Duck! They Have the Bomb!

Every time I walk through airports, I notice they make many visual offerings available to travelers both sublime and ridiculous, perhaps to take the edge off the anxiety that flying from here to there and back again can bring. Flotsam and jetsam adorning walls or in plexiglass cases, displaying the local board of tourisms version of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum.

On one trip, I had some time to kill before braving the security line at DIA and toured some of the large wall mounted exhibits around the main terminal building. One of my favorites is a colorful map of the United States, with a picture or two in each state of some little known tourist trap or oddity.

Naturally I looked at Colorado first because I live there, then I looked at Tennessee attractions because my wife is from there, and finally I looked at South Carolina because that is the land of my birth. What I saw posted in SC wiped out any memory of what I found in Colorado, Tennessee, or any other fifty states for that matter. Apparently there is an Atomic Bomb Crater in South Carolina. Let me say that again, apparently there is an Atomic Bomb Crater in South Carolina!

I was shocked, stunned. I was aware of many facets of my home state, but never knew somebody had attempted to nuke her. Fortunately, I was armed with my smart phone and therefore the all-knowing, all-powerful internet to dispel this hoax. For surely it was a hoax perpetrated by some drunken local with too much time and a shovel on his hands. I Googled it, then I tapped on the Wikipedia entry for it, and then my jaw dropped. Here is what I found.

During the Cold War (oh to again have an enemy that we only made pouty faces at), bombers were launched from an Air Force base in Savannah on March 11, 1958, to take part in European exercises and to be on the alert in case war broke out with the Soviet Union. As one of the bombers flew over South Carolina, the captain noticed an error light on one of the bombs showing it was not properly secure. He dispatched the navigator to the bomb bay to investigate. Apparently the locking pin had not been properly latched, and as the navigator reached around the bomb to reset the pin, he inadvertently pulled the emergency release pin. When the bomb hit the deck the bomb bay doors opened and now comes good news, bad news time. Good news, the navigator was not sucked from the aircraft. Bad news, the bomb obeying the quite insistent dictates of gravity plummeted 15,000 feet down to Mars Bluff, South Carolina not too far from Florence. Good news, the fissable material was stored elsewhere on the plane. Bad news, the bomb still contained high explosives. Good news, the bomb landed on an empty playhouse in the woods and exploded leaving a seventy-five-foot crater. Bad news, three little girls, their father and brother were injured (not killed thank goodness!) by the blast. The incident made international headlines, and the family made $54,000 for pain and suffering incurred by friendly fire.

Having found this out, I discover that I am unable to set the incident aside as easily as the Gregg family and the world did. Now, I love Georgia as much as anyone. As a youth, I was taken on many pilgrimages to Atlanta to visit family. When I was older, I would drive there on my own for family and Braves baseball games. When I was fit, I would go to Georgia to run in road races in places like Atlanta, Augusta, and Tacoa. I still have two uncles, an aunt, and numerous cousins of various types in Georgia that I keep up with through the wonder that is Facebook. That being said, I believe that back in 1958 a line in the sand was crossed when Georgia dropped an Atomic weapon on her neighboring state.

The US will not tolerate a missile test in North Korea, and it spends untold amounts of money trying to curtail Iran’s weapons program in the hot and sandy Middle East. The US goes about the world trying to stop proliferation of the nuclear variety where ever it may raise its ugly head. It is intolerable that they simply shrug, dip their hands into their pockets, and are content to simply buy off the victims of state-on-state violence and then go their imperious way!

That is why I am calling for a unilateral disarmament of Georgia. More than that, I want the United Nations to send its inspectors to dismantle Georgia’s nuclear programs and arsenal. I want Hans Blix to be set up as supreme overlord until fare and free elections in Georgia can take place and this heinous act of unwarranted aggression by the Peach State can be finally and completely put behind us.

It is hard for America to justify being the world’s police force when we cannot police ourselves. It is difficult for our government to make a case for curtailing the sales of small arms, when weapons of mass destruction are indifferently handed out to whatever state desires them. And it is impossible to bring about world peace when Georgia has the bomb!

Feet of Clay

I explore my childhood from a distance.  Observing it from Colorado, from Greenville, from Charleston - anywhere but Orangeburg, cradle of my cradle. I am not sure why. There are no great traumas that I am hiding from. I am not claiming a perfect childhood, or some idyllic movie-like home town.  But growing up the pains were large enough to teach without deep scarring, and the smiles were not so bright as to blind.
Still as I sit at my mom’s home in Greenville, I reflect on my walk this morning and the shimmering echoes of the past that it brought to mind. I marveled at the woods, so unlike the woods of Colorado. In Colorado, the land has seemingly swelled to create the space that is there. Its forest are populated without density, the gaps in even the thickest areas may be safely penetrated by the casual hiker or by snow skiers going thirty miles per hours. To get through the woods here you have to want to. The trees gather and cluster and crowd, deadfalls are fences and briars are barbed wire. They are challenges no child can resist and no skier would dare.
Thinking of the woods, I cannot leave a reverie of them without nodding to the trees. Here there are pines, and oaks, and maples, and others that tower straight and strong, racing each other for the clouds. They push against roads, to hem them in by day, and to add reflecting power to the headlights on them at night. They keep watch over you at the same time they keep you from seeing too far, bringing you the horizon and  making it attainable. By contrast, I now live where trees feel like dwarves and protect you from nothing. They are unable to grow in sky-reaching enclaves and most of those that aspire to are gnarled in the effort. The exception is the Aspen with its white bark like some pure knight’s armor. They grow straight and true and tall after a fashion, but pretenders to the faith like cotton woods and elms have simply earned the reputation of trash trees. They grow fast, spread thin, and give into age with twisted forms that huddle bare in the winter reminding me of some desperate, Shakespearian hags.
Also as I walked, I could see the red clay of South Carolina wherever the grass thinned or some earth mover had just begun its work.  I could remember when I used to play with it, imagining that I could form it with my hands, becoming a potter. I would make bowls and rustic mugs and thick red plates, but I knew nothing of the firing process required to harden these creations into the real thing much less what a glaze was. These childhood makings would melt as the fantasies they were with the first addition of creek water. I didn’t spend much time doing this, but enough time to know the clay, to recognize it as something more than Playdough or Silly Putty. Carolina clay has heft, a plastic density, a gravitas that no man made substance could come close to. I could look at this clay showing through the land at every opportunity and remember the feel of it between my toes during a warm summer rain. In some primal part of my mind, I believe that the clay that covered my feet was a binding agent for my soul, that I could leave the land but the land would never leave me.
These vision and others tumbled to me as I walked among my kin on familiar ground so similar to the pathways and hideouts I had as a boy. All around me tendrils of fog-like memory lead back to the swamp at the end of my street, the playgrounds where we played tag football, the streets and trails I would run, the faces that crowded my youth. I feel their pull, but I also feel safety from them at this distance of miles and years.
I can rationalize this vantage point on my life by saying to myself that I wouldn’t know ten people still in Orangeburg. That the circle of friends that surrounded me as a boy have themselves spread to points well beyond the banks of the Edisto River. But I know if I were to go back, and walk her streets, somewhere I would run across someone who would say, “Aren’t you a Handal?” In my heart, I know that I will never be completely removed from my home town, and I can’t explain why I keep my distance and have never waded into the complete nostalgia of her. Maybe I am afraid Orangeburg has changed too much. Maybe I am worried that my woods are now all housing developments, and the pine straw trails I used to run are now sidewalks or paved streets. I think if I am honestly admitting, the thought of Orangeburg scares me now, because it can’t be what it was. And that’s alright, there are some things that can be best viewed without perspective or without the confusing context of the present. Childhood is one of those things.

Humid Beings

 

The Colorado Springs night sits cold and quiet, attended by the moon and stars. Snow patches glow softly, muted reflection of lights both heavenly and man made. The frigid air that is dry to the touch, cracks skin and chaps lips. That arid quality is a constant through the seasons here, and something that drive my thoughts back to humid life in my native South Carolina.

I eschew the hallowed "dry heat" of the West. Its status shilled by snake oil salesmen marketing this starkly beautiful, rugged, and parched land. The dry breezes, the dry heat, and the dry cold are all odorless and impersonal, leaving seasons incomplete, lacking some essential element of their personalities.

Seasons are distinct in the South because of humidity. In the winter she seeps through layers of protection; transfiguring simple cold to something more personal assuming residence in our joints. In spring she moistens the new life that honors her with vibrant colors. In the summer she carries the heat deep into the shade, into every crevice of the day. In the autumn she is like some transformative Hindu goddess, easing the natural compost of life into reincarnation for spring rebirth.

Humidity in the South is synonymous with the land’s context and inseparable from its holiness and hospitality. Humidity is protector, companion, and lover. Her presence is a shield thwarting an onslaught of Yankee immigrants, Northerners who believe our air oppressive and somehow worse than the polluted humidity of their great cities. Their stifling confines are too real and definable, while our moist and fecund world is of mythological and romantic proportions.

She greets us in the morning as we step from our homes, imbuing the air with the day's scents of decay and growth, of grass and pine, of pluff mud and swamps. She lazes about the day slowing our motions and greedy fervors, settling us into a more languidly paced life. She settles in the night as we retreat to the regulated comforts of our homes; waiting just outside, prepared to accompany us when the new day begins.

Humidity is a special intimacy that we are sanctified by each day. She draws us in with warm embrace, clinging with sensual desire, caressing the body with eddies of damp heat which flush the skin with pleasure, and curls and kinks the hair as if we were coursing with the raging hormones of youth. Moving within her constancy stirs some primal part of our brains, recalling the amniotic womb that sheltered us when we were nameless, infinitely dependent, and at our most vulnerable.

Humidity is the continuum of which all things are inexplicably bound in the South. She is a palpable ether, subtext, and lead character to the people that “speak right,” remember manners, and savor the counterpoint of ice cold sweet tea to the hot heavy air of a summer’s day. She is an anthem to my spirit, and a persistent siren call for me to return to my roots.