So far
It’s very hot here in Mexico City. The highs have been in the low 30s C/high 80s F, which is not that hot compared to other places I’ve lived—or most other places experiencing this same heat wave—but as we’re all learning, extreme weather is often a relative phenomenon, experienced against not some objective standard of “bad,” but against the accumulation of subjective experiences that have coalesced into our idea of “normal” in a given place. Mexico City sits above 7,000 feet/2,240 meters, which means it has always been and will stay cooler than lower lying areas around it. That doesn’t mean a prolonged period of 31 C/88 F in June, when it’s supposed to be raining, is no big deal.
Infrastructure, as we are also learning, is built for “normal.” Luckily most apartments and houses here stay cooler on the inside than it is outside, which turns winter into what I call “indoor glove season” but makes the heat more bearable unless your space gets direct sunlight for hours and hours. But no one has air conditioning (or heating). Which is, so far, mostly fine. We open our windows and turn on our fans and look at our weather apps to see how many more nights we’ll be sweating in our sleep. For me, so far, it’s never enough days to justify buying an air conditioner or even go through the hassle of putting screens on our windows, to cut down on mosquitos at night. The mosquitos are annoying, but so far, they aren’t dangerous; Aedes aegypti, which carries dengue, chikungunya, and zika in other parts of Mexico, doesn’t live at our elevation because, so far, it’s relatively cool. So far, so far, so far.
When I started thinking about apocalypses in the past for my book, part of the point, of course, was to draw parallels between those times and ours. Which ones have humans survived (all of them); which ones took cultures and societies down (some, but probably not as many as you might think); which ones ended quickly and which ones had long tails. But I’ve also been thinking through what might be different about our time, our present and future apocalypses, than the ones in the past. Will the scale of anthropogenic climate change be different than natural fluctuations that have affected humans for millions of years? Will the interconnected, globalized world mean local events are easier to escape, or will it meant that no catastrophe is truly local anymore? I can make arguments either way. But one thing I imagined was confined to our time is the period we’re in now, when we know something bad is happening and will keep happening but it’s not quite so bad that the texture of our daily lives is permanently transformed. The period when things are not quite so bad that we’re certain we’ve forever left behind the Before. The period of so far.
I now think I’ve been wrong about that. I think that sense of borrowed time—whether it lasts a month or a lifetime—might actually be quite common for people living through apocalyptic transformations. Obviously, we have climate models and other predictive technologies the Classic-period Maya or the ancient Egyptians didn’t have, which allows us to quantify what’s coming and compare our present to possible future scenarios in a way that feels capable of generating more dread farther in advance. But it’s rare, so rare, for an apocalypse to truly come out of nowhere. There’s usually a period of waiting-and-seeing, of preparing however you can, of wondering how much of “normal” can be chipped away before you’re sure it’s gone forever. Ancient coastal communities built sea walls before being displaced by the extreme sea level rise at the end of the last ice age. People in medieval European cities knew the Black Death was coming, often many months before the first local deaths. I think it’s conceivable Neanderthals lived through a long so far as their communities got smaller and smaller while there seemed to be ever more of the newer humans around. And then there’s the Classic Maya collapse.
The Classic Maya collapse is one of those ur-apocalypse narratives that’s rippled out of archaeology and into the culture at large. Most people with a basic Western education and access to television/the internet have probably heard of it, and they’ve probably heard it had something do with drought and climate change. (They also might believe the Maya disappeared because of it, which they didn’t!) But something archaeologists know—even take for granted—that hasn’t managed to make a dent in popular consciousness is there wasn’t just one Classic Maya collapse. It was a rolling, uneven phenomenon, in which the first cities to succumb were abandoned 300 years before the last ones. There wasn’t a single cause or universal outcome; many cities fell in the absence of drought, while others survived long local dry periods. I’ll explore all that in depth in my book, but for our purposes here I want to sit with the idea that most Maya people, most of the time, might have experienced the collapse as something that hadn’t quite arrived, even well after an archaeologist can see their lives changing because of it. It was always happening, never happening, and suddenly happening, sometimes all at once.
In my own definition, apocalypses are moments of collective loss that create new, previously unimaginable futures. They’re supposed to have a clear before and after, the outlines of each recognized by a community. And looking back from the remove of centuries or millennia, they usually do have obvious boundaries. But sitting in my too hot apartment, in a too hot city, wondering if this is the thing I’ve been waiting for, reassuring myself with my so fars, I’m realizing how blurry those boundaries have likely always felt to those who cross them. Living through…whatever this is has helped me make room for uncertainty, doubt, and negotiation (about both beginnings and endings) in the past as well as the present, as well as see the meaning hidden within their desperate obfuscation. Stepping into the so far doesn’t mean an apocalypse is yet to come. It means it’s already here.
The Lizzie Wade Weekly needs your support! Subscribe for free and tell a friend.