Growing up, I attributed my father’s penchant for hoarding to having had a Depression-era childhood. We were comfortably middle-class in the 1960s—a three-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch house, a Ford in the driveway, and never hungry—but I heard stories of my parents’ lives in the 1920s and 1930s, especially on Thanksgivings, when my uncles drank too much and reminisced about the old days with my father. My mother still made her own clothes if she didn’t can fruits and vegetables as her mother had, and my father threw nothing out: his old Army camouflage duds, every used nut and bolt, and the many rifles both working and otherwise that he had inherited from his gunsmith father. The weapons were safely locked up down there in the cellar to keep me and my brother from playing with them, which we would have.
Our basement would put any contemporary Walmarts to shame. Besides all the tools, workbenches, spare rubber tires, and fishing rods numerous enough for my entire third-grade class, were rows upon rows of canned goods, bottled water, First Aid supplies, folded cots, and, of course, ammunition on the wooden shelves Dad had installed on three sides from ceiling to floor. My father was a practical man. Every item in the basement has its purpose, however remote, even if it was a mystery to his wife and children. As a man of few words, my father didn’t explain much to us. I suppose he assumed he’d be around to handle everything, should Doomsday come. Which was odd, given that he worked six days a week in a nearby city, and in a factory that processed uranium for the Navy’s nuclear submarines, and which was surely targeted by our sworn enemies. Some Saturdays, I’d accompany my father to work, and I was left free to roam around a building and immediate neighborhood with yellow and black signs posted to alert us to the location of underground fallout shelters, should the sirens go off. They never did, so my father’s preparations were never put to any real-world test.
I thought every family on our street had basements stocked like ours, but I was wrong. I wasn’t allowed to bring my friends down into the basement—now I realize my father didn’t want the neighbors to know what we had—but I visited theirs: old furniture, and maybe boxes of family memorabilia, but nothing you would need to live down there. That’s how I caught on that my father’s odd habit wasn’t just hoarding: it was methodical preparedness. It was hoarding with a singular purpose: to survive the worst of what was coming. Like I say, it was the 1960s. There was the Soviet Union and its leader Khruschev’s boast to literally bury us. Our basement was a fallout shelter, even if my father never said as much. His efforts may now seem naïve, or hopelessly inadequate: but remember, these were the years my brother and sister and I were taught by our teachers to dive below our school desks the second we saw a brilliant flash outside our classroom windows. We were confident we’d make it through, whatever they’d hurl at us.
When the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded in October of 1962, I was in elementary school. It was around that time my parents bought a small black and white television set for the living room. We used it to follow the news. We ate our dinners on folding TV tables we set up right in front of the little screen, where Walter Cronkite updated us each evening. Dad would occasionally get up to fiddle with the rabbit-ear antennas, hoping for a clearer signal. It was at those little TV tables that we followed the tense lead-up to the confrontation between the world’s two supreme nuclear powers in some place far from us, just not far enough.
You would think the news would prompt my father to reinforce our fall-out shelter, and perhaps he did. But the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded at that time of year when my father, dedicating one of the two yearly vacation weeks his employer granted him, would always go deer hunting with his brothers—those uncles of mine to whom I listened, spellbound, every Thanksgiving—in northern Maine. Nothing was going to interfere with that annual hunting trip. And so he went, even as Walter Cronkite was telling us to prepare for, if not expect, the worst Castro could do to us.
But that time, in 1962 and only 1962, the rest of our family went up to the State of Maine as well. My mother took us out of school for a week with no explanation. We went north not to hunt –that was grown men’s business — but, we eventually figured out, to be close to my father “just in case.” My mother had heard that Russian missiles launched from Cuba could reach southern New England, barely, but not Maine. We’d be safe there, in the single motel room my mother rented for the four of us while Dad was out in the woods camping with his brothers. So my mother loaded my brother, my sister, and me in the station wagon and drove us to Maine, a long journey for a child when my father enjoyed the other week off he had each year and took us to a lakeside cabin; but never as long as it was that October, when my mother inched along the slow local roads you had to use before Eisenhower’s interstate highway was complete.
I remember only a few details from that week away, but I do recall the Halloween that fell amid it. Depositing my infant sister for safekeeping with one of her sisters-in-law, my mother took my brother and me out that night in the pouring rain to trick ‘n treat in a place where she, and none of us kids, knew a single person. But it was 1962, and in those days you could ring a stranger’s doorbell and trust you’d be met with candy, not a gun. And indeed we were treated with candy, even if people’s smiles were not quite as broad as they had been on previous Halloweens.
Our costume—there was just one for my brother and me to share—was a white bed sheet draped over the both of us, with four little holes cut through it for us to peek out of it. We were supposed to be ghosts. But you do not put two little brothers in immediate proximity under a single, implausible costume and expect things to go well. They did not. We were soon drenched getting in and out of the station wagon to knock on unfamiliar doors. My mother chauffeured us in silence down one street and the next. People who opened their doors were kind to us, but my brother and I fought constantly with each other between the times we had to be polite standing before strange adults. Despite the bountiful sweet loot we acquired, my brother and I considered Halloween 1962 a total failure, unaware of just how frightened all those adults, including our mother, were in those weeks. That Kennedy and Khrushchev were on their minds. Maybe they had basements filled with supplies, like we did at home. We didn’t know. All we knew was that we had frightened no one but ourselves with our improvised bedsheet costume.
Fast forward a decade. I am away in college, but home for the weekend during the Arab Oil Embargo prompted by war in the Middle East. The cost of gas in America had gone up fifty percent, milk nearly as much. Without a car, and no longer a milk drinker, I didn’t give it much thought. But in the back of the house, just where the woods started, I spotted something new through the kitchen window. There was a good-sized metal shack, featureless but with a door secured by several padlocks and a thick linked chain.
I asked my father about it, thinking he might have put it there to store a snow blower and a riding lawnmower, the sort of things our neighbors did if they had shacks in their backyards. My mother said nothing as she did dishes in the sink. Dad gave no answer, but told me we were going out to finish painting it. This surprised me: my father had never asked us kids to ever help with any house project. He didn’t trust us to do anything right. This day was different.
I hauled the designated can of paint and two wide brushes out from the garage to the metal shed, and was about to use a screwdriver to pry the lid off of its top when my father undid the padlocks and chain. When the door was free and he swung it open, he told me to look inside but “not touch anything.”.
There was a huge black metal tank with spigots on one side filling nearly the whole interior of the building. The only thing there was additional room for in there were two small, red gas cans with flexible spouts, the kind you can carry to refill your chainsaw or electric generator. I exclaimed: “What the f***, Dad.”
“I built this last month. Two buddies from the plant helped me. We had to rent a big flatbed to get the damn tank here. Rolled it from the driveway to here. Then built the shack around it. We did it all at night, so the neighbors wouldn’t see what we were up to.”
“What is it?”
My father stood there with a shit-eating grin crossed with signs of a seriousness I’d known since childhood to pay attention to. “It’s filled with gasoline. For the cars. I’m not going to be caught short. This will last us a long while.” I gulped.
“Well, not a long while. The additives they put in the damn gas these days go bad. I have to rotate the old gas out and put fresh gas in. That’s what those cans are for. I do that at night, too, so no one knows what I’m up to.”
“Does Mom know about this?
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know this could blow up and destroy the house?” I said was exasperation. “The whole street?” I was stunned by the lengths the father had gone to in his hoarding. But it wasn’t clear to me whether he’d just lost his mind, or was doing something worth doing.
Dad said nothing more. He closed the door to the shed and locked it up again. We stood looking at each other for a moment in silence. Finally, I told my father he should go back inside the house. “I’ll finish the painting job,” I told him in a firm voice I’d only discovered in young adulthood. I didn’t expect him to obey, but he did. Still, I was careful to do a good job at painting, lest he look out that kitchen window and storm back out, cursing me for doing it all wrong.
The shack stayed there for a long time, long past the time when gas prices came back down and people stopped worrying about oil to go back to thinking about nuclear bombs. I don’t know how long my father kept the tank full of gas. We never talked about it. When my parents were dead, and my siblings and I prepared the house to put on the market, we never found the keys to the shed’s padlocks. We never looked inside to see if the tank was still full of gas. We told the real estate agent we didn’t know anything about it. And in a sense, we were right. We didn’t know anything about it, not really. It was our father’s project, after all, and not our own.
Now, I live in a part of the country where basements are rare, or even non-existent. I use a dry crawl space under my house to hoard my canned goods and water, my rolled sleeping bags and First Aid kits, a good amount of cash, potassium iodate pills, a compass, a radio with a hand crank, and a loaded rifle. I have to crawl on my belly to get to it. I secure its small door with padlocks and a heavy linked chain, and I certainly know where I keep the key. Everyone doesn’t grow up to be like his father, but some part of me has.