All Is Quiet

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Ten years ago, I was scared to death of Y2K and its incipient lawlessness and anarchy, and so I went to San Felipe with Greg the Fireman and Annie his Special Lady and their kids and my kid, and we camped close to the sandbar where I’d stayed with my family as a child, and we woke to watch the sun rise over the sea, dappled gold stretching for miles. After that, I felt ever so much better.

On September 11, I was scared to death of the breakdown of society that would surely occur any moment now, and for the first time in my life, I wished my boyfriend would bring his gun into my home, but instead he went camping for a week in the mountains without me.

I have publicly predicted the invocation of martial law more than once, and have been predicting the economic collapse of our United States for this past decade, along with everyone else with a brain in their heads (I mean about our economic collapse; the bug-eyed predictions of martial law seem to have been mine alone). I am a conspiracy theorist who believes Woody Harrelson’s father was one of the tramps on the grassy knoll. I know the Katrina death toll was vastly underreported, as they started knocking down homes with their attics unchecked. I do believe in the moon landing, though, and was pleased as punch when Buzz Aldrin punched out the whippersnapper who was getting all facey about it. As my mother once pooh-poohed my objections to taking my then-four-year-old son to see Lethal Weapon 4, a little violence never hurt anybody.

New Years at the Sydney Opera House

Michael Moore’s thesis in Bowling for Columbine was that our addiction to gun violence isn’t predicated on movie violence or poverty or macho Second Amendment posturing; it’s a reaction to steadily and purposely inculcated fear. (Though he does have a word or two about poverty, especially concerning the corporate giveaway—to Dick Clark of all people—that is welfare-to-work. And maybe he’s got a word or two about macho Second Amendment posturing as well, but his gotchas are never my favorite parts of his movies, and I wish sad, goofy old Charlton Heston had remained in his rancho unmolested.) And for a solid decade, I’ve bought in and sky-is-fallinged my very own self. I didn’t even realize I was doing it; I thought I was the type of hardy survivor/pioneer who could outrun the lava flows when 2012 came, and who could outrun another Depression with grit! and moxie! And yet, looking back, I’ve been as paranoid as Joan Didion when she wrote about seeing 1968 not as the Summer of Love but as a year of social breakdown in which she was constantly—fearfully—jotting down license plate numbers on suspicious cars, in case the police later needed to identify her murderer. (I think; I can’t find it now. My Dad is constantly lifting things from my bookshelf, which, when read, he then gives to other people. Such a giver, my father, of my belongings.)

We are paranoid, and they are out to get us. But we can borrow a stiff upper lip from the WWII British, and Keep Calm and Carry On. Placid, unruffled ... and bourgeois. I will happily be one in a nation of shopkeepers right now. I will be all Greatest Generation and shit. I am only fearing fear itself, along with maybe just the tiniest fear of middle age. They can pry my Clinique Super Rescue moisturizer from my (c)old dead hands!

In the last decade, there was no moment that was more terrifying for me than trying to cross back into the U.S. from Canada, on a monthlong road trip with Jimmy when he was eight. It was the summer of 2002, and there’d been a national abductathon gripping the country. I didn’t bring his birth certificate, since it would have showed his mother was someone other than me, and I had never been given a piece of paper by the state attesting to my guardianship. A nice old border guard brought us inside for follow-up, and we went through the following delightful bit of comedy:

Border guard: Is “Schoenkopf” your married name?

Me: Yes.

Border guard: What was your maiden name?

Me: Oh, I’ve never been married.

Nice old coot that he was, he pretended not to notice my direct contradiction of me while I pretended to breathe. Finally, thinking to clear the matter up easily, he turned to Jimmy and said, kindly, “Son, is this your mother?”

“No,” Jimmy answered, terrified his own self, and everybody in there—from the secretaries to the three grubby dudes cooling their heels in the lobby—let out a collective groan. After a shake of his dear head, which I love and honor to this day, the man sent us off home.

Three hours later, around Kalispell, Montana, I breathed again.

And so, when I drag my son to Ensenada tomorrow (yesterday) so we can wake early and watch the sun rise the day after tomorrow (today), I will take my passport, and I will take the piece of paper attesting to my guardianship of said son, and I will have nothing to fear. Be prepared! And loose lips sink ships! And cetera! And be strong, my brothers and sisters, because we’re going to have to conjure our own futures for a while, pioneer/survivor-like. At least until 2012 comes, with the lava and such. Honestly, you can’t outrun a volcano. Anyone who said you can is an idiot.

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