by Joanne Jacobson
Over the hydraulic hiss of buses and the rhythmic pumping of car radios, over the banging doors of garbage trucks—the whine of sirens unpeeled relentlessly in the street below my window, a disruption like no other. This was the voice in which news of home’s wounding went out in the months before I left New York, the sound that preceded the fearsome language: pandemic. Even for those of us who were not yet ill, the siren’s assault on our barricaded bodies revealed from early on the approaching damage: a wordless, almost animal, cry.
Though the siren is a modern invention, its story goes back to prehistoric drums and then to bells used in China during the Xia dynasty, as early as 2000 BCE. With the medieval spread of Christianity, church bells knelled across Europe to call people to worship and to publicly mark time, designating the audible boundaries of community. Later, sirens would be powered by steam, and then electricity, to warn of what lay ahead: floods, wildfires, storms. Later, they warned of nuclear attack. Even now, when the work that people do—in factories, in sawmills, in coal mines—puts them at risk, a siren remains the recognizable signal that sends families spinning out from home to face their losses.
Imagine New York’s seventeenth-century volunteer firemen hugging small bells to themselves as they traversed the streets, alerting neighbors to the presence of smoke. Or the eight-man “rattlewatch,” appointed to patrol the night for fire, supplied with wooden rattles. Their bodies must have rung lightly as they maneuvered the narrow, unpaved streets, signaling residents to form bucket brigades to save their wooden chimneys and thatched roofs from flames, defending the colony’s as-yet-uncertain settlement. Through those sounds, before sirens, residents of the city were linked—in fear and in obligation.
Sirens narrate wordlessly the unwelcome truths of our lives: the presence of danger and the limits of home as refuge. From September 1940 through May 1941, the first air raid sirens sounded harshly through London nearly every night, warning of the approach of German bombers. Already set on edge by predictions of a Nazi land invasion, Londoners fled their black-out-curtained homes for shelters dug into their backyards, and for the city’s deepest darknesses, the crowded Underground stations where together they awaited the single blast of “all-clear.” Too often they returned to burned-out rubble and blocks of brick carcasses. The Blitz left one out of six Londoners homeless.
During my time in New York, I would also be witness to the sky’s delivery of destruction: the World Trade Center towers leaking flames like a cartoon, spotlit in the sharp sunlight of an autumn morning. I saw the two smoking towers sucked impossibly back into the earth as though they had never existed. I heard ambulance sirens tracking the hopeless search for survivors. I would later read that the people flying out of the high World Trade Center windows were not jumpers after all–not humans making desperate choices–but objects propelled by the force of explosions, reduced to the force of physics, to mass in motion. That day thousands of us jammed the sidewalks of Manhattan, determined to escape the city’s smoldering center, to make our way home ahead of more disaster.
A decade later, my body acquired its own intimacy with sirens: strapped-in, speeding rides through city streets, disbelieving that such raw urgency could belong to me. First, aphasia’s un-anchoring, words melting into garble, a sound shadow ballooning in my wake. Then the ambulance’s razor siren turning above my confusion. At the hospital there would be a diagnosis—a rare blood disorder—and an assignment to a shabby room, its door left to hang ajar. In the morning, a nurse would appear without knocking, collect a load of blood in silence, and bind my tiny wound with cotton and tape. I listened to what passed as signs of life: the pinging of monitors, the uneasy breaths that reached me from the other bed, and the drip of a nearby IV. And over it all, the sounds of sirens shepherding ambulances to this alien place. Day and night, the beat of broken bodies being delivered, the city’s supply of pain unendingly collected from homes.
In the quarantined city—the sirened city—I could feel those memories revived ten years on: quiescent all that time, it seemed, below the surface of my once-again fragile body. I could see on my morning walk through the deserted streets the white tents of a field hospital going up in Central Park, a desperate medical innovation of the American Civil War. I could feel myself turned back to Walt Whitman’s gentle nursing, to the thump of sawed-off limbs hitting surgical pails and the stink of infection, and the poet hand-scribing to their parents and wives the letters of young soldiers as they lay dying: “I hope it will be God’s will that we shall yet meet again.” The leaves on trees in the park were budding, spring continuing to arrive as though illness had not already turned this most modern of cities toward griefs as ancient as the grip of plague. In bed at night, in the dark, I could feel from my own apartment the encroaching closeness of loss.
Through the first long weeks of retreat, my watch lay limp across my desk, old first-thing-in-the-morning habit, totem of adulthood and of movement through the world. Ordinary life—reading in the bedroom window’s spare light, turning my now stilled swimmer’s body toward meals—felt, day after day, unnaturally cocooned. And still the sound of sirens tracing the path of death in the streets, cleaving time in their wake, the before and the after.
In the long, static days and nights of the pandemic, I returned to Poe’s claustrophobic fictions, to their tunneling inescapably inward, their characters buried alive in dark wine cellars and in ancient houses teetering over tarns, to human beings driven inexplicably by illness into a place where a mysterious heart continued to beat audibly beyond a murderer’s reach. Throughout that unrecognizable time, sirens frequently dispatched the only messages of life from the outside world: reminders of the calculus of predator and prey that illness was reviving on an unanticipated scale, the old Darwinian story of survival to which I had rarely in my lifetime given thought.
I surprised myself with my own animal hunger for home—by returning after fifty years to blood kin, that most primal of connections. Returning to Chicago, where I was born, to the most recent generation of my people: my version of what scientists call “natal homing.” Sea birds like Atlantic puffins return at the end of winter to breeding grounds of their birth. Salmon and turtles use the earth’s magnetic and chemical clues to find their way home through water to reproduce and die. Although I am far too old to breed and not yet ready for death, these long journeys remind me of the cyclical shape of life, and of the force—as deep as instinct—that drove me back toward my own origin place.
As the months of illness wore on in New York, I dreamed of home from the distance of hundreds of miles, believed home was waiting for me: memory’s fortress, fixed at the heart of the continent. “Sheltering in place,” I stockpiled twenty-pound sacks of cat litter, dragging them through the front door and the foyer, through the living’s room stale air, jamming them beneath my bedroom desk. When I carelessly kicked the bags, they released clouds of clay dust, fogging the air and the view beyond my window. Young honeybees prepare for a lifetime of night feeding with “orientation flights” on which they master their territory, learning to recognize and find their way back to their hive. Would I even know home when I found it again—that fragile, need-filled nest, altered like so much else by these years and their hurts?
From inside my Manhattan apartment, I could see the shifting light outside the walls, the days growing palpably longer, the sun more powerful; could hear fresh voices in the streets below, louder and more lingering. I felt ready to be released, like a creature close to shedding or breaking through its chrysalis. It is time, the light seemed to be telling me. I am coming, I am coming. Against the windowsill, just beyond my reach, a delicate moth opened and closed its linen wings, afternoon light filtering thinly through the fine sheath. Tuned to the movement of the seasons, the moth cycles smoothly through the seasons of its own life, from egg to larva to cocoon, to its few months of flight and then death.
Returning then, to the midwestern prairie after more than forty years, I must re-learn the taxonomies of alertness.
On a summer afternoon in Chicago the National Weather Service issues a “hazardous weather outlook” for my county, predicting destructive winds (“up to 75 mph”), damaging hail (“capable of denting cars and siding”), and tornadoes—the most fearsome drama of regional weather. A “twister” takes shape out of an updraft of warm air, first rising through cold, then rotating with exponentially increasing speed and power and funneling down from a thunderstorm’s dark, lightning-lit sky. A tornado rated as EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale can create winds of over 200 miles per hour—powerful enough to strip the bark from trees, to fling trucks as far as a mile, to rip houses from their concrete foundations. At any moment the warning siren could sound, signaling that an actual tornado has been spotted in the area, raising the stakes of vulnerability. The siren will rise and fall, a sound-snake uncoiling for long seconds as the sky darkens to an eerie green and sinister pools of yellow, orange, and red wobble on the radar map.
Astonishingly, tornado warnings remained controversial well into the 1950s, long after the technology of weather prediction made saving lives a realistic possibility. During those early Cold War years, the very word tornado—dark, whirring truth—felt to the National Weather Bureau loaded with too much potential to touch off anxieties about nuclear war. The Bureau continued to employ intentionally imprecise language like “severe weather” and “funnel cloud” even as communities began to employ warning signs tuned to new frequencies of fear. I can recall counting as a kid to 120 when the siren singed the air, trembling through the minutes, scrutinizing the sky for enemy bombers no matter how many times my parents reassured me, “it’s just a test.”
On the last ferry ride I took to the Statue of Liberty, not long before the start of the pandemic, a voice announced over the loudspeaker that this was the same view that immigrants to the U.S. would have seen a hundred years ago as their boats entered New York Harbor. I imagined my grandparents rising out of their long days in steerage to see exactly what I was seeing, half a century before their children embarked on their own new life in the suburbs—each American generation re-visioning home with audacious hope. At the end of the ferry ride aboard “Lady Liberty,” I took a hard hat tour of the recently restored Ellis Island hospital, the dark corridors deserted and moody, still shedding paint chips, still evoking the tenuous presence of those who were held back by illness at the very threshold of America. I don’t know if any of my ancestors were among those stuck in limbo there. But now, looking at the photographs, I took in the wards where Florence Nightengale tried out her new ideas about contagion. What had felt to me before like an aftermath of COVID now reads as preamble. This was the stubborn lineage of vulnerability that my parents’ parents passed on from the world from which—like me, as it strangely turned out—they’d fled ahead of danger.
Early in the morning, months later, I thread a path among the unpacked boxes crowding the rooms of my new Chicago apartment, find my stumbling way to the perimeter of glass. From that high window I can see the awning of the toy store where I roamed as a kid among the Erector Sets like the ones my lucky boy cousins possessed, among the Tinker Toys and the Lincoln Logs. Next door a new store has replaced the former Five and Ten, but I can still call up the sensation of bouncing in my rubber sneakers down the long, varnished floorboards. I can see at night from here the tracks of the elevated train and the string of cars headed back as always into the city: a long tube glowing from within. In the other direction, a few stars hang visible over Lake Michigan in the muted urban sky—and I can feel in my chest the pang of recognition, the old pull of moon over water. I can see the fire station that my elementary school class visited sixty years ago, can recall the slippery feel of the poles that the firemen let us wrap our still-small, still-curious hands around. I can see from this window the newsstand corner where my mother used to run into her pals and stop to shoot the breeze, rocking with one hand my younger sister’s stroller. I recently witnessed from this apartment a car turning that corner and colliding with a girl on a bicycle, catching the bike’s metal frame on its bumper and dragging it briefly until the girl managed to stand and then limp over to a bench. My mother’s warning voice returns to me as sharp as ever with its unlikely, adult idea of a dangerous world: Be careful!
And I can hear again now the sirens of fire trucks making their way from the nearby station: the same careening, forever-surprising wire of sound unwinding its alarm. I have carried my need hundreds of miles, across the continent. And here, in the dissolving wake of sirens, home has once again revealed itself to me: familiar and fugitive as memory, a coveted and an injured thing, not making any promises.
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · October 2025
Header image by edenpictures
Leave a Reply