People | Arts & Culture | Bodies

Car Crashes, Climate Change, and Mothering Through Catastrophe

I recall a 2016 headline that warned, ‘Orangutans face complete extinction within ten years.’ Nash will be thirteen in 2026.

I see the black concrete coming toward the window before I hear the tinsel pitch of cement fingernails on glass. But it’s the shattering glass that makes sense of the concrete at my window. And so I remember the sound before the impact. Time is not obligated to logic in car accidents.

And then we are sliding. I’m in the middle of the row of seats behind the driver. Before the window broke into a thousand pieces, I was watching Portuguese cliffs blanketed with pink and yellow succulents go by. Steel blue clouds had just overtaken the marigold of our beach day and first raindrops had unleashed notes of earth and ozone from the clay. I watched the clouds gallop in and drifted into sleep, right before the window turned black.

In between me and the shattering glass is my three-year old daughter. Her caramel ringlets are coated in sand from the dune she rolled down before we noticed the approaching storm and gathered the plastic shovels and beach hats and damp towels into the mesh bag. When I moved her body from my hip into the car, her lids were half-mast; heavy enough that she didn’t fight me when I snapped the second seatbelt across her chest. Now, the plastic arm of this rented car seat is the only thing between the grinding black asphalt and the body of my sleeping child. I wrap my arms around her car seat, pulling her toward me. I think: How long before the cement reaches her? and push my arm between her body and the churning black gravel so that I will know first.

And then the car stops, and there is silence. A silence that fills the car, fills the rural highway, fills the farmlands on either side of us, twitches the ears of cattle who have lifted their heads at the sounds of shattering glass and 5,000 pounds of metal sliding on cement. I don’t realize the fickleness of this silence. My husband, in the front passenger seat, is thinking about the inherent danger of this second—about the oncoming lane in which the car has come to rest. But I am not. Because there is only one question in my mind.

I sweep my arm over the seat behind me, to the third row of the car, where my five-year-old son was in his booster seat alone before the glass shattered. I sweep for his body in the darkness of a window of cement and the darkness of a world where anything could happen. Where anything did happen. A world where the back of the car might not exist. With one hand holding back the panic barreling toward me, I reach for my son and command his name: “Nash. Nash.”

The panic churns 1/60th of a minute into the longest moment of my life. In this stretched time, I find his wrist, wrap my fingers around it. When he feels my touch, he says, “Mom.”

*

Nash has a book called The Photo Ark. It’s 399 pages of photographs documenting “species before they disappear.” The images are portraits; the eyes of each animal in focus. Pages of the book are ripped at the bottom seams, worn feeble by a child’s eager fingers.

Nash paddles through the pages with two palmed hands. He stops on a page where slate grey wrinkles swirl around the foggy black iris of a Northern White Rhinoceros. He points to the caption, “Read Mom.” The picture was taken three days before the rhino’s death. Fossils suggest the lineage is over fifty million years old. The last two of the subspecies are female, making the Northern White Rhino functionally extinct. Nash glides through more pages. He stops on a White-Headed Vulture whose brow is furrowed under a backward tuft of ecru feathers. The bird has a wingspan of seven feet. This year, seventeen White-Headed Vultures were found dead in Botswana. The vultures had eaten the poisoned flesh of elephants killed by poachers for their ivory tusks. The poachers poisoned the flesh because dead birds can’t circle and alert rangers to dead elephants. Nash palms the pages forward to the deep-set eyes of a Sumatran Orangutan looking into the camera at eye-level. This Orangutan is meant to live in tropical rainforests of Indonesia that have disappeared by bulldozer and fire for plantations, logging, mining, and roads. I recall a 2016 headline that warned, “Orangutans face complete extinction within ten years.” Nash will be thirteen in 2026.

This is the first year he’s too big to sit in my lap, but he still leans his body into the envelope of my arms. He squirms, looks up at me, “Why Mom? If we know it’s going to happen. Why don’t we stop it?”

I rummage for a calming, motherly, answer. In the absence of one, I pull him closer. We turn more pages. I see through his eyes the inevitability of the future flipping toward us.

Before we close the book, Nash returns to his favorite page. It belongs to the Spix’s Macaw. On this full spread, the cuffed ankles of two parrots of indigo plumage cling to a wooden perch. Neither of the birds look at the camera. One looks vacantly down. The other skyward with a half-mast eye.

“What does ‘captivity’ mean, Mom?”

“It means the last Spix’s Macaws are kept in cages, Nash.”

We have a window in our kitchen toward which Nash is always jutting a finger and shouting, “Red Tail Hawk, Mom!” He has memorized the favorite prey of Turkey Vultures and the highest recorded flight speeds of Peregrine Falcons. But there’s a line in the caption under the Spix’s Macaw that he makes me read every night: It hasn’t been seen in the wild since 2000.

“So there are no Spix’s Macaws that fly around? Less than a hundred left, all in cages?”

He looks out the window. It’s black.

*

“It started when I was pregnant with Nash,” I tell the osteopath. “Early in the pregnancy, when I was still naive enough to lift a heavy chair. I felt something snap. And then a sharp pinch doubled me over.” As I talk, my right hand drifts to my back, presses a thumb into the spot.

The osteopath doesn’t wear a white coat, and I wonder if all doctors trained in both Western and Eastern medicine have hung up their smocks and stethoscopes. She continues her review of my admissions interview. “And you’ve had this ‘knot’ in your back ever since?”

“Well, it comes and goes. But it’s been really angry since the car accident . . . ” There’s a frosted window in the doctor’s office. I watch a granulated shadow pass by.

The doctor captures my gaze, “You were in a car accident?”

“Yes . . . a few weeks ago. My father-in-law fell asleep at the wheel. The car was totaled. But we all walked out of it. Well, technically, we crawled through a window.”

She writes down a note and looks up. “You also list anxiety as something you’re experiencing?”

I laugh a little. “Not like more than normal-anxiety. Who doesn’t have anxiety on this planet right now?”

She looks down, tilts her head at one of the symptoms I’ve listed. “Can you tell me about this recurring nightmare you’re having?”

I rest my eyes on the white wall over the doctor’s shoulder. “In the dream, I’m following a broken cement pier toward the beach. It’s the Portuguese coast, so it has those impossibly arching sea cliffs carved of granite and red limestone. I see my children near the water, all bent knees and sandy elbows leaning over a hole they are digging from wet sand. And as I walk toward them, I notice the cliff walls are shimmering, then shaking, then quaking. And the walls begin to fall. I focus on my children, try to run to them. But the ground shakes and chunks of cliff collapse into my sightline. When I reach the spot where my children were playing, I see a swath of pink and yellow on the ground. I fall on my knees and wipe away the sand. It’s my daughter’s little swim shirt. It’s the side that doesn’t have the pocket. The back of her shirt.

I laugh a little. “Not like more than normal-anxiety. Who doesn’t have anxiety on this planet right now?” 

I scream as I dig. I pull her limp body from the earth into my arms. And I don’t know why the dream lets me see this. But it shows me. My daughter’s skin is ash. Her eyes are closed. Both her arms dangle backwards as I pull her to my chest.”

Tears drop in my lap.

The doctor hands me a box of tissues. She says, “Dreams show us unexpressed emotions. Can you name what emotion is underlying this dream?”

I look back to the white wall over her shoulder. “Terror?”

She looks down. We both know “terror” isn’t right. She orders a dozen blood and urine tests. When I stand up to leave, she hands me a color-wheel with the names of 200 emotions. She says, “Take it home. Think about it.”

A month later she calls me into her office and hands me an eighteen-page toxicity report. The tests conclude my flesh is steeped in heavy metals and industrial chemicals. Little black notches hover over the red ends of spectrums of mercury, lead, and uranium. Under something called 2-hydroxyisobutyric acid, a chemical associated with “hepatic, kidney, and central nervous system toxicity, peripheral neurotoxicity, and cancer in animals,” there is a scale that starts at 200 and ends at 7000. My score is 18,971.

The edges of the report’s pages feel sharp in my hands. A slap in the face of a life filled with organic food, mountain hiking, meditation, and vegetarianism. When did these metals and chemicals begin accumulating in my body?

I ask the doctor if the toxins came from a childhood drinking Oregon well water, my years navigating exhaust-filled streets of India, my home in Colorado near abandoned mines, or genetic inheritance from a grandfather who died of lymphoma after years of spraying pesticides in basements.

She says, “It’s hard to know. They’re everywhere.”

When I get into my car to leave, I slide into the driver’s seat and sit until I’m chilled enough to remember to turn the car on.

“Everywhere.” The pieces are everywhere. Through my windshield, the cold blue Colorado sky looks vacant. Nothing circles overhead.

I see a physical therapist to work on the knot in my back. I tell her about the car accident. About my grief for the future of my children. I tell her I suspect I’m holding onto something I can’t let go. She sets a glass of water with a lemon wedge on the table in front of me. I watch the water bead on the outside of the glass. She looks over my left shoulder and says, “Sometimes when grief doesn’t have a shape, something to see and touch—sometimes your body creates something so that you can know where to feel it.”

In the middle of the night, in the dark, I sit upright in my bed.

Helplessness.

The emotion is helplessness.

*

In the car accident, I found Nash’s arm in the sweep of the row behind me and held on. And as I hung from my seat belt, hugging her car seat, my daughter turned her cheek to within an inch of mine and said, “Mama?”

With one hand on each of them, I looked into their eyes and repeated: You’re okay. You are okay.

They did not cry. They did not scream. They braced themselves on my words, on my touch, on my confidence, on my instruction: Nash. Papa is behind you. He’s coming through the trunk. You’re going to feel his hands on your back. Now, Riva, I’m unbuckling you. But I have you. I’m going to raise you in the air. And do you see Papa up there? Reach for him.

When their soft bodies were out of the crushed metal, I looked for their shoes. I knew there was broken glass out there, on the road, and I knew their feet were still bare from the beach. So I looked for their shoes on the floor of the sideways car. I don’t remember how I found the shoes. Shock swallowed that detail.

But here’s what woke me up in the middle of the night: Where are the shoes I can give to my children for the broken world they will walk through? I see the future sliding toward us. A collision of waking terrors and quaking homelands. Of poisoned waters and heavy metal blood. A photo ark of eyes turning their pages on existence. No Spix’s Macaws fly free. Did I bear offspring with clipped wings? I chanted one mantra to my children in the car crash, while the opposite now cycles in my head: Nothing is okay. Nothing is okay. Nothing is okay.

The emotion is helplessness.

There exists for me a world in which another car came down the opposite side of that rural Portuguese road at sixty miles per hour during the same sixtieth of a minute that our car slid out of its lane. A world in which I sweep the back of the car and find it gone. That acute second of helplessness compacted a decade of anxiety into a moment of clarity.

My helplessness lodged into my back in the form of a knot I now call grief. Grief that plucks a chord of pain when I sit too long, lift without my knees, cradle a crying child. Grief for the assurance I can’t give my children. Grief that crumbles midnight cliffs and chants: How long before the future reaches them?

The planet is hurtling through lanes it shouldn’t, making nonsense of time. Breaking into a thousand pieces and eliciting a cement scream to which we barely raise our heads and stop chewing. I want to find shoes for my children. To lift them up through a window.

Yesterday, I followed my daughter on a dirt path along the Eagle River. She picked sagebrush, bromegrass, and cattails as we walked, and began a quiet discourse with the bouquet of dried seeds and blooms. I dared not interrupt. Over the hushed conversation between child and cattail, I welcomed the winter chill numbing my fingers. The reflection of sun on snow whitewashing the world. The caws of black crows perched in naked cottonwood. The gravity of all that’s fleeting. Just as pain brings awareness of not-pain, so has my grief sharpened the details of the world.

Trailing my child by the river, not knowing the future into which she walks, I clutched one last shard of hope with two hands: That what brings us to our knees might command us to our feet. If the danger feels close enough—a cheek against ours—maybe we will move swiftly, collectively, with sharpened instinct. To put an arm between what we love and what’s oncoming.