The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
logs, just the flat expanse of desert, covered over by what might be choppy water, or snow. And if any stowaways were hiding in the trees, bagworms in the needles or termite colonies under the bark, they’re vaporized like everything else, flat gone.
Live a bucolic life in the country, far from a potential target of atomic blasts. For destruction is everywhere. Houses destroyed, mannequins, representing humans, torn apart, and lacerated by flying glass.
—Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 6, 1955
It could be any cornfield, any stretch of snow. What’s left isn’t recognizable as a plane, and the dark shapes on the ground don’t look like bodies, although they must be. The coroner’s broad back is dark against the white as he leans over to take their measure. The thin snow crusting the ground makes everything look even colder. There’s a shape a few yards distant that looks like someone trying to crawl away. You know it’s a lie. They didn’t have a prayer.
Time to clean up. Down in Las Vegas, employees at car dealerships sweep up window glass that had been shattered by the blast, sixty-five miles away. Someone dumps the pieces in a barrel and starts charging for them: atomic souvenirs. They sell out by day’s end. In Doom Town, cars lie flipped onto their tops or burned where they stand. Telephone poles are snapped in half, their lines a snarled mass.
I watch a clip from “Test Film #33.” A camera pans down a line of mannequins staked to poles in the open desert. Their clothes wave in the breeze. “Do you remember this young lady?” the narrator asks. “This tattoo mark was left beneath the dark pattern.” As she speaks, the hand of an unseen worker lifts the skirt a modest few inches, smoothing the slip to show how the heat seared a design onto the fabric beneath. “And this young man? This is how the blast charred and faded the outer layer of his new dark suit.” The same worker’s hand, a wedding band gleaming on one broad finger, pushes the cloth back to reveal the lapel shadow seared on the mannequin’s chest. Then he smoothes the lapel back in place. For a brief moment, he presses his ungloved palm to the mannequin’s shoulder, as if to say, There you go. You did your best. Such a slight gesture, here and gone—he probably didn’t give it any thought. But it moves me, his moment of pity for even this mute copy of a man.
He never said hardly a word but “thank you.”
—Daniel Dougherty, of Buddy Holly’s banter during the Winter Dance Party at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa; February 2, 1959
Corn or soybeans, the field gets replanted every year. A beaten path runs along the fence, and at the site, there’s a memorial, metal records and a cutout guitar with BUDDY HOLLY RITCHIE VALENS BIG BOPPER 2-3-59 etched on the aluminum. People leave things: flowers, quarters, a red model Corvette, guitar picks, pairs of glasses, ticket stubs from the State Fair, a CD with WE LOVE YOU and RIP written on it, a WAYLON tour button, a small American flag. In winter, snow covers the offerings, and the metal records look like pie pans left out to scare the crows.
He died young and far from home, and snow drifted around his body all that long dark night. Damn cold in February, but at least it was over quick. At least you can say what caused it and nobody will argue with you. The reporter who wrote about the “honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching” wrote another article that scoffed at the threat of fallout, writing that “some of the scare talk is simply a matter of individuals’ basking in the limelight of public attention for the first time.” The woman who crouched in the trenches thirty-five hundred yards from ground zero—“the closest any Caucasian women have ever been to an atomic blast”—told of “the normal feminine excitement” in the air, but insisted that “I didn’t feel that my life was in any danger.” The leukemia clusters in downwind towns would emerge over the next three to ten years, but the government would fight the link between testing and disease for far longer. “Hysterical,” the reporter called a letter writer who claimed cause and effect.
I can’t stop thinking about the bare-handed worker showing the mannequin to the camera. About the newspaperman in the tank they nicknamed Baby, and about the soldier driving the tank, who was twenty years old, and from Bellefontaine, Ohio, the town where I was born. About the workers serving lunch at the test site the day after the shot. “I particularly remember some roast beef,” says the narrator in “Test Film #33.” “It was done to perfection and roasted in cans which could have been salvaged from demolished buildings.” The camera lingers over a woman spooning stew into her mouth, the cafeteria tray before her holding an opened can, an apple, and a carton of milk. What she took inside her that day, carried home to bed with her that night.
Today, there is no second-best for family’s civil defense. The urgent need to prepare now against the threat of atomic warfare. Or will you, like a mannequin, just sit and wait?
—“Declassified US Nuclear Test Film #33”
(Apple-2/“Cue”), 1955
When you see the explosion, even from a distance, you might be stunned into repeating inanities: Pretty pretty pretty pretty. (You see it visually but it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, just gorgeous.) The song gets caught in your head and you run through it again and again without realizing it; the song enters your life like a new reality. One quart of water per day. Food in bare rations. In the film about fallout shelters, the narrator advises you calmly to make your way to the shelter, unpack, and “take your bearings.” Someone chose actors; someone directed them. But you don’t think about that when you watch the film. Instead, you unconsciously select one person on screen to identify with, the woman with the child in her arms, taking neat steps downstairs and finding a place in the damp room, setting up the smaller cot beside her own and spreading a plaid blanket smooth.
There’s no other product that gives me as much fear and respect for the power of mass culture as the Hula-Hoop. It has a life of its own.
—Dan Roddick, director of marketing at Wham-O, 1988
The Hula-Hoop demands a lot of space. It has no place in a fallout shelter, the domain of compact games that pass time until the radioactive isotopes decay enough for a family to return to normal life. (Two weeks, says the narrator in the film.) Checkers, dominoes, or pickup sticks would all make better choices, or marbles or cards, or View-Master, “The World at Your Fingertips.” The hard-shell box is packed with reels in paper envelopes: The Grand Canyon, Beautiful Rock City Gardens, Petrified Forest, The Islands of Hawaii, Disneyland. Little Sister savors the quiet satisfaction of pulling the Yosemite reel from the Yosemite envelope. Summer vacation without the headaches, Father might say, the box of reels shelved between the powdered milk and the canned beef. Just about better than fresh.
And View-Master’s images are sharper than life, more saturated with color, Spider Rock’s crisp shadow a deep black on the desert valley, the polished spume of Old Faithful standing tall above a crowd of tourists leaning in to get a better look. Little Sister presses the viewer to her face and clicks through the shots, and when she gets up from the floor, Mother looks at her strangely; the viewer has left a mark. Time to go outside, she says. Get some fresh air.
Click, click, goes the hoop against the button of her jumper. Click, swish, go the button and the breeze. She can keep it going. The plane crash in Iowa behind her, the fallout shelter before her, but here she is, now, feet planted firmly on the ground, eyes on the horizon. Click swish, click swish, and when the hoop worries downward she kicks it back to the right place with a little jab of her hip. The drumbeat of “Peggy Sue” goes faster than her heart ever has, tacka tacka tacka tacka, like gumballs dumped onto a corrugated roof. The singer had been twenty-two, exactly twice her age. Impossibly old.
The Hula-Hoop fad begins in ’58 and peaks by ’59. I want my Hula-Hooping girl to be the same girl who pressed the View-Master to her face, the same girl who listened to records in the living room, but that’s impossible. The girl with the View-Master waits in a dark room underground; the girl with the record player lies buried inside the ruined house. But as long as the machine in the mannequin factory pours plaster into a mold, as long as a conveyor belt sends the shape through the oven to cure, as long as a worker’s there to stretch a sleeve over the arm and pull the torso upright and snap it to a pair of legs, I can have my girl, standing