by Dana Perry
Back before computers were commonplace, I played mayor. Nine years old and leader of my SimCity digital town, I carefully placed public facilities, libraries, municipal buildings, parks, businesses, power lines, roads, established some sort of tax rate for my (seemingly happy) constituents, and then watched the budget start to build, upward, almost with reckless abandon.
Eventually disaster would strike, and the city would get hit by a tornado or an earthquake, maybe a flood. Emergency services would drain city funding, and just as I would begin to rebuild, another debacle would hit. This time a hurricane or a series of fires, maybe even a meteor shower; glowing in squares, pixels of disaster. My still-forming brain was irate. The game made no sense and was completely impossible to win. Wasn’t even fun to play, really, it was completely unbelievable. How often was a town struck with a natural disaster—much less many—in the span of a few weeks.
The night that Milton set its tendrils on land, I woke up at 5 am with a pounding headache. Against my own suggestion to anyone and everyone that we limit screens as much as possible, I immediately I entered my six-digit code to access the glowing portal of news. I needed to witness the damage, to follow the eye as it moved. Obsessed with the storm: the climate calamity.
Calamity calamity calamity. Another unprecedented calamity.
The clamor begins again and again, but after 24 hours the stories disappear. The reels come and the memes go; social media’s clatter, a short-term memory of this and that and the other crisis. Unless we’re living in the detritus, the destruction—the debris, the floodwaters, the mess of what is leftover when disaster strikes—it is seemingly gone in an instant. The climate cacophony momentarily mute.
“Nothing will de-radicalize you more than having a child,” a parent said at a recent playdate. Between bedtime and rejected meals and rashes and marker on family heirlooms, the weight of the world is often shoved aside. The just barely 30 lbs of my four-year-old is too much; the tiny little thing. My brain spins in circles to protect her: is she eating enough, does she see the driveway, did wildfire smoke exposure thicken her lungs, is she wearing her helmet, is there lead in our dishes, is that the beginning of a fever, was I too stern, was I too soft, are there micro plastics in her veins, did I ruin our relationship, did I ruin her. I sink into the Brooklyn concrete, immobile.
Some kind of climate catatonia.
Mothers for all of eternity have wondered what kind of world they’re leaving for their children. But now we wonder, will there be any world left? Any human one, that is. We made a storm so powerful in Florida that it made a weatherman cry, and we are all culpable for this catastrophe. While the video has disappeared into the ether of the internet, I can’t get this phrase from my head: we made a storm so powerful that it made a weatherman cry. In Idaho, my mother’s neighbor scours his yard every week for dandelions, marking them with yellow flags; his signal that Round-Up is on the way. I could scream, the angry wind would carry my voice far away from his door, up over the mountains, past the melting glaciers. So I whisper, but dandelions are medicine.
I remember Richard saying that in times of ominous crisis we can take the long view. That in the coil of time since our mother earth started spinning, human existence is wildly short. A mere blip on the radar. Long after we’re all gone, we have to hope that some form of plant life will remain.
As humans, our options to batten down the hatches or to flee, but what about the trees, I wonder. How do plants adapt to extreme climate, I frantically type into the great Google machine; the artificial knowledge bringer, cursory informer of all we seek. Plants are trapped down to the roots, forced to weather the storm. I learn they change shape, flexible trunks to not break, or thickened ones to better protect the tender vasculature within; they alter their metabolism, to grow, flower, or reproduce differently than before; they reach their leaves to the sky instead of broad to the ground, reducing the impact of solar rays and creating wind tunnels to cool themselves; they use the wind to scatter their seeds. They accept the finiteness of their lives, sacrificing their own bodies but protecting their young. Like any mother would do.
Stepping back from the screen I remember that I already know some of these things. The things I didn’t learn from a machine, but from the older, wiser plant people around me. Of course plants prepare. They prepare for all seasons; they always have. With the first bit of autumn chill, energy begins to move down to the roots. The extraneous bits the curled leaves, the shriveled flowers, they drop to re-nourish the soil. We know this because as herbalists, we harvest roots in the autumn to make our sweet/bitter/earthy medicine: dandelion, burdock, valerian, yellow dock, marshmallow, ashwagandha.
Energy does not disappear. It shifts, it flows, it moves from one place to another. In the plant world, the very first part of a seedling—the embryo root—is called a radicle. It shoots deep into the soil, collecting vital nutrients and minerals in quiet darkness. Plants grow down before they grow up; they grow in before they grow out.
Two summers ago while in Ohio, I woke to a circular wail. Though I didn’t grow up in the midwest, even in my half-asleep stupor I knew it was a tornado siren. My husband, tiny daughter and I all walked the creaky steps of my in-laws house to the basement. With my daughter’s grandma, we watched a fuzzy television screen as the local meteorologist—alive with newfound importance—described pockets of electric activity. Grandpa decided to stay upstairs; getting in and out of the bed was hard enough after 80. “If the real one comes, let it take me,” he said.
This summer, from a picnic blanket in Prospect Park, I watched my daughter run through the soft mess of clover to the fluffy white dandelion seed balls poking their heads to the sky. Imperative that they remain intact until her show, she snapped them off at the stem, and carefully brought each one back to the blanket. “Now watch,” she said, giving a dramatically oversized blow. Seeds scattered and danced for one brilliant moment and then the wind gently carried them back to the ground.
We grow down before we grow up, I remind myself. We grow in before we grow out.
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Dana Perry is a teaching mentor and blog manager at ArborVitae (and also a proud alum). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.