“I QUIT MY JOB,” Brock tells me. We’re standing amid the rubble out at Rockaway. I’ve come to witness the damage to my favorite beach neighborhood in person. My eyes widen. “Really?”
“I’ve had it. First came the financial meltdown. We know who caused it — thousands of greedy bastards in the banks and insurance firms and ratings agencies — but did they go to jail? No! I share offices with the same people, and they’re richer than ever. It stunned me that Americans didn’t go ape shit about it. We all just shrugged.”
He looks out into the street, where a tangle of boardwalk planks entomb an overturned SUV. “And now this. Ultimately, our oil addiction caused Sandy, but people shrug and go back to work. They’re scared, I know. I was scared to quit, too. But fuck it.”
I ask him what he’ll do.
“Head as far south as I can get. With Fliss. I’ve got savings.”
South. I picture them in Bolivia. I picture Amaya. When I called her from the Cape, she sounded worried. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked, having seen the images from New York on television. I’m hit with a strong urge right now to hug her, to tell her I’m okay in person.
“Gotta split,” Brock says, interrupting my thoughts. “Fliss awaits.”
She’s volunteering up in Breezy Point through the relief movement Occupy Sandy. She’s helping people get back in their homes, and Brock is going to join her. I should join them, too, but I still feel too numb. I need to just walk Rockaway’s ruins today. Take in this new world.
“Are you guys in love?” I ask, before Brock goes. “I mean, do I get matchmaking credit here?”
He pauses. “Fliss has this story. I think it’s Buddhist. And it captures the honesty I love about her, and something about the way I’m going to start living.”
“What’s the story?”
He looks out to the ocean and says, “The journey of life is like rowing a boat to the middle of a large lake. Then the boat sinks.”
I wait for him to continue. He doesn’t. “That’s the story?”
Brock nods. “That’s it.”
I’D HOPED TO FEEL INSPIRED atop the Brooklyn Grange rooftop organic farm with my Sustainable Development students. But I don’t.
“Our beehives didn’t make it through Sandy,” Robert, the farm manager, tells us, his voice dejected. “They got ripped off the roof.”
The chickens had to be relocated, too. Gone is the lively clucking and buzzing. And with the growing season over, the landscape is now one of dry brown vines and windswept husks.
“It seems a little . . . dead up here,” Nicole tells me, sounding disappointed.
I try to bolster her spirits, describing the lush eden of my summertime visits. In response, Nicole coughs. So does JT. Several of the students caught colds during their evacuation from downtown dorms and apartments. They lived in squatter’s conditions in the Bronx and elsewhere Uptown, areas farther from the more damaged, ocean-facing downtown.
Beyond New York, even my Wisdomkeepers are uncharacteristically in the dumps for other reasons. “Lyme disease,” David Abram tells me. He’s got it, and bad. He’s been trying various treatments but now aches a lot of the time. Picturing the author of Becoming Animal with Lyme disease strikes me as ironic and tragic. Equally as tragic is that Lyme disease — with more recorded cases every year — is making people all along the Eastern Seaboard scared of being outdoors at all, yet another distancing between people and nature. Fear of a debilitating disease can push you to extremes.
De Graaf, too, is down. “Take Back Your Time has little money left,” he tells me on the phone. He describes how the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Ayn Rand Foundation are doing big things like “distributing thousands of copies of Atlas Shrugged for free on college campuses. They’re trying to change the paradigm, but toward more hyperindividualism instead of more community.” He further laments, “And the progressive foundations only fund little projects, those with ‘measurable results.’ But those interventions are too small to change the culture a decade or two down the line.”
Meanwhile, Melissa and I have become frustrated with her prenatal care. Because Melissa has good insurance through her job, we’re lucky to be at an Uptown New York hospital. But like most hospitals, they view pregnancy as a medical problem. In America, the national average for C-section rates are almost eight times greater than in Europe. Melissa’s ob-gyn visits are held in windowless, institutional-feeling rooms. Once, when Melissa asked about a pregnancy tea she was considering taking, the doctor rolled her eyes: “Doesn’t do anything,” she said. “Take as much as you want, or don’t.”
Now, while waiting for the subway in a dank post-Sandy station, Melissa says: “That’s the way they think: if it’s not Western medicine, they write it off completely.”
We’ve begun researching alternatives, but the only birthing center we can find is an hour away in Brooklyn, and we hear it might be closing. We have already considered and rejected home birth. “Imagine a water birth in our fish tank of a bathtub!” Melissa says. “I don’t even fit in it.” For now, we stick with the hospital.
As we wait for the train, I realize this is my first time in the subway since Sandy. On the opposite track, a mucky train pulls up, looking like it slithered out of a swamp. Trash overflows the bins and is scattered throughout the platform. The wet station feels pre-apocalyptic.
BARELY A WEEK AFTER the most damaging storm in New York’s history, another big one is racing toward us, this time a nor’easter.
“I just can’t get used to this new weather,” the cashier at Amy’s Bread says, as she rings up my coffee and half baguette. She sighs. “But I guess I will. People always get used to things.”
I take my breakfast to a table by the window and sit. The radio is on. Everybody listens to the minute-by-minute report of the approaching nor’easter. They’re saying it won’t be another Sandy. But after the trauma of what just happened, Amy’s customers nevertheless snatch up multiple loaves of bread, then rush to hole up in apartments. The wind picks up outside, and a medium-sized tree branch snaps off and slaps against Amy’s window. Pedestrians stride by, clutching scarves. People always get used to things. That’s a Homo sapiens specialty: get used to things, adapt, be resilient. This ability turned us — Jared Diamond’s once little-noteworthy “third chimpanzee” — into Earth’s dominant species, a species now numbering seven billion and counting. In fact, a growing number of scientists now call our geological era the Anthropocene, after the primate that has so fundamentally changed the Earth.
I finish breakfast and step out into the blustery winds of Bleecker Street. The radio says the worst part of the storm is about an hour off. I should seek shelter in the apartment, hunker down.
Instead, I impulsively bypass Cornelia, walking Morton across Seventh Avenue, and drop down to Pier 45. It’s 10:35 AM per the old Lackawanna clock tower across the Hudson in Hoboken, a city that still has thirty thousand homeless people from Sandy. I’m the only one on the pier.
Soon a mist of drizzle blows over, coating my face. Then the wind increases, blowing past the Freedom Tower and disappearing into gray clouds. When the sprinkle turns to big raindrops, it’s time for me to flee. Just last week, after all, Pier 45 was underwater. Many New Yorkers died. Still, I want to meet the storm.
The downpour hits. Through Pier 45’s little strip of grass I run, whooping and kicking up water, alone on a Manhattan pier. Three seagulls take flight from the handrail, braving the weather. One of them dives into the water, snatching out a silvery fish! Another of the gulls, envious of the catch, chases after the one with the flapping fish in its beak. When they cross the pier, I chase them both, squawking as loud as I can, but they don’t notice, my calls lost in the storm. I jog back to the apartment.
Soaked and shivering, I arrive to the hiss of our half-century-old heater. I light a fire with branches from Tar Beach. Then it starts snowing. Snow in November? The flakes fall onto the brick-red fire escapes. Thick steam-clouds billow from the neighboring building’s heating system, and I hear the whine of a band saw as a new building goes up. They’re filling a lovely courtyard below with yet another building, working even in this nor’easter. When I asked about it the other day, they told me they hold a permit for the two-year project. Noise. Every weekday from eight to five in our micro and on Tar Beach. . . for the next two years.
I’ve really been feeling the blues the past few days. It’s more than Sandy alone, more than the typical ups and downs of life. I know that so much is so very good. Squeaker is healthy. We’ll soon see Amaya — Melissa’s been saving up her vacation leave and we’ll be taking a big trip to visit her in Bolivia. And I’m living Slow — finding, in Manhattan, what nature writer John Hay calls “the elemental life,” beyond air-treated, fluorescent-lit human boxes. I feel the city’s wind and water, my sweat and shivers. I feel the elation of meeting the storm on Pier 45. Wind gusts through my lungs, rushes out in cries to seagulls; our tiny apartment grows a pyramid of skylights to the great gray vault of sky now angrily snowing over the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Bridge.
The storm is inside. I get up, go into the kitchen, and open a bottle of wine. It’s barely noon, but I feel unsteady. I drink the first glass quickly, then pour more. The snow thrashes around outside, the windows frost over. A side of me knows that humans either will or will not make it through climate change, through the insidious Indian Head alarms — the drones and nukes and biological weapons. Humans will or will not make it through biodiversity loss, through exhausting population growth and rising per-capita consumption. Perhaps, like Bloomberg’s global warming epiphany, we’ll even seize disaster as a chance to change. Perhaps. But still, on a daily basis, when I see the hollow exercise of voting, see the ways so many around me fill their days and their lives, see how heavily conditioned we are by advertising and marketing and family pressures — springing from a powerful, ecocidal culture with an imperative to grow — it feels oppressive. Not hopeless, but unwelcoming to me.
A WOMAN LIVING TWO BUILDINGS UP from us on Cornelia is raped.
It happened at 2 AM the previous night, the night after the storm. The guy was hiding in the building’s courtyard; he raped her there. My building neighbors plaster signs about it in our stairwell, by the mailboxes. On the gate of our horse entrance, the hand-lettered sign reads: “PULL the gate CLOSED so it latches!” Below it, the time and place of the rape. Nobody has been apprehended.
It could have been Melissa, I think when I hear about it, fists clenched. It could have been my pregnant wife.
The evening after the rape, Melissa is below — safe — in the apartment as I, having fully abandoned my “ghost pregnancy,” drink a lot of red wine alone atop Tar Beach. No more firewood up here — Sandy reduced our tree canopy by half, leaving hardly a branch for the nor’easter to topple — and all I can picture is that angry man, ripping off her skirt, violating her. First, the Cornelia Street crack dealer, now the Cornelia Street rapist. They’re drilling below me, inside the rising new building, working at night, too, shattering even the half-moon peace of the Beach.
I finish the bottle. It’s dark and cold. My mind goes to the place it does at the darkest moments. Civil War Liberia, where rape was so common that most women I knew admitted to always wearing tight shorts under their jeans or skirts — a near-useless barrier to rape, but all they had. I feel for those women. Feel for our neighbor.
Violence. I scratch at a wound, a memory I’m always suppressing, one worse than hunkering down in Buchanan with what might have been my last plate of palm butter.
It happened even farther inside the jungle. Twelve hours from the capital, outside of Greenville, crossing a checkpoint. A teenage soldier defending the border of a foreign timber concession.
“Get down!” he yells at me. Amphetamine strips on his face. AK-47.
I shake my head. I’m sitting shotgun next to Momo, my driver. Momo pleads with him, half in a whisper: “But, boss. Whiteman bringing food to the refugees-o! Let us pass, I beg you.”
The soldier is drugged. He’s still staring at me. Commanders feed the kids amphetamines through cuts on their faces to keep them primed for fighting. Keep them a little crazy. Crazy enough to defend a Malaysian logging company clear-cutting an ancient rainforest so the wood can be shipped to Chinese coastal factories, where it’s made into cheap furniture sold by Walmart in Ohio.
“Get DOWN!” he repeats, even louder.
I look out the truck window, down into the ditch beside the road. The ditch looks like an open grave. If I get down, this is where I’ll die. Again, I shake my head.
He yanks open my door. Nods for me to step down.
I sweat in the tropical evening, something thick and ugly caught in my throat. I’m going to die here. Outside Greenville, in a ditch, on the edge of a timber concession. Die, on a foul frontline of globalization.
Momo, just in time, fishes out a wad of green-and-red Liberty notes and holds the Christmas-colored currency out to the boy.
He looks at it. Looks at me. Looks at it again. Then he seizes the Liberty, kicks my door shut, and drops the checkpoint rope.
Because of Momo’s Liberty, I don’t die. But looking in the rearview mirror as we bounce away down the dirt road, driving toward the internally displaced people we’re to feed, I know that part of my innocence does. That’s because that boy with the drug strips on his face is already dead on that foul frontline of globalization. No amount of Liberty is going to save him.
THE NEXT MORNING, HUNGOVER, I take the subway to the Bronx Zoo. I spend hours with chimpanzees, elephants, tigers, macaws. With nonrapists, non–drone killers, non–climate changers. I’m sick of my species, sick of myself. On the way out of the zoo, I find a secluded stretch of woods, strip to my boxers, and leap into a small river, a tributary I’ve come to call the Bronx River, which dumps into the Hudson on its journey south.
I sink. Sink toward the bottom. Cannonball to the icy, muddy floor. It’s probably polluted. There are surely broken bottles down here, maybe medical waste, syringes. I don’t care. I want to kill some memories and feelings.
I know I’m unwell. This is worse than planes over Queens, worse than workaholism, even, somehow, worse than Rachel Wetzsteon and five stories down from Tar Beach. It’s a planet with drug strips on its face, a planet with AKs in the hands of child soldiers, a planet fumed up by too many cars and industrial plants. A planet of Frankenstorms.
Down on the bottom of the river it’s freezing, silent. After some seconds, the cold doesn’t sting. My head tumbles forward and touches mud. The peace down there. Womb-time. No mind time.
No rape time. No kid-soldier time. No suicide time. No Sandy time.
Oxygen expiring, I unfurl from my tight ball and shoot, spring-like, to the airy surface. I draw breath, exhale, and sink back into muddy silence.
On the subway back home, my hair still wet from the river, I wonder if I’m depressed. I’m unwell, I think, but also feral and free. But that’s crazy talk, right? I study the people beside me on the train. They exude workday exhaustion. Mopping Wall Street floors, assisting a dentist, cooking in a smoky kitchen. The “lucky” ones get to prepare legal briefs and fill cavities, but they too look spent. I hear macaw cries, the cry of a baby chimpanzee; I feel the scales of fish around me in the river and sink into silence. I’m unwell, but also feral and free.
Is it depression that makes me want to merge with every natural feature of the city I see, even a river in cold November? Chellis Glendinning, in her book My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, talks about how mental illness is often related to modern humanity’s great divorce from nature. I’ve opened myself up to the pain of that divorce all the more by going Slow. At the bottom of the Bronx River, I feel no pain.
SILENCE.
It slips into me after the Bronx. I talk less and less in the following days.
When I receive an email invitation to speak — at the Fez Forum on the Alliance of Civilizations, in Morocco — I can’t imagine accepting. Burn all that carbon to get me to North Africa . . .to speak? Dress up and lecture from a podium? All I want to do is be mute.
There are psychologists in New York who specifically attend to former aid workers. People who served in places like Liberia. A side of me wonders if I need to visit one, and another side of me feels like healing is a matter of allowing the space for things to come back into alignment. Space. The Rambles. Pier 45. The third story. A Harriman lean-to. Silence is part of allowing the space to realign. I’ve got this psychic garbage in me, the kind all of us have, so how do I let it go?
Melissa and I, after Amanbir’s Golden Bridge kundalini class, eat a silent meal at Back Forty West, an organic locavore bistro in SoHo. Aside from ordering, we spend two and a half hours in silence. Every table around us turns over, folks rushing to the bar or the theater, as the sky through the window drains of light like a squid releasing each drop of its ink.
Tastes and textures cross our lips as we tent hands across the table. I notice the paintings and photos all clumped together — a good hundred of them — on one single side of the room. The opposite wall is totally blank, Cornelia-micro blank, with nothing more than two soft-lit lamps. Everything on one side, nothing on the other. My eyes travel over the waxy surface of the candle flickering between us in a thin crystal cup and come to rest on a bone.
A cow’s large thighbone, dried and white, on an otherwise empty side table, a parched white beauty-mark amid the dozens of animate Homo sapiens, their taut skins holding back blood, plasma, living bone and marrow. Melissa is a little pinker than before, her gaze lying just beyond the candle on my empty plate. When I retake her hand, I see her eyes are moist. I give her a questioning glance. She shakes her head, smiles. She knows I am hurting inside. She knows she can’t touch that hurt, but she sees it echoing inside me. While I find solace in silence, the extrovert in her yearns to talk. I start to speak, but she reaches out a knowing finger and presses it to my lips.