Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
I grew up with the threat of tornadoes.
In Pre-Kindergarten, we had one touch down when I was four years old. All of the children had to move out of their classrooms and into the building’s interior hallways, where we lined up side-by-side with our heads huddled against the walls and our tiny hands clasped over our necks.
In elementary school, we again had a serious tornado warning, but this time at night, when everyone was home. My parents dragged us all out of bed and into the bathroom, where we squeezed ourselves into the bathtub and pulled a mattress over our heads.
These natural disasters were undeniably scary as a child – but there was a certain thrill to them as well, especially when the warning had passed and you could look back at the shared moment. I would be reminded, in my blooming consciousness, that I was alive, and that I couldn’t take this fact of living for granted; it was a frightening but invigorating discovery. My elementary and middle schools gave their best effort to not let this discovery fade, drilling us annually on our response to a fire, or to a tornado.
In the seventh grade, these collective safety exercises changed. Rather, they expanded to include another category of threat response: the active shooter drill.
At twelve years old, I don’t remember knowing the details of the Sandy Hook shooting. I think my parents and teachers tried to insulate me from the horror of the news story. But whispers of what had happened at that Connecticut elementary school – of the twenty-six people who had been murdered, most of them only six or seven year old children – echoed through the halls of my school. “Sandy Hook” meant genuine terror, with no invigorating side in sight.
I will never forget the active shooter drill we conducted in response.
For an entire day, in each of our eight classes, we went over the plan for what we should do if there were an active shooter in the school while we were in that particular classroom. We should immediately obstruct any doorways, turn off the lights, move as far away from the door and out of its line-of-sight as possible, and remain completely quiet. For a specific thirty-minute period in the morning, our entire school of seven hundred students rehearsed this procedure. I worked with my classmates to stack our desks together at the door of our English classroom, and we huddled together in the far corner of the room, in the quiet and in the dark, while the school’s officials went from door-to-door to check that each room was properly locked down.
I remember the specific absurdity of the plan in my tennis class, wherein we were supposed to hide together in a temporary hut made of thin plywood. My classmates and I debriefed together afterwards, out on the courts – surely the bullets would pass right through the wood, and it would be better to try to run instead.
Amidst the horrible news stories and the frequent reminders that we could be horribly, randomly annihilated, I grew a constant worry in the back of my mind that I would be caught out in the bathroom when a shooter came to my school, and that I wouldn’t be able to get into one of the locked-down classrooms. I strategized about which bathroom stall would be the most innocuous, the most-likely for a shooter to disregard; I thought about how I could crouch on the toilet to not be seen.
Fifteen years later, I still never use the first bathroom stall.
Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
