Hunters in the Snow
by Daniel Sherrell
Winner, 2019 Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize
selected by Tyrese L. Coleman
On April 14, 2018, a civil rights lawyer named David Buckel burned himself alive in Prospect Park. He did it alone, just before dawn, a brief illumination on a peripheral green. A jogger found his body in a circle of char, though she had to walk by several times to be certain of what she’d seen. Later she told reporters: it was hard to make myself believe it.
The suicide was well planned, even courteous. Buckel had cleared a ring of dirt around himself to keep the flames from spreading. “I apologize to you for the mess,” read a note found by the police in a shopping cart next to the scene. A longer letter had been emailed to all the major outlets. This was an “early death by fossil fuel,” it read. And, so that no one could miss the point: “It reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
I spent most of April 14, 2018 across town in Central Park. It was one of the first truly gorgeous days that year and the lakes were all crowded with rowboats, little schools of them flitting back and forth behind the curtain of the willows. From the small hill where I sat you could watch the loop road swell with people. Somewhere out of sight, a toggling stoplight let them loose in pulses: the tourists in their carriages, the cyclists, the loping roller-bladers. They passed quickly and suddenly, then a beat of empty road, and then the unseen light changed once more, presumably, and the next wave paraded by. The scene reminded me of a painting I’d seen in a history textbook, maybe by Bruegel, of a winter village somewhere in Europe. The view is down into a valley where you can see hunters and wood cutters going about their business, ice-skaters crisscrossing a pond, chimneys smoking in snow. According to the textbook, this painting was meant somehow to delineate the beginning of the Renaissance. As if all it took was a small vantage, the right dispersal of people, to catch the full sweep of the historical moment.
After a time I fell unceremoniously asleep, and when I woke up the temperature had dropped and the picnics dissipated. The few people still out seemed in a hurry to get home. I walked back through the park toward the east side, past the closing museums, past the expensive boutiques that mimicked the museums, single handbags underlit in glass display cases. Then down the stairs to the train, which I took back to the Bronx. It was only once I stepped into my darkened apartment that I saw the news from Prospect, glancing past it on my phone and then slowly scrolling back, registering what I’d read.
What struck me even more than the tragedy—and it did strike me, a slow onset, so that I failed to make dinner that night, and eventually, at a loss of what to do once I finally tore myself from the screen, went to bed without ever having turned on the lights—was how quickly the event, this thing of flickering violence, was subsumed once more into the general mill of the park. Was forgotten, essentially. Beyond the cordon of police tape, the newspapers reported, the barbeques continued as normal, the corporate kickball games resumed. Participants in a charity walk strode industriously by in matching purple T-shirts, which predicted, in cursive quotes, that an end to pancreatic cancer was at hand. “Wage Hope,” the shirts said. The moment rolled on, in other words. And know that I’m only being partially rhetorical when I ask you: what else could it have possibly done?
Afterwards, I felt irrationally like I should have been able to detect some ripple when it happened, a subtle shock wave passing from his park to mine, like a bell tolled to slice one hour from the next. Undoubtedly the news alerts had been piling up in my pocket, but I’d set my phone on silent, and so hadn’t felt even those regular vibrations I’d come accustomed to associating with tragedy. Impossibly, while the man burned—the flames carbonizing his skin, then evaporating his blood—I hadn’t felt a thing. It had been a beautiful day, and as I said I’d spent much of it asleep.
+ + +
When you read this—if you ever do—it will be many years in the future. I do not know what that future contains, or how it is built, or how much water it can hold without sinking. But I am writing to you anyway, as a means of explanation. It is difficult to write to someone you don’t know, much less to someone who may never exist, so I’ll just start plainly, with my most important apology. In light of the urgency and ubiquity of the Problem, I no longer know whether I should have you, whether it makes sense to bring you into the world. It’s a decision I’m still trying to make, though I really don’t know how.
Probably explanation isn’t my only goal here then. Exculpation too, it seems.
Several days after the immolation, I took a walk with my mother, the woman who may or may not wind up being your grandmother. We were strolling in loops around a smaller park near my apartment, a third park, St. Mary’s, this one less manicured than the other two. The cracked paths bristled with weeds that had sprouted eagerly at that first whisper of spring, and then died once again in the ensuing cold snap, looking now like drab little stands of some stubborn winter grain. A propos of very little, I had told her about the suicide and how sad I was about it. Which was not at that moment entirely true. In fact I was often pathologically adaptive to news about the Problem and that morning had woken up feeling completely fine, no longer able to access the pain I’d felt just days ago, like I’d stepped out of a room and had it lock behind me. My vain hope was that rearticulating the word ‘sadness’ would somehow summon its referent directly into my mother’s heart. That I could cast the word like a spell and it would conjure between us an instant and profound commiseration, obviating language altogether, which often struck me as plainly inadequate to any real consideration of the Problem. Though when this didn’t work—and it never did—I’d fall back on the usual bromides, letting them drop lamely into conversation. “I feel overwhelmed,” is what I said on this particular occasion. “It’s such a tragedy, and everyone’s already forgotten.” It was true, the news cycle had moved inexorably onward, though I still had a few emails at the bottom of my inbox with subject lines like ‘Rest in Peace,’ or in some cases ‘Forward re: Rest in Peace’.
My mother buried her chin into her scarf, listening. “He must have been kind of crazy,” she said. She sounded apprehensive, like she wanted to hear me agree. A soccer ball came loose from the scrum of a nearby game, and I kicked it back toward the goalie. We watched him scoop it up in his hands and hurl it out to midfield. The ball bounced once and rolled out the opposite sideline, disappearing behind a row of oaks.
We were both silent for a moment, falling back in step along the path. I didn’t think he was crazy, I told her finally, looking down at my feet. From what I knew his life had seemed normal, even honorable. He’d spent decades winning legal battles for LGBTQ rights before retiring and turning his attention to the Problem. In his last years he’d founded a largescale composting program, sequestering more and more carbon even as he watched global emissions continue to tick upward. Reading about his death, a part of me had understood exactly where he was coming from. I’d often thought about it myself I admitted—staging the perfect self-sacrifice, something to drive a lightning rod through the public discourse, a suicide that would finally make the Problem personal. Of course it sounded embarrassing when I said it, Messianic and delusional. And I chose not to even mention the specific and melodramatic scenarios that I had at one point or another entertained in the back of my head. Rappelling to the top of a smokestack and plunging in, for instance. Or monitoring the weather for the next freak hurricane, and then waiting on the beach as the rain picked up speed and the last bungalow renters pulled out of their driveways until finally the flood would come and wash me far inland and then back out to sea. I’d even run through some of the logistics, like how I’d need to bring bolt cutters in case the smokestack had some kind of grate on top. Or how it would help to rig a Go-Pro setup before the storm hit, in case the TV cameras weren’t there to capture the moment I went under.
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” my mother said, lifting her head from her scarf so that we both had to stand there and look at each other. Someone had scored a goal, and there were shouts from the field behind us. The sun was beginning to set behind the trees.
“I’m not depressed,” I told her, which was true. For a twenty-something who spent an above-average portion of his time thinking or trying not to think about the end of the world, I was, to my surprise and almost frustration, basically happy. “It’s just occurred to me as a strategy,” I added, as if this clarification might offer some comfort.
“Don’t you ever, ever do anything like that,” she said. “It wouldn’t do a thing except destroy the people you love.”
In the unseasonable cold, burrowed down into her coat, she looked genuinely worried, and I felt instantly sorry. Because of course I knew I agreed with her. It wouldn’t do a thing, it was bad strategy. The fire in the park had proven exactly this point, that even if you bowed definitively and dramatically out, the Problem would simply proceed without you. I promised her I wouldn’t, and it was an easy promise, but afterwards I felt a new and this time unprompted sadness. Because without the possibility of appeal to that ultimate recourse, there was little left to buffer this feeling that I’d been trying to outpace for months: that maybe it didn’t matter what you did, maybe there were just no strategies left to us at all.
As you can imagine, I didn’t want to feel that way, because I knew it would mean effectively giving up on you, and I can’t or don’t want to do that. Maybe that’s actually the purpose of these letters, then, a kind of trick I’m playing on myself. As if in writing to you I can make you more real, so that you’ll be harder and harder to give up on.
+ + +
Sometimes I’d accompany my grandmother to worship at her synagogue on the border between Far Rockaway and Long Island. It was an orthodox shul, though members referred to it simply as ‘black-hat,’ a term I much preferred.
We would sit apart from each other, my grandmother in the women’s section, which was separated from the men’s by a one-way screened partition. Through it she could watch me pretend to pray, flipping through the pages in my siddur, my train of thought curling itself into a little ouroboros of distraction. Around me the other men wore dark suits and tzitzis, occasionally a streimel lined with fur. They prayed in silence, shuckling and mouthing the words until the cantor broke abruptly into song. The singing was always disorganized, entirely absent the harmony of a choir, and those men who finished first would meander through the pews, pulling each other aside for hushed and familiar conversations.
I knew that—invisible behind the screen—my grandmother was praying for you, praying that I’d get married and bring you into the world, and that after services let out she would take me by the arm and point out any number of eligible and devout young women with whom this goal might be accomplished. So I paid particular attention to the rabbi’s sermons, hoping to arm myself with some other topic of conversation that might steer us away from you, from all the uncomfortable questions you begged.
The rabbi’s sermons often concerned the Mashiach—when he would come and what we could do to hasten his arrival. The Mashiach was meant to usher in Olam Ha’Ba, the coming world, though there was much debate about what this world would consist of. “There is there,” said the Babylonian Talmudist Abba Arika, “neither eating, nor drinking, nor any begetting of children, no bargaining or jealousy or hatred or strife. All that the righteous do is to sit with their crowns on their heads and enjoy the effulgence of the Divine Presence.” The second century sage Rabbi Yose Ha-Gelili pictured something darker and stranger. “The souls of the wicked,” he said, “will be slung away in the hollow of the sling.” The Sanhedrin claimed simply that all those who have died will be resurrected. And the Book of Isaiah averred entirely. As for the world to come, so it is written, “eye hath not seen.”
I agree that there is no use here in me speculating about the nature of Olam Ha’Ba, which is of course where you live. All of this is just to say that on some level I was already familiar with the eschatology of the Problem. I knew what it meant to dangle fate like a carrot on a string, just out of reach. How it might feel to wait a lifetime for something immense and uncertain to finally run its course.
+ + +
To get to my grandmother’s I took the subway, an elaborate system of tunnels burrowed beneath the skin of the city. At any given time the trains in these tunnels were shuttling tens of thousands of people through rock and river, occasionally emerging into the open air to clatter noisily above our heads. Yet inside the trains themselves we abided by a strict and definitionally unspoken pact of silence. Almost no one talked on the subway, and few people made eye contact. Sometimes panhandlers and proselytizers broke the pact, but even during rush-hour it was like they were speaking to an empty car, and in their very contravention revealed the rule’s abiding sovereignty.
That year it became publicly obvious that the system was falling apart. Parts were coming loose and connections weren’t being made. Old engineers and signalmen were being brought out of retirement, tapped for their arcane knowledge of a certain rusted switchboard at a major junction in Queens. The Governor wasn’t investing the money needed for an overhaul and spent much of his time trying to blame the Mayor, who had no jurisdiction over the matter. But although the infrastructure was outdated and the politics dysfunctional, it was a storm that really seemed to have pushed things over the edge. Improbably, the storm was named Sandy. At the time, some official body would give a name to each successive storm in alphabetical order, restarting each year at the letter A. Whoever it was tended to choose sunny names from the Greatest Generation: Sandy, Harvey, Irma—names you might expect to find in a South Florida retirement community, the kind of community which, ironically, was also highly at risk from the uptick in storm severity caused by the Problem.
When Sandy hit, the tunnels were pumped full of saltwater, like veins flushed with a corrosive. The pictures the next day looked like how I pictured the River Styx, a watery cave disappearing into complete darkness, just big enough for a Central Park rowboat. In the weeks following the delays got worse, the rush-hour crowds more packed and frantic. This deterioration coincided with a proliferation of signs and apps that told you the exact amount of time until the next train, so that as the system’s reliability decreased, its predictability increased. It felt, at least to me, like this indicated a subtle shift in our relationship to time, like we were no longer content to trust its progression but, like jealous spouses, felt better when we knew what it was up to. Though of course, knowing the wait time had no impact on its duration and, I suspected, only increased our impatience.
As the trains continued to fail, there was also a change in the quality of the silence among the passengers. Less rote somehow, more apprehensive, like a conversation was forever on the verge of breaking out. Coming home late at night I would sometimes see men my age talking to their reflections in the windows, mouthing the lyrics to the private songs playing in their ears. You could watch their mirrored selves, jerking and ducking against the darkness of the compromised tunnels. Then the train would pull into the station, and their own image would disappear from the window, replaced by a well-lit stranger waiting impatiently for the doors to open.
There was a sense that everything was just barely hanging together.
This was good sometimes. In the right frame of mind, it could feel like a miracle every time the train came. Even after 20 minutes, that it had come at all was a testament to the persistence of some much larger house of cards, balanced precariously just out of sight.
+ + +
Driving everything—the storms and the trains alike—was the instrument of David Buckel’s suicide. Fossil fuel was everywhere, though rarely seen. It hid itself in pipelines, snaking under our streets and through our walls, arcing across remote hills and tracing the bathymetry of the seabed. Even at the gas pump, the point where it rose most into our forebrains, oil passed unseen from nozzle to tank, leaving behind only a very polarizing smell.
The nature of fossil fuel was essentially ambivalent: an invisible pervasion that powered all things and would also, inevitably, destroy them. It was produced by drilling, extracting, and refining those delicate ferns and mollusks that millions of years ago had been ground to a sludge by the planet’s crust. The sludge got processed into coal, gas, or petroleum, then shipped off to power plants where it would be converted into energy. In this way we powered the present almost exclusively by burning the remains of the past. Unearthed, our history surrounded us, dissolving into the air, until its pervasion came to look very much like the future itself.
Another way to put this is that we were involved in a kind of transgeologic grave-robbing, in light of which, the Problem could rightly be seen as a haunting.
During the time of the suicide, I was working for a statewide coalition trying to pass legislation to contain the haunting. Over one-hundred-andfifty labor unions, community groups, and environmental organizations had banded together in the effort, and it was my job to make sure everyone played nice and stayed on task. Our goal was to pass a bill that would tax the companies most responsible for the Problem, and funnel the revenue into what were obtusely referred to as “mitigation” and “adaptation”: investments in carbon-free energy on the one hand, and, on the other, in the often poor communities most vulnerable to the Problem.
The trick with the work was not to think about the sheer length and delicacy of the causal chain we were trying to set in motion. With every meeting, every press conference, every rally we organized, the goal was to bolster support for, and coverage of, our demands. If we could build enough momentum, the thinking went, then we could marginally shift the Governor’s political calculus on the issue, a calculus complexly derived from polling data, donor priorities, and the nearness of an election. If we sustained our pressure and the other variables fell our way, then the Governor might be compelled to pass unprecedentedly ambitious and far-reaching legislation to address the Problem. And if the Governor passed unprecedentedly ambitious legislation in New York then, given the size and influence of our economy, other states might follow suit, at least in the immediate region. And if other states followed suit, then a new standard could be set to help prescribe the actions of the next federal administration. And if the next federal administration took up the torch we’d lit in the Northeast, then this would hopefully coincide with a similar strengthening of resolve from every other country in the world. And if such an upward spiral could be set in motion, then at least on paper it was theoretically possible for us to contain the Problem enough to prevent the level of fires, droughts, and floods that would render sustained civilization impossible.
The point being that this is sometimes what hope looked like that year, and so I couldn’t always look that closely.
What I looked at instead was my phone. The job, like many jobs, required it. My phone was where I took calls, wrote emails, checked the news out of Albany. When it wasn’t in my hand, it sat expectantly in a pocket, pressing against my thigh through a thin layer of cotton. It had the weight and polish of a river stone, with fine cracks splintering the screen. On its back I’d fitted a case with overlapping green, white, and blue chevrons, like a stylized forest of evergreens.
My phone is where I jotted the notes that have become these letters. Shuttling between meetings on the subway, I would suddenly think of something I wanted to tell you and reach for it in my pocket. Its resting face showed the date, time, and year, overlaid on an anachronistically vibrant coral reef, a picture I’d chosen years ago and never replaced. Below this was a single button, dime-sized, called the ‘home button,’ When I pressed this twice, the phone showed me everything I’d been doing the last time it had been in my hand: composing an email, paying a bill, buying a train ticket. Each of these activities had its own pane, and these panes stood one behind the other, receding into the screen like hills into the distance, each one a shade darker. To write to you, I placed my thumb on the foremost pane and flung it to the right. The rest of the panes would careen after it and then slowly decelerate until, if my thumb had applied the right amount of initial force, they would come to a halt on the pane where I could compose notes, which had been designed to look like looseleaf paper.
After I’d written something, I’d scroll over to my work emails, which the thought of you always prompted me to check. Inside the subway tunnels I didn’t get any service, so I would wait for the train to pull into a station and then, as the doors opened, quickly swipe my thumb downward to replenish the list of messages. At the top of its face, my phone would display a little grey daisy, rotating its pedals to quell my impatience as the emails loaded. And just in time, as the doors were closing, a new list of messages would appear, each of them marked with a dot as blue as berry.
I am trying here to evoke my phone like a landscape, a territory through which I regularly passed. This is an exaggeration, of course, though maybe not much of one. My phone was, it can certainly be said, a nearly ubiquitous backdrop, and in front of its screen I performed many of the activities that made up my daily life. I used it to exchange money, to find dates, to find food, to listen to music, to talk to my doctor, to talk to my therapist, to check the weather, to check my calendar, to take photographs, to take videos, to masturbate, to meditate, to find my way around, to find out what my friends were doing, to find out what their friends were doing, to see in the dark, to track trains, to get a lift, to read the news, to search for any information at all really, and occasionally to call my grandmother on her landline. Sometimes, I bid it speak and it would read out recipes, or coach me through a workout, or wake me up in the morning by imitating the sound of a wind chime.
I made various attempts at containing its influence: silencing its ring
so I wouldn’t hear its buzz, banishing it to my outer coat pockets so I wouldn’t feel its weight, changing its color scheme to the matte greyscale of newsprint. I even left it at home sometimes, on the rare weekend when I wasn’t expecting calls from any of the one-hundred-and-fifty organizations in the coalition.
None of this proved particularly successful. And the more strands of my life that got routed through it, the more I came to associate my phone in an obscure sense with the nature of the Problem itself. Because it wasn’t this simple, but this is how it felt: that as the world around me began to fall away, a new one bloomed outward from the palm of my hand. And as the former reeled from floods and wildfires, a retreat to the latter seemed not only more tempting but increasingly more viable. Even the storms themselves were routed through my phone now. At the first hint of flooding, the face of every phone in the city would flash suddenly and simultaneously with alarm.
+ + +
There are of course variations on this temptation, entire schools now of ontological escapism. A theory has lately gained ground among certain philosophers and tech billionaires which posits that we are all living in a sort of digital simulation. Given current computing trends, they argue, it seems not at all implausible that one day, possibly soon, we will develop the processing power to create giant virtual worlds inhabited by avatars that can learn, reflect, reproduce, wage war, and write speculative dissertations in philosophy. And if this assumption is reasonable, then who’s to say this hasn’t already happened, that we are in fact not the creators but the inhabitants of this virtual reality, that what we take to be our psyches are merely flickering patterns on a series of semiconductors in an outer world eye hath not seen. Or perhaps, they say, we are both avatars and creators, and each successive generation of conscious life eventually takes the Rubicon step of creating a smaller reality within itself, leaving the virtual denizens to scan their palimpsest for hints of the reality beyond. Which would mean that there is in fact a whole nested series of virtual worlds, leading all the way up to an original creator, a Russian Doll so old and massive that we can think about it only in metaphor, and even then imprecisely. The seduction of the theory is that things like the Problem, which appear cataclysmic on their face, turn instead into relatively minor bits of algorithm determinant of certain patterns of events in a virtual world whose plot its creators—perhaps trying to distract themselves from the capricious and invisible whims of the Russian Doll above them—have decided to thicken a little.
There were times when my dread of the Problem grew so great that I found this prospect appealing and gravitated toward its proponents. In college I took a class with a philosophy professor who found these theories compelling, and though she did not subscribe wholesale, had decided early on to hedge her bets. If we were indeed living in a simulation, she told us, then perhaps our creators were using our reality not just for entertainment, but to model the results of certain sets of historical, even physical, variables on the system as a whole. As with any computer model, she was banking on it one day being run again, and she intended to become so outlandishly interesting that the creators couldn’t help themselves but keep her avatar around for the next iteration.
You’d often see her shuffling across campus, a tiny woman in her seventies wearing a golden turban and multiple dresses made of some sort of voile. In lecture she wore a giant clock face on a chain around her neck and would occasionally heft it upside down in front of her to check the time. She had had a regular column in Playgirl before it folded, and for a time held the record for most letters published in the New York Times. Surely, we thought, she was a top contender for virtual resurrection.
Once she called me into her office and, after a brief discussion of a paper I was writing, put it aside and looked at me over her bifocals. “So tell me about this environmentalism,” she said. “I’ve never understood why I should care about one species of owl versus the next.” I couldn’t produce a satisfying answer, probably because in that moment I wanted so badly to inhabit her point of view. How hilarious, how arbitrary owls seemed in the light of the simulacrum.
For the record, I was not an environmentalist, though people often assumed that I was. Once I saw the famous movie director Darren Aronofsky speak at a gala to raise money to save the environment (the unstated assumption being that with enough money its protection could be purchased). Between the canapés and the main, he bounded out on stage in a trim suit fitted with a lapel mic. “I’m Darren Aronofsky,” he told the crowd, “and I’m a fucking environmentalist.” I clapped along with everyone, though this was precisely why I hated the word. I could hear how it needed that supplementary “fucking,” how this was the only way it could still be made to sound unapologetic.
I traced my misgivings back to the origin of the word “environment,” originally derived from the humble French verb “to surround.” It didn’t find its way into the English vocabulary until the mid-19th century, when it was defined as “the aggregate conditions in which a person or things lives,” a concept so vague as to just barely distinguish itself from the word “everything.” But by the late twentieth century the word “environment” had been cordoned off, dislodged from all the other things we cared about, sometimes even crowned with a capital E. There are scholars who claim that this fracture coincided roughly with the invention of the steam engine. Others trace it back further, to the advent of the Abrahamic faiths, the shattering of the animist idols. Either way, by the time I was old enough to use it, the word seemed to invoke a species of paternalistic love, a kind of separation. The environment was a whale in danger; a beautiful but distant forest. Everyone wanted to protect the environment, but few interacted with it regularly.
The mother of a friend of mine liked to tell a story about her early days as an environmental lawyer. One of her first assignments was to help conduct an environmental impact assessment for a proposed expansion of an upstate regional airport. She drove up to meet with the head of the county transportation department to walk him through the process. “You don’t have to bother,” he said, when she told him what she was there for. “There’s no environment up here, it’s just a bunch of trees and scrub.” This was how the process worked on the ground.
Once it had been coroneted, the environment warranted its own belief system and took its place among the other faiths: fascism, veganism, Catholicism etc. Transformed by its doctrinal suffix, the environment was now one alternative among many, a choice at the buffet. And seeing what had happened, a whole generation of well-meaning adherents scrambled to (often literally) sell this particular choice back to us, emblazoning a liturgy of exhortations and admonishments on bumper stickers and t-shirts and newspaper columns and picket signs and legal complaints and campaign speeches. Here was “save the whales” and “go green”; here was a single polar bear staring out at you from the side of a tote bag, evoking a twinge too feeble to possibly bridge the vast semiotic distance that separated you from it, standing there on its fabric floe, adrift off the arm of a stranger.
As it was, I struggled to feel passionate about environmentalism—this cheapening of a God into a religion, in need of legions of proselytizers just to stay relevant. I wanted to erode the whole word, to eliminate its usage and smuggle whatever feelings it attempted to transmit back into the bedrock of language. I wanted to bury it so deep in our vocabulary that it’d get reabsorbed, like how a body buried in earth becomes it.
But I didn’t give up. For a time, I went in search of other words, subscribing, as on some days I felt I did, to Joan Didion’s mildly self-serving maxim “that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” Perhaps, I thought, the Problem was simply born of bad thinking at scale, and might be remedied if we were just able to find the right words. This line of inquiry quickly veered into something more incantatory, a search for a spell I could cast that would engender in people a new and, at last, fully motivating sense of what was at stake. Sometimes I would try “Earth”, but it had been wrung dry, I felt, already in use for decades as a shibboleth for the kind of consumerist environmentalism that promised salvation for the price of a compact fluorescent bulb. Whenever I said it, I would picture this beach ball I had growing up that was printed to look like a globe, which sat for years partially deflated in the corner of our basement. Earth. It held an unmistakable gloom, like you were recalling a missed opportunity. “Planet” too had been played out, in the infographics of middle school science textbooks and the basso profundo of Neil Degrasse-Tyson. If anything, “planet” rang of an oblivious optimism— “planet” was the blue marble in the shuttle window, an amazing system we were just beginning to understand. Its typical inflections gave no indication that something had gone seriously wrong, that the Problem had placed a frightening asterisk over the whole ordeal, suspended it above our heads like the sword of Damocles. For a time, “world” seemed like the best option. To my ear it was tender and unpretentious; it captured the thin atmosphere of collective memory surrounding our beloved little rock. World, as in the whole. World, as in the end of. But still, when people asked me what I did for work, I could never say what I was thinking: that I was trying in all seriousness to save the world. I couldn’t imagine anything more clichéd.
Two years after Sandy, I read a seminal essay on the Problem by Zadie Smith. “There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather,” she wrote, “but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed.” After this, my search grew less determined. Most likely I’d been looking for something that wasn’t there.
+ + +
I do want to tell you about the mourning, though. I want to tell you that sometimes I felt the grief like a squall, momentary and encompassing. I felt it despite having no words with which to contain it, no words that could translate its strange weight. This is something I kept private for the most part, unsure of whether or how to share it. Even with my closest friends, discussions of the Problem tended to stumble into the arid gully of knowing commiseration. “We’re so fucked,” is typically what we let ourselves say, on the rare occasion the conversation wasn’t quickly diverted into lighter terrain.
But alone, it came up in me like a whale from a depth, almost invisible until the moment it breached, water streaming from its flanks, the most powerful thing in the world. And like with a whale, the breaches seemed to come at random, when I least expected them. I cried about it on line at the grocery store and in the bathroom at parties and by myself in the shower. Never loudly, just a few tears, messy and quickly stifled.
Sometimes I did share this with my partner at the time, though it wasn’t always intentional. I remember one night she came home in a gloomy mood and started telling me about something stressful that had happened at work. I really did think I was listening until halfway through her story I began tearing up out of nowhere. “You can’t make everything about the
Problem,” she said, frustrated, aware of what was happening. “I’m allowed to be upset about other things.” She was right, I know. My relationship to the Problem often does this, turns me into an asshole, myopic in my grief. And still I wanted to say: everything is about the Problem! The Problem is about everything!
Other times, I can read about global crop failure and drowning cities and not feel a thing. On a recent subway ride home from work, I pulled up an Elizabeth Kolbert piece that I’d been meaning to read. It was a feature on the prospect of carbon removal technology. The thesis was basically that there were no longer any paths to avoiding catastrophe without the large-scale deployment of atmospheric carbon removal, and that large-scale atmospheric carbon removal was for all intents and purposes impossible. The article had been published the previous year. Clicking shut my phone, all I could muster was a dull outrage that it took me months to find out that the end of the world had been convincingly proclaimed on page 72 of the November 2017 New Yorker. I walked back to my apartment as usual, stopping by the crates of produce put out for sale along the sidewalk. I bought a cactus paddle, and when I got home I cut its spines out and cooked it with eggs. Nothing else happened that evening that I can remember. It was perverse. Even now, as I write this, I don’t feel any sadness, I am merely telling you that I have.
+ + +
For a long time, this was how it was. All the way up until the age of 19, I never once felt truly sad about the Problem. I’d read enough to be able to trace its trend-lines and understand their consequences, but I could never muster the shock and sorrow these facts seemed to deserve. It was like reading a seismograph thousands of miles from the epicenter of an earthquake, the way the cataclysm gets transformed into reams of data on a printout, signifying lots of things but meaning almost nothing.
It took almost two decades for the weight of the Problem to finally provoke in me a commensurate sadness, and even then it lasted for only about twenty minutes. It was fall, and I was home from college spending a long weekend with my mother. The clocks had just been set back, and the early nightfalls still felt abrupt and unfamiliar. We decided to watch a movie and, knowing nothing about it, I suggested Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which I’d been assigned to watch anyway for a class. My mother propped the laptop on her knees and we sat up against her headboard staring at its screen.
In the movie, Kirsten Dunst plays a woman suffering from melancholic depression, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as her sister. The plot revolves around the sudden appearance of a new planet in the sky, which scientists have dubbed “Melancholia.” Gainsbourg is confident, in line with the prevailing wisdom, that Melancholia will pass close to Earth and then shoot past it. Dunst is convinced it will make direct impact, killing everyone.
On the day of the projected fly-by, the family gathers on the terrace to watch the spectacle. The planet floats like a sightless face, a huge pale mask, over the grounds of their palatial home. Gainsbourg’s young son twists a green twig into a circle, which they use to track the planet’s progress across the sky. As Melancholia flies past Earth, Gainsbourg watches it grow smaller and smaller in the rudimentary frame, receding into space. She is giddy with relief, though Dunst is listless as a prop, hardly responding to the news. On the morning of the next day, Gainsbourg places the twig to her eye once more and is shocked to see that the planet appears to have gotten bigger again. In a panic, she places the circle to her eye again and again, but the result doesn’t change: in the pull of Earth’s gravitational field, Melancholia has circled back and is headed straight for them.
In the last scene, Gainsbourg, her son, and Dunst share a final meal together. Above them, Melancholia has replaced the sky itself, its crated surface obscuring all the blue. For the first time in the movie, Dunst is calm—there is a new life to her gestures, as if Melancholia has realigned something inside of her. When the son gets scared, Dunst tells him not to worry, that they can escape the collision by hiding in a ‘magic cave.’ Grabbing her sister too, she leads them to the top of a small hill and constructs a fragile teepee from broken branches, insisting they all sit inside. As the planet gets nearer, each of them adopts a pose: Gainsbourg is bent double and sobbing; her son has closed his eyes, trusting in the cave; and Dunst sits cross-legged, watching them both, a new sense of peace straightening her back and relaxing her shoulders. Then Melancholia makes impact, destroying the entire world.
When the movie ended, we watched the credits fall down the screen, neither of us making a move to break the spell. I could feel the heat from the bottom of the laptop, the beleaguered whir of its little fan. Then all of a sudden I was sobbing, really sobbing, like the sobs were gripping my arms and shaking me hard enough to dislodge tears. It was so sudden that at first I didn’t know what was happening, and so couldn’t explain to my mother that the movie had finally induced the kind of feeling I’d always assumed was latent in my understanding of the Problem, this fathomless realization that the world I knew could end, might end, was perhaps in the process of ending.
The feeling reminded me of certain dreams I’d had. In these dreams I would plunge into a body of water and realize I was sinking. Casually at first, and then with increasing urgency, I would thrash my arms around, trying to swim back up. But no matter how hard I kicked, the surface would continue to recede and the water would grow blacker and blacker. Eventually the thought would occur to me that I’d exhausted all my options, and that I was soon going to drown. I would feel my mind wrapping its arms around this fact, trying to press it into an alternative formation, squeeze from it some last trickle of hope. And when this inevitably failed, the gates of my mouth would open and resignation would come flooding in with the water—a sudden slackening of the muscles, a last-minute shuffling of priorities, the bounds of my foresight snapping back to within arm’s length. Then I would wake up suddenly, and, without moving, I would look up at the ceiling, trying and failing to retain this feeling that was so elusive in waking life: the feeling that I could die, was in fact going to die.
But like with those dreams, the feeling I had after Melancholia dissolved quickly. I stopped crying and got up without explanation, assuring my mother that everything was okay.
That night I went to bed thinking about Kirsten Dunst. It didn’t seem like a coincidence that the depressed character was the only one prepared for the apocalypse, the only one who could see it clearly. It was like those studies where the depressed people are the only ones who can accurately evaluate their driving ability, the rest of the respondents just assuming they’re better than average. In her sadness lay a certain kind of lucidity.
To me this was a cruel irony: how you had to already feel like the world was ending to be able to assimilate the truth when it actually did. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel it, not consistently. The selective blindness, the congenital optimism—it all felt too hard-wired. Which is why, over time, I came to weirdly treasure those fleeting moments, like the one that evening, when the depth of my grief seemed actually to match the gravity of the Problem, when the gap between fact and feeling appeared momentarily to close. Because even through my devastation, I felt like I was brushing briefly against some truer reality, the empirical one, the world as it was outside and prior to the filters with which I otherwise convinced myself, silently and as a matter of course, that everything was fine.
+ + +
Before it hit Far Rockaway, Hurricane Sandy sent word of its arrival. The wind picked up and the trees bent double. The awnings on my grandmother’s apartment building snapped against their tethers. Everyone watched it approach on TV, its vortex rendered in vivid green, a juggernaut lumbering toward the coast. They watched until the sky was dark and the rain sounded urgent against the windows, like something knocking to be let in. They watched until the wind cut the power and extinguished the TVs and they could no longer see where the storm was, or what it was doing. And only then, in the blackout of its own making, did the storm make landfall.
The Atlantic swept across the neighborhood, searching basements and kitchens, blocking roads. The water ripped up stop signs and buoyed parked cars. It stopped just short of the synagogue where weeks ago we’d prayed for the coming of the Mashiach. Across the neighborhood thousands of people were forced to evacuate their homes, leaving hastily as the storm worsened. My grandmother returned the morning after to a darkened apartment, the food spoiling in her fridge. I tried to call her but the storm had severed the phone lines.
I remember feeling then a kind of muted shock: something long-anticipated was finally happening. Not only happening, but happening to us. It was as if the Problem had jumped out of the screen and into my grandmother’s living room. Like a fortune we’d received was at long last coming true. It was a moment I knew that I’d been bracing for. But even still, it was hard to make myself believe it.
When I finally got through to her my grandmother did not want to talk about the storm. “Unusually bad,” was all she had to say on the subject. Instead, the conversation found its way to you. “When are you going to start a family?” she asked, her usual refrain. Except that after the storm the question felt different, heavier. It felt like I was considering it— considering you—for the first time. And all of a sudden I knew that I really did want to have you and that this conclusion had taken shape prior to and underneath any conscious deliberation.
Even as I write this I can picture you clearly, strapped to me with one of those baby backpacks, the kind that rides in front, so that when you fall snoringly asleep your head rests on my chest and your arms dangle next to mine. I have predictable little reveries of pulling socks onto your tiny feet, and wrapping you in a towel at the beach, and pretending to chat nonchalantly with other parents as I nonetheless watch you out of the corner of my eye hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Though we never decided to have you, let alone with each other, my ex and I still played the dangerous game where we’d picture our lives together. She liked to imagine that we’d also have a big orange cat, and that you two would strike up a kind of unspoken friendship of convenience, hanging out on the rug together, occasionally getting on each other’s nerves. How we’d cheat sometimes, and let you nap in our bed, even though the baby books cautioned against it. How we’d vie for the privilege of staying at home with you during the long days when all you’d do is shit and sleep and cry.
But standing with my ear pressed to the receiver, these feelings terrified me. I had had no hand in them. They’d simply appeared fully-formed, as if they’d always been there. I pictured the debris sitting outside my grandmother’s door, the soggy trash and hunks of plywood. I pictured the milk rotting in her fridge. I pictured my genes like a virus in my body, co-opting it, infecting me with the idea of you.
“Soon,” I assured the woman who aspires to be your ancestor. I think, but am not sure, that this was a lie.
In the years since then, more storms have come, storms that have dwarfed Sandy in damage and death toll. Just a few days ago, Michael made landfall in the Florida panhandle, clocking wind speeds of 155 miles per hour, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit this country. Its ghost is still stalking north up the seaboard, blackening the sky out my window. Already there are reports of whole families swept away, but I am safe here at the edge of the system: the weakening cyclone has brought us only a heavy rain, which I am watching now as it trellises the glass.
And this is what terrifies me: not just the storms, but the ease with which their violence can become a patter on the pane, ideal for writing letters.
+ + +
At the beginning of Melancholia there’s a ten-minute overture sequence set to an opera by Wagner. Von Trier strings together a series of static shots filmed in slow motion, like a dreamscape of the apocalypse, the figures barely moving. Kirsten Dunst looks straight into the camera as birds fall dead from the sky; a giant gnomon on the lawn of the castle tells two times (one shadow from the sun and the other, presumably, from Melancholia); Charlotte Gainsbourg collapses to the ground, clutching her son; her son whittles a branch, looking up at the sky. And the two planets circle each other through space, emitting a low low rumble beneath the Wagner, a sound that registers less in the ears and more in the fingers and teeth.
On rewatching the film, I’ve come to notice something I hadn’t seen the first time: amid the opening sequence there is a lengthy shot of that same Bruegel painting, the one from the textbook, which I’ve since learned is called Hunters in the Snow. The frame is full of it: the icy hill and its copse of birch, the dogs and men poised on top, drawing your gaze along with theirs toward the tiny bustle of the town and the mountains beyond it. For several seconds nothing happens. You watch the painting. Then shards of black begin to fall, obscuring parts of the image, and you realize that the painting is burning, flaking off bits of ash from the top.
The thing about watching a painting burn is that it elicits no reaction from within the painting itself. This should not be surprising but is, somehow. A painting is a world, after all—a miniature moment Russian-dolled inside your own. You half expect its denizens to revolt against the destruction: the birch trees to bend, the dogs to howl, the hunters to flee or beg. But everything and everyone hold its pose, even as the fire peels back the margins.
+ + +
Ten months after Sandy, on the first day of the Jewish New Year, I accompany my mother and my grandmother to Rockaway beach to perform tashlich. It is early fall, and a cold front has killed the wind. The surface of the ocean barely moves. Behind the dunes, a part of the boardwalk is still uprooted and weirdly bent, its wooden slats looking for all the world like the spine of a whale. There are other remnants of the storm, too: houses we walk by with boards on their windows, faint tide lines still staining the vinyl. But the water itself betrays nothing, not a hint of what it was or will be.
Tashlich is a ritual where you’re meant to cast out the sins of the previous year so you can start the new year afresh. You do this symbolically by consecrating pieces of bread and tossing them into a body of water. My grandmother has brought a whole-wheat loaf from her freezer, still half-frozen, and we stand there silently on the beach, three consecutive generations, tearing it into little pieces of shame and regret.
I am not sure what to call my sin exactly, but I direct its atonement toward you and throw my piece at the horizon. The bread is stale and doesn’t fly well. It lands in the shallows a few feet away, where the seagulls scoop it up and lurch off, unaware of the karmic implications.
When I finish I take off my shoes and stand in the cold sand. I can see my grandmother and my mother a little ways down, still clutching their pieces of bread, heads bent in thought or prayer. I walk to where the beach is wet, right up to the edge of the ocean. The waves are small and unusually calm. They wash toward my feet but never quite touch them.
Daniel Sherrell is an organizer in the American climate movement. His writing has appeared in the Colorado Review, Wag’s Revue, and The Best American Sports Writing. He is currently on a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Adelaide, where he is finishing a book about grief, fatherhood, and coming of age in the Anthropocene.