Hard Landings: Climate Change and Cheap Wine

In observation of the 35th Annual Earth Day on April 22, we asked award-winning writer Seamus McGraw, author of Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change, to combine his signature humor and measured approach to the climate change debate for a guest blog post.

'Hard Landings: A Tale of Cheap Wine, Broken Bones and Climate Change'

By Seamus McGraw

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It wasn’t until weeks later--long after the half-gallon of Carlo Rossi red I had swilled and the painkillers that came later in the night wore off--that I actually felt the impact. Sure, I had some vague recollection of the fall, of trying to hop up on the banister in the atrium of my college dorm, three floors above a flagstone foyer, and of missing it by a good six inches. If I racked my brain while recuperating in my bed at home, I could dimly recall a fleeting Wile E. Coyote moment of clarity as I realized that I had indeed missed. And if I really tried, I could even feel myself plunging ass-first through the air as if I were doing a cannonball down onto the stones.

But that’s all. I had no recollection of hitting bottom, no memory of the thunder clap of savage pain that shot through my whole body as part of my hip snapped. What’s more, I had no memory at all of what happened next; how, in an astonishing display of the power of blind, late-adolescent stupidity, I got up, broken hip and all, and, I’m told by several witnesses, tried to run back upstairs, as if rolling the whole episode back to the beginning and doing exactly what I had done again, only this time a little more gracefully, would erase it.

And then, one night, weeks after the incident, while lying in bed half asleep, it all came back, all of it, unbidden-- the panic as I plummeted, the bone-crushing pain as I hit. It was as if it was happening right then and there. But it was, in a way, worse, because with it came a hot rush of shame, not just for being stupid and arrogant enough to do what I did in the first place, but for being such a coward that I wouldn’t even allow myself to fully feel what it was that I had done until I knew I was safe.That was years ago, and, to the relief of everybody who knows me, I’ve long since given up the Carlo Rossi. But I’ve found myself thinking back to that event a lot in recent days. Most recently, it was when US Senator Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and perhaps that august body’s most strident voice against doing anything to combat anthropogenic global climate change, strutted into the Senate with a snowball in his hand.