MOBBING CALL

TRACY O’NEILL

When we were still in a season of firsts, the last man I brought home to New Hampshire and I were people who stayed up too late talking in awful railroad apartments and after-hours spots that would later become, in memory, always dark yet glowing blue. As far as he could have known, I only ever wore sequined cocktail dresses and elevator shoes. I always saw him in Ben Sherman suits. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask what sort of family he imagined for himself. For the most part, the furthest into the future I spoke were vows to vacate my lousy nightclub job. It took me falling asleep at a party in the middle of a conversation, then waking to him removing a cup from my hand as he covered me with a woven floor mat, for me to see that he wanted to take care of someone.

Maybe it was that improvised tucking in, or maybe it was the crushing light in his face as he recalled after-school snacks of pickle sandwiches that made me want to show him where I grew up. We got the honking silver pickup on the highway. I got grandiose and I meant it. I told him the New Hampshire of my childhood was one in which the natural world supplied a sensory rampancy approaching an ethic of liberty, that there you are free to perceive with dilettantish abandon. I told him that where I grew up there is Baboosic Lake shifting blue at its center through the summer, then the red smack of turning leaves. In winter, you feel the cold, sickening fist of glee bobbing up the gullet in a slide over ice—and, if you are lucky, someone’s mother pouring hot maple syrup into packed snow to make candy.

I told him that to be precise about New Hampshire requires paradox. It can be summarized by its poles. The state motto is “Live free or die,” and therein lies its conceptual sexiness, its blunt-force frisson. It’s in this grandiosity you can cultivate ambitions to erect a cathedral to zero fucks or die trying, even as it inspires an obsession with dwindling time, too. New Hampshire’s spectacular parade of seasons may mean you reside in pointed existentia, suspect it is more accurate to say live free then die; but by all means, live free first. How many more autumns will I see the flame of leaves? you may wonder, I told him. When, if it does, does the world end?

If it is not evident, this man was patient with me.

On that first trip home to New Hampshire, it was presumed that this man was going to be the father of my children. He brought a basket of Hudson Valley jams to my family. We hacked crusted ice from the walkway to the door. My parents noted that we both had thick, dark hair; were good eaters; additionally, he was broad where I was slight. And despite an ambivalence toward parenthood, it had become somehow a given that if we were to have a child together we would name the child Sammy. I was stupid with love, and in those moments, I could believe that to stand proximal to childhood was to be availed of astonishments, to feel the bright firstness of a child’s experience smear back into one’s own. I could believe in the green of Baboosic Lake shifting blue. The father would be the one to teach Sammy to swim since I was hapless in water.

Yet even as we visited New Hampshire, even as my friends celebrated the third birthdays of their children and so on, there were doomy tolls sounding. One day, I saw a news item on the internet saying Nashua, New Hampshire, had been named one of the safest cities in the United States to raise a child. Nashua abuts the town of Amherst, where I grew up. Accompanying the ranking were tips on how to sustain the safety of one’s child: Practice crossing the street safely. Monitor their online activity. But what struck me most was Tip #8: “Establish and practice a family escape plan.” How, I wondered, would a family escape climate change?

It is difficult to fix the discovery of climate change to any one date. It’s been studied in some form since the nineteenth century. Most people recognize the 1980s as the decade in which the urgency of human-caused global warming solidified into scientific consensus. And as early as 2003, even the Department of Defense acknowledged the threat it posed, publishing a report referring to it as a “plausible” if “unthinkable” security crisis. In fact, it was not unthinkable. The Pentagon thought quite seriously about this potentially operatic tragedy: how commercial fishermen would be insufficiently prepared for the migration of their quarry, how some pest populations would thicken through the altered weather, how food scarcity would disrupt economies, and how, eventually, conflicts over dwindling resources might drive interstate violence. A non-negotiable number has been named. The UN estimates we have only until 2030 to forestall disaster.

The notion of the ticking clock is not unfamiliar in narratives of reproductive adversity, which remind prospective mothers at dizzying turns that even the happiest childlessness will not always be only a choice, will one day become an unavoidable fact. We accept the science that tells us fertility is finite and revocable. But many of us today have honed a selective acceptance of science, believing instead that when it comes to climate change, there will always be another Tuesday. It is a popular delusion that, under liberalism, deferring action to avert environmental catastrophe is an exercise of freedom.

My personal deferrals have tended more toward the child question. In the years that followed that trip home to meet the parents, I spent days at a time reading in Brooklyn. I said, more often than not, yes to one more party before going home. Apropos of a cigarette, women would tell me they quit like that the moment they got pregnant. My mother began referring to my pet as her grand-dog. I enjoyed the kind of attentive friendships in which we did not merely ask after the kids, asked at least as much, “How are you?” All the while, New Hampshire was, of course, rich with admonition of time passing. Snow fell. Snow melted. Ice hardened on branches like glass gloves, and then came new shoots. When the last man I brought home to New Hampshire expressed enthusiasm over some kempt, expensive place, it might have been, confoundingly, because of the school district.

Confounding because I had, indeed, fallen into imagining the life of an unborn child. That speculative biography consisted of the child at twelve or eight or some other number knowing not only that their personal experience of the world, but the world as we know it, was numbered. Maybe there would be the warring consequences predicted by the Pentagon. Definitely there would be flooding and heat clumped with disease-carrying bugs. The child would become someone who was twenty and afraid, thirty and afraid, fifty and afraid. I would have brought into being a consciousness who would experience terror for which I could offer no consolation. I was not sure I could abide this story, let alone cause it.

The essence of a story is not constituted by its worst events, but I wondered what of the landscape would remain to inflect a life with pleasure. The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services has concluded that autumns will go duller in color, green ceding quickly to brown as trees die off, non-native species invade, and flora becomes “climate stressed.” As temperatures rise, skiing season will be truncated. Others anticipate that the warmed weather will rob the maple syrup yield. The possibilities for licentious New Hampshire experiences will narrow, becoming less available or not available at all.

Happiness hardly requires leaf peeping and winter sport, of course. Plenty of people manage all right without them. But even those parents I know who do not particularly love parenting want excess for their children. They want the better school, the better food. Even before the children were born, they wanted the best ob-gyn. They are prone to declaring they want to give their children the world. If this is true, then the question is why we’ve not collectively wanted to preserve more of what makes the world worth living through.

What if we cared not by producing new sentience, I asked the last man I brought home to New Hampshire, but by sustaining our world for those who already and may one day exist? Robert Frost put it differently in his poetry collection New Hampshire. Considering what sort of life to fashion, the poem’s speaker declares, “I’d hate to be a runaway from nature.”

In 2017, a Lund University study found that the most environmentally destructive action an individual can do is to bear offspring, a choice that would require 684 teenagers to commit to comprehensive, lifelong recycling to offset it. I read this study when I was one year away from being someone whose pregnancy would be, in medical parlance, “geriatric.” From friends, I solicited counsel on what it meant to reproduce into likely devastation. Almost invariably, someone would say, “But that’s politics. What do you want?” I did not understand how desire would exempt my hypothetical child from climate change.

The next year, a friend gave me a small novelty book where I encountered the notion that New Hampshire has an “ungenerous,” meaning infertile, nature. It is a rocky place, tight in its crop yields, and in the book, it was said that the White Mountains, in their rigid looming, “signal something a bit aloof about the state’s character—a rectitude that stands in splendid isolation.” But to me, New Hampshire has never been aloof. Its rectitude, if that’s what it is, simply remains agnostic. Though enamored of freedom, the state remains undecided about how exactly the human prerogative fits into it.

The regional liberation narrative is, after all, defined by a particular strain of one-or-the-other. New Hampshire was the first American colony to assert independence from Great Britain in January 1776, unless you believe that it was Rhode Island in May of that year. It wasn’t much of a battleground in the American Revolution, unless you believe the work of Portsmouth pirates counts. Exeter, New Hampshire, is where the Republican Party was established on October 12, 1853, unless you believe the party was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, 1854. And after his son’s death under the watch of a white family, Chief Chocorua cursed the settlers in revenge before dying of gunshot wounds, unless you believe he cursed them and then threw himself from the peak of a mountain to his death. From a view on high, it might appear that we are not especially adept at determining the arc of where living free or dying begins and ends.

My friend gifted me the book shortly after it became apparent that the last man I brought home to New Hampshire and I would not have a baby together. In several ways, it seemed, it was too late, and in turns of ironic thought I remembered how my mother used to fear I’d become a mother too early. Hers was a family where habitually unwed women became unwed mothers. That fact had not convinced her that life went on but that freedom was easy to ruin.

I recall debating such potential disastrousness with her on the telephone one afternoon when I was younger. That day, I pictured her by the glass sliding door of the family living room. She would have been turned to the window, a cordless telephone clamped between her head and shoulder, looking out into the thick pines behind the house, the ones that went black at a particular deepening hour when I was small and terrified and thrilled, in a race against an uncanny sense I was being pursued.

“But so what if life is beautiful?” I said to my mother.

My point lay somewhere in the day when I was a child and it blizzarded hard enough that the weather came up to my chest. I’d had to swim my arms out first to dig a path. In one moment, my mother let out an awkward, ugly scream, believing I’d drowned in the drift, though I was only lying in a self-made snow grave. I was only trying to catch sight of the six points of snowflakes before they expired on my face. I could not quite make out where one point became another, or if the snow was soft or stinging as it came down on me. I stayed there open to the sky, half-forgetful that I’d intended to impress angels in the yard, happy.

“Isn’t new life always beautiful?” I said to my mother, because I wished it to be true. I still do.