A friend of mine got married in her parents’ garden last year, on a lavishly beautiful late-summer afternoon in Cape Town. Many of the guests were British, and they could not stop remarking on the fineness of the weather. It was a startling reminder that some people still relish hot days with no possibility of rain, that not everyone looks upon February in the Western Cape as something to be endured. After the ceremony, my date and I stood by the swimming pool, drinking sparkling wine and monitoring the canapés. My friend’s stepfather came by to say hello, carefully picking his way past the bride’s two young brothers, who were playing an ecstatic game of hide-and-seek on the lawn, getting grass stains on their tiny suits. After gracefully accepting our praise about how lovely everything had been, he told us that he’d been having torrid anxiety dreams. We nodded. Weddings are notoriously hard on the old nerves—guests to be tended to, speeches to be made, and the pool just lying there, waiting for any old idiot to accidentally fall in and cast an undignified pall over the happy day. He shook his head. His dream, he explained, was about the garden.
Cape Town’s drought was officially declared a national disaster a couple of months ago, but even last year it was bad enough that using the municipal supply to water your garden was tantamount to taking out an advertisement in the newspaper that read, “I Don’t Care at All About Other People, the Environment, or Anything Except My Thirsty Hydrangeas.” Like many residents of Cape Town’s wealthier southern suburbs, however, my friend’s parents had a borehole. The garden had been made wedding-ready using groundwater, which is relatively plentiful, rather than municipal water, which is not. In the dream, though, the neighbors didn’t know that. In the dream, the neighbors believed that my friend’s parents were watering their garden day and night with the municipal supply, and were so enraged at this wanton excess that they staged a protest outside, screaming at guests through bullhorns as they arrived.
At that point, I had not yet developed my own personalized version of the water-anxiety dream, and I remember a brief jolt of surprise at how vividly realized his was. What I mainly remember, though, was the cold thread of worry that vined its way up the back of my neck, spread out along my collarbones, and settled there. I don’t know why it dawned on me then that the water crisis wasn’t a temporary problem, or that “crisis” is probably the wrong word for something that is never going away. Perhaps it was the grim specificity of the stepfather’s dream, which contrasted with the whirling happiness of the day. Perhaps it was the slightly too on-the-nose reference to W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” that I was only just able to prevent myself from making (“how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster”). I don’t know why I felt it then, and, a year later, I still don’t know how to describe it. Something like: Oh, no. Something like: We’re all going to have to be scared about this, every day, forever.
In his new book, “Being Ecological,” the scholar Timothy Morton argues that humans must find “a way of feeling ourselves around the age we live in, which is one of mass extinction caused by global warming.” It is an arrestingly horrible requirement to have to meet. I don’t want to think about the implications of the latest U.N. World Water Development Report, which concludes that, by 2050, around three billion people could be living in “severely water-scarce areas.” I want to avert my gaze at the cinema when the trailer for “An Inconvenient Sequel” comes on. Being in Cape Town for the past year has made these feats of willed obliviousness impossible. It has also revealed them for what they always were: luxuries of middle-class thinking. Water insecurity is both a cause and a symptom of poverty; in the government’s latest community survey, South Africans listed it as the most significant problem facing their municipalities, far ahead of unemployment and crime. According to the same survey, more than two and a half million people in the country have “no access to safe drinking water.” Most of them live in the poorer, less urbanized provinces. They do not need to be told to think about something that already defines their lives. The rest of us are catching up.
It’s true that the threat of Day Zero, the date on which the municipal taps will be shut off, does not dominate conversations as it did earlier this year. Now city officials tell us that Day Zero has been “defeated”—pushed back to July, when the rainy season ought to take care of things for the foreseeable future. (Recent projections by two local climate scientists suggest that this has less than a five-per-cent chance of happening.) Some people already look back on those stricken months with a kind of detached bemusement as to what, exactly, the fuss was all about. There are still buckets in every shower to catch runoff, pleading signs in every restaurant bathroom, electronic billboards informing us that the dam levels continue to drop, water tanks planted in gardens where the agapanthuses used to be. Water restrictions remain at fifty litres per person per day. But the gnawing fear of a few months ago has loosened its grip. In our waking lives, we worry about other things. Two weeks ago, Cape Town’s deputy mayor announced that water consumption had increased by five per cent.
Yet the dreams keep coming. Two, in particular, have visited me often since my friend’s wedding. In one, I am in the quad at my old primary school, and I realize that my brother, who in the dream is a little kid, is about to have a swimming lesson but doesn’t know that the pool is empty. I start sprinting across the quad and screaming at him to be careful, but I know that I won’t get there before he jumps in and hits his head on the concrete. The second dream is set in an old office building, at night, lights off. Every tap in every bathroom on every floor is turned on full blast, and I am tearing up and down the stairs trying to turn them off. The water keeps running, though, and after a while I understand that this is because there is a person, unknown to me, who is turning the taps back on. I don’t know how to get out of the building, or how to turn on the lights, or what is going to happen when the person catches up to me.
Morton suggests that living in the age of mass extinction caused by climate change has resulted in “a traumatic loss of coordinates”: we don’t know how to see the world anymore, and we don’t have the words to talk about it. A few years ago, the same idea drove the artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante to found the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a crowdsourced “dictionary for the future present” that coins neologisms for our troubled age. Solastalgia: “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has been altered and feels unfamiliar.” NonnaPaura: “the simultaneous sensation of a strong natural urge for your children to have children mixed with an … urge to protect these yet unborn grandchildren from a future filled with suffering.” Shadowtime: “a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.”
I don’t want to need these words, but I do. At the wedding, I didn’t want to think about how much of my youth was spent in swimming pools just like the one in the middle of that lawn, or the one in the dream with my brother, and to wonder at the extent to which I took them for granted. The Bureau has a word for that, too: agualation. It describes the conflicted feeling the comes from watching people, especially children, enjoy water with abandon, and wishing that they would conserve a resource that you yourself never thought about until it had all but evaporated.
