Early September brought Seattle what were to be some of the hottest days of the summer. For weeks, people had been turning on fans, escaping to cooler places to spend the day, buying out air conditioners, which most of the city didn’t own. I cowered in my room with an AC unit on loan from a friend lodged in the window, only going out walking when the sun had set.
That week, Eastern Washington was burning. It does that every summer. But this year, a lot of Eastern Washington was burning. Say it with me – 2017 was one of the worst fire years on record. That week, the ash from the fires drifted over Seattle. You smelled smoke everywhere in the city. The sky was gray. At sunrise and sunset, the sun was blood-red. One day, gray ash drifted down from the sky, the exact size of snowflakes. It dusted the cars and kept falling through the afternoon.
That day, people said the weather was downright apocalyptic. They weren’t entirely wrong.
Many people aren’t clear on what exactly a nuclear winter is. The mechanic is straightforward. When cities burn in the extreme heat of a nuclear blast – and we do mean cities, plural, most nuclear exchange scenarios involve multiple strikes for strategic reasons – they turn into soot, and the soot floats up. If enough ash from burned cities reaches the stratosphere, the upper layer of the atmosphere, it stays there for a long time. The ash clouds blot out the sun, cool the earth, and choke off the growth of crops. Within weeks, agriculture grinds to a halt.
There’s a lot of uncertainty over nuclear winter. But by one estimate, the detonation of less than 1% of the world’s nuclear arsenal – a fairly small war – could drop the temperatures by five degrees Celsius, and warm up slowly again over twenty years. The ozone layer would thin. Less rain would fall. Two billion people would starve.
On Tuesday and Wednesday that week, the temperature was predicted to reach over 100 degrees. It didn’t. The particulates in the air blocked enough of the sun’s heat that it barely hit the 90’s. Pedestrians didn’t quite breathe easier, but did sweat less. Our own tiny, toy model taste of a nuclear apocalypse.
I’d been feeling strange for the last few weeks, unrelatedly, and sitting at my desk for hours, my mind did a lot of wandering. I hoped things would be looking up – I’d just gotten back from an exciting conference with good friends, and also from seeing the solar eclipse.
I’d made the pilgrimage with friends. We drove for hours, east across the mountains the week before they burned. We crossed the Colombia River into Oregon, and finally, drove up a winding dirt road to a wide clearing with a small pond. I studied for the GRE in the shadows of dry pines. We played tug-of-war with the crayfish and watched the mayflies dance above the pond. The morning of, the sun climbed in the sky, and I had never appreciated how invisible the new moon is, or how much light the sun puts out – even when it was half-gone, we still had to peer through black plastic glasses to confirm that something had changed. But soon, it became impossible not to notice.
I kept thinking about what state I would have been thrown into if I hadn’t known the mechanism of an eclipse – how deep the pits of my spiritual terror could go. Whether it would be limited by biology or belief. As it is, it was only sort of spiritually terrifying, in a good way. The part of my brain that knew what was happening had spread that knowledge to all the other parts well, so I could run around in excitement and really appreciate the chill in the air, the eerie distortion of shadows into slivers, and finally, the moon sealing off the sun.
The solar corona.
The sunset-colored horizon all around the rim of the sky.
Stars at midday.
We left after the daylight returned, but while the moon was still easing away, eager to beat the crowds back to the city. I thought about the mayflies in the pond, and their brief lives – the only adults in hundreds of generations to see the sun, see the stars, and then see the sun again.
I thought something might shake loose in my brain. Things should have been looking up, but the adventures had scarcely touched the inertia. Oh, right, I had also been thinking a lot about the end of the world.
I wonder about the mental health of people who work in existential risk. I think it must vary. I know people who are terrified on a very emotional and immediate level, and I know people who clearly believe it’s bad but don’t get anxious over it, and aren’t inclined to start. I can’t blame them. I used to be more of the former, and now I’m not sure if it’s eased up or if I’m just not thinking about things that viscerally scare me anymore. I’m not sure the existential terror can tip you towards something you weren’t predisposed to. In my case, I don’t think the mental fog was from it. But the backdrop of existential horror certainly lent it an interesting flavor.
It’s late October now. I’ve pulled out the flannel and the space heater and the second blanket for the bed. When I went jogging, my hands got numb. I don’t mind – I like autumn, I like the descent into winter, heralded by rain and red leaves and darkness, and the trappings of horror and then of the harvest. Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall. The seasons have a comforting rhyme to them.
That strange inertia hasn’t quite lifted, but I’m working on it. Meanwhile, the world continues to cant sideways. When we arranged the Stanislav Petrov day party in Seattle this year, to celebrate the day a single man decided not to start World War 3, I wondered if we should ease up on the “nuclear war is a terrifying prospect” theme we had laid on last year. I thought that had probably been on people’s minds already.
So geopolitical tensions are rising, and have been rising. The hemisphere gets colder. Not quite out of nostalgia, my mind keeps flickering back to last month, to not-quite-a-hundred-degrees Seattle, to the red sun.
There’s a beautiful quote from Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” That Tuesday, like the momentary pass of the moon over the sun in mid-day, in the height of summer, I saw the shadow of a nuclear winter.
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