Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,17

extension of capitalism itself.

And it brought to mind an image that had gone viral around that time: a photograph of three men obliviously golfing against the backdrop of an Oregon wildfire, a sheer wall of incandescently burning pine forest rising like a vision of the inferno itself above the impeccably maintained greens. It was like a Magritte painting in its surreal juxtaposition of irreconcilable realities. The first time I saw it on my Twitter feed, my reaction was one of almost vertiginous moral horror. It was almost too terrible, too bizarre, to assimilate. And then I kept seeing it, over and over, until my reaction became: this again?

My point is that it did not take long for me to become, in my own way, one of the golfers.

* * *

—

Waiting for a call from Vicino to arrange our meeting, I had nothing better to do than mooch around Hot Springs. It was Sunday, and the town was largely deserted, save for a steady procession of grizzled and leather-vested bikers passing at a respectful clip through Main Street en route to Sturgis, many of whom had hoisted Old Glories like ensigns from the sterns of their Harleys, flags so incommensurately massive as to provoke faint anxieties about wind-drag and possible capsizing. In the town itself, I noted the omnipresence of the same flag—on car bumpers, in store windows, on sundry items of clothing, billowing superb and regnant from otherwise unremarkable buildings—and was impressed by the melancholy strangeness of this insistent motif, which seemed to me a kind of obsessional warding off of its own meaninglessness.

In a café on Main Street, I sipped a coffee and scribbled in my notebook, before being driven away by a loose but resilient alliance of flies, who took turns in alighting on my forearms as I wrote. I walked the bank of the river, giving a wide berth at one point to a yellow-striped snake as it hustled its way across the path and up a grassy slope, and then I followed on a whim a sign for the Fall River Pioneer Museum.

I was as it happened the museum’s only visitor, and I found myself unnerved by the silence of the building, and even more so by the chipped and peeling mannequins stationed about the place, dressed in nineteenth-century apparel: long silk gloves, black gauze veils and bonnets. At the summit of the house, in a large, creaking room devoted to agriculture, I encountered an exhibit that caused my heart to momentarily falter: a pair of rampant Friesian calves, taxidermied in a freakish embrace, the hooves of their forelegs resting on each other’s shoulders. According to the laminated card in front of them, they had been born “joined at the brisket.” The sense of indeterminate augury I had felt since entering the museum rose to consciousness now in the presence of these unreal animals. In the Middle Ages, I remembered, conjoined births were an omen of ill times, and during periods of widespread struggle and turmoil their appearance was seen as an outright portent of apocalypse.

On my way out the door, the gnarled old man at the desk remarked that I’d gone through the museum pretty quick. I could have been picking him up wrong, but he seemed a little put out.

“Be sure to check out the iron lung in the garage out back,” he said, in a manner both rote and wistful, and I assured him that I would, but I did not.

As I walked down the hill, my phone vibrated in my pocket. Vicino was out at the site and was ready when I was.

* * *

—

About ten minutes after turning off Route 18 onto the cracked interior roads of the ranch, I passed what was once the town of Fort Igloo, home to the hundreds of workers who moved there to take up jobs at the Black Hills Ordnance Depot, built in 1942 to service the army’s increased wartime need for munitions testing and storage. Schools, a hospital, shops, houses, a church, a small theater: all abandoned now to the oblivious cows. Only once the hollow carapace of Fort Igloo began to recede in the rearview mirror did the landscape reveal the true depth of its uncanniness, because it was then that I saw the vaults. I noticed at first only three or four of these things: low, grass-covered protuberances, spaced a few hundred feet apart, their hexagonal concrete frontage jutting from the earth. The deeper into the ranch I