by James John Bell

Created on: March 09, 2008

The Many Faces of Apocalypse

"If the apocalypse comes, beep me." Buffy Summers in "Buffy The Vampire Slayer"

As kids, my friends and I stumbled across the old piece of plywood while hiking. Such large junk was a familiar sight. These woods on Chicago's South Side near Palos Forest Preserve were really not woods at all, but overgrown underbrush along the industrial Illinois & Michigan canal corridor. The piece of plywood was almost overlooked, but I noticed that if you jumped on it there was a bit of a bounce. We cleared off the dirt and grass. There were hinges; it was a makeshift door. With some effort we opened it and within seconds we pledged to keep our discovery secret. After all, it's not every day that you find buried in the woods a nuclear fallout shelter!

For the next few years, during the early 80's, my friends and I prepared for the end times. It wasn't enough to just plan, the door we discovered became our escape hatch from the world, where we would adventure in role playing games like Twilight 2000 and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. We didn't just believe the end was coming, we fantasized about it. Jimmy Carter reinforced our beliefs in his farewell address, Ronald Reagan said Star Wars could save some of us from an all-out attack, abc's The Day After prepared us for survival. Then the 1984 movie Red Dawn brought our past few years of post-apocalyptic planning to life on the silver screen. The apocalypse better get here soon, our kid-sized notions told us, otherwise we're all going to have to get jobs at McDonald's or the mall.

Apocalypse Then

Little did we know that decades earlier the nearby forest preserves of Red Gate Woods were the secret birthplace of the atomic bomb. The peaceful Palos woodlands contained, at one time, secret military installations where the Manhattan Project took place. I didn't find this out till years later when I was beginning to understand what the world looked like beyond the safety of my childhood fallout shelter.

I lived a nomadic activist lifestyle during the 1990's in the twilight world of the Western Shoshone in Nevada. It was a struggling native nation where over 900 nuclear bombs had been detonated, many above ground, since the dawn of the atomic age.

My friends these days were those who navigated the back-country of the Nevada nuclear test site. When word of an underground nuclear test came they would hike miles, avoiding security patrols and radioactive craters, in order to chain themselves to ground zero in protest.

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