Thirty miles on the bike this morning. I toyed with the idea of 40, but glad I decided against it. The theory is that there are always 10 more miles in me somewhere. And I think that’s true. Feeling achy? Pedal 10 more. Got a cramp? Readjust and push through for 10 more. Feeling dehydrated? Ten more, no problem.
But then I thought, Ya know. You’re going to be in the car a lot today. Maybe you shouldn’t find any more reasons to cramp up mid-drive.
And so it was. And I did not have any uncomfortableness as we ventured to north Alabama this evening. There’s a birthday to celebrate tomorrow. We got to my grandparents in time for dinner — they chose the nearby catfish joint, which has become a regular destination.
The hush puppies are a bit overly greasy, but otherwise the place is good. Swamp John’s started as catfish in a gas station. (You can do that in this part of the world, and it is good. If you know what you’re looking for.) He started catering, selling out and now has three restaurants in the northwestern corner of the state. He’s done that in a decade. And he’s done that in a place where catfish is a staple of the diet, so it isn’t as if there’s no competition. There are at least a dozen other catfish joints in the county, says the all-knowing Google Maps.
This store has a mural covering a back wall of the place that features the nearby TVA dam. Be sure you notice it, or someone will point it out to you. The place just down the road, Newbern’s, has a large panoramic photograph of when the dam was being built as a WPA project.
For years I imagined all of these places pulled their product out of the Tennessee River. I knew better, but it was more fun that way. It is all farm-raised, even my aunt’s place in the next town over, where the creek drips right through their backyard. I’d never given much thought to where these places must get their shrimp. Being 350 miles inland would push it a bit for being catch-of-the-hour.
We cleaned up my grandmother’s hydrangea. She has a giant patio off her back porch, which is hemmed on three sides by privacy fences. They aren’t enclosed, but afford you access at any corner. In my life there have been two fences there, a brutally bad red fence and a natural color that’s in place now. It is starting to age a bit, too, though. At one corner of the fence there is this giant plant which always provided a natural speed bump for rambunctious children. My grandmother could grow anything. She could take the lettuce from her salad at the catfish place, plant it in the ground and win a prize with it before the season was over. Everyone knew it, everyone admired it and even the kids knew not to mess with her flowers. If you were playing tag, you had to negotiate that corner carefully, or sprint the length of the fence for the next opening. The bush is so big now, though, that passage is impossible.
So we’re snipping off old growth and breaking up stalks and limbs and my mother, in one of her well-timed moments of spontaneity, says “Let’s go down into the fallout shelter.”
I’ve never been down there. It has been in that yard since my mother was a child, and has always been a mystery and a focal point of yard play, but I have never been invited into the mysterious metal caverns until today. Everyone seemed shocked by this, which is odd, because no one ever offered me a tour. And anything mysterious or old or some place I’m not supposed to go, is a place in which I’m interested.
I have pictures.
This was a four bed shelter, and this is about half of the space. Note the support beam down low with now decades old canned vegetables. Some of them have failed seals, but some look pretty good. We opened one of the ones that still looked promising. The beans smelled fresh, at least.
In this box: enough food and water for one person for 14 days. (If you could supplement the supplementary food with some other calories and you didn’t mind being thirsty for two weeks.
This is the hand crank to recycle the air. The mechanized part is still free. My mother says she remembers the sound. As best she recalls the shelter was installed around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but they had it primarily for the area’s stormy weather.
There was a bag of cereal samplers down there. Eighteen packages of 12 favorites. I couldn’t wait to see the logos and the fonts.
But this bag of cereal had been down there for decades. The shelter was clean enough for being underground, well-built and dry, but hardly sterile. Time marches on, and it crunched through the flakes and raisins and left nothing behind. What little moisture was in the shelter probably came from the breakdown of the contents in that cereal bag. Opening the thing, gently as I tried, destroyed all of the thin cardboard inside.
Remember, it isn’t what you know, but who you know, and I know Crackle.
Sugar Stars and OKs. No one remembers these cereals. The things you note, though, are the Hannah Barbera character endorsements and how much sugar figured into the name of things in the middle of the 20th century.
Sugar Smacks. I remember these from my own childhood. They were renamed Honey Smacks in the 1980s when we decided to get healthy. Or at least when we decided marketing makes us healthy. Then they were simply known as Smacks for a while. And now they are Honey Smacks again. Healthy! But not really.
If you’re looking to carbon date the stuff we found down there, a church flier referenced a local radio station that only used those particular call letters during the first part of the 1960s. Quick Draw carried the Sugar Smacks brand from 1961 through 1965.
More pictures, and the birthday party, tomorrow.
