2.5.23 Apocalypse

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2011. I am 8 years old.

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The television is filled with news of unrest in Lybia, Arab Spring, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and especially the Tohoku earthquake. At that time I had largely unmonitored internet access, and images from the earthquake- and the tsunamis that followed- seemed to fill my senses for months. The following summer, a newfound sense of anxiety began to take form, growing like a tumor on my young mind, paralyzing in its obscurity. It was the fear of indiscriminate catastrophy, especially in the form of massive walls of water.

But tsunamis never hit the east coast, so nothing for me to worry about, right? Wrong! Conveniently for me, I learned this shortly after reading about the 20,000 deaths in Japan. In the Canary Islands is a volcanic ridge that, if it should collapse, would dispense massive amounts of rock into the ocean, potentially displacing enough water to trigger a mega tsunami that would ravage the entire American east coast in just 8 hours. This is called the Cumbre Vieja hypothesis. And it absolutely terrified me. I lived a mere 2 minute walk from the ocean, surely me and my family couldn't get out in time, at the same time as countless others.

August 23, 2011. The first and only earthquake I have experienced. Coincidentally, the same year as the one that shook the far east months before. It was perhaps 11:00 am. I was home with my father, him sitting at the table and me on the couch. The house starts shaking. We both look at each other. We run outside. My cousin and aunt, who were across the street, meet us in the middle of the road, now filling with confused and concerned people. My cousin, just a few years younger than me, said something to me, I don't remember what it was. I didn't want to talk to him. I'm not sure that, if I'd tried to form words, anything would have come out. All that I could think about was what followed sea-borne quakes. Tsunamis. It was happening. I would soon be killed, if not instantly by the force of the water, than soon after when I would be flung about in the churning tide, pushed into the ground with other debris. Obviously this never happened, as this was not a sea-borne quake and there was no tsunami threat. But there is still a crack in the ceiling of that house from the earthquake.

Just a week later, the New Jersey coastline was evacuated in preparation for the incoming hurricane Irene, a storm predicted to deliver havoc. As we are packing up to leave, Soni asks my mother, "is the world ending?", and my mother is quick to shush her, gesturing to me and asking her not to say those kinds of things around me. I feel in that moment as though they are hiding some cold truth from me. I believe it was this moment when it finally dawned on me that perhaps the world was not safe, and not stable. Perhaps it could change its rules at any moment, sudden and unexpected.

Now, Soni is a new mother, and I sometimes wonder how her daughter will eventually grow to interpret the world around her, watching as it withers, and how Soni may attempt to mask its demise, because what is safety, what is security if not a brilliant lie that we have passed between generations, from when we were still foraging, huddled for warmth in the unforgiving wilderness of the pleistocene, as a social mechanism to tuck away all of our fears. Perhaps we have no reason to fear the earthquake, or the walls of water, or the creatures that lurk in the night, or the phantoms down the hall, just out of view. We do not fear them, but instead we fear the possibility of their existence. After all, as it turns out, hurricane Irene did not wreak the coast more than any other hurricane.

It would not be for another year, until October of 2012, that the New Jersey coast would truly be ravaged, destroyed almost beyond recognition by hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. In fact, Sandy had evolved past being dubbed a hurricane, instead classified as a "super-storm" by the time it made landfall. The destruction to the community was indescribable. Upon returning to my mother's, it was like the entire area had been blown apart by a nuclear bomb. Telephone wires were strewn about the landscape like a black spiderweb. The pavement of the road was no longer visible, now under mounds and mounds of sand, some taller than me. My mother's house was lucky to survive the onslaught with minimal damage. Our neighbor just a few doors down had her house torn from its foundation, flipped ninety degrees, and gutted from the inside out. It is thought that this blocked the tidal surge from flooding the rest of the street.

***

The remains of Albania's house.

The Star Jet rises from the sea like a steel leviathan.

Piling wreckage upon wreckage.

It never ends.

This is how I imagine hell.

And it had come to New Jersey.

***

Mass destruction, to me, was something restricted to the annals of history, or distant war-torn lands, or action movies, but now it was here, at my front door, down my street, across my whole neighborhood, and I was walking through it. I remember hearing stories that, a few miles down the strip, the basement of a surf shop was full of dead fish and sharks, as they'd gotten trapped down there when the water finally receeded. Just a few minutes drive away, an entire block apparently exploded during the storm due to a ruptured gas main. A couple miles away, rumor had it that the freezers of a local grocery store which still had power were being used to house unclaimed and unidentified bodies of those who chose not to evacuate, and were killed by the storm. All stories turned out to be true. God was nowhere to be found in Lavallette.

It wasn't a tsunami that devestated the barnegat peninsula, but a "storm surge", or instead just a dramatic rise in water level, combined with making landfall at high tide, during a full moon, and all the other conditions that made hurricane sandy a literal "perfect storm". It was a tsunami by any other name. In some way, my anxieties from the previous summer were realized. They were validated. The following month, 2012's December, on the 21st, the Maya civlization had predicted that the world was going to end. My hyperactive mind could not have a moment of respite. Perhaps I was living through the apocalypse.

But does anything ever truly end? Lavallette and the rest of the coast was rebuilt, slowly, over the next 5 years. The hurricane is a memory. The sun still rose on December 22nd. The Maya believed that the world had ended many times before then, and it would continue on its cycle of birth and death long after them; it was something cyclical. The word apocalypse itself comes from the ancient Greek word meaning to uncover, or reveal. Literally "lifting the veil", a revelation.

In the norse tradition, Ragnarok is prophesized as the battle at the end of the world, one which would remove Odin from his throne, leaving him and the rest of the Aesir dead. He does everything to try to prevent Ragnarok from occuring. He imprisons Hel in the land of the dead, he banishes Jormungandr into the sea, and he has Fenrir bound with an unbreakable chain. However, all of these things inadvertently bring Ragnarok one step closer to beginning. Hel raises an army of the dead, Jormungandr grows to an incredible size, and Fenrir's rage grows and grows; and the three end up turning on Odin and his family, Fenrir even being the one to kill him. And despite the ensuing chaos of Ragnarok, when the dust settles, the world has not ended. It has just taken a different shape.

The land that Lavallette is built on did not exist 200 years ago. It is a barrier island, an embankment of sand and sedgelands ever changing and shifting with the tide. It should have never been a place of human development. It is predicted that in the next few decades, hurricane after hurricane will erode the island away piece by piece, until the next superstorm swallows it back into the sea. We can try to reverse this fate, we can dredge and rebuild more and more, but in the end the ocean will take what it wants. And perhaps our interference is only hastening the process. And perhaps, like Odin, we are our own undoing. But the world has always been a place of chaotic change. And the new will always come to supplant the old, no matter what.

I do not believe this is the design of God. I do not believe that God relishes in burning buildings, in flooding streets and in indiscriminate death at the hands of natural disaster. These things are just attributes of the world. There is no one to blame for the Tohoku earthquake. There is no one to blame for hurricane Sandy. There is only us and our perception of our environment.