"Camp Slugs and Mushroom Clouds"
Chapter Four
Darkness descended rapidly upon the already smoke-darkened Domingo Canyon area, making search efforts even more difficult.
On the bright side, nightfall also caused the relative humidity levels to rise and the winds die down.
This allowed the fire crews to finally get the brushfire contained.
As the fire continued to rage on, in some of the canyon's more remote, inaccessible areas, the rescue teams continued their search for the missing firefighter—right on through the wee hours of the evening.
John just couldn't seem to get to sleep. So he cranked up the old Victrola and put on a Perry Como record.
Over the needle's 'scratch-scratch-scratch' ing, the singer's deep, mellow voice began to croon.
"Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Never let it fade away
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Save it for a rainy day
For love may come and tap you on the shoulder some starless night
And just in case you feel you want to hold her
You'll have a pocketful of starlight…pocketful of starlight"
The listener's lantern-lit face scrunched up a might and he redirected his attention to the stack of reading materials he had placed in his lap.
John noticed that some of the newspapers from 1951 actually carried a radiation reading on their front pages, right beside the daily weather report.
While digging through the stacks and stacks of musty, dusty, dated periodicals, the paramedic had even came across a Popular Mechanics magazine containing a fallout shelter blueprint for the 'do-it-yourselfer'.
He found a government pamphlet filled with Nuclear Warhead Detonation Info, and learned some astonishing—and rather hair-raising—facts. For instance, he found out that the blast wind produced by a nuclear bomb will reach 2,000 mph within the first half mile from ground zero…drop to about 1,000 mph at 2 miles out…and will still be at hurricane force (200 mph) several miles out.
'Fallout arriving within a few hours after a nuclear explosion will be highly radioactive. If it collects on the skin in large enough quantities, it will cause beta burns. If a mushroom cloud is seen, one should seek immediate shelter in places that appear to provide the best shielding from gamma radiation.'
Heck, after what he'd just read, the fireman figured that, if he should ever be unfortunate enough to see a mushroom cloud, he would be much better off to just bend over and kiss his ass goodbye.
The reader suddenly realized that his eyes were really beginning to burn from all that accumulating kerosene smoke.
Speaking of the reader's burning eyes…
John's jaw suddenly dropped open and his smoke-irritated eyes widened. "Where there's smoke, there's fire!" he excitedly exclaimed. "And where there's fire, there's firemen!"
He scrambled off of his ammo box bed and began hobbling about the abandoned bomb shelter, collecting every lit kerosene lantern in sight.
John placed the gathered glowing lamps directly beneath the hidden shelter's busted entrance hatch.
When dawn came, he would crank the cotton wicks on the lamps way up, causing them to 'smoke'—like crazy!
The shelter's 15-foot long by 5-foot diameter, circular corrugated steel hatchway to the surface would act as a chimney.
The spotter planes would see the smoke, report a 'hot spot' and somebody would be sent in to extinguish the blaze.
The paramedic's little plan was positively brilliant—and so was the smile that illuminated his face, as he carefully crawled back onto his ammo box bed.
The old Victrola gradually wound down, and the foxy firefighter finally drifted off into a deep, peaceful slumber.
John fell asleep praying he would not be seeing any 'mushroom clouds' in his dreams.
The missing firefighter's shiftmates had completed their mandatory rest period, following eight hours of rigorous searching, and were out looking for their lost friend—again, even before first light.
Gage groaned himself awake, shortly after sunrise.
"I must be getting old," he grumbled aloud. His poor, abused body just didn't 'bounce back' like it used to. Hell, he didn't seem to bounce anymore—period. The now moaning old man tossed his blankets back and began crawling stiffly—and painfully—off of his ammo box bed.
Body willing—or not—he had an important task to perform.
The search team was in the midst of making its umpteenth pass along the burnt-out ridge, where the missing paramedic had last been seen.
Chet Kelly was the first one to get a good 'whiff' of the kerosene smoke. "Hey! Guys! Over here!" he called to his crewmates. "I think I might a' found something!" he joyously added and went trotting off across the ridge, in the direction the 'smoke smell' was coming from.
Chet's heart suddenly leapt in his chest.
The cloud of kerosene smoke seemed to be ascending up out of a small black hole in the hillside's charred, ash-covered landscape.
The happy fireman halted dead in his tracks, suddenly unsure of his footing.
If the earth had swallowed one fireman up, it could quickly gulp down another.
"Careful, Cap!" Kelly advised, as the remainder of the search and rescue party came running up. "This whole area might be undermined."
Hank Stanley stared down at the 'smoldering' hole in the ground. "Well, I'll be damned…" he muttered beneath his breath.
They'd already covered that entire area of the ridge—at least a dozen times.
Hank quickly cupped his hands around his smile and called out—at the top of his lungs, "Ga-age! You in there, pal?!"
John had headed—er, hobbled, further back into the fallout shelter, to avoid the thick cloud of smoke his 'signal fire' was creating around the entrance tunnel.
He heard his Captain calling him and quickly hobbled his way back over to stand beside the abandoned bomb shelter's dry-rotted ladder. "Yeah, Cap!" he finally managed to answer back, between bouts of coughing.
The Captain exchanged grins with the rest of his guys. "Roy, let me see your radio…"
John's still-grinning partner promptly handed him his HT.
"Here comes a radio!" Hank warned. "You ready to catch it?!"
The found fireman cranked the last of the lit lanterns' wicks back down, and the thick haze of smoke gradually began to dissipate.
The paramedic coughed and aimed his stinging, watering eyes upward. "I'm ready!" he finally replied back, to his Captain's muffled question.
"Okay! Heads up!" the fire officer further warned and tossed DeSoto's hand-held radio down the hole in the hidden shelter's rusted out hatch. Two seconds later, the Captain's own HT crackled to life.
"Got it, Cap!" Gage's voice rang out, via the radio's speaker.
Hank thumbed its send button. "Great! Where are you?"
"I'm standing about twenty-five feet below you, in an abandoned fallout shelter. The structure is roughly ten feet high, fifteen feet wide and fifty feet long. It's got a dirt floor, concrete walls and a shored up, wooden-beamed ceiling. As long as nobody parks a bulldozer over this place, there shouldn't be any danger of it collapsing on me, Cap."
The firemen exchanged relieved looks and quickly and carefully crossed over to the hole in the ground.
Stanley stooped beside—what appeared to be—the bomb shelter's ground-level entrance and peered down through the hole in its rusted, busted, thin metal hatch cover.
By the light of a half-dozen flickering flames, Hank could see his no longer missing crewman.
John Gage was leaning back against a wooden ladder, grinning up at him. "I've been *hack hack* expecting you!"
The Captain's own grin broadened. "Were you injured, at all, in the fall?"
"Affirmative. I got knocked out—cold, the first time. And I sprained my left knee—pretty good, the second time. The, uh, ladder appears to have dry-rotted, Cap."
Stanley studied the ladder's recently broken rungs. "I see that…Okay. Just sit tight, pal." The Captain straightened up and raised his radio to his still-smiling lips. "Search Team One to Base…"
Chet dropped onto his chest and stuck his helmeted head down the hole. "Hey, Chief. We got your 'smoke signal'."
The fallen paramedic pocketed his radio. "I was sort a' hopin' you would."
"Base here…Go ahead, Team One…"
"Base, Team One is pleased to report that we have found the missing firefighter—alive. However, he has fallen a considerable distance—twice, and has been injured. Request paramedics and air-evac. Our present position is on the west side of Ridge 7, in the upper right corner of Quadrant Three. We're gonna need a Stokes, a backboard, a few hundred feet of rope and some lifebelts. Tell the chopper to land at the base of the ridge and we'll guide the paramedics up here. Did you copy all that, Base?"
"10-4, Team One…Squad 16 and air-evac responding to your location. The paramedics and chopper pilot will be advised to meet you at the base of the ridge."
"Mike, Marco, you guys wanna go down and show them the way," the Captain requested.
Stoker and Lopez nodded and began taking their leave.
Hank replaced his HT and then leaned out over the hole in the ground. "I don't think this is what the department meant by 'mandatory down time'…"
The Captain's witty comment caused everyone within earshot to chuckle—including the two guides and the 'downed' paramedic.
"Yeah," Kelly agreed and continued to gaze down into the ridiculously deep underground cavern. "Criminy, Gage! It's a fallout shelter, not a fallin shelter."
"Thanks, Chet. I'll try to remember that. In the meantime, I am hungry and I am thirsty. So, kin you guys please hurry it up?"
A tremendously relieved Roy DeSoto sprawled out on the ash-covered ground beside Kelly and stuck his helmeted head down the hole. "Who ever heard of a 'scared-y hole' that didn't have plenty of 'provisions' stock-piled in it?"
"Oh, this place has 'plenty of provisions', all right. Trouble is, the food and water is older than I am. Plus, there are spiders down here the size of Chihuahuas…"
The complainer's three remaining crewmates glanced at one another and exchanged a group eye roll.
Ten minutes of nearly continuous complaining later…
Gage glanced up as a dangling lifebelt finally appeared in the hidden shelter's now fully opened hatchway. He continued watching as both the rope and the belt gradually began to descend upon his position.
The fallout shelter's sole occupant extinguished the kerosene heaters and lamps and re-donned his turnout coat and helmet.
Next, the 'sheltered' fireman hobbled over to his 'liquor cabinet' and stashed four bottles of 'company whiskey' into his jacket's bulky side pockets.
John hobbled back over to the ladder just in time to buckle the now fully lowered lifebelt around his midsection. His left hand latched onto the handle of his Adze. His right hand gripped the dangling rope. The paramedic gave his 'gloom and doom' surroundings one last, lingering parting glance…and then tugged on his lifeline.
Squad 16's 'fall victim' was hoisted up out of his buried time capsule and placed upon a backboard.
Roy grinned down at his squinting partner and then dropped to a knee, to give his found friend's right shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "Why are you 'clink' ing?"
John grinned back at him and began passing the contents of his coat's pockets out to his colleagues, one precious corked bottle at a time.
Chet gazed lovingly down at the vintage Irish whiskey in his hands. "Arrr! Buried treasure!"
Another round of chuckles ensued.
Gage passed the last bottle of 'company' booze on to his Captain. "I'd like you all to have a drink—on me. You guys might wanna wait until after eight, though. That way, you won't be drinking 'on duty'," he added, with a wry, sly smile.
The guys grinned gratefully back at him.
Stoker took a look over his Captain's left shoulder. "I hear 1951 was a good year."
"Guess we'll find out…in another fifteen minutes, or so…" Hank Stanley determined, following a quick glance at his watch. The Captain pocketed the liquid refreshment and then smiled down at his injured crewman. "We'll, uh, be sure to save you a few swallows."
"I'd appreciate that, Cap." Gage's squinting gaze suddenly shifted to the fallout shelter's shattered entrance hatch cover. "I would also appreciate it, if someone were to fill that dang hole in. A person could break their bloody neck fallin' into there." Hell, he could've broken his bloody neck!
Perhaps being a 'camp slug' wasn't such dreadful duty, after all.
The End
Author's note: (Some basic background info about the world scene at the time the fallout shelter that John fell into was built)
** The Russians had exploded a hydrogen bomb, touching off a nerve-wracking arms race.
Nuclear air raid drills were part of everyday life for schoolchildren in the late 1940s and early '50s. Children were taught to "duck and cover" under their desks and were herded into school basements for periodic air raid drills.
As the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union escalated, fear of the bomb and anxiety over the possibility of a nuclear war drove many Americans to dig deep into the earth in an effort to survive what seemed, at the time, an inevitable nuclear attack from our enemies. Ordinary Americans built bomb shelters in their backyards, often hiding them from their neighbors.
Millions of comic books were distributed to school children featuring a cartoon turtle called Bert that urged them to "duck and cover" in the event of an atomic strike. Metal identification tags similar to military dogtags were even issued in some schools.
Spotters were assigned to watch the skies for anything that looked suspicious or out of the ordinary.
Back in those early 'Cold War' years, the bomb shelter business was probably a billion-dollar industry.
Survival stores around the nation sold air blowers, filters, flashlights, fallout protection suits, first aid kits and water.
General Foods and General Mills sold dry-packaged meals as underground rations.
Families with well stocked shelters lived with the fear that after a nuclear attack they'd be invaded by an army of friends and neighbors who neglected to build bunkers of their own. Many ordered contractors to construct their shelters in the dead of night so nosy neighbors wouldn't see. One owner assured his neighbor that the bomb shelter he was building was really a wine cellar.
1960's:
Following Soviet Premier Nikita Krushschev's scary shoe-banging tantrum at the United Nations, President John F. Kennedy warned his fellow Americans that they should build "A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible."
The Russians ended a three-year moratorium on nuclear testing with a blast over central Russia and warned the west that "It would take really very few multi-megaton nuclear bombs to wipe out your small and densely populated countries and kill you instantly in your lairs."
A year later, the Cuban Missile Crisis would shove the world to the brink for 13 agonizing days.
But the bomb never dropped.
The world heaved a sigh of relief as the Soviets backed off. And as the immediate peril of nuclear holocaust began to fade, Americans began to accept that fallout shelters probably did little to protect them from nuclear disaster. The backyard bomb shelters became wine cellars, fruit cellars, or just quietly filled up with water.**
(**basic background info gleaned from the web)