast. But cities continued to talk about building shelters that could hold up to 50 million people, and farmers wondered how they could build them large enough to hold their cows.

I am among those who recall the Cold War with a certain amount of grim nostalgia. I didn’t build a bomb shelter then, and I don’t plan on building one now, but I am taken with a strong feeling of deja vu as I surf the Internet’s material on life underground in the event that things get, well, out of hand.

For instance, one Web site offers information relative to meters capable of detecting everything from nuclear radiation to an outbreak of German measles, while another yields updates on potassium iodide anti-radiation pills. A third outlines how to send for nuclear target maps, a kind of guide, I suppose, on where not to live when the missiles start flying.

Ifeel relatively confident that evacuation just won’t work in L.A. as an alternative to annihilation. We can’t get through the evening rush hour on our freeways with any kind of efficiency, so it’s unlikely that we’ll all be able to get out of town easily, if at all. Three fender-benders and a mattress in the fast lane and we’re doomed. I suspect that terrorists are storing up old mattresses even now, waiting for the right moment to dump them onto the Santa Monica.

I also don’t feel that bomb shelters are the answer, despite illustrations on the Internet revealing how the simplest of us can create an adequate, if primitive, means of surviving a nuclear attack.

I am especially taken by a photograph of “two non-athletic college girls” with radiant smiles, hunkered down in what the caption describes as a “four-person Pole-Covered Trench Shelter.” It took them 351/2 hours to build it using only hand tools, but, silly girls, they could have done it in far less time if they hadn’t dug it near a tree.

An accompanying text points out that the digging took place in Utah in the summer, so the “coeds,” as we used to call them, decided to build it in the shade. Not only did they encounter roots that were tough for them to cut through, but, the text adds, “gamma rays from fallout particles on the leaves and branches would reach and penetrate the shelter.” Best, I suppose, to avoid trees and possibly even Utah in the summer.

There is much to learn from those who, anticipating our needs, are busy warning us what we might face if we don’t start digging. Flash burns, fires, blindness, skin burns from heated dust (“the popcorn effect”) and probably dry mouth and unpleasant sexual side effects are just a few of the maladies that await at the height of a nuclear encounter.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going on vacation before whatever is crawling up my leg reaches its target. If hell awaits, I’d rather it be on company time and not when I am out enjoying myself on a beach somewhere. So see you later and happy new year, if we’re still around.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be contacted at al.martinez@latimes. com.