LEAP
MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
my entrails
dangle between paradise
and fear.
—JOY HARJO,
“The Creation Story”
1997 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 362 ppm1
Oregon summers are for sleeping outside. By July, the legendary Pacific Northwest rains retreat and we have two months of skin-kissing temperatures and clear, star-studded skies. It’s the season that makes suffering through the long gray winter worth it. After dinner we start a bonfire and surround it with our bodies and stories and songs. Soon it grows late and my boyfriend and I extricate ourselves from the group and find our way by headlamp to the bed we’ve set up at the edge of the forest. Nothing more than a tarp and a load of blankets piled on the ground just beyond the sagging back porch of our cabin, which is made of sculpted earth and century-old timber. There, in the liminal space between domesticated and wild, we enter the territory of our cat, Stranger.
I say that Stranger is “our” cat, but he isn’t really ours. Nothing is. My boyfriend and I live in a community of non-blood relations on a forty-acre land trust, the deed held by a nonprofit. Stranger, a panther in miniature, belongs to the Douglas fir forest that rings the clearing where our community has cultivated a garden and built a cluster of cabins and a house of straw bales. Sometimes we’ll spot his elusive form trailing behind us as we forge our way into the forest. Each time we enter the trees we take a different path, surrounded by trillium in the spring and chanterelle mushrooms in the fall. We move through the woods immersed, without fear. There are no poisonous snakes. No ticks. Maybe a brown recluse spider in the woodpile or bald-faced hornet nest under a log, but mostly we have to skirt just one threat: poison oak, its three shiny leaves waving like a warning flag.
Once we are sleeping outside, settled in our outdoor bed, Stranger hovers around us until his sleek dark body vanishes into the trees, shadowed from moonlight. He returns moments later with his prey of a small vole, and feasts beside our pillows. When he disappears again and returns with a bat, still alive, we leap up and wrangle it from him. We tuck the creature in a shoebox on a high shelf on the porch, out of Stranger’s reach. In the morning, I awake at first light to the feel of the earth below me, sheltered by a canopy of fir needles. I have slept the sleep of gods, and the bat has flown.
2004 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 377 ppm2
We can’t stop fighting, and I’m finally the one to sever ties. The organism that was us dies. He and Stranger stay, and I leave, leaping into a new life that trades the Oregon woods for New York City, where the opportunities to become a professional storyteller expand, but the ones to garden naked evaporate. The only outdoor sleep I get is by sneaking up on a couple of rooftops, once to make out with a stranger who I shouldn’t be kissing, and another time to not kiss a friend who I suspect would like to kiss me. Stargazing becomes a short-lived and atrophied activity, so I turn my attention to falcons, the aerial predators that live on skyscrapers and bridges. This is my wild way into an urban landscape, my attempt to write a new story that sustains me, to build a new world—solo—out of words instead of wood, in a place of concrete and steel. But something is seeping out of me, an energy force I can’t identify.
700 B.C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 285 ppm3
More than a millennium before I move to what the Algonquian peoples perhaps called Manahatta, amid a cluster of islands in the Aegean Sea, people tell themselves stories of a different sort. They speak of Antaeus, a giant from Libya. The son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, Antaeus would accost passing strangers and challenge them to wrestling matches.4 He’d always win. Every time. Until, one day, the demigod Heracles took him on and figured out his secret. He remembered the bloodlines that ran through the giant’s veins. It wasn’t his size that made him the champion, but the fact that every time Antaeus touched the earth, he tapped into his mother’s might and his father’s force, doubling his strength. That power could make men strong—when they remembered to draw upon it. It was the impetus that pushed mushrooms from the soil and flowers from their buds. It carried the salmon downriver into the sea and helped them find their way back home again to spawn and die. But Heracles figured out how to stem the flow of power. All he had to do to beat Antaeus was to separate him from the earth. He held Antaeus aloft, severed from the ground, and the giant’s strength drained out of his suspended body like an ice cube melting in the sun. Heracles snapped him in two.
2007 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 382 ppm5
I escape the city one fall day. Follow the curve of the Hudson River north into the Shawangunk Mountains to trail behind a biologist on his daily rounds. Find it curious as he shirks a field tall with drying grass, saying something about ticks. But our eyes are to the sky: the story I’m working on is about the falcons that inhabit the cliffs above us. That evening, I can’t seem to find a decent campground and end up, along with a few others, paying fifteen dollars to pitch my tent in the backyard of some sketchy stranger. In the dingy shower, my soapy hand feels a bump on my butt and I recoil, yanking the beast out and flinging it down the drain. I later learn that this is an improper method of tick removal. There are stars outside my tent in the Shawangunks, and the earth below me, but my sleep is restless.
2011 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 392 ppm6
I escape the city for good. I fall in love with a professor who’s also a storyteller and he lures me to Cape Cod. Behind the cedar-shingled home we buy together, we smother a corner of the lawn with cardboard and have our new neighbor top it with a load of manure from his horses. I go exploring. Trails wind through conservation lands, through forests of oak and groves of holly. I learn to look out for poison ivy, similar to the poison oak of Oregon, both with their three-fingered wave. I follow a sign that says “Town Way to Water,” tromping down an overgrown trail to the edge of a kettle pond. Delight in the discovery of the hidden water body. “I could make this place home,” I think. That night, the delight vanishes when I find the brown abdomen and waving hind legs of Ixodes scapularis, the deer tick, protruding from my torso, its head embedded in my flesh, feasting on my blood.
I’m learning the rules of this new landscape. I extract the tick more carefully this time, cursing the creature. Cursing the probing, blood-sucking thirst of the arthropods that carry the viruses and bacteria that cause the illnesses that befall us. I am hearing too often about lives upended by Lyme disease. Reading too many front-page stories about ticks in the Cape Cod Times, along with stories of seaside houses tumbling into the ocean. I’m still writing about falcons, but also about water shortages and crop failures as far away as India, and something unsettling is setting in as I realize that it is all one story, and the story is changing how I relate to my world.
There are multiple reasons for the expansion of the tick’s range. A warming world is one of them. That sky where I look for falcons holds more carbon dioxide than it used to, and thus more heat. The warmth stretches Cape Cod’s summer like its famous saltwater taffy, leads to a longer season with fewer tick-killing freezes. On my way to the New Year’s Day polar bear plunge in Barnstable Harbor, I pass a forsythia in bloom. In the summer, the rains come down heavier than ever. Ticks thrive on the moisture. They have more, as the scientists say, “reproductive success.”
Scientists have also found that in the last decade and a half, tick-borne diseases have more than doubled in the United States and its territories. They account for more than three-quarters of all vector-borne diseases reported, and cases are known to be wildly underreported.7 We humans aren’t singled out by the bloodsuckers. Across New England and Canada, the moose are dying in droves. Imagine fifty thousand ticks feasting off one moose.8 The great creature is brought down by blood loss before disease can even set in.
From Guatemala to the Sahel, Syria to Bangladesh, vector-borne diseases are thriving in a time of climate change, spreading among the people with the fewest resources to handle them. Sandflies with leishmaniasis. Lice with typhus. Tsetse flies with sleeping sickness. Fleas with plague. And the mosquito, carrying dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, a Kimakonde word meaning “to become contorted,” as the victims curl into themselves with joint pain.9 Several hundred million more people are at risk of malaria with a few more degrees Celsius, says the World Health Organization, added to the nearly half million who already die each year.10
“Climate change,” declares a governmental publication, has “far-reaching consequences and touches on all life-support systems.”11
I think of Antaeus, reaching down to his life-support system, making contact, doubling his strength. And then I think of Heracles, severing the connection between that seemingly indomitable giant and the earth and snapping him in two.
2013 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 400 ppm12
As far as we know, there hasn’t been this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for three million years.
I’m not thinking of this when, on a tire swing under a load of stars in his parents’ backyard, just ten minutes from our home, the storyteller asks me to marry him. We seal it when he slips a clunky Ace Hardware ninety-nine-cent lock washer over my finger. I am joyous. So are his parents, but they’re also tired. In their late seventies, they’re both recovering from babesiosis, the latest tick-borne disease to arrive on the Cape.13 Their diagnoses are 2 of only 1,762 cases this year across the entire country.14 Lyme still dominates, but the list of other pathogens that lurk in tick spit has grown to seven on the Cape.15 In addition to Lyme and babesiosis, there’s anaplasmosis, Powassan, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Heartland virus.16 New types of ticks have shown up, too. Along with deer ticks and dog ticks come lone star ticks. They all show up here in New England, where a power plant is named after the pilgrims who once landed here, fracturing the lives of the Mashpee Wampanoag with diseases the newcomers carried. The names of the ticks and the diseases they harbor reveal their displacement.
I feel less displaced, more at home here, but new and disconcerting habits I didn’t have in the late 1990s have set in. I find myself pausing at the edge of the forest. To step into the woods, to encounter any type of brush, to expose my midriff because of an untucked shirt, or an ankle from a slouching sock, is to become vulnerable. I stop looking for the mushrooms or cascading down to the kettle pond sunk in the hollow. Exploring the path isn’t worth an encounter with what might be lurking there.
We develop a new ritual in early summer. Instead of setting up an outdoor bed, we decide which will be our set of outdoor clothes for the season. I clip them to the clothesline and douse them with permethrin, an insecticide that mimics the repellent quality of chrysanthemum flowers, until my wrist hurts from squeezing the spray bottle trigger. Now, when my love and I go for a walk, we tuck our pants into white socks, don hats to cover our heads, and basically prepare for battle.
2017 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 406 ppm
I’ve nearly lost touch with my West Coast ex, but word comes from other friends that Stranger no longer emerges from the forest; he is presumed dead. There’s also news that Oregon is aflame with a thousand fires. As the ticks have spread, so too have the wildfires, becoming more sudden, more intense. Summer temperatures have transformed into scorching ones, the fire season extending year-round in some places. A friend along Hood River tells me her plans to go hiking were canceled, again, the air choked in hazardous black smoke. On the Cape, I deftly remove a tick from the scalp of my friend’s young boy, using a tick-extracting device I carry on my key chain, always at the ready.
2018 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 408 ppm
I keep telling myself that it’s the ticks that have changed my relationship to nature. With each story I hear from my scattered loved ones, I realize that it’s a lie. The friend who lost his Red Hook apartment to Hurricane Sandy, the Indian aunt stranded in her Chennai apartment after the flood, the friend in California who fled the fires. With each new reported story for my journalism—the failed peach harvest because of the too-warm winter, the dogsledders in Wisconsin who can’t depend on the snow, the North Dakota rancher who sold off her stock during the drought—I experience the lie anew.
It isn’t about the ticks. They are just living their intrinsic ticky lives, doing the only thing they know how to do. They hover on a stem, forelegs open wide, reaching with desire and hunger, waiting for the exhaled breath of carbon dioxide that signals a mammal passing by, and then—leap. They probe their way in, and drink. Biological life forces lead the way, driving the actions of all beings, a tick, a coronavirus, you, me.
How I relate to the ticks has become emblematic of my entire relationship with the natural world, that wild and rank place I used to immerse myself in completely. It restored me. I could disappear into the Oregon woods and come back calmer. I could lie at the base of a tree amid the leaf litter without fear and let my gaze follow the trunk up to infinity, inducing vertigo, and feel like I was flying. I didn’t worry about ticks in New York City either, could stand on the Brooklyn Bridge with binoculars and a contraband bottle of wine looking for falcons and feel the same brilliant giddiness. I could forget everything in those places and move without fear. I could sink in and lose myself. Find myself.
Now I can’t stop the calculus in my head as I interact with the places that once offered solace. This is what climate change is. It’s what it does to the psyche, along with the body and the places we love. It’s nearly invisible until the moment something startles you into attention. A creeping catastrophe, waiting with arms outstretched to deliver a suffocating embrace. And once the knowledge is gained, there is no unknowing it. You are no longer climate blind. You see and cannot unsee.
We used to be a story in nature. Now we are the story. There was a time when Homo sapiens used narrative to explain the inexplicable. Gods of the sea and goddesses of the earth. Then some of us forgot the stories. Some of us cut paths through the territory of the unknown with increasingly bigger machines, thinking we’d gained control of our world. That was a lie, too. We are back in a time when the land again acts in disorienting, incomprehensible ways. Ten thousand years of living in a steady climate is over. We have returned to the times of mythology, and we need new stories to survive.
2020 C.E.
Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere: 416 ppm17
With each flip of the calendar, as I labor at this draft, I have to update the figure that marks the carbon dioxide level of our atmosphere. By March I’m spraying down my overalls with permethrin but I’ve nearly forgotten about the ticks and their disabling bacteria, as a virus rewrites our world this spring. This wasn’t the new story I was expecting. Or any of us, really—except for the epidemiologists and the disease experts who’ve been warning us for years. We disregarded them as we have the climate scientists who’ve been cautioning us for decades.
But some are listening. Some are already writing the new stories we’ll need to survive. I sought them out over the years, as climate facts turned into knowledge, as the far-off future became the present. Found them among young West Texas wind turbine technicians, apolitical and aloft in their power offices that spin in the sky. Farmers in Rajasthan growing soil as much as crops. Tribes of women who gather in kitchens for squash soup as they envision new ways of being in the world, and with each other. Young evangelicals fighting to save God’s creation, and the Lakota Water Protectors who remind us that water, not oil, is life. For now, as I and others stay home to stay safe, that carbon dioxide level takes a dip. I tend the garden and turn to sci-fi writers who imagine the best, and worst, of what we can become. In real life, half of Main Street has been taken from the cars and granted back to pedestrians. New stories are emerging.
Ekstasis is the Ancient Greek word for that moment of dislocation when we step out of ourselves, become unbound, when something beyond our bodies engages us to the point that we transform. Will climate change force this upon us? Could we take it as an opportunity to decide what that future could look like, not trapped but ready to leap?
We could be the next generation of Poseidon and Gaia’s love children. Antaeus almost had it right, but not quite. The giant squandered his superpower. He touched the earth to redouble his strength and then wasted it accosting strangers. We could draw on the same earth force, but instead of using it to fight each other, use it to refill our pens and recharge our minds and repower our worlds with energy spun from light and wind. Wander through the woods, soles to the soil, and emerge transformed, our anger and terror turned into something revolutionary. The mythologies of future generations are ours for the making. What story shall we tell?
Notes
1.Rebecca Lindsey, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” NOAA Climate.gov, August 14, 2020, www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide.
2.Lindsey, “Climate Change.”
3.Dieter Lüthi et al., “High-Resolution Carbon Dioxide Concentration Record 650,000–800,000 Years Before Present,” Nature 453 (2008): 379–82.
4.“Antaeus,” GreekMythology.com, accessed February 27, 2021, www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Gigantes/Antaeus/antaeus.html.
5.Lindsey, “Climate Change.”
6.Ibid.
7.Ronald Rosenberg et al., “Vital Signs: Trends in Reported Vector-borne Disease Cases—United States and Territories, 2004–2016,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 67, no. 17 (May 4, 2018): 496–501.
8.Laura Poppick, “As Winters Warm, Blood-Sucking Ticks Drain Moose Dry,” Scientific American, December 11, 2018, www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-winters-warm-blood-sucking-ticks-drain-moose-dry; Chris Bosak, “For NH Moose, Winter Tick Can Be a Deadly Mismatch,” Keene Sentinel, updated August 28, 2019, www.sentinelsource.com/news/local/for-nh-moose-winter-tick-can-be-a-deadly-mismatch/article_cfc8fae3-617b-57bb-bc77-60225616a184.html.
9.“Vector-Borne Diseases,” World Health Organization, updated March 2, 2020, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vector-borne-diseases; “Chikungunya,” World Health Organization, updated September 15, 2020, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/chikungunya.
10.Carolyn Beeler, “Climate Change Will Make Animal-Borne Diseases More Challenging to Predict,” The World, February 14, 2020, www.pri.org/stories/2020-02-14/climate-change-will-make-animal-borne-diseases-more-challenging-predict; “Malaria,” World Health Organization, updated November 30, 2020, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria.
11.A. K. Githeko et al., “Climate Change and Vector-Borne Diseases: A Regional Analysis,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78, no. 9 (2000): 1136–47.
12.Robert Kunzig, “Climate Milestone: Earth’s CO2 Level Passes 400 ppm,” National Geographic, May 12, 2013, www.nationalgeographic.com/pages/article/130510-earth-co2-milestone-400-ppm.
13.“Babesiosis—Data & Statistics,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, updated January 13, 2015, www.cdc.gov/parasites/babesiosis/data-statistics/2013.html.
14.Ibid.
15.Rosenberg et al., “Vital Signs.”
16.Ibid.
17.“Daily CO2,” CO2.earth, accessed March 16, 2020, www.co2.earth/daily-co2.