Village of Chatham declares snow emergency

By PARRY TEASDALE

I’M WORRIED ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE. I’m wondering how are we going to get most of us working together to get out of the messes we’re making with the elements we’ve exploited and haven’t replenished, and replaced … or something like that. It doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.

It’s not my job to take on these tasks. I get that. But that leaves me with the responsibility for finding something small but useful to contribute. That can be hard when you consider what’s needed. It also encourages way too much over-thinking. This is not an exercise.

In the mid-1950s I got a lesson about this. You might have been subject to similar pressures. TV and newspapers were full stories and photos about America’s space race with the Soviet Union and what you had to do to protect yourself if a Russian nuclear bomb was headed your way. Initially students were told to crouch beneath their desks: “Duck and Cover.” It’s part of that era’s popular culture now. But it was a different image that sticks with me. That one was called “fallout shelters.”

We lived in a new suburban house in the Town of Poughkeepsie. A short walk up our road brought you to the IBM “Research Lab.” Grownups who lived on our road were eager to know more about fallout shelters, considering how many of our adult neighbors attended. And, for reasons I don’t know, the neighborhood community group was to gather in the living room of my house.

The salesman explained the details of building a fallout shelter beneath individual homes. My parents and their guests heard how an attack from the communists would mean you would have to have at least a month or more of food and water piled in your shelter. Our neighbors who worked for IBM asked technical questions. I got bored.

My mother was cordial. She almost always was. But by the time everyone but family had left our home that evening, she was furious. She said she couldn’t bear living with strangers–let alone family members–for months, maybe longer. There is no “shelter” she said, or words to that effect.

If our neighbors had built fallout shelters we had no word of it.

I believe a community is a place so welcoming that no one wants to blow it up.