How to Fill the Grand Canyon with Gravel
Climate anxieties swirled with grief
Updates for SLC Locals:
Starting this weekend, you’ll be able to find Lady Flour goodies at Pizza Nono’s new market right next door. They’ll be open 9am to 9pm, so plenty of time to grab cakes and hand pies.
Crush cakes for Valentine’s Day go on sale Monday 1/27. Last year I sold 100, this year I’ve set an arbitrary goal to sell 300. Are you with me?
I woke up thinking about those who lost everything in the LA wildfires and was reminded of the weeks after my friend Rebecca died, when I’d wake up each day and have to remind myself that she was gone. In the few seconds between opening my eyes and forcing myself to remember, there was a disorienting peace. It’s such a fragile, minuscule moment, when anything can be true and you feel like you can decide to stay in a different reality for a while: she made it out of the flash flood alive, or maybe there wasn’t a flash flood at all, maybe she had a great time, maybe the trip was actually boring, maybe she came and went to the Grand Canyon and nothing happened at all.
This sounds like the bargaining stage of grief. I imagine if you lost your home and everything that keeps you safe, you’re doing a lot of bargaining in that sleepy moment as well. Though once you know grief, you know that it doesn’t move in stages like we’d been taught to believe. You don’t graduate from one level to the other, but rather bounce back and forth.
During the Make Jokes So It Becomes Bearable Stage, my brother quipped that maybe Rebecca’s death in the Grand Canyon would be the start of my villain origin story. I had just finished declaring how I hated the national park and that I wanted to fill the whole canyon with gravel, DESTROY IT!, because it took my friend. He said maybe you’ll turn into a super-villain whose main mission is to harm the environment. I liked picturing my character’s timeline, as the girl who studied environmental science in college and marched against the Keystone pipeline, who went on to work at the National Wildlife Federation on their climate adaptation team for a year. And then a national park took a person I love, so now I must take away the national parks. Muahahahahaha. We landed on Climate Change as my super-villain name.
Last week, my sister, her husband, and 2-year-old evacuated their home when a fourth fire started in Runyon Canyon in LA. They live right there, but are lucky enough to be on the other side of the highway. It all happened quickly and I just kept picturing her, 8 months pregnant, walking on crutches, trying to chase down her toddler and pack up the necessities for a few days. They’re very fortunate to have been able to return home, as the Sunset Fire was more easily contained than the others and the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. But it has me thinking about go-bags.
This past November, while hurricanes Helene and Milton ripped their way through the southern US, it was surreal to watch live footage of the historic storms via social media. I became obsessed, which I guess is what the Instagram algorithm is designed for: feeding you content that will keep you on the app. You could be laying in your bed in Salt Lake City, watching in real time as someone in Florida makes the decision to shelter in place, or go outside during the storm, or be stuck in miles and miles of unmoving traffic. I’d bookmark certain posts from people who didn’t evacuate because I wanted to check back later and see how they fared from the storm. I wonder if any of them prepared go-bags at the start of hurricane season.
Salt Lake City is no stranger to its own climate problems. The Great Salt Lake is drying up and once that’s gone, it will reveal a lake bed laced with arsenic dust that’ll poison the air. One of our state lawmakers called it an “environmental nuclear bomb.” We’ve also got our own fire season and a unique winter phenomenon that we lovingly call the inversion, where our mountain range’s geography creates the conditions for cold air to be trapped underneath a layer of warm air. This subsequently traps toxins in the valley, creating stagnant polluted air for days – sometimes weeks – at a time.
So I’ve been thinking about go-bags. And resiliency. My boyfriend said I sound like an end of times prepper, but my sister said I’m right to. As it feels like there’s a new unprecedented event every few months, are we living in a time where we might all have go-bags prepared for the disaster that is most likely to affect the region we live in? Is the survival backpack industry about to pop off? Is now a good time to invest in Big Canned Beans? Probably. Corporations will profit off of States of Emergencies, why not me?
If you live in a place prone to hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, or tornados, you are no stranger to disaster preparedness and having your life put on hold, or completely uprooted, because of conditions outside yourself. Most of us actually have experienced this through the covid pandemic: this great pause, where suddenly everything stops and instead of going to work or school, or making plans to try that new restaurant, we’re now forced to ask ourselves – is my family going to be okay? Do I have enough resources? What does this mean for the future?
But does going through this once make it easier the next time? Whether it be pandemic or evacuation or worse? No no, Becca, that’s not how this works.
After Rebecca died, when I couldn’t eat or sleep or talk to my mom on the phone without breaking down, she lovingly told me that I would get through it, and that once I did, I’d see that I’d be able to get through it again. It was some tough love, basically ensuring me that more and more people in my life would eventually die and I’d have to get through it each time. She had to learn this at a very young age. My mom lost both of her parents by the time she was 13. I had been lucky enough not to know grief like this until my twenties. And now that it’s been over 3 years, I can see what she was talking about. I did get through it.
But I don’t think growing through grief is the same as growing a thick skin. It’s not cumulative – the more you experience it doesn’t make you immune to the devastation of a new loss. If anything, it compounds. It makes you more resilient, sure, but no one becomes resilient by choice.
So we’ll adapt and prepare ourselves for more and more natural disasters because we’ll have to. We’ll pack go-bags. And as climate change continues to unfairly demand resiliency of our most vulnerable citizens, we’ll notice the ways it changes us and shifts the way we think about our interconnected futures. We will grow thicker skin. We won’t ever lose the ability to grieve.
