In the dark and roiling sea that was 2020, back when we had only barely begun to embark upon her troubled waters, before coronavirus had hit our borders, before racial tensions had exploded in the streets, and before the very foundations of democracy trembled beneath our nation’s feet, there was a foreboding event that tried to warn of the great storm to come.
Sure, there were already strange signs brewing in the air. The raging wildfires in Australia. The shooting down of a 737 passenger plane in Tehran. These events erupted like flashes in a cloud looming in the distance. But the event I speak of was much more subtle, like a roused wave that momentarily jolts the boat’s bow, leaving the sailor with an eerie feeling it was set forth by a more menacing wave lurking beneath the nightscape.
It happened at 7:30 a.m. on Jan. 12. It was a peaceful Sunday morning in Toronto. Sleeping, I was awoken by the screeching sound of a provincial emergency alert. The cryptic message said there had been an incident at the Pickering nuclear plant, that staff were responding to the situation, and that we should remain tuned to the news for further instructions. But the media didn’t know any more than we did, and I found myself frantically searching for answers to questions I had never thought about: What does a cyanide pill do? What direction was the wind moving that morning? Should I bolt for the airport? Drive north?
Despite the existential threat, and despite my quickened pulse, I laid in bed all morning. I did nothing but google. It was an alarming realization of my uselessness: both the failure of my imagination to truly fathom such an event could occur, and the limits of my knowledge as to what to do. (Turns out the advice for surviving a nuclear incident was the same advice I would later receive to survive a pandemic – stay home).
The next message from the government came 108 minutes later. It was a false alarm. There was no incident. There was no threat. The false alarm passed through like a ghost, but that unsettled feeling it left has remained. Those 108 minutes have stretched like Dali’s clock across the entire year of 2020.
For the year two thousand and twenty came fast, and its wave was destined to wallop everyone’s boat.
Each week, sometimes each day, a fresh news story would fall like the foot of God to lay another crack on the earth, to shake our attachment to the world we knew, or rather the world we thought we knew. Apocalyptic? Perhaps. There have been many apocalypses, and if our ancestors could speak they might laugh at what we think qualifies.
But let us not compare our toughness to other ages, for it would hide what was truly terrifying about this past year: that we are not as invulnerable as we thought. Not our economy, whose delicate supply chains we saw tremor in empty grocery store shelves; not our homes or businesses, which wobbled precariously before the next mortgage payment; not our health systems, which panicked at the sight of shrinking beds and bare cupboards of PPE; nor even us as a human race, as the hatred and vitriol of right versus left politics rivaled our collective instinct to survive.
Now, battered and tattered in our life rafts, as our eyes cling to the shores of 2021, let us hope for some calmer skies, and some time to think about what all these bewildering events actually mean.
So well written - humour, personal insights and an unvarnished look at the chaos of our current world.