Minnesota in November. Not a good time to discuss global warming. Yesterday, it was 9 degrees.
If anything, winters are getting colder. This is all in our imaginations, of course. Winters are not getting colder. We’re getting older.
Sitting in her apartment, I complained to Reba about winter. Wearing two sweaters and a shawl, she hates winter too, and survives by “cocooning”. Her building is one hundred years old. As we speak a cast iron radiator knocks and gurgles, adding a subtle commentary.
She sat on the couch and pulled her stocking feet beneath her. Like a cat. “Climate change,” she told me. “Is a hoax.”
I politely laughed. No one is more left than Reba.
“I’m not kidding. It’s political.”
“But that’s what climate change deniers claim.”
“They’re right. But for the wrong reasons.” She sipped black tea. “Sure you don’t want a cup?”
“You don’t have any cocoa, do you?”
“No.”
I’m a little suspicious of Reba’s tea. She mixes her own herbs. The last time I had a cup I went home and wrote eleven poems. Then ate an entire lingonberry pie. Then went looking for my wife. Luckily, she was shopping.
“Listen,” Reba continued. “The term ‘climate change’ is political. A trap to squash discussion. Of course the climate is changing. It has always changed.”
“Then what should we call it?”
“The correct term is global warming.”
“Right. And our goal is to cool…”
Reba cut me off. “You think we can cool the earth? Terraform the planet into a new mega-trend? Now you’re in the realm of conjecture. Even science fiction.”
Reba is up on the science. Extremely so. She was once a hard-core activist, living with seven others in a teepee near Washington’s Olympic Park. They were squatters, protesting old growth logging. One day she moved out of the teepee, leaving the others behind. “It got weird,” she told me.
I wasn’t finished with climate change. Or rather, global warming. What about the Paris Climate Accord? I asked.
Reba placed her teacup on top of the radiator. “Paris is a high-buck sideshow. The polluters created a game with trade-offs and tax credits. Right now they’re sitting around shaking dice and moving their little wheelbarrows and doggies around the world. In the meantime, they strip-mine the Congo.”
“But we have to do something…”
“Do something?” Now I got her dander up. “Whenever I hear someone say that I want to slap them. You want to do something? Stop the wholesale deforestation of rainforests. Or mining the Boundary Waters. In thirty years, we may or may not move the dial on climate even a single degree. But in that time the ancient forests of Borneo will be obliterated.”
The bigshots knew what they wanted. They always do. It seemed bad, but Reba’s mood quickly rebounded. Outside her windows it had begun to snow. “Look how pretty,” she said, lifting her cup.
“It is pretty.”
“Write a poem for me. Something about falling snow on black hair.”
I told her I’d work on it.
“If you drank some of this tea, you wouldn’t have to work very hard…”
Of that, Reba, I am sure.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com