For the first half of my childhood, school vacations meant that my family would leave our twelfth-floor apartment in New York City, marching onto the sidewalk in Wellington boots and L.L. Bean. Buckling fanny packs around our waists, we would head for a crystalline lake in the Catskills or a salty cove in Maine. I despised many parts of these camping trips: the physical exertion, the mosquitoes and leeches, the dearth of WiFi and pillows. My younger siblings learned how to tie knots and dig latrines. I tended to pack stacks of books, which I implored others to carry in their backpacks, and read in hammocks until the trips were over. I didn’t anticipate that the trips would eventually end for good.
The summer I turned thirteen, my family ventured farther north than we ever had before. We stewarded our canned beans and insect repellent to Torngat Mountains National Park, a polar bear-inhabited wilderness at the tip of Canada’s Labrador Peninsula. Although we arrived at the park’s base camp around 9 P.M. or 10 P.M, the cluster of canvas tents was still full of subarctic summer daylight. The camp lay at the inland end of a fjord, and from our vantage point on the water’s edge, we spotted seals. We kept our eyes peeled for the orca whales that sometimes swam along the shore.
Growing up, instead of introducing my siblings and me to Nickelodeon, our parents showed us nature documentaries with titles like Blue Planet and Great Migrations. We developed an encyclopedic obsession with wildlife and dressed up as lemurs and dolphins for Halloween. So to us, a wildlife-rich park was paradise. I accepted spending seven nights in a sleeping bag as the price of seeing a polar bear. Nature brought my parents together, too. Their views diverge on many subjects. But my dad proposed to my mom while trekking in the Andres; they honeymooned with a canoe trip in the Adirondacks.
The summer we visited the Torngat Mountains, the park’s polar bears were famished. The bears depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals, their primary food source. As recently as the 1990s, the extent of the Arctic sea ice rarely fell below 7 million square kilometers, even during the September lows. But from 2010-2020, the September sea ice averaged 3-4 million square kilometers. As a result, starving polar bears, perched on melting icebergs and dry land, have become the face of global warming.
The park’s ecosystem also showed other signs of strain. We swatted away thick swarms of mosquitoes and flies, which had hatched in unusual numbers because of the warmer weather. The glaciers that sat among the park’s rocky peaks had shrunk as well. Due to a phenomenon that scientists call “polar amplification,” the top of the world experiences a greater degree of global warming than equatorial regions. As the Arctic ice cap melts, the white “mirror” that reflects sunlight away from Earth disappears, and the region becomes disproportionately warmer. Our Inuit guides lamented that as the weather changed, the wildlife was becoming too sparse to hunt. And if the number of polar bears dwindled and the mosquitoes got worse, the guides told us, they did not know how much longer the visitors would keep coming.
The trip to the Torngat Mountains was one of the last vacations my family ever took together. Over the subsequent two years, my youngest brother became afflicted with a mysterious illness. An avid runner and athlete, he was ten years old when the symptoms started. He stopped running because his breath became ragged –– even laughing would leave him winded. He stopped going to class because of severe, migraine-like headaches. Eventually, he grew too tired for school altogether, and my mother decided to homeschool him. I began to see less of both my brother and my mom, who moved a mattress into his bedroom and slept beside him. Inexplicable bruises appeared on his body, and he and my mom would inspect them in the dark, leaving the window curtains drawn because the light aggravated his headaches.
Doctors eventually diagnosed my brother with Lyme Disease and Babesia, two tick-borne illnesses. He must have gotten the tick bites on one of our outdoor trips. Once the tick-borne illnesses became entrenched in my brother’s body, there were no obvious treatments. Doctors prescribed rounds of antibiotics that lasted for months. For an entire semester, he and my mom disappeared to a hospital in Germany, where doctors raised his body temperature to 107 degrees Fahrenheit in order to increase the antibiotics’ efficacy. Lyme often comes with neurological symptoms, including depression and sleep disruptions, and doctors prescribed a slew of sleeping medications for my brother. We would discuss how the medications were working as he administered subcutaneous injections for himself, pulling up his shirt to stab his stomach with needles.
Scientists are only slowly beginning to understand tick-borne illnesses, but researchers have connected the diseases to a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: climate change. Much like the mosquitoes in the Torngat Mountains, ticks have benefitted from warmer weather. The black-legged creatures emerge when temperatures are above 45 degrees Fahrenheit, so climate change has increased the ticks’ range and the percentage of the year during which they are active. Lyme disease rates have doubled since 1991, rising to 500,000 recorded cases each year in the US and Europe. In fact, the US Environmental Protection Agency uses Lyme Disease rates as one of its official “Climate Change Indicators,” along with measures such as Arctic sea ice.
I have never heard my brother speculate about whether climate change may have contributed to his own infection. However, he does talk about climate change forcefully, often, and in great detail. He explains climate science with the jargon and acronyms of an expert: IPCC, UNFCCC, Keeling curve, GHGs, atmospheric aerosols, emissions pathways. He will tell anyone who will listen about overlooked sources of carbon pollution, such as cement production. He knows which islands might slip beneath rising seas and which species will likely go extinct due to warming. Of course, my brother is confined to a bed inside our apartment, so he rarely experiences changing weather and ecosystems. Yet after losing the outdoors, he fears that the rest of the world might lose them, too.
My brother’s psychologist put him in touch with a New York Times reporter investigating the growing prevalence of “ecological grief” linked to climate change. He told the journalist about the panic that he experiences due to climate data. To be able to function day-to-day, my brother self-censors his consumption of environmental news, avoiding projections about climate change’s worst impacts. I’ve learned to censor, too. Recently, when making a video compilation of messages for my brother’s 18th birthday, I removed well-intentioned references that friends and family made to camping, hiking, and his ability –– once upon a time –– to beat anyone we knew in a running race.
My family no longer goes camping. When I think of the Torngat Mountains now, specific images have lost their focus. I can recall the unsullied air and the icy rivers and the fresh fish, my brother’s giggle, my father showing us how to start a fire with bits of twigs. I know there are photos, stored away in albums and on hard drives, that could spur my memory. I leave them be. It would be too painful to peruse them. But I know that the ice is still melting, and the polar bears still prowl, hunting to no avail at the top of the world.
By Anonymous
