War, Peace and Poppies

We met at Belgum right before the climb up San Pablo Ridge. Strangers walking the same trail. She mentioned she was going through it, how rough it is for young people now.

I said "Yeah, it is. I can see that. It's heavy right now."

A few miles later, we came over the crest before the trail crossing at Mezue, ahead of the cattle corral. The crest pulls you like a magnet, into a pause, into noticing. Almost a 360-degree view... Mt. Diablo, SF skyline, Golden Gate, Mt. Tam, Marin.

Off in the distance, another hill almost the same height we were standing at. On its east side, a straight wall runs against the slope, the first thing that doesn’t look natural. Above it, left of the brushline, you can see maybe thirty or forty yards of flat ground.

She stopped and pointed. “What’s that?”

I told her it was the old SF-09 Nike missile site, remnants of the Cold War. The launch control and radar side, the eyes that find the targets. The launch batteries were further down, at Wildcat Peak in Tilden Park.

She’d heard of the shoes, obviously. But she didn’t know what a Nike missile was.

I explained how target-rich the whole Bay Area was. The twelve Nike sites around us were there because of it. The naval bases, nuclear weapons labs at Berkeley and Livermore, ports, airports, railways, water, power, the financial district.

And all those millions of people living on top of it. We were one really big strategic target for the Soviets.

Her face shifted from confusion to something closer to disbelief. Found it strange this existed at all, and that she'd never known about the Cold War. Said she was twenty-four.

“You had drills for this?” she asked. “Like fire drills?”

“Yes.”

“In school?”

“Yes.”

“Like, cover your head under the desk?”

“That’s the one.”

She laughed, but not a funny laugh. The kind that comes when something sounds made up but it's actually true.

“I can’t even imagine,” she said. “Adults were telling you to hide under a desk from a nuclear bomb?”

“They were.”

“How real was that?”

I told her the truth, the drills and infrastructure were real, and so was the threat. We weren’t seconds from annihilation every day. It came in episodes, sometimes you could forget about it a little.

Then the newspapers would run headlines again. Adults would start saying things like hair trigger, brink and close call.

The weight of it was in the air. We had to breathe it.

I told her about the 1979 false alarm, when NORAD’s computers showed 1,400 Soviet ballistic missiles approaching North America. Planes were scrambled, protocols activated. Six minutes to establish it was a glitch.

Six minutes between nothing happening and something nobody could undo.

It wasn’t the only close call. In September ’83, a Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov judged a missile warning to be false. Then came Able Archer that November, when a NATO exercise raised Soviet fears of a real attack.

We only heard about some of them later.

“And you never knew any of that when you were a kid?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Not until later?”

“Much later.”

She looked back out at the hill. Only the wall and the flat top give it away. The plants came back, obscuring the true shape of the history underneath.

We walked over to it, stood on the pad, and enjoyed the view. A similar one to the crest, just a different character and weight, knowing what we were standing on.

The men who manned these stations knew when the alarm sounded, there wasn’t much time.

I told her how the poppies come up all around and through the concrete in the spring. That people come up here just to take pics when the bloom is in full swing.

I showed her a few from the spring.

She smiled, looked a little lighter and said, "That's so amazing, so pretty, and here in this place."

Then I remembered being seven years old. The teacher showed us pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the projector. Footage of survivors in hospitals, more graphic than most horror films. Then told us to get under our desks.

That’s the part that still catches in my throat.

We were shown cities turned into ash and told a book over your head would protect you.

You don't need a physics degree to know those two things don't match. You just need to be a child watching adults who can’t make it make sense.

Some of us grew up anyway. Married, had kids, and now care for aging parents, holding it all down for everyone else. Still functioning at warp 10 while the ship is clearly breaking up. Not because we figured out how to carry the weight. Because there were no other options.

There’s a whole lot of keep on keepin’ on happening.

I have no idea what she thinks about it now. I didn’t tell her anything except facts. She asked about the site and how real it was, I answered, real. Asked about the drills, I told her. The rest, she made her own conclusions from there.

Maybe she decided her own problems were real, mine were real, and both could exist at the same time.

We shook hands, I headed back over the ridge, and she took off toward Tilden.

The hill stayed behind me. Visible if you know what you’re looking at, invisible if you don’t.

I remember exactly where I was when the Berlin Wall came down.

Fall of ’89, we rented a big beach house at Stinson for some time off. I was outside getting the barbecue going when E came out yelling, “It’s coming down, it’s coming down, it’s f@cking coming down!” calling everyone inside to watch it on TV.

At least a dozen of us were glued to the screen. No one said a thing. We just stood there in silence. There probably wasn’t a single dry eye in that house.

We were all around twenty, from the same places, grew up around the same Nike sites. Went to the same schools, hid under the same desks with books over our heads.

The weather had begun to breathe a little easier.

What did you grow up carrying that nobody ever explained?

→ Share this with someone who did the desk drill, or someone who’s never heard of it.

Outlooks & Vantages:

→ 2026 Wildflower Gallery: April - September
→ Blue & Golden Hour: 10-05-26 @ Point Isabel

Trail Crossings & Waypoints:

→ What Regulation Made Possible
→ Everything at Once

Connective Tissue:

→ Survival Settings
→ Fieldcraft for the Feral Generation

Exploring Nike & Cold War History:

→  Nike Missile Site SF-09 IFC: San Pablo Ridge
→ Nike Missile Site SF-88: National Park Service video
→ Nike Missile Site SF-88: National Park Service overview

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *