My Cold, Dark Place

I came home from school one day and it was part of my life--my bomb shelter. Actually, it wasn’t all there that first day; they’d only just started building it. It would be several weeks before the gaping pit in our driveway in Eagle Rock would evolve into living quarters for a family of six trying to escape the atomic bomb.

I was 9 in the winter of 1961. The Cold War had just got off to an explosive start, and with Cuba pointing Soviet missiles at the United States, President Kennedy was encouraging Americans to prepare for war.

For several weeks, the jackhammers pounded and echoed from my driveway, disrupting the serenity of my usually quiet neighborhood. One afternoon I returned home from school to find them lying silent and lifeless at the bottom of what had become a 30-foot-deep crater. It was where my friends and I had played tetherball; now it was to be my underground home when the bomb came.

The cement was poured next--to keep out the radiation. At least that’s what the cement salesman told my father. “Five-foot-thick walls,” he said, “and we guarantee you’ll withstand any atomic bomb.” Every evening, after the workers left, I’d lower myself into the pit and carefully measure each wall, envisioning myself on a dangerous but vital mission to ensure that the walls were thick enough. I trembled at the thought that a sloppy worker might have poured one of them even a millimeter short of the required five feet.

“Mom,” I remember asking one evening after completing my measurements, “I’m not quite sure I understand how Dad could collect if this five-foot radiation guarantee doesn’t hold up.”

“Oh, don’t worry about those things,” my mother replied. “You’ll have your driveway back to play tetherball soon enough, and you won’t even know the bomb shelter’s there.” I said nothing but immediately retreated to my bedroom, stunned. Tetherball? Did she really believe that my main concern was tetherball? That I’d forget about a 9,000-cubic-foot hole in the middle of our driveway?

Our home was built on a slope, so to get into the bomb shelter we had to walk out our front door, turn left and go to the end of the property. There we’d descend a narrow wooden staircase that took two right turns, forming a U-shaped course. The stairs ended facing the entrance--the first of three doors. This door was made of prison-like bars with a padlock that held it closed. Immediately after passing through this first door, we would make another right turn and face the second door, a monstrous floor-to-ceiling piece of inch-thick dark green metal. Once inside this second door, we would walk through a 20-foot-long concrete tunnel where a single lightbulb hung from above. At the end of the tunnel was a third door, exactly like the second one. This third and final door led into the main room, or what the pharaohs would have called the inner chamber. It was a perfect rectangle, 25 feet long and 12 feet wide, and it always smelled faintly of fresh concrete. What confused and troubled me most, however, was something my father told me the day construction began. “When the sirens go off,” he said, “we can’t let our friends and neighbors in. There won’t be enough food or water for everybody.”

With shame and embarrassment I confessed the sad news to my best friend, Michele. “I’m sorry, but you may as well know now. When the atomic bomb comes, I can’t let you in my bomb shelter.” Michele wrinkled her eyebrows and looked at me the way she did whenever I stepped on the sidewalk snails we encountered while walking to school. And then she laughed. I laughed too, but late that night I trembled in bed as I imagined her screaming and pounding on the thick metal door while the sirens wailed.

I imagined radiation to look like pinkish fairy dust, sprinkled across my lawn, covering the roof of my house. The sparkles would drizzle down on the entire neighborhood, covering trees and lights posts--and people unlucky enough to be outside when it happened. People like Michele. Maybe Michele would be there when we reopened the door. Maybe by some miracle she would manage to avoid the poisoned fairy dust. I prayed it would be so and pictured a thousand different ways how that fateful day might play out.

Word soon got around school that I had a bomb shelter. Two other children in my class also claimed they had bomb shelters, but after debriefing them I knew they merely had basements stacked with canned food. “How thick are your walls?” I asked, and then silently shook my head. I took it upon myself to make sure that everyone in my class knew the difference between a real bomb shelter and a basement.

Eventually the entire school recognized me as a bomb shelter expert--a consultant, of sorts, who would listen as kids described their makeshift shelters and escape plans. I’d then inform them how effective (or ineffective) their bomb shelters would be. Usually the news was not good. Many asked whether they could use my bomb shelter. “Sorry,” I said. “My bomb shelter’s full.” And at the end of the day, I’d make a mental checklist of those of us who would live and those who would die.

Once the major construction was finished, my mother began decorating in such a manner that none of us would mind spending all of those days down there. She carpeted the bomb shelter in yellow and bought two lime-green Naugahyde couches, but no beds. Perhaps it was more appropriate to sit and chat while the bombs dropped and Michele pounded on the door.

My mother put in a portable electric heater, but it always stayed cold down there. It could also be darker than pitch when the lights were turned out. My siblings and I often played a cruel game on each other, turning out the lights and closing the door with someone left inside.

My father built some wooden cupboards and my mom painted them green and filled them with cans of tuna, jars of peanut butter and packages of Melba toast. We were ready. Or so I thought.

A short time after the bomb shelter was finished, my brother announced that he was leaving home. He was 19 and wanted to get an apartment by the beach in Santa Monica. The beach was 25 miles away! How could he possibly make it to the bomb shelter in time? I was horrified. How could he even consider such a thing? I pictured him by the shore when the bomb came, alone and crying with none of us there to comfort him, little pink waves lapping at his feet.

My parents also were concerned about him living on his own. They all began shouting at one another. I ran out of the room and continued to listen from my bedroom. Their shouts grew louder and my head began to hurt. I played out the pink-wave scenario in my head over and over. Soon I could no longer hear their voices because of my own screaming. Everything went black, and when I awoke I was lying on my parents’ bed, looking up at the three of them. I fell onto my knees and prayed to God for a miracle.

The bomb never came. Something else, though, came in its place: a blinding flash of insight that tore open the entire tapestry around my 9-year-old existence. I learned that life’s worries were much bigger than I had ever imagined.

And then the oddest thing happened--I never had to fully wrestle with this new concept. Instead I busied myself with a thousand childhood distractions. As the Cuban missile crisis defused, I filled my days with the familiar routines of life before my bomb shelter. And in the evenings after dinner, I often played tetherball.

As the weeks and months passed, my family found other uses for the bomb shelter. At first it housed our winter clothing and seasonal fishing gear. Then it became a sort of halfway house for junk that we no longer needed but weren’t quite ready to part with.

As the years went by, we used it less and less until we sort of forgot it was there. The wooden steps leading to the entrance rotted out, and my father never replaced them. Eventually, on the surface, everything seemed completely normal, just as it once had been, just as my mother had said it would.

Yet, somehow, things were never quite the same for me after the winter of 1961--the coldest winter of my life.