Hello from the California golden poppies opening up their faces this morning. I’m in my second day of journalism school orientation. If you enjoy these newsletters, consider becoming a paid subscriber to help me continue to make these essays possible while I’m in grad school.
In May, while in the Bay Area for my cousin’s wedding, I stole a day to visit Berkeley, California, where I’d move later in the summer. When I stepped out of the car and onto UC Berkeley’s campus, I felt I’d arrived in paradise.
It was the most beautiful university I’d ever seen. I didn’t miss the neo-gothic architecture of my own alma mater. I knew I wouldn’t miss winter or the timekeeping of seasonal change, or even the vibrant colors of a New England autumn. Walking around Berkeley, California, showered in sun, the scent of eucalyptus pungent in my nose, everything blooming bright and alive, I could not have dreamed up a more perfect eden. That whole afternoon, enraptured by the landscape, I was almost unbelieving of the fact that people lived here, that, soon, I would live here, and I’d get a hall pass exempting me from brutal winters and humidity.
When people asked me why I’d chosen this specific journalism program, I would list some of the academic reasons, and then sheepishly admit that I also had a fantasy of moving to California. If I was making a big life and career transition anyway, why not do it in the best place I could imagine.
I know it isn’t a landscape untouched by disaster. When I visited in May, my sister’s friend met up with us to walk around; sitting down on the south edge of campus, he gestured toward the sky: “It glowed red from the fires last September,” he said, describing the eerie dark orange resulting from the way smoke particles absorb and scatter light. Another friend who lives in San Francisco told me I’d better pack a “go bag” so as to be prepared for the much-hyped, much-anticipated earthquake that would send us running for safety.
As I was getting ready to move, I joked with several friends that, “If California is going to be unlivable in the next 10 years, I’d better go now.” That statement has started to weigh on me with more specificity and urgency than far-off fear. Recently, I’ve been having disaster dreams. The other night, a torrent of water flooded through a valley in my subconscious. I stood on only slightly higher ground, my knees submerged in churning indigo, while I looked to my right to see the cataract of my nightmare ripping trees from the earth, crushing telephone poles, and dragging human bodies beneath the dark current. I awoke from the inky terror to gentle morning light filtering through my curtains, then gulped water from the glass next to me, my throat parched.
Only a few days later, my mom sent me a New York Times article about a catastrophic storm that is predicted to hit California in the not so distant future. Raymond Zhong’s ominously titled “The Coming California Megastorm” subtly references Kathryn Schulz’s wavemaking 2015 New Yorker feature, “The Really Big One” which forecasts an inevitable earthquake that will destroy a massive portion of the coastal Northwest. I’d read Schulz’s article when it came out—still one of my favorite longform pieces to date—and felt a drop of dread in my gut. Now, apparently, we should also be worried about a plume of water vapor that will form over the Pacific and be carried by atmospheric currents to unload on California.
Zhong writes,
This vapor plume will be enormous, hundreds of miles wide and more than 1,200 miles long, and seething with ferocious winds. It will be carrying so much water that if you converted it all to liquid, its flow would be about 26 times what the Mississippi River discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at any given moment.
When this torpedo of moisture reaches California, it will crash into the mountains and be forced upward. This will cool its payload of vapor and kick off weeks and waves of rain and snow.
I scrolled through the chilling data visualization that chronicled a month of torrential climate-change fueled rain. Levees and dams will fail. Hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage will result; estimates predict the cost of megastorm damages will be five times that of Hurricane Katrina. The monstrosity of these events is difficult to conceptualize, and even harder to prepare for. Indeed, the barrier between nightmare and reality is thin, and the closest thing I can imagine is the cataract of my dream, a deluge so powerful it crashes over levees and sweeps away life, a flood of biblical proportions.
I’m guilty at times of a common cognitive distortion known as “catastrophizing,” imagining the worst possible outcome that is usually highly improbable, if not impossible. But when preparing for catastrophe becomes our reality, catastrophizing becomes a necessity. Infrastructure designed to keep a storm out makes the threat real and vast and measurable. Build the dams for the most water we can imagine. Build for the longed-for water we can’t bear to imagine. Either way, a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
In some ways, my move to California and my decision to pursue climate journalism magnify the impending natural disasters: I’m diving into what some reporters call the “apocalypse beat,” tuning all the little hairs on my arms to the frequency of climate change-fueled catastrophe. Some disasters are inevitable. But some are not. And it feels motivating to devote time and energy toward ameliorating the worst possible outcomes, with respect to our climate, but also in my life on a much smaller scale.
It’s so paralyzing to feel powerless and so invigorating to feel agency. In the middle of writing this piece, I kept thinking I was smelling burnt toast. My first thought was that I was having a stroke (improbable). My next thought was that our house was burning down (somewhat more probable), and I ran down the stairs to find that my roommate had left a pot of oatmeal on the stove’s gas flame, the grains black, crusted, and smoking.
I was annoyed. Then I laughed. It reminded me of when an ex boyfriend started filling up a tub of water in his kitchen sink, then forgot about it and hopped on a 45 minute call, flooding his apartment as well as the two floors below. Sometimes, when the mishap is so proportionally small, so solvable, I feel a wash of relief.
That relief does not scale up to cataclysmic disasters, which invoke the sweaty fear of my dream. But foreboding can still function constructively to remind me that disaster hasn’t struck yet, therefore our fate is not sealed. As brilliant as Zhong’s reporting is, it left me feeling like there is nothing to be done, that even in California, one of the most progressive states in the country, disaster preparedness is stymied by government inaction. One of my goals as a climate journalist is to demonstrate that direct, accessible actions are possible and worth the effort. We are agents of hope and change, and we don’t have to wait, defenseless for calamity to consume us.
Cataclysmic foreboding also serves as a reality check, tempering my illusion of a paradise that does not exist, here or anywhere. It’s dangerous to believe in the perfect and untouchable when everything and everyone is vulnerable, fallible, flawed. A place or person does not have to be perfect to be worth saving. Each of us, after all, is a whirling catastrophe: burning oatmeal, flooding basements, loving too hard and too much and too late, believing in things that don’t exist. And things that do.
Fortnightly Faves
This fabulous essay, “Scenes from an Open Marriage” by Jean Garnett for The Paris Review. I was so affected by this piece I went down a Jean Garnett rabbit hole and also loved this essay on envy and being a twin for The Yale Review (and if you read the second one, here’s a CW of ED behaviors because I was surprised by them in the piece!).
This piece by Stephanie Murray for The Atlantic tackling why people are so weird about pain in childbirth. I remember when I read Robbie Davis-Floyd’s Birth as an American Rite of Passage in my college “Freshwoman seminar” and it radicalized me, and I liked that Murray’s piece had some of the same flavor.
This interview with Phoebe Bridgers and Matt Berninger from several years ago which I read last week when I was feeling sad and was only listening to old Phoebe songs all day. I really like hearing artists talk about their lyrics and what they mean—it feels like being on the inside of their heads and their creative processes, plus I just like to know what each specific line means. I’m nosy!
This YouTube explainer on the evolution of architecture styles in San Francisco. I went into SF several times last week and a friend kept pointing out all these different styles and explaining to me when and why they changed; if you’re curious, this video summarizes the major shifts and it’s less than five minutes long.
Fascinating read in The Ringer on how moral panics emerge, using the case study of those early aughts “jelly bracelets” that were outlawed in every school for fear each color corresponded to illicit sex acts.
One of my favorite King Princess songs on the new album, which is very worth a front-to-back listen (the way God intended).
I didn't know you were specializing in climate journalism - what a good choice - and I loved this piece.
“The other night, a torrent of water flooded through a valley in my subconscious.” Hopeful flirting with disaster.
Thanks for a great list of fave links ❤️