That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
It has been an interesting week to consider the world beyond my front door. My own particular front door is in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, twenty-some miles outside of Washington, D.C. This Sunday afternoon, while my wife and I were sitting and talking in our living room, our four-year-old was playing on our front porch (I think our older was in her room upstairs). With no warning, we suddenly heard a mighty boom or a crash. I don't remember noticing anything shake, but three of us - my wife and I from the inside and our son from the outside raced to the front porch.
A few months ago, we had a friend over for dinner when we heard something similar. It was February, and so it was fairly dark out even though it was barely 6:00, but as we strained to see we could just barely make out that a tree had fallen on our neighbor's house (more properly, the extension that was being constructed). That was the first thing we thought when we heard the noise, but shouting over fences to the neighbors no one seemed to have any idea whose house it might have fallen on this time.
We turned from our immediate neighbors to our virtual ones next - there were already a handful of posts asking what we all wanted to know—"WHAT WAS THAT BIG BOOM!?" When we realized it was heard as far afield as Annapolis in the east and Manassas in the west, we scrapped the tree theory. Sonic booms and earthquakes were the prevailing theories, with plenty of folks swearing that they've experience one or the other and this was not that. Eventually the cause was determined and verified, though the details why took a bit longer (and gave plenty of time for the conspiracy minded to construct their own stories, particularly since they could point to all the people that said it wasn't like any of the sonic booms they've experienced).
But there was that brief period of time when all the explanations were only plausible, and for one reason or another would seem to fall flat. Why would there be a sonic boom? There was no advance notice of training or drills. _If_ this were an earthquake, why didn't USGS seem to have any measurements? You find yourself thinking there was no reason to think it was anything disastrous, but if it was, how would you know? What signs and signals am I missing? I found myself trying to rewind our DVR to see if I could hear it on the broadcast of the Nationals baseball game. No one there seemed to be in a panic. There was nothing else across Twitter/Reddit that suggested something bad so everything is...probably fine. Right?
We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite?
The back half of the week has had a different hue (quite literally). While it hasn't been as dramatic here (and thankfully so) as it has been in New York City, we are also feeling the effects of the Quebecois wild fires. We first felt the effects of it in earnest yesterday as the Air Quality Index (a new metric which everyone is suddenly quite conversant in) shot up and we could smell the smoke in the air and feel it tickle our throats.
The outdoor events for our kids—the one at kindergarten and the other at a pre-school summer camp—have been curtailed, the neighborhood pools also closed (not that they are warm enough to be enticing anyway). I found myself thinking about Dom DeLillo's White Noise and its airborne toxic event. You can go outside, and if you do, something vageuly bad may happen to you at some unspecified point in the future. No one's really sure.
I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
I am following along with Gracy Olmstead’s book club she is running through her Substack Granola, which is reading through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. My goal will be to use this space to record my own impressions of the readings. This reading follows the first week, which includes the first half of Chapter 1, where all the quotes have been taken from.