I Hope It Breaks My Heart

In October, the flames of Northern California Fire Season danced around the edges of my neighborhood and Ron and I remained on evacuation warning for five days with our electricity turned off by PG&E. During that time, many people contacted us by text and email to see if we were safe. We didn’t get the emails until the power came back on because we had no internet service. I soon found myself trying to formulate my thoughts and feelings into words to describe how I met the moment.

When we received the evacuation warning, we loaded our cars with many of our most precious possessions, prepared to leave. Having done this exercise when placed on evacuation warning for a day the year before, I was able to pack up and load my car in under an hour. I keep a thoughtfully compiled list of what to take so I don’t forget anything in my haste. I walked through the house and said my goodbyes as best as possible to the many things we would leave behind that would burn up if it came to that. In the end, it's just "stuff," isn’t it? Stuff I like, but just stuff. My home is wherever Ron is. I can love him in any bed. We laughed at ourselves because once we had the cars loaded, we had no idea where we would go. The highways were closed in most directions and a large swathe of the county was on evacuation warning with the power shut off. We could have driven North to look for a hotel, I suppose, but I would first have to find a small-animal emergency shelter because I would not get far listening to the yowling of two elderly cats who seem to think that a pleasant ride in the car is a form of torture from one of the circles of hell. Fortunately, we never had to evacuate.

Those five days with no power were actually quite lovely. At night I could see many more stars without the city lights to dim them. We usually see plenty of stars in this rural area, but it was even more dramatic with the lights of the town snuffed. Usually people don’t come out in the street to interact with one another much in our neighborhood, so it was a treat to have neighbors hang out in the street together chatting, joking, and sharing the news updates. With no internet, I took a break from the chaos and horror of current events. I did some writing using my laptop’s battery backup. I cut fabric for a quilting project, to sew later when the power came back on. We turned on our backup generator for a few hours every day to warm the house, recharge the phones and laptops, and take hot showers (we have an on-demand electric hot water heater). I went for walks. We did word puzzles together and played cards. We read by candlelight in bed and, well, one thing led to another because, after all, we were in bed together. Old people look younger by candlelight. (I wonder if there will be a baby boomlet in NorCal nine months from the power outage.) The house was silent without the background buzz of electrical current and humming appliances that we generally tune out but never free ourselves from. It was a peaceful five days.

I suppose the eventual collapse of systems due to the climate emergency will take us back to a simpler and more basic way of life. It will be a more dangerous way of life and will require far more physical labor. Perhaps that will be a good thing. Good for some, not so good for others. Good for those healthy, fit, skilled, and resourceful. The permanent loss of electricity and failure of established systems would kill my husband, who is vulnerable because of his compromised health. He can’t maintain his body temperature in the cold weather and he’s an insulin-dependent Type I. So I can’t truly wish for systems to begin breaking down, although I confess that a part of me would welcome that. I have even had my moments in which I felt relief at the possibility of having all our stuff burn up. Just as wildfire cleans out the forest, it cleans out the accumulation of people’s stuff, taking us back to fundamentals. At this stage of my life, I’m moving toward unloading my possessions, a lifetime collection of beautiful things, so that I don’t have so much to maintain and also so my children don’t have so much to wade through when I’m gone. It’s challenging to do this in an ecologically sound manner while tempted to just cart it off to the landfill.

I often recall that my people walked away from dire situations in countries persecuting Jews with not much more than the Sabbath candlesticks. They didn’t just start over with no possessions, they often started over with no money, no resources, no knowledge of the language, and no viable profession. In a wildfire two years ago that destroyed his house, a friend of mine lost the tefillin (a ritual Jewish prayer object) brought to America by his grandfather fleeing Eastern Europe. The tefillin was one of the only things brought out from complete loss by my friend’s grandfather. It was not only an instrument of prayer, but a beloved object of everyday use for the man who brought it over from the old country. Irreplaceable. I found myself putting simple objects of everyday use into my car, such as a quilt I made and my well-seasoned, ancient, cast-iron, deep-dish frying pan (which I then had to fish back out of the car that evening to cook dinner).

In some ways, I have been preparing emotionally for the climate emergency ever since I was a child. I was aware of many of the dangers and issues long before most people had any inkling. My mother told me that when I was ten years old (I don’t remember this), I went door-to-door in our neighborhood in upstate New York to warn the neighbors that acid rain would fall over the Great Lakes if we didn’t stop polluting the air with gases such as carbon dioxide. The year was 1964. I have rehearsed for environmental collapse in my head my whole life. I wrote a sci-fi novel about it that I can’t get published. One literary agent told me she found the book too depressing. Seriously? I suppose it’s easier to pretend this isn’t happening. My point is that I have been hyper-aware about climate degradation for a long time. Once a week the trucks come through my neighborhood to collect my trash, recycling, and compost bins left at the street for pickup. One of my greatest pleasures is lying in bed in the early morning on waste collection day and listening to the garbage trucks clatter through. It comforts me to hear evidence that the systems are still working. I give thanks for the garbage pickup every week. I have done this for decades, in several different houses. Bill Watterson (creator of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon) says:  “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

I read a recent article in the New York Times about coping with “climate grief.” Those of us cognizant of the climate emergency must struggle with the weight of what we have lost and what we stand to lose as our planet tumbles toward the inability to sustain human life and the lives of a vast number of exquisite non-human species as well. But life has always been about loss, hasn’t it? That’s why we cherish it so. When I realized that my loss of hearing in the high ranges had finally robbed me of the ability to hear birdsong, I had to accept the loss and move on. And that was such a small thing compared to, say, the death of a person I have loved. The death of a person, while no small thing ever (in Senegal they say, “when an old person dies, a library burns down”), is a small thing compared to, say, the drowning of all the islands of the Maldives. Or the disappearance of the coral reefs, the loss of the rainforests, the death of a species. All whales. All orange trees. All elephants. All algae.

I still have faith that personal action makes a difference, however small, so I take many actions to show the love for Earth, to preserve the climate. For instance, I drive an electric car. I try to appreciate and cherish the treasures in my daily life:  a delicious bowl of soup, spectacular oak tree, splendid sunset, evening of conversation with friends, reading to my grandson, tending my garden, laughing and cooking with my children, kissing my husband. I count my blessings often. I also have faith in the younger generations coming up. I believe that the young ones will rise to the challenge of figuring out solutions. They will create, invent, innovate, transform. They will accept our losses and move forward into the unknown, making it up as they go. They are resilient and brilliant. They will shine. Today looks vastly different from 1920, which looks vastly different from 1820. Who would have imagined? I refuse to believe that human endeavor ends with us. I have faith that an unimaginably different 2120 landscape will come into view, and I have faith that it will contain at least a few righteous humans who have not burned up, starved, drowned, or become illiterate.

Life is ever precarious, balancing on a razor’s edge. Seeing what I saw about the coming climate chaos at a remarkably tender young age, I have lived my life with passion and gratitude. Now, selfishly, I pray that in spite of the danger, violence, and destruction that engulfs the world, my own blessed life continues to be so full of joy, bringing me continued gifts and wonders, that it breaks my heart to leave it in the end.