Zibby Mag

By Emily Halpern

One early winter morning in February, when I was fifteen years old, my father left for a solo day hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and never returned. While near the summit, he became trapped by a violent blizzard, grew lost and disoriented, and ultimately succumbed to hypothermia. His body was discovered three days later near a stream he’d been following, trying to get home.

My father’s sudden death interrupted the idyllic narrative of my own life and sent it careening wildly off course. A child experiencing profound grief, I sought an outlet for my despair. I couldn’t blame my father; I loved him too much. Instead, I blamed nature. Overnight, the natural world transformed from a place offering warmth and comfort into a menacing landscape.

Woods I’d playfully explored countless times before now signaled danger. Trees under whose branches I’d once found respite now cast a foreboding shadow. Snow was the worst. At the sight of freshly fallen snow, feelings of exhilaration were replaced by despair.

Today, I find myself visited by that early trauma response. Watching natural disasters unfold in rapid succession, one after the next; reading about deaths from Covid too numerous to process, I feel similarly helpless, tossed again by the instability of this world. I reach for equanimity as I try to protect my three-year-old daughter by serving as a buffer between her and a frightening world, one in which masks are routine and ecological fragility looms large. For most people, escaping trauma by retreating into nature is something of a poetic convention. But what to do when nature is the source of trauma?

For most people, escaping trauma by retreating into nature is something of a poetic convention. But what to do when nature is the source of trauma?

In my case, I recently turned to one of my father’s favorite poems; an escape into nature of a different kind. John Dryden called Virgil’s Georgics, written ca. 30 B.C., “The best poem by the best poet.” It’s a poem to which I was introduced early in my life, both because my father loved it and because my mother, a Classicist, helpfully stored multiple editions in our living room.

In The Georgics, Virgil celebrates nature and life in all things with an almost rapturous enthusiasm. But The Georgics is more than a celebration of the natural world. It’s also a work about the vulnerability of the human species. He writes about mankind with admiration and palpable compassion.

As humans we work, we invent, we create (“toil, relentless toil, urged on by need”); yet despite our noblest ambition and most concerted efforts, at every stage, we remain vulnerable to acts of nature. And perhaps what is more important, we remain vulnerable to our own human frailties — our own natures, our own inevitable folly.

This was certainly true of my father. As an adult, and after much catharsis from grief, I recognize that nature behaved neither vengefully nor mercifully that day; it simply did not take him into account. Nature proceeds to obey laws of its own, seeking neither to comfort nor destroy us. But it does, as Virgil writes, signal its intentions: “Jove, the father himself, provided signs… No storm comes on without giving you any warning.” The signs are there if we’re willing to look for them. Today, the signs are not only visible — they’re relentless.

Yet, in counterpoint to his dark graphic depictions of calamities that threaten mankind, Virgil, in the fourth and final book of The Georgics, offers hope. Much of the book considers the lives of bees. Virgil writes with detached wonder about their remarkable ability to harmoniously and efficiently coexist. The bees are drawn as a microcosm of humanity, a tiny collective made up of individuals working towards a common goal.

The signs are there, if we’re willing to look for them. Today, the signs are not only visible, they’re relentless.

Like the bees, Virgil argues, it is essential that human beings work in concert with their natural environment so that, while the individual may die, the collective may continue. Thus, “the race in immortality,/ Its fortunes maintained for many generations.”

For me, revisiting The Georgics satisfied an impulse to retreat into nature. It also satisfied a desire to return to my childhood, a time when my father was still alive, climate change a speck in the distance, my own quiet world safe and intact. There’s a deep resonance in Virgil’s poem, written some two thousand years ago. We inhabit this world together. We can see the signs: We are, in fact, the signs themselves.

My husband and I recently took our young daughter to the mountains, roughly two hours northeast of our home in Los Angeles, hoping to introduce her to snow. My daughter didn’t sleep well, she rarely can when traveling. She woke at midnight, restless and energetic. After nearly two hours trying to coax her back to sleep, I capitulated. We stepped into our kitchen and saw through the living room windows the fresh snow that had layered the ground outside. Her face lit up, so I zipped her puffer jacket over her pajamas and pulled her winter boots over her socks.

Frigid white air greeted us as we opened the door. Gasping with delight as she took in the landscape, my daughter held out her tongue for the crystals still falling from the sky. Exhilarated, she raced to grab a handful of snow from the ground, and pressed her reddened fingers to her face, feeling their sting. She then came to me, grinning, her outstretched palm icy cold. I took her hand in mine. For a brief moment, we stood together, savoring the stillness.

Emily Halpern is a writer and producer living in Los Angeles, California.