THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

The emergency alert came to my phone in the morning, as I was reading in bed. I burst into the other room and read it to my husband. Most of you know what it said:

Of course, the alert really meant: "You’re going to die, within fifteen minutes, in the center of a global nightmare."

Dazed and petrified, we gathered things and asked small, tight questions of each other. "Do we have water?" "Are you going to wear your pajamas?" "Where do we go?" "Maybe to the mountains?"

The mountains. Of course. We’ll go there.

We live in a high rise in Honolulu, so we caught the elevator downstairs with a few people staring at their phones. I couldn't speak, but my husband asked them where they were going.

"We don't know yet."
"Is there a basement in this building?"
"I have a flight out of here so I guess I'll head to the airport..."

We ran to the car and drove. Traffic was light and the streets eerily quiet. By the time we were out of the city, we had checked Twitter and knew the warning was a false alarm.

My husband was calm but pale as we pulled into a parking area next to the entrance to a beloved arboretum and forest trails. I was nauseated from the adrenaline and crying silent tears of relief.

The immediate threat after the gamma radiation from a nuclear bomb (vaporizing everything within 6 square miles), X-ray heat blast, and pressure wave… will be the firestorm that will follow, with its intense heat and hurricane force winds…

We walked into the native Hawaiian forest in what felt like slow motion. Without discussing it, we chose a more overgrown path than our usual route.

The forest was teeming with color and light—abundant life taunting death and destruction.

I stopped to stare at a lone orchid growing in the middle of the path, bright and defiant.

I know how crazy it was to think we had time to get in the car and disappear into the mountains while a mushroom cloud bloomed, fed by a nuclear firestorm. But we weren't headed there thinking we could survive on spring water and fruits of the forest.

We were following our final life instinct: to die in nature, hopefully quickly—in the most peaceful spot we could think of—while we sat and held each other, saying our last goodbyes.