A Sailor on the Seas of Time
The morning of September 11, 2001, I was supposed to go to Washington, DC. I had planned to fly out of Raleigh-Durham Airport, a smaller regional airport with little security, but my partner was squirrely about it. She had a bad feeling, she said, and that was so rare for her that I agreed to take the train instead. At 8:30 a.m. I was in my office checking my email, my luggage beside my desk, ready to take a cab to the train station in an hour and a half.
You know what happened next. Breaking news bulletins, the phone ringing off the hook, everyone under the sun calling and comparing notes. My coworker came in. He was trying to get information, but there wasn’t much. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Maybe it was two planes. What in the world was happening?
I called my friend Liz in DC, the one with whom I was supposed to be staying that night. Should I still come? What was up? Liz and I were talking and then suddenly she said, “Oh God.”
“What?” I said.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “I heard a boom and out my window I can see a plume of smoke rising from down toward the mall.” And through the phone I heard it: every siren in DC blasting, every emergency vehicle tearing down the street outside her window, the old civil defense sirens shouting out their warnings of nuclear war or air raid. A plane had hit the Pentagon.
We stayed on the phone another few minutes. “I have to go,” Liz said. “A police officer just came in and said we all have to go to the air-raid shelter in the basement. Bye.”
My coworker had found a TV. We watched Tom Brokaw. My partner called. “Are you still going to DC?”
“If the train is running, I’m going,” I said. “It’s politics. It’s important.”
She swore up and down, but she didn’t try to talk me out of it. But they halted the trains. They grounded the planes.
My coworker and I watched the towers fall. I worried about Karen, a friend who worked a few blocks away.
At last, we had to stop. He took the TV back into his office. The phone stopped ringing. “I’m going down to the sandwich shop,” he said. “Do you want anything?” It was one o’clock.
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know how it had gotten so late. I went in my office and closed the door. I stood in the corner window of this old office building, looking out toward the airport at something that I had never seen in my lifetime—a planeless sky. It stretched blue and perfect, not a single contrail, not a single flash of silver on approach to Raleigh-Durham. From the seventh floor I could always see planes.
And so I looked down, not at the bright sky but at the other buildings. There was the Department of Revenue building, its art deco façade proclaiming it had been built in the thirties. My granny had worked there, one of many women bookkeepers. Had she stood at that window on the morning of December 8, 1941, that cold Monday after Pearl Harbor? I could almost see her there. I could see her standing in the window, her hair in braids across the top of her head, a black dress because it was winter, her hands on the sill as she looked out across two blocks and sixty years. Could she see me? Could she imagine the daughter of her son, who was then a college freshman, looking back? No; she was thinking of him. She was thinking of her freshman son and war. She could not imagine me here saying, “Granny, it’s ok. He won’t be fine but he’ll come through it and there will be two granddaughters and right now you’re widowed only a year and your heart is in pieces, but you will love again and he’ll be a really super guy, and I promise your son will live. You will do things in the next ten years you can’t imagine, and you’ll do your best to save the world, and someday I will be looking back at you, two blocks and sixty years away.”
I could almost feel her presence, not as she was then but as I last knew her, as if she were saying, “I don’t know what this crisis holds for you. But I do know this: you’re strong. You’ll get through winter. We always do.”
And so we do. The wheel turns and turns again. Winter follows autumn and spring follows winter. We are not lost in a trackless sea. We are following the paths of wind and wave that those before us have navigated.
I am a novelist, and before that I spent more than a decade as a political operative. I am a historian by training. If you want to understand what the tides will do, ask a sailor. The way to understand the tides is to know the sea, to understand her patterns and her currents, the pull of the moon and the way of the waves. Knowing these patterns shows the sailor what course to set. It allows the sailor to predict what conditions will be based on what conditions have been in the past—not just the immediate past but the long past of experience. The way to understand what will happen in the future is to understand history and the patterns that govern it. I am a sailor on the seas of time. So are you. This book is a navigational chart to this sea of Winter, an atlas to our present season.
First, we will examine the great patterns, the currents that flow beneath the surface and underlie history as we live it: the Great Wheel of the Saeculum. We will examine the patterns, regular as the tides in their waxing and waning and as natural. They are part of the world. Just as the Wheel of the Year turns round and round, so the Great Wheel turns across human life spans. We will review the seasons of the saeculum, which have been discussed in more detail in my book The Great Wheel.
Then we will examine more closely the last time we voyaged here, our last saecular Winter from 1925–1945. While very few of us have traveled those waters ourselves because it was eighty years ago, we have many charts created by those who were here before us. We’ll examine these precious stories, consider what we can learn from them, and ask those who have gone before us to help us navigate this current crisis.
Next we will look at the beginnings of our current Winter. We will consider who we were and where we stood when Autumn changed to Winter. In order to understand where to go, both as individuals and as a society, we need to understand how we got here. Through journaling and meditation, we will explore our story in the context of the cycle so far.
Then we will take an in-depth look at the phases of Winter, examining each of them in turn—what we can expect and what steps we need to take to survive and thrive in this era of crisis. We can’t make Winter go away or make the season change faster than it naturally will, but we can take steps to safeguard ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities as this storm deepens. In other words, our knowledge of the sea tells us as sailors that a storm is upon us. Our skill as sailors can see us through. Through stories, exercises, and rituals, we will chart our course through this crisis.
Lastly, we will look forward at what happens next. Before 2030, Spring will come. What will that be like? Looking at the patterns and at current trends, we will examine the transition to Spring and discuss the “long-range forecast” for the coming season.
I invite you to join me on this voyage. Together, let us put forth bravely.