Nuclear Exile

"Don't go out into the fog."

I have a deep and abiding love for this movie.

Every summer I got exiled to Lake Pinawa (home to a nuclear reactor) to take swimming lessons. We had to be 'in class' by 8 a.m. and our first 'task' was to swim out to the wooden island floating in the middle of the lake.

Even to this day I wonder why they placed that stupid pontoon so far out. Anyone who was a good swimmer would be exhausted by the time they got there and once they did they had nothing else to do but sunburn there till it was time for them to swim back.

Anyone who was a weak swimmer would be drawn to this wooden beast and due to the weakness of their stroke would get too tired to make it back and risk drowning. But that was typical of places I got sent in the summer. It was always a life or death situation.

However, in the days before cable TV, the huge radio tower that sat in the middle of the town (which also processed nuclear materials) could pick up TV stations from the US until dawn when the picture was interfered with. We always figured it was the nuclear energy being turned on again.

There was one station from North Dakota that played old television shows and monster movies until dawn. In the cool of the night we cousins would relax in the motor home and watch those great movies from the fifties and imagine mutated insects that would take us away from those dreaded swimming lessons. After all, we were in reactor city. Surely some bug or something could get into the machines, grow to humongous size and run rampant all over the town.

Near the end of our purgatory one year we were shopping in the department store and found models that depicted scenes from those fantastic monster movies. I grabbed the one from 'The Deadly Mantis' and my cousin got the giant spider diorama from 'Them'. Building and painting those dioramas was the most fun we ever had at our nuclear exile.

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