What does it mean to have chosen to have a child in this time of climate crisis?
I become pregnant as wildfires devour the West. In rainy Oregon, fires burn hot enough to generate their own weather. Vortexes of heat, wind, and smoke roil in “firenados.” In California, sequoias older than Christianity blaze and fall to the ground. Firefighters in respirator masks and hardhats wrap flame-retardant foil around the burgundy bark of the largest known tree in the world, a 2,000-year-old giant sequoia nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty and wide as a tennis court. An astronaut on the International Space Station snaps a photo: a sickly-gray plume oozes over swaths of brown land. People in New York smell smoke.
In our small urban garden in Salt Lake City, ash falls onto tomato leaves. I stand on concrete in the late summer heat, surveying the raised beds my husband built, which now burst with green. A muted orange globe hangs in the sky without shining. The Wasatch Mountains, usually crisp above the skyline of half-built highrises with their cranes, have vanished. This morning it rained, but instead of bringing the relief of petrichor, the rain has somehow amplified the smell of smoke. I’ve trapped myself inside for days, air purifiers blasting, leaving only for work. Now I’ve dashed outside with scissors and a bowl. I tie back my hair, hold my breath, and harvest: curved golden squash, little yellow tomatoes, three kinds of basil. Preterm birth, birth defects, childhood cancer, I think. Go inside. But my feet do not move. Sticking my head into the viny mess of tomatoes, I rub my fingers on their leaves, thumb their stalks. I breathe deeply, sucking in the scent of abundance, childhood summers, caprese sandwiches on the lakeshore.
I imagine how in some months, a similar breath-hunger will emerge from the lungs of the rapidly dividing cluster of cells in my womb, still smaller than a berry, whose ferocious entropy will somehow organize into a human being. These cells that I am, with deep-gut fear, trying to protect from this polluted, burning air. These cells that I am, with much deliberation, choosing to bring into this world we pollute and burn. These cells that I am, with urgent hope, welcoming into this world of seeds and shoots and leaves and bees, this world of miracles almost too beautiful to believe.
My husband and I, both resident physicians at the hospital, leave home before sunrise each morning, strapping on goggles and N95 masks as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage. This month, I am caring for children with cancer, many of them dying. In the middle of the night on a 24-hour-long shift, I am paged to the room of a giggly toddler with brain cancer who abruptly stopped smiling. Her eyes are glazed. Emergent imaging shows the tumor eclipsing her brain. Unlike the plume of smoke in the astronaut’s photo, this child’s tumor will not recede. Yet both the fire and the cancer have irreversibly scorched the delicate, life-giving tissues they now obscure. My breath clings to my throat. I clutch the waistband of my scrubs and struggle to push words through two layers of masks as I tell my patient’s mother that her daughter will soon die. The mother grips the rails of the hospital crib, throws back her head, and wails. I am paged to the next room.
A fire erupts in a local canyon, where spruces and pines now blaze. Six thousand nearby homes are evacuated. I vaguely consider making a “go bag,” but my limbs are too heavy.
My husband decides we need to get outside. He crouches by the refrigerator, filling a cooler with snacks, his auburn hair streaked with sweat. While I worry about the air, he worries about the wilting of my soul. He nurtures me with the tenderness and persistence with which he grows seedlings in our basement each spring. If the air is too bad to hike, we can at least amble, he decides. I stand mute and motionless in a corner of the kitchen, still wearing last night’s clothes, feeling as though I’m watching him through a TV screen. I can’t remember what to do with my arms or legs. He hands me a water bottle to fill.
We drive out to the Great Salt Lake, two and a half hours on highways turning to gravel. Buildings and billboards are replaced by fields of sagebrush and golden grasses. The smoky air hides low-lying mountains that typically snake along the horizon. As we get closer, we see black boulders and the occasional roadside sunflower, drooping in the late afternoon heat yet shining in the sun. Our destination is the Spiral Jetty, the massive earth-sculpture created by artist Robert Smithson in 1970 on the northeastern shore of the lake. The water in this part of the lake is almost ten times saltier than the ocean. It glows pink with algae and halophiles: salt-loving bacteria that thrive in harsh salinity. Jagged slabs of salt cover the sand. Smithson used black basalt and lakeside soil to build a 1,500-foot-long walkable spiral winding from the grassy shore to the water. The basalt conjures the lava that once flowed, while the spiral shape mimics the molecular pattern of salt crystals layered throughout the lake’s floor. Aware that his art would change with changing water levels, Smithson intended to render impermanence. Just two years after he created the sculpture, the lake rose and submerged it for decades, until drought uncovered it again in 2002.
The first time I came to the jetty, in 2007, water weaved between the rings of rock. As I walked along the volcanic stone, the spiral’s curves guided me to view the lake from every direction. The pink water was the same hue as the sunset above. I stepped off the jetty into waist-high water, whose temperature, too, somehow seemed precisely that of the air. Closing my eyes, I could no longer tell where air ended, and water began. The salt lifted me: effortlessly, I floated. I was held.
Fourteen years later, blistering drought has pushed the lake far from its former shoreline. Aerial photographs show its body shriveled to a skeleton. Islands are no longer islands. The jetty now spirals on dry land. Arsenic-laden dust lurks beneath the lake, kept in the ground by water and salt. If the lake continues to dry, toxic dust storms could blow across the Salt Lake Valley into the homes and bodies of more than two million people, including us.
My husband and I reach the edge of the jetty’s outermost spiral and, in the smoky dusk, still can’t see water. The sunset blurs on the horizon; peaches, tans, and blues smear like we are inside a child’s sidewalk chalk-art. It’s eerily beautiful. We walk on piercing lattices of salt, bending down to taste oceans condensed into kernels. After a while, we can no longer see the jetty and barely see the shore: now we are inside a world where there is only color, salt, and each other.
Then, suddenly, there is water. Warm like arms, the water lifts us. We float; we surrender. We are weightless. We are held.
After, we perch on the trunk of the car, bodies caked in salt. Children squeal and dogs pant as families play on the jetty while the last light fades. We eat thick slabs of summer tomatoes with fleshy balls of burrata, piercing the cheese’s tender skin with our teeth, tonguing the cream inside, licking tomato juice as it runs down our chins, sopping it all up with hunks of sourdough, closing our eyes to taste even more. We wiggle our salty, stinging bodies next to each other and hold each other in rapture.
The following June, I am lying in bed with our baby on my chest. I feel his ribs pulse with breath: staccato gasps between gulps of milk, interludes of contented sighs, a slowing when he slips into sleep. The air purifier hums. A pile of blue scrubs crowds a corner of the room, which my childless self somehow had thought would be easier to put away after the baby was born. Scrubs that, days before his birth, I wore while working in the pediatric intensive care unit, moon-belly swelling below my PAPR respirator as I touched the paralyzed bodies of intubated, breathless children. Scrubs like those that my colleagues wore in our delivery room, huddled holding the ventilator mask to my baby’s tiny body when he came out blue and limp and breathless, strangling on the cord that gave him life. When my first words upon seeing him—clamp and pass!—were not mothering but medical. When my pediatrician and parent selves collided and crushed me. When what I knew as a doctor I suddenly re-learned, with all the force of my bursting body, as a mother: that having a child means confronting how the threat of death—in the burning smoke, the toxic dust, the hot and cramped air of a birth gone bad—comes with the first breath.Having a child means confronting how the threat of death—in the burning smoke, the toxic dust, the hot and cramped air of a birth gone bad—comes with the first breath.
A month later, so much about my baby seems impossible: the softness of his cheek, the intensity of his hunger, the dirt under his fingernails even though all he’s ever touched is cloth and skin. That any imperceptible change in the sequence of events from the beginning of time, if time has a beginning, could mean he never existed. That he is made of me. That he breathes, and he breathes, and he breathes.
My husband, an atheist, and I, an agnostic Jew, chose our baby’s name while walking in a dried desert riverbed between red and tan sandstone cliffs. Panting and sweating, I stripped down to my sports bra and lay on the cool rock, my belly blossoming up towards the sun. My husband took off his backpack and sat down beside me. Above us, brown streaks of oxidized iron and manganese cascaded down the stone where the cliffs met a cloudless sky. Swallows swooped in and out of holes in the rocks. Shards of flint glinted by our boots, a glimpse of people who had lived here before—who, we had read, thrived on squash and berries and piñon nuts, back when water freely flowed—people who had lived in this changing climate, among cliffs that seem immutable yet are made from grains of sand.
We named our baby for the Hebrew, “He who is like God.” A spiritual belief we share: holiness is everywhere and therefore nowhere in particular; our baby’s existence is both entirely ordinary and ineffably miraculous.
A paradox from the writer Martín Prechtel comes to mind: “The people cannot be healed until the land is healed. The land cannot be healed until the people are healed by the land.” What does it mean, in the face of destruction and danger, to choose to nurture life?
Back in our yard, snap peas twist up their trellis toward the sky. Carrying a heaping bowl into the kitchen, I wash the dust from their curved bodies. I sauté shallots in butter, add rice and a splash of wine, scatter handfuls of bright green peas, and spoon broth ladle by ladle. I stir the risotto slowly, keeping our baby far from the flame.
Once, I try reading Rilke out loud, holding my baby in one arm and a dog-eared book of poetry in the other: “Let this darkness be a bell tower / and you the bell. As you ring, / what batters you becomes your strength. / Move back and forth into the change.” I try to sound reassuring and confident, like a mother should. These words have rescued me before. But now they sound hollow. I stare queasily at the overstuffed bag of supposedly “sustainably harvested” diapers soon to be trucked off to the landfill. The baby squawks as I wet his neck with my tears.
When we chose to conceive, my husband and I told each other that having a child is an act of hope. He committed; I wavered. What if believing in hope is just a selfish delusion spun by our DNA’s relentless drive to replicate?
Our baby learns to smile, his entire face crinkling with pleasure. He coos and grabs my hair. As we lie on a blanket in our tiny concrete back patio, he wiggles his dimpled arms and legs with glee, listening to the chitter of sparrows and staring up at light flickering through leaves. With his naked body on mine, a warmth spreads from deep in my pelvis out to my legs and arms, joy dissolving me as my empty womb still reaches for him. As I hold him, I am held.How can we honor our grief yet orient ourselves towards joy, act each day to cherish human and non-human life, and teach our child the same?
Bits of our baby’s DNA swim among my cells, weaving us together as chimera. He is made of me, yes, but I am also made of him.
As he grows, his cries get louder, more insistent. Often the only way to console him is to go outside. Stepping onto our patio, he quickly calms, only to howl again if brought back in. At first, I check the air quality app and try to stay indoors if there is too much particulate matter, or ozone, or anything that turns the app’s image from a green smiley face to an orange pout or red frown. It’s dangerous for your developing lungs and brain to be outside, I plead with him silently, his screams piercing me. But he refuses. I imagine his reply, still steeped in primordial wisdom of the womb: But Mama, isn’t it also dangerous to spend life inside? How can we love the world, and care to heal it, without living in it? I stop checking the app.
As we sit, we start to smell smoke. Black flecks fall into our gazpacho. Ash.
The next morning, a dark layer covers the ground, but the sky has turned blue, the air blissfully clear. I bounce the baby in our little raised-bed garden. Bees shimmy their furry, buzzing bodies into the sweetness of lavender and marigolds, tomato blossoms and basil. A flake of ash lands on our baby’s cheek like a stray eyelash. I try to brush the flake away, but it leaves a dark smear on his cheek and my finger. Sparrows scour the ashen ground for grubs. The contented chatter of people walking with their morning coffees drifts over the rustle of leaves and the hum of the neighbor’s air conditioner. The first squash of the summer, a knobby yellow crookneck, gleams between leaves as broad as the baby’s body. A yellow butterfly swoops among branches of the horse-chestnut tree shading our house. It almost pauses at the tallest leaf, but blurs with the fluttering of its wings, never quite still. I breathe in sun-soaked abundance, both paradox and salve.
Hanna Saltzman is a pediatric resident physician and writer in Salt Lake City, where she lives with her husband and baby. Her essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in River Teeth, The Examined Life Journal, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and various medical outlets. Before medical school, she worked with environmental nonprofits. You can read more of her writing at www.hannasaltzman.com.
Header photo of Spiral Jetty at Great Salt Lake by DennyMont, courtesy Flickr. Photo of Hanna Saltzman by Stephen Trimble.
