What if we make it through
Unlikely hope
Lately I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with my father when I was in third or fourth grade. We moved so often that I keep track of my personal timeline by which house we were in. This memory takes place in the dining room of our house in Leland Street, in Maryland, so I was eight or nine years old. It would have been about 1970.
I had just learned about the Bay of Pigs crisis in Cuba. My parents told me what it was like thinking we were on the brink of war, before I was born. At nine, I was the same age my father would have been when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“There is no possible way,” I said, furious, “that I will get to be an adult without another nuclear bomb being dropped, without nuclear war. We have the weapons. We have already used them. How can you pretend they won’t be used again by the time I’m your age?” And yes, I really would have talked like that at nine. I envied them their past; their relative safety that was so different from the future I anticipated for myself.
I remember my father’s baffled expression. He couldn’t fault my reasoning, but I think he was surprised I was so angry with him. I blamed my parents as part of a generation that should have done something. About nuclear war, about the environment.
About this time, the EPA was formed, after a number of environmental disasters. We made drawings in class and mine were always of a dark, polluted riverbed on one side and a shiny clean river on the other side. We lived outside of Washington DC and there wasn’t any clean water around, the waterways were largely polluted. When we drove out to Washington State to visit my mother’s family, I remember seeing clean water in Montana, sparkling rivers. On a stop we walked by a creek, and I put my hand in the icy water and brought some to my mouth, the taste like melted ice, pure.
My grandparents had a house at Birch Bay, up by the Canadian border, and there is an oil refinery across the bay. It belched smoke, like a malignant monster, and often flames would shoot out of the chimney. “Flares,” the adults said without concern, but I was horrified, the sooty fire leaping from the top of the towering chimney like a Tolkienesque beacon of evil. All that oil, so close to Birch Bay and the Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands my grandfather taught me the names of as we moved through them on his boat. I remember scenes on the evening news of birds covered with crude oil and tried to imagine the majestic herons that flew low across the tide flats grounded, sodden in oil.
I am quite certain that in a few years’ time my granddaughter will have pointed observations about what my generation, adults in general, should have been doing these years to protect the planet, the children of the world, a civil society. She will be right. I mean, we knew. Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring came out in 1962 and pesticides and “forever chemicals” still plague us.
I know many people envy those of us in our sixties, and I understand why. We had drills as children in school for nuclear attacks, but never school shootings. I bought a house twenty minutes outside of Seattle as a single mother, in 2001, for just over $200,000. I grew up before global warming and the resulting massive fires and apocalyptic storms. You didn’t need air conditioning in Seattle, even in the summer, until the last decade. I didn’t own an air purifier until the fires started and now I have two, chugging away, from that year when the distant forests burned, and the air looked like dusk in the middle of the day, the sun a lurid, distorted orange disk.
We should all be taking action, we should all be doing whatever small things we can politically, in our community, so we can stand in front of our children or grandchildren and say we did what we could. We know. We must take action. But that’s not what’s on my mind.
What I keep thinking about is that I was wrong when I was a child. And that gives me hope. It is still startling to me that even though many superpowers have access to nuclear weapons, the last ones to be used were when my father was a child, and they were used by the United States.
My granddaughter told me this weekend that worry isn’t bad if it makes you more careful. She was talking about her experiments on the bars at the playground at school, that a little worry can make you cautious. We should be cautious. We have cause for worry, and that worry should impel us to action. But I told her that on the other side, if you can’t work with your worry, it might keep you from doing things you want to do, things you need to do.
What if we can make it through? My mother’s mother lived through the Depression, with what we would now call food insecurity. She told me about it as we baked in her kitchen, as she carefully scraped the last scraps of butter off the waxed paper cover, how she and her sisters had to ask the nuns for food.
I remember the beginning of the pandemic, my daughter working in the ICU at a big county hospital. We weren’t sure if we would all get it and die, but we kept seeing her and her new baby. I kept my will on the top of my desk. That was only five years ago, but it seems like a lifetime.
I’m not discounting how bad things are right now. And it hits harder when we can see all the images, live, when social media is flooded with pictures of friends, family, people we feel connected to, showing the burned-out shells of their homes, or another hospital bombed in Gaza. Of course we grieve, we worry, we mourn. But I don’t want to fall into despair, into hopelessness. I want to be able to tell my grandkids what I did, when they stand, fists on hips, furious at the state of the planet. And I want to work, on the chance, however slim, that we can get through this and make it better for them.