feature image photo by Jay L. Clendenin / Contributor via Getty Images

I was at the edge of the world, in Key West, Florida, when I first read about the record-breaking fires swallowing up Los Angeles. I went through my mental catalogue of friends back in LA and sent my check-in texts. Almost all of them did the exact same for me this past fall during one of the longest and worst hurricane seasons to hit the southeast in recent years.

This was my fourth hurricane season in Florida and second in the central part of the state where hurricanes move slow, dropping enough rain to flood lakes and low areas, floods that aren’t nearly as terrifying as the storm surges on the coasts but still rattle with just how quickly they happen and how hard they are to predict accurately, like most natural disasters. The tornadoes were particularly bad during these hurricanes, and while meteorologists are quick to point out they tend to happen in rural, less populated areas, those areas are full of particularly vulnerable structures and therefore vulnerable populations, including people in mobile homes. My friends in California describe the winds, and it sounds familiar. When Milton passed through Orlando overnight, I didn’t sleep. I don’t know how anyone could with winds that sound like that.

We got lucky during the storms this year, but surviving natural disasters always feels like that: luck. The only reason a tree didn’t smash through our roof and into the bedroom where we slept as Milton passed through town was because the landlord had installed a basketball hoop with a concrete-poured base in the backyard long before we moved in. The tree hit the hoop, which stopped it from hitting the house. For so many reasons, we were lucky. Only 100 miles away and also in the center of the state, our friends in Gainesville didn’t fare so well. When Milton struck hot on the heels of Helene, some of them even evacuated to the north despite a lack of orders to do so, still traumatized by the winds of Helene.

We’re lucky, a lot of my friends in California reply when I check in on them. One friend has to follow up the next day: Update I was wrong yesterday! Different fire nearer to our house, we’re in the level two “get ready to evacuate” border so we’re headed to a friend’s parents. Less than 15 hours passed between her all good! text and her we’re leaving! one. In Natural Disaster Time, that’s either very short or very long, depending on how you look at it. Your circumstances can change in a matter of minutes when it comes to a natural disaster, but time also moves slowly somehow when you’re in it, and tomorrow can feel very far.

As I text my friends for updates, I’m thinking a lot about the temporality of natural disasters and the language of them. It is strange, to put it lightly, to text the friends for updates on the natural disaster they’re living through who did the same for me a few months ago, and I know we’re doomed to continue the cycle. The flooded checking in with the fired, the fired checking in with the flooded. There is comfort in knowing we have each other’s backs, every mutual aid effort I see in the wake of devastation a reminder of how communities help each other get through the unimaginable. Every time a hurricane nears, my local friends create a group chat so we can all keep each other in the loop: who has power, who’s flooded, who can host family dinner with hot showers. I watch as friends in LA similarly offer up their homes to friends, their pets, their kids. It wasn’t until I went through my first hurricane season that I truly understood the meaning and impact of queer chosen family. Group chats in times of crisis are invaluable.

But of course, it shouldn’t have to fall entirely on us to fill in the crevices created by a government fueled by corporate greed and extractive capitalism, things that help make the storms — be they fires or hurricanes — bigger and badder. It feels like everyone I know is taking turns living through something environmentally unprecedented or, if not entirely unprecedented, still nightmarish in scale. California is no stranger to wildfires just like Florida is no stranger to hurricanes, but these are the worst fires to strike Los Angeles in recent history. The burned area is roughly the size of three Manhattans, a data point that has circulated a lot but warrants repetition for just how striking it is. One publication compares the size to 270 golf courses, and the irony of the comparison makes me want to scream; there are over 600 golf courses in Southern California, and in addition to drinking up millions of gallons of water a day, golf courses use fertilizers that significantly up their carbon footprints. The 2024 hurricane season meanwhile was similarly brutal, the first year since 2019 to have multiple category five hurricanes. It was the first year on record that there were three simultaneous hurricanes active in the Atlantic after September, strong hurricanes still brewing during the part of storm season when there’s supposed to be a lull. Fire season in California is supposedly over by January, but when the typically “wet season” has instead been a continuation of drought, fire season can be any time now. Natural disasters increasingly feel like they’re not governed by linear time.

***It is hard to talk about natural disasters, even when it’s difficult to think of anything else. Floods and fires are devastating on a scale difficult to measure. Both can erase entire homes, as the fires have done and are still doing in California and the floods did this fall in North Carolina and several coastal towns in Florida. USA Today reports more than 12,000 homes, businesses, schools, and structures have burned down, but that number isn’t final. I’m struggling to find an exact number of how many homes were wiped away completely by the flooding and mudslides caused by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, but over 100,000 homes are estimated to have been seriously damaged or destroyed, and even if it’s just a small fraction for the latter, that’s thousands of homes gone. Many North Carolinians displaced by the hurricane live in RVs, which are difficult to keep warm, and the region is now in the midst of bad winter storms. While at a literary seminar in Key West, I read about critic and writer Gary Indiana’s entire personal library being destroyed in the fires during their relocation from his New York home where he died to Los Angeles where they were meant to be preserved and archived and instead were destroyed. That’s a massive loss for queer culture, and yet it’s fractional of what the fires have taken. Tiny tragedies all stacked on top of one another.

To lose everything you own except what you can carry in an evacuation is an immeasurable loss, and yet people are forced to measure it legibly for the insurance companies, who for the most part do not cover flood damage at all by the way. People have figured out how to circumvent those limitations in some cases. We tell each other never to use the word “flood” when talking to insurance companies, to instead use vague descriptions of “water damage.” Now, I see people cautioning each other about what language they use to title and describe their GoFundMe pages for rebuilding after the fires because of concerns of how they might be interpreted by insurance companies or even FEMA when it comes to aid. It is a gargantuan task to put into language the loss of these disasters and a slap in the face to have to do so in secret code or risk not receiving help.

Maybe the check-in text messages and conversations they spur are the only place where any of us can be totally honest about what we’re experiencing and feeling during natural disasters. I know plenty of people who don’t think texting is meaningful communication, but as someone who has always had long-term long-distance friendships, I know that isn’t true. Or it doesn’t have to be. In truth, sometimes it’s hearing from the friends I don’t talk to much at all that means the most. They tend to begin their check-ins with apologies, sorry I know you’re probably getting a million texts like this. I found myself doing the same as I checked in with Angelenos, even though I’ve always waved off those apologies when they’re directed my way. It’s true that you don’t always have the capacity to update everyone, but no one will ever get mad at you for not replying to a check-in text; we understand how all-consuming this can be. Though it is easy to feel at a loss of words when talking to someone in these situations, authentic words of care and connection do matter. We have to talk to each other about all of this.

Natural disasters activate stress responses. Even for my friends who did not have to evacuate, many say they had not slept, could not sleep. They’re still expected to show up for work. But even just one night without sleep can wreak a nervous system, devastate the body. To go about normal life when nothing feels normal is another storm in and of itself. My wife and I always have to search for the line between staying informed and information overload in the days leading up to a storm. We watch the weather channel, but it becomes repetitive, and after we’ve made all our preparations, there’s little else to do than wait. The news reports are interrupted by commercials for generators that are made to look like news reports themselves, a reminder that even in times of crisis, things will be sold to you. The check-in texts are a brief reprieve from all that.

***I recently wrote about longing to see snow and the white Christmases of my youth in a brief climate anxiety essay that now feels childish, even if many of its sentiments remain true. Mere days after I wrote and published it, my hometown of Richmond got hit by a freak winter storm. The city’s water system faltered as a result of the storm, and thousands of people including my parents were without clean water, under boil advisory for nearly a week. I watch as small, queer-owned businesses, like Cry Baby in Louisville and Firestorm Books in Asheville set up warming stations, more institutional crevices filled.

Wildfire weather conditions doubled in California between 1980 and 2020 — 40 years of rapid increase. I recommend reading that full linked interview with a climate scientist; it demonstrates how to be specific when discussing climate change and natural disasters, provides some of the nuance I don’t quite have in this essay, because I’m no climate expert. I write this instead from inside the cycle of fires and floods. It is easy to see how we’re all connected by these interlocking and mirrored disasters: the fires, the floods, the freezes. It’s a reminder of how bullshit borders are; we’re all living on land in crisis. There’s an exchange that happens between coasts as we go through these cycles; when smoke and dangerous air hit the east coast the summer of 2023, friends in California and the Pacific Northwest gave the east coasters tips on how to get through it. Many people would balk at me drawing parallels between California and Florida — people I love, even — but what good do we do by focusing on our differences? Coastal cities in all four corners of the country are sinking. People are surprised to learn I’ve lived in cities like LA and New York and have fallen in love with Orlando, and sure, all of these places have their differences, but I’m always so uninterested in these imagined wars between cities. Everyone always asks where my favorite place is that I have lived, and I say all of them, and it’s true. If you take the time to connect with the natural world, you will love every place, even when that love is complicated. Wildfires are different from hurricanes, but we all share the language of natural disaster and climate devastation. These group texts, these cross-country check-ins, these ways of connecting with and relating to each other are the language of natural disaster and climate devastation now. We cling to one another in times like this, because that’s what being family and sharing the home of this planet means now.

I’m just checking in. How are you doing?