You could blame it all on Pappy, I suppose. He served in World War II with Patton's Third Army on its dash across France and all the way to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Along the way, they hit the southern flank of the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated a concentration camp or two. Not a bad piece of work.
Pappy came out of that war proud and optimistic, feelings that soured in the face of post-war Soviet aggression. Thus, when the Cuban missile crisis came, things were going just about the way that he assumed--to Hell--so Pappy, Grammy, and his two sons, the younger of which was my father, temporarily moved up to the family cabin in the Maryland hills between Frederick and Hagerstown for a couple of weeks. There, they met up with a handful of cousins and several great-aunts and great-uncles, to dig a bomb shelter. My father was too young to do much of the heavy work, but he pitched in. The womenfolk handled stockpiling the food and supplies, including mattresses and cots. This would be the family redoubt, assuming sufficient time to travel in the event of an emergency.
None of these men were college boys. They all worked in the building trades so, between them, they rousted the equipment and supplies and quickly built a reinforced concrete bunker designed to hold 15 people for four weeks, if you really squeezed in. Years later, as the result of an overheard moment of candor, I learned that the plan had originally been for a shelter that would hold Pappy's immediate four-person family for three months, figuring for radioactive fallout, but then you really cannot politely ask family to dig a bomb shelter that you are not going to let them use, so Pappy changed the plan on the fly.
The base of the shelter was twenty feet below ground with eight feet of clearance from floor to ceiling. When you factored in the one-foot-thick reinforced-concrete ceiling and the one-foot-thick reinforced-concrete floor, there were ten feet of dirt covering it to get back up to the level of the surrounding ground. Then, to provide extra protection, they layered on five more feet of earth over the main bunker site, figuring that it would settle over time, even when compacted. The entryway, however, stood a bit away from the mound that had been added to the surface of the bunker. There, a heavy, steel hatch covered a circular shaft with a ladder up to the top. The hatch was recessed into the ground so that earth and grass camouflaged the door a bit. To enter, you had to pull the hatch up. If you were inside, trying to get out, you had to push it up. Pappy was particularly proud that closing the hatch made an airtight seal so that no fallout or biological or chemical agents could get inside.
Maybe this sounds like a bit of overkill, but the cabin was not too far from Fort Detrick, where the Army did, and does, biological weapons research, and Camp David, the presidential retreat. Pappy rightly figured that the area was going to take a pounding, if the balloon went up, so why not add some protection? Still, the concentration of fire would be lower there than down in the immediate Washington, DC suburbs where they lived, so it was a reasonable solution in those troubled times.
Fortunately, the bunker was never needed. Dad, who had inherited the cabin, did take my mother, sister, and me up there after 9/11 when we were kids, just so we would know where it was and how it worked, in case we needed it.
Doing so, we realized that, due to some sloppy design choices Pappy and the family building crew made, it was not possible to stay down there for any extended length of time. About a day was the limit with four people. More was theoretically possible, if you had the hatch open. Otherwise, the oxygen ran out. We knew because, when we stayed there for one night the weekend after 9/11, my mother was complaining of a headache the next morning. The rest of us were dopey. Dad figured out it was too much carbon dioxide.
The air circulation system that Pappy and company had planned simply did not work. It was badly designed and even more badly built. Pappy wound up plugging the hole that was supposed to have a filtered air intake tube, but he never liked admitting mistakes, so he never seemed to have told anyone, including my father. I figured it out later when I was looking it over, trying to figure out what to do with it and lit a charcoal fire to see if the smoke left at all. Not a good idea. Damned near asphyxiated myself.
The upshot of that weekend was that Dad decided it was a refuge of last resort. Otherwise, it was a curiosity that was good for storage and maybe as a short-term tornado shelter, if needed. We left some canned goods down there along with a little gas camping stove and a half dozen gallon jugs of water, just in case. But my mother remained spooked from nearly dying down there, as she said, and usually told us it was off-limits when we were at the cabin for the rest of our childhoods. Of course, that did not stop me from doing my smoke test later but, if I remember correctly, I had been drinking a bit, so my judgment was off.
My uncle, by the way, did not get cheated when Pappy died, and Dad got the cabin instead of him. My uncle got Pappy's boat instead. To my way of thinking, that was the better payoff because, as far as I know, bikini-clad college girls do not usually want to fuck middle-aged men in their mountain bunkers, but my uncle's experience shows that they are willing to give it a go when the middle-aged man is giving pretty girls free booze on a boat moored in the Loxahatchee River near all the bars in Jupiter, Florida.
On the other hand, women in their late twenties are apparently fine with wanting to fuck a mid-thirties guy in a mountain bunker. At least one was. Unfortunately, she was my wife. More unfortunately, I was not the mid-thirties guy she was fucking. That was her boss.
Aside from my wife and I, and her boss, no one who knew about the bunker was alive anymore, or in a position to talk about it, as far as I knew. Pappy and Grammy had died about twenty years ago. The distant cousins and great-aunts and great-uncles who had helped build the thing were gone, too. We fell out of touch with those branches of the family tree and had not seen them in years. Dad died of a massive heart attack about five years ago. Mom had a stroke and was in a home, and my sister had overdosed when she was in college some years ago. And I was sure no one ever got any permission from the county to do any building, back in the day, so there should be no records of the bunker anywhere. In addition, the people who built it were not, as a rule, writers. They were not diarists. They were close-lipped folk.
Come to think of it, I don't think Mom had even bothered to deal with probate for the cabin when Dad died. It was the only thing my parents had not owned jointly, and they never really used it much by the time Dad passed. Sorting it out now would probably mess up the benefits Mom was getting from Uncle Sam for her long-term care.
I pondered these facts as I quietly shoveled dirt on top of the bunker hatch about a foot deep and then, when the dirt totally covered the hatch, gently began piling fifty-pound bags of fast-set concrete mix neatly over the dirt. My wife had wanted me to build a nice patio outside the cabin. We were the only people that used it these days. I had made an order for concrete a few months ago. I had the bags delivered weeks earlier, but placed in an out of sight area, along with the bags of topsoil and grass seed. It was all documented.
Not that my wife would have noticed. She and her boss had a routine, which I had discovered by accident a few weeks earlier. I am a general contractor, like the men in the family before me. I also do landscaping. Sometimes, we build stuff in sketchy areas where I do not want to drive my nice truck so, late on Wednesday morning, I bought a beater car for cash from a guy who was a friend of a friend of a friend. I made the purchase not too far from my wife's real estate agency office, so I thought I would surprise her, show her my new wheels, and take her for lunch.
There was a surprise, alright. Mine, not hers. As I drove into her parking lot, I saw her getting into her SUV with her boss. I also saw his hand on her ass. Being curious, I followed in my new beater car, which she had never seen before. It did not take too long to figure out where she was headed. I turned off my phone at that point. I knew then that, whatever happened, the "it" that happened was not going to require photographs.
When the lovers remained stopped at a green traffic light because they were too busy sucking on each other's tongues to notice that it changed from red, I did not honk. Instead, I drove around them, keeping my head in a position that they could not see my face. I arrived at the cabin ten minutes before them. The beater had good acceleration.
The next surprise was where they went. I would have guessed the cabin itself. It was rustic but clean. But no. They went for the bunker. I was watching behind some nearby trees.
I should have guessed.
I had showed it to my wife some time before. We had even baptized it sexually. The darned thing fascinated her. I was jaded. And I already knew that it did not really work right. She was always asking about it though. Every time we went to the cabin, she wanted to do the horizontal tango in the bunker. Shades of Eva Braun, I remember thinking, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. I figured, if the average teenage guy is willing to do it in the back seat of a car, then a bomb shelter bunk bed is not all that bad an alternative. Besides, it took hours of that kind of activity before the air went bad. She did not need to know any of that, so I never mentioned it.
I don't think she told anyone though, except for her boss. Friends knew about the cabin, but no one ever asked about the bunker, so she probably had not revealed its existence. That was a risk I was willing to take.
I am my own boss, and no one ever knows where I am, so it was easy to watch her and figure out her routine. After looking at her phone, I saw that she always kept the midday timeslot on Wednesdays open on her calendar. She and numb-nuts would drive North thirty minutes to the cabin from her office in Frederick in her SUV around lunch times on Wednesdays and come back before 2:30 p.m. They would get to the bunker, hide the car in a clearing behind the cabin, walk back with a picnic, pull the hatch up, and go down the hole, pulling the hatch closed behind them.
