As a child of the 1950s I was dumbstruck when one of my fourth grade  classmates took me over to his house after school one day and pointed to a heavy, square metal plate embedded into the front lawn of his home. It looked a bit like a manhole cover—thick and immovable—but I really had no idea of its significance until Timmy explained it to me.

“It’s the hatch to a Fallout Shelter. That’s where we will go if the Russians drop an atomic bomb on us.” Then he added, “And they will be dropping a bomb on us, my dad says.” Now in all fairness I had no idea at the time what “fallout” was, though I did assume it wasn’t good, and I had very limited knowledge of what “atomic” meant, though I knew for a fact that that wasn’t good.

What I did know was fear—fear of the evil Russians, fear of being bombed, fear of having to eat peas. Now, with this revelation, Timmy was adding “fear of living underground like a gopher” to my list. The schools were already doing their part through having us practice “duck and cover” drills by hiding under our twenty-year-old wooden desks when the terrifying alarm sounded.

At least we had the assurance we’d be safe if a bomb exploded on our shingle roof.
I never got a chance to look inside that Fallout Shelter (who knows, it may have been a made up story to scare the hell out of his kids) but the concept never left me and 60 years or so later I wrote a story called Where Shadows Run From Themselves which centers around one of these structures that had so captured my attention.

The story is a heart-pounding morality tale set in that era and I hope it provides some fodder for thought in our current times. Also, a bit of a shout out to the sixties’ power trio Cream whose song, White Room, included the tantalizing lyric that I used for my title. Shadows has yet to be published but it will soon be so please stay tuned for that.