Appalachian Apocalypse:
My Son Caught By the Eye of the Storm
September 2024
I’m not dead.
—Zazu, my thirteen-year-old son responds to how he is fairing following the horrors of Hurricane Helene
Did I prepare Zazu for this? Did my “extremism,” our radically unconventional lifestyle prepare him to land unexpectedly smack in the middle of an “unprecedented tragedy” (Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s governor), “the site of biblical devastation” (local emergency-services official)? And without me, his mom, without any family?
Across the walls of my husband’s woodshop/community-maker’s space, leading to a sixteen-foot-high ceiling, there are several fiberglass panels that Wild will replace with reclaimed windows. For now, finches tease the fiberglass strands from the reinforced thermoplastic web to build their offspring’s nest; baby birds enveloped by a polymer matrix. I wonder with horror, is this what I have inadvertently done to my baby bird, my Zazu? Not realizing of course, that he would be caught by the eye of the storm.
These meanderings emerge (the root of the word emergency) from my series “Apocalypse of the Familiar.”[1] Weaving relentless urgency, conviction tinged with knowingly-displaced doubt (an acerbic gift of motherhood), now more than ever, my family embodies the effects of apocalyptic parenting—both its gifts and sometimes demoralizing contradictions (See my Apocalypse of the Familiar: Transforming Digital Normalcies through Apocalyptic Parenting). Apocalyptic parenting isn’t a paralyzing, disempowering child-rearing “method.” It is a passionately committed release from the trappings of industrial-waste dominant culture.
How does Zazu feel now as he is living Armageddon for which I have been preparing him, apocalypsing him for his whole life—revealing how to be resourceful and radically self-accountable? By demonstrating how modern civilization (Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, compulsory education, etc.) is at the core of carbon capitalism, apocalyptic parenting reflects and offers continual interplay between gratitude, grace, and grief, courage, creativity, and curiosity.
Why, you may ask is Zazu, a young teen, in Asheville without me to begin with? He was there for the very reason the hurricane was tearing through the Southeastern United States. In my attempt to escape the malfeasant entrapment of digitally-addictive technologies, I lose my child smack in the middle of climate chaos—one of the many outcomes of modern civilization’s technotopia/ techno-euphoria. However, there is no escape. Not when we (Western-industrial imperialism) repeatedly demonstrate contempt for nature’s boundaries. My response to raising a child in an era of inescapable self-destruction through ecological devastation has been to find community. After thirteen years of searching across the US for a community for both of us that practices profound environmental consciousness in conjunction with racial equity, a diverse eco-social-child-focused intentional community, I give up. I did however, finally find one for him: Arthur Morgan School. A boarding school. I swallow my sadness, my shame. Barely a whisper can I say these words. Yet, when I move past how I have internalized nuclear-family, privatized norms of how we are supposed to raise our children, I realize that this is an extraordinary opportunity to practice: “It takes a village…” (an ethic I have tried to live in ecovillages for decades).
What does it mean to protect our children? What does it mean to prepare them? In Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate-justice book, I state: “Within the national debate about how to emotionally protect our children, many ‘holistic-minded’ parents conflate ‘news’ about terrorism, police brutality, school-shootings, etc. with ecological devastation—claiming all as taboo subjects. Contrary to such fears, we suggest parents and educators teach our very young children why ecologically-conscious values and accountable behaviors are both nourishing and necessary to repair our world (the Jewish tenet, tikkun olam).
My son is good in crises: In his thirteen years, beginning with our unassisted homebirth when his shoulder was hooked on my pubic bone (shoulder dystocia), Zazu has experienced firsthand how medical-industry protocol insidiously intersects with corporate profit. As an infant bound to my breast, Zazu was on the frontlines of the Oakland Occupy Movement. Through his toddler and post-toddler years, even as I made collective attempts at radical community, Zazu encountered the effects of human greed, witnessing hypocrisies of living in urban co-housing and rural ecovillages fraught with economic, race, and gender-skewed power discrepancies. As a young boy at Earthaven Ecovillage, Zazu and I trudged waist-deep through a rising flood, trying to get to our Love Bus (I was convinced it would be carried downstream). See also https://carajudeaalhadeff.com/when-love-ignites-a-creative-waste-revolution/ We fled the west coast fires of 2021, and endured the terrifying, mighty winds whipping through Nederland, Colorado. Most recently, we navigated the self-perpetuating apocalypse of colonialist exploitation in the Voodoo community in Ouidah, Benin.
Everything we need to know is already within us just waiting to be realized.
—Stephen Hawking…Hawking could very well be describing the fertility of apocalypse.
In her recent essay, “Peaches for The Apocalypse,” my dearest friend and poet/prose author, Darrah Danielle cites adrienne marie brown: “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.” However, I sense that nature is doing the “pulling.” For over 30 years I have written that the term “natural disaster” rarely applies to our condition of being vulnerable in the face of Mother Nature. Whether we label “natural disaster” nature’s retaliation or simply common sense, dominant culture continues to create suffering and be in pain. There may no longer be such a thing as a “natural disaster.” Nature’s mutiny, yes: trees fallen on powerlines—stomping out our power addictions, an illusory moratorium on our electricity-obsessed society, rains engulfing bridges and roads—preventing the seemingly seamless coming & going of car-dependent culture, rivers whisking downstream beer kegs, propane tanks, shipping containers—our pleasures, our conveniences absurdly inaccessible, winds whipping through homes—transforming them from cohesive entities to fragments once again. One nightmare leading to another. Ruthless quantities of trash creating more trash. Remedies reinforce the cycle of self-destruction. Victorious corporations. Toxic effulgent. Entire communities erased.
We can no longer live in denial, under the veil of habituated obedience, of convenience-consumer culture. We can no longer pretend our actions do not have consequences. I have tried to embody a “philosophy of warning,” a radical break from conformity, a pedagogical-lived commitment to co-create alternatives (Santigo Zabala).[2] This is what I have always tried to creatively, lovingly, and urgently share with Zazu. In her delightfully provocative Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances, my colleague Catherine Keller writes about the vitality of “apocalyptic mindfulness.” She reminds us of the power of grief, the “work of mourning,” in which the responsibility for the world develops: “The ability to respond depends upon our capacity to feel response” (54). I wonder how our response changes when we anticipate catastrophe compared to when we are caught off guard because we live in a world of taken-for-granted norms. My parenting reflects not only an anticipation of catastrophe, but a sense of how to creatively and collectively prevent and respond to catastrophe. It reflects John Steinbeck’s “indispensable apokalypsis: ‘This is the beginning—from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’” (The Grapes of Wrath, 152). Steinbeck declares” a revelation of interrelation” (Keller, 105). This is apocalyptic parenting.
You don’t come to the baths for a miracle, you come for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.
—in reference to pilgrimage to the healing waters in Lourdes, France at the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, “The Miracle Club”[3]
Have I taught Zazu that there are no miracles? No—quite the opposite. I have taught him to take nothing for granted, because everything is a miracle. We are the miracle. I have taught him how to respond to being inundated with what feels like a world where all miracles are being threatened. I have taught him that apocalypse is part of how we receive miracles, the apocalypse that demands we wake up from rampant cultural somnambulism. We can’t receive miracles if we are numbed by habit, by conformity. Apocalypse is the shedding of conformity. Apocalypse invites freedom. Is an event still apocalyptic if you were expecting it? Or is it then simply a horrific confirmation? And how does a teenager’s mind metabolize what had been “prepared” for?
The Arthur Morgan School community felt like a miracle…
Since the womb, I have consciously and unconsciously shared with Zazu that it is our sacred duty—our humility for the gift of being radically alive on this earth—to resist falling blindly into the normalcy of carbon capitalism and its embedded carceral culture. And yet, I am riddled with self-doubt: How could I have separated myself from my child amid so many impending disasters? Ironically, I wasn’t even aware that Asheville, North Carolina was touted as a “climate haven”—a safe home, a place where people could “escape” extreme weather, climate crisis. The city of Asheville, its inhabitants’ lives, have been devastated by Hurricane Helene. A few years ago, Asheville was third on a list of the top 12 U.S. cities most likely to economically benefit from climate migration. Just as there is no “away” when people misleadingly act as though they can throw “disposable” items “away”, there is no escape from climate crisis. Our contemporary climate apocalypse is clearly demonstrating this inescapable fact.
The first few days after Hurricane Helene ravages Asheville and the surrounding mountain communities, I have little idea what is happening with Zazu. I do understand he is physically safe—temporarily in the home of a welcoming and generous family. His school is now completely inaccessible, the entire Celo community, the bridge over Toe River, swallowed… This school that has taken me thirteen years to find—(although my discovery had been an excruciating compromise since I cannot live there and be with Zazu).
The nights before we part, before I leave Zazu for his first three-months in his new outdoor education, Montessori school—his Rites of Passage outside of Asheville, Zazu and I read aloud to one another Masters of Silence—a remarkable story about Jewish refugee orphans hiding in a convent from the Nazis. (When my father was five to seven-years-old, he hid in a closet during the Holocaust.) The story tells the history of how Marcel Marceau, the exquisite mime artist, (the Harriette Tubman of La Resistance) rescued hundreds of Jewish children in an underground railroad from Southern France to Switzerland. Zazu and I spend our final few days together in Asheville walking hour-after-hour along the foot and bike paths on either side of the French Broad River. Those paths, along with the majority of West Asheville’s River Arts District, are now submerged under water. A combination of torrential downfall for three straight days produced thirty inches of rain leading to unprecedented utter destruction, 25-30 feet over riverbanks.
Satellite links are re-installed on some mountain ridges. When Zazu finally has cellphone service, I ask him aside from what he can directly see, how he is finding out what is going on nearby. He tells me he was sitting in an electric car listening to the radio. But, he adds, the announcer was reading a script they didn’t seem to know; reading it and then sounding surprised by what it said. What he does see is a “wasteland.” Roads turned inside out and upside down. Zazu is on top of a hill when a military helicopter drops in so close, he can see inside. I ask if he can see the pilot’s face. No, only reflections. The eerie scene compounds. The distinction between what is real, nightmare, dream continues to blur.
For years, before Zazu left for Arthur Morgan School, our most heart-wrenching arguments were about his feelings of depravation, being the only one of his peers living without electricity, without flush toilets, without Wi-Fi, without a phone. He drew and wrote about his confused feelings in “A Foot in Both Worlds.”
What happens when a mother’s warnings become reality? When a profound respect for how we harvest water and food shifts into a collective requirement to ration water and food? Zazu has grown up living off grid, essentially independent from the corporate-controlled systems most people in this country rely on: electricity, water, food. In large part, he has deeply resented my choices to resist normalized-infrastructural relationships to acquisition rooted in environmental racism and ecological hell-making. He has vociferously criticized our off-grid world. Yet now, perhaps just a little bit more, Zazu understands our value. No, our imperative.
As I write this, Zazu is on an emergency flight returning home.
[1] We have confused Apocalypse with Armageddon. Unlike Armageddon, a decisive (albeit illusory) battle between “good” and “evil,” apocalypse refers to disclosure or revelation. “Apocalypse of the Familiar” is not referring to an end of the familiar, but an ongoing revealing of what we take for granted in dominator-cultures. How can we loosen the grip of our habituated obedience, that relentlessly, numbingly comfortable sense of the known? Most people are so entrenched in the familiar, they will only hear what they want to hear, only see what they choose to see.
[2] Zabala, my colleague at The Global Centre for Advanced Studies, describes warnings as hermeneutical—changing the future by reinterpreting the past.
[3] “Spiritual energy breathes through this small village. To date, there have been 70 confirmed miracles at Lourdes since the first apparition appeared to a 14-year-old peasant girl in 1858” (Lourdes, France - A Town of Healing Water and Miracles (albomadventures.com).
Oh Cara. Feeling you all now. We are experincing massive floods here where we live in Thailand too. We are in in now. This is it.
Oh, Cara, my love, I am speechless and overwhelmed, to tears.