Taken Somehow By Surprise

How the Visiting Poet Ended Up in the Abandoned Nike Missile Silo in Pacific, Missouri, after Surviving a Morning of Grade-School Classroom Appearances on Behalf of One of the Better Impulses in the History of Human Behavior

90 i. Because it was lunchtime, and I wasn’t hungry. Because I asked the man with the keys. And because most people had stopped asking years ago, he gladly walked me down the road, through acres of wheat, under the no-longer-electrifying fence to an overgrown mound of concrete where a pair of doors, ridiculously thick, angled into the ground. He sprang the padlocks, and then with his crowbar we pried and pulled until those doors finally gave. He showed me down a long staircase by flashlight until we hit bottom, standing suddenly in the middle of another one of those it-seemed-like-a-pretty-good-idea-at-the-time slaphappy Cold War motifs: a cavernous, unassailable bunker, one of four whose aim was protecting St. Louis in the tenuous ’50s and ’60s. Most U.S. cities of consequence were ringed by these underground wonders where Nike Hercules missiles with nuclear warheads could be raised, then guided to vaporize enemy bombers—a desperate last line of defense to prevent the Russians from dropping their blood-Red nuclear cargo. And never mind the ensuing blast, the politics and bombast, the unavoidable fallout. Maybe, just maybe, what might be a disaster would be visited on the boondocks alone, while the cities themselves theoretically were saved for a more consequential future. And I was thinking surely this was some overblown, cartoonish opposite of the do-it-yourself backyard shelter How the Visiting Poet Ended Up in the Abandoned Nike Missile Silo in Pacific, Missouri, after Surviving a Morning of GradeSchool Classroom Appearances on Behalf of One of the Better Impulses in the History of Human Behavior 91 that Benny the Ball’s father never did quite finish building in 1962. The Ball and I would take refuge there anyway, smoking Kool after pilfered Kool—no end of the fourth grade, not to mention the world, that we could see. We were veterans of the weekly air-raid drills at Hamilton School, where every kid was issued actual dog tags so we could be identified in case of the unthinkable, according to the lovely Miss Jago, our first real bombshell teacher. In case worse came to worst. And since she’d put it that way, Miss Jago was almost all we ever thought about. Back upstairs, bent over our desks in the middle of New Jersey, halfway between Philadelphia and New York, we couldn’t help ourselves: yes, we were small, but we kept busy doing the bigger arithmetic—what we most needed was more time, and then one day our indefinite lives would finally add up to something. ii. Now over forty years later, he tells me he couldn’t believe someone thought it would actually work: St. Louis was worth more than four of these. Hell— Chicago had eleven. Even cow-town Kansas City had five. He was twenty and stationed right where we stood. We never knew what might happen, one day to the next. In 1962, who did? Everyone’s future was miles up in the air. But he’s still here—down-to-earth Senior Custodian at Nike Elementary, a school named after a missile system. Forget about the winged Greek goddess of victory. It’s nothing to do with the sneakers, either. Just try telling those kids that the sneakers weren’t until later. 92 The base was officially dismantled in 1967, but when he hit a certain switch I could see the enormous lift was amazingly still in decent working order. I could hear the power left behind in all of its ghostly hydraulics— fifty feet of cold steel rising, humming overhead in the noontime dark. That would bring the missiles to the surface, where they’d be loaded, by hand, onto launchers, and I was humming too, sweating it out over nothing all over again, there in the middle of that anti-wheat, anti-Heartland, anti-anything-that-comes-naturally-out-of-the-ground anti-silo. Technically, the school district owns this now. That’s why I have keys. They mostly want to pretend it doesn’t exist, but I keep telling them that with a little fixing-up, they’d have one hell of a principal’s office. And me, without a hall pass. I wanted up. I really had to go. He had to laugh: Okay, but how about a song or two before we leave? To keep our...