“Wow. Strong medicine.” I folded the page and put it in my case. “Was Ferring arrested? What happened?”
Cady scrolled through the fiche. She tapped a finger on the screen to show me an article that had run the following day, but she gave me the highlights without looking at it—she’d been through this story more than once.
“The air force was in charge of the silo, so they could have arrested people under military law or something, but they didn’t—they took them away forcibly. I guess they didn’t want any more negative publicity than they already had.”
The Air Force escorted the demonstrators to buses, which drove them to Lawrence, where they were free to go about their business. At the request of U.S. Air Force Col. Malcolm Pavant, we are withholding photos of the protesters. We don’t want people defacing a military installation to glorify themselves in public.
The article concluded with a comment from Colonel Pavant, who said the air force appreciated the support of the local law-enforcement agencies “and also of the many Kansans who understand that when you are facing an enemy like the Russians, you have to be prepared to make sacrifices.” Pavant didn’t spell out the sacrifices, but I suppose they included incineration in a nuclear holocaust.
Cady moved aside while I read through the next several days’ worth of the paper, but she was right, there was no further mention of Emerald, or indeed of any other protesters, by name. The Douglas County Herald was doing its duty as diligent guardians of the First Amendment by keeping people who peaceably assembled out of the paper.
“Does the missile silo still exist?” I asked. “Where is it?”
“Out east of town about five miles. They took the missile out after the Cold War. We used to have thousands of them in the Midwest. There were a bunch of talks, and then treaties, between us and the Russians, and then the air force started taking missiles out. Anyway, the Kanwaka silo, out east of town, some developer wants to buy it from the air force and turn it into survivalist condos.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
Cady made a face. “You’d think, but it’s happening around the country. Some people are buying them to live in right now, because they’re cheap and they think it’s cool, but some of the big ones, developers are turning them into hugely expensive shelters for surviving the worst.”
She turned from the fiche reader to a computer, bringing up some sites of missile silos–turned–homes. A man in Texas had created the ultimate bachelor pad somewhere out in the bare, bleak stretches of the state, but the most eye-popping was one Cady showed me in Montana, labeled “The Great Escape: Fifteen underground levels of peace of mind.” A subhead, with lightning bolts flashing off and on around it, screamed that “Fortune Favors the Prepared.”
I bent over Cady’s shoulder for a better view. The website showed a cutaway of the underground part of the missile silo, fifteen stories of condos, with five stories even deeper underground for the mechanicals, swimming pools, water and air filters, and so on. Units started at $1.5 million and came with a five-year supply of freeze-dried food. The silo had massive generators, updated from when they’d only had to power a Titan missile over the pole to Russia. There was also dedicated Wi-Fi—assuming the Internet would function post-Armageddon. Your choice of views from your windows—a computer would give you seascapes or mountains or amber fields of grain so you didn’t have to stare at concrete walls.
I felt as though spiders were crawling up my arms: locked underground, no escape hatch, waiting for the end of the world with a few dozen other people, in units with the granite countertops, German dishwashers, under-the-counter refrigerators, and surround sound that all upscale buyers are looking for in their second home. The Great Escape had sold five units; thirteen more were available but going fast, so make an appointment today.
The slide show on the screen showed an artist’s vision of the exterior, with trees and a heliport surrounded by rosebushes. I wondered if the real deal would include bunkers for snipers to shoot any of the 99 percent trying to flee nuclear winter.
“Is that what’s happening to your silo, the— What is it called?”
“Kanwaka. It’s from some Indian names,” Cady said. “It’s like everything else in Kansas. It used to be Indian land, and we took it and turned it into something bigger and better—namely, a huge bomb site. I haven’t paid that much attention to what they’re doing at Kanwaka, but last I heard, there was some question about the land. One of my grandmother’s friends was trying to broker the conversion of Kanwaka into condos, but the deal fell apart.”
“When Emerald and the others were protesting out there, there must have been pretty tight security,” I said. “Did they camp out on the perimeter, or were there houses or trailers?”
“Tents in the field, is what I was always told,” Cady said. “It’s really hard to find anyone who remembers anything about it—details, I mean. You can talk to people in town, and they all remember the demonstrations. Depending on their politics, it was either a wonderful example of grass-roots activism or a horrendous display of mob violence. Of course, that was way before smartphones, so it’s not like people were posting photos to Instagram or anything. And then the commune burned down about two months after the protest, so there’s not anything left out there to look at.”
“Burned down?” I echoed. “How?”
Cady hunched a shoulder. “They say one of the hippies was probably smoking—dope, they mean—and let a fire get out of control.”
She turned back to the microform and found the story in the Douglas County Herald.
After we and the rest of the Fourth Estate took the spotlight away from the demonstrators at the Kanwaka silo, the hippies evaporated, proving what Air Force Col. Malcolm Pavant suspected all along: these were bored publicity seekers. Apparently they didn’t put out their campfires before they took off. Douglas County Sheriff Milt Julkis reports that about ten days ago a fire took out most of the tents and shacks the protesters left behind. The news was kept quiet until Col. Pavant was able to confirm that there was no damage to the silo and no radiation leakage as a result of the fire. He also confirms that there was no loss of life.
“It’s really hopeless,” Cady said. “The only person I know who really remembers the missile part is one of the math teachers at my school. She’s about ten years older than me, and she grew up out near Kanwaka. She went to this two-room school out by the silo and said it totally spooked her and her friends, going past it every day in the school bus, knowing the U.S. thought we were expendable. Like, we could be a first-strike target because we didn’t count.”
I nodded absently, wanting to know more about Ferring’s involvement. “What was the movie, the anti-nuke movie that they made here? Did Ferring star in that?”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t think she had anything to do with it, but I’d have to look at the credits. The Day After, it’s called. It was made for TV and showed the kind of radiation poisoning you could expect after a nuclear war, if you weren’t killed right off, and how there wouldn’t be food, that kind of thing. It was pretty controversial here in town, some people thinking the mayor should be thrown out of office for letting the Russians believe that Lawrence was scared of nuclear weapons. Of course, there was pretty strong support for disarmament here as well, but Reagan—he was president at the time—he tried to get ABC not to show it.
“The movie was released right after I was born, so of course I don’t have personal knowledge about all the controversies, but I talk to everyone who was living here then about what they remember.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve watched the movie maybe fifty times. I keep hoping I’ll see my mother.”
“Was she an extra?”
“No. She was at the protest, though, at the missile silo, and then . . . she died.”
She bit her lip, pushing back emotion, tears. I sat quietly, waiting until she felt like speaking again.
“No one knows what happened—I mean, how it happened. She drove her car off the road and drowned in the Wakarusa—that’s a little river near the silo. I was six weeks old, and she’d taken off without me. She’d forgotten me—that’s what hurts the most. One of the farmers found me and brought me to Gram. They say maybe she was smoking dope, which I guess could be true, or drunk—how would I know?”
I’d lost my mother when I was a teenager, and I still missed her. I could imagine the hole there’d be in the middle of my heart if I’d never known her at all.
“I started studying history—it’s what I mostly teach, you know, although there’s general social studies, politics, that kind of thing—and why I work here. I keep hoping I’ll get some whiff of something that will explain my mother to me. Gram, she’s so bitter about everything that went on around Kanwaka, she never talks about it. It wasn’t until I got to high school that I even knew about the protests at the silo—all she ever would say was that my mom died when her car went off the road. First Grandpa—her husband—died in a car crash, then Jenny, my mom. Gram almost wouldn’t let me learn how to drive, she’s so sure there’s some kind of curse. But you can’t really get around in a town this size without a car.”
“That sounds like a tough load for both of you.”
Cady laughed self-consciously. “Some. You should have seen me when I took driver’s ed—it was a month before I could figure out how to keep the car going in a straight line.”
I waited a respectful moment before changing the subject. “Was the protest at the silo connected to the anti-nuke movie?”
“I don’t think so. The protest was a part of the times, you know, people all over the country fed up with the arms race and wanting an end to it. The Day After was more like a reflection, see, of the public mood. My mother, from what I can dig up, she was part of this commune who wanted to try to re-create what the women in England were doing at that same time, protesting nuclear warheads in the middle of the country. At its height the English had almost a hundred thousand women at their air force base. Here in Lawrence they had maybe twenty. Kansas, you know!”
She fiddled with the reader dials, making the text jump in a sea-sickening way. “I’ve read all the local stories—including what the Kansas City and Topeka papers covered—a few dozen times, but I didn’t know who Emerald Ferring was. I mean, that she was a movie star or African-American or anything. I didn’t pay attention to her name all the times I read about the protests. I was just looking for any mention of my mom. Jenny, her name was. Jennifer Perec.”
Cady whispered her name, talking more to herself than to me.
“What does your grandmother say about the commune and the protests?”
“I’ve never been able to get her to talk about it, beyond saying the only good that came out of it was me.” She flushed and glanced up. “That’s nice and all, but it’s always felt to me like Gram is hugely angry with my mom, and I can’t get her to talk about her. Or get any idea of who my father might have been. He wasn’t in the car with my mom, and Gram doesn’t know who he was, or at least she says she doesn’t know.”
I could imagine that deep wound as well: a teenage romance, the boy not wanting to be saddled with a baby when his girlfriend died. He’d had the option to disappear like smoke. “Did she—Jennifer—grow up here? She must have some childhood friends you could talk to.”
Cady nodded. “I have, believe me. And I have her high-school yearbook. She was voted most likely to be the next Marie Curie because she was interested in science, but Gram won’t even tell me if the physics classes she took were what turned her into a disarmament advocate. My mom was only nineteen when I was born, so it’s hard to find people who can tell me much about her. She was good at math, she liked biology, she was an ace soccer player.”
“Your grandmother didn’t have other children?”
“My mom was three when my grandfather was killed. Gram had been putting him through law school, so they were waiting to have more children, I guess, and then she never married again.”
So no aunts or uncles who could talk about the Kanwaka sit-in. I got Cady to let me look at the microfiches from both the Douglas County Herald and the Lawrence Journal-World.
Cady’s focus had always been on a quest for her mother, but I wanted more coverage of Emerald Ferring’s role in the protests. I couldn’t find anything, except for photos that showed a heavy military presence around the missile silo. Any pictures of anti-nuke protesters were obscured by a huge banner that read god bless the united states of america air force, held aloft by people identified as Douglas County Freedom Lovers. It was decorated with pictures of fighter jets and the American flag.
Another story showed people playing softball and barbecuing near the half-moon dome covering the silo.
Americans know the safety of our nation and her citizens is the number one priority of the U.S. Air Force. Douglas County citizens can picnic safely because the Air Force routinely checks radiation levels in the nearby land and water. And they know this missile is here to keep us all safe from the Russian menace.
I wondered how much radiation leakage there was around these old missiles, whether it was really safe to live in one of their silos—assuming your claustrophobia didn’t put you at risk of a mental meltdown first.
I was turning the wheel faster when Emerald’s name jumped out at me. I scrolled slowly back through the pages until I found the story. It didn’t have anything to do with the missile or the Greenham wannabes: Lucinda Ferring, Emerald’s mother, had died of pneumonia at age sixty-four, about six weeks after the protest. Emerald had returned for the funeral, held at St. Silas AME Church. There was a photograph: by 1983 an African-American actor was a celebrity. Emerald was wearing a hat with a veil that covered the top half of her face, so I couldn’t see what she’d looked like without stage makeup.
A cough from the doorway startled us both. The woman from the front desk gave an apologetic laugh. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but it’s six, Cady. I need to leave. Will you lock up?”
“Good grief, we’ve been talking our heads off in here, Melanie. I didn’t even hear you come in. Sorry! You go on, but we’re leaving now, too.”
She leaned across me to pull the microfiche from the reader. She fiddled with the plastic sheet, waiting until we heard Melanie’s footsteps heading down the hall, and then said shyly, “Maybe you could come over to the house with me, talk to Gram. She might say more to you than she does to me. Maybe she did know Emerald Ferring but didn’t want to talk about her.”