The End Of The World
It isn't always where or when or what you think it is.
We fled in the middle of the night in our pajamas.
We might have been more prepared, but we weren’t. The Eaton Fire was only a couple of miles away and the Santa Anas were blowing hard, but still. We hung onto denial. The winds are blowing the other way, Kyle said. It won’t come in this direction. In any case, we didn’t have anywhere to go. It felt too overwhelming to even consider, an impossible thing to contemplate even as the power went out around us and left us in the dark.
We crowded onto the sectional in the living room, clutching our flashlights. We whispered about what we might do, if we had to, but we also reassured ourselves: we wouldn’t have to do anything, would we? The fire wouldn’t come this way. It just wouldn’t, how could it, and in any case the wind was blowing the other way. We told ourselves that the wind was blowing the other way. We fell asleep right there on the couch, believing that with all our hearts.
I’ve lost homes to fire before. The first time was when I was about six years old, and we lived on a street called Dogwood Crescent; some loose wiring in our kitchen caught fire in the middle of the night and set everything ablaze. I was the one who woke up and called out, waking my parents and allowing us to escape onto the roof outside our bedrooms. In my memory we jumped from the roof together, hand in hand, sailing safely into the sky like the Darling children in Peter Pan, carried by pixie dust before settling gently onto the ground, but then I also told my parents that Jesus had woken me up, and of course it didn’t happen that way. There was dust and grease and smoke and firefighters carrying us sobbing down ladders into a crowd of gawking neighbors. Our home burned to the ground; so did the dogwood tree in our back yard.
The second time it happened, I was twelve; our camper van exploded in front of our rural home in northern British Columbia the night before we were set to leave on a two-week camping trip. It burned the whole front half of the house clean off, leaving it looking like a nightmare Barbie Dream House, charred and black but open for play. By some miracle we were outside at the time, away from the blast, down at the end of the drive talking to a neighbor about our trip; we were going to be driving south to the Okanagan, as far as Osoyoos, where we’d swim and sunbathe and roast marshmallows and look at the stars. I remember the sound of the blast, I remember us rushing toward the house and seeing everything in flames, I remember my mom bent over the grass, crying and vomiting and then yelling for someone to check on the goats.
In both cases we lost everything. After the first, we recovered. After the second, we didn’t. It was the beginning of the end of many things for our family. You go on, but you go on feeling stalked by disaster, and when you feel stalked by disaster it wears down your nerves and everything feels harder. You go on, but you aren’t the same.
When the alarms went off the other week, it was barely 3:30am. We didn’t have to look at our phones to know what they meant; the sky outside was red, there was a roar in the distance, sirens blared outside. We sprung to our feet, hearts racing, trying to remain calm. The power was still out, so we fumbled around in the dark; we whispered, as though the fire might hear us and find us more quickly, a robber in the night. Grab a sweater, I said to Jasper. And maybe some of your treasures, just in case.
We’re coming back though, right?
Yes, of course, probably. I hope so. It’s just in case.
I held a flashlight between my teeth as I went through my office, moving things around my desk, asking myself, what are my treasures? Laptop, journals, an old birthday card from my mom. From my altar I grabbed crystals and sage and photos, a small velvet bag, a carving made by my dad. My mom’s jewelry, her old recipe box. I heard things dropping on the floor and told myself that they were things that wanted to stay. It was a sign, I told myself. You can leave things behind. You’ll come back. I heard the fire outside, demanding that we leave. I grabbed some sweaters that were sitting in a thrift shop bag by the door and left, only to return moments later to grab my parents’ ashes. Then we chased down cats, shoved them into cardboard boxes in the truck, and drove off into the night. We didn’t know where we were going, only that we had no choice but to leave.
We ended up driving out to the desert, where we have a modest cabin that’s currently uninhabitable because it’s been stripped to the studs as part of a stalled renovation. No water, no heat, no flooring, nothing at all beyond some stray tools and a refrigerator, which you would think would disqualify it as an evacuation landing spot. But we have three cats and one large dog and there aren’t a lot of places that you can run to in the middle of the night while dragging behind a small zoo, and above all else it was a place where we wouldn’t have to call ahead, where we wouldn’t have to wake someone and say the thing out loud — we’re in danger, we had to leave, we need somewhere to stay.
So the cabin it was, and it was as cramped and dusty and dark and cold as expected and on the first day one of our cats caught a lizard inside and placed it neatly in her food dish as if to say, look, look, we can survive here. It was full-on survivalist camp-out conditions but it was also exactly what we needed: a quiet place of our own, at the end of the world, a reminder that if we lost everything, it would be terrible, but it wouldn’t be the end of all worlds. There would still be this one, barren and dirty and derelict but, like all reno projects, full of potential. And there would be other worlds to come, expansions of this one, maybe, or brand new ones, crafted out of love and persistence. You could make this place beautiful, the poem goes. Maybe this shithole is all that you have left, but still: this place could be beautiful.
Later on I would realize that I hadn’t grabbed pants, which is also the thing I remember most from the immediate aftermath of our house on Dogwood Crescent burning down: the tragedy of not having your own clean clothes. I’d been wearing a nightgown when we escaped that particular fire; the family friends who took us in had boys my age, and they offered up their clothes, which was generous but also terrible because I was six and I had short hair and I didn’t want to look like a boy. I had wanted to just keep wearing my nightgown but my parents made me accept the rust-colored Wrangler corduroys and Snoopy t-shirt and I can remember crying angry tears as I put them on. I knew that it was wrong but I couldn’t make myself be grateful for the charity pants. They were an insult after the injury of the fire, a reminder that we had lost everything and were no longer ourselves, that we were now defined by our loss, by the things that we no longer had. Devastation underscored by ugly Wrangler cords.
You’d think I’d have learned from that experience, but I didn’t; this time, I rushed out the door in ratty sweatpants and a tired (but cherished) Taylor Swift sweatshirt and somehow forgot to grab any clothes other than the three sweaters in the thrift store bag. I mentioned this in a text to a friend the following day, when she messaged to see whether we’d been evacuated and how we were. Yes, I said, and not well. It had been horrible, terrible, and I’d left behind so many things. I saved a bunch of crystals but I left behind a magic mushroom chocolate bar that I was saving and also I forgot to grab a change of pants. You can be grateful to have saved things that were irreplaceable and still be mad at yourself for not being practical, for not thinking about the things that would make you feel normal. The mushroom bar wouldn’t make me feel normal but it was hard to come by and I’d been saving it for just the right moment and now I was living in a world where magic mushroom moments just might not matter anymore, and I didn’t have a change of pants.
But what is normal, really? I wore those ratty sweatpants for almost a week but it’s not like I’d never done that before. When Trump won the second time I wore pajama pants and a Wild Feminist sweatshirt and stayed inside eating cookies for days. When my mom died I put on one of her old sundresses and didn’t take it off until it needed to be washed, and even then I just swapped it out for a different one. I still think about how badly I wanted to just keep wearing my trauma nightgown when I was six. Sometimes wrapping yourself in what’s familiar is the most normal thing that you can do. Sometimes hanging onto what you know is what keeps you sane. Staying sane is how you stay ready to navigate whatever the new normal is when worlds are ending, or whatever you call it when everything changes everywhere all at once.
During the pandemic I taught an online course called Women’s Work, which was basically about witchcraft and capitalism and the ways that women’s modes and practices of sharing wisdom have historically been marginalized and disparaged, and about how reconnecting to those practices can be a means of liberation and survival. I talked a lot in that course about how the word apocalypse from the ancient Greek1 doesn’t actually mean destruction, but rather, revealing — as in, revealing things that have been hidden — and about how women’s wisdom has for so long been associated with cycles of concealing and revealing, descent and reemergence, death and rebirth. Destruction and creation. Eucalyptus is a feminine plant because its very name, so close to the word apocalypse, means to conceal;2 it’s known for being flammable, but also for releasing its heat-protected seeds after fires. It’s part of the myrtle family, which also includes primroses and pomegranates, long associated with Aphrodite. Love is rooted in the dark; love brings rebirth; love always involves revelation.
But revelation is often destructive, and destruction is almost always revealing — when everything starts burning you discover what you really care about. You learn important things: what you will reach to take with you when you start running, what you will promise to return to or to rebuild or to build anew, what seeds you will scatter when the destruction subsides. Those are mostly not material things. Those are things like friendship, family, community, hope. Those are things that we knit together with heart magic and hold onto with heart magic and protect with heart magic. Things that fire can’t burn. Capitalism and patriarchy tell us that those things don’t count if they’re not contained within houses and held together with money and resources, which is just not true, but — but — it’s also not not true, inasmuch as we need things to live and it’s sometimes easier to love your family if you’ve had a bath, and even more so if you have clean slippers and a change of pants. Houses are not just wood and stone and mortgages and lease agreements: they are the spaces of our protection and safety. They contain lifeworlds, the stuff of our lived existence.
Democracy is also a house, a lifeworld. We can wax poetic about how we have all the magic that we need to fight for the spirit of democracy and about how democracy lives in our hearts and that if democracy burns to the ground we can rebuild it but that doesn’t help much when we’re standing in our pajamas in the middle of the fire, when all we want is for the fire to stop, just stop, before everything is lost. It’s not like we keep the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a fireproof safe that we know will survive intact. We can’t just shove them in a bag and run. We can say (as I did in an unhinged text to another friend), homies are where the heart is, but we are not, in fact, all homies here and democracy isn’t family and friendship, it’s a flammable structure and it’s not insured and there’s no guarantee that we can rebuild it if it burns to the ground. And maybe that sounds over-dramatic but you should never apologize for being over-dramatic when there’s a fire on the horizon and you can’t tell which way the wind is blowing.
Anyway. At the end of the world, in an apocalypse real or imagined, you end up with a lot of unanswerable questions. What is home, what is safety, what is peace, what is security, what does it mean to carry both fear and hope on your back, what do you reach for when it feels like everything is about to burn down? What direction is the wind blowing, and do I have a change of pants? If I end up with nothing but some crystals, some cookie recipes, a Taylor Swift sweatshirt, and a community of caring human hearts, will I be okay? Okay might mean something entirely different at the end of the world, but that’s what we prepare for, I guess.
So that’s what we cling to. Whatever happens, we could be okay. And we could make okay beautiful.
Apo (un) kaluptein (to cover): uncover or reveal.
Eu (well) kaluptos (covered); the ‘covering’ refers to the unopened eucalyptus flower, which lives inside a protective cap until it begins to bloom. Eucalyptus trees are highly flammable, but also highly fire-adaptive, because their seed pods are heat resistant; the trees release an abundance of seeds during fire events.
A wonderful read. Beautifully written and so personal.
Catherine, your writing always get me right in the truest place. ❤️❤️❤️