Fallout

^{The author, age twelve, with his younger brother, Leigh, standing in front of their family’s below-ground bomb shelter, 1962. A playroom and bedroom would soon be build over the shelter.}

The one-story ranch house looks smaller than I remember. The white pine in the front yard that I used to climb as a boy looms a dozen feet higher than the roof. The locust tree I helped my father plant fifty years ago is now almost as tall as the pine. The front lawn, which once felt so expansive, now looks hardly large enough for a game of tag.

The home’s current owner invites me in. The slate floor in the living room has been replaced with carpeting, and the kitchen has been modernized. As we walk down the hall toward the back of the house, I am flooded with memories — the games my brother and I played, the fights, the chases, the nooks and crannies we hid in for hide-and-seek.

At the back of the house, where the playroom once was, there is now a short hall and two smaller bedrooms. We go into the first bedroom — decorated in pink, a color virtually nonexistent in the male-dominated home of my childhood — and the owner opens a closet door. He clears away some shoes and dolls from the carpeted floor. “Listen.” He raps the carpet with his knuckles, producing a dull, echoing clang. “We never had it removed.”

He means the metal trapdoor. He can’t show it to me without pulling up the carpet, but it evokes a memory just the same — of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the years after, when the threat of nuclear war had diminished, and the trapdoor practically vanished under toys and balls and other sports equipment.

The trapdoor has been permanently sealed. No one will ever open it and climb down, as I did as a teenager to show my friends the shelter. Instead there is an outside entrance to the shelter now, and, as the owner leads me out to the backyard, he asks me about the stories the neighbors told him when he and his family moved in twenty years ago.

Is it true that before he had the shelter built, my father had a twelve-foot fence erected around the property so that no one would be able to see in? No, I tell him, that’s not true. Besides, building a fence would have only invited questions and scrutiny.

Was it true that building the shelter took every spare cent my family had, and as a result we had to forgo vacations, dinners out, and other leisure activities? While I was not privy to my family’s finances as a child, it’s doubtful. I recall that we vacationed on Cape Cod and skied in Vermont, and we went to Chinese and Italian restaurants.

In the backyard, except for one large weeping willow, the trees I remember are gone. Here concrete steps lead to a subterranean wooden door. Before we descend, the owner tells me the story of having this entrance built: after inspecting the shelter from the inside, the contractor estimated that the job of digging the new outside entrance would take no more than three or four days. At first the digging went quickly, but when the workers started to break through the cinder-block concrete wall, they found something unexpected — an interior lining of quarter-inch-thick iron plating.

A welder had to be brought in to cut through the iron with an acetylene torch, and when this was done, there was yet another surprise — on the other side of the iron plating was a second wall of cinder blocks.

“Your father really wanted to protect you,” the owner says as he leads me down the entrance steps.

I wish I could say that once inside the shelter, old, forgotten memories were unearthed, but almost everything down there is different now. The bunks and wooden shelves of supplies are gone, replaced with metal file cabinets. The overhead water tank has been removed, and a dehumidifier hums in one corner. The steel ventilator still pokes out of the wall, but the crank is missing.

Holding a flashlight, the owner leads me around the shield wall and into the narrow corridor beneath the trapdoor. The rungs in the wall are still there, shrouded in spiderwebs. The owner offers an unnecessary apology for the webs, saying he rarely comes down to the shelter anymore, and it has been many years since he’s looked on this side of the shield wall.