In new book from Wilmington writer, it's the 'End of the World' but with a sense of humor

Wilmington writer David Gessner doesn't just hit the library when he writes a book. He hits the road.

In "The Tarball Chronicles," he traveled much of the Gulf Coast to survey the short- and long-term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. For biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey, he tramped through the wild places they loved.

Now, for a survey of climate change, Gessner, a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, hits the road again. In "A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Fire, Wind and Water," he surveys the wildfires in California and the Rocky Mountain states, rising sea levels along the Atlantic and New Orleans after Hurricane Ida. Then he stays home to weather a hurricane or two. Or three. Or four.

Basically, Gessner is trying to imagine what the future will be like for his daughter, Hadley, now 19. It's often not a pretty picture.

Glaciers are melting and the sea level is rising, in some places more than others. New Orleans, Miami and much of the Florida peninsula could be submerged within a century or two. One planner semi-seriously suggested that New York City could replace some of its streets with canals.

Temperatures are rising, and the thermometer has been hitting the mid-60s in central Alaska in December. Off the coast of Vancouver, some shellfish were literally cooked alive in the ocean during a recent heat wave.

We may not have more hurricanes, but it seems they'll likely dump more rain and linger longer in places, as Hurricane Florence did in Wilmington in 2018. One study suggests that rainfall in the Southeast might increase by 23 percent, with it often hitting all at once.

Some, however, won't get enough rain. Warmer, drier seasons have contributed to an epidemic of catastrophic wildfires across much of the American West. Gessner meets friends in Colorado who lost all they had. Then, after the fires come floods. Without trees and bushes to soak up the rainfall, runoff turns rivers and creeks into torrents.

It's not that Gessner wants to be depressing. Unlike a lot of environmental writers, he actually has a sense of humor and can be quite jovial at times. "Living on our spur of the southern North Carolina coast," he writes, "he had been fooled by the Cantore who cried wolf."

A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, Gessner gives a hilarious account of a Northerner's first encounter with Southern summers. (A veteran friend told him that North Carolina is worse than Vietnam.)

Reviews of North Carolina books Book outlines how free enterprise and a few characters shaped today's Outer Banks

Gessner hops around, both stylistically and in the flesh, catching odd parallels. A look at the cliff houses of the Southwest, abandoned as the climate changed in earlier centuries, quickly segues to the U.S. Capitol in the weeks and months after Jan. 6, 2021, and then to oceanfront houses washing away in the surf. A day watching vultures leads to a meditation on death and a rereading of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets."

Gessner admits his own hypocrisy, scolding over pollution and waste but burning plenty of gasoline traveling around the country. And he professes to have no answers, although he quotes sources with plenty of suggestions. Among them: environmentalist Dan Driscoll, who says, "We need more hypocrites who fight."

Book review

'A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO THE END OF THE WORLD: Tales of Fire, Wind and Water'

By David Gessner

Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, $21.99 paperback

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: "A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World" by UNCW's David Gessner