J. A. Bernstein
Before Dusk
Located along the shores of Lake Michigan, just west of Stevensville, set back from the rushing whir of I-94, the Cook Nuclear Plant, and the congestion of a Cracker Barrel lot, the woody hills of Grand Mere State Park feel like an oasis of sorts. Entering their leafy trailhead, passing through a curtain of basswood and oak, one has the sense of stepping backward in time, of entering a prehistoric era, where dinosaurs roam.
Indeed, our son, who’s five, is enthralled by the fronds of tailed bracken fern, which, we remind him, predate the dinosaurs. Our younger daughter, who’s seven, races ahead to the dunes, having kicked off her sandals. A few mosquito bites line her tan shins. She has one purpose in life now: to ascend the sweeping hill, and to do so ahead of her older sister, who is nine.
“No fair,” says the older one, having also ditched her sandals midstride.
The air here feels fresh, balmy, and gray. A soft mist trickles down from the pines. It’s surprisingly overcast this afternoon, and a light rain will soon fall. Our kids don’t care, scrambling past the sea oats and soapweed, the reed canary grass blooms, the looping knots of poke berries. A few warblers tilt south, and in the distance, beyond a gauzy pond, where waterlilies glisten in mist, a deep wailing sound echoes. Possibly a sandhill crane.
Above us, a sandstorm churns on the ridge, arms and heels flapping. The nine-year-old has won.
We’re visiting my parents this week in southwestern Michigan, having escaped the heat of Mississippi in July. As a child, I used to sled here on the weekends, and the snow—the huge mounds of it that fell—felt more or less permanent, blanketing the dunes from mid-December until March. It was always an anomaly, I remember, to see patches of sand, which dragged down our Flexible Flyer and might, in retrospect, have saved a couple lives. Even last winter, when we went sledding here again, I underestimated one of the slopes, and my older daughter, with whom I share a toboggan, did a headlong sail through the air, remaining airborne for a good several seconds before we crashed. Toppling over, the sled’s rim caught her cheek, slicing a gash and producing several ounces of blood. My daughter would turn out to be fine, though we will never be allowed to go sledding here again.
This evening, a quiet dusk gathers, and a narrow rain falls. I stop for a moment to inspect the purple milkweeds, which sprout in the sand. Their crinkly green leaves are so resplendent to the touch, as if birthed by magic, protruding through the crystalline grains. A spindly caterpillar wends its way down a long stem, one of the few monarchs left, we’d suppose, and I pray that my children don’t stomp it as they pass.
Presently they’re thundering down a far slope, and my wife is warning them to be careful.
My youngest daughter, heedless, soon tumbles to her face. Huge cries resound, and when my wife shrewdly suggests that it’s time to go home, the cries fade, giving way to a race up the hill.
Nowhere in this world is more majestic than this place, more removed from human time, and yet more endemically part of it.
My wife, who is a climate scientist in Mississippi, is not by her nature political or outspoken. Almost all of her work involves numbers—huge swaths of data—which she codes and processes on supercomputers. The bulk of her research involves modeling the Earth’s climate under varying conditions and simulating the results. In short, she, like the hundreds of other climate modelers around the world—and there actually aren’t that many of them, when you stop to consider the stakes—is trying to determine what impacts humans have on the earth, sea, and air. It’s all enormously complicated and difficult to parse. And yet she is certain, as is nearly every other practicing scientist in her field, that this is our very last chance to prevent the worst effects of climate change, assuming it isn’t already too late.
Recently, she explained to me how almost no coastal areas will be inhabitable in future years, including those along this lake. Chicago, about ninety miles west, will have to contend with constant flooding, and other areas, such as this pristine region, with its tall grassy dunes and wood hills, will suffer from crippling erosion; to a large extent it already has, with many of its beaches washed out.
One thinks of dinosaurs, and how massively they roamed here, and how confident they must have felt in their steps. Or one imagines the Potawatomi, the Miami, all the others who encamped on this land, only to find themselves vanquished or displaced.
My wife kneels beside a patch of wild bergamot and smells its thin, lavender buds. Three days ago, when I told her that a senator from West Virginia had killed the president’s proposed climate legislation (later, he’d relent), she looked at me, then returned to folding laundry on the bed. She was unsurprised by this, since she, an Israeli, regards most Americans as astonishing in their indifference to the earth. She simply doesn’t understand—and never has—how addressing climate change could be a political matter. Indeed, few people around the world regard it as such, and it is only a handful of folks—primarily in the richest states, including the U.S.—that seem not to grasp the cataclysm gripping the earth. That these same people have mostly caused the earth’s ruin also isn’t lost on her, but again, she isn’t one to make pronouncements or complain.
And yet I see it here, in the way she smells the buds, carefully, effervescently touching them, as if these could be the last.
Last September, as Biden’s proposed climate legislation took shape, she, at my urging, published a newspaper op-ed warning that failing to act on climate change now would come with irreversible harm, as the latest IPCC report indicated. A week later she received a letter in her campus mailbox. The envelope, which bore a made-up return address, contained a picture of a bleeding cross. Her reaction then, too, wasn’t so much surprise as much as confusion, a kind of bewilderment that anyone would fail to understand what the earth is about to endure, or, indeed, endures now.
Last August, our own home suffered damage at the hands of Hurricane Ida, which lassoed our fence. Thankfully, no one in our family was harmed. As usual, we huddled in our bathroom, the kids in their bicycle helmets, crouched down in the tub, a few sofa cushions propped along the rim. We had heard the howling—the colossal, evil winds—and we had wondered then, as we do today, what others who endure this must feel, if they really doubt the effects of climate change, or if they see this as natural. We honestly don’t know.
Tonight, as we stumble home from Grand Mere, my youngest daughter cradling her ankle, which she claims to have hurt—this will prove a good excuse for my carrying her, as always—and an amber sun sets, like a beacon through the trees, igniting a black canopy of oaks, I’ll ask myself how we, alone among the generations, among the eons of men, could witness and be responsible for the destruction of the human race, as seems increasingly possible; how my kids will likely be the last ones to race down these dunes; how the warblers and cormorants, who whelp, shriek, and groan, know what great end lays in sight.
I want to tell my children that everything will be okay. And I know that my wife wants this, too. It’s why she does what she does, laboring every day in the face of common hate. Yet, we also know what the projections entail: the acidifying oceans, the icemelt, the widespread extinctions, the denudement of the soil, the choking air. We know that there can be no escaping this now without a major change in our ways. We’re just hoping that it isn’t too late.