Around 4 a.m. on October 9, 2017, my family was awoken by someone frantically ringing our doorbell. I begged my partner not to answer the door. In my sleepy and panicked state, I imagined it would be the prelude to a home-invasion robbery.
He did answer the door. I heard muffled voices, smelled smoke, heard the wind whipping outside. It was his mom and stepdad and their two dogs, who’d evacuated from the swift-moving Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa in the middle of the night.
As they settled in with us in San Francisco, I turned to Twitter and the local news. In the San Francisco Chronicle, we saw images of fire ravaging their neighborhood, residents with hoses keeping the blaze at bay. Their house survived, thanks to those neighbors, but their fences and half their garden were reduced to ash. They were lucky; the fast-moving blaze burned more than 5,000 structures and killed 22 people.
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California has always had a wildfire season. And although the Tubbs and other fires in 2017 seemed worse than average, they also seemed like a fluke, a random circumstance of spark and windstorm. But it happened again in 2018, when the Camp Fire raced through Paradise, destroying the entire town and killing 85 people. And again in 2019, when the Kincaid Fire raged across Sonoma County, including some areas that had burned only two years earlier.
For three years running, autumn brought evacuations, keeping track of family and friends, hypervigilance, scanning Twitter for news. A recurring nightmare of fire, fleeing, and fear.
Then this year’s wildfire season arrived — early and furiously. In the morning of August 16, I was awoken again, but for a more mundane reason: My daughter was sick to her stomach. I helped her clean up and get back into bed when I saw a flash in the night sky. I thought I’d imagined it; thunderstorms are rare in coastal California. But then came another flash, followed by a rumble of thunder, and another, and another.
That unusual summer storm generated at least 10,849 lightning strikes — and sparked more than 500 fires across hot, parched California. In August. Fire season doesn’t typically begin until September.
I returned to Twitter, focusing on the Walbridge Fire. It threatened Armstrong Redwoods, the grove of misty, wise giants I’d often visited while growing up nearby. It threatened homes and neighborhoods I’d spent my teen and early adult years visiting. And it came within a mile of my dad and stepmom’s home, west of the Dry Creek Valley. I’m not sure I took a deep breath until they got the all-clear to return home.
‘Somewhere, some tragedy is enveloping someone, and their world is going to be completely remade as a consequence.’
Smoky air arrived a few days after the lightning storm and has continued for almost a month. We’ve had a few good-air days, but for the most part we’ve been hiding indoors, camped out near our air purifiers, feeling even more trapped than when we only had a pandemic to worry about.
Over Labor Day weekend, we had a massive heat wave. Downtown San Francisco recorded a record-setting 100 degrees. Across the state near Yosemite, the Creek Fire exploded from a small blaze to more than 160,000 acres, while the August Complex, which had been sparked by those lightning storms nearly a month earlier, grew to an unthinkable 875,000 acres.
Then Wednesday came. The day the sun didn’t rise across much of California and Oregon, leaving us in a permanent orange, fiery dusk. Our mammalian brains know it’s dire when the sky remains dark all day. A friend’s partner practiced the poses he might like to be in if, as in Pompeii, we were suddenly buried in ash. A local man named Terry took drone footage and set it to the soundtrack for Blade Runner 2049.
“Apocalyptic” was the word on many people’s tongues.
When I was a teenager, the Book of Revelation was my favorite part of the Bible. It was a gripping story, with its Four Horsemen and massive earthquake and skies going dark, its hail and blood and locusts. Then a “new heaven” and a “new Earth” arrive, and God comes to live among humanity. The River of Life and the Tree of Life appear and begin healing the world.
Humans love a good apocalypse story, whether it’s Revelation, Ragnarök in Norse mythology, or flood tales from the Epic of Gilgamesh (and, later, the Bible). They are common in our cultural mythologies, and we explore them in novels, films, and television.
At the zenith of our nuclear anxieties came The Day After, about the survivors of a nuclear attack, and more allegorical films like Dawn of the Dead or Night of the Comet. The climate crisis has inspired films in which civilization is wiped out by earthquakes, sudden ice ages, or comets. The Hunger Games series is one of the bestselling franchises of all time. Dystopias and postapocalyptic world-building is so enticing that some of our best-known literary authors, including Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, have done it.
Why do we return to these stories again and again?
“[Author Dale Bailey] says one reason we’re drawn to apocalyptic stories is because they capture the way that personal tragedy can feel like the end of the world,” wrote the creators of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy for Wired in 2018. “‘For somebody, their world is ending as we speak, right now. Somewhere, some tragedy is enveloping someone, and their world is going to be completely remade as a consequence, and it can happen at any time.’”
Sometimes it feels like we’re on the brink of imminent Armageddon. Constant war, poverty, and famine. Increasingly powerful hurricanes, hotter and hotter weather, every wildfire season worse than the one before. We often use the phrase “the new normal” to help ourselves cope with these terrifying changes. Fiction also serves a role in how we cope.
“Post-apocalyptic books are thriving for a simple reason: The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it,” Jason Heller wrote for NPR in 2015. “These stories are cathartic as well as cautionary. But they also reaffirm why we struggle to keep our world together in the first place. By imagining what it’s like to lose everything, we can value what we have.”
Calling it an apocalypse is arguably taking the easy way out.
Many apocalyptic stories end with the world remade anew, the slate wiped clean — as with Revelation and some flood myths — or depict everyday people discovering their resilience and heroism in moments of stark crisis. We want to believe we are survivors. That we would carry on, rescue people, become our better selves.
In Yes! magazine, Leah Fincke notes that in these stories, there are always survivors; otherwise, who would tell the tale? “Millions (billions, even) die, as is required in any apocalyptic tale, but some live. The difficulty of life after catastrophe is portrayed in all its trials and horrors, but humanity goes on…For the most part, we can rest assured that humanity will survive whatever apocalypse may come.”
This quote reminds me of a line from John Kelly’s book The Great Mortality, about the bubonic plague pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe in the 14th century. That pandemic was its own kind of apocalypse; it killed between 75 million and 200 million people, 30% to 60% of the population of Europe.
“In the worst years of the mortality, Europeans witnessed horrors comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even when death was everywhere and only a fool would dare hope, the thin fabric of civilization held — sometimes by the skin of its teeth, but it held,” Kelly wrote. “Even in the most extreme and horrific of circumstances, people carry on.”
For many descendants of white Europeans, the apocalypse feels as though it is in our future. The Armageddons of the Black Death, Pompeii, or Mount Tambora aren’t still with us. This can lead us to romanticize the end of the world, to imagine it will bring out our best selves or make us heroes, just like in the stories.
But for many cultures, apocalypse is in their recent past — and present. And often, white descendants of Europeans were the cause. For the Indigenous tribes of the Americas, European settlers were an apocalypse. For Africans, American enslavers were an apocalypse. For African and Native Americans, the United States is an ongoing one. For Jews, the Nazis were an apocalypse, and for gay men and trans women in the Reagan years, HIV/AIDS was one.
Yes, there are survivors. Yes, some are heroic. But to glorify apocalypse like it’s something to look forward to is quintessential privilege.
And I think, when we saw those dark orange skies — whether it was outside our windows or online somewhere — many of us recognized that for the first time. And the white folks among us saw that we were the cause of it. Again.
At the same time, calling it an apocalypse is arguably taking the easy way out. As I was scrolling through social media, attempting to soothe my jangled nerves, I came across a post that said something like,“Everyone is too quick to call this the apocalypse. It isn’t over yet. We can still fight what’s happening.”
I know, people are tired. And I know, there’s a part of our mind that sees a dark orange sky and thinks, “That’s it. The sun is never coming back.” But it is coming back — slowly, and through layers of ash and smoke that have temporarily poisoned the air. We can undo some of what has already been done, and we can keep things from getting much worse.
But for that to happen, we can’t give up.
By any measure, 2020 has been hard. We began the year with massive fires burning in Australia and murmurings on Twitter of an imminent World War III. Then there’s the coronavirus pandemic, which had killed more than 646,000 people worldwide by September 1 and has led to long-term health effects, widespread job loss, and financial uncertainty for many more. Black Lives Matter protests took to the streets across the world, calling for the defunding of police departments. The United States is heading toward a very important election that could determine the future of our democracy. Not to mention the locusts and murder hornets.
The worsening wildfires, heavy smoke, and dire-looking skies could easily feel like just one more trick 2020 has pulled. But as California Governor Gavin Newsom noted on Instagram, “This isn’t a ‘because… 2020’ thing. This isn’t going away January 1.”
I’ve often wondered if we haven’t done more to prevent or correct climate change because letting the planet fall apart is easier. It’s less work than changing our industries, our economies, our habits. We see apocalyptic stories and think, “That doesn’t look so bad. There are some survivors, and they get to be resilient and heroic. Surely that would be me.”
Newsom is right. When 2020 is over, these mega-wildfires won’t end. The pandemic won’t end. (Covid-19 is not even a 2020 virus; it’s right there in the name.) Summers won’t cool off. Smoke and ash will keep raining down. The sky will probably turn dark orange again.
The word “apocalypse” comes from a Greek word meaning “revelation,” “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling.” Sometimes it’s God doing the unveiling. “Armageddon” comes from the Biblical hill Megiddo, where the last battle between good and evil will be fought. In Norse mythology, the word “Ragnarök” refers to the “Twilight of the Gods”; the German “Götterdämmerung” means the same thing. The Greek word “eschaton” translates to “the final event in the divine plan; the end of the world.”
Most of these concepts suggest a time when humanity will be abandoned by the gods. Whether or not you believe in a higher power (especially a higher power that created the universe and the Earth), it makes no sense to think they will protect the planet for us. That seems like our job — if we want to continue living here, anyway.
If we wipe ourselves out, Earth will recover. It’s ourselves that we need to save.The sooner we realize that and stop living out our apocalyptic fantasies, the more of us there will be to hold the thin fabric of civilization together.
