Middens

The packrat moved in last summer after the monsoons we had all prayed for failed. It was a summer of fire. The Teller County arsonist had already lit 13 quarter-acre fires in three days, and a meteor—“balls of fire,” reported the astounded witnesses as far as New Mexico—grounded the air tankers over the Springer fire in late June. Then flames towered 200 feet up over Waldo Canyon, the air singed orange for days above the ashes, and the human remains eventually found in Mountain Shadow.

It was then I first saw the pinecones and the leaf litter ringing the porch board knothole directly beneath the old rocking chair in which I once nursed my daughters. Scanty, but a precise halo. I remember looking up as if the wind could be a god, stepping out of a paleo-sky to arrange this perfection of detritus like some Tibetan monk sand-painting the “world in harmony.” But the world in flames, I swept the porch bare.

In 1975, two years before I graduated from a small town high school where football rivals dubbed us “River Rats,” Newsweek heralded “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns [had] begun to change dramatically.” Concerned scientists pointed to declining growing seasons, rising equatorial temperatures, increased Northern Hemisphere snow cover, “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded,” and a significant change in the amount of sunlight that hit the earth. The apparently cooling earth. Since 1940, the world temperature had in fact cooled, the “average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported, “by half a degree.”

“Melt the Arctic ice cap,” the Chicken Littles of the time advised. “Cover it with black soot.”

My mother remembers the deep Ohio freeze that year. My father, a general practitioner, drove down our gravel lane alongside the county cemetery each morning to his city office before winter broke open that first frozen tip of light. I think of him checking the breath and pulse of countless patients he might have healed, or not, while my mother worked our farm alone. That winter, she sledgehammered apart the milky rills of ice in the water troughs that thickened by morning, and then again by evening, despite the water heaters we floated.

“That year,” she says, “25 degrees below zero. Days, I think.”

What I remember is my sister and brother and me maneuvering the unwieldy blocks of ice from the troughs, the freezing water burning through our mittens, the steamy breath of Angus cows blurring the frozen world. And then, evenings, before the aluminum farm gates lit up with my father’s returning headlights, we walked into the dark to pull the ice again, my father, pale in the dashboard light, driving blindly past us out of a precarious world we didn’t quite know yet, but for the stones placed over the cold hearts of our neighboring dead.

Headlines or not, this was what we lived.

Thirty-seven years later, my mother frail—“She’s turned a corner,” my brother warns me—my daughters, whom we once ferried newly born through the new snow, grown and gone, and my father, not that frozen world of my childhood, dead, the headlines repeat themselves, but with a twist. Yes, changing weather patterns, rising surface temperatures, “Frankenstorms,” and “historic tornado outbreaks,” but spawned, it seems, not by a cooling Earth this time, but a warming one, this world rife with open Arctic water, loss of summer sea ice, and the Greenland’s Petermann Glacier calving for the second time in three years a 46-square-mile chunk of ice, two times the city of Manhattan, while fires in the west burn and we grieve what’s lost. And what’s soon to be lost.

“Global warming,” my husband Leonard and the news say, “accelerated by human activity,” even as scientists report the ending of an 11-year solar cycle, the most active in 8,000 years, the sun increasing its spew of flares and spots, solar radiation that the NOAA says “drives the weather machine” and what Mayan occultists say foretell the...