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Chapter Four:
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Story Wakes Up
This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.
 The autumn wind was chilly and dry leaves rattled in the tree branches. I was sixteen years old and it seemed possible that the world was about to end and take me with it. It was October 1962, and humanity was living through thirteen days when the United States and the Soviet Union sparred with the idea of unleashing nuclear war. We all seemed frozen in place reciting over and over in our minds: no they wouldn't — but what if they do?
I was a sophomore in high school in suburban Minneapolis. My girlfriends were driving me crazy talking about who would sit next to whom on the school buses fleeing toward Minnesota farmland and a fantasy of safety. "How can you be boy crazy at a time like this?" I yelled at my friend Jane.
 "Everything else is crazy," she countered. "If I'm going to die, I want to do it in the arms of Kenny Corens. He is such a dream." And she flounced off, ponytail bobbing perkily, walking with a posture that told me she was still imagining balancing a book on her head, the way we had practiced in Home Economics.
"Great," I thought, "she'll never grow old, but she'll die with her head up." How could anyone — young, old, American, Russian, world-onlooker — possibly cope with the idea of our own extinction? Yet extinction is a shadow that never leaves us — not since August 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that initiated the Atomic Age, and not since we continue to turn our backs on the laws of nature.
At Wayzata High School, we lived through those days in an atmosphere where the consequences of our country's political action and reaction were overwhelming; it seemed to make the consequences of everything else drop away. Couples were necking in the corridors, and kids who barely knew each other's names were holding hands. Teachers roamed the hallways reciting a litany, "Okay, knock it off, get to class, you'll be tardy…" I suppose it gave them something to do. Though too insecure to join in the love fest — this was before the sexual liberation that would begin to surface a few years later — I have to admit I was wondering about the real need for studying algebra in light of world conditions. But under the watchful eyes of my parents I dutifully trudged through equations, in case we didn't die.
 Our lives are lived in story. Story is how we organize experience. In the constant stream of things happening, what we remember are the interactions we cull from our experience and call into our story. And the stories we remember are the ones in which we made a significant choice or decision about what things mean.
I remember October 1962, because suddenly I understood that my story and history were inextricably linked. What happened to the world would happen to me. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred just at a moment in my life when I was ready to start waking up.
Poised at the garage door, I struggled to carry a garden shovel in one hand and a square, green metal box in the other. Not wanting to explain to my mother what I was doing, and not wanting to be questioned by that rambunctious passel of boys who ran with my brother from yard to yard along the dead-end gravel road of our neighborhood, I waited until dusk. In the fading light I looked furtively both ways, then made my dash across our back lawn to the edge of the woods and over the rise, disappearing down the slope that extended a quarter of a mile through stands of oak toward a swamp below. I leaned up against a tree and caught my breath.
. . .
Something is happening in this moment. Something is happening to our story and we don't yet know it. We are just in it. We live in story like a fish lives in water. We swim through words and images siphoning story through our minds the way a fish siphons water through its gills. We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story.
We are the story-making creatures. We are the species that has evolved a language that leads to self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is based on the ability of the mind to take one step back from experience, to filter and interpret and reflect. This is our great and sometimes lonely differentiation from the rest of the animal realm: that step back, the mental requirement that we run everything through the brain's word processor before we know what's happening.
. . .
There are many tools we humans have developed for molding and influencing our journey on the earth, many technologies and social experiments: story is the oldest and the most consistent survivor of all these tools. Story is the mother of us all, for we become who we say we are.
. . .
 Standing under that bare oak with the threat of nuclear war thumping loudly in my chest and holding my girlish hope that this time my story would be the story to be saved, I realized that I would live my whole life balancing between the little story of myself and the Big Story of the Times. Just as one drop of water is part of the river, my one life was part of Life, and my one story was part of Story. It is not one particular drop of water that flows: it is the River. And it is not one life that survives: it is Life. It is not my story that leads us: it is Our Story.
. . .
We had almost lost the whole story, and the shock to me was that I hadn't even known there was another story until I glimpsed the largeness of the world. I have asked a dozen people recently, "Does the date October 1962 mean anything to you?" Mostly I get quizzical looks and people draw a blank or make a wild guess. "Oh yeah, something political happened … was that when Kennedy was shot? Or Martin Luther King...? Jeez, I wasn't even born yet ... were you...?"
Yes, actually, I was born — born to the story.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
Significant events become woven into our ongoing stories as we decide how to gauge their impact on our lives. We remember where we were, what we felt like, how it sounded, how it smelled, and what our reactions were. We compare notes with other people affected by these events, sometimes altering our details and merging our stories. Used as teaching tools, the stories that emerge can help us avoid repeating the worst outcomes and reinforce the best outcomes.
What would you put in the earth as a treasure for the future to find?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to respond to this question with a story from your own life >>
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