As a preschooler I was afraid of the wolf I knew was waiting to jump out of the closet and attack me as soon as my parents closed my bedroom door at night. That wolf was real. My hammering heart told me so, and I made my dad check the closet every night.

Sixth-grade students crouch under or beside their desks along with their teacher, Vincent M. Bohan, left, as they act out a scene from the Federal Civil Defense Administration film “Duck and Cover” at Public School 152 in the Queens borough of New York City on Nov. 21, 1951. Dan Grossi/Associated Press, File

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathy Westra Stephens is a resident of Owls Head.

By the time I got a little bigger, I had new fears: the real-world anxiety of being sternly punished by my parents for some infraction. My heart would begin to race when I knew I would face the consequences of telling a lie, hitting my baby brother or buying penny candy with the nickel my dad had given me for the Sunday school collection plate.

I did not know real fear, though, until the fall of 1962, when I was 8. That fall, fear invaded both my waking hours and my dreams. For what seemed like endless days in October and November of that year, I would walk to school from my house on Underwood Avenue, scanning the sky above our neighborhood for the falling bombs that would destroy me, my family, my house and everything and everyone I knew. I remember wondering if I’d still be alive for my ninth birthday in February.

All the grownups in my life were acting nervous, but no one talked to me about what was going on. At home, Mom and Dad just talked in hushed voices when they thought I wasn’t listening. I heard snippets of their conversations: “Russia.” “Crisis.” “Missiles.” “Cuba.” “Khrushchev.” “Kennedy.” I didn’t know what those words meant, but the dread they conveyed was unmistakable.

At school, my teachers supervised regular bomb drills – a brand-new activity like a fire drill, but preparing us for something even more terrible without any explanation of what the threat entailed. Without any warning, the bomb siren would sound, and we would quickly get up from our desks, exit our classroom single-file and follow our teacher to an interior hallway, away from the windows, where we joined other teachers and their students. We all stood shoulder to shoulder against the walls, not allowed to make a sound until we were given the “all clear” to go back to our classroom.  As an adult, I wonder why they bothered. Surely no school hallway anywhere could protect a child from a nuclear blast.

I did not know then what I know now: that in 1962 the United States and the USSR were escalating a dangerous Cold War game of nuclear chicken, with the Russians siting ballistic missiles in Cuba in response to the U.S. positioning nukes in Italy and Turkey. With these actions, each superpower would have been capable of wiping out millions of people. Historians believe this is the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. So far.

Earlier this month, President Biden talked of “Armageddon,” referencing the same 1962 missile crisis that terrified me as a child. His remarks have brought back the same feeling of visceral dread I knew as a fearful 8-year-old. Although it’s 2022, and I’m almost 69, I feel as anxious – and as powerless – as I did that long-ago autumn. I am too old to trust the false sense of security I once found as I followed my teacher away from my second-grade classroom to the cinderblock hallway of my elementary school. I know too much about the heady allure of absolute political power to disregard any would-be despot’s threats – Putin’s or Trump’s – as mere bluster.

Because the brinksmanship of the Cuban missile crisis played such a large role in my childhood, I have a hard time thinking of nuclear annihilation as merely an abstract idea.

What I do think about is that somewhere in Kyiv or Moscow is a little second-grader named Katya. She is walking to her neighborhood school and scanning the sky as I once did, heart pounding in fear of what may be coming to destroy all she knows and loves. I think of her, and once again I am afraid.