From the archives. Written in 1994.

1972

I Just read a detailed history of the Cuban missile crisis and a monster named LeMay, the USAF Chief of Staff who, in 1954, had hoped for a 'preemptive nuclear war'. Several years before I was born, and when my older brother was a newborn, the world almost ended. I imagine that raising small children at that time and through the '60s, would have been difficult. For my father, a quiet World War II combat veteran, who paid close attention to world politics, it must have been especially trying.

My children are now 4 and 2. Their world is one of candy and butterflies and playing outside. Already, though, they are learning of some fear - Sam points to the wall next to his bed and says, "My bad dreams come from here," and Sue says, when she won't sleep, "Daddy, there are monsters under there." I bang on the wall with my fist and then kneel down, looking under their beds, and say, "Get out of here, you things! You don't belong here." The kids smile and giggle and fall asleep quickly and fast.

How to keep my children's safe peace that they have... when I seldom see them because of too much work... and what to feel when I start to see their world becoming too small for them, as it became for me, as it seems to become for all of us? Do we cross streets because of the mysteries on the other side, do we climb trees because of the height and the views? Or are we trying for something else?

When I was 14 my father left me completely alone and went to Russia. I had the phone number of a neighbor. My younger sister and brother were with my older brother, who was working several states away as a camp counselor for the summer. I had to stay home because I had failed English and Algebra during the school year and was supposed to retake those classes in summer school. My father, deciding I was old enough to be alone, went to the Soviet Union as part of a group of American scientists on a peace mission. While there, my father smuggled back the personal papers of a famous Jewish dissident scientist. As my father was doing this - he was gone for over a month, and if he had been caught, would have been gone for a much, much longer time - I was walking up the Potomac River's C&O canal to West Virginia and then walking South on the Appalachian Trail. Technically, I ran away, but mostly I was hiding from the monsters of loneliness that came at me in that big, empty house. In the woods, along the Potomac river, and in the hickory and walnut forests of the Appalachians, the monsters were not so bad.

I walked from Rockville to Great Falls, Maryland the first day. That was the most difficult day since it was 15 miles on roads with cars driving past. Then a week of walking to Harper's Ferry, where, turning South, I walked to the Southern end of Shanandoah park and kept going South, deep down into Virginia.

A few months before, hurricane Agnes -- which, ironically, had been my mother’s name -- had hit the East coast and caused tremendous flooding of the Potomac River. The walk from Great Falls to Harper's Ferry, about 60 miles, was bizarre. The flooding river washed mud, trees, and all sorts of garbage - wrecked houses, cars, picnic tables, clothing, and trash - into 20-foot high piles at every turn it took, smashing down large oaks and poplar trees. All of which I had to climb over. My walk along the river, on a path that had up until then been mostly a bicycle path, was solitary. In my first week, there was no one but myself. No one. And though the days were dangerous, I loved them and was never frightened.

The nights, though, were different. Even with the walking - 10 miles a day with a pack that weighed 50 pounds, nearly half my weight then - which put me at the end of each day to a fast, deep sleep, I would often wake up in the dark and be frightened. Each evening I would lie down and try to fall asleep before night, hoping that I would not wake up until morning. I was scared of the sounds out there and thought of myself as a weak coward. But I was by myself, with no one knowing where I was, and starting on a path where for a long time my best comfort would be in the solitary places I would go, crossing distance and seeing what was to be seen. Now, when I sleep outside on clear nights, the darkness is a friend with her stars, like a blanket, and her sounds are good. I have heard moose and bears walk close by in the great, dark, wild places, and have not been frightened, but at 14 the sounds of frogs, crickets, and raccoons made me scrunch down to the bottom of my sleeping bag and hide. I wasn't hiding from the darkness or those sounds, instead, I was hiding from something that I knew but that I didn't want to understand so soon. I did not want to admit that I had already been alone for a long time. Eventually, I would lose my stuttering, fear of the dark, and most of my loneliness. I had run away from abandonment and had started on a solitary path that would teach me to look and listen and would lead me into a world where I would become capable of not being alone, into a world where I would talk, listen and share.

At Harper's Ferry there were two bridges over the river into West Virginia: a highway bridge and a railway trestle. Each was about 3/4 of a mile long. This was before a pedestrian walkway was added. I walked across the railway trestle because I thought the police would see me walking along the highway bridge and wouldn't know what to do with me. The 15 minutes it took to walk across the Potomac may have been the most dangerous time of my life. There was no walkway, and if a train had come, I would've had to try to hang from one of the railroad ties. Because I saw a train go over while I was deciding how to cross, I made a child's assumption: another train wouldn't be coming again for at least an hour. I ignored the huge signs warning that walking on the trestle was deadly, but I was doing everything I imagined necessary to keep from going home to an empty house. Crossing dangers alone, not realizing that I was ending my childhood. I had no way of knowing then how long it would be before I could return to any kind of innocence. The innocence I now understand by seeing it in my children, the innocence of not thinking of difficult decisions. And after all these years, coming to a place where I am starting to understand and forgive my father.

He had survived several years of combat in the Philippines during WWII. Then lived near Washington D.C. with his wife and son during the threat of nuclear annihilation. And when things seemed like they might have been going smoothly, my mother died. He must have been haunted, trying to raise children without a clue how to do it, a man who never figured out how to talk with his children or keep their bad dreams away.

For him, going to the Soviet Union in the rage of the Cold War might have been an escape, similar to my clambering over hurricane debris. He was 58 then and had been a widower for nearly four years. He still slept in the big, king-sized bed. The bed I had crawled into many times when darkness and noises frightened me; snuggling between mom and dad, maybe four years old, those are my first memories. Warm and safe, two parents always there. I don't know if my siblings also used to crawl between my sleeping parents. They never seemed as frightened as I was; they all seemed more capable of taking care of themselves. They would get up at night and do what they needed by themselves. But I would call for mom. Then after she was gone, for dad. I kept calling out until, when I was ten years old, not long after my mother had died, my father came to my bed and said that I was old enough not to wake him up every time I needed a drink of water. It wasn't the water I needed, though. I needed him to pound on the wall and talk with me. I needed to hear him say that everything was going to be all right. I think I left home to look for what I missed. And I think raising kids now is the 2nd chance that I found.

(c) 1994 Steve S. Saroff