“Marley was dead.”

OK, not the opening line you’d expect to launch a holiday classic. Punchy, sure, but dark. Really dark. This from “The Man Who Invented Christmas”? What lessons for a mortal such as I? Let’s assume a lightly regarded author hopes to move from obscurity to neglect. The formula is seemingly established: Start dark (really dark) then redeem the central character from darkness in the last chapter. 

Start dark.

I wrote a novel, The Christmas Quilt, some years ago with no expectation that it would find an audience, primarily as an excuse for me to wallow in the sort of coded sentiment that brings a gulping, snorting, soul-liberating tear-fest. I started in full sunlight, the central character awakening from dreams filled with exquisite fabrics to a fulfilling day as a quilter. I tossed a few challenges her way, but gave her a best friend who remains one of my favorite people. Spoiler Alert- she does not survive the book, but the spirit of Christmas does, hence the previously mentioned cathartic weeping.

Snuffle, sniffle, blow nose and repeat. 

But not dark. I hadn’t really experienced dark.

Ten years ago I could summon a good snuffle and sleep soundly. Yes, we knew grave shifts in climate were likely and political discord was threatening, but, you know, later. 

I began this piece as a whimsical reflection on my descent into catatonic acceptance of a truly devastating future. A friend sent an article (one of several hundred I’ve read) prophesying the end of Democracy in the US, asking for my thoughts on the author’s reasoned description of White Christian Nationalism. Operation Red Map, a reactionary Supreme Court, a clown car congress, and a relentless stream of threats from the former President offering little hope for an orderly transition of power in November and January. This week storms from Texas to Iowa have swept tornadoes across the middle of the country as the seacoast south experiences flooding at a catastrophic level, and the dreadful insistence on vaporizing Hammas in Palestine has cost thousands of lives and terrible famine, polarizing the voters most likely to prevent the political cataclysm I fear in November.

I haven’t been able to summon whimsy for some time; the landscape is growing darker by the day. Am I steaming, railing, marching, protesting, bombarding editors with my reasoned outrage?

Nope.

I sit in my comfy home in Connecticut and for the first time understand the meaning of the term “gobsmacked”. The relentless litany of awful has knocked me into flat-affect narcolepsy.

Only a few years ago, I was roused to action as firestorms raged throughout the west, deciding to become a climate migrant. Our best laid retirement plans simply hadn’t worked out; it was time to migrate!

Things had looked pretty simple in 2014. We bid Cate School and Edenic Carpinteria, California farewell and retired to the almost equally paradisiacal Rogue Valley, settling on a small farmstead near Ashland, Oregon. Mary developed a thriving enterprise training dogs on our two agility fields, and I joined the company of the Ashland Shakespeare Festival as an audio describer working with visually impaired patrons.

Ok, the first summer was daunting – weeks of 100 degree days filled with smoke from the Butte Fire in California and others in Washington, and Idaho. So, that wasn’t great.

But wait …there’s more!

The next summer fires destroyed almost 50,000 acres in Kern County’s Erskine Fire  and 132,000 acres in the Soberanes Fire along the Big Sur near Monterey. In October of 2017, the Northern California Firestorm spread through Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Burre, and Solano Counties, burning 245,000 acres. In December of 2017, the Thomas fire started near Santa Paula and quickly spread, burning almost 300,000 acres in Filmore, Ojai, and Ventura, forcing the evacuation of students from Thacher School to the Cate School campus. In January, heavy rains caused erosion, flood, mud and debris flow, sweeping away 129 residences, damaging another 300. The 21 fatalities included a student we had taught and her father. Although fires continued to flare on all sides, the Camp Fire in 2018 was even more notably devastating, sweeping through northern California, destroying the town of Paradise, killing dozens in that town and more than 85 people in the adjoining counties. Damage caused by the Camp Fire was estimated at 16.5 billion dollars. The President(tourist?) visited the smoking remains of what was once Paradise and expressed his regret to the people of “Pleasure”. 

Insult to injury.

By comparison, we in the Valley had only to deal with a summer of relentless smoke. We’d been expecting the usual five to six weeks of troubling smoke, but it was in the course of this summer that we learned to check the Air Quality Index on a daily basis to see if we could safely walk outside. I’m not sure if other regions were as attuned to the index as those in the Valley became. I look up today’s index here in Connecticut and see that we can expect air quality ranging from 10 to 15. That’s good. Most folks out here have never heard of the Air Quality Index, much less check it daily.

The yardstick runs from 0 to 500. An AQI above 100 is considered “unhealthy” for sensitive groups; the “red zone”, just plain unhealthy for anything alive, is an AQI above 150. During the summer of 2018, we regularly saw an AQI of 200 or better. As a result, the town of Ashland, a vacation destination, saw tourism drop by 80%. The Shakespeare Festival struggled mightily, installing air filters in the theater and moving performances in the Elizabethan (outdoor) theater to the local high school’s stage. Almost 50% of the season’s performances had to be canceled altogether. 

In the summer of 2019, more than 7,500 fires burned in California alone, but with the exception of a spike in July and August, the air was mostly breathable. Persistent drought, however, lowered the supply of ground water to a dangerously low level. Our neighbors’ well went dry. We took a deep breath and hoped the town and the Festival could recover.

But, no … in September of 2020, we caught on fire.

In early September, 2020, the account published in the New York Times read, “A two-week stretch of 110-degree days sends the fire department scrambling to rescue people overcome by heat, and tests a force already accustomed to tough summers.”

Our home was ¼ mile from the path of the firestorm which reduced our town to cinders, and consumed more than 2800 homes and commercial buildings in a span of four hours. We heard fuel tanks exploding, saw black smoke rising, shoved our dogs and the Go Bags in the car, and evacuated to what we hoped would be a safe refuge.

Our home survived, but in the subsequent weeks, the Air Quality Index in our region was regularly above 400.

Oh, and in March, 2020, Covid. 

2020 as a whole was not a great year. We were in the midst of the pandemic, the worst heat wave on record arrived in the summer (126 degrees in Canada!), Europe flooded, George Floyd was killed in Minnesota, three million animals died in Australia’s worst fire, Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, “murder hornets” arrived in the US, and there were so many hurricanes that we exhausted the alphabetical names and had to resort to the Greek alphabet, Amy Coney Barret replaced Ginsberg, and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch joined the Supreme Court.

So, we swallowed twice, drove by the rubble that had once been the Umpqua Bank, eyed the vault, the only remnant of buildings in town, realized that without the bank to block our view, we could see our home from its parking lot, began looking at the record of snowfall in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and began the process of searching for our next home. We moved to northern Connecticut in January of 2021, stomped through moderately heavy snow fall, settled as best we could, and kept up with the news of the nation and the world by subscribing to six newspapers on-line and watching the nightly news, assuming it probably couldn’t get worse.

And yet … 

2021: Rioters (tourists?) stormed the Capital, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, Winter Storm Uri knocked out power in Texas, Daunte Wright was killed in Minnesota, the Delta Variant arrived, the “fetal heartbeat bill” was enacted in Texas, the supply chain was still sluggish, the Taliban returned to power, and Russia built up troops on the border with Ukraine.

2022: Russia invades Ukraine, a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, Shinzo Abe was assassinated, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, Gas prices hit $5.00, Hurricane Ian slammed Florida, a cruise ship docked in NY dragging an endangered whale, and although in December, the holidays were merry and bright again, the temperature dropped 40 degrees in an afternoon, another gift of climate catastrophe, but nothing compared to the “snow bomb cyclone” that pounded Buffalo. You’d think a planet called upon to invent a term such as “snow bomb cyclone” would be on high alert, but here’s the next necessary neologism “climate numb-out”.

Hurricanes, monsoons, drought, landslides, reservoirs and rivers going dry, leaving me with the observation the philosopher Mediocrates is reputed to have offered:

 “Meh”.

The world as we know it not only will not exist in a decade’s time, it has already experienced non-reversible change. The outlook is not brilliant even for those of us who are currently alive. Even less brilliant for Polar Bears, Rhinos, North Atlantic Right Whales, Black footed ferrets, and Orangutans.

And then, all my news sources and the three brilliant columnists I follow agree that we are about five months from the End of Democracy.

So dark, right? 

But I wake, check my email, finish a crossword puzzle, read a book, mindfully eat and snack, watch tv, and go to bed. 

Just as “climate numb-out” describes this slack environmentalist, “fatalistic proto-slave” is as close as I can come in describing the energy I give to righting any of the world’s wrongs.

It took THREE visits from the other side to convince Scrooge that he was part of a greater, richer, more fulfilling humane world. It may take more than that to pull me back from the mushy discontent of a half-swallowed “Meh”.