Remembering the Bomb Years

We'd been driving for hours in the dark, or so it seemed, the dark broken by nothing but our own headlights. It was rare to encounter another car on that road at any time of day. It might have been dark already when we came over Montgomery Pass, but my inability to see them would only have made my terror of the f the steepcliffs worse. I always dreaded that part of the tripP. The two-lane highway veered right and lift along the narrow ledge for miles and miles and miles with the cliff too closeon the side. . On one trip Daddy stopped the car and got out to look over the cliff because another car had run off and was crashed far beblow. It was too steep to get down to help anyone if there was anyone left alive to help so we drove on. He'd have reported it to the police when we got home.

I spent too much of my childhood terrified of rmany things. Montgomery Pass was one of them. As far as I know I was the onlyl one in the family who experienced that dread. Another terror was the water heater on the back porch that went out awfully frequently and had to be relit. I would run out to the porch as soon as I got up to see if the flame had gone out and would be enormously relieved if it hadn’t. . It burned oil and Daddy would let it get too full of oil and then light it by throwing a match into it which woujld ignore it with a roar and flames shooting out of the little opening. It took a long time for the roaring and flame-spitting to die down to a normal level. The idea was to get it to heat the water faster than usual but such a practical reason was lost on me. I woujld sit in school all morning worryinhg about the house going up in in flames.e. He’d light the stove the same way when the pilot went out, turp the gas up high and then stand back to light a match and toss it onto the burner which would burst into a ball of fire with a great whoosh. At least that would die down rapidly and didn’ t torture me in class..

By fourth grade I was terrified of the fallout from the bomv tests at Yucca Flats. I imagined it in the air around us as we sat in class. The school had bussed us out to a hill at the edge of town where we could see the mushroom cloud. We were told to cover our eyesy while they counted down to detonation and then we could look at the cloud. They only took us out to see it once that I recall. The pictures of it in the newreels we'd see in the movie theater on Sundays were better. But it was imagining thefallout i the air that caused the anxiety, not the bomb itself.

We only made the trip to Southern California once a year to visit relatives and it was only on that trip that I had to endure Montgomery Pass, on the trip down and then the trip back. Oddly I oly remember the blackness of the night on the trip back, I don't remember moon or stars but they must have been there. And the silence in the car. It was late enough that we kids had stopped fighting with each other, and our parents didn't talk much as I recall. So there was the sound of the engine and the tires on the asphalt.. Some of the four of us or even all of us might have been asleep by then.

Maybe Daddy said something about almost being homebecause he knew we liked to be awake for the last stretch.. The road curved widely aroudn the big shadow of a mountain on the right and that's when we could see the little necklace of lights in the distance. Home. The dead center of Nowhere.

Well, that's how Mom thoguth of Tonopaht. Being kids to us it was home for the nine years we were there. S he missed Santa Monica, her two sisters, the grenery, the avocado tree in our back yard, civilization. I was old enough at six to remember Santa Monica but her missing it was worse than any missing it of my own could ever have been. Her unhappiness was as dark a cloud as any bomb cloud could ever have been. It might have affected Bob too, he was five, but I don't know, and since he's been dead for thirty years I'll never know, not in this life anyway. The others were too young to be consciou of it until later.

Recently I was diagnosed with a thyroid condition that might qualify me for government compensation as a “downwinder” from those bomb years. The final diagnosis isn’t in yet.