The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There’s a certain boldness to inaction. But it seemed to me that we were being asked to perform the impossible, as unlikely a strategy as if they’d proposed strapping ropes to the sun and dragging it across the sky.

Light would be unhooked from day, darkness unchained from night. And not everyone would go along with the plan.

It was voluntary, of course. We were not required to squeeze our days into twenty-four little hours. No new law was passed or put into place. This was America. The government could not dictate the way we lived our lives.

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

But doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?

One thing that strikes me when I recall that period of time is just how rapidly we adjusted. What had been familiar once became less and less so.

These were the individuals who were refusing to abide by clock time. They were naturalists and herbalists and holistic-health enthusiasts. They were healers and hippies and vegans, Wiccans and gurus and New Age philosophers. They were libertarians and anarchists and radical environmentalists. Or else they were fundamentalists, or survivalists, or back-to-the-landers already living in the wilderness off the grid. They were hostile to corporations. They were skeptical of the government. They were contrarians by nature or by creed. You didn’t always know who they were, not at first, anyway. Some kept it quiet for as long as they could. Others announced it.

But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest. Six or seven weeks after the slowing started, a certain boredom developed.

At the time, of course, we hoped these measures might be temporary. All the officials were repeating the same neat phrase: out of an abundance of caution. It was only later that I would come to think of this shift as not just one more weird phenomenon but as something different, a final swing.

Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn’t right. It’s not love—it’s relief.

There was a feeling on that last day of school, as we zipped up our backpacks and stacked our books in the book room, that we might never return to those halls. September loomed just three months away, but we had stopped predicting the future.