I pray she’ll never know hunger, but certainly much of the world will. There has yet to be a global food shock as devastating as 2034–35, but it’s only a matter of time. I pray she’ll never know true sickness, but already the disease vectors of the tropics have raced to new latitudes. Covid-19 was but a warm-up for what epidemiologists fear might be unearthed by melting ice or forged on the anvil of breakneck evolutionary change. In Uganda, a variant of Rift Valley fever has jumped from person to person for the first time, killing four thousand people so far as the World Health Organization races to contain it.
Aliah will live to feel heat that no person living today can understand. How do human beings survive temperatures upward of 130 degrees Fahrenheit? The answer is they don’t. There was a time when a heat wave was considered a poor person’s disaster. The impoverished and the elderly were largely its victims, and most died quietly. But no summer goes by now without news of children, high school athletes, and perfectly healthy adults succumbing to heatstroke and dehydration. It sneaks up on you, they say. This summer we met Moniza’s parents in New York City for a weeklong vacation, and I woke to an alert on my phone telling me not to take my daughter outside under any circumstances.
Aliah will live to see storms of uncanny size and strength. During that New York heat wave and Uganda’s clash with the new Rift Valley strain, a super-typhoon named Osara, with wind speeds approaching 250 mph and a small ocean of rain spewing from its vortex, came curving out of the Pacific into the mouth of Hangzhou Bay. Wind and water swept through the streets of Shanghai, killing over one hundred thousand people and destroying the city’s sewage, electrical, and transportation infrastructure. China got its democratic revolution, but the atmosphere does not much care. My guess is that my daughter will live to see the ghost city of Washington, D.C., wash away. She will know the names of the hurricanes that will deliver the final blows to Houston, Boston, Miami, and New Orleans. She may even bear witness to New York City inundated, abandoned, and drowned.
No matter how many new Nunavuts open their doors, the refugees will continue to arrive on every shore, in every airport, by every rail line, smuggled in every truck bed, car trunk, airplane, and shipping container. The endless flow of human beings will never slow, not now, not in Aliah’s lifetime. On our current trajectory, many regions across Asia, Africa, and Oceania will eventually become uninhabitable. Even if Aliah grows up in the best-case scenario of a world racing toward justice and sustainability, even if humanity finally stops the planet’s warming at 2.3 degrees, as many scientists now think is possible, and pulls enough carbon out of the atmosphere to begin cooling the planet back to a safe temperature, it will take centuries for many of those ecosystems to recover. My dream for my daughter is that it will be her generation that will see what we have forsaken, that will rewild and reawaken our damaged and depleted home, but that dream has never felt so far away.
This horror has no conclusion. It will not end in my daughter’s lifetime or even the lifetime of any descendent she can hope to love. She will know no other future outside this claustrophobic emergency, this coffin we are all now pounding on the lid of. She will know death and pain with unthinkable intimacy and likely become inured to the suffering pouring forth from every region of the world in order to keep going. No matter what ideologies arise, what myths we embrace, what technologies we invent, what dreams we offer, this crisis is effectively our eternity.
When I look at her fragile, beautiful face, when I watch her hold a pinch of dirt from our garden and go soft and quiet with mystery, I agonize over it. What will she think of us? What will she think of the expanding deserts, lost soil, acid seas, poisoned land, baking heat, horrific diseases, and a horizon black with storms? I imagine her asking me someday with the hot fury of a teenager’s clarity, Was it worth it? Was a raped and murdered world worth it for a few decades of excess? How did you let this happen? You all knew. Everyone knew. She will gaze up into this haunting vortex, the consequences of what was done in just a single human lifetime, with nowhere to run or hide or escape this uncharted and endless future.
All I will be able to tell her is that some of us tried, baby. Some of us fought like hell.
In May 2031, Kate and I drove west into the Sierra Mountains.
After too many IPAs the night before, a shot of Everclear in the parking lot, and leaving her electrolyte vomit on the pavement, she had a rough go of our first five miles up Mount Whitney. As we ascended, the horns and ridges of nearby mountains appeared in the first gray light of dawn. We turned our headlamps off and walked by this ghost light. Over water crossings, balancing on logs as we traversed streams, up rocky trails and through verdant riparian clearings, Kate struggled. She was sweating, belching, looking pukey and tired, stopping to suck water from her CamelBak and chew energy gummies because she couldn’t stomach real food. We stopped so I could get a picture as the Sierras caught the pink of the sunrise.
“That’ll teach you to get boozed before climbing the highest peak in the contiguous United States,” I teased her.
“I’ll fucking kill you, Tar Heel.”
“It’s not your fault, babe. You’ve been an office jockey for ten years now. No more Kate Chaos. Kate Orderly and Pragmatic. Kate Make Her Eleven O’Clock Appointment with the Congresswoman.”
“Kate Clog the Toilet with Her Coffee Poops,” she said.
“You’ve always been that.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked off the trail. “Speaking of.”
It would be the last joking or good humor I’d manage for the day.
When we reached the ninety-seven switchbacks, this vicious two-mile staircase up to the trail crest, I was starting to really feel the twelve thousand feet of altitude. We’d decided to do all twenty-two miles up and back in the same day, and now I regretted this. On those switchbacks, Kate began to pull ahead. It made no sense. She went from vomiting to practically running up the mountain. I watched her strides grow stronger. At maybe switchback seventy-three, after pulling myself over an icy patch via a gnarly cable handrail, I had to call ahead to her. I took a seat on a rock as she walked back down to me. Each inhalation was a struggle. When I stood up, I had to immediately sit back down.
“You okay?” she asked gently.
“I think I might pass out,” I said. She put a hand on my shoulder. She had her hair pulled back, but as usual several of those wild strands had crawled out to dance in the breeze.
“Put your head between your knees. Take a few deep breaths.” I did as I was told, pinprick stars appearing when I closed my eyes. But after a few minutes I did feel better. “It’s just the altitude,” she said. “Your body can always handle more than you think. We always got one more in us, right?”
“Right, Coach.”
Another couple minutes and a lot of chugging water, and I felt better. We carried on. When we reached the trail crest, I sagged with relief. But on the backside of Whitney, looking out over this new and foreign mountain range, the trail turned into a hairy, technical scramble. We toed over boulders along the side of a cliff, and at certain points the drop-off was so steep—untold thousands of feet—that it might as well have been a plummet into another universe. I was well aware this was the part of the climb where people tended to die, including a woman earlier that summer. This was where Kate really began to lose me. She stopped even using her hiking poles, just clasped both in one hand and went bounding over the rocks like there was no drop-off to certain death on her left. The altitude seemed to have no effect on her at all. Meanwhile, I was terrified, planting one foot and one pole firmly, then locating with certainty where the other foot and pole were going next before moving another step. The fasciitis in the ball of my foot started to throb, and with each yard she put between us, I grew more and more irritated with her. It was like she was showing off, joking as she passed other thru-hikers coming from the PCT or John Muir Trail. She hopped onto a boulder jutting out over a precipice and pranced across like she was on a playground balance beam two feet above the wood chips. Over the course of two hours, my irritation metastasized into anger, then fury, as her green windbreaker pulled farther away, until she was nothing more than a dot on the rocky outcroppings of the mountainside. I began rerunning through my head every fight we’d ever had, every time she’d slighted me. On the last leg, as I worked my way over a small patch of snow and ice, I could feel the altitude like nothing else. I’d take three steps and my heart would pound at 130 beats per minute. I didn’t take a single picture, and I didn’t see any of the beauty at the time.