Perceptions

On October 30, 1938 the Columbia Broadcasting System created a bit more than just a simple little stir in a nation gathered around their radios and listening to a program on Mercury Theater on the Air. It was the Halloween episode directed and narrated by Orson Welles and adapted from the H. G. Wells' novel War of the Worlds. The first two thirds of the radio broadcast was done as a news report of actual events, and for those tuning in midway through, the perception was that the earth was being invaded by aliens from outer space.

There are things in this world that, I suspect, will always be a constant for most everyone. One of those "universal truths" almost certainly would have to be that summers in the upper Midwest are always better than the winters for those who've reached the age of some sort of claim to responsibility. If you were a kid growing up in a little Wisconsin town, it likely didn't seem so much the truth only because there was fun to be found no matter the season. Winter had snow and sidewalks slick with hard packed snow, or better yet, ice which made for great sliding and "skating" without the luxury of ice skates. That old sled with the metal tracks worked on any incline from the lawn of the old boarding house next to the funeral home to the glorious hill beside the Methodist church. You didn't need much to find joy in yet another day even if it was only just above zero outside.

Of course, even for kids, summer has advantages that winter will never be able to duplicate. For one, the days are a whole lot longer and warmer, so the need to put on layer upon layer of clothes is done away with. I'm pretty sure that my standard summertime "uniform" as a kid was shorts, shirt and bare feet. I don't think there was any kind of problem with the folks being able to afford shoes, it just never seemed to be a part of what was required while outside and on the run. It didn't take long for the soles of my feet to get toughened up to the point that wearing holes in the bottoms of a pair of perfectly good shoes didn't seem to make much sense anyway. Of course, the downside to that were those miserable sandburs that always found their way into that really soft spot right between my big and second toe or right dead center in my heel. Then there was always that black asphalt on those days in July and August when I'd swear the whole street was melting, and not only were my feet going to end up being burnt off but also I was going to sink in up to my knees, and then how was I going to get out? The memory of that black and, normally hard-as-rock surface slowly oozing up between my toes, can still be felt and the footprint left behind still seen. Because of those days of leaving toe and heel prints in the asphalt when I one day heard about the La Brea tar pits way out in California, I had no problem believing that once you got yourself into that stuff, you weren't getting out.

Today I'd be hard pressed to tell you with certainty exactly when it happened since the days and years never have been the things that tend to stick solidly within my memories. Vague generalities usually seem more the norm for my memories, and I often marvel at how some folks seemed to remember days and dates with the precision of an atomic clock, though the truth is, I've sometimes wondered if they're merely better at believing they remember than I. In the end there are moments I remember mainly for the moment and the rest, the time, the day and all the rest are at the very best fuzzy smears around the edges of the memory. And so I did a bit of research, tried remembering the moment even a bit more clearly, and found a place on the web that pretty much validated what I've remembered all these years.

As a kid in "the Fifties" I didn't know that much about the world beyond the city limits of my town. In fact I'm not so sure I knew all that much about life two blocks over from my house and even less about what went on across US 12 & 16 other than that dad spent his fair share of time at any one of the three bars over there. At eight years of age, about all I knew with any certainty was that pretty much for sure we were all going to get attacked by the Soviet Union. We just called them "the evil Russians" most of the time, and the only way we could save ourselves from those terrible A-bombs of theirs was to duck under our desks when we saw the flash. I never really wondered what might happen to me if I wasn't at school and didn't have a desk close at hand to duck under. I guess I just figured that they'd only try to blow us up while I was in school. The rest of the time I figured I was pretty much safe.

So on that evening in July, you couldn't begin to imagine the thoughts that raced through my mind as we ran screaming toward the only safety close at hand, Sheila's house, four solid walls and a door that would slam shut once we got behind it. Thinking back on that moment I want to believe there was some undetermined mixture of fact and fantasy in both our minds as we ran hollering and screaming that the world was about to end. Then again we were kids who really had no idea of where reality ended and something else began; for us there still were no clear and defined boundaries on most things in our lives.
We'd been playing, Sheila and I, across the street from her house on the southwest corner of Division and Liberty streets. I'm not sure why, but it seems that most, if not all, of my earliest friends and playmates were girls. Sheila had a couple brothers, one older and one younger, but she and I were the same age. My mom and her mom were friends, so we spent time together doing whatever it was two kids might do on a summer's evening. In those days there wasn't a house there, and so that lot and the grass lawn around the old boarding house were fair game for running, falling, rolling and pretending big time. And I'm guessing that's exactly what we were doing as the sun was setting and the night sky was beginning to show itself.

I'm not sure who saw it first, but I know that neither of us could begin to comprehend what we were looking at. For more than a moment we stood there transfixed by the sheer beauty of what we were seeing and unable to move. Never before had we seen anything like it, and so there was nothing from our brief histories on earth to even come close to relating what we were seeing to other than those "evil Russians" and mushroom clouds. And so we stood there watching what we suddenly concluded was the beauty of our impending doom. So at that moment on that evening in July of 1957 in that little town in Wisconsin two kids, an eight-year-old girl and boy, turned on their heels and began running faster than they'd ever run in their lives away from what they'd just seen in the sky and toward the only safety they knew in the moment. In their minds and in that moment all that their teachers had tried to prepare them for what was coming to pass, and there was no school desk to hide under to save themselves.

The Menominee Indians of Wisconsin believed that the lights indicated the location of Manabai'wok (giants) who were the spirits of great hunters and fishermen. The Inuit of Alaska believed that the lights were the spirits of the animals they hunted: the seals, salmon, deer and beluga whales. Other aboriginal peoples believed that the lights were the spirits of their people.

Our mothers came out the front door at the sound of our screaming. In time we were reassured that the evil Russians weren't attacking; they were safe; we were safe at least for the moment.

The bomb never fell, the "evil Russians" never attacked, the Martians have yet to be found, and the Northern Lights are something we marvel at on the rare occasions that we see them. And still the feeling of being truly safe is an elusive thing at best. Those kids running toward the only safety they knew had no idea that perceptions are only that, perceptions.