decline and fall
Just after I got home from Tokyo the seasonal switch got flipped. (Oh, yeah, I had a work trip to Japan. I had a wood-paneled hotel room like a cabin with tiny lounge chairs around a tiny table and a delicious bakery downstairs, and I did my work things and then walked for miles and miles through the city like a character from a William Gibson novel or Hayao Miyazaki film. I was very lonely but it was excellent. Maybe that version of me is real and she is imagining my family and my garden and my menagerie in California. Anyway.) I rode Lenny in the late summer heat wave and stopped at Canyon Market on the way home, after dark. People were buying firewood and persimmons had come into season and there was a chill in the air. Fall.
We moved here in April of 98, an unusually wet spring, and it wasn’t until I drove back from the playa that September, crossing the Bay Bridge at 3am, filthy, exhausted and happy, that I saw the lights of San Francisco and my heart said: “home.” Another year I remember unlocking the door to our house on Alabama Street and feeling the twilight chill and thinking of apple pie. The city is at its most beautiful in October, when the drawn-out summer wrestles with the brilliant dark, and loses.
Election years are especially wrenching in this respect, when the encroaching cold threatens to swallow up all the bitterly-fought-for, hard-won concessions to our collective humanity. It sucks to have to beg for our lives every four years. I have to drag myself out of the doomscroll with an act of will. It helps to think about deep time. Turtle Island, I say to myself, and the bay fills in with prairie that stretches out to the Farallones, where smilodon and direwolves hunt camels and rhinos and woolly mammoths. It also helps to be completely in the moment. I turn on the Merlin app and try to see the cedar waxwings singing in the lillipilli tree. I think about Ed Yong’s powerful xoxo talk, and how he counter-balanced his pandemic grief by paying attention to lazuli buntings and the tide.
It was high tide at Heron’s Head this weekend, the path stretching out into the bay like a road to the land of the dead. I walked along the path furious. Why does it feel like I was put on this earth to love things, only to have them ripped from my hands? Why do I get a ringside seat to the sixth extinction, and why do I have to feel it so deeply? A sardonic voice in my head, maybe my mother’s, said, “Because you’re good at it.” I thought of that edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with the Roman column crumbling to ruins. (1946, oof.) I thought (again) of the lyric from The Mountain Goats song Fresh Tattoo: “all of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” I’m sentient stardust witnessing the heat death of the universe, and I’m grateful, so grateful, for every bit of beauty and grace.
