Wednesday, September 26, 2001
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Wednesday, September 26, 2001 |
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We'll be back after this By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
It was the mid-1950s, and we were in Dave's old Studebaker coupe heading for a weekend home with our families. About halfway to Harrisburg from Gettysburg where we were students, we'd reached the darkest stretch of U.S. 15, when suddenly the sky east of us lit up in a massive, pulsating red glow. The radio station continued playing music without interruption. Traffic neither sped up nor slowed down. There was nothing to tell us the meaning of the bright light on the horizon. For a long time after our initial "What's that?" neither of us spoke. But we were both thinking the same thing: The capital of Pennsylvania, or perhaps the Navy supply depot at Mechanicsburg, had been the target of an atomic attack. We were frightened, deeply frightened, especially that such a horror could have happened while everything around us looked so normal. We learned much later that the glow in the sky was caused by the pouring of molten slag at Bethlehem Steel in Steelton, reflecting from a cloud bank. But that night, all we knew was that we were living in times when the Soviet Union and the United States had enough weapons pointed at each other to wipe out civilization worldwide. We knew people were building fall-out shelters to protect themselves and their families. To what avail? we argued. To live for weeks in subhuman conditions, only to emerge and discover the world we had left no longer existed? And to face the certainty of lingering radiation and terrible death? A few years later, we had two beautiful little girls and a brand-new baby, and I sat nursing her in stark terror from news reports that the U.S. and Cuba (hence, the Soviet Union) were facing each other down just 90 miles from our shores. Clearly I remember wondering what kind of a world I had brought these children into. Young mothers think a lot about "what ifs." What if there were a nuclear war and somehow our babies survived us and were left helpless? It was more than we could bear to think about. What if Dave went to work one ordinary morning and was hit by a car he used to ride a bicycle or a motor scooter to the plant; even with insurance, how could I pay bills and a mortgage and take care of those children? What if we were invaded and our precious babies taken from us by harsh strangers? Every one of these scenarios has happened somewhere in the world, some time in our history. War in one's own country, the loss of a spouse, single mothers working to survive, homes torched, marketplaces blown up. From biblical times to this very minute, these are the subplots of the history of the world. I remember Pearl Harbor dimly, as a child who noticed only that the grownups were very serious and worried, but I remember the Cold War when it sometimes blew hot, and I remember the death of a young president and not knowing whether it was the first in a series (it was a series of gifted leaders). I remember the pit-of-the-stomach hopelessness that descended over me when I read, like a fool, Nevil Shute's "On the Beach." (I smile now, but it was so real then that I nearly canceled an appointment to have the children's teeth cleaned. What was the point of having perfect teeth if we were all going to die?) I remember the deaths that paced alongside our lives: Daddy first, then my younger brother, then a daughter, in-laws, mother) and I remember reacting, as so many do, to ordinary, normal things. Look at those people walking down the street, laughing, window-shopping, as though everything was all right. Don't they realize it isn't? You, you young toughs with your sullen faces and dangling cigarettes my brother was so bright and good and talented. How dare you go on sneering and wasting your lives when such a treasure has lost his? It's different now. Our children no longer need us and we feel free to leave this life, if it comes to that, knowing they can do more for themselves than we can. The pit-of-the-stomach despair is not part of what I'm feeling right now, although it probably should be. Deep sadness, yes. Death has scarred us permanently. But we've seen, and seen, and seen the images, and we've heard, over and over, the stories, heard stern rhetoric from our leaders, and yet the cardinals are busy on the sunflower feeders. The wren is warbling a new song she saved for the end of summer, and the squirrels are raining walnut shells down on the porch roof. Our sky is a clean, clear blue, not a smudge of smoke or dust in it, and the mail comes and choirs practice and school buses run. The library is open, committees still meet, the church looks just as it did before Sept. 11, solid and safe, and sunlight sifts through green leaves, spangling the deck. Contrails make chalk lines on the sky, the Internet connects, and the crack of the bat is heard once more, interspersed with commercials: "We'll be back after this." Yes. We'll be back after this. ...
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