I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. This excellent, bleak book describes the journey of a man and his young son in the fallen world of the end times, the cause of which, quite appropriately, is never named.
I found reading this book to feel unusually relatable, because I spent my earliest years very sure that I was doomed to experience the chaos of the end days alone. I grew beyond this haunting decades ago, but it was a very real part of my childhood that was formed by two things: an air-raid siren and the antichrist.
The air-raid siren.
I was born near the tail end of the Cold War in the mid sixties, when families were still warned to guard against Commie spies and to be prepared for a sudden and inevitable war. As I assume was not uncommon in those times, there was a monthly-tested air-raid siren mounted on a tall steel pole in the alley just behind our LA-suburb home. Likely erected in the 1950s, this siren provided the authorities with an efficient way to warn citizens to run to safety in the event of incoming fighter jets from the Russians or the Japanese or whomever.
M
y family moved to this house when I was about six months old and, I am told, when the siren would go off I would scream, utterly terrorized, until it stopped. I don’t know how many times I went through this before my family researched the test schedule and made sure I would be far away when the siren went off. They were usually successful at keeping me away from the siren, but there were times here and there that I’d be playing in the yard or in my room, the siren would go off, and my mother would whisk me into the car to get me away. This was the earliest example of my hyperacusis, or extreme sensitivity to sound.
Probably as I got older, I suppose age 3 or 4, I asked why the siren was even there, and my parents or, more likely, one of my brothers explained it to me. Thus my unreasonable panic from the sudden and painfully loud sound became accompanied by fear of an invasion, of death and calamity, of violence, of war.
My only memories of all this is that I frequently dreamed of it. I dreamed of horrific mutated creatures that would try to get into the house, or my cats scrambling up the screen door trying to get away from monsters as the siren blared in the background and planes fell from the sky.
You know, normal childhood stuff.
And then there was the antichrist.
My family was very active at a Conservative Baptist church, at which the main message was that you must accept Jesus into your heart or else end up in hell forever. Of course I enthusiastically climbed aboard that Jesus bus. There was much talk to the youth in this church about the Rapture: when Jesus will come to the earth to collect all the good Christians, and then those left behind would suffer in a terrible nightmare of a world ruled by the antichrist.
But no matter how much I prayed to Jesus, I knew that everyone in my family was saved but me. As young as maybe six or so, I was pretty sure—primed in part by the psyche-twisting air-raid siren’s message of inevitable war—that I was somehow doomed to go to hell anyway. I knew that one day all the good people would disappear and I would be left behind in the post-apocalyptic world ruled by the antichrist.
Even into the second or third grade, if I got home from school and nobody was home, the Rapture would be the first explanation to occur to me. Now, as I look back, I cannot be sure how deeply I believed it by then—but the apocalypse was definitely the first impulse, the fear, that would pop in my mind.
Of course I know that there is so much more to Christianity, and perhaps it was just this one church or even this one Sunday School teacher who over-emphasized the Left-Behind stuff… I have no idea. All I know is that, combined with the conditioning from my early years with that air-raid siren, I’d twisted things into my own impending doom.
But I got over it.
Into my early teens I would still startle anxiously at the sound of a siren, but eventually I reasoned that many of our fears control us only because we allow them to and it was time for me to stop. It was also about that time that I left the church, leaving not only the rapture fears but also a belief in god behind.
And so I gradually let go of my fear of sirens and became secure in a reality that excluded the antichrist.
All of this was so long ago. While I suppose it must have left a small, detectable scar on my psyche, it is very definitely not a wound, leaving me resilient rather than afraid. But to this day, I’m sure to have a go-bag ready, just in case of the “zombipocalyse” that I half-joke about.
Bringing this back to The Road: rather than dread, this book felt oddly familiar, inevitable. If nothing else, I’m grateful that reading this book motivated me to examine and write about the odd post-apocalyptic obsessions of my childhood.