A World Covered in Catsup: Stories from the Time Before. №1.
Kotzebue, Alaska, June 28, 2019.
I.
An hour ago, I was in a plane, aboard a modern-day magic carpet slicing through the clouds. I didn’t get on an airplane until I was 9. We had a school field trip to the airport. We toured the terminal and got to board an actual plane and sit down in the seats and buckle ourselves in. There was a story about another class that had done this. They thought it was just a field trip, but surprise! They were going to Hawaii!
I waited for this, unclear about the procession of events, would there be an announcement. I sat in the giant seat, pulling my belt tight across my lap like we were instructed to do. And then the stewardess made an announcement. It was time to get off the plane and go home.
II.
I didn’t get on a plane that was going anywhere until I was 19. A one-way ticket from Phoenix to Chicago. I sat in the window seat, gob smacked. My travel companion was indifferent, parsimonious with his joy. I had spent so many years looking up at clouds. Reading shapes as if they were tea leaves. And now here I was, sailing above them. How is this possible?
On my second flight was later that same year. I flew from Chicago Montreal to see a friend. Again, I had a window seat. There was a sunset, the clouds infinite and color saturated. As the sunlight slanted into the cabin, I didn’t understand how people could pull down their window shades. How they could be so indifferent! I was the rube, the newbie, barely containing my delight. It was all I could do not to clap and point, to gesture to all those around me, “did you get a load of this!” then dramatically opening up the window shade as if I was about to reveal a salacious centerfold. I didn’t know how something so extraordinary could be so ordinary.
I had to change planes in Toronto, and this was in one of those transition times, where the airline industry was still trying to pretend they cared. Flying was still meant to be special or some sort of celebration. In the terminal, there was a grand piano. A tuxedoed man played Rhapsody in Blue. The piano was so much more grand than the terminal but that was okay. It was perfect because that’s what I felt inside. Rhapsody. I wanted to kiss George Gershwin on the mouth. With permission. On my next flight there was a meal served. A meal served on actual plates with actual silverware and I wasn’t even in business class. Magic.
III.
And still so many years and so many flights later later, so much has changed. There are no pianos in lounges. If meals are served they are in plastic trays, with plastic cutlery, with food that tastes much like the material on which it is served…but still that view. That view, the cloud laced Cinerama, the endless acres of earth quilted in roads by day and lights at night, mountains and oceans. I am in the back of the plane, looking out the tiny window in the galley. I watch as the jet stream casts a shadow and etches a line across and the vast expanse of the Mongolian plateau. Etch-a-sketch on an epic scale. Magic. I realize that I haven’t breathed. My breath. My breath. My breath is caught in my chest, it can’t even make it to my throat because it is all so beautiful can still take my breath away.
IV.
And today, flying over the glacier laden confection of Alaska, there was a moment where the combination of light and clouds, I swear I somehow saw that moment what Michelangelo did before he rendered it on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Here is what I thought of, here is what I keep thinking of. To love the world, to see the world, to travel the world is to play some part in its destruction. All that beauty trammeled beneath billions of carbon footprints.
For a short time, I was an archaeologist. I recently told someone that I left archaeology, in part because of its inherent destruction. To investigate a site, you must destroy it. You dissemble it.
You literally sift through the fine sediment if the past. The past is pulverized by time, compacted to dust, a fine silt buffering the artifacts that survive. Sometimes it leaves a scrawl. Often it is no longer legible just gone.
We breathe those who have gone before us.
V.
I have chosen travel over many things. My suitcase is old, dirty, and exhausted, my passport with abundance of stamped pages is a prized possession. I have been so very lucky to have had the choice.
And I don’t know what to do. How to reconcile with the colossal carbon footprint of flying, leaving behind an incessantly swelling tide of single use plastics, cups, cutlery, food containers.
And yet our economies are enmeshed, so many economies are now enmeshed in accommodating people who want to or need to be somewhere else.
And it’s not just people, its everything else. Even if I didn’t take planes, it is hard to find food, things, the stuff of life, the stuff that doesn’t fly, drive, or float to get to you.
I live in the flight path to O’Hare and at night, all night giant lumbering cargo flights sail overhead. Chicago to Anchorage, Qatar to Chicago, and to and from, and from and to all points. An aerial armada of goods dispensed to the world.
VI.
And today I am here in Kotzebue, Alaska, twenty-six miles from the arctic circle, the circle that is actually an imaginary line, so evocative that one expects it to be real and encased in ice.
I can see the ocean from the window of my hotel. There is no ice. On this seasonably hot day, I can see the iceless ocean from the window of a hotel that that was built on a street that was once not a street but a shore — -for which the street was later named.
Shore Street. Shore Street that once was where the land once raveled to the sea. Shore Street is now a sea wall.
Sea wall. Two incompatible words if ever there were any.
The earlier buildings in town, all crowded at the waterfront as if they were trying to get a good view. In those days the water was really the only way to really get anywhere that wasn’t here. Then came the airstrip. But still, the roads here just end. Petering out into the tundra or the water or they circle back. You leave town, drive past the cemetery, then drive back in an endless loop of coming and going.
And I am here.
Everything that isn’t hunted, or grown, or gathered needs to be brought in, barged in, floated, or flown in. In winter, there is the option of dog sled or snow machine. Every. Last. Thing.
At the grocery story my heart hitches at the sight of dozens of catsup bottles lining the shelf. I used to work in a grocery store, one of my duties was stocking or “facing” the shelves. I took compulsive delight in this task, aligning products in perfect rows, evenly spaced with the labels facing out.
Here. These condiments. This condiment section is a work of art. Jaunty bottles of red and yellow. Catsup, and mustard aligned with military precision, as if the stocker worked with a level and a ruler and carefully placed each on the shelf.
And I thought again, how is this possible? I don’t know how it is that we can figure out how to get catsup, all over the world (or so it seems) but not feed everyone. I am gobsmacked by every decision, every innovation, every abomination, ten trillion inflection points that make it possible to have a fully stocked shelf of condiments in a grocery store high above the Arctic Circle. What if we had to pay what it really cost?
But somehow we can’t save it. The world that is, not catsup.
And everywhere is like this. The novelty of this place makes the obvious readily apparent. Everything that isn’t hunted, or grown, or gathered need to be brought in, barged in, floated, trucked, or flown in. Everywhere is like this.
Our roads all lead back.
We are lying if we think great scorching maneuvers are not required to bring us just about everything we can so easily buy.
Did Nero really fiddle while Rome burned?
To some extent, aren’t we all fiddling?
VII.
Back in my room I stare out at the ocean. If I stand in the middle of my room and look at the window the ocean appears at eye level. Am I above the ocean or below it? A line across the horizon, where sky and sea appear to meet, and you are below it yet somehow not submerged in it. An optic trick presaging what is to come. I think of these communities at the shore, perched on the edge of the continent, ready to be tipped into the ocean.
Am I above the ocean or below it?
You can feel the moment skittering away. Rain falls, glaciers melt, and the water creeps inch-by-inch closer. In some places there is too much water and in others not enough. How is that possible?
And yet I stand there dumbfaced. Part of a a collective flotilla of people white-knuckling it through each day, swiping away at the cavernous terror of what’s next searching for somehows to save things. Maybe butterfly wings can help.
And if I sound maudlin, and dramatic, and tragic it’s because it is and I am. Because I often wonder, what the f*ck I am doing in the world instead of ONLY trying to stop the ravagement of it. How is that possible?
The coupling of will and ability is such a delicate dance. If we can cover a world in catsup how can we not save it from climate change? How is that possible?
