Airborne by Ryan McFadden
August
The vacation rental was a few miles outside Healdsburg. The road to it—at first open, corrugated with grapevines—crested over a rise, and sank into a bowl overgrown with dead grass and bone-dry oaks. At the far end, a security gate opened to a quarter-mile private drive that wound steeply to the house itself, and the whole property backed onto unincorporated wilderness, just over the ridgeline. It was the fifth day of a record-setting heat wave, four months since the last drop of rain, five consecutive years of drought. Trump had the nuclear football, and the virus raged on.
We’d come here for a break, but I was too twitchy to relax. While by day I floated in a foam chair sipping a Pimm’s Cup, at night I lay awake watching my four-year-old sleepwalk to the bottom of the pool, meth heads bust in with knives, tidal-waves of fire loom over us. Fire, most of all. While I was physically living out some bougie asshole’s long weekend of privilege, inside I was spinning like a top.
Yes, 2020 had me tense; me and everybody else. But also, I have anxiety. I mean OG anxiety—the clinical kind. Obsessive-compulsive tendencies, a salting of cyclothymia, and a panic disorder (without agoraphobia). I’ve been counting bathroom tiles and tracing figure eights since I was six; I thought it kept the world safe. I was here long before you all gentrified the place with meditation apps.
Yet despite a lifetime with these mental dormmates—along with two decades of psychotherapy, and a strict daily regimen of supplements, meditation, exercise, and sleep hygiene—I’ve never been able to shut them up. At best I can train the hyperconscious eye back in on itself, breadcrumb a perceived threat back to its source. While I can’t stop the somatic effects of anxiety I can, with a little interior looking, at least tell when I’m making stuff up.
This was not one of those times.
In less than a week the fifth largest fire in state history would burn to within a mile of our wine-country hideaway. It would char 350,000 acres, destroy 1,500 hundred buildings, and kill five people. Ash from this fire—and dozens more—would combine to blot out the sun. And while the fires were fueled by the very warning signs I was looping on, their trigger was totally novel.
At four-thirty in the morning on our last day, the house jolted. I sat up in bed, heart thumping, waiting to gauge the quake’s magnitude. But there was no sway, no roll, no glass rattle. Maybe one of those single-shakers, I thought. Then, after a minute, another jolt, chased by a steady murmur. I went into the bathroom, to the window facing the hillside. In the dimness I could see the trees bent and swaying—it wasn’t an earthquake, but wind. Two huge gusts of it, followed by a strong, continuous breeze. It smelled of dryness and dust. And heat.
Wind was bad. Very bad. Wind could take a spark and whip it into a firestorm that sped uphill at thirty miles an hour. Wind could knock down power lines and make its own spark in the tinder all around us. I knew because it had happened just last year, because it happened every year now.
I went back to bed, lay beside my wife, Emma, in darkness. She was awake, too. Together, we listened. Waiting.
That’s when the lightning started.
It was a stray flash at first, followed, many seconds later, by quiet thunder. But it kept on, getting brighter, more frequent. I started counting one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, calculating the distance to danger. Fifteen to twenty miles, I reckoned. Safe. But I was already planning our escape, wondering how many seconds we’d save not strapping the kids in their car seats, and whether plowing the security gate would blow the airbags and kill the onboard computer.
For those who don’t live in the West, it can be difficult to understand. How tenuous it is here, how frequent and varied the disaster. 2018, Paradise burning to the ground; 2017, the quarter-mile slide at Mud Creek; floodwaters islanding my high school in ’97; the great quakes of Northridge in ’94, and Loma Prieta in ‘89; the collapse of the Auburn coffer dam in ‘86. We’ve always had too much water, or too little; there’s always too much to burn. The Central Valley is sinking, the coastline eroding, the ground constantly giving way beneath us. But this frequency and nearness recalibrates the threat sense. A month without disaster is a long time; twenty miles may as well be a thousand. We acclimate and learn to live with blinders on.
Electrical storms are different. They are rare in Northern California and, given the dryness, they are uncommonly dangerous. We fear lightning far more than the earth cracking open because lightning means fire, and fire is guaranteed disaster.
My anxiety went into overdrive as the flashing and thunder went on, every few seconds, for hours. And all without a hint of rain. Lying beside me, Emma whispered: “What if there’s a fire? Should we go?” My wife, the least anxious person I know, was my litmus test for the reality of danger. If she was worried, I reasoned, then my panic was justified. I started to salivate and trace my finger on the sheets, wrestling internally with whether to run. In the end we stayed, but only because of my training as a Californian: rationally, I knew we still had miles of buffer.
Eventually, I slipped into uneasy half-sleep, and woke to white noise. I went fast to the window, expecting to see chaparral just starting to burn. But I could smell it before I saw: that particular scent of wetted concrete. It wasn’t fire, but rain! The power was out—either a mainline had blown down, or PG&E had proactively cut transmission, forecasting another billion-dollar lawsuit. But it didn’t matter. The night of ignition had brought its own extinguisher. We were, by some stroke of luck, still safe.
The rest of the morning had a floaty unreality. As if the rarity of a few drops of summer rain—the patter of it, the smell—were the details of some weird waking dream. One of the friends with us drove down the hill to check the security gate which, without power, of course didn’t open; another searched for a cell signal to call the property manager. Meanwhile we did dishes till the well tanks ran dry, recycled our empties, and packed up. We drove the quarter mile downhill to the gate and stopped. I hopped the fence, but the emergency release was jammed. So we waited, laughing, noting how bad this could’ve been. Eventually a contractor showed up, pried the release open, and we drove home. Back to quarantine, back to abstraction.
We didn’t know the fires had already started.
Over the following three days, lightning struck Northern California more than 12,000 times. These strikes ignited 650 fires, four of which—the SCU, LNU, North, and August complexes—would grow to become among the six largest in state history. In sum, lightning-triggered fires would burn more than 4.5 million acres—about four-and-a-half percent of the state’s total land, an area bigger than Connecticut. The August complex alone torched more than a million acres, burned till mid-November and became, twice over, the largest California fire on record. By Christmas, at least three—the Moraine, Rattlesnake, and SQF complex—were still not out. This year’s Paradise and Concow become Berry Creek and Feather Falls—whole towns nearly wiped off the map.
In the days following our return home, the SCU, LNU, and a third, “smaller” complex—the CZU—exploded in size, encircling the Bay Area. Their ash billowed into the stratosphere, so dense not even sunlight could penetrate. On September 7 we had a day of cold, ecliptic midnight; from the ground, the sun seemed to not rise. On September 8, the clouds did lighten, but this was worse: the atmospheric ash was now snowing down on us. A layer of white coated our cars, the plants, the front steps. Even with the windows shut, it somehow collected on the sills; even indoors, it hurt to breathe. Obsessive checks of purpleair.com proved our AQI was the worst in the world. Our dubious honor.
I caught myself collecting these particularities—measured reduction in sunlight, numeric readouts of air quality—into some paranoid vision of what it all meant, what kind of world I was leaving for my two sons. Apparently, I was not alone: As they had in March, with Covid’s first wave, Google searches for the word “apocalyptic” spiked again. While smoke and the virus were airborne, mass anxiety, it seemed, was in the air.
September
I first noticed it while I was peeing. A dusty spot on the beadboard, in a corner of the bathroom wall. It was in my line of sight as I stood there, and I stood there a lot now that my home bathroom was also my work bathroom. Instead of noise-canceling through my commute, I now spent idle seconds cataloguing the imperfections of home. Looking for fixable things I could fix.
I misted the spot with an all-purpose cleanser and wiped it away. But a week later, the “dust” came back. Five more spots of it in the ceiling corner, and one in the adjacent laundry room. I showed my wife. She took a paper towel to it, and what came off was a gummy pink goo. Not the pretty pink of a flowering plum, but the pink of mold, of the slime additive in McDonald’s hamburgers. The pink of microscopic life and synthetic ick.
We each Googled different keyword permutations. I latched on to the most common result—mildew—even though, as Emma pointed out, the pictures didn’t match. No, I insisted. It’s an easy fix. A mix of stuff from under the sink, a little elbow grease. Baking soda fixes everything.
Emma handled the cleaning. She climbed up a stepstool, scrubbed the spots, then the whole ceiling. I came in as she was finishing. At a glance, it looked good: the pink spots were gone. But then I noticed something else. On the shower glass, hundreds of white dots that hadn’t been there before. I watched the dots very closely. They were moving.
When I showed Emma, she shuddered. She shoved the bowl of paste at me, threw her clothes in the washer, and took a long shower in the other, uninfested bathroom. In her cleaning, she’d knocked something loose—these head-of-a-pin sized bugs—and they’d fallen, briefly airborne, until they found a new surface to cling to. Like the shower glass and, probably, her hair.
I called the exterminator; no appointments till next week. So, I made a solution of bleach and water, sprayed the spots where we’d seen them, and closed the door, sequestering the sterilizing fumes. We agreed we wouldn’t use that bathroom a while, addressing the situation the same way we had the virus and fires: by giving ground. We’d already fallen back to our property line, then indoors, and finally to the center of the rooms. We had a second bathroom; it didn’t matter. Retreating came naturally now.
The mites kept coming back. Each day we’d crack the door, find new spots, and bleach them away; the next day we’d check and find more. The worst—the biggest—agglomeration were the thousands I found inside the cat’s litter box, tumorous and teeming. Masked, holding my breath, I dumped the litter in the curbside can, and commenced with more bleaching.
Back inside, I paced from room to room, analyzing every surface. I noted the salt-and-pepper ash on the sills looked just like mites; I paused, scanning for movement in the dust. And a new anxious thought arose: that we were unclean. That the mites were due to some dormant flaw in us, that infestation had been inevitable. And, like all anxieties, this had at least some kernel of fact in it: bathrooms are, after all, invisibly coated with soap scum and shed skin.
The exterminator finally came. He sprayed a generic insecticide on the walls and ceiling and baseboards. He walked the perimeter of the house, looking for points of incursion. When he finished, we stood outside, masked and distanced, speculating. Could be mold mites, he said. Or bird mites. Psiocids, I asked? (I’d done too much homework.) Never heard of that one, he said.
How did they get in? In general, the same way fleas do: on an animal’s back. But we went down a rabbit hole of contextual stories. A rat’s nest in the crawlspace, or a dead one in the wall; a bird’s nest on the roof, or our cat having rolled on a kill. Or maybe I released them in the DIY remodel I’d just done in our other bathroom—some hundred-year-old spore in the three truckloads of lathe and plaster and black iron I’d hauled to the dump. Or maybe they blew in through the bathroom window, off a squirrel perched on the red maple outside.
This last idea was the worst to consider: That the mites needed no animal transport, no contact to spread. That they were airborne. And while the exterminator hedged, he hinted it was exactly that. We would’ve heard something living, he said; we would’ve smelled something dead.
He left, and I found myself holding out for a dead rat. For a lone, traceable carrier that had chewed through the galvanized mesh on a dormer vent, mired in fiberglass insulation, and died. For a small population of parasitic mites that had come in on this host, fed until the blood got too rancid or desiccated to stay, then somehow bored their way through gypsum, looking for food. I hoped for a cause already neutralized, and effects that were already bleached away.
A dead rat was always preferable to unknowing.
October
The constant bleaching, and the disuse of that shower—meaning no steam, a hard drying out—seemed to work: we hadn’t seen mites in weeks. The pests mitigated, I finally got up the nerve to do my root-cause analysis.
I walked the perimeter of the house and confirmed there were no tunnels. I climbed onto the roof, but found no nest, no chew marks. I went into the crawlspace under the bathroom but found no droppings. These easy things done, I shimmied onto the fridge and removed the trapdoor in the ceiling. I peered in with a flashlight, sat and listened, sniffed. I used a broomstick to churn the insulation above the bathroom ceiling, a hammer at the ready, in case something jumped at me. But, as expected, I found nothing living, dead, or abandoned. Only this dry hot lifeless desert, snowed over with pink insulation.
This work done, I joined my wife at the neighbor’s, where she’d taken our kids for a backyard play date. I sat under a clear blue sky, in the shade of their two urban redwoods, and for the first time in weeks didn’t think about fires and global warming, about my outsized responsibility for both. I watched our kids tumble on a trampoline, and didn’t think about mites, about our defining trait as infested people. I didn’t think about the viral plague, my once anxious certainty that I had it, that I was a spreader. I even watched a droplet of spittle leave someone’s mouth and hover a moment, catching sunlight before vanishing into the bark. Like a dust mote in a cathedral, it was weirdly pretty.
November
It was warm, still no rain, and I was in front of my house, organizing the recycling in the curbside can. I was unmasked. As I stood there doing my futile part, I caught, in the periphery, someone paused on the sidewalk. I looked up. She had on big noise-canceling headphones and a bandana over her mouth, and she was staring at me.
“Come on, man,” she said. “We’re in code purple here!”
I managed to sputter out “That’s not how it spreads,” but she was already walking away. Left standing there, alone, I pictured myself ripping off those smug, cloistering earmuffs. Yelling about her misunderstanding of facts, her dogmatic finger-wagging, how she wanted her own fear to govern what other people did. That she gave us liberals a bad name. That she needed to check her anxiety.
Back inside, I calmed down, and chided myself for thinking a shouting match with a stranger would fix anything. In my head, I played out a future encounter where I didn’t clam up, where I pedantically replied: “Hey, it seems like you’re living in a lot of fear. Can I explain the science to you?” At which point I would elucidate that there were next to zero cases of contraction via fleeting, outdoor passings, fifteen feet apart. That the virus was an indoor thing, that it needed long exposure. That it was not mixed with our oxygen, not ubiquitous. That it was localized; airborne but not “in the air.”
But I never got that chance. I did see her once more—again in front of my house, me again unmasked—but this time she didn’t stop. As if she’d already made up her mind that I was one of “those” people. A face to attach her fear to. The fear that had been growing in her all these months of quarantine, of too little exposure to people. Her fears given thingness in me.
December
Home.
The weather cooled, hospital bed capacity ticked toward zero, and the death rate spiked; the state called another lockdown and, stuck home, I slid down a rabbit hole of worry. That I had the virus, that I’d spread it in our cavalier Thanksgiving with family. That some early rain meant mudslides on denuded land, too much growth to fuel next year’s fires. That the rain’s stoppage meant a sixth year of drought, desiccation to fuel next year’s fires. That seventy-four million people voting for a dictator meant history was repeating itself. That this was Germany in the 30s, all over again.
Stuck home again—indoors and without perspective—I peered out the window, seeing in the seasonal normalcy of sycamores dropping their leaves instead some impending darkness. The beginning of the end.
The night the outdoor dining ban went into effect, Emma made a rushed reservation to the nicest restaurant she could find. Under the cascading lights of the Bay Bridge, we drank too much, ate too much, soaked in one last social evening. After, we shivered in Union Square, sipping cocktails from mason jars and watching masked tourists take selfies under a towering, too-conical fake tree. We escaped into Macy’s to get warm, and commenced pissing away more money in a frenzied, buy-everything-you-can grab of ugly Christmas sweaters and tchotchkes on late-season discount. Presents we would open at home. Decorations we’d place around home. The home of quarantine. The home we had to take a Lyft to because we missed the last train, the windows down, a cold ventilation and paper masks our only protection from the driver, from his last fare; the only protection we could offer the poor guy against us. The home of a now cloying brightness.
The next day, I berated myself: Why did we expose ourselves this way? And why, after all these years of living, couldn’t I get it through my idiot skull that drinking only hooded the anxiety? That it was always worse the next day. I goaded myself to do something. To get out of my head and be useful. To join a protest, a phone bank, a food bank. Instead, I relapsed to pacing, scanning for movement in the dust. It meant something, I reasoned, that I never found the mites’ root cause. That there was no lightning strike, no moment of viral jump, no decades of white rural discontent. The mites were a mystery. They would come back.
Later that day, walking my son to preschool, I passed our neighbor’s big urban redwoods and thought back to my naïve moment of pause. The mites mitigated, the smoke blown inland, the virus not yet resurgent. When, from the right angle, lockdown had a pleasant sense of nesting. Home as mooring rather than confining. The paradoxical freedom—the license—to narrow focus on just my patch of dirt, on those nice tomatoes I’d grown. Yes, I’d soon rip them out, convinced they harbored a colony of rats. And, yes, they were inedibly coated in ash by then anyway. But, for at least a moment, I’d been attuned to the real, to what I could see touch hear taste smell, unfiltered by mental spin.
Anxiety is useless. Pre-thinking bad stuff doesn’t stop it from happening. It only makes me the unreliable narrator of my own life. It is an overlay, an augmented reality that, left unchecked, becomes an alternate one. But there are these countermeasures: first, to go looking, to see if there’s a rat, rather than wonder. And second, to use the loops as signposts, the very fact of repetitive, catastrophizing thought, rather than its subject, as the big red “X” marking unreality. So armed, I can know the true size of things—a droplet of spittle, for example—and recall the world is benign. Not harmless, of course. But unthinking. Unintending. That the shadow puppet is bigger than the hand. That the wizard is just an old man with a curtain.
Home was never the problem, and neither was the rat. I made up the rat.
The root of anxiety is unknowing.
Ryan McFadden lives in Berkeley with his wife and sons. By day, he’s a tech writer. On weekends, he crafts his own stories. His essay “What is Left” was nominated for a Pushcart and indexed in the “Best American Essays, 2020.” He’s currently neck-deep in writing his first essay collection.
16 May 2023
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