After vacationing in Colorado and Louisiana this summer, I came home and reinstalled Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PlayStation and started spending some time in the digital simulacrum of both. Playing taciturn gunslinger Arthur Morgan, I often ignore the main storyline in favor of wandering aimlessly through forests and swamps on my horse (a black steed named Pony), occasionally hunting wild animals and camping under the stars. There's something captivating about a life like this, so straightforward and ignorant of, I don't know, Manhattan podcast drama. Like in the TV show Westworld, this game lets the player indulge in a variety of "Wild West" fantasies. You can rob trains, play poker in frontier towns, tame wild horses. Arthur is of course just a vehicle for the player's motivations, so who's to say which of these hobbies would be his favorite, but there's one aspect of his personality that the player can't change: his discomfort with civilization.
Throughout the game, he and his gang are trying to get to California, away from the encroaching civilization of the East Coast. Sorry for the enormous spoiler here, but he never gets there. California isn't even part of the game map. Arthur unknowingly catches tuberculosis early in the game and later dies of it; afterwards you play as a different character to finish the story. I've never played that part, because it makes me profoundly sad that this fictional curmudgeonly outlaw has worked so hard for a kind of freedom and peace he'll never experience. All he wanted was to get away from technology and high society and just fish on a lake in the Sierra Nevada (probably). That's beautiful, man.
But one unavoidable tension in the game is that the life he wants, and the California he imagines, don't really exist anymore. The Wild West is over. Small towns have train stations and electricity and are expanding quickly. Pinkertons impose law and order. Settlers are chopping down forests to build houses all over the wilderness, and oil barons are starting to pollute it. North America has been in an ecological and genocidal crisis since Europeans first landed here, but this game shows the unique cruelty of that crisis as people started moving west. At one point, you encounter the fictional Wapiti tribe who are being forced off their land by an oil baron. Their plight calls to mind the real life tragedy of the Osage in Oklahoma, and how they were murdered for oil.1 Is there actual freedom here? Actual peace? Is Arthur's dream pure fantasy?
I'm moving back to California soon after a few edifying years on the East Coast.2 Since we're driving there, Frankie and I will witness all the subtle changes in the landscape, how lush deciduous forests slowly give way to unfathomably wide plains. Somewhere in those plains we'll cross the 100th meridian and suddenly be in The West.3 The change will be imperceptible, until the plains sweep up into the Rockies and there won't be any doubt about it. A few deserts and mountains ranges later, we'll be in California. Finally, finally. I hope Frankie likes it.
I have of course already successfully convinced her that this move is worthwhile, but I worry my romanticism for California is also just pure fantasy. In a well-intentioned attempt to remember what life is like back home, I read Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear, which you can imagine is more of a buzzkill than not. His essay "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" is a sobering reminder of the realities of fire season, a problem predictably made worse by, what else, the twin demons of capitalism and white supremacy. Another essay, "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre", talks about how while Californians may "love" the idea of "wilderness", they are shocked and outraged that building suburbs in mountain lion territory means their kids might get attacked by a mountain lion. Ecology be damned, Californians are going to live where they want and bend nature to their will. So what if climate change makes living there worse? So what if they make climate change worse? Build another mansion on fire-prone chaparral, and slaughter a keystone species while you're at it!
As much of a downer as this book is, it also reminded me of why I want to move back to California. The pristine ideal that Arthur Morgan was dreaming of? That's gone. That's been gone, and we're continuing to lose more of it. But there's still some beauty there. It hasn't completely been ravaged by the fires, landslides, and urban sprawl of climate change (yet). A shred of the fantasy is still real. The way the fog rolls over Mt. Tam, the sound of a Pacific wren singing among the redwoods, the color of the sunset in Anza-Borrego. I want to experience all of this again, before climate change pushes me out for good.
On our most recent trip to Louisiana, Frankie and I got beers with a born and raised southern Louisiana Cajun I know from the internet. We were at a dive bar where you can smoke inside or sit by the water as summer thunderclouds pass by. It's a pretty view, but our friend pointed out that while that water used to be drinkable, it's now salt water being pushed in from the Gulf. Another casualty of climate change. Soon we got to talking about where we might want to live once our respective home states become uninhabitable. Michigan? Upstate New York? They seem a little more climate resilient. The food is worse and the winters will suck, but...
Frankie and I had a similar conversation on our first date. We love where we grew up. My love for an oak savannah matches hers for a swamp cypress grove. But year after year we're watching these landscapes die and we don't know how much longer we'll be able to enjoy them. And if we know they're disappearing, why did we leave? Can we have more time there? In the back of our minds there's the constant desperate thought: "If not now, when?"
In Red Dead Redemption 2, a moribund Arthur tries to help the Wapiti tribe reclaim their land. Nothing comes of this, since the historical accuracy of the game forecloses any chance of a happy ending for the tribe, and almost everyone's story ends in death or exile, all because a capitalist had a murderous lust for oil. This story, and its real world analogs like the Osage murders, are among the first climate change tragedies. In Southern California, the fires didn't used to be so devastating when the indigenous Tongva maintained the landscape with controlled burns, an idea that drives Malibuites and other rich jerkoffs living in fire ecologies into such a state of frothing apoplexy that one such jerkoff even sued the fire department because the scorched earth of these burns might drive down the value of his mansion (begging the question: what value will it have after another inevitable fire?) The Tongva are still in Southern California, and the state government is finally doing some controlled burns, but untold damage has already been done to both the land and its original inhabitants. Is a happy ending possible?
I don't know. On my worst days, I'd say no. Not entirely with despair, but with the "it is what it is, fuck it we ball" attitude everyone 40 years old or younger has developed to cope with climate despair. Very occasionally, the despair floods in past this defense and my mind drowns with sorrow. But on the best days? Well it's not hope exactly. I still think things will get worse. But what am I going to do, cover my eyes and pretend everything is fine like some jerkoff from Malibu? Give me a break.4 My home is more than a fantasy, it's beautifully and terrifyingly real, and I want to be there as long as I can, doing my best to help take care of it. If not now, when?
1 A story recounted in David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon, which judging from the book is going to be one hell of a movie.
2 I learned to never do it again.
3 Or maybe it'll happen a little sooner around the Flint Hills of Kansas, which author William Least Heat-Moon offers as an alternative demarcation. The boundaries of the West are still up for debate.
4 I have to get this off my chest: I despise Malibu. It's a deeply nihilistic and antisocial place. Among its many fascist tendencies is the fact that while California's beaches are all public in theory, the people of Malibu hire security guards to scare you away. Honestly I hope all their houses sink into the ocean they wanna privatize so bad! Fuck Malibu!!!