It started with Russia.
In February 2013, a fragment of the 2011 EO40 asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere, officially becoming the chelyabinksk meteor. The giant rock had somehow been a surprise, catching the Russians unaware by hiding in the glare of the sun. Nearly fifteen hundred people were injured and whole buildings were destroyed, causing millions of dollars in damage. I remember watching online footage and thinking to myself that it had to have been an Internet hoax. This kind of thing didn't happen in real life, right? Asteroids. Meteors. Hordes of screaming people running to evade falling space debris when the meteor exploded in the sky. This was the stuff Hollywood made movies about; it wasn't supposed to be the Top Story on the Evening News.
Scientists first spotted our asteroid back in 2004. They named it 99942 Apophis. I used to wonder how and why they came up with these names. It's kind of like how someone arbitrarily decided to reclassify Pluto and voted it off the Planetary Survival Island. Who made these decisions? Did it matter which space rocks were big enough to be planets and which ones were simply asteroids? And why did they need names and designated numbers in the first place? In the case of our asteroid, the co-discoverers had chosen an appropriate name. In ancient Egypt, Apophis was the Greek name for the enemy of the sun god, Ra. Apophis was the deification of darkness. But these were all things I only learned about just as everything was coming to an end.
When I was just starting junior high, Apophis came within 19,400 miles of the Earth. Scientists around the globe did the math; they studied the trajectory of the giant space rock's next orbit, and when they didn't get the answer they were looking for, they checked the numbers again and again, but with the same results. We were doomed. Apophis was going to hit us.
Everyday, the asteroid traveled closer and closer to Earth like a doomsday calendar. Rumor has it that the government even consulted with Hollywood screenwriters responsible for all those films where the hero has to destroy a similar space threat. I guess Life really does imitate Art. But eventually the scientists convinced the government that it would only cause more damage if they--as all those apocalypse movies suggested--blew up the massive rock before it hit Earth, effectively splintering the asteroid into a million pieces. Instead of one giant impact zone, there would have been hundreds of thousands.
The days leading up to Apophis's impact were the worst. There was rioting in the streets and huddling in people's homes. It seemed like most people approached the End of Days in one of two ways – party hard until the world ended or stay at home and pray like hell it didn't happen.
When Apophis struck, things naturally got chaotic. The damage was unprecedented, but I suppose it could have been worse – we could have all died immediately on impact or drowned from a giant tsunami wave. Unexpectedly, the blow was softened by the shallow angle of the meteor's approach. Like the Russian meteor before it, Apophis exploded in the air before it actually hit the Earth's surface. The planet still turned into a piece of Swiss cheese from the resulting rubble, but we all thought we were going to be okay. We could rebuild from this. We hadn't shattered like a glass that had been dropped on the floor.
But Apophis was a red herring. It wasn't the asteroid itself that we should have feared. What the scientists should have been worried about was the aftermath of the impact – what came to be known as the Frost. When Apophis exploded, the atmosphere absorbed immeasurable amounts of meteoric dust. The debris in the atmosphere joined the already high levels of man-made carbon monoxide. This, along with a slight wobble in the Earth's orbit caused by Apophis's collision, created the perfect storm to trigger something that hadn't happened in about 12,500 years – an Ice Age.
Technically it wasn't an Ice Age; what we were experiencing was an Impact Winter or a Glacial Period, a cooler period within an Ice Age. But that was just semantics. Our reality was a vicious cycle – the more the temperatures dropped, the more ice and snow covered the earth, and the more the sun's rays were reflected back, making it even colder.
I might sound like some kind of astronomy expert, but my understanding at the time of what was happening was pretty rudimentary. When Apophis hit and the world as we knew it was starting to change, my high school had gathered everyone together – school assembly style in the gymnasium – to educate us about the upcoming crisis. I had never really taken an interest in school and I hadn't taken an earth science class since the eighth grade, but when I realized that my survival might depend on this knowledge, I became the greatest student. +
It's ironic to think about now because before scientists discovered Apophis, everyone thought that the big threat to humanity's existence would be Global Warming. The ice caps would melt, the polar bears would die, and the oceans would reclaim the planet. No one ever suspected that the real threat would be the exact opposite. We weren't going to bake inside of a giant greenhouse; we were going to slowly freeze to death.
The flowers were the first things to die. Anything that relied on photosynthesis was eventually choked out by the dust cloud that refracted the sun's radiation. I remember fondly my mother's great flower garden in our backyard. She was a grade school teacher with summers off and she devoted those months to the garden. Hydrangeas, pansies, daffodils, tulips, petunias, cornflowers, daisies, tiger lilies – I remember them all. She never grew anything of great import – anything of practical use – something my father had once snapped at her about when the produce section at the grocery stores went barren. But I do remember it had always been very pretty.
Beautiful things of little use had no place in the new world that emerged because of the Frost. That's what it came to be called – the Frost. Pretty innocuous name if you ask me. I wonder if the government had a lame contest over naming this disaster.
Life in my hometown fell apart quickly once the Frost set it. The town had been unstable to begin with, the result of an oil boom that had more than doubled the population of our small city overnight. Williston, North Dakota had the unhappy coincidence of sitting in the center of the Bakken oil formation (which I'd always thought sounded like an alien species).
The town had remained relatively unchanged since the 1950s until the boom. The rest of the country had been experiencing an economic depression, but you'd never know that from the looks of Williston. Classrooms in a once small school district now teemed with the children of young families eager to take advantage of the wage inflation caused by the employment shortage. The local Walmart couldn't keep up with the demand for everyday products, and shelves emptied as soon as they could stock them. Waitresses made a killing on tips from the truck drivers and the frakkers and the cementers who frequented their diners. My family owned our house, but I heard stories about people being evicted from their apartments when landlords doubled or tripled their rent to make room for the men who worked in the oil shale fields who could afford the bloated prices.
Like a modern day gold rush, people across the nation had left their 9 to 5 jobs to work in the oil fields surrounding my hometown. But not my dad. My father was a man of logic and numbers. He was levelheaded and not apt to make decisions whose consequences he hadn't fully considered. He worked at a bank downtown in the tiny financial district as a loan officer. He approved or denied people money for start-up businesses or commercial farms based on a 3-digit number that told him the reliability of that individual. He brought home a suitable paycheck that, combined with my mother's public school teacher's salary, had afforded us a 3-bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac. His conservative mindset went beyond the economic world and bled into the social. But he wasn't an anomaly in that. In rural North Dakota, just about everyone was a little unevolved.
After Apophis struck and the Frost began, the government federalized the oil fields and coal mines to avoid price gauging during the crisis. Once the epicenter of an economic boom, Williston became a military camp, practically fortified to keep the nonrenewable resources safe. Safe from whom, I'm not sure. Elsewhere, hydroelectric power ended because the water froze. Our other renewable energy sources – solar, geothermal, and wind – simply weren't enough to power the giant machine of America. There was even an urban legend that the government, anticipating that something like this might happen, had been building a secret bunker and that they had been able to tunnel their way close enough to the Earth's core that the underground city was powered by fusion or magma or whatever was at the squishy center of this candy-coated planet.
Rather than countries pooling resources and working together as they had in other times of crisis, we all turned a blind-eye to our neighboring countries' needs. And the way the world governments failed to work together was reflected in the people. After the Frost, altruism and charity became antiquated concepts struck from humanity's lexicon in favor of survival. We could have continued to have a civilized existence if people weren't so naturally greedy and self-serving. The temperatures hadn't yet dropped to uninhabitable. In fact, I'd witnessed even colder, harsher winters in North Dakota when temperatures dipped so below freezing that even breathing was a chore when your lungs burned and the snot froze in your nostrils.
Almost everyone I knew left Williston to go further south. It made sense. That's what a lot of older couples did in the winter months anyway – Snow Birds, we'd called them. And what was the Frost if not an extra-long winter? But the southern states could accommodate a couple hundred thousand seasonal retirees; they weren't prepared to house and feed the entire northern portion of the continent.
Flights and boats closer to the Equator were the next phase of retreat as the temperatures continued to drop. But soon after the mass exodus from the larger northern continents, the tiny island nations that floated near the planet's bellybutton closed their borders to refugees, and developing nations like those in Latin America and Africa could hardly support their native populations, let alone millions of North Americans and Europeans.
My family was not among the refugees. We stayed. Maybe it was foolish, maybe it was arrogant to think we could outlast this extreme climate change. Who knows how things would have turned out for us if we'd decided to leave with the other families who lived on our street.
In the beginning, my family had no special skills to ensure we'd survive the Frost. We hadn't been one of those Doomsday-prepping families who'd built a special underground bunker filled with ammunition and nonperishable food. When the government had warned the general public about what was happening to the Earth's climate, we'd stocked up as best as we could, but it wasn't anything particularly impressive. Resources in Williston had already been strained long before the crisis because of the oil bonanza.
No one in my family had been particularly handy with a weapon or traps with which to catch wild game. When my grandfather was alive, he'd taken me fishing on the Red River once, but I'd been five years old at the time and the only thing I could remember about it was being more interested in the night-crawlers than the actual fish.
For my own meager survival training, I'd been in Girl Scouts long enough to realize I didn't like sewing or embroidery. I'd had to take archery in middle school as part of mandatory gym class, but there had been a push to eliminate it from the curriculum because some parents on the PTA thought it was too violent. They should have gotten rid of dodge ball instead.
The one thing we did have going for us, however, was my Grandma Rosie. My uncles and aunts had all left for more tepid climates, but Grandma Rosie stayed behind and moved into the guest bedroom across the hallway from my own bedroom. She'd thought herself too old to be wandering the globe like so many others, all in search of elusive warmth. Now well into her eighties, she had come of age in the heart of the Great Depression. Her generation, more so than any of the pampered Americans that had followed, was best suited to get through this current crisis. Just as there had been no guarantee the world would recover from the global depression back in the 1930s, it was her optimism and faith and good sense that kept us alive.
The first months of the Frost were like a dream or a movie. It hadn't felt real what was happening. Outside looked and felt no different than a typical Midwestern winter, but everyone I knew, the friends I'd had since preschool, the people in my neighborhood, my extended family, had all packed up their essential belongings in the backs of trucks and trailers and had left. When spring came on the calendar, but the snow remained thick on the ground and no tiny green buds appeared on the skeleton-like branches of the trees, it started to become more real. But I still wasn't worried. My grandma's confidence was contagious, we ate well, we played board games, and we built fires in the woodstove and fireplace when the central heat no longer worked.
It was an adventure like I was Laura Ingalls Wilder out on the prairie with Ma and Pa and Carrie and Mary. Our home wasn't too large, and my father had smartly insulated it to keep from wasting heat. For now the Earth's temperature hadn't dropped so much to necessitate us sleeping in the same room, huddled around the fire. I was thankful for the privacy and the ability to exist in my own space, even if it was my childhood bedroom and not a campus dorm room or a studio apartment.
It was a comfortable, if unpredictable existence. But we all knew that eventually our supplies would run out or the temperatures would dip so dramatically that we would freeze to death. It was just a matter of time. It was survival of the fittest at its best. Or at its worst.