“Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’ This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.”
Three mornings ago I dreamt* I was flying in a plane to visit a school in the dark of the woods. I was going back and doing it again. I am too old for this, I told myself. Like a police detective in a movie. The plane landed on the ground and the ground was ice. The buildings were more base camp than campus. The winds skittered ice crystals low against the purple sky and the frozen ground cried out beneath me. A Jeep was standing by with chain tires. “Hop in,” the driver said. Unmistakably Bavarian. “We are going to have some fun.” Two hard turns of the wheel. “The world is ending and we are going to be there for it.”
“Where?”
“There. Here. All around us. The trees sing of it. As they have always sung of it, but now is the crescendo. Do you hear it, how they sing? In arias of ecstatic fury.” The whirling ice accumulated at the corner of his eyes and mouth. “Quick, to the bunkers…”
The bunker turned out to be a transport container whose door drew aside with our approach. It yawned and swallowed us.
“We will be safe in here. Things are unraveling quickly.”
A moment in darkness. We wheeled out the other end of the transport container. The ice was gone. Only mud and mist and forest. The smell of guns and smoke.
“Time has shifted. We must shift with it.”
Werner Herzog slammed down on the accelerator and we were off.
*Due to a combination of traveling for work, having just read Of Walking in Ice, and watching Game of Thrones.
