Through Trails

Essays on Emergence & Emergency

PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN

“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.

Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. 

I want an excuse to change my life.”

FRANNY CHOI¹

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The last winter that I lived in Boulder, communities in Boulder County weathered the worst wildfire in Colorado state history. Over the course of a single day, sustained hurricane-force winds blew a grass fire into an urban firestorm² that charged across highways and consumed surrounding homes. More than 30,000 people were evacuated and over a thousand buildings burned.³

I was home alone that day, and didn’t know how to make sense of my body in space or time. Strong winds were part of living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. But we didn’t get winds like this—erratic, unrelenting—for hours, and hours, and hours. The wind shook the walls of my duplex as if exorcizing a demon, and sent trash cans tumbling through the streets. 

By mid-morning, the sky was ash gray. You got the sense that you could cup a palmful of air in your hands, like sand. Particulate matter wasn’t a metaphor. 

As more and more neighboring communities were evacuated, my friends and I checked in. Some were scared, and thinking of leaving. Others weren’t worried. The county was sending evacuees to Boulder. 

I had studied disaster preparedness for years: I thought I would know what to do. But faced with fire so close to home, I felt reckless with fear. What even was real? I mean, I could smell the smoke from the burn blazing just several miles south, but I also saw an Amazon truck charge through the ghostly light. That was the weird thing, the devastating, dissonant thing; everyone read the signs differently. 

Since moving to Colorado, I had stashed a go-bag in my closet. Although it was mostly packed with practicalities (my passport, a can opener), I tucked in a few things that were irreplaceable: journals, love notes, a serpentine chain my grandmother had given to my mother, and my mother in turn had given to me. After a few hours of texting friends—one was watching the fire from an overlook— I grabbed my go-bag and sat it by the front door. I wanted to be ready for whatever might come.  

At some point that night, we got an alert that the fire was partially contained. My roommate had finally made it home, and we sat curled together scrolling on our phones. If catastrophe was a bodily ache, screens were the anesthetic that dulled the pain.

But the grief got through anyway. I used to have sleep paralysis, and would sometimes wake up to the sound of a spirit saying my name before rising from the bed and walking away. It was almost always a man, close enough I could sense his hot breath on my neck, and this grief felt like that, like an apparition in the night: premonitory, sentient, scalding to the touch. 

In my dreams, I saw families fleeing by foot, animals trying to outrun the flames, trees and shrubs and seeds sublimating into smoke. Who would be their witness? Their hospice? When I woke in the middle of the night, breathless and in-between states, I turned my back to the window so I couldn’t see the street. I didn’t like looking out at evidence of a world that was bigger— more treacherous and unpredictable— than this.

The next day, it dumped snow. The fire curled into embers. Thousands of evacuees were now faced with a desperate need for warm winter clothes. My friend and I brought wool socks and snow coats to a community clothing drive. Nothing felt sufficient, and I was scared to sleep at night. I kept my ringer on, and thought everything was an alarm. 

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I’d like to tell you that this fire marked a “before” and “after” in my life. I think that would make for a nice narrative arc. 

But disaster isn’t a straight path from destruction to the day after. Disaster is a shape shifting god from Greek myth. Disaster is the disruption, sure, the cataclysmic event; it’s also the throughline, insistent, and daily, like breath. 

Cut any life in half, as you would a tree, and you can count the disasters from each year. 

This firestorm wasn’t a one-time thing. It was part of another story, an unfolding story, that was unjust and all-encompassing. The fire didn’t so much remake me as reveal a longing to better learn how to stay with⁴ catastrophe. If chaos was the condition⁵, what would be my response?

After the fire, I struggled with how to talk about it. I worried that others would read my sorrow as posturing. Like I was stealing thunder, or currying sympathy. 

I also struggled because we rarely discuss the realities of “natural” disaster—like where we would go in a hurricane, and who we would check in on during a flood—in our culture. In my own life, I wrestle with the irrational fear that I might conjure catastrophe by writing about it. It’s a fear that presupposes an internal locus of control that I don’t actually have. I’m still reconciling myself to the truth that you can’t evade catastrophe, or outwrite death, and that everything is practice (fallible, fluid) until the end, and maybe even after that. 

It’s in that spirit that “Through Trails” is a micro study in how catastrophe—as eventuality and enfleshed reality— can remake our intimate selves. This missive is not so much about meaning making as it is about working through—as in practicing, as in prototyping, as in stumbling, and still showing up. I can’t promise coherence or clarity. But I can promise to stay truthful to the times we are in, however agonizing, and full of awe. 

“Through Trails” grew from my research on disaster “preparedness.” Over the course of the past 6 years, my beloved collaborator Kailea Loften and I have stewarded “Compassion in Crisis” (CIC), a community-sourced guide to navigating this era of emergency. We first published CIC in 2018 and more recently, signed a contract to publish a revised iteration in spring of 2026. 

CIC is a collaborative project, and one of the publications I am most proud to steward. And, the more that I work on it in conversation with our contributors, the more I need a space— like this—to sift through my stuff. I’ve been an editor for close to a decade now, and have come to learn that I am a better collaborator when I have a creative practice of my own.  

So “Through Trails” is an exercise in writing from where I am. My hope is to explore the interstices between extreme weather and our internal topography through essays on the dailiness of disaster: cooking during a heatwave, working without power, creating with crisis, dating during disaster, developing a post-hope politics. It’s about the entanglement of emergency and emergence and how to make a life, a good life, even, in the specter of “natural disaster. ” 

Because “Through Trails” is personal, this project will be paywalled. I wrestled with this decision for some time, but I need to feel safer sharing, and having a closed container helps do that. I’m sensitive to just how many artists right now are reaching out with requests for (much-needed) support. Although Substack has a threshold for what you can charge, I’ll coordinate as many sales as I can in the hope that paying for this publication won’t make it harder to support others. 

My goal is to publish a missive each month. That said, how we show up to any project is never our decision alone. It’s easier to write about disaster from a distance than it is to create in acute crisis: our work(ing) is shaped by the seasons, the threat of fire or flood, our home space, head space, heart space. We’re so vulnerable to the elements, and utterly dependent on each other. 

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I want to timestamp every essay in this series. I want it on record: if it was rainy or dry, if it was days after a flood, or in the middle of a heatwave. 

So: I wrote this essay throughout September. I scribbled notes on the train, and in community gardens across NYC. It was mostly warm, 70, 80 degrees. I watched plantain pale in the sun, aster and chicory grow toward the sky, blue light pool across the shoulders of goldenrod. My motivation to work slowed to a trickle. Beauty can do that to you. 

I was rocked by incandescent rage as well. We are living through multiple livestreamed genocides, ongoing socio political crisis, compounding climate collapse. And I’m tired of grouping these tragedies together, to make some point or clarify the stakes, when every one of these violences is its own apocalypse. 

In the face of such suffering, it’s easy to numb. I go there often. 

But I want to be remade by this moment. Isn’t that our responsibility?  To meet the unimaginable and unjust with love? 

There’s so much more to say, and so much more to come. For now, thank you for being here with me. 

In love and solidarity, 

Kate

Thank you to Amirio Freeman, Kailea Loften, Josepha Natzke, Leah Powers, and Radhika Sharma for reviewing this first essay. Editing truly is an act of love, and I’m so grateful to my friends for their sustaining insight.

1. Choi, Franny. “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on.” Catastrophe is Next to Godliness. Ecco Press, 2022. 5.

2. Wallace-Wells, David. “The Return of the Urban Firestorm.” New York Magazine, 1 Jan. 2022.

3. Lakhani, Nina. “Three months after a wildfire swept through, displaced Colorado residents struggle to rebuild.” The Guardian, 29 March 2022.

4. Haraway, Donna. “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.” Duke University Press, 2016.

5. In this August 2024 episode of How to Survive the End of the World, Malkia Devich-Cyril argues that “chaos is the condition” of our times. As Devich-Cyril notes, this articulation of chaos draws from the work of Prentis Hemphill.