bombs that leave things in the rain

[rm]

It keeps coming up because of Watchmen which really does, I suspect, have little impact if you don't remember the cold war.

I try to tell people what it was like to be so scared of nothing and the sheer ubiquity of the topic, but it's hard. It never comes through. I fail.

But I keep trying, because it's all so strange; I mean, I'm old enough to have fucked men that got sent to war to fight the Commies. It's so strange. It's so personal.

In my school's basement cafeteria, painted brown and yellow in my childhood and thankfully later renovated, there was a sign over the the vending machine that sold cola and Hawaiian Punch and seltzer, designating the area a Nuclear Fallout Shelter.

I saw that sign every day for years starting when I was five, pondering it every time I walked down the stairs to lunch, to recess, to our Brownie troop meetings.

"What does it mean?" I asked, one day, pointing at it. I was probably six.

That's when they told me about the bombs that leave things that come in the rain. The sign meant this place would be safe while it was very cold outside and bad things you can't see that attach to metal tried to get in to eat your skin and make you lose your hair.

I frowned, puzzled. Turn right and you were in the cafeteria, but turn left and left again and there was a heavy metal door. It led to the outside and was made of metal. It didn't seem a very good seal against bombs that would leave such hungry things in the rain.

"How long then?" I asked. The cafeteria was so ugly, and not the sort of place I wanted to spend much time at all.

"Years. Twenty years."

I didn't even know what twenty years was, but I imagined it in that ugly cafeteria with its terrible food (we weren't allowed to bring our own, lest we compete) and the pats of butter stuck to the ceiling where older girls had flung them.

I worked out how to rearrange the tables to make for the most sleeping space. I thought about where to put classrooms, what to do about toilets. It was a small place, an ugly place for such a long time.

In third grade, The Day After was a big television event and we were supposed to watch it with our parents. They sent notes home about it and everything.

Elyse had to go to therapy after that, when she began to dream of nuclear war every night.

It didn't bother me so much, but then I read books about nuclear war all the time by then. Z for Zacharias and Hiroshima, children's books and not. It was good I was precocious, I'd be ready to know things if I needed to, in case the poison in the rain came for all the grownups first. There were windows in our classroom, so I worried about that.

Every time I enter an office or a shop or some other non-residential place, I think of how to make it a refuge, a shelter, from bombs that leave things in the rain. Here will be the bedrooms. Here, infirmary. Here we will store food. Here there will be privacy for sex. Here there will be children.

Every day for thirty years I have done this. Every day for the rest of my life I will do this.

That's what it was like. So real, so omnipresent, that if the specter of nuclear war was mentioned, it seemed to make everything around it real, no matter how fanciful.

Because I sort of always write like this, you probably don't believe me. But if you remember it, you're nodding, because you know, you remember, and because at some point you'll take a drink at a party and laugh over your glass to someone else who knows and remembers and talk about how you thought when you were six or seven or eight that you were going to live your entire life sealed inside an ugly cafeteria or a drugstore or the halls of a stadium, vomiting and losing your hair.

It's like the biggest secret club in the whole world. And it sucks. But I think it's why I'm so good at endlessly rearranging the stuff in our freezer to make more fit. I grew up thinking about cramped geometries.

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

They had us watch The Day After in high school health class (!). I wouldn't look at the blast scenes. (And just think, if I were British we could have gotten Threads and really been fucked up for life.) Now I keep running into people about ten years younger who've never even heard of the Berlin Wall. It's very odd.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Now I keep running into people about ten years younger who've never even heard of the Berlin Wall.

Having taken high school history, I suppose I know how that's possible, but how is that even possible?

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I remember. It is so interesting to talk with my younger friends and realize they have no idea of the Cold War mentality and what we expected when we were young.

[cleverthylacine]

I look at what people have achieved at their age, and wonder why I didn't, and then it hits me: I never thought that it was going to MATTER. By the time I was 30, 40, 50...we'd all be dead, right? Or living in the wilderness.

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

*nod* I've run into the exact same situation (although I had the daily nightmares about WWIII long before I saw The Day After, sigh - Briggs' "When The Wind Blows" didn't help, either) and it's surprisingly difficult to explain the ambiance of the time.

"Oh, like we are now about terrorists, right?" No, not at all like that, honestly... *sigh*

[argentla.livejournal.com]

At least the film didn't try to update the story to the present. In Hayter's earlier drafts, it did -- with a contrived set-up of Chinese interests that just didn't have the same feel -- but Snyder decided against it. Both that and The Dark Knight Returns are so heavily informed by that era.

When I was nine, I learned about sub-launched ballistic missiles, and realized that the world could end at any moment, with no notice at all, not as a random act of terror, but as a perfectly legal expression of policy on behalf of the recognized leaders of the most powerful nations on Earth.

I'm glad that the generations after ours aren't growing up with that fear. There are new apocalypses now, but not with the immediacy of that one. Seven minutes' transit time. No warning at all.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Seven minutes! I totally had forgotten that.

Yes.

We always talked about that. What would you do with those seven minutes.

[manycolored.livejournal.com]

You too!
I remember reading a paperback about how to select an inside room of your house - maybe a closet - and stockpile water and rations, and what to do with your bodily wastes, and how to rig an air filter out of toilet paper. You should bring a deck of cards, the book said. Being alone with nothing to do for several weeks isn't good for the psyche. I wondered how the hell I was supposed to play solitaire in the dark after the EMP effect. It was before rechargeable batteries. I must have been eight or nine.

[rm.livejournal.com]

OMG, the weird things I supposedly know how to build filters out of!

[wcg.livejournal.com]

But if you remember it, you're nodding

Yep. I was born in 1954. Started school in 1959. I remember.

[rm.livejournal.com]

God, you got the _whole_ thing too.

[genders.livejournal.com]

Wow, blast from the past.

The hallways in my elementary school had the "Fallout Shelter" graphic and text. We had "duck and cover" drills which involved crouching under one's desk. I knew early on that this would protect us from nothing.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I remember getting sent to the principal's office because during one "duck and cover" drill, I st at my desk. At ten years old I had worked out that the school was six blocks from a refinery that made jet and rocket fuel, and so we'd all be incinerated regardless.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I am exactly old enough to remember the cold war, and exactly young enough to little to none of the context.

But I do remember the Fallout Shelter thing--perhaps a relic of the Upper East Side?

You may have finally put a finger on why I've always had a love for post-apocalyptic stories. As a child, I often had abandonment nightmares that were tinged with, "Yes, but how do you take care of this situation?"

I remember an episode of Alvin & The Chipmunks (yes, really) about two siblings caught on either side of the Berlin Wall.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I totally saw that Alvin & The Chipmunks episode.

[thornsilver]

I remember nightmares about radioactive rain and poison coming from the sky. Not helped by the Chernobyl disaster that brushed us by. I now understand scientific principles of radiation and radiation sickness better, and yet it still creeps the fuck out of me, like it is a dark cloud of evil magic, rather than scientific phenomenon.

[rm.livejournal.com]

When Three Mile Island happened, my parents talked about sending me to Florida to get away from the radiation.

[6-bleen-7.livejournal.com]

I recommend The Atomic Café for some amusing examples of Cold War civil-defense propaganda from the peak of the Red Scare. My favorite is Duck and Cover, featuring Bert the ever-alert (nowadays, we'd say "paranoid") turtle, excerpted in The Atomic Café and available in full on the Wikipedia page.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I used to work for the director's husband.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

Did you ever go to the anti-nuclear conferences for high school students at Yale?

[lawsontl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I completely get it. I grew up (and still live) near a strategic military base. WPAFB, we also have the aliens from Area 51 here, woot!

I didn't really have to learn about nuclear fallout shelters. They were pointless. If they dropped a nuke on the base, we were vaporized before we heard or felt the blast. Yeah, we had the drills where we hid under our desks, but they put more focus on tornado drills than fallout drills, and we all knew why. To this day, I can identify the geographic boundaries in our area where you cross from "vaporized" to "alive but dead within days" to "alive but why would you want to be?" to "it's you and the cockroaches, baby."

One of my first Grown Up jobs was at a former defense supply center that had been converted to office space (imagine a Quonset hut painted peach and given cubicles...no, really, imagine). We didn't have tornado safe spots there, which I found odd, until someone pointed out that the building had been made blast safe to help it withstand the effects of a nuclear explosion. A tornado was a non-issue; the whole *place* was a safe-spot. My first response was "cool!". My second response was "Did anyone tell the Russians we're just a bunch of banking flunkies now?". Because even though it was years after the Cold War had technically ended, one wants to ensure these things stay current on the maps, just in case things fall apart again.

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

To this day, I can identify the geographic boundaries in our area where you cross from "vaporized" to "alive but dead within days" to "alive but why would you want to be?" to "it's you and the cockroaches, baby."

Exact same experience here. We always said that if a situation went to Defcon One, we'd scramble up on the roof, watch the show and avoid the suffering/starving/shambles afterward.

Living near major military targets gives you a different perspective, I think.

I was afraid of Bubonic plague, though. Still am.

[contrarywise]

Oh, I totally remember that. The Day After, the Berlin Wall, the Communist Threat, Mutually-Assured Destruction... The Cuban Missile crisis happened the year before I was born, and my dad was still on active duty in the Army during that time. And when I got involved in the feminist women's community as a teenager, many women I knew were involved in anti-nuclear activism as well as feminist and gay activism. I'm not quite old enough to have been taught to "duck and cover" in school, but I have friends who were. And I've been to Hiroshima. It's the nicest, most horrible place I've ever gone. There's an office building that's visible in the Boston skyline that reminds me of the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, and it freaks me the fuck out whenever I see it. Yeah, Watchmen nailed the feeling of being in the middle of the Cold War and being inescapably aware that nuclear destruction could rain down upon us at any time, with no warning. If you don't remember that in real life, it's just not the same to see it on screen or in print.

[splix.livejournal.com]

I have a weird nostalgia for the Cold War, and maybe it's a generational thing? As kids, we knew who the bad guys were, and for all that it was terrifying, there was a certain poetry to the symmetry of mutual aggression. Then the Wall came down, and those of us coming of age felt a sort of invulnerability, or maybe foolhardy innocence. And then 9/11 brought an entirely new kind of fear, one born of chaos. And we're still adjusting.

[thornsilver]

I still know who the bad guys are. If they are trying to kill me, they are bad guys.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

Yes, to all of this. I was at that party a few weeks ago and we talked about that terror, the practicality of that terror.

I think also sometimes this is what so appealed to me about Doctor Who, and why the games my brother and me played outside were often about spies and bombs and aliens. If we could see aliens on TV and fight them in the back yard, we would be ready when the bomb hit. Somehow.

The practicality of that terror.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Post apocalyptic thinking is part of who I am, and always will be.
That's what the cold war is. Those who come after will never completely get that, for which I am grateful.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1981, so I remember learning about the cold war and the bomb in school -- and I remember my mum talking to us about it, which made me quite scared -- but I don't think it felt that immediate most of the time. We certainly didn't have bomb/fallout shelters in our school (which was mostly demountable classrooms), and it was out in the country, which I guess gives some sense of protection -- after all, the Russians were hardly going to drop a bomb on a village of a few hundred people, 500km from the nearest big city. Of course, I know that radiation, etc, would still have been a problem, but it just didn't seem that constantly threatening.

However, I watched a movie called Thread in high school, and that freaked me out. I never, never want to watch it again.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I remember being in summer camp, a YMCA camp in Banff, and our talking about whether we were far enough away from Calgary to survive The Bomb.
The Cold War was a constant. I don't know how you can convey it to someone who does not remember.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Banff! Oh, now I have context for you. Weird.

[dine.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1959, so grew up with a real feeling/understanding that bombs could land any time. neighbors a couple blocks away had a shelter in their backyard, and the basement in my grade school had Nuclear Fallout Shelter signs by a big door leading to a stockpile of food/water/etc. it intrigued the hell out of me, though I only once got a peek inside, and it was slightly disappointing there were just big crates & drums covered with tarps (not at all exciting).

my hometown had several companies manufacturing specialized components for military contracts, so we figured we'd be a strategic target, even if it wasn't a major population center.

I was a pretty fatalistic kid, who read Alas, Babylon around age 10, and spent hours trying to assess our chances of getting to the family farm (and likelihood of survival if we could)

[byzantienne.livejournal.com]

I missed the Cold War, by about five years. (Born in 1985. One of the first historical events I remember was the fall of the Soviet Union, and I remember that in a shattering, fascinating way. I was five. But even then I knew about worlds ending.)

And I've been strangely nostalgic for it almost my entire life. Not the fallout shelters. Well. Not really the fallout shelters. But the structure and the parallelism and I've always wanted -- been fascinated with -- fast apocalypse, just enough time to say what you always meant to say and then done, over, finished.

And I have nightmares about radiation sickness. But that's the inverse, that's slow. Worlds ending.

-- it was never my war and I wish it had been, sometimes. Which is just -- odd.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

People talked about fallout shelters a lot, but there were actually very few of them.

[ophymirage.livejournal.com]

*nods* I was born in 1970, and grew up in Illinois, so we still had the fallout shelters, and once a month, they would test the 'Air Raid' siren that was at our school, during school hours. (I remember getting caught outside, once, when it went off - it was so loud that it literally made me dizzy and confused, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to be or what to do.)

I think we also did 'Duck and Cover' drills, but my memory is more of them being for tornadoes (a much more immediate and likely threat.)

I do remember The Day After, but not that it had particular effects on me at the time - I think I was actually much more upset by Red Dawn for post-apocalyptic-America visions, though.

and YES to the 'seven minutes' comment, that still comes up in my head every so often.

I'm curious about the comments from several of you that 9/11 fear is different than the nuclear fear. To me, it's not different at all - I still have no control if they decide to take Bill O'Lielly up on his invitation to bomb SF off the map, any more than I would have had control if some crazy five-star general Ivan had gotten a little too paranoid in his sub.

[graene.livejournal.com]

Also from Illinois, Chicago area, and our town would sound the siren once a week, on Tuesdays at 10:30am. When I moved to NC and there was the first big hurricane scare, I couldn't understand why I couldn't hear a siren warning everyone in range that it was time to stop staring at the sky and get under cover. They don't have them here, or maybe they're only at the military bases.

I think they gave up on claiming the drills we were doing would be good for anything but tornadoes in about third grade, but various teachers would still tell you if the hall you were in that year could also be sealed for use in a bomb attack.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

One thing about Watchmen, he said, finally remembering the subject of the post, being old enough to remember being afraid of Nixon, which I imagine you aren't, quite, adds a dimension to the Watchmen Universe.
I'm still scared of Nixon.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not really. But my parents tell me stories about how I would shriek and cry when they brought out the Nixon puppet they had in their art gallery.

And I grew up hearing about how Henry Kissinger was very very evil (this later became hilarious because his wife was a client of my mother's for a while, so she would ask after Dr. Kissinger's health and the wife would inform my mother that he was "peppy").

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Every time I enter an office or a shop or some other non-residential place, I think of how to make it a refuge, a shelter, from bombs that leave things in the rain. Here will be the bedrooms. Here, infirmary. Here we will store food. Here there will be privacy for sex. Here there will be children.

I have never done this, in large part because I know that I'm lucky and would never have to live like that. However, I remember those days vividly. I am just old enough that in first grade, I had a real duck and cover drill - those stopped by the time I was in second grade. I also remember being 19 and on a college trip to pick berries in the early 1980s. We were standing in the Missouri countryside on a hill looking off in the distance, and my friend Karen mused about looking out and seeing a mushroom cloud over St. Louis, we all talked a bit about this and then fell silent.

Today, I wonder if bombs will fall over India or Pakistan someday, but that would merely be a distant tragedy, like so many others.

[don-negro.livejournal.com]

I have a very simple metric. I ask people 'did you ever see a vapor trail and wonder if you only had fifteen minutes left to live?'

If so, then you're one of us. If not, you're a kid, and the fall, when it comes, is going to hurt.

[cleverthylacine]

I remember that feeling.

[eac.livejournal.com]

Oh, yea, I remember, though The Day After Aired when I was 12.

I never had plans to be a grownup (or, for that matter, about how to arrange a bomb shelter) because I lived in the DC suburbs and I knew I would be vaporized.