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Riders on the Earth

1991; University of Missouri; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.1991.0051

1548-9930

Valerie Hurley,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

RIDERS ON THE EARTH/ Valerie Hurley SHORTLY BEFORE MY SECOND BIRTHDAY, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My mother arranged a birthday party for me, pinned a white silk rose in my hair, dressed me up in taffeta and mary janes, festooned the dining room with favors and paper hats. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were filled with Japanese children. My mother took pictures of my face stuffed with cake, the flower dangling down by my ear. Eight twoyear -olds sat on the sunUt front step, squinting into the camera. My mother beUeved that the United States had to drop atomic bombs on Japan. She beUeved that breast milk was bad for babies and that the silvery blue DDT bomb under the sink would perfect her flower garden. I was nurtured by a world unsure of itself. The neighbors constructed faUout shelters. In school there were air raid drills, and we were taught to crouch down in the haUways. What was about to come shrieking through the glass? Who would bomb our school? Would our arms over our heads preserve us? In 1962, I sat in the college lounge Ustening to Kennedy's ultimatum to the Soviet Union during the Cuban missUe crisis. It suddenly seemed obvious what the years of squatting on the cold tile in the school haU had been for. Terrified, I telephoned my father in New York. He laughed at my alarm. His nonchalance was comforting. The fifties were not a time when things were talked about. Menstruation maybe, but not sex and not bombs. The fifties were a time of atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, strontium-90 in the milk, DDT on the crops, faUout shelters in backyards stocked with a year's supply of pickles and dried beef. My neighbor went to coUege in the mid-fifties, and it took three bedrooms of her house to contain her new wardrobe. I was one of the neighborhood children who toured the rooms, obeisant, dazzled by the strapless net gowns and gloves and plaid pleated skirts and cardigans and matching purses and shoes. But eight years later when I went to coUege, what was needed was not a trousseau but some blue jeans and a moral vision. It was the time of the Beatles, Vietnam. The toddlers of the forties now wondered more and beUeved less. Some of the things we had been taught— The Missouri Review · 111 respect for our elders, obedience to authority—hadn't been learned. In 1969, my new husband and I Uved in the highest crime area of Manhattan, in two long narrow rooms decorated with paper lanterns from Azuma. There we were mugged by two jittery young druggies carrying knives. EventuaUy we moved to the country, looking for a purer world. I envisioned brown eggs and strawberries, spring water, an orchard, a farmhouse with a fireplace in every room. We got mice nesting in the springbox, a leaky roof, young fruit trees nibbled by rabbits, deer, and caterpiUars, red squirrels Uving in the attic, a wandering brook that flooded our basement in January. We were happy. Here, for the first time in twentyseven years, we were introduced to the Earth. The summer before our first daughter, Mara, was born, I planted a tukp garden for her. She was born in February, and in May the tuUps appeared—pink and yeUow and red and scarlet, their ruffled tops frayed with color. I walked her in her carriage down the rose-colored road, tucked bunches of wUdflowers in beside her face, hoping she'd grow up to love them. The night our second daughter was born, she was wheeled back to the room with me after the deUvery. Erin was less than an hour old, but she looked up at my husband and me and studied us for a long time. Her eyes were wide and alert, huge and blue; it was not a loving look. Who are you? she seemed to be saying. Are you worthy of me? I nursed and rocked my babies, sang to them, introduced them to the wUdflowers that grew around our farm, the moles that ate the tuUps, the rabbits that ate the pear trees...