The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

by Michio Kaku

  Like other parents in my situation, I couldn’t get through to Anna, who didn’t seem to want help at all. A few months after she decided not to participate in the NIMH study, and five days before the first total solar eclipse visible in North America in decades would darken our sky, Anna walked to a local pharmacy after everyone left the house and bought a box of blister-packaged, over-the-counter sleep aids. When she returned home, she filled our bathtub with water, and swallowed every lavender pill in the box.

  As partial paralysis crept over her body, she had second thoughts, and managed to dial 911 before stepping into the tub.

  After three days in the hospital and five more in the mental health center, Anna returned home. The psychiatrist who treated her there told me he didn’t know how to help her, because she resisted all treatment suggestions and refused to participate in group activities. Therefore, she was released with the same medications. The same suggestions to continue talk therapy. And she felt exactly the same too.

  * * *

  During the following year, I tried to remain hopeful, but I was on edge. Statistics show that a serious suicide attempt often leads to another within six months. But six months passed, and then nine. Anna landed a job at McDonald’s for the summer and enjoyed it. Even though she complained about her depression and was unwilling to try the lithium her psychiatrist suggested, she begrudgingly agreed that I could schedule a consultation for electroconvulsive shock therapy, an outpatient procedure proven to ease the symptoms of depression. She earned her driver’s license and talked about plans for her senior year—​tentatively, but she talked about them.

  Maybe she’d make it through this, I thought. I stopped worrying so much when we left her home alone.

  But exactly a year since her suicide attempt, and a week before the beginning of her senior year, Anna grabbed her purse and headed out the door, casually telling her twelve-year-old sister that she was picking up dinner at McDonald’s. I didn’t think anything of it until my husband pointed out that she hadn’t returned home after two hours.

  “Where are you???” I texted to her at 7:18 p.m. My phone rang within thirty seconds, displaying a number I didn’t recognize. When I answered, I heard the squawk of a police scanner, followed by a man’s brusque voice.

  I envisioned the front of our red Toyota Prius smashed and buckled, the result of a rear-end collision with a car an hour away. I imagined Anna arguing with the police officer about why it wasn’t her fault.

  “Come to the hospital quick,” the police officer urged. “She jumped off a parking garage. Right now she is still alive, but that’s all we know.”

  After ending the phone call, I crumpled into a heap and screamed.

  At the hospital, my husband and I were told that someone found Anna, unconscious, in the alley behind the parking garage; no one knew how long she had been there, nor did she have any identification on her. Because police didn’t see much blood, they thought perhaps she had overdosed. A closer look showed some bruising and blood, so police then determined she might have been assaulted. But early X-rays revealed a fracture of her calcaneus, or heel bone, which is a common injury sustained after falling from a tall ladder or greater height. The discovery led police to the roof of the parking garage, where they found her purse, paper note, phone, and glasses.

  Eventually the trauma doctor, dressed in pristine scrubs, began detailing each of Anna’s injuries and issues, pointing to his corresponding body parts as he talked. Unlike her mental health diagnoses, these injury descriptions were assertively precise.

  “We tried our very best,” the doctor said finally, shaking his head. “But after a certain amount of time, and doing everything . . . the injuries . . . we knew she would not survive. There was nothing more I could do. She did not survive. I am so very, very sorry.”

  * * *

  For me, the jagged pain of her suicide had been partially sanded down before it even happened, smoothed by years of visiting different therapists and psychiatrists, reading about diagnoses, feeling misunderstood, experimenting with different medications, feeling hope, having hope dashed. I’m sure DMDD was a correct diagnosis for Anna’s early problems with rage and irritability, but I feel it came too late for us to prepare for the deep depression that would consume her later. Of course, it’s possible that the diagnosis wouldn’t have made a difference—​Emanuele suggests that parents should not become overly concerned with names of diagnoses. No person or pill or label could ease what Anna wrote in her final minutes as a life “without ever feeling happiness or satisfaction,” according to a lengthy note she wrote on her iPhone and posted on Reddit before she jumped. Diaries she left behind showed that she had been planning her suicide attempt of August 15, 2018, since May.

  “I remember around 12 years of age, I began to have fleeting thoughts of suicide. I never really understood it much back then,” she wrote in the note, the link sent to me by one of Anna’s online friends. “It’s been years since then, and those fleeting thoughts only got worse. Nowadays, I have spent large portions of my time thinking about suicide.”

  Anna shared in the note how she wished she could have left her mark on the world, but that life was too painful. She couldn’t claw her way out of the black hole that enveloped her mind and squeezed away every ray of sunshine. Her hope, she wrote, was that the Universe could be erased, so no being would ever have to suffer again.

  On the night Anna died, a social worker led us to a room where we saw her for the final time. Although stricken with a deep sadness, my only reaction was to approach her bed gingerly, and then woodenly stroke her hair. I wanted to know: Why? Why didn’t she hold out a little longer? Why couldn’t we have made it to the consultation for a different therapy? What more could I have done? But as my thoughts wandered back to her note, I realized her pain was something I could not understand. Despite my own suffering in that moment, I knew that Anna’s hope was not my hope.

  My hope is that more in this Universe will take mothers of young children seriously when they worry about their child’s mental health, and not dismiss their concerns. My hope is that more people enter the field of child psychology and child psychiatry so that there are more treatment and provider options. My hope is that more researchers will advance research into mental health disorders and neuroscience. My most ardent hope, however, is that after years of waiting for a diagnosis and treatment, no other mother is forced to contemplate that her daughter’s final, calm expression might have been her most peaceful one ever.

  With those hopes in mind, I reached down and stroked Anna’s blond hair for the last time.

  JON MOOALLEM

  “We Have Fire Everywhere”

  from The New York Times Magazine

  The fire was already growing at a rate of one football field per second when Tamra Fisher woke up on the edge of Paradise, California, feeling that her life was no longer insurmountably strenuous or unpleasant and that she might be up to the challenge of living it again.

  She was forty-nine and had spent almost all of those years on the Ridge—​the sweeping incline, in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, on which Paradise and several tinier, unincorporated communities sit. Fisher moved to the Ridge as a child, married at sixteen, then raised four children of her own, working seventy-hour-plus weeks caring for disabled adults and the elderly. Paradise had attracted working-class retirees from around California since the 1970s and was beginning to draw in younger families for the same reasons. The town was quiet and affordable, free of the big-box stores and traffic that addled the city of Chico in the valley below. It still brimmed with the towering pine trees that first made the community viable more than a century ago. The initial settlement was poor and minuscule—​“Poverty Ridge,” some called it—​until a new logging railroad was built through the town in 1904 by a company felling timber farther uphill. This was the Diamond Match Company. The trees of Paradise made for perfect matchsticks.

  Like many people who grow up in small commun
ities, Fisher regarded her hometown with affection but also exhaustion. All her life, she dreamed of leaving and seeing other parts of the world, not to escape Paradise but so that she could return with renewed appreciation for it. But as the years wore on, she worried that she’d missed her chance. There had been too many tribulations and not enough money. She was trapped.

  Then again, who knew? That fall, Fisher was suspended in a wide-open and recuperative limbo, having finally ended a five-year relationship with a man who, she said, conned her financially, isolated her from her family, and seized on her diagnoses of depression and a mood disorder to make her feel crazy and sick and insist that she go on disability. “What I thought was love,” she said, “was me trying to buy love and him stealing from me.” But now, a fuller, bigger life seemed possible. She’d tried community college for a semester. And just recently, she got together with Andy, a big-hearted baker for the Chico public-school system, who slipped out of her bed earlier that Thursday morning to drive down the hill to work. Fisher was feeling grounded again: happy. It was odd to say the word, but it must have been true because there she was, getting out of bed at 8 a.m.—​early for her—​energetically and without resentment, to take her two miniature schnauzers and Andy’s lumbering old mutt into the yard to pee.

  She stepped out in her slippers and the oversize sweatshirt she slept in. She smelled smoke. The sky overhead was still faintly blue in spots, but a brown fog, forced in by a hard wind, was rapidly smothering it. “I’ve been here so long, it didn’t even faze me,” Fisher said. Small wildfires erupted in the canyons on either side of Paradise every year. But then the wind gusted sharply and a three-inch piece of burned bark floated lazily toward her through the air like a demonic moth. Fisher opened her hand and caught it. Bits of it crumbled in her palm like charcoal. She took a picture and texted it to her sister Cindy Christensen. “WTF is happening,” she wrote.

  Cindy knew about wildfires. In fact, she’d spent every summer and fall fixated on fire since the “fire siege” of 2008, when Paradise was threatened by two blazes, one in each of the canyons alongside it. One morning, as the Humboldt Fire approached from the east, the town ordered more than 9,000 people to evacuate as a precaution, Cindy among them. But when Cindy pulled out of her neighborhood, she instantly hit gridlock. An investigation determined that it took nearly three hours for most residents to drive the eleven miles downhill.

  Sitting in traffic that morning, Cindy felt viscerally unsafe. Ever since then, she obsessively tracked the daily indicators of high-fire danger on the TV weather reports and with apps on her phone. “It consumed me,” Cindy said. She spent many nights, unable to sleep, listening to the wind plow out of the canyon and batter her roof. Many days, she refused to leave home, worried a fire might blow through her neighborhood before she could return for her pets. She didn’t just sign up to get the county’s emergency alerts on her phone; she bought her own police scanner.

  It pained Tamra to see her sister fall apart every fire season; Cindy seemed irrational—​possessed. It was hard to take her seriously. “That’s just Cindy,” Tamra would say. Now, standing with her phone in one hand and the charred bark in the other, Tamra needed Cindy to be Cindy and tell her what to do.

  “Evacuate,” Cindy wrote back.

  “Answer me!!” Tamra texted again. “It’s raining ash and bark.” Neither realized that some texts weren’t being received by the other. Then the power went out, and Tamra, who had dropped her cellular plan to save money and could only use her phone with Wi-Fi, was cut off from communicating with anyone.

  “Leave, T. Paradise is on fire,” Cindy was texting her. “Leave!!”

  By then, Cindy was almost off the Ridge, bawling in her car from the stress and dread. Forty-five minutes earlier, she learned that a fire had sparked northeast of town, and she immediately didn’t like the scenario taking shape. The relative humidity that morning, the wind speed and direction, which would propel the fire straight toward Paradise—​it was all very bad. “In my mind, I pictured exactly what happened,” she explained. She’d spent years picturing it, in fact. She left right away.

  This time, there was no traffic; Cindy says she saw only two other cars the whole way down. Later, she spotted her home in aerial footage of Paradise on the local news. Her aboveground swimming pool was unmistakable. Nearly everything else had burned into a ghostly black smudge.

  * * *

  By the time Fisher got in her yellow Volkswagen, the sky had transformed again: it was somehow both shrouded and glowing. Many other residents had learned to keep a “go bag” packed by the door, with water, medications, and copies of important documents; a woman from the local Fire Safe Council, a volunteer known affectionately as the Bag Lady, held frequent workshops demonstrating how to pack one. But Fisher was indecisive and moving inefficiently. It had taken her nearly forty minutes to commit to leaving, wrangle the dogs, and scramble to grab a few haphazard possessions.

  It was now 8:45. So many calls were being placed to 911 that a dispatcher interrupted one man reporting a fire alongside Skyway Road—​the busiest street in Paradise and the town’s primary evacuation route—​with a terse, “Yeah, sir, we have fire everywhere.” Officials had started issuing evacuation orders about an hour earlier; Fisher’s neighborhood was among those told to clear out first. Her street was plugged with cars. A thick line of them crept forward at the end of her driveway.

  There are five routes out of Paradise. The three major ones spread south like the legs of a tripod, passing through the heart of town and continuing downhill toward Chico and the valley below. Fisher lived in the northern part of town, on the easternmost leg of the tripod, Pentz Road; she rented a bedroom from a woman who worked at a nursing home in town. It baffled her to see that all the cars in front of her house were heading north on Pentz, cramming themselves away from the center of Paradise, away from the valley, and further uphill. The opposite lane, meanwhile, was totally empty. It seemed obvious to Fisher that, if the fire was approaching from somewhere in the canyon behind her house, there would be plenty of Paradise left in which to safely wait it out. So she pushed across the traffic, into the empty lane. But she barely went 100 yards before a driver sitting in the jam alongside her rolled down his window and explained that Pentz was blocked up ahead.

  “Great,” Fisher muttered. As she turned around and took her place in line, she wished the man good luck.

  “You too,” he said.

  She was recording everything on her phone, compelled by some instinct she would strain to make sense of later. She wanted people to know what happened to her and presumed, nonsensically, that her phone would survive even if she didn’t. Maybe, too, she wanted someone to be with her while it happened. Her phone created the illusion of an audience; it was the best she could do.

  It was suddenly much darker. Everyone had their headlights on. The sky was blood red in places but waning into absolute black. The smoke column was collapsing on them: The plume from the wildfire had billowed upward until, at about 35,000 feet, it froze, became heavier, and fell earthward again. Outside Fisher’s passenger-side window, the wind snapped an American flag in someone’s yard so relentlessly that it seemed to be rippling under the force of some machine. Then, a mammoth gust kicked up, spattering the street with pine needles. It sounded like a rainstorm and, when it subsided, bright orange embers appeared beside Fisher’s car: trails of pinhole lights, like fairies, skittering low over the shoulder, chasing each other out of the dry leaves, then capering off and vanishing in front lawns.

  Fisher noticed a minivan struggling to merge just ahead—​people weren’t letting the driver in. She stopped to let it through, then suddenly screamed: “Oh, my God! There’s a fire!” She yelled it again, out her window, as though she worried she were the only one seeing it: the tremendous box of bright, anarchic flame where there used to be a home.

  It was 9:13 a.m. Fisher had been in her car for nearly half an hour and traveled altogether nowhere; in fact,
the burning house appeared to be only a few doors down from her own. There was a second structure aflame now. The fires were multiplying rapidly.

  “I don’t want to die!” Fisher shouted. The mood had shifted. People started honking. Fisher honked too. She began to sob and scream, to open her car door and lean her head out, asking what she should do. Later, she felt embarrassed. She would see so many YouTube videos of people calmly piloting their cars through the flames. There was one guy who went viral, singing to his three-year-old daughter as he honked and swerved, commenting on the encroaching inferno as though it were an interactive exhibit at a science museum. (“Be careful with that fire!” the girl says adorably. The father replies, “I’m going to stay away from it, OK?”) It didn’t make sense to Fisher that she would be the only person screaming. Even the three dogs with her were silent, though two of them were deaf and mostly blind and the third was shivering, eyes locked open, too shocked to make a sound. “I’m scared!” Fisher shouted. “Somebody!”

  “OK, calm down,” a voice called. The person urged her to turn around again. She did and suddenly, still crying wildly, found herself shooting south again, through the other, wide-open lane of Pentz, following a white truck with a Butte County Fire Department decal on it. She tailed the fireman intently, coasting past one burning house after another. Some were being steadily, evenly devoured; others angrily disgorged flames straight up from their roofs. Fisher knew the people who lived in many of these houses—​this was her neighborhood. “This is Pentz Road!” she yelled as she drove. “These are people’s homes.” Then added: “I’m sorry. I am so sorry!”