A helicopter flies over a wildfire burning in Gennadi village, on the Aegean Sea island of Rhodes, southeastern Greece, on July 25.Petros Giannakouris/The Associated Press
Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
I was probably foolish to plan this family vacation. But Greece is always scorching in summer. So we rented a place with a pool on the island of Rhodes.
At first, all went well. We ate grilled octopus and tasted thyme honey, swam in our cooling little pool, surrounded by pine trees, the cicadas so loud you had to shout over them.
That cloud rising behind the beach hills, I dismissed. Who knew what that was? It was only when I planned the next day’s car trip on Google Maps that I grew concerned. A flame icon appeared in the middle of the screen: wildfires.
At dinner in a nearby taverna, my partner, our son and I ordered as normal, which is to say, greedily: tzatziki and souvlaki and moussaka and more. I sidelined the restaurant manager, out of earshot of my seven-year-old. The winds are blowing the fires away from us, the manager assured me. To prove this, he called a buddy who was volunteering with the firefighters. On speakerphone, I heard crackling, and Greek that I couldn’t understand.
The manager hung up. “It’s coming in this direction now,” he said.
If the fires closed in, he explained, the government would issue an emergency alert on our mobile phones. Then we’d rush to the closest beachside town.
“But can we go to sleep at night?”
“Fire moves fast,” he replied.
We drove back to our rental at the edge of the forest. When I asked Google Maps to show the closest evacuated town, it gave a drive time of 14 minutes.
We kept all this from our son, putting him to bed as normal – then packed. Once he was asleep, my partner and I went poolside, needing a cooling and calming swim. But the night air smelled of smoke.
Our flight wasn’t for four days. Should we ditch everything and flee, wasting our vacation time and our money too, not to mention the expense of last-minute replacement flights in peak season?
Perhaps we were overreacting. Perhaps we were underreacting.
We spent the subsequent days vacillating this way, acting as if things were normal before our boy, visiting archeological sites, fanning ourselves desperately under the suffocating 40-degree heat, hiding under beach umbrellas – all while wondering if we were insane.
In other words, we faced the climate dilemma in distilled form. Should you deny what you know, and distract yourself with pleasures, hoping someone else will sort out the disaster? Or should you act somehow and face the emergency before it engulfs you?
And if so, what exactly to do?
Each time my partner and I stepped away from our son, we grabbed our phones, struggling to translate Greek reports on social media, wading past tweets of crisis-denying loons who swore the Rhodes fires were utterly normal, and that public warnings were just a way to panic everyone into “climate lockdowns.”
Meantime, I kept registering our own climate impact with heightened unease: the plastic water bottles piling up in the kitchen (“Don’t drink the tap water!” the rental agent warned); the absence of recycling that obliged us to toss everything into a single landfill dumpster; all our air conditioning, just to keep from fainting. Also, the leering brutality of that vast Virgin cruise ship, like a beached building in Rhodes harbour, spewing emissions from its funnel.
“There are just too many people around,” I said in Rhodes’s old town, edging past sweaty crowds and tourist-trinket shops.
“You are one of those people,” my seven-year-old noted.
The wildfires kept expanding – still distant enough to spare us, yet sometimes reaching a town we’d visited a day before. Videos circulated of bedraggled package-holiday customers ordered to flee, refugees with beach towels and Havaianas.
On our final night, the national-emergency alarm screeched from our phones at 1:40 a.m., ordering another evacuation, frighteningly close again. In the sweltering dark, my partner and I debated whether to wake our son, and drive to the airport immediately. We studied maps and wildfire locations and breaking reports, sleepless till the sun rose to torment us again.
When I returned the rental car, a tourist/refugee was sobbing uncontrollably to the booth attendant. In the airport terminal, scores slept higgledy-piggledy on the floor, trying to catch any flight home. Somehow, ours left only a few hours late.
Those stranded tourists were sure to reach safety in the end. No such escape awaits the residents of Rhodes.
They are stuck on scorched land, a gutted tourist destination. We found kindness and culture and charm everywhere. I cannot imagine returning.
In Greek myth, a three-headed hound guards the dead, keeping them imprisoned in the afterlife. That creature, Cerberus, was the name of this summer’s first European heat wave. When a second arrived, climatologists dubbed it Charon, after the mythical ferryman transporting dead souls to Hades.
None of us can flee this – not even those billionaire creeps, building space rockets for vanity, as if some day they might jet away from us, the hoi polloi, burning down here in Hades.
Once, vacation was where you went to forget your woes, to replenish yourself. Today, our woes waft over the hills; you can smell the burning. Heat waves and wildfires cannot be dubbed shocking events any more. They just mean it’s summer.
When I was a schoolboy, each new grade seemed to begin with a version of a dreary assignment: “Write one full paragraph about what you did on your summer vacation.” Today, they should change the assignment: “Explain what summer vacation is for any more.”
We’re still trying to vacation in the past, travelling from cool climes to sun in search of that ideal temperature, yearning for heedless consumption, for freedom again, if just for a few blessed weeks.
Only, the climate has changed. And it’s coming on holiday with you.