I slipped out of bed an hour before sunrise and moved quietly down the stairs, hoping not to wake my weekend roommates. I had an hour before sunrise, just an hour, and I wanted to walk. Walking calms me.
I’d arrived in Portland the night before on the cusp of a heat dome to gather with friends I’d met, briefly, pre-pandemic. We’d kept in touch on Zoom through the lockdown, but the lockdown was over, if not the pandemic; so, we isolated and tested and met for the weekend, which had sounded great from the safety of my living room couch—but when I walked in the door of the house we had rented, I felt sure that I’d made a mistake.
They were ivy league or private league, were doctors or had married one, were executives, jurists and teachers. They lived in big homes in coastal cities, had long and fruitful marriages, had children and grandchildren and direction. I went to state school on the G.I. bill nights and weekends as an afterthought and lived in a high desert town in a state that’s easy to make fun of. I had dogs and divorces and, right then, indigestion. I was lost before the weekend even started.
I closed the front door behind me, softly until it latched. I didn’t have a key but had the code to the lockbox in my head—the lockbox that held the key, if it was in there and I could open it, which wasn’t a given. I’m not good with puzzles or numbers, but my memory is strong, unlike my fluctuating confidence, so I’d fiddle with the combo or climb in a window, but that was in an hour. This was now. Time to walk.
I’d left my phone on the dresser upstairs in the rental. I like to walk undisturbed. I planned to walk an hour—four right turns, four walk straights, four fifteen-minute intervals. I’d be back before the sun fully rose over the Overlook Victorian Mansion, the official name of the house we’d reserved long before anyone could have predicted that torrential rains in China would send warm, moist air into the jet stream; that the jet stream would carry the air east, where it would collide with a high-pressure ridge above the Pacific Northwest and be joined by the fragments of a heat wave from the southeastern edge of the North American continent and entrench for five days, spewing misery, spawning fires, spoiling crops and killing fifteen hundred people—seventy-six in Portland alone—mostly people without access to systems that might cool them.
Meteorologists describe a heat dome as a cap on a bottle full of hot air growing hotter. Expanding, it settles and hugs the earth like your least favorite uncle. The dome is stubborn, almost leak proof, preventing milder air from moving in and displacing it.
I’d heard Portland would have a heat dome, that it would be very, very hot—a once-in-a-thousand-year occurrence—but I’d only half-listened and only half-believed it, because everything now is a superlative: the worst, biggest, coldest, hottest. We don’t have weather. We have events.
Regardless, I want what I want. That morning it was a walk.
The sky was dark, the morning quiet, the streets and the sidewalks deserted. I studied the house before I left it: white shutters, white siding, wide porch, doric columns, concrete steps, narrow driveway with a red Prius parked in its middle. I checked my watch, but not the address, ignored the street sign as I breezed past it: left foot, right foot, picket fence, turn. Watch the curb. Watch your pace. Watch your footing.
Birds sang from the wires, from the fence posts, from the treetops above me. Bushes bent heavy with fruit or with flower, framed pathways, skirted walkways to quiet homes where people, the smart ones, lay sleeping. The air felt heavy, felt sticky and humid. My skin, my desert skin sucked it up.
The Overlook Victorian Mansion, an Airbnb, sits between Overlook Park and Interstate Avenue on the north side of Portland, near but not too near a university. That’s all I knew about the area. I’d gone from airport to airport to curb, had been picked up and zigzagged down freeways across bridges on main streets or side streets to the Airbnb, where my friends and I gathered around a table on the patio, talking, drinking tea and eating cookies. We’d traveled, were tired and went to bed.
I decided to walk a square between the park and the avenue, assuming—for whatever reason—that they were far enough apart to handle my segmented plan. So, when I reached Interstate Avenue in less than fifteen minutes, I had a decision to make: time or distance. I paused my watch and pushed the walk button on the light standard beside me.
The light flashed red, urging caution. I ignored it, ignored every signal in every direction for as far as I could see. The red reflected in the windows of the shops and businesses—all closed—that lined the empty sidewalks in front of them. Interstate was as deserted as its side streets: no people, no bustle, no brainer. I should have turned around and taken shelter, and if I wasn’t so stubborn, and hadn’t seen the tracks, I might, I really might have done exactly that.
I’d heard in the airport or somewhere in my travels, that the light rail had been shut down because the tracks had melted or might do so, might soften or had softened from the heat. I’m an investigator, a fire marshal by trade; heat-related distortion intrigues me. I crossed the street to the tracks to examine them.
The geography of my home state, Nevada, is basin and range. I live in the Truckee Meadows valley between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Virginia Range. The Truckee River trickles through the center of the valley, providing water that greens the meadows for which we’re named. Vegetation outside the meadows is dry sage, rabbit brush and pinyon juniper. Train tracks run adjacent to the river.
Some trains carry passengers, but most carry freight, so they’re heavy and hot and often behind schedule because the uphill slows their progress and the downhill heats their brakes. So, they speed on the flats east to west or vice versa and lay on the horn as they blow through the basin, and everything is okay, unless the brakes or the wheels or, occasionally, the tracks overheat and throw metal that sparks a fire, to which the fire department must respond, an investigator in tow. When the fire is extinguished, the investigator’s job is to look for the metal that lit the brush that burnt the field, building or possessions too near the tracks, and I’m retired now, but when I was that investigator I’d find the chunk of metal, usually, because I’m focused and competent; although investigations, like walking plans, don’t always go as I might wish.
I poked around the tracks that ran down Interstate Avenue, but saw no buckle, no warp, no gap or distortion, found no chinks or kinks in the metal. Yet I was certain that Portland, like any other city, wouldn’t have shut down the light rail unless its experts had deemed it a necessity. Citizens, at least some of them, need public transportation even more in an emergency. I wondered what I just wasn’t seeing.
I learned later that the tracks weren’t the problem. The system had been shut down due to sear and buckle in the overhead lines, the lines that powered the system. I’d never seen the light rail, didn’t know how it was powered, but I’d been taught to always, always look around and above me, and that morning I didn’t—in so many ways.
I didn’t notice, for example, that Interstate Avenue angled, just slightly, at the place where I’d crossed it, and an angle, even a slight one, skews trajectory. The square of my walk was no longer square, and I just kept walking, oblivious.
On the other side of Interstate, the neighborhood changed to light commercial. Shops, cafes and apartments lined its side streets. The smell of weed drifted out windows above me. Beer oozed sour from the pavement. Cars parked bumper to bumper against the sidewalks. No heat emergency here I told myself as I looked into coffee shops full of college-aged kids drinking lattes and eating Danish, and I wished that I was younger and could join them, but I’m grandma-aged, a senior. I’d be tolerated but not welcomed. Regardless, I hadn’t brought a mask—or money for that matter—and pandemic protocols were still in place. I couldn’t have gone in if invited.
The sky brightened; the shade receded. I checked my watch. My hour had passed just that quickly. I resumed my walk. Quickly, in fact. My feet soon dripped moisture into the cheap socks I favor. Sweat trickled from my head to my neck, down my collar and itched along my back. My eyes flitted from watch to pavement, pavement to distance, anxious to see Interstate, then Overlook, then the house.
I turned a second time and then a third and saw Interstate in the distance. I reached and crossed it and re-entered Overlook; yet the streets looked different, more rundown, confusing. I saw a rat disappear into an alley overgrown with weeds. I passed a dumpster, another dumpster, another alley. Where were my birdsong and flowers, my picket fence?
I told myself I’d be okay, that neighborhoods can change block to block, that I’d landed a few streets over, parallel or perpendicular, that my way would even out and become clear, but I had a sense of dread inside me as the streets curved topsy-turvy. I walked in circles, in fits and starts, looking this way and that way for something familiar. I grew weary, grew angry at the heat, the stupid streets of stupid Portland, my ill-conceived, poorly executed plan. I could die here, actually die here, alone.
And then I saw a street sign that said Overlook Terrace, and I followed it onto Overlook Circle to Overlook North, past Overlook Park, and I knew that I was close—because Overlook, that’s me—but I didn’t know how close or which direction, and I was hot and very tired. I didn’t have the energy to wander this way or that and hope I’d run into the mansion by mistake or by magic: the white house with doric columns, the red car—and wait. What if the car had been moved, which could happen. I hadn’t thought of that. Would I recognize the house without it, or would I pass it by none the wiser?
I imagined my body falling, the rat feeding, the stench by which they’d find me in the alley by the dumpsters, the Jane Doe of my body. I had no I.D. in my pocket, had left no note for my roommates. Nobody would know where or who I even was.
I could have stopped, knocked on a door and asked directions, but without the address or the street name, phone number or email of the mansion or of my roommates, what exactly would I have asked for, and what would they have thought, the people who might have answered, if they did in fact. answer. I never do. I live alone and don’t think it’s safe.
Would it be done unto me as I do unto others, or would people open their doors to this discombobulate senior and say: wait here a minute, Honey, while they called the authorities and whispered I have a lady here, a little lady. She’s confused.
I wasn’t ready for a clinic or shelter, for questions that I didn’t, maybe couldn’t even answer. I had no choice but to walk, so I walked.
If my skin cooled or my legs cramped I don’t remember. I remember that my feet hurt; that I crawled along, thirsty; that I stuck to main streets and checked the side streets at corners, looking for the house with doric columns on its the porch. Doors were closed. Shades were drawn. Nothing moved but me.
And then I saw movement: a lady halfway down one of the side streets. She held a hose with running water over her flowerbeds, and I knew that she might be an apparition, but I walked towards her anyway, and as I approached, she didn’t waver or fade, and so, yes, she was real: a real lady, real water, real flowers. When she looked up. I said I’m in really big trouble.
She offered me the hose and asked me a couple questions, and she didn’t roll her eyes when I told her that I didn’t know the street or the address or the phone number of the house or my friends, because all that was in my phone on the dresser in the house I couldn’t find.
She asked what it looked like. I told her.
She asked how many stories. I said three.
She asked if it was a Victorian. I said, yes it is. I think so.
She asked if it had been recently renovated, and I remembered, from the website, that it had.
She asked if it had air conditioning, and I said yes it does, and the fact that it had air made her smile. She said I think I know the house, and as she walked me towards it, she explained that homes in Portland, especially the older ones, don’t often have air. They haven’t needed it until recently, until climate change.
She knew the house because her best friend lived across the street from it, and they’d watched the renovation, together, sitting in her friend’s yard, drinking coffee amongst the fruit trees and flowers that grew, almost unbidden, in the pleasant summers of Portland’s past, and she remembered the air conditioner being added.
I hope I thanked her profusely, hope I hugged her tight to my body, hope she knows that I’m eternally grateful, but what I remember is the stairs, the porch, the door being answered, that I joined my friends, once again, around the table. They asked where I’d been. I said, walking, just walking.
*****
I wake early when it’s hot, and it’s very hot this summer of ‘24, triple digits mid-July, another heat dome. I’m out the door by six, walking uphill from the meadows towards the mountains, dressed head-to-toe in sun-protective clothing. In Reno, as in Portland, birds sing from the wires, from the fence posts, from the treetops along the pathway, but in Reno, the vegetation is late August dry, and the humidity falls to new lows almost daily. I walk mornings, late evenings or not at all. The rest of the time, I just worry. We are ducks, sitting, waiting for disaster: a campfire unattended, a cigarette out the window, a thick-glassed, beveled bottle left lying in the sun; a spark, a breeze, a fire, conflagration.
Or the disaster might just be smoke: smoke from a distant fire; smoke stubborn like a heat dome; smoke that settles, lingers, stifles and kills us, slowly. Smoke instead of fire sounds like a bargain, but it’s not. It’s windows closed, shades drawn, air filtered for days weeks, months. It’s walking inside on the treadmill staring at the wall, daydreaming about the birds, the trees, the flowers, about the bike rides of my childhood in the cool, clean early ‘60’s air—pre-heat dome, pre-pandemic, pre-doomsday ticking clock.
The doomsday clock is the brainchild of the Society of Atomic Scientists. It premiered in 1947, with its hands set at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight meaning total destruction. Its purpose was to call attention to our risk for global extinction from a self-imposed disaster. The clock has been re-set twenty-five times. Initially, the only disaster considered was nuclear, but it now includes the potential for misuse of biologicals as well as climate change.
When I was a ten-year old bike-riding pseudo-innocent, the clock read twelve minutes to midnight, despite the Bay of Pigs, just one year earlier. Things looked even rosier—seventeen minutes to midnight—when the Cold War ended, but the big hand moves forward as well as backward. In 2023, the hottest year on record, scientists re-set the clock at ninety seconds to midnight. 2024 is on track to be even hotter.
But right now, it’s six a.m. in Reno. I close the door behind me and walk west towards the Sierra’s under a blue and cloudless sky. It’s day seven of my second heat dome. I’m no longer lost, just disenchanted. We keep heating, flooding, burning; keep building, drilling, driving; keep growing and eating animals; keep trading footprints for credits as we fly across the world to visit glaciers before they melt, and I worry that we’re ignoring this disaster, and I feel that worry, as I feel everything, in my stomach. I walk it off, my dog beside me. Two hours until her paws burn. Forty minutes until I calm down. Ninety seconds until none of this matters.