Their pet project, apart from the cats and the hootch, was an underground shelter furnished with canned goods to keep them, and the cats, going for a year or two. After that the radiation levels would hopefully dissipate enough for them to rise to the surface for some welcome fresh air. However how she would handle her loan business upon the return to normal times was another matter.
The best carpenter in town, Bill Spencer, was given ten thousand dollars – a healthy sum in those days – to build the 20 square foot shelter to appropriate safe and comfortable specifications. If the Cuban missile crisis had gone the other direction and Castro hadn’t listened to Nikita, who knows perhaps the Goslins would have been Gibsons’ only survivors. Today, the hundreds of canned goods probably remain intact together with the now retro-furnished living quarters. What a find that would be for a collector freak – all those neat items! It would be yard sale heaven.
Our two closest neighbours were an antithesis to each other. One side literally provided hope and the other none whatsoever. To our right lived a semi-retired doctor and his wife. Dr. Chrisholm and Grace Chrisholm were about as left politically as you could go except they didn’t quite go so far as having a hammer and sickle as a door knocker nor a picture of Lenin on the walls of their medical clinic downstairs.
On our left lived the town undertaker, Jack Quinn. His regular business was downstairs; to make an extra living he also served as a skillful barber. I used to go to his upstairs facility and, for 75¢, received an excellent crew cut. Going there for a trim and a shave, particularly for older folk, was perhaps a bit of a perceived risk and yet a relief to depart from quickly, happy in the knowledge that they had cheated the downstairs profession once again.
Let me tell you, that wharf – just walking up those planks sends goose pimples up and down this burned-out pedant’s back. No more chalk in my pocket, sharpened pencils and a plastic protractor to make out worksheets at McDonalds with a coffee and cranberry muffin.
Each plank on the old government wharf makes a hollow sound like a kind of drum roll into the past, mixed up with the present and yet hard to reconcile either. It seems like the 1950s and “today” are pieces of bread. I’m somehow the main ingredient of the sandwich, complete with lettuce, mayo and processed cheese. I was processed into a university, trained as a “chalk holder” and when the school pictures were taken, staff and students said cheese or fromage for the sake of posterity and P.R.
Up the hill, now from an over the hill perspective, past the village is a steep road we used to call the Rocky Road, until it was paved. It was a pretty rough climb all right because at the top was my elementary school – Gibsons Elementary – grade 1 to 6. I couldn’t speak a word of English – just German and Spanish. My parents had escaped to Bolivia where I was born about 10,000 feet above sea level, part of a displaced instant Jewish community.
The key opening our box number was like a link to the old world, our relatives and friends scattered throughout Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, England, Israel, Australia and the U.S. It was also from where our lawyer in Bonn, West Germany, would communicate any news re restitution claims.
Thin blue envelopes with exotic stamps and Air Mail – Par Avion stickers were like heaven in the hands of Mom and Dad. When something arrived, both were happy and momentarily at peace like a boat with temporary anchor. If nothing arrived it was like defeat at a battle. The weapon was a manual Royal typewriter and a ribbon that was constantly assaulted with a vengeance of memories and ties to a past that exploded like the poof of magnesium powder at a photographer’s studio.
Dan Propp