The Labor Day Storm

This one is creative non-fiction. Which means everything happened but I made up some of the details or described them as best I could remember, which may or may not be accurate.

They postponed opening the schools in my district in 1997 because they couldn’t get the buses through the streets when they were full of fallen trees. My friends and I were ecstatic about this, as well as about the sudden availability of hideouts with walls of tangled branches where we could hide and stake our claims to these natural forts created by winds that had somehow done the work of a battleaxe. I also found a certain romance in burning candles instead of turning on the lights, and I liked the taste of macaroni and cheese leftovers that had been fried on the gas stove better than its microwaved equivalent.

            These and other perks were endless: Emily and I spent a week riding our bikes around my street, which was blocked off because of all the branches and bark in the road. We were too young to help our parents do much other than pick up twigs off the front lawn, and nobody we knew had been hurt.

            The only downsides to the 1997 Labor Day Storm were the live wires on the ground, which we were repeatedly warned to avoid and which made the sidewalks suddenly lethal, and the deaths of two men who had been outside their trailers at the New York State Fairgrounds, twenty-five minutes away from my neighborhood. In between games of hide-and-seek and fort building under the tree in Emily’s yard that had crushed her entire porch (nobody was hurt), I wondered about those two men. Had they been chasing after debris that had come out of someone else’s trailer? Had their trailers fallen over? Did they know each other? Did they work on the Midway rides, or in the horse barn? Where were they from? I had been told that a mattress had been found in the debris, among other absurd things, and I now pictured a man holding onto a mattress for dear life as the wind picked it up tossed it into the air – a kind of wild, tragic Aladdin’s magic carpet ride.

            When we did start second grade, a week later than planned, all my classmates had stories.

            “Our power is still out,” said Joey.

            “A tree fell on my mom’s car when she was driving it,” Ashley announced. “But she’s okay.”

            My own stories of bike riding in my otherwise empty street were met with envy.

            Later that week, when the glory of the storm and its aftermath had faded, we started learning about the solar system. I was sitting on the blue carpeted floor of Miss McNerney’s classroom under the poster of “-at” words (cat, rat, mat, flat) when, for the second time in two weeks, my seven-year-old mind was faced with the fact of my mortality.

            “Someday, in about a billion years, the sun is going to swell up into its next phase as a star, and when it does, it will swallow up Mercury, Venus, and Earth,” Miss McNerney said matter-of-factly.

            I looked around wildly at my classmates. Somehow the news that our planet was going to be swallowed by an enormous ball of burning gas, never mind how far into the future, had only inspired awe in the faces of my peers.

            My fear lasted for the rest of the day. When we lined up to wash our hands for lunch, I stood there, my skin actually tingling with the knowledge of my own, and my planet’s, future demise. I overheard Joey talking about this next to me and turned my head sharply as he said, “BOOM!” spreading his arms apart to indicate the breadth of the sun’s future explosion.

            “Joey, stop it,” I said.

            “Why?” Joey asked, smiling. “By then we’ll all be living in space anyway.”

            “We will?”

            “Sure. Not in our lifetime, though.”

            What did it matter, all this talk of lifetimes and suns? I eventually got over my fear and regained my childhood sense of invincibility, but some core part of me was altered by the events of September 1997. I felt much more keenly for the future generation that may or may not be wiped out by the sun’s expansion. I also wondered occasionally if there was some way the Earth would miraculously just move away from the sun, like a magnet being forced away from its twin, continuing its orbit at a more cautious distance, allowing my descendants to continue living in harmony with the winds and trees and bicycles of their time, flying around the world on magic carpets and wearing green glasses to avoid being hurt by the big red sun of the future.