Journey to the End of the World

I was waiting for the bus at the bottom of the hill in the sudden dark after a warm day when a voice I didn’t recognize reached me and asked, “Been to Piandellenoce lately?” I couldn’t imagine that anyone in this town besides Daniela, Bente, Michelle and Lewis had any knowledge at all about my forays into the wild Umbrian hills toward Piandellenoce—plane of the nuts—so I felt a bit accosted and spied upon. Turned out it was the boyish bus driver who’d talked my ear off under the “don’t talk to the driver while the bus is in marcia” sign hanging just above the driver’s seat the last trip I’d made when I’d had such a hard time finding any bus at all and had wound up alone with just this boy-driver who had explained to me that we were making the route backwards; the red house would not be last stop before Montemartano, but first stop after Montemartano. Now we stood poised under the Calder Sculpture waiting for the E bus and his evening duty driving the E bus and me in it up the hill—if the E bus ever happened to arrive.

All weekend it has been in the mid-sixties to low-seventies, weather completely unseasonable for January when the mountains should be capped with snow and our breath visible as we speak beneath the newly lit streetlamps. This is the second January I have spent in Spoleto when Spring has seemed to hurdle over all obstacles to arrive prematurely, even impossibly, a déjà vu that prepares me for the turn in my conversation with the young bus-driver: how scary it is— warm weather in January, surely evidence of global warming and the coming end of the world. Now that the sun has gone down, it’s not really warm, there’s a damp chill; I’m wearing only a fleece, and don’t need more, and it’s dampness more than cold that makes us hold ourselves tight to ward off shivers as though our bodies had already gotten the message that Spring had come and were resisting even the slightest dip in temperature. The air smells like Spring air, like fecundity, like germinating nubs of plant-life poking white-green from moist peat, from forking branches of branches. A colleague at school who worries about the end of the world has indeed verified that there has not been a winter so warm in Umbria in 156 years. Global warming, you betcha! Had Al Gore produced his film on the subject before the last election, guaranteed he’d be president today.

I am relieved when the bus comes and I can point to the “don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in marcia” sign as an excuse to take a seat toward the back of the bus by a woman I don’t realize is drunk, drunker than I’ve ever known anyone to be and don’t know her to be until she hands me her shopping bag and stands up only to realize that she can’t stand up. She hangs from the pole, stiffens her knees to hold herself up right, then her eyes close and she passes out for a moment while standing, jerking awake before she falls, murmuring words I don’t understand, smiling in some kind of communion with herself, closing her eyes, passing out again, jerking awake, again and again. There’s a well-coiffed older woman sitting across the aisle from me politely, her gloved hands crossed daintily in her lap. She refuses to look at either me or the drunk lady and I think it strange that we do not look at each other to acknowledge—with pity surely, with concern—what is happening right before our eyes, what we are living in this moment together as the weary, creaky-feeling bus makes its sudden twisty-turns up the hill. There’s something about night travel that’s so intimate: the insides of the bus lit up so fluorescently, all of us contained so tightly within, and so at the mercy of the driver and flukes of circumstance. For a funny, fluttery moment I want desperately to make eye-contact with someone—the lovely old lady sitting there so prim with pursed lips, the drunk woman whose head is lolling and eyes are closed, though she’s still smiling in her bemused way as though privy to something the rest of us can’t know, my friend the bus-driver whose forehead is visible in the rear-view mirror, but not his eyes where I can catch them, and find in them some reassurance of something small talk about the weather can no longer provide.





This is the way the world ends...
"...not with a bang but a whimper..." T. S. Eliot


An Inconvenient Truth
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.