The Year We Lost Our Breath

 

During the worst days of the September wildfires, as I struggled to take my mind off the low-level perma-headache, I read an article in the New York Times, about how a group of scientists might have found life on Venus. The evidence—a chemical marker for anaerobic microbes—wasn’t exactly made for Hollywood. Just the filigree of a possibility, invisible to the naked eye. But something in me was desperate to hold onto those slim odds. 

The article was accompanied by a painting of the Venusian landscape. But that felt like a hallucination left over from the nineteenth century, and I craved something more objective. A search led to surface-level photographs taken by a Soviet lander a few decades back. In them, everything, even the sky, seemed to be made of radioactive leather. 

I nodded. That was the sepia glow I was now seeing outside the window I couldn’t open. 

In that same outside, the birds, who had disappeared when the smoke first slunk in, were back, but not to fly, or even to sing. They hopped around the yard, looking confused—little dinosaur descendants. Modern-day Venus is a descendant too, but its dinosaur was its gentler self—maybe covered in oceans, and maybe earth-like in other ways, before some unknown event turned it into an acid-cloaked waste. 

It boggles the mind: how much damage can one planet take? As a kid, I was fascinated by the pop-culture spectacle of exploding worlds—Alderaan in Star Wars, or Superman’s Krypton. A stupendous burst of light and sparks, like a fireworks display. I doubt our destruction of Earth, assuming it continues, will be that flashy—and I doubt Venus’s toxic transformation happened that way either. Even dying, a planet keeps doing its thing in space—it just gets confused, like one of those birds in the yard.

No one should have to raise kids on a dying planet. In Portland, the summer was stressful enough before the poisonous air. Quarantine-crazed, we’d spent as many evenings as we could in the backyard, occasionally catching a more distant view of Venus. One of the brightest things in the sky, it was easy to mistake for a star, guiding the way. But toward what?