Mushroom Clouds

Mr. Pickens, a nurseryman for whom I worked part-time as an adolescent, had moved his field hands to, well, another field a couple miles north of my house. I vividly recall bending at the waist, and dropping handfuls of weeds into my empty bushel basket.

Of course, I’d been listening to Walter Cronkite, or Huntley and Brinkley each night, and I had my trusty transistor radio nearby, and as I dragged that basket along in the heat of the Florida sunshine, the natural peace which accompanied my work was broken only by a myriad of troubled thoughts which permeated my mind.

With the advent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I could imagine the end of the world as I knew it. I would be slaving in the fields, and as I stood to stretch my back a bit, and I gazed towards the West,

… A Mushroom Cloud

would appear, and intuitively I would understand a city of several hundred thousand people had simply vanished. The City of Tampa, with all of its inhabitants, was only a memory now.

And almost immediately thereafter, as I turned to face the Northeast, a greater explosion now, and I felt the earth rock beneath me, and though the sun was low on the horizon, the light which sprang from this ghastly thing renewed the day, and the awful reds and violets and yellows of that massive cloud almost threatened to envelope me.

 

It was the age of fallout shelters. Americans were building them at an unprecedented rate. One young lady, whom I fancied as my girlfriend, once gave me a tour of her family’s fallout shelter. (Funny, fifty years hence, her former home is a lawyer’s office, and that relic of yesteryear is still standing nearby; a host of weeds and small seedlings growing out of the roof).

There’s a phrase, attributed to President Kennedy, which was used at the time to describe the end of the crisis.

“We were standing there staring at one another, face to face, and I think the other guy just blinked.”

And so he did, and I thank God for it. My life returned to normal, and I continued my work in those filthy caladium fields. An unsettled peace had descended upon the land, but it was enough, and my thoughts were redirected towards the former things; skateboards and comic books and bowling and girls, and a dozen other small preoccupations.

 

By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from the volume "Writings" Copyright pending

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