Off Gurney Hill: Leave the Native Range Behind
Is your sign of the apocalypse still fresh enough?
It’s been a while since I’ve sent anything on this frequently mothballed newsletter. There have been plenty of things I’ve thought about covering here, from patio gardening to fresh indigo to garlic (for the last time in the foreseeable future). But for one reason or another, those essays haven’t come together. I even came up short with the second-annual Off Gurney Hill gift guide, which I ended up tweeting out last week instead of running it here (you can find it here if you’re still looking for gifts). If you’ve missed me in this guise, my apologies!
But we’re back here again today with something a little different, because not for the first time this year I had a pitch for a story that, in the past, I would’ve tried to get paid to write. But now, in a wildly deteriorated digital-media landscape, I wasn’t even quite sure where to pitch it. I tried a few places, it didn’t land for one reasonable reason (not commissioning at the moment) or another more unreasonable (no response), and since the peg will only stay fresh for so long, I’m running it here. It’s not a story about gardening, but it is one about nature—and, I think, something that really only I would write (perhaps to my professional detriment). With the industry crumbling it feels like there will only be more and more “opportunities” to publish similar things here. So maybe expect more of this! Or maybe I’ll disappear again for the better part of a year! It’s anyone’s guess, really.
So without further ado, a consideration of Leave the World Behind (the book and the film), the symbolic horsemen of the apocalypse, and avian vagrants both fictive and irl.
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Only Rose seems to notice that something is happening with the deer. Initially, it’s just a few sneaking past the hedge line, from whatever wilds of Long Island that lay beyond, entering into the still idyllic-looking yard of a high-end vacation rental complete with a swimming pool and patio. When her parents spot a pair on the first night of their family getaway (which coincides with what they haven’t quite realized is a world-historic disaster) Amanda and Clay see the creatures as a bit of peaceful idyll—just the kind of thing they wanted experience while getting away from the city for a few days.
Rose is just 13, and in Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel Leave the World Behind and the new Netflix adaptation of the same name, she has fewer pressing concerns than the adult characters: a catastrophic (and only very vaguely detailed, particularly in the book) attack on the United States turns the family’s vacation from Brooklyn to Long Island into an apocalypse scenario. Cell phones, the internet, and other digital means of communication are all offline. And after the owner of the house and his daughter show up in the middle of the night, describing what sounds like escalating chaos back in New York City, it’s clear (to the reader/viewer, if not to Amanda) that whatever is going on, it’s very bad. But while the adults become focused on trying to determine what, exactly, is happening in the world at large, Rose is focused on two things: first, figuring out a way to watch the series finale of Friends, a show she is obsessed with, and in a distant second, the increasingly large numbers of deer that keep showing up at the house and in the surrounding woods.
But as it becomes more and more clear that everything is falling apart — as ear-splitting sounds ring out from the sky, as passenger planes plummet to the earth, as driver-less Teslas gather for a mass vehicular suicide — there is an escalation on the part of nature. During a rainstorm one night, a flock of birds appears in the yard, but they aren’t just any birds.
“These were flamingos, the best of flamingos, hale and powerful,” Alam writes in the book. “They rose into the air, a simple trick, and above the trees. The flamingos on the grass followed, seven human-sized pink birds, twisty and strange, ascending into the Long Island night, beautiful and terrifying in equal measures.” The implication of their uncanny arrival is very clear: it’s an even more insistent sign that things are very, very wrong.
The response to this moment from viewers of the movie seems to pretty universally be along the lines of, “FLAMINGOS??” Which makes sense: they are one of the most iconic birds (in the sense that we often think of plastic yard flamingos as much as the feathers-and-blood animal) that aren’t just associated with the tropics, they are a symbolic stand-in for the tropics. Seeing them alight in a Long Island swimming pool, even in later summer, should come as a shock.
But a lot has happened in the three years between the book and movie, including this: over the summer, hundreds of American Flamingos, a species native to the Caribbean (and, once upon a time, southern Florida) were blown across the eastern United States by Hurricane Idalia. For weeks after the late August storm birders excitedly jumped at the opportunity to see the pink waders without a trip to the tropics. Flamingos were spotted as far afield as the Great Lakes, a suburban development in Ohio, and a farm pond in rural Pennsylvania—which, much like Long Island, is just a few hours drive from New York City. In the time it took to option, adapt, produce, and release Leave the World Behind, the improbable became probable.
A bird that shows up in a place far outside of its native range is called, rather delightfully, a vagrant. And while vagrancy happens for a variety of reasons that don’t always have to do with climate change, major storms like Idalia are known to blow various birds off course in ways that can be thrilling to the hardcore birding crowd. And hurricanes, nor’easters, and just your run-of-the-mill rainstorms are getting both larger and more frequent in many parts of the country thanks to climate change—more frequently generating the conditions that could land an unlikely bird in an unlikely place.
Writing this the day before the winter solstice, as the roses are yet again still blooming deep into December, I don’t have to grasp for other examples of the climate crisis pulling the rug out from beneath cultural symbols. A hurricane-like storm just washed away all of the snow from Vermont’s ski resorts, while New York City winter will very likely be snow-less or close to it for the second year running. “White Christmas”—a song originally about spending the holidays in Los Angeles—is shifting toward a lament that could be about practically anywhere.
Of course, Leave the World Behind is about a much more immediate man-made disaster than climate change. Whatever happened in the story drove flamingos to the northeast in a matter of days—not after centuries of burning coal and other fossil fuels and thereby gradually increasing the intensity of storms year after year to land us where we are now, in the climate chaos of 2023. But by its very nature, climate change affects everything, culture included. Just as there is growing uncertainty over where might burn or flood next, there is now also the question of just how long it will be before your fictional sign of the apocalypse shows up in real life.