Homeland security was cozier in the Cold War
By Lucy Ferriss
When I was growing up in what is now known as Old Clayton, our back yard had everything. It had a swing set. It had a brick patio that iced over in winter so smooth shoes skated nicely. It had an apple tree that I could climb and the cat could climb higher. It had a bank of tulips and daffodils in which my father would place, with magical precision and balance, Easter eggs dyed accidentally perfectly to match the flowers. (Every year we three kids would miss one and leave it for the dog to find on a sultry morning in June. Peeee-eww.) It had a club-shaped gravel driveway from which we could shoot into the hoop nailed to the front of the detached garage, and the erratic bounce of basketball on gravel increased the challenge. It had a brick side patio where my mother sat to read. It had a rickety storm fence behind which lay an odd, narrow no-man’s-land where, the summer of my brief evangelical spasm, I would set up a little Jesus sanctuary and hold prayer meetings with my invisible friend. It had just enough room and landmarks for a wicked game of kickball. It had trampled grass that my mother tried vainly to revive with a side-to-side sprinkler that provided perfect intermittent cooling-off as my real friend and I baked on basket-weave loungers in the sun. It had pass-throughs at the back, one to the widow next door, who gave us candy, and one to the bee man’s back yard, through which we ran on our way to the library on Forsyth. It had a sandbox. It had a bomb shelter.
My mother called the bomb shelter “Franklin’s Folly,” though she feared nuclear annihilation at least as much as my father, Franklin Ferriss, did. If the communists invaded Missouri, she told me, she would hide us all above the joists in the basement, where the cat liked to prowl. But if the communists rained terror on us instead, I asked, could we take the cat to the bomb shelter? No, she said. Even with the litterbox? No.
We purchased the bomb shelter one raw December day. In my mind, shelter shopping blends with Christmas-tree shopping so that, in more or less the same image, we kids are trailing my father around a muddy lot, looking first at the thickness and shape of fir branches and next at the mechanics of filtering systems. In the bomb-shelter lot, we are allowed to climb inside the hidey-holes, to raise and lower the bunks, to bang on the metal. My father chooses a spindly Christmas tree and an ovular bomb shelter. We strap the one on the top of our Ford Fairlane; the other arrives with workmen sometime before the ground freezes. They dig an immense hole in kickball’s left field and drop the gray shelter in.
The bomb-shelter literature explains that children should become comfortable with the idea of staying in the shelter. We are encouraged to lift the heavy round hatch, to descend the slippery rungs into the tight cavern, to finger the canned goods on the narrow shelves, to crank the air filter. Every few months my mother replaces the cans, which rust in the below-ground damp. The filter itself seems to be a simple fan, like the sort that exhaust from commercial kitchens, but we are assured that it will suck down the good air, keep out the bad air. My brother, Dan, can make it whir incredibly fast so that it sounds like rubber bands launching a host of cardboard planes.
For a year or more the bomb shelter retained its interest. For hide-and-seek it was not much good, because the seeker would check it first and there was nowhere else to sneak to. Likewise, the game of Sardines—though it was still fun to descend alone into the cool, dark shelter, lower one of the four wooden bunks and crouch in its corner, then wait for the next person to come in. You would squat on the bunks, giggling and spooking each other, and then another would join you, and then another, until the whole gang was underground. On the other hand, if you wore dark clothing and made yourself small enough and turned your pale face to the corner, there was always a chance that some stupid boy would lift the hatch, peer down, say, “Are you there?” and possibly descend a couple of rungs before deciding that you had chosen, say, the space under the side porch instead. Then he would lower the hatch and you would be left alone, breathing the loamy air. Above your head you could hear the others: “I told you, I checked, she’s not down there.” “Did you go all the way down?” “’Course I did. I checked all the bunks.” Did not, did not. Their footsteps would pad away across the grass. Silence. You would fall a bit asleep, then worry that you were using up all the oxygen, even though the literature had said it wasn’t like hiding in a closed refrigerator and you couldn’t suffocate. Still, you would worry, and then you would imagine how it would be, really, staying down here day after day, night after night, with just your family, in the dark, someone having to crank the filter every minute of every day, and where would you pee, and what if you ran out of food, and everyone outside meanwhile dying of radiation poisoning, and no cat, it would be like Anne Frank only worse, and when you finally stepped out there would be only the communists waiting to eat you, and next thing you knew you were either hauling ass on the filter or scrambling up the rungs and pushing open the latch with all your might into broad daylight and your friends’ laughter.
Slowly the bomb shelter lost its charm. When Dan held his annual Fourth of July backyard-fireworks show, he used the hatch top as the platform from which to launch his rockets. When the three of us cooked up a backyard circus—with the collie next door pressed into service as a trick pony and my sister Julie’s multiple cartwheels circling my hula-hoop marathon—we popped the hatch and every clown in the neighborhood under the age of 8 emerged, just like the clowns from the Volkswagen in the real circus, and the parents applauded. Otherwise, the shelter languished. The apple tree caught a disease and had to be cut down. We gave away the swing set. Suntanning caused skin cancer. We paved the driveway, but no one shot hoops any more. Our mother stopped replacing the cans in the shelter, and rust thickened on their rims. Eventually, as the war in Vietnam grabbed headlines, we learned that our lifesaving filter would only have drawn the radiation downward and we would have expired in our metal tomb. Elsewhere in town, black-and-yellow “Fallout Shelter” signs were replaced by signs reading, “There Is No Shelter from a Nuclear War.” Our bodies too large to hide above the basement joists, we learned that the world posed dangers other than communism. We grew up.
Shortly before I left St. Louis for college, my parents divorced. My mother put our rambling Clayton house on the market and held a yard sale of most of our childhood possessions—badminton set, roller skates, easels, baseball bats and gloves, board games. When I returned home, to a small ranch house near my sister’s school, I sometimes drove down the streets of Old Clayton and paused by our house, but I never ventured onto the property. The neighborhood changed, as neighborhoods always do, and one by one the frame houses with their generous lawns were replaced by mammoth structures, either single-family homes with central air and enormous indoor footage or condos that jutted out toward the sidewalk.
Then, in January 2004, while I was living in Connecticut, my parents died, coincidentally, in the same week. My life was a maelstrom of airlines and arrangements and grief. Driving away from the funeral home on Delmar one day, I had the urge to revisit the old house. I feared seeing a McMansion in its place, but what I found was worse: There was a fence partway around the property, and a sign for a demolition company was posted, but the house still stood. Its roof was caved in, the tiles cluttering the lawn. Windows had disappeared. The side patio was transformed into piles of bricks, neatly strapped together on top of removable skids. Later I would learn that there had been a flood, beginning on the third floor of the home and working its way downward, so there was no way to salvage the house. But that January day, bleak as the day we went shopping for a bomb shelter, it looked simply as though the house, like my parents, had died—or, in this case, had been killed by some sort of cosmic hatchet chop to the roof. I crept up the porch stairs and peeked in. There, to the side of the front door, was the powder room my parents had put in. Ahead lay the front stairway, with its squared-off newel post. Below, the floor was gone; I looked straight through to the basement.
Shaken, I made my way around the side of the house. The back yard was small, as are most back yards when adults return with their new sense of proportion. How had we managed kickball there, or Red Rover? How could it have seemed such an expanse of freedom? Then I noticed the metal pipe sticking up from the ground. Picking my way over the mud, I bent to the hatch. I pictured our rusted cans of food still on the bomb-shelter shelves, the bunk boards moldering. The hatch was heavy but not locked. I pulled it up. A cistern of muddy water rose to the rim. Whatever lay below was unreachable, drowned for decades.
I replaced the hatch. Leaving by way of what had been the patio, I took one of the bricks waiting to be hauled away and sold. I would keep it with me as a talisman. Nothing else, for better or worse, would remain.
