Same Sky, Different Storms
Winter 2009-10, Connecticut, USA
I’m writing this sitting in my home office in England, surrounded by waterlogged fields and flooded roads. Meanwhile, my friends back in America are just starting to dig their way out from under 18 inches of snow. They are excitedly sharing snaps of rulers buried deep in the snow on their decks, and we’re reminiscing about the winter of 2009-10 when we had big snow dumps every other week for six weeks straight - so much that you could walk off the edge of the back yard trampoline and land in it.
What a welcome distraction this storm is from the real storm happening in America.
America is good at snow. Certainly the part of the States we lived in. You know it’s coming. You run to the local store to empty the shelves of bread and milk. You test your generator. You hunker down and place bets on whether tomorrow will be a two-hour delayed opening or a full snow day. You wake to the muffled sound of snow plows (it’s spelt that way in America) driving around town and enjoy the unscheduled pause in your routine.
Snow days are carefree, blissful interruptions full of fun and hot chocolate and dogs running around the yard having stolen your woolly hat. The rare pleasure of having time handed back to you. The streets are cleared efficiently. Sidewalks follow. Within a few hours daily life resumes, only now wrapped in a blanket of sparkling white stuff everywhere and an impossibly deep blue sky.
Beautiful.
Seriously, America really needed this snow storm.
Here in the UK, the rain isn’t as dramatic. Instead its impact is cumulative - kind of creeping, insidious. When we left in 2009 there was occasional flooding, and of course there has always been rain. But in our absence, as predicted, things have become worse. Climate change has led to more intense rainfall and less of the persistent drizzle I remember from my youth. The UK’s aging infrastructure was never designed for this version of the climate. As a result, almost every field is totally saturated - to the extent I am frequently walking through mid-calf high water when out walking our dogs - many country roads are flooded, and there are potholes everywhere.
Potholes, and not the weather, are the thing most people are complaining about. (Interesting aside: I looked up the other day where the name “pothole” comes from and it’s from around the 16th century. Back then potters and brickmakers needed good quality clay and they would steal it from the roads, thus creating potholes - who knew?). As a recent transplant to the UK it’s not the potholes that are bothering me. They are just a frustrating (and wheel-destroying) symptom of a far bigger reality that England is just not facing.
It rains here. A lot. This is no longer an anomaly, it’s reality. Until that altered reality is truly acknowledged and accepted, this country will just keep on patching its potholes.
Maybe it’s part of the human condition, I think it is, this refusal to see what’s happening right in front of us, to say “surely not” and to hope against reason or rationality that it will just all go away if we don’t think about it - don’t look too hard.
So this is where I land.
What’s happening - here and across the Atlantic - is no longer normal. Both countries are grappling with systems built for a world that no longer exists. Accepting reality isn’t defeatist or pessimistic, it’s the first, necessary step towards taking responsibility.
Do we complain about the symptoms, or do we accept that the ground has shifted?
You may well be wondering what all of this has to do with my creative work. Honestly? Not a lot. But there’s something about authenticity, something about noticing, naming, being jointly responsible. Sometimes it’s about paying attention, and choosing to act. That awareness, that willingness to face reality, is not unlike the first step in any creative act.
It’s time to stop hiding from what’s already here and start working with the reality we’re in, not the one we wish would return.
Dedicated to Renee Good and Alex Pretti