Book Two: Last

Three Kinds of Aftermath 

I’ve never seen so much destruction. Not in person. Walking through the sand where a highway once ran, to my left there’s a speedboat perched atop a 7-Eleven that’s been ripped in half; to my right, a field of rubble where a row of oceanside housing once stood. Two-story stilt homes, so I’m told, flattened without exception. Framing and roofing and appliances all jumbled together, half a staircase upside-down in a jacuzzi, a telephone pole protruding through the shattered windscreen of a Bronco. It looks like some great god took the world in her hands and shook it. It looks like the end of the world has come and gone. 

Almost. Except, we have been spared. Left behind to bear witness. To salvage what remains. And, in my case, to make this report. To tell you what we found when we emerged from the house where we were sheltering, the morning after Hurricane Orville made landfall on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the two hundred mile-long string of barrier islands that hugs the northern half of the state. 

Is that what I’m here for? 

I am—or at least I have been for the better part of my life—a journalist. A profile writer, I am in the habit of clarifying quickly, lest anyone get the wrong idea and picture me embedded in Fallujah or rendezvousing with some secret source in a dark parking lot, exposing corruption and abuse, holding the powerful to account. I’ve never taken such chances, nor achieved such results. Never, until now, put my life on the line for a story. Nevertheless, I have practiced the art and made my living at the trade for twenty-four years.

But I didn’t come here on assignment. This isn’t the story I was supposed to be telling you. I walked away from that one like my husband walked away from me: with love and respect, maybe wishing I didn’t have to, but going because some sense inside me screamed that I’d be dying if I didn’t. 

Noah, that’s his name, my soon-to-be-ex-husband. I might as well tell you now because, though I have tried to write this story without mentioning it, without mentioning him, I can’t. The disillusion of our marriage and my journey to the Outer Banks are too entwined. I am unable to explain one without the other. 

For another type of essayist—the memoirist, the professional confessor—this would be a matter of course, wouldn’t call for any preface. But I am not that kind of girl. I’ve never seen myself as a subject. Rather, I have used my subjectivity as a tool, a lens, a means of framing others, inevitably coloring them, distorting them in the process, but attempting to present you, dear reader, with an honest portrait of their lives. Aspiring to come as close as I might to Emerson’s ideal of the transparent eyeball. 

But I am having to rethink everything now.

I didn’t expect it. Convention would suggest that the dissolution of a marriage might well bring about such a period of questioning (go ahead, call it a crisis). But the way Noah and I loved one another, like the way we arranged our marriage, was not conventional. It wasn’t covetous; it was open in every sense—making space for other sexual partners, yes, but above all prioritizing the lines of communication between us. The atmosphere of our partnership was one of abundance, of permission, of support. We never promised “til death do us part,” never assumed eternity was requisite to sanctify our love. Our vows were to be true to ourselves and honest with each other. This was our highest commandment, to which we were faithful until the end. 

So, I understood the day might come, as it did, when Noah would come to me and say, I have to leave you to follow my heart. But this did not prepare me for the reality of hearing those words. Hearing and then having to live by them. 

I was just as unprepared for the reality of a hurricane. Disaster footage has become a commonplace. We’ve all watched the network TV weatherman in his rain gear shouting into a microphone as palm trees bend and sign posts rattle. We’ve seen the dizzying drone shots of flooding stretching through whole neighborhoods, turning streets to rivers and houses to islands. We’ve scrolled through iPhone footage on social media of someone’s neighbor’s house being carried away as onlookers gasp expletives. The imagery is so ubiquitous, I’d grown numb to it, barely batting an eye at wreckage that once took my breath away. 

But let me assure you, it is something else to stand in the midst of the destruction. To smell it. Not twenty-four hours after Orville’s eye made landfall on Cape Hatteras, the Outer Banks’ southeastern extreme, fifty miles south of us, and already and in spite of the gentle breeze blowing in off the Atlantic the air is thick with a noxious odor unlike any I have smelled before, part chemical and part biological, the smell of rot and mold and mildew; the smell of sulfur and oil; the smell of sewage. 

“And that,” says my guide on this grim tour, “is the stench of a decaying empire. That’s the perfume of Western Civilization nearing its natural conclusion.” 

My guide, my subject and the reason I stand here amid the wreckage and the stench, Z (pronouns they/them) is an ex-climate activist and one of the founding members of One Point Five Degrees C. A non-profit known for its direct action campaigns, One Point Five got its start in the summer of 2007, with the goal of making climate change a more visible issue in the ’08 election cycle. In the years since, it has expanded to encompass more than four hundred chapters internationally, organizing marches, sit-ins, divestment campaigns and floating blockades from the streets of New York to the ports of Australia. 

It’s One Point Five I was supposed to be writing about. That was the plan, the one Noah and I devised before he realized he wanted to forge the next chapter of his life with someone other. Because, we were not just partners in marriage, he was my editor at The Magazine, in whose venerable pages my profile of the activists was meant to run. 

Our collaboration began long before our employment coincided. He’s been my first and best reader since before we were married; since, a mere month into dating, I showed him a draft of the piece I’d been working on the day that we met, a portrait of the musician John Vanderslice on tour. I’d worked with dozens of editors by then, many talented, a few visionary, whose insights depend and sharpened my storytelling. But with all of them the editorial process felt like a negotiation. With Noah it became an act of co-creation. 

Just as I cannot separate my story of the storm from the story of my divorce, I cannot separate my understanding of my craft from my understanding of our union. There was no distinction between life and work, between love and work, for us. We were always talking about writing. 

It was during one of our meandering brainstorms that we devised the idea for a “Saviors” themed issue of The Magazine, in which the essay on One Point Five was meant to appear. We jointly pitched the concept to The Magazine’s Managing Editor, assorted profiles of individuals and groups attempting to save a variety of people, places and things, which would collectively explore our impulse for salvation. Tricia approved the theme and pointedly slated it to run this September in the lead-up to America’s midterm elections. 

That issue is appearing on news stands even as I write this, without any contribution from me. But that isn’t Noah’s fault. We’d agreed we could still work together, that our professional relationship should continue. Dutifully, I was doing my research. I’d scheduled the requisite interviews. I was resolved that our separation wouldn’t kill the story. 

Z took care of that. A week before I was booked to fly out to New York to meet the five founding members of the group, Z came to the conclusion that they had to walk away—not just from One Point Five, but from activism entirely. 

“It was you who prompted me to quit,” they eventually confessed. “The idea of you. When I imagined trying to sell you on the party line, that time is running out but we still have time; that we can stave off the worst effects and survive… When I imagined that I knew I wouldn’t be able to say it. Those words used to be true. But they’ve become a lie.” 

Z believes that humankind has passed the point of no return. That, because of our long inaction on climate change, our failure to sufficiently reduce fossil fuel emissions, our species’ extinction is assured. 

“Once I allowed myself to know what I believed, after that I had to walk away. It would have killed my soul to stay, to try to pretend it wasn’t so.”

I understood the feeling. I’d been feeling something like it myself, in the months since Noah moved out. In the months I’d been sleepwalking through my life, trying to muster the least bit of interest in what formerly meant so much to me.

As I listened to Z speak about their choice to walk away from the organization around which they’d built their life, when they described the questions they were wrestling with, about how to live honestly, honoring their new understanding of reality, I recognized my confusion in their confusion, felt the upheaval of my life in the upheaval of theirs. And something more: for the first time since Noah’s announcement I remembered what it was to want something. 

Specifically, I wanted to keep talking to Z, to see if our conversation might yield at least a clue as to how I might once more come to feel like I was living. It was just a flash of a feeling, desire—like catching a glimpse of something shimmering far off in a dark forest—but it was the only light of any kind that I had, by which to navigate. 

I wasn’t surprised when Tricia declined my pitch of this alternate essay, profiling Z alone. “The deserter’s tale,” as Z put it, could hardly serve as the get-out-the-vote rallying cry she had envisioned. When she said no I didn’t hesitate to choose the story that spoke to my soul over the job I’d formerly thought I wanted. Like Z, I quit.  

Quite the pair we make, subject and narrator both, two lost souls, cut loose from the lives we’ve taken for granted our whole adulthood, trying to understand what comes next.

“I feel like I’m in free fall,” they told me when we first met in New York City, where Z lives, where we naïvely believed this interview would unfold. 

I nodded, “What does that mean for you?” taking my notes, and tried not to let on how much I could relate. I never meant to tell Z about Noah, like I never meant to tell you about him. I played the part of my former self, still believing I could be her. 

And would I have ever stopped pretending? Doubtless something, some time would have forced my hand, forced me to reckon with the reality that my life had changed, and so now I had to, too. But I was unprepared for the reckoning to come so soon; never dreamed it would come in the form of a Cat Five hurricane. 

Orville’s landfall was nearly historic. It enters the ledgers as, depending whether your metric is internal pressure or wind speed, the third or fourth most powerful storm to collide with the continental United States. It clocked an internal pressure of 912 millibars and wind speeds of 165 miles per hour. Its storm surge topped out at 18 feet, high enough to wash fully across the Banks in places, separating the boot of Hatteras Island from the leg. And, though the highest rainfall occurred inland, where flash flooding caused its own destruction, here on the barrier islands 16 inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours. Nine lives were lost on the Banks alone and an estimated half a billion dollars of damage done.

But we don’t know these facts and figures yet. Standing squarely in the wreckage the morning after the storm, we have no distance from the event. We are simply in it, having the experience. So what if worse has occurred? This destruction feels total, like too much to bear, and too much to bounce back from. 

The word post-apocalyptic comes to mind.

“A strange word, though, isn’t it?” says Z when I voice my thoughts. “Oxymoronic. How could there be anything after the end of the world? It’s an admission, isn’t it? Proof we don’t really believe in the end. Not actually, not a full stop. We’re convinced there will always be something after, something more. The new day, the next horizon. Maybe Heaven or a reincarnation. But not nothing. Never that.” 

“Do you believe in nothing?” I ask, trying, myself, to conceive of it. “Like, as an actual possibility? Do you think it’s achievable? Has there ever been nothing? Or, will there someday be? I mean, maybe we can’t conceive of it because it isn’t possible. Maybe there is always something. Like, after humanity, another species. After the Earth, other planets. After this universe, the next universe. Do you think?” 

I ask, but I will have to wait for my answer, because a shout has gone up, down the beach. We are being summoned. We are not alone here at this not-quite-end-of-the-world. 

All Roads Lead to the OBX

Let’s go back in time, back to the summer of 1984. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was playing on the radio. Ghostbusters was playing in theaters. The first Macintosh personal computer had hit the market. The World’s Fair had come to Louisiana. The Summer Olympics had begun in Los Angeles. Famine was ravaging Ethiopia. And the Cold War was smoldering on. 

In Mobile, Alabama, on the Bay, a world away from most world events, Mary Campbell was pregnant for the third time with the child who would one day christen themself Z. Mary regarded her predicament as a matter of course, an unremarkable occurrence. She was eating Vlasics from the jar in front of the family’s single air conditioning unit, gossiping with her girlfriends on the rotary while kids one and two marched their G.I. Joes through the sand box and tied their neighbor’s Barbies to the train tracks. While her husband, in his office down the hall, wrote the fire and brimstone sermons he would preach, come Sunday. 

“I was born into a world of material chaos and moral certainty, a paradoxical kind of a place, where my greatest fortune was my parents’ divided attention. They would have curtailed me more, if they’d had the time or the energy for it. Instead, more often than not, I was left to my own devices. And when I was left to my own devices, I took shelter in the natural world. That’s where all of it began for me. That’s why I became an activist. I didn’t care about people, not at first. You know, because I hadn’t felt cared for by them. And I certainly never wanted to know anything about politics. But, love compelled me. Love made its demands. If I wanted to protect the Earth, I grew up to understand, I would have to learn to communicate with the species causing it the most harm.” 

Was it merely a coincidence? That same summer, Mary’s youngest sister Linda found herself faced with the same double pink lines that had foretold Z’s arrival. She’d taken the test on her lunch break at Birmingham Savings and Loan, where she was a teller. She burst into tears and then she burst into laughter and then she gave her two week’s notice. 

“It was, I won’t say the best, but it was one of the most important things that ever happened to me.” 

Like Z would come to, Linda had found herself at odds with the culture into which she was born, and in response she had grown, by turns, angry and apathetic, perennially dissatisfied with existence. 

“Back then, I was all anti-this and anti-that. Opposed. Affronted. Disgruntled. It had never occurred to me to consider I could take a positive approach, that I could be living for something. I’d never seen it done! I’d been living like a victim, whose only recourse was to react. But man did that dipstick wake me up. I saw clearly in its threat—or, promise—how I had given away my autonomy, abdicated responsibility for my experience of life. And, by extension, I saw that I could take it back; could become, you know, the author of my story. I was awakened to causality, basically. To the fact that if I wanted a different experience, I had to make different choices.” 

Linda availed herself of the services of the Birmingham Planned Parenthood (“Bless them to eternity.”), loaded her life into her VW Beetle, and drove. “I took it seriously, maybe more seriously than I’d ever taken anything, the decision to end that life. I didn’t think I’d committed murder. But I did feel like a being had sacrificed themself to teach me an essential lesson. And maybe that’s an absurd way to look at it. But I’ll never know, will I? So, that’s how I’ve lived, assuming what I felt was true.”  

Determined, awakened, Linda set out to taste of the fruits of life. The first stop on her “Freedom Tour” was Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she learned to roll a joint and where she learned to meditate. She went next to Fort Collins, Colorado where she discovered yoga and peyote. Sonoma, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Ashville, North Carolina…she sampled of the nation’s counter cultures and tried every substance she was offered. And wherever she went there were animals. She kept bees, raised llamas, adopted every stray that crossed her path.

And at last, in 1997, with two goldens, a terrier, three calicos and the boyfriend who would briefly become her husband, she crossed over the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge onto Roanoke Island, nestled just inland from the outer crescent of the Banks at the approximate midpoint of the chain, where every license plate begins with OBX, and she knew instantly: “I’d come home.” 

“She was a mysterious figure to me in my childhood,” Z told me. “She represented an alternative, and that was an inspiration. But I didn’t really know anything about her. She didn’t visit often. And, anyway, I was preoccupied, trying to survive adolescence as a closeted leftist eco gay in the deep South.”

It wasn’t until the spring of Z’s sophomore year of college that they reconnected. Z had just come out to their parents. “Genderqueer was the term most in vogue at the time, which, to be honest, I still prefer. Nonbinary has always struck me as sort of sterile. But, of course, I’m all for any language that helps someone know who they are. The language was different in my day, and there was less of it. No one was changing their pronouns. Though you can see I was going for something like that with my name. Really, I didn’t so much want a label. The only category I wanted to belong to was the category of uncategorized. Which was the gist of what I tried to tell my parents. I certainly didn’t say gay. I just described how I felt. They heard me out, if silently. And then I told them I was changing my name, and they hung up and didn’t speak to me for the next six years.” 

Linda, on the other hand, phoned them the minute she learned this news from her sister, offering her congratulations and inviting them to spend their summer with her on the Outer Banks. 

By then, by 2005, Linda—who we must henceforth distinguish as Linda B—had gotten sober, split, “80 percent amicably,” from her husband and turned the big blue Victorian they had shared—the same in which we would ride out the hurricane—into the headquarters of the Small Mammal Protection Brigade, the wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit she had founded with the woman who was fast becoming her best friend, another Linda—Linda O. 

While Linda B had been learning to get free on her slow tour of the States, Linda O had been earning her MBA at Duke and training at the Culinary Institute of America. She’d opened a restaurant, The Middle Sister, in Carrboro, earning rave reviews and, three years later, selling it to the biggest hospitality group in the Triangle. “I’m the practical one, I dot the i’s and cross the t’s. B has the vision, I’ve got the follow through.”

“She’s practical, but she’s also a perfectionist,” B made sure I knew. “Everything she does, she does to the highest standard.” 

O moved to the Banks a year after B to open a seafood restaurant, Salty’s, which she ran until 2020, when the pandemic inspired her to retire so she could focus all her energies on the animals. 

The two met in the median of North Croatan Highway, the Banks’ main thoroughfare north of Roanoke Island, now largely subsumed by sand. Approaching from opposite directions, they’d both spotted the opossum, victim of a hit-and-run, who lay unmoving in the sparse grass, and pulled over to see how they could help. 

The rest, as they say, is history. The Brigade now boasts fifty volunteers and takes in around two thousand animals annually, the injured and the orphaned, mostly rabbits, opossums and squirrels, though no creature great or small is turned away. 

Outwardly, the Lindas present as opposites, almost comically so, one tall, one short; one fat, one thin; one Black, one white, but, just as a long and happily married couple might, they speak and move almost as one. 

“We were more at odds when we met,” they told me when we met. 

“We’ve grown together,” said O. At which statement B promptly burst into tears. 

Because, O is dying. She has less than a year to live. She was diagnosed three weeks ago with a glioblastoma, a fact she kept secret from B until the hurricane warning came with an order to evacuate and she decided that she wouldn’t. 

This is the reason we weathered Orville on the Outer Banks. Because Linda O resolved that she wouldn’t leave her home when her life was about to be cut short anyway; resolved that she would stay and be ready to rescue the impacted wildlife the moment the hurricane passed. Her decision created a domino effect: first, Linda B refused to leave her; then, when B called Z to tell them that she loved them, just in case, Z resolved not to let their aunt risk the storm alone. 

These conversations all occurred in the hours after my first interview with Z, a perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal tour of the neighborhood where they lived when they first moved to the city, in One Point Five’s earliest days, which were also Obama’s, back when hope didn’t feel like such an uphill battle. Their aunt called them and then they called me, to apologize for having to cancel every plan we’d made for the coming days. 

“What if I go with you?” I found myself asking. I’d caught sight of that glimmer again. I felt the tug of an imperative. 

“You understand the risk?”

“Of course.”

“That we might die.”

“Of course.” 

Did I really believe it was possible? Or was this another ending of which I couldn’t conceive? Certainly I thought it was unlikely, despite the warnings, despite the evacuation order. But I think: I never made a reasoned assessment of the likelihood, never actually weighed my chances. I only obeyed a compulsion that rendered the facts irrelevant. In other words: I was desperate. 

It’s a long drive from Manhattan to Manteo, nine hours. I pulled out my pen and recorder and we settled in. I’ve ridden with bands and drag queens and authors on tour, with a long haul trucker crossing the continent, with an equine veterinarian making house calls. On the road is a great way to conduct an interview. Maybe it’s because driving distracts one part of the brain, but for some reason, in the environment of the moving motor vehicle, folks tend to let their guards down. 

Z hadn’t been evasive in our first conversation, but I’d felt them measuring their words—as any activist trained in media relations might do. In the car, though, as we drove, they spoke expansively, casually, passionately, about that pivotal summer they lived with the Lindas on the Banks. 

“To be honest, I went in skeptical. Three months with two middle-aged women who spent their days rescuing rabbits and whatnot? Even to me, who’d grown up a pariah for how I saved yellow jackets from our classroom windows, that the teachers wanted to swat…even to me it seemed a bit much. When Linda told me about the Brigade it sounded, well, childish to me.” 

It didn’t take them long to revise their opinion. “I’ve met a lot of remarkable people, doing what I do. What I did. Selfless, tireless, brilliant, compassionate. The best of the best, out there trying to save the world. But I’ve never met anyone I admire more than those women. Better than the best of us, and they don’t get any applause for it. I mean, mostly they get derision. Most people think they’re nuts. Like I did. But, watching them work, seeing them in action that summer, witnessing the way they administer care to every single creature that crosses their paths, I think that was more foundational to my activism than anything.” 

Thus our conversation began in typical journalistic fashion. But the drive was longer than the story of that summer, and the farther South we got, as the cars on our side of the freeway grew sparser, as the traffic on the other side of the median grew more congested with folks fleeing Orville’s path, the reality of what we were doing began to sink in, demanding a different sort of conversation. 

“I know why I am,” they said, “but why are you taking this chance? It can’t just be for a story.” 

Pretense falls away, it turns out, when a hurricane’s headed your way. I told them about Noah. I confessed how rudderless I was. I admitted that this was part of my motivation for wanting to write about them. Behavior I never would have considered appropriate under any other circumstances. But with the possibility of death at the end of our drive, all the rules I’d once held to had flown out the window. By the time we were crossing the last bridge onto Roanoke Island—the same that had served as a threshold for Linda B twenty-nine years ago—I had told them the whole history of our love and its dissolution. 

Inside the Brigade HQ

Neither twenty-four years of journalism nor my divorce have numbed me to the wonder of being invited in, being trusted with a story. The Lindas each embraced me at the door, and from that moment on I felt as cared-for as family. Or, perhaps the more apt comparison: as cared-for as one of the animals they rescue. Of course, I was arriving with B’s sibkid (the gender-neutral alternative to nice and nephew that they employ), but I sensed they would have welcomed me as instantly and as heartily regardless. 

“We have an open door policy,” B told me, which O amended: “Open door, open mind, open heart. That’s the code.” 

The Lindas’ home, an elegant Victorian in mild disrepair, has in every way been given over to its primary function as headquarters of the Small Mammal Protection Brigade. Their kitchen cupboards are chockablock with three types of formula, bone meal, seed and nut mix, and assorted bowls, syringes and rubber nipples, while their closet space has been ceded to a vast store of towels, heating pads, disinfectant and wet wipes. 

The heart of the operation is a room they call The Menagerie. Once a sitting room, it’s been fitted with shelves on every wall, lined with cages of varying sizes, and, on an old dining table, sit the four that are currently occupied. When I arrived the Lindas were tending to two litters of squirrels, one of opossums, and a single rabbit, the last surviving of its litter. 

They whisked me through the HQ on a quick tour, but we had little time for conversation that evening. We had to prepare for the storm. Friends had helped them board up as many windows as possible during the day. We plastered duct tape Xs on the rest, filled the generator, stowed their patio furniture in a garden shed (which Orville would later obliterate), and then set about moving every animal and as many supplies as possible upstairs, to B’s bedroom, in case of flooding. 

I first got to know the women by watching them work, B flitting from task to task as the mood struck her, while O made methodical progress on one job after another—at least until a thunderous headache overtook her and B insisted that she rest. She complied for an hour and then rejoined us, moving more slowly but with resolve. 

We were engaged well past sunset, and though my thoughts had been racing when we arrived, about Noah and Orville and Z, busying my body seemed to have quieted my mind, and so, exhausted I fell asleep, in a guest room now brimming with rehabbing supplies, far more readily than I expect to. 

In the night, the rain began. 

I ate two breakfasts in the Lindas’ home, the morning of the storm and the morning after, a study in contrast. 

The first was an elaborate spread, fit for a photo feature in Southern Living. We had little to do besides care for the animals and so we prepared a feast. Linda O assembled the biscuits and gravy while Linda B tended to the collards and grits. Z scrambled half a dozen eggs to perfection, and I made myself useful as everyone’s sous chef, washing, mincing and measuring as I was bidden. 

Linda O put Elvis’ Aloha from Hawaii on the turntable and we took turns shaking our hips as we cooked. We were putting on a show to distract ourselves from the increasing ferocity outside, trying to drown out the noise of Orville’s approach, trying to drown out our anxiety. It was cheer, but forced, performative, for our own sakes and for each others’. I kept them chatting about Z’s summer on the Banks while we ate, but we washed the dishes in silence, listening to the sounds outside the house. 

The morning after the storm there was no music and no ceremony. Not only had the power gone out, but the Lindas’ generator had been carried away by the storm, and so this time we feasted on cereal and un-toasted bread and jam, our only luxury the orange juice that Z squeezed fresh. The floodwater that had entered the house the day before had by then retreated, but it left behind a film of mud like a second baseboard on the first floor, so we descended only for flatware and glasses. We ate picnic-style on Linda B’s mattress. 

It was, by appearance, the far more desperate scene, but the experience of it was one of tranquil elation, of thrilling calm. We dined on the ecstasy of having been granted a second chance, and how sweet it tasted. Even Linda O, or perhaps especially she, was feeling the effects. Tears brimmed in her eyes as she raised her glass of juice to toast, “Every extra minute we are given.” We spoke and ate slowly, savoring those minutes, knowing that the storm had left us with much to do, and soon enough we would have to set about doing it. But for the length of that meal we were simply and profoundly grateful.  

And what happened in between? We lived five lifetimes. 

We watched, we heard, we felt: increase. Of wind, of rain, of dread. The terror began and it did not abate, though it was mixed with curiosity. What was the inside of a hurricane like? 

It was loud. The wind whistling, the rain pounding, debris flying—which is to say small trees and parts of houses. And the tide was rising as the rain fell and the wind pushed the ocean toward us. By noon we could see water approaching up the driveway. By one p.m., as the eye wall reached Cape Hatteras, making Orville’s landfall official, the sea was lapping at the lowest of the Lindas’ front steps. And it kept climbing. 

At two-thirty we moved to the second story, where we would stay for the remainder of the storm. As the water entered in under the front door, the wind flung limbs of trees about like toys and stripped them bare of leaves and needles. The rain fell sideways, so thick we couldn’t see the neighboring ranch house, the only structure within eyesight of the Lindas’ secluded dwelling. And by the time visibility improved its roof had been pried off as though it were a doll’s house, as though we were indeed nature’s play thing.

The greatest mercy, in the midst of it, was that the wildlife needed feeding. The young eat around the clock, and each littler had their own schedule, so it happened that whenever my anxiety felt unbearable one of the Lindas’ alarms would sound and we would be summoned to B’s bedroom, where we’d moved their cages, to do the honors. 

Young opossums, unable to swallow, require tube-feeding, inserting a slender tube down the length of their esophagus. It’s a technique I was too timid to attempt, but when it was the squirrels’ turn I joined in. Patiently the Lindas explained how to hold a kit sitting upright in one hand and, with the other, slip the rubber nipple-tipped syringe into its mouth, then gradually depress the stopper. 

It’s a practice that requires presence. You’ve got to be responsive to the animal’s drinking style and speed. Depress the syringe too quickly and it will aspirate, too slowly and it will lose interest and stop drinking. It’s a goldilocks situation. There’s a perfect angle at which to hold the syringe, a perfect grip with which to hold the squirrel, a perfect temperature to heat the formula. And, if you are one of the Lindas, a perfect kindness you radiate while you accomplish all of this without any show of effort. 

It was an effort for me, though, holding my full attention. It felt like a meditation. And, in the midst of the storm, it also felt like a lifeline. I thought of a collegiate Z, two decades ago, learning this same technique as they navigated another type of storm, the storm of self-becoming. How it must have grounded them, then, as it did me now. 

The only other respite we had was when Orville’s eye passed overhead. Was that a break? In the weather, it was. I think that nothing I say can capture the strangeness of standing in that circle of calm. We went out onto the Juliet balcony that extends from Linda O’s bedroom, and stood in wonder, in terror, in awe, faced with the scope of the storm. 

The wind was only a light breeze. There was blue sky overhead. And, all around, surrounding us, stretching eight miles into the sky, the eye wall loomed. It was dizzying to see. It felt like a kind of spiritual vertigo, to look from the tranquil blue to the devastation surrounding us. We were surrounded by water like we were surrounded by clouds, and floating by went pieces of people’s lives—a lampshade, a lawn chair, a Barbie Dream House. 

None of us spoke a word as we gazed on that scene. 

And then the winds began again, blasting in from the opposite direction, from the west, and this was when the pine tree, just a trunk by then, but massive, fell on the Lindas’ roof, tearing a hole in its northeast corner, in the room where I’d slept, letting the rain pour into the house. 

The water was still rising then, and for the first time we truly believed that we might die. 

Imagine drowning. We had to imagine it. We discussed strategies for surviving if the house were swept away, using its timber as raft and paddles, trying to steer, if we could, toward anything solid.

Linda O was determined to try to keep the critters’ cages with her in such an event. Linda B said, best to open them, let the babies free, and hope they could find their own way to survive—though who could believe, either way, that they would? 

Privately, Z and I agreed that, if the worst did come to the worst, they would attempt to stay with their aunt, while I would stick with Linda O. Never mind that she was dying. I didn’t consider it. I knew I would give my life, if that’s what it took, to get her through the storm. 

We spoke calmly, the four of us, as we discussed our life and death predicament. We were reasoned and considerate, keeping our fears and our sorrows to ourselves. But beneath the surface they worked on us, and on none so profoundly as Linda O. Privately she fretted until the weight of what she felt grew unbearable. 

We were debating the best way to climb onto the roof when, without warning, she burst into tears. From zero to sixty, she went from dry eyes to positively sobbing, snot and hiccups and all. She slipped from her chair and she fell to her knees before B, hugging her friend’s legs, clinging on until at last she was able to speak. 

“Forgive me!” she pled, and she repeated, “Forgive me!” 

More of what was said then, between those women, I will not record here. They were the most private of sentiments, words spoken in the face of death, between the dearest friends. Linda O was wracked with guilt. Her choice to stay endangered all our lives, and she hated herself for it, regretted that stubborn insistence, wished to go back in time and choose again, choose differently. She felt ashamed, and begged forgiveness—which we all sincerely granted her. 

How strange it was, to be included in this intimate scene. But that’s what a crisis does, or can do: draw us together, make us family. When they wept, I also wept. And when they embraced, I also was embraced.

The Possibility of Nothing

When we were inside the hurricane, the weather that engulfed us felt both infinite and eternal. The future, if we thought of it at all, was rendered hypothetical in the extreme. 

But now, already, it’s a memory, that experience of intensity. Time and space have regained their ordinary dimensions. We have passed through the terror, through the trial, and through the ecstasy, too, that followed—the flood of relief that the flooding Atlantic didn’t claim us. And on the other side of it all we are faced with a new reality, this world of the post-apocalypse, the landscape of Orville’s aftermath. 

A tuft of insulation blows past, like a tumbleweed. Z and I consider the possibility of nothing. And, down the beach, Linda O calls out to us. Linda O, who has ventured out despite the throbbing that’s asserted itself in her head, that will only increasingly be asserting itself, because, “The animals need me.” She’s waving her hands in the air, “Here! Here!” She’s found the first squirrels we will rescue today. 

For now, we are the only humans in sight, the first on the scene in this spot, though as the day lengthens more will arrive as the local, state, national and nonprofit mechanisms of disaster relief—themselves in various states of repair—kick into gear. 

While they do their thing, we will do ours, and by nightfall the Lindas’ storm-ravaged home, the best shelter currently available, will house six dogs, eleven cats, thirty-two squirrels, sixteen possums, four rabbits and one mouse, a temporary safe-haven before volunteers drive them inland to foster homes tomorrow. 

This work, like the work of preparing for the storm, keeps us utterly occupied, and so Z and I don’t make our way back to our speculative conversation until we break for lunch, PB&J’s that we take to eat by Manteo’s topsy-turvy docks to give the Lindas a moment to themselves. 

“I have this instinct,” Z says, looking out at the half-submerged ships, “to go into climate messaging mode. You know? To start talking about how this is a prime example of the worsening of extreme weather we’re going to see as climate change accelerates. Which, it is. But what I used to say next I can’t say anymore: that if we take our sorrow and our rage and turn it into action—if we just act drastically now—we won’t be able to save everything, but we’ll be able to save what matters most.” 

That’s what the old Z would have told me. “What about the new one?” I ask, as the old Ann would, because, though I know she’s a ghost, I have yet to discern her replacement. 

“The new me?” Z says. “Whoever I am now, all I can tell you is the truth. Which is: this is just the beginning, Ann. This, all of this, is next to nothing compared with what’s to come. The future we’ve assured for ourselves is going to make this day feel quaint. Now? An event like this is followed by a period of recovery. This beachfront is going to be rebuilt, and for some amount of time, folks will feel safe here, again. They’ll go blithely about their lives, like they were doing two days ago. But one day we will cross a threshold, and we won’t know when it is until after it’s passed, but there will come a time after which disaster will follow so fast upon disaster that there will be no more recovery. And then we will be living in a constant state of crisis: storms, droughts, floods, heat waves, the rising sea, the slowing ocean currents, and the resulting wars, famines, plagues. Relentless and increasing misery. That’s what awaits us. That’s how we’ve chosen to end our chapter in the history of the universe.” 

Doomerism is the word commonly employed to describe Z’s perspective. “A marketing campaign,” they say, “intending to make those of us speaking the truth seem lunatic and fringe. So that The People don’t rise up and demand the better world they could. So that the powers that be can go on selling us their cars, their hamburgers, their ballistic missiles, their large language models…right up until the end. And it’s been effective, hasn’t it? Playing upon our hopes and our fears. It’s been so effective, even my friends who have all the data points to prove otherwise, who have seen first hand how slow society is to change…even they can’t read what the facts are spelling. Can’t, or won’t.” 

I feel accused by Z’s words, though they aren’t accusing me. Because, as much as I have always believed in climate change, I have never put my life on hold to address it, never taken it so seriously that I’ve done much more than vote the right way, shop local and change out my lightbulbs. Did I think this was sufficient? Some part of me always felt certain someone else would solve the problem. Someone like Z. That the experts and the activists would take care of things. 

Even now, in spite of everything they’ve said, in spite of everything I’ve read, in spite of the landscape now before me—and in spite of the landscape now within, of heartache and confusion—I find myself struggling to believe that there’s really no hope, that time has actually run out. Whether because of capitalist propaganda or something more innate—some human refusal to accept the possibility of nothing—I can’t conceive of humanity’s demise. 

But I try now. I look out at the wreckage around us and I imagine it stretching across the globe, a wasteland of our making. Imagine, for that species of primate that built cities and wrote books, that strove for millennia to understand the workings of the universe from which it emerged, but—for all its insights and inventions—could not overcome its own greed, the actual end of the world. 

Los Angeles Interstitial 

Back in L.A., back in the house I used to share with the man who used to be my husband, I sit down at my desk and take out my notes from North Carolina. Usually, this work feels fun, like trying to solve a puzzle: deciding where to place each piece, each detail, to create the most entertaining and honest portrait. But I’m having a hard time seeing what’s fun about a hurricane that devastates a whole geography and an ex-climate activist who believes that humankind has less than a century left on Earth.

Besides, if Z is right, if we are doomed, why should I be trying to entertain anyone? If Z is right, I have to wonder: what’s the point of journalism, and what’s the point of anything? Why am I still here at my desk typing, typing, typing? (Looks like: trying, trying, trying.) Why, making this tremendous effort to tell a story nobody asked for whose grim conclusion is our extinction? 

Writing has been my life for so long, I don’t know what else to do. I have no better way to try to make sense of these facts. Yet, I am failing to make sense of them. 

In the past, pre-apocalypse, I would have taken my troubles to Noah and we would have talked them through. Invariably, when I got stuck, a dose of his perspective would nudge me free. My work, for the greater part of my career, has been the product of our two minds in dialogue. 

I don’t doubt that if I called him up he would answer and gamely hear me out. I don’t doubt that he would offer some wisdom that would shift my vantage point sufficiently to see me through to a conclusion. But the thought of turning to him now, as he’s busy building his new life, the thought of admitting that I can’t do this work without him, when I have no choice but to live without him, feels worse than the end of the world. 

So, I make a different phone call instead. 

The first profile I ever wrote was for my middle school newspaper, the Barstow Bulletin. I’d been assigned a short blurb on the marching band’s bake sale, but as I made my rounds through the maze of folding tables in the gym I got talking to Mr. Alvarez, father to Mia and Maria, then in eighth grade, a drummer and a majorette. 

As well as the baker of a mean duce de leche cheesecake, Carlos Alvarez happened to be Chief Observer and Telescope Engineer at the Solar Observatory in Big Bear, an hour’s commute south from Barstow. This was the first I’d ever heard of such a job, and as soon as I did I wanted to know more. I peppered him with questions while he doled out slices. And then I asked him if I could see the telescope. I asked if he would let me shadow him at his work. 

That Tuesday in May that I spent at the Observatory remains vivid in my mind, almost perfectly preserved twenty-eight years later. Unforgettable like first love, my first profile, the one that set me on this path, which, like a lover does, felt meant for me.

I never doubted it was, until now. 

And now, plagued by doubt, I call up Mr. Alvarez, ostensibly to ask a scientist what he thinks of Z’s assessment of our odds. But I know that’s just an excuse. I know I am really hoping that by returning to that place, being back where I felt such clarity, I will be able to feel it again. 

We meet in the parking lot, where my mom dropped me off almost three decades ago. Of course Carlos—as he immediately asks me to call him—has grown older, his hair white, his face lined. But more notable are the ways in which he has not changed. He’s still trim and smiling, wearing the same turquoise bolo, and he’s still preternaturally calm, but, as soon as you ask him a question, voluble. 

We fall easily into conversation, like old friends. He asks about my parents, and I his wife and Mia and Maria. We gloss the decades. Inside the observatory, he talks me through all the upgrades they have made, the installation of a new 1.6 meter Goode Solar Telescope and the battery of software and instruments that support it, a litany of acronyms: VIS, NIRIS, FISS, BFI, CYRA, MIRI, WHISPER. 

Since I was last here, the Observatory has undergone a technological metamorphosis. But once again I am more impressed by how its spirit has remained the same: studious yet jovial, much like Carlos himself. 

It puts me at ease, this familiarity. It lulls me, making the possibility of extinction feel distant and indistinct, like a bad dream. Grateful for the relief, I find myself avoiding the questions that brought me here. Can’t we just keep talking forever about the sun’s coronal loops and cryogenic spectrography; about Mia’s big career moves and Maria’s still-growing family? 

It’s Carlos himself who breaks the spell as we climb from the workaday control room into the grander of the telescope’s loft. “So, Ann,” he says, “what brings you back to Big Bear?”  

What did I expect? I think I thought he would choose a side:doom or deliverance. But he doesn’t. Instead, when I have told him about Z and Orville, he pulls out his phone and pulls up a video he’s clearly shared before, an excerpt from a 1981 BBC interview with the late physicist Richard Feynman. Winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, famous for his Caltech lectures on physics and a member of the Manhattan Project, Feynman, here in his early sixties, is seated in front of a large picture window, beyond which flowers sway in the breeze as he speaks. 

He’s been talking about religion and how, in his view, it falls short, fails to account for the scale of the mystery that surrounds us. Instead of trying to nail down an explanation for existence, instead of trying to fit nature into our narrative, he suggests a shift in perspective: 

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things. By being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me. 

I look up from the screen to see Carlos beaming at me, very much like Feynman himself. 

“That’s how you feel?” 

“I can’t claim I’m never frightened. Or quite so comfortable with uncertainty. But, his is the attitude to which I aspire.” 

“How do you get there, though?” I ask. “How do you achieve that kind of equanimity?” 

“I can’t pretend I always do. But, I’d say: look at Feynman. Look how awed he is by the mystery he’s beholding. Probably, the more time you spend in that state of wonder, the less time you’ll find yourself worrying about death.”  

In Search of a Conclusion 

“That’s a beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed,” Z says when I read them Carlos’ quote from my notes. 

It’s three weeks after Orville’s landfall and I’ve come back to the Banks to check in on them and the Lindas and the recovery effort. They’ve moved in with the women, “for as long as they need me,” assuming responsibility for the repair and upkeep of the house to allow B to focus on O’s care. 

They’ve cleared the mud from the first floor, removed and replaced the ruined upholstery, patched the roof until it can be rebuilt. I’m amazed by how much they’ve accomplished in the physical world while I’ve been busily chasing the tail of my thoughts. After they take me on a tour of their improvements, we carry sweating glasses of sweet tea out to the balcony from which we observed Orville’s eye and resume our existential discussion. 

“It’s a good formula,” Z says. “More wonder, less doom. But while you and Mr. Alvarez are out there trying to make peace with uncertainty, I have a different concern. Because, sure, there’s a lot that we don’t know and will never know. How we came to be here, and why, if there is a why. What, if anything, lies on the other side of death. If there ever was or will be nothing. But I think I’m okay with the mysteries, more or less. The paradoxes. The conundrums. Mostly I don’t mind them. In the right mood I can even enjoy them. But what I can’t be okay with, not now, not yet, is certainty.” 

They mean the certainty of our extinction. 

“Right now, most folks are coping with that inevitability by denying it.” They mean folks like me. “But their denial doesn’t make it any less certain. So, for those of us who can admit it, the question becomes: is there any way not to despair in the face of our impending, inglorious and entirely unnecessary demise?” 

“Is there?” I ask. 

I want answers, although I know nobody has them; although the art I admire most resists them. I want to offer you something here, at the end, that makes the threat of our demise more bearable. I want that, too, for my own peace of mind. And, selfishly, I want to understand what I should do next, with my life.  Because, extinction or no, I have to wake up every morning and find a way to spend my day, and I want that way to feel meaningful. 

I’d hoped that working on this essay would be like opening a doorway onto my next chapter, but it seems a lot more like the doorway I have cracked belongs to a cartoon or some sci-fi, opening onto the vastness of empty space, threatening to deposit me somewhere alien and uninhabitable. 

I cannot, in other words, offer you the balm of a tidy conclusion. All I can do is relate to you my experience. 

I timed my return to the OBX to coincide with a performance of the musical Man of La Mancha being staged by the Roanoke Players, a local theater troupe that’s been mounting summer productions on the island since 1976. Their intended run of shows at the Town Theater, slated for the weekend after Orville’s landfall, was postponed for obvious reasons.

The Theater has been condemned. Instead, they are performing outside on the Manteo Green, no longer very green, but at least cleared of debris. The seating is an array of mismatched chairs donated from across town. The low stage was constructed from lumber salvaged from the storm. And admission, by donation, will go to Helping Hands of Roanoke, a local mutual aid network supporting community members to whom disaster aid has not been forthcoming. 

Based on both the life of Miguel de Cervantes and his masterwork Don Quixote, La Mancha opens with the character of Cervantes being thrown into a dungeon by soldiers of the Spanish Inquisition. While he awaits trial with the authorities, his fellow prisoners put him to a trial of their own, threatening to confiscate his possessions if they find him guilty. Among those possessions is the manuscript of Don Quixote, and so, to save it, Cervantes stages a production of the novel’s plot, employing the prisoners as actors: a play within the play. 

One way to describe the plot of that play, and of Don Quixote itself, is to say that it is the story of a lunatic man who retreats from reality into fantasy. Alonso Quijano takes up the mantle of Don Quixote and sallies forth to fight giants and vanquish armies—in reality tilting at windmills and battling a band of muleteers. 

At the inn where he stops for the night (in his mind, a castle), he encounters a prostitute named Aldonza whom he takes to be a fair and virginal lady, rechristening her Dulcinea. And here Quijano/Quixote’s imagination is put to the real test: can his fanciful vision of her make a material difference in her life? Will she come to see herself through his eyes, in spite of her circumstances? 

The musical pulls no punches in representing Aldonza’s reality. Quixote’s fantasies do not prevent her from being raped, as Cervantes’ fiction cannot save him from the Inquisition. The fabric of reality is not altered by his impossible dreaming. 

Or so it seems, nearly to the last. Defeated in “combat” by his niece’s fiancé, Quijano returns home and takes ill. But on his deathbed Aldonza finds him and reminds him of the words he once sang to her: “To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go…” 

Hearing, Quijano remembers. He rises from bed, he joins in the song; he becomes Quixote once more, and dies happy in the thrall of his vision. 

Tonight, the part of Aldonza is being performed by a friend of the Lindas, one of their Brigade volunteers and one of B’s AA sponsees (she has given me permission to say). 

Like Aldonza, Kimberly Lane has not lived an easy life. Abused as a child, and raised in poverty, she’s been in and out of prison, struggled with a few kinds of substance abuse, and so far failed to find a mutually respectful partnership. 

“I feel every word I sing,” she tells me when we talk after the play. 

It is to Kim that the stage belongs, in the end. Quijano/Quixote has received his last rites and the soldiers of the Inquisition have marched Cervantes away to stand trial. At first alone, Kim/Aldonza/Dulcinea begins to sing a reprise of “The Impossible Dream.” At first, she is only repeating Quixote’s words. 

But, as one and then the rest of the ensemble join in, the song evolves, and the “Finale” concludes with new lyrics that carry the theme forward:

To run where the brave dare not go 

Though the goal be forever too far 

To try, though you're wayworn and weary 

To reach the unreachable star 

To reach the unreachable star 

Though you know it's impossibly high 

To live with your heart striving upward 

To a far, unattainable sky! 

A crescendo of feeling, each verse seems to be reaching that much higher toward the unattainable sky, the unreachable star, the impossible dream. The cast link arms and their voices soar and, glancing around the Green, I find I am not the only one with tears in her eyes. 

The sentiment must feel deeply resonant to this audience, just beginning the long journey of rebuilding their lives here on the edge of the continent. 

It seems crazy to me, that they’re going to do it, pour billions into recreating communities destined to be washed away again by the next Orville; that they want to live somewhere so perilous, so precarious. It seems crazy. But then, by Z’s reckoning—which I resist not on the basis of any fact, but only my own desire—no matter where we live, we are all, essentially, building houses on the Outer Banks in an age of hurricanes. Put another way: henceforth, we are all just choosing how to spend the days that remain to us, after the terminal diagnosis.

Linda O’s headaches are coming faster and more devastatingly now. She and B have paired down the number of critters in their care to a single litter of squirrels. B’s primary concern is caring for O. But O wants someone to care for, too. As I load up my rental car the morning after La Mancha she is in the kitchen, mixing up another batch of formula, humming a medley of melodies from the show. 

She’s made peace with her certainty. “At least for today,” she says, laughing. 

And how did she do it? 

“It was what the storm taught me: be fucking grateful for what you’ve got. If I have to die, I’m going to live first.” 

Gratitude. Wonder. An embrace of what remains. She and Carlos make it sound easy. But, like me, Linda B is feeling less sanguine about what the future holds. “I’m grateful,” she tells me when we are alone. “I’m grateful to the ends of the Earth for every minute we’ve had. But I’ll never be able to accept this. Never! My best friend—” She looks away, and her fury gives way, and then she’s crying. “We were supposed to have more time.”