First the Tornado
Many years ago, when our son was still young enough to fall asleep clutching a stuffed rabbit in the backseat of our car, Grant and I watched a skinny tornado leap over the interstate just ahead of us. There was a furious shrieking inside of our car as the pressure changed. It felt as if the air was being sucked out of the car, and maybe it was. I’m not going to explore the science behind that sensation just now because this monthly letter is about time.
Keeping this newsletter is part of my effort to develop an embodied sense of a month. The effort is going about as well my efforts ever go, meaning there’s a gap between my vision and my execution, and in that gap I keep stumbling over the glimmering secrets of the universe. One being that confirming whether or not the air was actually being sucked from the car all those years ago would take more time than I should dedicate to a monthly letter.
Another being that, at the broadest cultural level, we put too much effort into nailing down the ticking seconds of our lives, and we put too little effort into ripping away our temporal foundations entirely.
In the first few months of the pandemic, I sat in my office staring at my computer while the coach on the screen timed me. I was to tell her when I felt that a minute was up. We were testing how I experienced time against how I should experience time. We discovered that I experience twenty seconds as sixty seconds. This has held steady, so I’m guessing it’s how I’m wired. Since that moment, I’ve steadily chipped away at working within the minute, the week, the month, the year. I’ve found enormous amounts of support for this. Books, coaches, groups, apps, timers, planners.
Not once though has anyone questioned me about another important sense of felt time—my embodied understanding of the brevity of my single human life. Nobody has tested how deeply I grasp that death is my steadiest companion, or stressed the importance of sitting in marvel until I am breathless with the absolute fucking miracle of being here at all. An inconceivable number of things had to go right from (at least) the Big Bang forward to land me here now, at this laptop, typing a letter to you.
Last weekend, I went to Deerlick Astronomy Village in Sharon, Georgia, with my friend, N. We wanted to watch the annual Peresid meteor shower. Deerlick is two hours east of where we live, and it requires an annual membership for even one night’s visit, but we really wanted a dark sky and those are hard to come by these days.
I drove. We traveled with a storm most of the way. According to my Code Red app, we were in a major storm with lots of flash flood potential. Also high winds, tornados. Even without blaring alarms, we would have known these things. At one point, the winds were shearing in such a way that leaves and roadside trash whooshed like a river about fifteen feet over our heads, flowing backward the way we’d come, while down below I fought crosscutting gusts that threatened to shove my Prius off the road.
“Radar says the skies will be clear by two am,” said N, “but if you want to turn around, I support you.” She pointed over our heads at the debris stream. “I don’t even know what that means.”
N and I have lived in the same geological quadrangle for most of our lives. We’ve grieved environmental changes for years—remember the lightning bugs? The toads? The stars? We’d already agreed that this summer’s storms are consistently fiercer than any summer we’ve known.
I said, “Tornados always funnel down from a cloud.” I hoped this was still true.
My son slept right through that tornado all those years ago. At the time, I marveled at his capacity to sleep through such a high-pitched screeching, however brief. Now, I marvel at his sense of safety. How lucky was he, to experience such faith and security when he was young? I knew those feelings too as a child. I loved falling asleep in the backseat of the car, hearing my parents’ low voices, the soft thrum of the radio. I especially loved sleeping in the car when it rained. Then there was the heartbeat swish of the wipers, the slick whir of tires on wet blacktop. I didn’t understand hydroplaning, car wrecks. I didn’t have an embodied sense of fighting to keep my car on the road while scanning for funnel clouds and listening for shrieking.
We’re like lucky children asleep in our parents’ car when we ignore the precarity of our situation and spend all of our time nailing down the ticking seconds of our lives.
I looked up at that debris stream and considered turning back. But I couldn’t see enough of the future to make such a decision. The Peresid is an annual event, but I can’t know whether there will be clear skies next year around two am on August 13th. I can’t know if the new Harrison Feed Mill just down the street from Deerlick Astronomy Village will bring about the sort of development that erases dark skies. I can’t know if one of the many collapses that feel imminent might happen by next August—the collapse of the Gulf Stream, for instance. In the next year, my life may change in ways I cannot imagine, ways that make it unlivable. Which brings me to the most basic unknowns, whether or not N and I will be alive and able-bodied this time next year, able to pack up my Prius and creep our way through an absolutely godforsaken storm with tons of hope that the chaos will pass and we’ll soon be sitting in lawn chairs staring up into the rare and blessed dark.
We drove out of the storm, reached Deerlick, and then waited out the storm again, but this time we were parked in a field. Code Red alerted us to the dangerous heat advisory we already felt. There was too much lightning to open the windows. My Prius is too old and irritable to run the a/c, or even the fan, if I’m not driving. We’d brought tuna fish and garlic greens for dinner. We sweated and we stank and we laughed until we cried. We told ghost stories.
Once again, our weather apps were correct. The storms passed. We set up our tent for a few hours of sleep, and we knew it was time to go outside when some stargazers near us, three young men who chatted softly all night in a language we couldn’t identify, said, “Ahhhhhh,” in unison.
It wasn’t the steadiest meteor shower I’ve experienced. At some point in the mid-1990s, I lay in the field beside my rented farmhouse and watched one that I remember as almost ceaseless streaking. We only saw a Peresid meteor every several minutes. But some of them—my god. We watched for a few hours, until one streaked across a good third of the visible sky, the light as wide as two of my fingers. And as the light dissipated, a glittering cloud lingered, a trail—I don’t know the correct language. Imagine the shimmering slime that marks a snail’s path. A bit like that, but from a meteor’s body.
The next day, N and I drove north to meet some friends in Athens for brunch. I described the shower to our friend who is known to many as a “practical genius.” I told her that we’d not seen nearly as many meteors as we’d hoped, maybe not even enough to justify my decision to keep driving. Then I described the one so bright it left a haunting in the sky. She said, “If you get one really good one, that’s enough.”
One good minute, one good year, one good life. I appreciate that clock time is the cost of admission to a whole lot of human life. I’m all for accurately timeblocking my days in my calendar and coloring in little squares to track my progress. But the only reason I do that is to better seize hold of my minutes so that I can have more of the experiences that matter most to me, the experiences that rip away my foundations and release me entirely from time. The experiences that deposit me in the vapor trail of the night’s most amazing meteor, a miracle I will not, in this moment, explain scientifically. Go and find that answer yourself, beloved. Invite me along. I’ll drive if I’m able.
