Scribbles & Munch

       This morning I awoke to see fast-falling tufts of snow. There was a thin carpet on the roofs and lawns, white lines hugging the telephone wires draped just across the street. I knew instantly, without even looking out the window, that it had been snowing, because of the special shade of burnt tangerine light that was visible between my curtains. Everyone who's seen snow in the city knows this: the crystals amplify the rust-colored glow of the street lamps, until the world is aglow with a special hue, ironically warm in color to compliment the chilly weather. As I prepared breakfast, I watched the windows as the sun began to rise. There was no way to see it past the thick cover of cloud, of course, but I knew it was happening because of the change in the light: the orange abruptly faded, giving way to a hundred variations of blue. Every contour, line, and shadow took on this shade on the opposite side of the color wheel. It's as though, during sunrise, snow plays out a love song to every lake, river, and sea that it has known. It dances blue through the world, then lets the color drain away to the white and grey tones of a snowy morning. Such commonplace magic.
      Most midwesterners I've met are so used to snow they fail to see the magic in it--and by the end of winter, I will share their sentiments. But then over the summer I'll forget again. The snow today especially made me happy because it closely resembles the snow we get back home, in the Portland/Seattle stretch of the west coast. Back there, snow is fluffy, wet, and clings, so that every barren twig and branch gets coasted in puffy whiteness. I was astonished last winter here in Ohio to find that we could get upwards of six inches of snow in 24 hours, and almost zero would cling to the trees. It blows around like cold sand; who knew that water could be so dry?
      Of course my husband immediately had to make an "Interstellar" reference.* There's an ice world in the film that does a great job of portraying how unforgiving "below freezing" can really be. It also does a wonderful job of showing how unforgiving the earth can be, under the right conditions. If you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm not spoiling anything when I mention that the very beginning has documentary-like clips of older people recalling terrible dust storms; in the film, these horrific dust storms are making earth increasingly uninhabitable. Well my husband discovered that those really ARE documentary clips! They're from Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl,"** a four hour documentary about one of the most terrifying and dramatic examples of how human hubris can influence climate. So of course I decided to watch it.
      Previously, the whole of my understanding regarding this part of American History can be summed up in one sentence: during the Great Depression a whole section of the mid-west turned into dust, and nothing would grow, and John Steinbeck wrote a famous novel about it that I was forced to read in high school and didn't like at the time because it was long and depressing.
      Here's what I didn't know about the Dust Bowl: it lasted a decade. And it was primarily in a relatively concentrated part of the U.S., focusing around the Oklahoma panhandle. And it was caused by a startling combination of economic, agricultural, political, and environmental factors. And it was much, much worse than anything I had previously imagined (I kind of skimmed "Grapes of Wrath"--see my earlier comment about long and depressing). This documentary is fascinating to me for so many reasons, and I am so grateful to Christopher Nolan for using the Dust Bowl as his template for the "end of the world." Hollywood has done nuclear explosions, it's done meteor crashes, it's done pandemics, it's done war, it's done global warming, and it's done pollution. But here is a real catastrophe that we've already tasted, right on the edge of living memory. And it is so timely, to recall this now.

      As a writer, this piece of "Interstellar" really impressed me as how fiction can be such a powerful vehicle for reintroducing history. The human race is capable of learning from its past--but only if it remembers. I wish more artists would do this. It certainly has cemented my interest in keeping my stories - however far removed from reality - firmly rooted in well-researched history, whether it's the brand of tea being served or the building of the Panama canal.



*If you haven't seen the movie yet, do so. Like, today. You're online, so look up the movie times and see when it's playing. Then go. Seriously. It's really, really good. I can't think of a single person I know who wouldn't like this movie for one reason or another.

**You should watch this too. Break it up into four one-hour chunks, and make sure you have a glass of water with you--your mouth is going to feel dry.