Wildfire, weather events, and claustrophobia in the American West.
What do you do when there is nowhere to go?
I had a dream a few nights ago that Ben and I were in the car, navigating a stressful highway interchange in, of all places, Kansas. (In the delightfully mishmashed dreamscape, Kansas resembled that triborough shitshow near Yankee Stadium, where my mother and father can never remember if we do or don’t want to be getting onto the Major Deegan Expressway.) In the dream we were looking for “I-80 West,” but almost inadvertently merged onto an eastbound ramp, before cutting across several lanes to reverse course via a cloverleaf. As we followed the signs for all points west, the color of the sky changed and smoke loomed. I inhaled dread as I contemplated the lack of fresh air for the next 1500 miles. We pulled up our N-95s which had been dangling from our ears. I woke up feeling suffocated.
The smell of smoke in the American West has infiltrated my dreams and it is apparent that the the incursion of climate change into our lives will not be as subtle as I had once imagined. Even as scientists have long warned of the dire consequences of each rising degree of ocean temperature, on some level I understand that warning to mean our planet would warm one degree at a time. Of course the reality is that the aggregate effect of incremental temperature changes is more extreme weather events that, for a long time seemed to happen elsewhere, but that are increasingly frequently happening to us.
“How do you maintain your optimism?” This is the question asked by one of the best books I’ve read about climate change, which is not exactly a book about climate change at all, but a novel about living in the world in 2021 with climate anxiety - Weather, by the marvelous Jenny Offill. In Weather, it is question asked by a young woman to the protagonist’s academic mentor, during the Q&A period following a lecture. Thanks to Offill’s distinctive fragmented form, we do not hear the academic’s answer. But how to maintain optimism in the face of this anxiety is one of the central questions of a novel, in which the protagonist’s climate change dread not only looms, but comes to infuse all of her relationships, especially her relationship to parenting.
I am in the midst of a California drought in the early days of fire season. I have learned to dread fire season with an intensity not shared by the native Californians in my life, who seem to be vaguely inured to wildfire. Perhaps because I am a transplant, I can’t accept that it is natural to see ash raining from the sky and to hear discussion of fires “jumping” the freeway. I don’t trust our ability to contain the fires and to stop their raging before they destroy us. My favorite months of the year have now become synonymous with eerie skies, staying indoors, changing plans, and desperate hope for shifting winds.
As evidenced by my recent nightmare, I am haunted by the cross-country drive we embarked upon a year ago this week, when the haze of Western fires followed us until we hit Kansas. California was burning, Oregon was burning, Colorado was burning. Our drive between Moab and Denver took nearly twice as long, since wildfires has forced the Interstate west of Denver to be shut down, and we were detoured through Colorado’s southern mountains, on winding hairpin turns without cell service. Not being able to outrun the smoke triggered a bout of claustrophobia at odds with the enormous expanses of the American west. I made Ben promise that next year, if fire season were bad enough, we would pick up and leave. I did not want to see my home shrouded in orange Mars-like gloom1. I feared it would force me to face the unsustainability of living in a place that I love, that has come to be home, that it would force me to say “We need to leave California” - words I did not want to say. If only we could avoid fire season, if we could afford to fly and live somewhere else for a few weeks a year, I could deny its untenability, we could find a way to stay. But this fiction of escape was shattered a few weeks ago when smoke from the American west made its way all the way to the East Coast, layering New York City in eerie film. Nowhere on the continent was spared.
The rest of my book club hated Weather. They found the protagonist tiresome and her worldview unbearable. Admittedly, this shook me, as Offill’s representation of a woman suffering from anxiety, but who also loves—and worries—deeply, had reminded me very much of myself. She lays awake one night asking herself a question I have come to begin asking myself - “What will be the safest place?” Haunted by an interview with a climatologist, she is unable to fall back asleep: “I don’t think there will be any safe places. I am . . . the impacts are going to be big. So my approach is to be as movile, as flexible as possible, to be able to adapt to whatever is going to happen. My children are bilingual and we’re working on a third language. Both children have three passports.” I too am prone to these middle of the night spirals, particularly when the smell of wildfire creeps in through the open bedroom window and threatens not to just to ruin the land in its path, but the air for miles, keeping us indoors and unexercised and stifled. I recently expressed to my best friend my nervousness that poor air quality would ruin my upcoming trip to Tetons and Yellowstone with Ben and my parents. She told me I was “catastrophizing.”
But isn’t it a catastrophe? Each room of our home now contains expensive domestic ventilators, machines that help purify our air so we can breathe without endangering our lungs. In our bedroom sits a square two by two foot machine resembling a giant iPod shuffle that emits a blue light and a purring hum. When the quality of the air coming in through the open window plummets in the middle of the night, the light turns red and the purr wakes me up as it roars to the level of a commercial airplane’s jets turning on for takeoff.
In an interview, Offill said that she realized she couldn’t write about climate change head on. There is the dystopian novel, which inhabits a post-climate change apocaplyptic landscape, but otherwise, it is challenge to write about something nebulous and intangible that will happen. I also can’t read about climate change head on. Ben had to more or less confiscate Elissa Gabert’s essays on disaster, which comprise the first third of her collection The Unreality of Memory. (However, I fully endorse the other two thirds of the collection as strange and beautiful and fascinating.) The episodes of The Daily on climate change reports and extreme heat waves pile up in my queue. I can’t bring myself to listen to them. Even more than for any other bad news, what is the point?
What makes Weather tenable for the reader, in contrast to The Daily, are the human questions at its core and the tiny, seemingly insignificent, human answers. How do we keep moving forward? (We just keep moving forward.) Why and how do we continue to have children in the face of our near-certain destruction, despite unusual weather events large and small occurring on a near daily basis. (We love them.) How do we maintain a kernal of hope that humanity (and industry) will get their f@$King act together? The novel is unable to provide an answer to any of these questions beyond giving us a character who keeps putting one foot in front of the other, a character who loves, as each of us do.
I too am unable to answer any of these questions, unable to square my desire to have a child with terror about the fate of our planet and the quality of our air, and the question of where it might be safe to raise a family. I’m unable to reconcile my desire to escape the consequences of our actions by contributing further to them by running away on a gas-guzzling jet plane - evidence of my broader anxiety that having a child will make me selfish, unwilling to make sacrifices for the greater good. But there is also the possibility that having a child will give me a reason to make those sacrifices.
Writing is an insufficient reaction to climate change. But unlike me, Offill decides to do something about fiction’s inability to answer unanswerable questions, and includes a link at the end of Weather to a website titled www.obligatorynoteofhope.com, her testament to “all the different ways ordinary people were refusing to give into fatalism and were exploring the possibilities of what they could do, what they might fight for in this half-ruined world of ours.” In the absence of any better answers, I leave you with Offill’s Obligatory Note of Hope, its aggregator of modestly inspiring Wendell Berry quotes, and links to humble organizations doing good work, and a note of gratitude for each late-summer day spent outside in clear air.
Photo cred goes to https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1663483/0