C-O-D-E-R-E-D

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. My first grade friend Mattie Mae was a happy kid who wore her hair in short braids all over her head, fastened with colorful plastic barrettes. She lived on the other side of the tracks in my small hometown. I discovered this the day I went to her house to play after school. Mattie Mae’s prairie- type sod house was buried in the ground like a hobbit’s habitat, all covered with grass. Its threshold, however, stood upright in a mound of rounded earth, looking nonsensical and inventive. The door opened to a stairway leading down into a dark room with a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Apart from this, the brightest thing in the underground room was the smile on the face of Mattie Mae’s mother, waiting with cookies and milk.
Before visiting Mattie Mae, I’d seen underground storm shelters on my cousins’ farms. These were primitive dugouts covered with a wooden door that lay flush with the ground. In the earlier part of the last century, you had to lift the heavy door of a shelter straight up to slip in under it, and you had to be careful not to squish your fingers when it soundly slammed down. I ventured into a shelter in a game of hide-and-seek. Peeking out through cracks in the wooden door, I shivered from the damp chill of the cave below and the excitement of concealment.

Hiding from a real tornado was never fun and games; in the heartland, storm shelters are not a luxury item. Eight hundred tornadoes a year are reported in the United States, most south of Kansas in Oklahoma and Texas. Twisters cause an average of eighty deaths a year and 1,500 injuries.’ Releasing raw destructive power, the area receiving the brunt of their devastating energy is called ground zero. Here cattle and trees may be flung like matchsticks. Houses and even entire neighborhoods disappear.
When my family moved to the West Coast, another kind of shelter took the population by storm. The Cold War made Americans feel vulnerable to attack on our own soil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis fueled our national paranoia toward Communism and the threat it represented. We were told that the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs poised toward American cities. Living in a prime target city where U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were based made San Diego feel especially vulnerable. By 1961 my innocent daily walk to the elementary school became ominous. Pipes sticking out of the ground began to appear in front yards. By each a sign offered notice of a fallout shelter that would provide protection from chemicals and nuclear radiation. At school bomb drills replaced the more mundane earthquake drills. But the defense strategy was no different. We were to immediately take position under our desks—as if that would protect us from bombs or contamination. As an eleven-year-old, I discovered the world was becoming a menacing place.

Finding innovative ways to exclude the munching invaders from his landscape becomes simply another part of participating in the landscape of life.
“We are never nowhere,” explains Kevin Sharpe, a professor at Union Institute. “From our first environment in our mother’s wombs to the last breath we take, we continually interact with the world around us.” The summer I had a large strawberry patch was one of the happiest times of my life. My toddler “worked” beside me, both of us on hands and knees. I was glad when one-year-old Terza learned that those red squishy shapes tasted good. She quit picking the plants by their roots and plucking off the green fruit. I let her eat her fill until she fell asleep in the grass. Her exhausted sleeping form—back lit by the sun, which shone through a mop of curls—was an icon of that holy place and time. Within a twinkling, it seemed, she was eight and had been joined by two sisters. Still, Terza led the entrepreneurial effort to pick lemons and limes from our backyard trees and sell them on the street (“Five cents, please”), and a pitcher of homemade lemon-limeade was her idea. Little did it matter to me that the sugar and the paper cups cost far more than would be earned. The pleasure on three cherub faces was my contribution to the world that day. This was the true landscape of my life, sweeter than the scent of the roses along the neighbor’s front porch.