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.

[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.

[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]

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?

[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.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Woah.
Nelly.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

To me, it was always the idea that the world could have ended six minutes ago, but you still had a minute of blissful ignorance ahead of you.

[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.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

What you just said, re high school history. I mention how important all this stuff was, and how close the world really did come to being destroyed, and how much the psychology and rhetoric and priorities and cultural assumptions of the Cold War are infusing and poisoning our foreign policy even now, and they don't give a goddamn; that stuff's, like, ancient history and thus has no impact on them whatsoever even when it does.

[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]

I totally saw that Alvin & The Chipmunks episode.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1957. Oh, yeah, do I.

[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]

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

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I used to work for the director's husband.

[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.

[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.