It All Started With a Word
“It All Started with a Word” is a series where I choose any word from Robert Hendrickson’s great book Words and Phrase Origins, 4th Edition and write, well, whatever comes to mind. The exercise is a mixture of freewriting, research, and play.
“Duck and Cover” is a method of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear explosion. Ducking and covering is useful at conferring a degree of protection to personnel situated outside the nuclear fireball radius but still within sufficient range of the nuclear explosion that standing upright and uncovered is likely to cause serious injury or death. In the most literal interpretation, the maneuver's focus is primarily on protective actions one can take during the first few crucial seconds-to-minutes after the event.
The teacher handed out tiny pink-faced pamphlets that morning. Earlier, Mother made burnt toast at the edges, scrambled eggs, and slices of orange with the rinds still attached. We — my sister and I — loved biting that tough part. The citrus (at the time, we thought it was some fairy dust) spritzed up into your tiny noses like magic out of a wizard’s wand.
On the bus ride to school, we sat apart, her with a friend and me alone. I made sure to keep an eye on her. There was that wolf-eyed boy, Tyler, or maybe Bob, who was always pulling on my sister’s hair. I almost fit him through one of the bus’s windows to toss him out onto the street, but the driver grabbed me before I could. The road was moving so fast I knew Tyler, Bob, whoever would never touch my sister again if he hit it.
“What’s this?” I whispered to the kid next to me.
He was staring up at the star dirtied lacquered ceiling, snoring.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked a girl near the window.
She was silently staring outside, gazing at the trees stocked with birds.
I pressed down on the edge of the pink pamphlet and slid it toward me. I have no idea why, but it like a snake as if it were dangerous. Never before in my life had I felt the contents of a book was going to hurt me. Quickly, I lifted my desk and took out a pencil. I fit the black lead tip under the cover and slowly lifted and pressed the cover onto the cold wooden surface.
Dropping immediately and covering exposed skin protects against blast and thermal effects … Immediately drop facedown. A log, a large rock, or any depression on the earth’s surface provides some protection—close eyes. Protect exposed skin from the heat by putting hands and arms under or near the body and keeping the helmet. Remain facedown until the blast wave passes and debris stops falling. Stay calm, check for injury, check weapons and equipment damage, and prepare to continue the mission.
These were the first words in the pamphlet I saw. I didn’t raise my hand because I saw that it was shaking. A fear, once invisible, uncurled in the pit of my stomach. My breath dropped into the back of my throat. My eyes were suddenly dry and unblinking. Every sound became heightened: the boys snoring; the little girl now scribbling in her notebook about nature, the nature I wished to be hugged by; and the teacher in their creaky wooden chair as he stood up. I was paralyzed with the fragility of existence.
Much later, I told my two kids, “I would always look up in fear when a large airplane flew over, waiting for the bomb bay doors to open.”
“We’re going to put on a film from the Civil Defense,” the teacher ordered. “It’s for children I hear in which Bert the Turtle shows what to do in case of an atomic attack. Does everybody know what an atomic attack is?”
I nodded my clueless head because it was better to lie than admit you knew nothing.
“Good,” the teacher said. “In case you don’t, it’s what the Russians and the rest of those commies are going to drop on us if we don’t do it first.” The teacher pressed a button to start the wheel, lit a cigarette, and crossed his legs as he flipped the paper open, ignorant to my need to flee.
Run where? a foreign voice whispered inside of me.
I did not answer because there was a black and white turtle with a tiny hard hat on the screen. Then there was a monkey with a stick of dynamite in tow. I never saw this battle between reptile and that species of a mammal ever again. It’s not funny to say, but the monkey was on some suicide mission. They blew themselves along with the tree they were in. The turtle, luckily, sucked itself into their shelf. All this chaos was happening as a small jingle played in the background:
Dum dum, deedle-dum dum/Deedle-dum dum, deedle-dum dum/There was a turtle by the name of Bert/And Bert the turtle was very alert/When danger threatened him, he never got hurt/He knew just what to do…/(bang) He’d duck! (gasp) And cover!/Duck! (gasp) And cover!/He did what we all must learn to do/You, and you, and you, and you/(bang) Duck! (gasp) And cover!
There were images of children skittering under desks, followed by an explanation of existing dangers like fire, traffic, etc. I imagined my little sister trapped in our house, our parents dead, in flames. I saw my sister running across the street to surprise me for fun, only to be struck dead by a car. I envisioned every atrocity possible to the ones I loved, yet, even after all of those scenes, the video told me there were more.
“Now, we must be ready for a new danger,” the narrator said. “The atomic bomb. You’ll know when it comes. There is a bright flash, brighter than the sun, brighter than anything you’ve ever seen.”
My knees chattered on the bottom of the desk. I looked around, and no one seemed to be affected. With their eyes glazed, they watched, dumbly accepting their fate, however mysterious.
“If you are not ready, if you do not know what to do, it could hurt you in different ways,” the narrator continued.
I couldn’t take it anymore and felt myself pull out of my chair to run for the door.
“Hey!” the teacher shouted at me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
My two kids, always curious and wanting answers that nobody should ever have to answer, asked, “Were you scared? Where were you going? What did you think you were going to do against all that power?”
“I was,” I told them.
I truly was, but something was stronger than the fear.
“And I didn’t know where I was going right away,” I continued. “I was running down the hall as fast as I could, turned a corner, then another corner, feeling caught in a maze I will never forgive them for putting us in, and then I was suddenly there.”
“Where?” my two kids asked eagerly.
“At my sister's classroom,” I said. “The fear I felt did not outweigh the desire to try and save her; the obstacle be damned.”
Suspended but not expelled, my father explained to me the reasoning behind Bert, behind duck and cover, behind the film on the way home. My sister was left at school. I tried to put up a fight, but I was so small, and they were so big.
“We must all get ready now, so we know how to save ourselves,” he told me with two hands gripped around the hard plastic wheel.
“Why?” I asked that fear slowly unfurling again.
My father did not have an answer.
Mitchell Duran is a writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He has been published in Free Flash Fiction, Black Horse Review, Drunk Monkey, The Millions, BrokeAssStuart, and more. He lives in San Francisco, California. Find more work at Mitchellduran.com
