Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I was feeling listless, isolated and bored. Confined in a Brooklyn apartment with my roommate, I spent my time working at my computer and taking the occasional walk around our neighborhood. But one day, I received an unusual message. The environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams had heard my podcast, Constellation Prize, and she was inspired to do a project together.
Terry suggested that we go on nightwalks together from the new moon and the full moon, write each other a letter after each walk and record these letters in audio.
Debut: The word connotes virginal daughters of the elite, gowned and gleaming, stepping lightly in heels through a ballroom and into high society.
This summer brings my debut. I’m sixty-five. I wear orthotics, not heels, and step lightly through the Trader Joe’s parking lot. And rather than a high-society ritual, my debut is a novel—not the first I’ve completed, but the first to make it into print.
Last month, I took the 9:30 AM from JFK to Seattle, where my mother met me at SeaTac with a car full of camping gear. We drove over the mountains and into the wide, dry part of the state, dipping down to cross the Columbia River—the much-dammed snake that flows down from Canada and through central Washington until shifting west to the Pacific to make a rippling border with Oregon—and then up again in a road cut through black basalt cliffs. The sky here is big, like Montana, and even in June the grass is yellow and dry; the land is a maze of cliffs and canyons, cut during the last ice age when a dam burst on a vast lake covering much of Montana and northern Idaho, and drained to the Pacific in two days flat, carving out the land like worms cut through cheese. We were here, in this dramatic canyon country, to see Joni Mitchell sing.
The series, however, offers no blueprint for how to arrive at that utopia, unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s techno-bureaucratic cli-fi or the bloody oral histories imagined in Everything for Everyone’s postrevolutionary New York commune. Chambers simply tells us that “[t]his had been the way of things since the Transition,” after all machines spontaneously and mysteriously came to consciousness—and fled. Left to their own devices and in need of a reset, “the people had redivided the surface of their moon. Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature”—evocative of Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s “half-earth socialism.” Chambers starts her story on Panga centuries after this Transition: human society has already been built for radical sustainability (out of “translucent casein and mycelium masonry”) and democratic governance (with leaderless village “councils”), and nature has been left to heal itself. Out of that rewilded nature comes Mosscap, the solar-powered robot elected to reestablish human contact with one small question: “What do humans need?”
You left in a whoosh
Without a goodbye to us
Grief left in your place