hydrogen bomb exploding 
              (credit: United States Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Autumn Of Grade Nine

I started grade nine at thirteen years old. I didn’t turn fourteen until late October, so I was younger than almost everyone else in my grade. I had started grade one at five, which, for me, had been no sweat. I took to academic things.

Or at least the school work was no sweat. But by the time I was entering my teens, fitting in with guys who were bigger and more mature was becoming difficult. And like many a smart kid, I tried so hard to compensate and make myself cool that I frequently became an irritation to my peers and teachers alike. Trying too hard. How that phrase resonates with me now.

But grade nine changed me in deep ways, partly because it was in grade nine that I had Svend Hansen as my Science and home room teacher. He would have been in his early thirties then. Handsome in the eyes of my female peers. I heard them say so. Athletic in a stocky, solid way, with close-cropped brown hair, blue eyes, and Viking features, slightly hooked nose, crystal blue eyes, and all.

He had a big influence on me.

He belonged to the service club called the “Kinsmen”, so he took part in their big fundraiser in late September. They sold Planter’s peanuts door to door over the whole of Edmonton and the funds raised, because all the help was volunteer, “helped the Kinsmen to help the kids”. It went to fund summer camps for handicapped kids, I think. I can’t remember for sure now.

So, he asked four young guys from his grade nine homeroom to do the selling door to door as he drove his car slowly up and down the streets of one of the Northside neighborhoods. I can’t remember exactly where now. But we did well. Each of the four of us sold about one hundred fifty cans of peanuts in around three hours at a dollar a can. Planter’s peanuts. About seven hundred dollars worth of fund raising from one team, and there must have been a hundred teams working the city that night. Nineteen sixty-three dollars. With inflation, about ten times that value here in two thousand eighteen.    

It was a vivid night, partly because I’d never done anything like “fundraising” before, but more because that night held the most spectacular display of northern lights I'd ever seen. To this day, I’ve never seen the northern lights so vivid and enthusiastic. Greens and yellows, common enough, but even blues and violets. Dripping down the bowl of the night sky like syrup.

Hansen bought a can of peanuts for the guys and we got cokes on the way home. Grade nine boys, helping the world and having fun. It was a good night.

My mind was more open to him than to most teachers when he told us in Science Nine about the scientific method. I got it, the idea of forming hypotheses and testing them and gradually, in teams of researchers all supporting and feeding off each other, closing in on the truths of the universe. As we humans found more of those truths, we were soaring past the speed of sound, into space, curing diseases, building thinking machines, and …bombs.

You see a smart kid not only can grasp what the atom bomb that had dropped on Hiroshima did, he can grasp – even at thirteen – how it works and what the building of ever bigger ones could mean. The end of civilization, of all order, of ninety percent of humanity in an afternoon. Hansen had got me curious, scared – no, terrified – not intending to – but I was a thinking kid and a worrier anyway. 

Then, like a fool, I read the nonfiction book called “Hiroshima” by John Hersey just a few weeks after the Science Nine lesson about the atom. Got about half way, and then I could stand no more. Bug-eyed as I grasped the full horror.  

To this day, I have never gotten over it. I don’t fault Svend Hansen. I had kept pressing him for more answers that day of learning about the atom in class, and he had given them. He knew his Science. More than any grade nine boy needed to know. But he was only telling me about reality. Nuclear weapons are real. They aren't a Dracula horror movie or space aliens or something equally ridiculous. They are real and they are much worse.

The burnt, mangled, mutilated thousands in Hiroshima that Hersey describes in that book, the women with breasts ripped off by flying glass, burned babies like roasted Easter hams – all described from the points of view of medical staff in the city who had survived. 

I never got over the autumn of my grade nine year.

My junior high school, that same school, had had an air raid siren on our roof – the roof of a junior high school – go off the year before. An air raid siren is made so that it will be loud enough to be heard for miles. Its sound is pitched to be distressing to human senses. It must not be ignored. And me a sensitive kid. We never got an explanation for why that air raid siren went off in sixty-two. We just sat and stared at each other for ten minutes or so – God, it was loud! – and then it stopped. Must have been a mistake. Go on with the day. 


 

                              air raid siren (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

I used to lie awake and listen to the sirens in my city through the night, and try to judge whether they were police, ambulances, fire trucks or …the unthinkable horror show. It came to me that there was nothing anyone was doing anywhere that took up even a little of the shadow of this mushroom cloud glowering down on our planet. Over all of us. This was the issue of my era in History. As Kennedy said to the U.N. General Assembly, we must end war or it will end us. 

And then they killed President Kennedy.

I saw some of my teachers cry that day, November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. Mrs. Barbara Page. Hansen’s eyes were red-rimmed when I saw him in the hall. (Shock. Men don’t cry, do they?) We went to class, but no one studied much.

In stunned disbelief, I watched two days later when the purported assassin was himself shot. At close range. In the police station. In the guts. On camera.

These are harsh things for a grade nine boy. We have fire crackers that can take out a city in one pop. Thousands of such bombs. The leaders who are supposed to keep us from using them are crazy.

I never got over the autumn of my grade nine year.