Rememberment, Chapter XXI: 1986

Being a full 10 years old felt significant. I was a big boy now and I knew it. 

No doubt that feeling was further amplified by the fact that I was now a fourth grader, as high as it got in our school. Furthermore, Dad said that I was now old enough to handle a BB gun. I had tried shooting before and enjoyed it quite a bit, so I was thrilled. He bought me the gun and gave me all the instructions on how and how not to use it, and soon I spent most of my time outside practicing with my new weapon.

That's not the main thing I remember about that year though.

On the 28th of January, the Space Shuttle Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral. Initially, everything seemed to be fine. But after about a minute and a half after liftoff, the vehicle suddenly exploded in a cloud of smoke and debris, killing its crew of seven people.

The Challenger explosion remained the main news headline for quite a while, until it again made room for the usual Cold War news and the seemingly eternal conflict between Iran and Iraq. Then came the end of April.

It didn't seem overly significant at first, but as more days passed, it all became more and more alarming. Then everyone kept watching the news as the experts tried to figure out where the winds had carried the Chernobyl fallout. There was a constant barrage of instructions by the officials about what we can still safely eat, what berries and mushrooms can still be picked and where, how they should be handled, and how often we should have fish on the menu.

"Chernobyl" also became a part of our everyday language, and we habitually misused it as an adjective whenever we wanted to refer to something that was particularly foul, such as Mika's farts during class.

The year wasn't done with Chernobyl. In Cameroon, carbon dioxide erupting from a volcanic lake killed over 1700 people and thousands of livestock. There was also a destructive earthquake in San Salvador in October and only a few weeks after that the pollution from a chemical spill turned the river Rhine red, killing massive amounts of fish. I remember the last one, because it convinced my dad that we are indeed witnessing the End of Times. It may not have been that, but it was indeed a year of disasters that made people wonder where the world was going.

For me personally, it was also the year when I learned how to hit things with a BB gun. And after the summer, also the year when my mental health started to take a turn for the worse.