A Paradise Built in Hell (19 page)

Reading Fritz, it becomes clear that disaster provides not only opportunities and communities but a changed sense of self that matters. As Fritz wrote, “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.” Here Fritz seems to venture close to another sense of religion, not as community or belief but as practice, as a craft of refining the self into something more adequate to the circumstances we face, more able to respond with grace and generosity, to achieve less temporary liberation. Most religions turn their adherents toward the things we are afraid to face: mortality, death, illness, loss, uncertainty, suffering—to the ways that life is always something of a disaster. Thus religion can be regarded as disaster preparedness—equipment not only to survive but to do so with equanimity and respond with calmness and altruism to the disaster of everyday life. Many religious practices also emphasize the importance of recognizing the connectedness of all things and the deep ties we all have to communities, from the congregation of the faithful to all beings everywhere. In so doing, they inculcate as everyday practice the mutual aid and altruism that disaster sometimes suddenly delivers.

The overlaps are interesting. Buddhism, for example, teaches that suffering comes from attachment, including attachment to past pains and future outcomes and to a sense of a separate self. Disaster encourages nonattachment to material goods as well as to past and future, or rather less attachment to abstractions and objects and more to other beings and states of being. People are set loose in an absorbing present of intense uncertainty. During California’s horrendous 2008 summer of fire, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a community residence and retreat center in the rugged mountains of California’s central coast, was threatened for weeks with incineration. As the last of the monks and residents evacuated that July, the abbot and four others decided to turn back and face the fire.

The danger was high. While reluctantly allowing them to remain in the evacuated zone, the Forest Service had asked for the names of their dentists, in case they needed to be identified by charred remains. Their account of the several days they lived surrounded by burning land in an otherwise depopulated region is remarkable for its aplomb and for their quest to find metaphors other than fighting for what they were doing with fire—and for their success in saving their community’s home. For days as the fire approached, they cleared brush, kept watch, and maintained firebreaks and their sprinklers, pumps, and generators. The day that towering flames up to forty feet tall approached them from all four sides, they patrolled for sparks and flames and put them out to the best of their abilities (they had some firefighting training, protective clothing, and equipment). It worked.

One of them wrote in the center’s online journal of the disaster, “What was most compelling during these hours, and which in reflection remains the most satisfying, is the constant vigilance and effort that the fire required. It was . . . a demanding schedule of pure presence in which one utterly let go of a known outcome. There were undeniable moments of fear and anxiety, especially when we understood the reality that the fire was descending into Tassajara fast and from all sides, rather than creeping down one slope at a time as had initially been suggested by several professional firefighters. But there was little time to entertain fear, so fear quickly gave way to our effort to fully meet our belated guest and the tasks at hand.” Dave Zimmerman, the center’s director, concluded a few days later, “And finally, deep bows to the fire, whose undeniable dharma teaching of impermanence has earned our awed respect and attention.” The abbot, Stephen Stucky, later said in a lecture that this encounter with the fire gave force to the idea of “ being prepared to meet whatever arises.” Tassajara survived as an island of green in an ocean of blackened moun tainsides and burned forests. The community in looking for lessons from the fire found many, and much to be grateful for: their Buddhist practice had equipped them to respond calmly (many were distressed at the possibility of losing a beloved place but recognized that nonattachment and equanimity were other lessons that might have to be learned). And they benefited immensely from being a community, with the ability to organize responses and draw on support and resources close at hand and far away.

The Vietnamese Buddhist community of Biloxi, Mississippi, didn’t have the resources or the luck that Tassajara did, and they faced water, not fire. They were dedicating their brand-new temple the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and the head monk from Vietnam, a visiting senior monk, about eighteen elderly women, a neighboring African American family, a Vietnamese American Texas doctor who studied with the monk, and several others took shelter in the attic after the waters of the storm surge rose to the ceiling of the temple. They did not know for the several hours that they were trapped there in the dark whether the water would continue to rise, but the monks chanted, everyone remained calm, and afterward the national Vietnamese community brought relief supplies and aid in rebuilding the temple (as did the Burners without Borders project started by participants in the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert). The doctor who had been stranded there told me, “Everything is so impermanent. One day we’re having a celebration and a grand opening and the next day it’s all destroyed. So you just sit down and think deeply. It does shock me to go through that. But as for the people it’s very hard. First of all they’re poor to start with.” But the temple was rebuilt, and the monk who heads it was more than cheerful about the disaster when I visited the rebuilt temple. “Very happy” were his parting words on the subject.

The language of religion might best explain that sudden joy in disaster. It’s anarchic, a joy that the ordinary arrangements have fallen to pieces—but anarchic in that the ordinary arrangements structure and contain our lives and minds; when they cease to do so we are free to improvise, discover, change, evolve. Although religion has talked for millennia of the liberations of loss, and from Tibetan sages to Saint Francis of Assisi giving everything away has been a first step on the spiritual path, it is a dangerous thing to say that disaster is liberating. Dangerous because when thrust upon those who are unprepared or unequipped, rather than chosen or embraced, when it comes by surprise its effect is only loss and suffering. But a surprising number of people seem ready to make the most of this moment, including those who have lost much or are suffering. The same is often true of those surviving serious illness or nondisaster losses. Transcendence sneaks in everywhere as a survival response.

Contemporary language speaks of the effects of disaster entirely as trauma, or even more frequently as post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. The twin implications are that we are not supposed to suffer and that in our frailty we are not merely damaged, but
only
damaged by suffering. If suffering is a given, as it is for most religions, then the question is more what you make of it rather than how you are buffered from it altogether. The awareness of mortality that heightens a sense of life as an uncertain gift rather than a burdensome given also recalls religious teachings, and it is often shared by survivors of individual traumas. One professor of psychology, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, writes, “The confrontation with physical and psychological annihilation essentially strips life to its essentials, and for many survivors becomes a turning point from the superficial to the profound. Life takes on new meaning and one’s own life is often reprioritized. In our own work with survivors of life-threatening diseases, crimes, and accidents, men and women frequently reported that only now can they truly enjoy life because they no longer take it for granted.”

Indeed, disaster could be called a crash course in Buddhist principles of compassion for all beings, of nonattachment, of abandoning the illusion of one’s sense of separateness, of being fully present, of awareness of ephemerality, and of fearlessness or at least aplomb in the face of uncertainty. You can reverse that to say that religion is one of the ways crafted to achieve some of disaster’s fruits without its damage and loss. That state of clarity, bravery, altruism, and ease with the dangers and uncertainties of the world is hard-won through mental and emotional effort but sometimes delivered suddenly, as a gift amid horrific loss, in disaster. Think of the exhilaration of Pauline Jacobson and William James; think of Samuel Prince seeing disaster as religious trial; of Dorothy Day’s populist mysticism: “While the crisis lasted, people loved one another”; think of the young woman who suddenly realized she might have been hurt when her shelter crumbled around her in the Blitz but emerged to experience “pure and absolute happiness.”

The conundrum we call human nature readily rises to the occasion of a crisis and as readily slacks off when the living is easy. During its decade of prosperity based on precarious financial schemes, Iceland grew politically apathetic and a little dull and demoralized. When its mismanaged economy crashed spectacularly in October 2008, furious citizens took action and a vibrant civil society emerged; it was the best and worst of times as the country lost its economic wealth and social poverty. A young member of the demonstrations that toppled the neoliberal government wrote to me of those days of bonfires and drums, “I felt as if Iceland was being born again.” That the worst time becomes the best is interesting, but hardly ideal. That the best times, the safe and affluent ones, become the worst poses other challenges, of how to maintain a sense of purpose and solidarity in the absence of emergencies, how to stay awake in softer times. The religious language of awakening suggests we are ordinarily sleepers, unaware of each other and of our true circumstances and selves. Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful effort keeps us awake.

N
ew Orleans, 1950: A stowaway sneaks ashore one night in New Orleans, plays cards, wins big, but feels sick. Before the illness gets him, a thug guns him down near the waterfront. It’s just an ordinary murder until the coroner discovers the man was infected with pneumonic plague, an airborne and highly contagious form of bubonic plague, the disease that as the Black Death once wiped out a third of all Europeans. This is where the public health officer steps in. To prevent an epidemic, he’s got forty-eight hours to track down all the people who came into contact with the dead man and inoculate them—and he needs to keep the press silent, lest there be panic. A lot of officials are skeptical about the gravity of the situation, but a cop works with him—and to keep things quiet jails the reporter who’s got the story. We’re meant to believe that a free press and an informed public are a menace, because that public would behave badly were it to find out what dangers face it. That’s why the movie is called
Panic in the Streets
.

Los Angeles, 1974: a graduate student at the fictional Seismology Institute has miraculously mathematically analyzed the geological data to predict a massive earthquake is imminent. He is eager to warn the public, but the institute’s director squelches him, saying, “A public announcement now that an earthquake is imminent: that could create incredible panic. People climbing over people trying to leave the city. That could be worse than the earthquake itself.” Just as human reaction to a nuclear bomb could be worse than the bomb, so it could be worse than the most exciting earthquake the movies can concoct: one with the soil seething as though monsters are going to burst out of it, tall buildings toppling, a dam breaking, and people running every which way and screaming, especially the women, who scream a lot. After the shaking, blazing, and crumbling in this version of disaster comes lots of looting, carjacking, and general rampaging. (Even if they were predictable, earthquakes don’t actually call for leaving the region, merely for leaving unsafe structures and situations: you can weather almost any quake on open ground without anything to fall on you or collapse under you. One of the peculiarities of this movie, however, is that the great low-slung sprawl of Los Angeles is represented largely by a high-rise downtown district.) Imagine if the National Weather Service gave up hurricane warnings for fear of panic and evacuation. The seismologists settle for warning the mayor, who alerts the governor, and they deploy National Guard troops—to manage the panic in the streets when the unwarned public is suddenly shaken. Once again the public is the menace. Not much in the cinematic imagination has changed in the twenty-four years between
Panic in the Streets
and
Earthquake
, the blockbuster movie starring supermacho Charlton Heston and a smashed-up Los Angeles.

The Cascade Range, Washington, 1997: a volcano is about to bathe the idyllic small town at its base in molten lava, and only the rugged geologist Pierce Brosnan understands this. He wants to warn the townspeople to prepare for evacuation, but his boss refuses to let him, on the grounds that if it’s a false alarm, they’ll be liable for the economic losses. (In real life a similar argument was made about the tsunami that devastated the South Asian coast on December 26, 2004: “The important factor in making the decision was that it’s high [tourist] season and hotel rooms were nearly one hundred percent full. If we had issued a warning, which would have led to an evacuation, what would happen then? Business would be instantaneously affected,” said a Thai official.) “I know it was intense up there,” the boss says of some of the strange things happening on the volcanic caldera, “ but I don’t want to cause a panic over a few tectonic plates and shakes.” Brosnan himself tells the town council that “we don’t want to start a panic.” Tension builds for an hour of film time, and by the point the scientists finally warn the small town at a meeting in the high-school gym, the eruption is already beginning. They’ve started a panic. “Do not rush, do not rush,” says the sheriff, and so the small-town hordes rush out of the meeting, knock one of their own over and nearly trample him, and jump into cars which they begin driving erratically in all directions. Inevitably, one of them smashes into a power pole, electrical lines fall and spark and snake, brakes screech, and wheels squeal. And then Dante’s Peak, after which the film is named, starts pumping lava. Brosnan, like a human Swiss Army knife, keeps opening up new skills: he is the superhuman scientist-action-figure who recurs in movies such as 2004’s climate change drama
The Day After Tomorrow
.