I would hear the mournful wail of the siren and hold my
breath, not moving a muscle, and listen intently to the sound. Would the whine
of the siren fall after rising, and then rise and fall again? If so, then
everything was okay. That was just a call for the volunteer fire department to
respond to a fire or maybe an accident out on the highway.
If the siren rose and didn’t fall again but persisted in a
steady, high fashion, I would have to mentally time it while scanning the
horizon. Was it a summer day with dark clouds approaching? A tornado warning
for our town meant the siren would blow continuously for a couple minutes
before the whine quieted down and would be replaced by the roar of the oncoming
storm. Recognizing this siren, too, would calm my fears. A tornado wasn’t a big
deal in comparison. It was the third siren I dreaded hearing.
My grandpa was the Fire Chief in town, so I knew there was
another siren that could sound. It would rise and then blow steadily, not for
just a couple minutes, but for one hour straight. Or at least it was supposed
to scream for one hour straight to sound the proper alarm, but I knew that if
it ever happened, it would be silenced within a half hour, after the first
nuclear bomb wiped it out. The siren I lived in fear of was the one that signaled
war.
Yes, I was a child of the 80s. I know all about Flock of
Seagulls haircuts and Rubik’s cubes and the Don Johnson white jacket. But what
really defined the children of the 80s, in my opinion, is our living in fear of
a nuclear holocaust.
It wasn’t just me who had this fear. I remember my sister
and her friends about to leave the house one day (with their feathered hair and
jean jackets, no doubt) while I was watching TV, and suddenly the show was
interrupted by the Breaking News music and a stationary graphic. They all
stopped dead in their tracks and waited to see what the news would be. Dan
Rather came on and began saying something that I can no longer recall, but it
was not a declaration of nuclear war. My sister made some excuse along the
lines of, “I just had to stop because I love to listen to his voice,” and the
other girls made up similar lame excuses. Nervous laughter floated through the
air and then they were gone.
But we were all on edge, waiting to hear that President
Reagan or perhaps the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev had pushed the fictional “red
button” and begun the Armageddon. (Def Leppard’s Armageddon It, anyone?) At
some point I had heard that it would only take 30 minutes for the first Soviet
missile to reach the United States, so I would mentally tell myself that when
the announcement finally came, whether via local emergency siren or Dan Rather,
I would have a half hour left to live. I don’t know anymore what I planned to
do with that half hour. Make sure my parents were home, I suppose. Or grab my
cat and hide in the basement. Or maybe I was finally going to unleash my wild side
and eat Pop Rocks while drinking Coke. There were a few buildings in our town
that had those black and yellow signs with the triangles that indicated “Fallout
Shelter”, but I don’t think I ever seriously planned to go to one of them.
Watching other people’s hysteria would be worse than just dealing with my own.
Being a true child of the 80s, I framed this 30 minutes I
had left to live by thinking of it as the time it takes to watch the Cosby
Show. I remember once being at an outdoor theater watching a Shakespearean play
and seeing planes fly over and wondering if it had started and none of us knew
yet, because none of us were watching TV or listening to the radio and we were
out in the countryside where the sound of the sirens might not reach us. I
started picturing an episode of the Cosby Show, wondering how far I’d get
through it before the blinding flash of light would signal the end, when my mom
nudged me. “Look at that guy with his Walkman,” she whispered. “He must be
listening to the Brewer game.” I immediately relaxed. He was piped in to the
real world. If the war had started, he would know. I was safe. For now.
Come with me, Kitty, and I will protect you from the nuclear bombs! And that wallpaper.
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