The recent spate of large tornadoes striking the southern plains has emphasized a frightening and humbling fact – there are few shelters that can truly protect us from the destructive power of 200 mile per hour winds.
Just last Friday, Oklahomans who thought they could drive away from an oncoming storm found that the combination of rush hour traffic and a sudden influx of other panicked citizens clogged the escape routes and left everyone more exposed than they were before they left their homes.
When I was growing up in Montrose, New York, in the 1960’s, my father decided to build a fallout shelter alongside the house. It was his response to the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union. The walls of our shelter were made of thick, poured concrete, reinforced with iron. Air shafts went to the surface so we could breathe. A dehumidifier, bunk beds, and a few cases of water and dehydrated rations were in place. We were all convinced a nuclear attack could come at any moment, reducing our house and the entire world, really, to a smoldering, radioactive wasteland unable to sustain life.
I will always admire my father for his determined effort to protect us, but there was no real plan for survival after the first strike. We just wanted to outlive our neighbors, the McInernys. When the air raid sirens went off, I wasn’t sure how we were going to tell them they couldn’t come in and share our dank hole in the ground, but I knew that might be necessary.
Fortunately, it never became an issue, and the fallout shelter wound up being a very secure home for spiders. I assume it’s still there, and will probably be the one piece of construction I was associated with that will last long after I’m gone.
But I pray nobody ever feels a need to use it.
Where is your safe place?
Trail Baboon 
Good morning. I guess I don’t have any place, such as that bomb shelter, that is safe. We do go down to the basement for protection when there is a tornado warning. I would not say our basement is the equal of a bomb shelter.
I have always thought that I could use my imagination to get myself through a difficult situation. If everything is falling apart I would still have my mind and could think about something that would keep me occupied in a way that would help me hold myself together. I would tell myself a story that would keep me from thinking too much about a bad situation that I couldn’t change. However, I have never been in a totally bad situation to find out if I could use my mind in that way.
The new format looks good, Dale.
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oooooooooooo new font, new format. cool.
my uncle casey put the same shelter in his garage when i was a kid. the hole was a great place to go down into for a year or two then it lost interest. today when if the tornados come i have a couple rooms in the basement where the funnel wont get you but the rescue crew had better be aware of because it would take a lot of digging to get to those points if the building was tumbled down on top of it. my safe place today is a different place when when i was a kid. i remember waking up in the middle of the night when i was about 4 or 5 and feelin the urge to throw up and running into my parents bedroom to tell my mom that i was sick and going to throw up. she moved pretty quick but wanted me to go ahead and start without her. i thought having her ther to hold my head was part of the deal. in the tornado drill the most important part of feeling safe was having her there to tell us we were doing it right. i have a daughter and a son who each had anxiety about sleeping over at a friends house when they were little and would try and try but always wound up calling for a ride at whatever wee hour of the morning they made it until if we were lucky it was 11 if we were not they made it until 2 or 3. never had to go at 5. the safe place today is a place inside where there are reassuring words from a comforting me helping me talk my way through the angst of the moment. i have the ability to worry and internalize and ulcers are a part of my Medical history so i need to acknowledge and deal with the issue and not bury it inside. im not sure i would know where to go if the bomb were coming today. if the world were coming to an end i think i would want to be with my family and let watch the end together as the final moments came. its more a mental place than a physical one.
the blog on this official 3rd anniversary is one of the places i go to sooth my soul and be in a place with friends. even when dale makes me remember the fears of the air raid drills and hiding under my desk a school.i remember wondering how getting under my desk was going to help me as my skin was melting off but again i internalized and didnt talk to my friends about their ideas on this. i guess i thought it would scare them.
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tim, your comment reminds me that I see families as being the key to being safe in this world. Hopefully anyone who can would provide help to anyone who needs it, but I would hope than one could always count on family members to provide help. My Dad set a good example for me by being aware the problems faced by one of his sisters and always being there to help her. Of course, some families are in bad shape and need help from other people including government and private social services. I think the work done by social services to provide people with help should be more widely recognized and more highly valued.
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Safety is a mental state, and it can fool you. Many of the kids who died in Moore, OK, sought safety in the basement of their school, and then they drowned down there when the basement flooded. I feel relatively safe in my home, and yet I know that it is only relative. The stuff that scares me the most can find me anywhere I go.
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Rise and Run For It Baboons!
OOOH, Dale, I like the remodel. Are your muscles stiff and sore after all the construction–or maybe just your mouse finger? That bomb shelter is quite elaborate, Dale. Your dad must have been convinced of impending attack.
We run for the closet in the basement here if there is violent weather. Outrunning a storm in my car always seems foolhardy to me, but perhaps it looks different if your home is built on a slab. There is a black stripe right through the middle of tim’s post where he is commenting on emotionally safe places. I think he says the blog is that for him. Me too.
TLGMS used to be a place like that. Now I pull out the old album Jim Ed and Dale compiled, Comfort Keepers to reproduce the feeling. Also there MP3 recording of old Schticks reproduces the feelings, too.
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i hope you like my new black stripe. it took some extra effort in this new format to put that there. do you think i should include that along with my lowercase letters as an identity here in the new trail?
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It is quite a trendy, fashionable black stripe!
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A stripe full of emotion and angst.
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Jacque, I think it’s you who is the polymer clay artist, right? If so, you probably know about this exhibit, but in case you hadn’t heard about it I thought you might be interested. I haven’t seen it yet, but the pictures on the web site are intriguing and I plan to take it in. Flow Art Space recently moved from Northeast Minneapolis to Lowertown in Saint Paul; this exhibition runs through June 15. http://www.flowartspace.com/
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I do know about it, and thanks for your interest. I plan to see it this weekend.
Everyone else, click on the website for a look at what you can do in this medium. My teacher and friend, Maureen Carlson, was one of the judges.
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Oooh, the slide show is wonderful!
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I like the new layout. I see a trail. Is there a baboon lurking? We rarely, if ever, have storms that would require a safe place. I would go into our basement if necessary. I prefer to stand in the garage and watch things blow past. We only had one tornado in the 25 years we lived here. The most destructive storms here are termed “straight-line winds” which seem to flatten things in the path.
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My book club is a safe place (BBC, too – but I’m talking more of my other club). These are women I have known for 25 years or more and we have been meeting monthly to ostensibly talk about books for almost 20 years. We have gone on trips together, helped each other through the sleepless nights of early parenthood, death of family and dear friends, divorce, job changes (and layoffs), health issues, and other bumps in the road. We have also been there to share in the joys of new parenthood, weddings, the joys of later parenthood, travels, new jobs, new houses, graduations (ours and those of our kids) and other celebratory events. The group has also had its ups and downs, but like an old sweater with a few holes, it’s comfortable, not always suitable for public view, sometimes a bit scratchy, a warm embrace when you need it, and it’s been through a lot with you and holds the memory of really good stories (including that one about how it lost the third button…).
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i remember thinking at age 7 when the red scare was all the rage, that the getting under the desk was a waste of time. if the bombs were coming the desks wouldnt provide much help. it was funny that they got every school kid in the country to do this. i hear the schools have drills on how to deal with terrorists today. i wonder if that is the kids or only the teachers. i think if the scary stuff comes today you are just out of luck. my wife as i have posted before here on the trail was affected by her brothers best friend being picked up at the corner store by john wayne gacy in chicago and having the unfortunate fate of being his final victim. she has never been able to rest easy allowing the kids to go play in the neighborhood since then. times have changed in america where the bike rides with baseball cards in the spokes to the trails that led to the river bottoms and far away mystical places when i was a kid are no longer common daily activites for kids today.someone might snatch you. well i was told not to take candy from strangers and not to get into anyones car but the tv shows about sickos were not on 3 channels every hour of every day to scare the bejeezus out of every mom on the planet. i really feel sorry for kids of the modern world today. how do they learn to appreciate nature and exploration? a safe place keeps your boots nailed to the floor instead of sending you out on new adventures. i loved tom and hucks stories when i was a kid, the difference was that their river was more active than ours. we used to hang with the barge guys and get ropes to tie to the trees to make swings out of from them. all you ahd to do was ask, barge guys were great guys. i doubt many parents today want to hear about their kids getting barge ropes form the guys on the barges. rusty, little joe, big al all great barge guys we would meet building a fire on the riverside burning up the dead wood the last flood left ther for us and catching carp with corn or cigarette butts. in the bomb shelter we would have needed batteries for flashlights or fuel for a coleman lantern. today they would need a generator for xbox and video screen. 2 days with a flashloight would be like a lifechanging activity for kids today. my safe place is in my ability to deal with the fact that life is what it is. it reminds me of steves statement the other day about race car drivers. they think the stuff they are doing is safe. they have the tools and ability to go out and deal with the race on their terms. so it is with life. it may look dangerous but off we go with stepping over the land mines along the way and hoping for them all to come home wagging their tails behind them. most likely with an iphone to keep them company.
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The drill in schools for terrorist attacks is the lock down drill. When the announcement is given the students are locked into their classrooms. The teacher locks the door and keeps it locked until another announcement is given ending the drill. I did this on several occasions as a substitute teacher. At one of the schools the principal took the drill very seriously and would walk the halls checking all the doors to be sure they were locked.
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I worry that I’ve already told this story, but………….in high school, I became obsessed with the threat of nuclear bombs, did my big research paper on it, and organized talks to scare people into building bomb shelters. Adults just laughed at my efforts, so I began to use my baby sitting jobs to scare little kids into pleading with their parents to install bomb shelters! Needless to say, I lost all my jobs and not a single bomb shelter was built. I truly believed that I was saving lives back then. Pathetic?
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Wow. If you’ve told that before, CB, I don’t remember it.
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About the new format – the font is so much smaller that it’s harder to read.
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CB, I think you probably can change the size of the font on your computer if you wish. On my Apple computer there is a drop down menu under view that has a zoom in option that can be clicked to increase the size of the font and other things on the screen.
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I find the font small, too. My browser has an easy way to enlarge the font, but I’d prefer a font that is more readable to begin with.
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Interesting. I find this font easier to read than the last one. I especially noticed this on tim’s comments.
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If you are finding it easy to read tim’s stuff you should seek medical help. 🙂
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I said “easier,” not “easy.”
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hey watch it
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Morning everyone–
Happy Third plus 2 days more!
Dale, thank you for keeping this going.
Sunny here at the moment- going to try farming again today and will feel safe there in the tractor. Unless something unexpected happens and then isn’t it interesting how your perspective changes so quickly? I am confident I can skirt the edges of the wet spots and I won’t get stuck. And while being blinded by confidence suddenly the tractor is slipping sideways and forward momentum is slowing down and then stopped and there I am. And now I don’t trust the look of any field… And then I’m not feeling so safe as everything is filled with apprehension. Yeah, isn’t that interesting.
How do you describe that feeling of positive attitude and being blissfully unaware until ‘it’ happens? There is nothing that feels as good as you were just before ‘it’. Does that make any sense? I’ve been thinking about this lately and I can’t come up with just the right words.
I know we’ve all been there and I would imagine the illness and loss we’ve all dealt with is ‘it’.
Hmm.
Safety for me is home with family.
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Ben, you don’t need words to express that thought. That sequence of false bravado followed by disaster is what Roadrunner cartoons are all about. Wile E Coyote always gets a look of smug confidence just before his world explodes. I used to think of him as my totemic animal.
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Thanks for that image of the roadrunner Steve- it gave me something to think about while planting corn. The thing about him is he never gives up. Gotta give him credit for that, eh? There’s a fine line between determination and foolhardy.
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hey watch it
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I remember finding a house (when house shopping decades ago) in S. Mpls. that had a sub-basement – really, a lower level under the basement. I loved that – thought it would be a very safe-feeling place to go, and not only in a tornado. Hmmm…
Home comes to mind, but that sort of requires that home is as you expect it. Husband is here (or will be soon), the important people in my life are in their respective usual places. Familiar. It does seem that the safe place is in the mind as well as a physical one.The first few weeks after son Joel died were very eerie, a little like being under water, because that familiarity had been yanked away. But as we gradually got used to that new place, it eventually has become a new safe place.
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Yes, Ben, I think that is a problem we all face. How to maintain a positive attitude when things slip off track, especially when you are hoping for a clear path to get your work done.
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I have a basement, but it’s not a very pleasant space to hang out – musty and cobwebby. Since I’ve lived here there haven’t been any tornado events that came very close, so I haven’t taken shelter in the basement. I feel pretty safe on the first floor, but I suppose it’s a false sense of security. The house has been standing here for nearly 130 years and hasn’t been hit yet – surely the lucky streak will continue. Right?
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The other way of looking at it is if you haven’t been hit in 130 years, you’re due!
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Pessimist!
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Hmm, still thinking about the font. Seems a little skinny to me, I think I would prefer a slightly more well-fed looking font myself.
On my way here today, I did the craziest thing, and I have no idea how I got there, but suddenly, I had little school picture sized shots of what looked to be 3 years worth of blogs going past me on the screen. Some where well remembered old favorites, but some, I clearly missed the first time around.
Dale (or anybody else who might know), how did I do that? It was pretty awesome.
I find this to be a pretty safe place.
We also have a rather disreputable old couch that has been too big for any domicile I have ever lived in (word to the wise, never buy a couch without taking your tape measure along, and for sure don’t buy one that is on display outside). A normal person would get rid of “Big Pink” (note, Goodwill would certainly not take it, too well worn), but we are very attached. I kind of feel the same way about the old mission style rocker I bought in college. If I am sitting there, bad things aren’t so bad.
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Maybe you should feed the font some scones, MIG, and they will start to look more well-fed.
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Afternoon all!
If we go literal, then it’s the basement, although my basement has windows in every single room, so whenever the sirens go off, we always take a big quilt and pillows in case we have broken glass.
However, like a few other baboons, I prefer the non-literal today. My safe place is here… here in the Twin Cities where I have many beloved friends and neighbors and here on the trail, where I also now have beloved friends and neighbors. Teenager is now officially graduated (ceremony was Saturday night) and feted (yesterday — thanks for all the baboons who were able to join us to celebrate and for the good wishes of baboons far and wide).
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Congrats to Teenager!
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Format comment. Where is Blevins? And Rhonda?
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They must have taken refuge in the bomb shelter.
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OT: My former wife is visiting my daughter and three-year-old Liam. She just sent two Liam stories:
Molly: You better hurry up and put on your shoes.
Liam: What are the consequences?
Molly: Ummm, I don’t know. I haven’t thought any up. Does it matter?
Liam: No, not really. I just wondered.
John (Liam’s dad) told Liam that last night, Chloe (the black Lab) spotted a raccoon climbing on a wooden garden gate next door. The coon ran when Chloe barked. Liam: “So it was a gate-climbing raccoon?”
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🙂 🙂
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its a lot like a winnie the pooh conversation.
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