Chernobyl
(expanding on a comment I posted in seti_drd's lj)
I was nine, going on ten. I don't remember what I did the exact day. I remember the oppressive fear of the following weeks and months - watching the progress of the fallout on the news; wondering if the air I was breathing or the rain that was falling would make me sick or kill me; using powdered milk and avoiding nuts, mushrooms, grapes. I was a little too young to really understand what radioactivity meant, which made it all the more eerie - a fairy-tale fear, a subtle thread of nightmare lending a sinister side to the most innocuous everyday activities - perhaps the single most potent source of my more general, and lasting, feeling that the world can't be trusted, or taken for granted.
These things come to mind in particular:
1.) A sleepover with friends: listening to them breathing, wondering if the air they were exhaling were poisonous, and if any of us would die of it before we were old.
2.) A class trip to a museum or something, and getting caught in the rain: a feeling of being helplessly exposed to something both entirely impersonal and utterly malignant.
3.) Desperately wanting to believe my father as he explained that, really, the danger to us wasn't all *that* great. (He was right, of course, and wrong at the same time, because the thing I had realised didn't have much to do with Chernobyl itself, but rather with the general unreliability of the world.)
4.) Lying awake for countless nights for years after, waiting for the sirens. (Anyone remember those? The ABC siren drills we used to have every now and again, back in the Cold War? Those sirens always sounded like the end of the world to me, even before Chernobyl.) I had heard of Biblis, heard that it wasn't the safest nuclear power plant around, and that, for all intents and purposes, it was just around the corner from where we lived. I waited for Biblis to blow up througout my childhood; part of me is still waiting for it.
I was nine, going on ten. I don't remember what I did the exact day. I remember the oppressive fear of the following weeks and months - watching the progress of the fallout on the news; wondering if the air I was breathing or the rain that was falling would make me sick or kill me; using powdered milk and avoiding nuts, mushrooms, grapes. I was a little too young to really understand what radioactivity meant, which made it all the more eerie - a fairy-tale fear, a subtle thread of nightmare lending a sinister side to the most innocuous everyday activities - perhaps the single most potent source of my more general, and lasting, feeling that the world can't be trusted, or taken for granted.
These things come to mind in particular:
1.) A sleepover with friends: listening to them breathing, wondering if the air they were exhaling were poisonous, and if any of us would die of it before we were old.
2.) A class trip to a museum or something, and getting caught in the rain: a feeling of being helplessly exposed to something both entirely impersonal and utterly malignant.
3.) Desperately wanting to believe my father as he explained that, really, the danger to us wasn't all *that* great. (He was right, of course, and wrong at the same time, because the thing I had realised didn't have much to do with Chernobyl itself, but rather with the general unreliability of the world.)
4.) Lying awake for countless nights for years after, waiting for the sirens. (Anyone remember those? The ABC siren drills we used to have every now and again, back in the Cold War? Those sirens always sounded like the end of the world to me, even before Chernobyl.) I had heard of Biblis, heard that it wasn't the safest nuclear power plant around, and that, for all intents and purposes, it was just around the corner from where we lived. I waited for Biblis to blow up througout my childhood; part of me is still waiting for it.