This essay has been in the back of my mind for a few days. In thinking about where we shall live with our children, where we can possibly go that there will be good community, relatively undamaged ecosystems and a non-volatile climate, my husband and I have created a *very* short list. This is thinking in the mid- to long-term. Where we can make a home where our kids can also grow old, if they so wish.
Out West is ruled out (tough, because we love it out there, but it’s always on fire and there is not enough water). Down South is also out, because the rising temperatures are going to force everyone indoors, and there is the possibility of dangerous heat waves, hurricanes and brownouts. This leaves the Northeast and Midwest--so domesticated, so suburbanized, except for some wilder parts along the northern border with Canada. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for example. Upstate New York (except for the Finger Lakes, yikes! ;-) Rural Ohio...?
But the reality is that the future is less and less predictable, and no place is entirely secure. We cannot safeguard the world for ourselves and our children, or move to the magical place where nothing has been damaged. But we can hope to find a strong community to help weather the storms and floods. I’m sorry about the flood dangers in your town. That seems like an intractable problem with no easy answers.
it's certainly a tough problem... one thing that tends to go unappreciated in these calculations—a lacuna in our culture—is the idea of spiritual resources. all things being equal, a place that has a more vibrant spiritual ecosystem will allow life to bounce back from calamity more quickly and vigorously. in a mundane sense, this can be a place that is more inspiring for people (although "inspiring" is a superficial quality that can hide deeper resonances.) finding a place like that can make all the difference, even though nowhere offers perfect security.
for my money, i can't imagine living anywhere else, floods notwithstanding. i've lived in Central New York my whole life; the metaphysical landscape makes sense to me in a way that's hard to shake. even if we got flooded out, it would be very hard to leave forever: the land here has big mana.
i'm sure you'll find your spot :) and maybe we'll be neighbors! keep me posted.
Painfully but beautifully expressed. If I haven't already used all the oxygen in the room talking about Western wildfires as a parallel to [every other type of climate catastrophe], here I go again: No, I don't have kids, but I always daydreamed of living on a rural wooded property, an exceedingly modest ambition which I will probably never be able to achieve. With my own eyes I saw the fire billow up in 2020, ripping apart the towns just 30 miles south of us; I work in an industry whose bread and butter is risk management, and virtually no insurance company west of the Rockies still offers indemnity to properties affected by wildfire. On the valley floor below my hometown are hundreds of little old homes settled into shaded mossy lots; they're simultaneously worth more than I'll ever be able to afford by virtue of being large lots technically within driving distance of Portland, and an enormous financial risk should the next bad drought season push the fires just a little further north. Drop $550,000 on your cozy dream home and then watch it go up in smoke two years later... And that's all she wrote.
I recently cracked open a book, "Uncle Ramsey's Little Book of Demons," which has given me a lot to think about. It's kind of a self-help tome, where the author proposes interacting with every vexing part of the world, especially aspects of your own psychology, as a fully-conscious entity, or "demon":
"At some point nearly every child makes the vital leap and recognizes that certain patterns of reaction are so complex that they can only be accommodated by projecting some of its own conscious awareness out into the pattern--in other words, by assuming that other people too are conscious intelligent beings ... Look for conscious intelligence in phenomena and you awaken the greatest powers of the human brain to assist your exploration or mastery. Superstition thrives on absolutes, not relatives. Religion and science teach us to look for absolutes and so we lose trust in what is relative. Magic teaches us to walk on the shifting sands of relative or workable truth."
Well, these passages came to mind when you wrote about trying to make sense of flooding from the perspective of the lake. But I struggle to imagine what perspective you can offer to wildfire: chemical flashpoint, cascading failures. The demon eats and eats and may still be eating six months after the fact, in the dead of winter, simmering under wet ash.
You can't negotiate with a wildfire. I guess you can't negotiate with a surging lake, either, but it's easier to conceptualize the lake as a being which has some right to assert itself against abuse. Fire has the feeling of a landscape possessed of so much hatred it would rather destroy itself than remain habitable to the likes of us.
Not going anywhere else with this. Just having a moment.
In unrelated news, it is currently 88 degrees on this April day :)
this will offer no comfort to the humans stuck in the middle, but i'll have a go: Wildfire is Woodland's jealous lover. they burn for each, even though they know that their union will destroy everything around them. Wildfire hates to see Woodland get fat and complacent, too full of itself, because Wildfire knows how toweringly, terrifyingly beautiful Woodland can be in full fury, caped in black smoke and roaring, and can't help wanting to kindle that ferocity. it would be purely destructive—a romantic murder-suicide—if it weren't for all the precious little things that grow in the aftermath of their liaison: the quiet, the space, the sunlight, the rich soil and the new green shoots. and, of course, they never really die.
humans are in a unique place to offer couples' counseling for them—but we're just too goddamn busy these days, and so we're the neighbors who suffer when they hook up *yet again.*
i get it: i've had friends like that.
cold comfort for you all out there, i realize. but we can't expect these immortals to put our needs ahead of theirs.
Today it was your writing here that was on my mind as I scythed a new patch to put the chickens on tomorrow (Luna’s mob). Sometimes it’s a little too early and a little too dark and my coffee isn’t yet working it’s magic to string together some thoughts, so a thank you was all I could manage. A beautiful read, thank you. Sorry to hear about your father”s passing and sorry to hear about the lake situation.
Sounds like you should build a house boat. And that’s not me making light of the situation. I hope your essay here gets widely read because it’s a reality that a lot of us are going to face up to soon. Here in the Philippines I’ve thought about this a lot every time typhoon season hits and yet another mega typhoon threatens to rip my roof off. The solution here, or I imagine that it’s not so much a solution, but it’s a practicality of living in the tropics, is to build a bamboo house. The traditional bamboo house is called the Bahay Kubo and if you search you will see videos of villagers, friends and neighbours, coming together to lift the little house off its simple foundations and move it down the road to a new spot. I imagine a lot of times it may because of marriage, maybe a family is moving closer to its in-laws or something but I think in the past it was often political. If you didn’t like your local chief, move your house to a friendly neighborhood.
And in regards to W. McCrae’s comments below, the bushfire situation in Australia was the reason for me not returning to my home country (and lucky me that I actually got to have a choice). Philippines may be fucked up, but at least I already knew that when I came to live here. There’s a certain amount of resiliency in a population that faces massive disasters every year.
One thing you will hopefully be safe from if you stay there is wildfires. A hydrated landscape is a good preventative of the wildfires we are now seeing.
thank you so very much for taking the time to both read and comment, despite being (it sounds like!) extremely busy out where you are.
i shouldn't moan too much: we're certainly much, much better off with our troubles here than what McCrae is dealing with out West, and what you're dealing with in typhoon territory. i've probably just been dwelling too much on endings lately, with my family situation (thank you for your condolences) plus keeping up with all the thinking coming out of the Dark Mountain ecosystem.
the end of our world here will be more of a slow sink than a sudden erasure. there's something to be said for that. we may even get lucky and postpone our reckoning for another fifty years, if we act fast. nevertheless, it's all so much harder when we're trying to prepare our kids for a life beyond our own, and wondering whether they'll have a home to come back to, depending on the choices we make now. grief shows up in many different ways.
and a mobile home sounds like a wonderful idea.
best of luck holding it down where you are, and please do consider sharing this if you think other folks would get something from it. thanks so much again.
You're right to think of these great lakes as old souls of a kind.
Up here in Ontario I live a mile from the shore of Lake Ontario, and we have a summer cottage a hundred feet from the shore of Lake Huron. These lakes make our weather. The one thing I share with every person in my urban area is the lake-effect weather. You could say that it is the basis of unity in my city and the deepest level.
But we think so little about the enormity of this body of water.
Sometimes I stand on the shore of Lake Huron and try to imagine the vastness of the distance across 200 miles of water to the long shore of Michigan. We watch the sunsets and ponder what is brewing way out there over the lake to make such amazing cloud formations.
Then I look at the physical map and realize that the entire district, all built up with roads, etc. is basically just an ancient lakebed and ancient shorelines. The ancient sand dunes a few miles inland are now covered with soil and forest, but as you have so eloquently reminded me, the Lake would have no problem moving back in.
No problem 't all.
One time we were out for a swim. The Huron waves were about three feet. We lost our ability to touch bottom and in a few desperate moments my wife and I were both swimming for our lives, fighting exhaustion.
absolutely right. awesome in the true sense of the word: both inspiring and frightening, to live in the footprints of these giants. thanks so much for reading and commenting.
Beautiful. I wonder if we would build differently if we treated nature as something moveable rather than immoveable. We make too many assumptions that everything will just stay like *this.* Or that we can control it to keep it like *that.* This is the conversation we should be having about climate change. Not how should we stop it from happening, but we can adapt to it.
you're absolutely right—and i think it's about controlling (our perception of) time as well as space. if we focus entirely on linear time as an arrow pointing into the future, then the past becomes a place for burying things we don't want; once we bury them, they're supposed to stay buried. cyclical time comes with a built-in warning that nothing stays buried forever, and the things we try to get rid of will eventually return.
we tried to bury the lake here—but the lake doesn't play by those rules, because they're rules that we invented. we're learning now; hopefully it's not too late.
This essay has been in the back of my mind for a few days. In thinking about where we shall live with our children, where we can possibly go that there will be good community, relatively undamaged ecosystems and a non-volatile climate, my husband and I have created a *very* short list. This is thinking in the mid- to long-term. Where we can make a home where our kids can also grow old, if they so wish.
Out West is ruled out (tough, because we love it out there, but it’s always on fire and there is not enough water). Down South is also out, because the rising temperatures are going to force everyone indoors, and there is the possibility of dangerous heat waves, hurricanes and brownouts. This leaves the Northeast and Midwest--so domesticated, so suburbanized, except for some wilder parts along the northern border with Canada. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for example. Upstate New York (except for the Finger Lakes, yikes! ;-) Rural Ohio...?
But the reality is that the future is less and less predictable, and no place is entirely secure. We cannot safeguard the world for ourselves and our children, or move to the magical place where nothing has been damaged. But we can hope to find a strong community to help weather the storms and floods. I’m sorry about the flood dangers in your town. That seems like an intractable problem with no easy answers.
it's certainly a tough problem... one thing that tends to go unappreciated in these calculations—a lacuna in our culture—is the idea of spiritual resources. all things being equal, a place that has a more vibrant spiritual ecosystem will allow life to bounce back from calamity more quickly and vigorously. in a mundane sense, this can be a place that is more inspiring for people (although "inspiring" is a superficial quality that can hide deeper resonances.) finding a place like that can make all the difference, even though nowhere offers perfect security.
for my money, i can't imagine living anywhere else, floods notwithstanding. i've lived in Central New York my whole life; the metaphysical landscape makes sense to me in a way that's hard to shake. even if we got flooded out, it would be very hard to leave forever: the land here has big mana.
i'm sure you'll find your spot :) and maybe we'll be neighbors! keep me posted.
Painfully but beautifully expressed. If I haven't already used all the oxygen in the room talking about Western wildfires as a parallel to [every other type of climate catastrophe], here I go again: No, I don't have kids, but I always daydreamed of living on a rural wooded property, an exceedingly modest ambition which I will probably never be able to achieve. With my own eyes I saw the fire billow up in 2020, ripping apart the towns just 30 miles south of us; I work in an industry whose bread and butter is risk management, and virtually no insurance company west of the Rockies still offers indemnity to properties affected by wildfire. On the valley floor below my hometown are hundreds of little old homes settled into shaded mossy lots; they're simultaneously worth more than I'll ever be able to afford by virtue of being large lots technically within driving distance of Portland, and an enormous financial risk should the next bad drought season push the fires just a little further north. Drop $550,000 on your cozy dream home and then watch it go up in smoke two years later... And that's all she wrote.
I recently cracked open a book, "Uncle Ramsey's Little Book of Demons," which has given me a lot to think about. It's kind of a self-help tome, where the author proposes interacting with every vexing part of the world, especially aspects of your own psychology, as a fully-conscious entity, or "demon":
"At some point nearly every child makes the vital leap and recognizes that certain patterns of reaction are so complex that they can only be accommodated by projecting some of its own conscious awareness out into the pattern--in other words, by assuming that other people too are conscious intelligent beings ... Look for conscious intelligence in phenomena and you awaken the greatest powers of the human brain to assist your exploration or mastery. Superstition thrives on absolutes, not relatives. Religion and science teach us to look for absolutes and so we lose trust in what is relative. Magic teaches us to walk on the shifting sands of relative or workable truth."
Well, these passages came to mind when you wrote about trying to make sense of flooding from the perspective of the lake. But I struggle to imagine what perspective you can offer to wildfire: chemical flashpoint, cascading failures. The demon eats and eats and may still be eating six months after the fact, in the dead of winter, simmering under wet ash.
You can't negotiate with a wildfire. I guess you can't negotiate with a surging lake, either, but it's easier to conceptualize the lake as a being which has some right to assert itself against abuse. Fire has the feeling of a landscape possessed of so much hatred it would rather destroy itself than remain habitable to the likes of us.
Not going anywhere else with this. Just having a moment.
In unrelated news, it is currently 88 degrees on this April day :)
this will offer no comfort to the humans stuck in the middle, but i'll have a go: Wildfire is Woodland's jealous lover. they burn for each, even though they know that their union will destroy everything around them. Wildfire hates to see Woodland get fat and complacent, too full of itself, because Wildfire knows how toweringly, terrifyingly beautiful Woodland can be in full fury, caped in black smoke and roaring, and can't help wanting to kindle that ferocity. it would be purely destructive—a romantic murder-suicide—if it weren't for all the precious little things that grow in the aftermath of their liaison: the quiet, the space, the sunlight, the rich soil and the new green shoots. and, of course, they never really die.
humans are in a unique place to offer couples' counseling for them—but we're just too goddamn busy these days, and so we're the neighbors who suffer when they hook up *yet again.*
i get it: i've had friends like that.
cold comfort for you all out there, i realize. but we can't expect these immortals to put our needs ahead of theirs.
Thank you.
Today it was your writing here that was on my mind as I scythed a new patch to put the chickens on tomorrow (Luna’s mob). Sometimes it’s a little too early and a little too dark and my coffee isn’t yet working it’s magic to string together some thoughts, so a thank you was all I could manage. A beautiful read, thank you. Sorry to hear about your father”s passing and sorry to hear about the lake situation.
Sounds like you should build a house boat. And that’s not me making light of the situation. I hope your essay here gets widely read because it’s a reality that a lot of us are going to face up to soon. Here in the Philippines I’ve thought about this a lot every time typhoon season hits and yet another mega typhoon threatens to rip my roof off. The solution here, or I imagine that it’s not so much a solution, but it’s a practicality of living in the tropics, is to build a bamboo house. The traditional bamboo house is called the Bahay Kubo and if you search you will see videos of villagers, friends and neighbours, coming together to lift the little house off its simple foundations and move it down the road to a new spot. I imagine a lot of times it may because of marriage, maybe a family is moving closer to its in-laws or something but I think in the past it was often political. If you didn’t like your local chief, move your house to a friendly neighborhood.
And in regards to W. McCrae’s comments below, the bushfire situation in Australia was the reason for me not returning to my home country (and lucky me that I actually got to have a choice). Philippines may be fucked up, but at least I already knew that when I came to live here. There’s a certain amount of resiliency in a population that faces massive disasters every year.
One thing you will hopefully be safe from if you stay there is wildfires. A hydrated landscape is a good preventative of the wildfires we are now seeing.
thank you so very much for taking the time to both read and comment, despite being (it sounds like!) extremely busy out where you are.
i shouldn't moan too much: we're certainly much, much better off with our troubles here than what McCrae is dealing with out West, and what you're dealing with in typhoon territory. i've probably just been dwelling too much on endings lately, with my family situation (thank you for your condolences) plus keeping up with all the thinking coming out of the Dark Mountain ecosystem.
the end of our world here will be more of a slow sink than a sudden erasure. there's something to be said for that. we may even get lucky and postpone our reckoning for another fifty years, if we act fast. nevertheless, it's all so much harder when we're trying to prepare our kids for a life beyond our own, and wondering whether they'll have a home to come back to, depending on the choices we make now. grief shows up in many different ways.
and a mobile home sounds like a wonderful idea.
best of luck holding it down where you are, and please do consider sharing this if you think other folks would get something from it. thanks so much again.
You're right to think of these great lakes as old souls of a kind.
Up here in Ontario I live a mile from the shore of Lake Ontario, and we have a summer cottage a hundred feet from the shore of Lake Huron. These lakes make our weather. The one thing I share with every person in my urban area is the lake-effect weather. You could say that it is the basis of unity in my city and the deepest level.
But we think so little about the enormity of this body of water.
Sometimes I stand on the shore of Lake Huron and try to imagine the vastness of the distance across 200 miles of water to the long shore of Michigan. We watch the sunsets and ponder what is brewing way out there over the lake to make such amazing cloud formations.
Then I look at the physical map and realize that the entire district, all built up with roads, etc. is basically just an ancient lakebed and ancient shorelines. The ancient sand dunes a few miles inland are now covered with soil and forest, but as you have so eloquently reminded me, the Lake would have no problem moving back in.
No problem 't all.
One time we were out for a swim. The Huron waves were about three feet. We lost our ability to touch bottom and in a few desperate moments my wife and I were both swimming for our lives, fighting exhaustion.
Yes, the Lake doesn't care.
absolutely right. awesome in the true sense of the word: both inspiring and frightening, to live in the footprints of these giants. thanks so much for reading and commenting.
Beautiful. I wonder if we would build differently if we treated nature as something moveable rather than immoveable. We make too many assumptions that everything will just stay like *this.* Or that we can control it to keep it like *that.* This is the conversation we should be having about climate change. Not how should we stop it from happening, but we can adapt to it.
thank you so much!
you're absolutely right—and i think it's about controlling (our perception of) time as well as space. if we focus entirely on linear time as an arrow pointing into the future, then the past becomes a place for burying things we don't want; once we bury them, they're supposed to stay buried. cyclical time comes with a built-in warning that nothing stays buried forever, and the things we try to get rid of will eventually return.
we tried to bury the lake here—but the lake doesn't play by those rules, because they're rules that we invented. we're learning now; hopefully it's not too late.