Myself As Another

I ran across this post on BoingBoing this morning, and I’ve been scouring the Web ever since, looking for pictures of the North Dakota Safeguard Pyramid.

I’ve never seen or heard of this structure before. I’m in awe. There’s something so spooky about it. I’m trying to figure out why it’s so compelling. I grew up near Fargo at the height of the Cold War hype. I remember always hearing the odd fact that if North Dakota were to secede from the Union and become its own country, it would be the world’s third largest nuclear super power. We lived among thousands of warheads buried in the flat prairie. I remember watching movies like Red Dawn and The Day After. I remember the fallout shelter signs in the Wahpeton Armory where I attended Mrs. Wilson’s kindergarten class each afternoon. I remember the “emergency drills” in grade school where everyone packed into the basement hallways of my elementary school. Hands behind our heads, heads tucked between our knees, and both knees on the floor as we eached faced the wall two and three rows deep. The Russians were always ready to launch an offensive, and we’d be their primary target. Thousands of bombs raining down on us. Mushroom clouds sprouting across the landscape like instant thunderheads rising in their own summer heat.

I can’t say that I lived with this fear everyday. No, it wasn’t that immediate. I don’t know anyone who had a fallout shelter. And most everyone I knew, kids and adults, thought that surviving the initial attack would be virtually impossible, given the density of sites around us. I remember my mother admitting that even if we could survive an attack, the radiation would be so intense for so long, we would wouldn’t last long anyway. Basically, it came down to either being incinerated in a rolling shock wave of blinding light and hellfire, or bleeding to death internally over the next several weeks as the radiation blew through our bodies like human screen doors.

I imagined hearing the sirens, and everybody walking out into the street to watch the missiles lift off into the Western sky. I imagined nobody saying a word as the missile exhaust drifted over us, as we all stood, mouths agape, wondering  what we might do. I thought to myself that I would climb up on the roof of our house and wait. I wondered what death would be like. If I would be able to feel myself burning. I wondered if I would leave any remains to be found, hundreds of years later, when the radioactivity had subsided enough to make North Dakota habitable again. I remember thinking that it would be maybe the most peaceful resting spot in the history of the world. No one to disturb us for a long, long time. I imagined the Soviet missiles passing our own somewhere over British Columbia. There was something visually beautiful about it. I thought about missiles alot back then. I never imagined them thundering forward at great speed parallel to the ground. Instead, I imagined them sort of cruising, tilted just slightly backward, leaving behind a silent trail of smoke. I imagined hundreds of them all in the sky at once totally in sync with each other. And then I imagined exactly the same from the other direction. Two floating fields of warheads passing each other in the sky.

They weren’t really nightmares. And I don’t remember any anxiety about what I thought might happen. Odd, now, looking back on that time. I must have been anxious. It must have been the sort of anxiety I lived with so long, it just became part of the landscape. Part of the future. An embodied dread. A serene landscape that would eventually rise up to incinerate those living on it. Some symptom of what fate does to those who deny it.

This is the landscape on which I grew up. This is the landscape, too vast for human shaping, which shaped me instead.

Now the silos are empty.

And in Nekoma, North Dakota, a thick, concrete pyramid rises up from the landscape. A heavy monument to generations of dread and stoic acceptance. But it’s a pyramid without a tip. Maybe whoever build it knew better than to build something new that points at the sky. Maybe it’s unfinished. Maybe the men and women building it thought it might be more approapriate to stop where they were, to leave this one last gesture of commemoration and safety unfinished.

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What parts of YOUR childhood have been decommissioned? What anxieties have become part of your landscape? If your state seceded from the Union, for what would it be known? Post away!