Armageddons

May 13, 2017

I’m driving west out of Louisville on a bright, clear day. Driving with purpose, feeling productive, focused. The interstate is broad and smooth and relatively free of traffic, an easy upward grade. Miles behind me, a friend is setting out from the college where our presentation went well. He’s in his own car, traveling the same route. We’ll hook up in the next town.

Mountains in the distance as I enter a graceful bend in the road, and then I see it. An enormous mushroom cloud rising beyond the farthest ridge. It’s a thing of silent beauty at this distance, perfectly white, cerulean sky, and chilling. Fog rolls down the highway, pushed, then cars exiting ahead of the fog, then debris, anonymous chunks tumbling after. The pregnant edge of chaos.

I turn the car around, try to call my friend, but maintaining control of the car is almost more than I can manage.

Back at the college, I’m frantic, asking what’s happened, what they know about the blast.

“It was a mushroom cloud!” I shout, “I could see the top of it, but not the stem!” The stem was behind the ridge line, I explain.

Blast? they say. Nobody knows anything. I’m stunned by their indifference.

September 23, 2016

I’m riding in the passenger seat, east out of Greenville, as a scene of apocalyptic devastation comes into view. Entire buildings tossed onto the highway, everything south of it yanked violently north. The highway itself is unrecognizable, towering loops of ragged blacktop, trees and chunks of earth dangling, bridges collapsed, flipped over, huge sections pointing to the sky. I think in the moment it must have taken a very large bomb to produce a landscape as crazy as this, but the driver, an old girlfriend, keeps driving right into it, not even slowing down, miraculously weaving among the tangles and chunks, down into the river of mud, up onto the sides of fallen buildings and parts of bridges, under the crumbling loops, careening, accelerating. Several times I close my eyes, sure we’re about to die, but nothing can stop her.

June 24, 2016

A fiery Armageddon nearly upon us, an extinction event, so my main concern is how to kill myself and Acadia in tandem, painlessly, rather than letting either of us burn to death. I decide a stick of dynamite sandwiched between us as I cradle her in my arms will work, but then I realize the snake-like sound of the fuse will frighten her, which means I have to find another way, and time is running out.

(date misplaced)

Again, I’m the passenger. Again, a woman is driving. In the mountains. Again.

A sheer rock wall to our left, a steep drop-off and a beautiful valley in the distance to our right, then a massive column of fire forming directly in front of us. Ground zero. Time freezes and I know how it will feel to be vaporized. I know how the car and the rock wall and everything around us will snap out of existence, and the brutal inevitability of it is overwhelming.