Raging against the storm
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- February 15, 2019
- 1303
Sometimes I think about my childhood bed, the books I read there and the winding stories that would take me to far-off places. I constructed each detail the author would share until I had the faces and places so vivid in my mind I could go there even when I wasn’t reading.
I listened to late-night radio, the AM stations crackling and bringing me far-off voices that didn’t come in during the daylight hours. It’s a phenomenon called skywave propagation, but to me it felt like magic.
It reminds me of sitting in our old motorhome at night, fiddling around with Dad’s CB radio and seeing who would answer back after lofting weightless words into the starry sky. “CB” means Citizen’s Band, a shortwave radio system that allowed people to communicate inside a short distance.
I roll those words around on my tongue — Citizen’s Band — and like the way it’s a joining of people, a way of communication within a relatively tiny sphere of space.
We weren’t supposed to be playing with the CB radio, but inside a velvet night it felt deliciously like living on a slippery edge and sliding all the way down. You never knew what voice would come back, and we’d hang it up and run inside, shrieking into the starry skies.
My bed was an island, a shelter from vicious words and tempests. Nothing could reach me there, and I’d curl up while my LPs would turn on their turntable and let the music take me far from the melee.
The pink with tiny white-flowered wallpapered walls felt like the warmest of crocheted afghans, and I let them cover me from head to toe while the lyrics of the songs coated my eardrums.
I’ve been thinking about why I reminisce of cozy nests, peaceful dwellings or a refuge from life’s storms. The windows of my office are covered with a smattering of rain, and the sky is metal gray. As I sit in a comfortable chair at my library table turned desk, the silence is a balm to my ears. The silence speaks to me.
I’ve felt an uncertain chaos in our land that tells me to seek shelter, to batten up what’s exposed, to hide deep within comfortable, clandestine places. It’s innate to survival, the desperate need to hibernate until a storm is over. It’s the same sense of urgency that compels me to buy milk and bread when a snowstorm is coming: I never know how long it’s going to last, and I need to be ready.
I want steadiness. I don’t want uncertainty.
Yet I know I cannot hide, and it is the knowledge that although ferocious storms come in with a bent for destruction, they do fade away after wreaking havoc in their wake. We forget them and their names, picking up the pieces they intentionally left scattered. But some gales leave a scar we can’t repair, and we must work hard to patch what’s been rent.
And so I dream of my small acre in this world becoming a place where folk can band together as citizens and residents not trapped inside the cycle of a terrible maelstrom. Where communication is held together by short wave wizardry, not by words that beat us down. Where seeking to understand concerns comes first, instead of mangling them into calculated untrue definitions.
Where there is no attacking of who we intrinsically are, and instead we hold up the value of each person present. Where magic is still felt in a night sky, instead of panic upon waking telling us it’s time to dive into the hobbit hole.
I stand outside the tumultuous disturbance that is our now and will continue to rage against its unnecessary terror. I will throw my voice out into the velvet night, trusting that the storm — like all storms — will fade and move out to sea, never to remember it and how it made us feel.