How I found out my parents were siblings, and my life changed forever
by Kate Durbin
*originally published in Poetry Magazine October 2023
It’s August 2022, and Chicago meteorologist Greg Dutra is conducting the morning weather report when his hand accidentally grazes the weather map.
The map moves.
“Wait a minute,” Greg says. “I can do that? No way!”
The ‘adorable’ video, which soon goes viral, shows the handsome weatherman in a state of childlike excitement as he places his fingertips directly on the map. He tilts the Eastern United States up, then down. “Whoa!” His normal voice is dude-like.
When Greg discovers he can actually zoom into the Great Lakes, he becomes so agitated he no longer seems aware he is still live on the air. Marveling at his newfound ability to go into the map, Greg, whose chiseled face is definitely blushing, turns to the camera. “A beautiful day in the next few days, I’m gonna figure this out, Roz, we’re gonna go out to you while I figure this out.”
Watching the short clip, it’s unclear to me who Roz is. A field reporter, I assume. Maybe standing that moment in an actual field. Inside the weather. I imagine unseen Roz smiling at Greg’s joy on a tiny screen like the one I am watching this on. Roz’s face wetted by a foretold, cold light rain.
*
A blizzard comes to southern California at the end of February 2023. The first since the 1980s. I can see the snow piling up on the brown mountains outside my window, brown from recent forest fires. But snow always seems unreal to me as a Southern Californian. When my friends tell me they’re going out to visit it, I want to ask, “Are you sure the snow is a place?”
During the storm I become obsessed with watching weather reports on YouTube.
Early blizzard reports have a kind of charm, though there is an underlying unease, a sense of blurring or colliding realities. A dazed pelican blows in on the jet stream and lands on a giant snowbank near Lake Tahoe. Its webbed feet sink into the snow as it wanders, lost in a world of freezing whiteness it doesn’t understand. Two men in bulky North Face jackets corner the bird by a garage, rescuing it, though it looks like they are going to hurt it. A man stands on the side of an icy road, holding a monkey named Darwin. The monkey looms into the camera, curious. A retired Boomer couple in red puffer jackets, with extremely rosy cheeks, throw snowballs at each other. They drove in from a distant town. “We want to play in the snow,” red puffer woman says, in a singsong voice. A local man complains of blizzard tourists clogging the highway like a toilet. Men in cargo shorts lug giant bottles of kerosene into the back of a pickup truck. Snow flurries around their bare legs. “It's legit snow, legit snow,” says one cargo short man, sounding very California. It’s never snowed in his town before. Not in his lifetime, anyway.
“That’s a dog,” says the weatherman’s voice in another video. A small dark spot moves jaggedly over the landscape, looking like something else, not a dog. When he says, “that’s a dog,” the weatherman sounds unsure, even a little scared.
I am surprised at how much of the weather channels’ footage is just videos taken by regular people, posted to social media. Repurposed for the news broadcast. The reporters' job is to decipher the blurry homemade footage on the spot. To manage the footage, and by extension, the weather.
Trying to manage the weather, especially now, seems insane to me. Like trying to manage an erupting volcano.
The disaster continues. The reports turn dire. People are snowed into their houses. There is a fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. The roof of a grocery store collapses under the weight of fallen snow; from the sky, the store looks like an ancient ruin. A snowed-in woman with an unspecified medical condition has only three pills left. A mom with six kids speaks to a reporter on Facetime; their Airbnb hosts are threatening to kick them out. Meanwhile her kids have all come down with a mysterious rash. They’ve had to use the Epi-pen twice. The news cuts to a blurry cell phone image of a small human stomach with an angry red spot on it. In the YouTube comments, someone writes, “Well how can anybody get kicked out when nobody can get in or out?!?!”
A field reporter up to their waist in snow tries to walk forward in the snow, explaining how hard it is for her to walk in the snow. “See?” she says, gesturing to the whiteness engulfing her legs. “It’s never snowed like this before, not here,” several locals are recorded saying. Twelve bodies are found, though reports are inconclusive as to their causes of death. “It might not be the blizzard,” a reporter says, which feels like gaslighting, even if it's true. Everyone is running out of food at the same time. There are multiple mentions of frozen pizza.
HELP US someone scrawls on the side of the mountain in snow. A neighbor films it with their drone and posts the video on Twitter. It ends up on the news. It is strange how labyrinthine the paths to communication are. Who is speaking to who? The disaster relief is not fast enough, it is inadequate, underfunded. This is usually the case in California, but watching these videos, I worry that everyone is passively looking at screens, that no one knows who is supposed to be helping.
I text the HELP US photo to my family group chat. “You should go up there,” my mom texts, unhelpfully. She lives in another state. “Get snowshoes,” she texts.
At my house, at this lower elevation, rain falls in sheets. “Due to climate changes, there has been an increase in the total amount of moisture the atmosphere holds,” says a reporter. Out my window, I can no longer see the mountain. It’s covered in a thick cloud. The blizzard.
The algorithm suggests more videos. They all become weather to me. They all become the blizzard. The way the storm blew the pelican in from somewhere else. “Why Aubrey Plaza seemed annoyed at the SAG Awards.” “People vs nature fails.” “All the mistakes the Donner Party made.” “Cannibal claims murder was a MUTUAL agreement.”
Tom Cruise is on Jimmy Kimmel Live talking about doing dangerous stunts, like jumping off a cliff on a motorcycle. They had to tape his clothes down, so they wouldn’t catch on the motorcycle which would then plummet him to the earth and he’d die.
I start to wonder if maybe the algorithm is revealing the hidden structures of our changing reality. The weather people just report on the effects, but maybe the algorithm knows–or even is–the actual blueprint. I find myself longing to look directly at it, like I longed to stare directly into an solar eclipse (without those little paper glasses) as a child.
The final video, which I decide not to click on, which is how I know it is the final video, is: “How I found out my parents were siblings, and my life changed forever.” The thumbnail is of a woman in her seventies with white hair and glasses. She looks strangely familiar.
The video’s subheading: “I was revolted at me.”
It has 2 million views. I want to watch it more than any of the other videos, but something stops me. I feel sick. I have seen too much. I am not ready, I don’t think, for it all to come together. I am not ready for my life to change forever.
Out my other window, the one on the front of my house, my lawn is a lake. The rain hasn’t stopped for days. It’s never rained like this before, not here. In the bathroom, the water is coming up through the toilet. It’s an emergency. I need to call the plumber again. He was supposed to be here hours ago. Inside the toilet bowl, leaves from a tree I don’t know and an appearance of very small stones. Outside the rain is falling. I guess I already mentioned that. It seems like snow. I have never seen real snow but I hear it brings with it a silence.