May 1980
Thursday October 22, 2009
I recently told my friends the Tillmans a story from my childhood as we had drinks and waited for dinner to be ready. I don’t remember why the story came up, but when I was done, Christine Tillman was adamant that telling this story would be the best possible way to introduce my artwork. I assumed that she meant this because of the apocalyptic subject matter of my illuminated manuscripts and some of my church ceiling paintings. She said, and I’m paraphrasing “no … I thought it would explain why there’s so much stuff in your work that doesn’t make sense together.” I assume she meant this with utmost respect and affection. Thanks, Christine. Here is my story.
May 1980
The sky was pitch black, but not in the way that a sky is black at night. It was certainly darker than usual on that Sunday afternoon, but it was as if the sky had been painted black in a strip at the top of a child’s drawing, to indicate a storm. There was still daylight down below, but above us, something terrible was happening.
I was seven and my sister Molly was nine. We had just walked out of Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church, which for reasons I will explain later, we had attended by ourselves. Clasping hands, we agreed it was either caused by Ronald Reagan or Jesus Christ. I, for one, did not know which was worse.
There are things you need to know about Ronald Reagan and seven-year old me, and things you need to know about Jesus and seven-year old me. I’ll start with Reagan, as he’s much less complicated.
As a seven-year old, I equated Ronald Reagan with nuclear war. I had it in my head that he and his arms race would cause the war, not Brezhnev, of whom I don’t think I had even heard. The Soviet Union was the enemy in the abstract, but it would be Ronald Reagan’s fault. My parents hadn’t wanted Ronald Reagan to be elected. In fact, Molly and I knocked on doors in the neighborhood and asked people not to vote for Ronald Reagan. I’m almost positive that no one put us up to this. This is just the kind of kids we were.
I knew a lot about nuclear war, because my dear mother, who remembers this differently than I do, read John Hersey’s Hiroshima to us out loud. If you haven’t read this highly specific and personalized story of nuclear war, you probably should, but probably not to your children before bedtime. For the record, I don’t think that she did read this to us as a bedtime story, more as a midday diversion. And also for the record, I enjoyed that she didn’t always read us kids’ stories, that she also read us Black Like Me and a Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy. She must have needed a break from endless volumes of Little House on the Prairie — not that there’s anything wrong with those.
She also reminded us that the bomb that fell on Hiroshima was only a fraction of the one dropped on Nagasaki which was only the tiniest fraction of the power of what would be dropped on us, were we to be subject to a nuclear war in the Reagan ’80s. Molly and I used to try to comfort ourselves with the notion that living in the tinier town of College Place, Washington, right outside the tiny town of Walla Walla, Washington would somehow protect us. But our mother was quick to explain that Walla Walla was third on the list of nuclear targets for the Soviets.
I’ve read a lot of books lately about the faulty nature of memory, so I wasn’t sure she had said that at all, as it didn’t seem plausible. Were they after the proportionally large Seventh-day Adventist community we were part of? Were they after the inmates of the State Penitentiary? Or was it a ploy to cut off the country’s supply to the Walla Walla Sweet Onion? After only a very brief amount of Internet research, I found what my mother must have been talking about. The Hanford Site or Hanford Nuclear Reservation is 110 miles driving distance from College Place, Washington, according to Google maps. The distance is even shorter, as the crow (or the nuclear fallout) flies. I couldn’t find anything online listing Reagan-era Soviet targets, but it was once a major producer of plutonium and is currently the worst site of nuclear pollution in the United States. (Harden, Blane) Walla Walla is now only considered a medium terrorist target. (Walla Walla County Emergency Department)
In any case, I had reason to be afraid of nuclear war. And if nuclear war happened, I only thought I had the slightest chance of survival, and this would be Ronald Reagan’s fault. But for some reason, I was at least equally scared that this was not the doing of Ronald Reagan, but of Jesus Christ, specifically that this was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
The first thing you need to know about Jesus Christ and seven-year old me is that I loved Him with my whole heart, but for some reason I have yet to figure out I could never entirely believe that He loved me.
The next thing you need to know is that when I was seven, my parents were still Seventh-day Adventists. If you’re not familiar with Seventh-day Adventism, you might get them confused with other fringe Christian denominations, or think of them not as Christians but as a cult. But in my experience, Seventh-day Adventists are normal, as far as any fundamentalist Christian in the United States can be called normal. They’re like Baptists, with a few extra quirks.
Most of those quirks, like an obsession with health, a propensity towards vegetarianism, and a resistance to jewelry are not important here. What is important here is that, as the name states, they worship God on the seventh day of the week, which is historically Saturday, and believe that the rest of the Church took the wrong path in beginning to worship on Sunday. The other item of great importance is that they are, as a rule, just a wee bit obsessed with the end of the world. The church was founded by some followers of William Miller, who predicted that Christ would come back in 1844. The fact that He didn’t is referred to as “The Great Disappointment.” While the disappointed Seventh-day Adventists do not predict a particular day or time, they do believe that we are living in the end times and spend a lot of time discussing and preparing for this end.
So on the day that I was walking out of Sunday school from the Presbyterian Church with my older sister Molly, I felt terribly guilty. We had just sat through a lesson on the Ten Commandments in which the Sunday school teacher had glossed over the 4th commandment. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God …” (Exodus 20 vs. 8-10, King James Version, emphasis mine.) She illogically stated that this commandment was why we went to church once a week on Sunday. And even though I was the kind of seven-year old who often corrected her teachers, I, for once, kept my mouth shut, and felt bad about having done so.
It had been my idea to stop going to Sabbath school in the first place. In my Sabbath school, we spent weeks learning about Ellen White, a prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Ever since she was seventeen, she had countless visions and dreams. In my Sabbath School class, we didn’t learn about her dreams, visions or subsequent writings. And we definitely didn’t learn about the Bible. Instead, we spent weeks hearing the story of her childhood, how she was a very unpopular girl and how some mean classmates had regularly hurled stones at her on her way home from school. One day, one connected and hit her smack in the face. She was badly injured and unconscious for a long time. Even then, I wondered if there had been some brain damage, which not too much later caused her “visions.”
My parents were respectful of Ellen White, but had taught me that if I ever thought anything Ellen White had said contradicted what the Bible said, I should go with the Bible. When I complained that I was learning nothing about the Bible in Sabbath School, I was told I would have to continue going to church with them on the Sabbath, but could skip Sabbath school if I agreed to go to Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church, where their friend was pastor.
In the meantime, Molly had found her own reasons not to continue with Sabbath School. In her classroom, the obsession with the end times had taken a rather frightening turn. The children were made to hide in caves made of black garbage bags stretched over chicken wire. They were practicing heading to the hills and finding “refuge in the strongholds of the mountains,” as Ellen White had predicted that the persecuted true believers would do in the “Time of Trouble” directly before the Second Coming of Christ. (White, Ellen)
While my mother clearly didn’t think that open conversation about the likelihood of an all out nuclear war was too scary for her little girls, both my parents thought making us play out terrifying end times scenarios was going a little bit too far. That is what ultimately put Molly and me outside of the Presbyterian church that Sunday afternoon when the sky turned black.
It didn’t look like a storm or anything I had seen before. If Reagan had gone and started World War III, I had little chance of survival, and my soul would sleep until Judgment Day. If it was Jesus, well then it already was Judgment Day. Either way, I wasn’t ready. Caught in the sin of Sunday worship, my fragile hope that I might come out on the good side of that judgment was rapidly dissolving.
This all happened on Sunday, May 28, 1980. I was seven and my sister was nine. It did not take long for me to be disabused of the terrifying possibilities of nuclear holocaust or the second coming of Christ. What really happened, I was told by my father who had come to pick us up, was that Mount St. Helens had blown its top. Mount St. Helens was clear on the other side of the state, and we were safe. But the explosion had been so big, that the sky had turned black with ash across the entire state, and probably beyond. By the morning, a fine gray dust had settled everywhere.
I don’t remember thinking much about the fifty-seven people who died as a result of this natural disaster. I do remember collecting the dust off our windowsills and keeping it in film canisters for years to come. I remember it making me feel happy and a little bit proud, to have at least partially witnessed something large taking place. That is, I remember feeling part of history. But most importantly, I remember feeling relief. The final judgment was no longer imminent, at least not for me. I still had time.
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Sources
Harden, Blaine; Dan Morgan (June 2, 2004). “Debate Intensifies on Nuclear Waste”. Washington Post: p. A02. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7951-2004Jun1.html
Walla Walla County Emergency Department (October, 2003) “Hazard Identification and Vulnerability Analysis (HIVA) Walla Walla County, Washington –Terrorism”, www.co.walla-walla.wa.us/Departments/…/Hazards/Terrorism.pdf
White, Ellen (1858), The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan, Chapter 39, “The Time of Trouble”, p. 626, available at www.ellenwhite.com.