Twelve Years

Twelve years ago, I went to Biloxi, because I was at loose ends, because my parents bought my plane ticket, because them sending me was something they could do to help in Katrina’s aftermath. I worked with Hands On Disaster Relief (now All Hands Volunteers), the sort of outfit in its early years that asked only “do you have your shots, and do you want someone to meet you at the airport or bus station?”

My friend Serena had found this group, she went down a week before I did and met me at the airport. Other friends—Nina, Josh, Lydia, Kate, Carrie, Beth, Laura, Will, Vee—came too, or we met and made friends with each other as the raggedy bunch of recent college grads we were. I don’t remember it all, perfectly.

What I do remember is the knot of horror and rage that left me feeling like I was going to cry or vomit most of the time. I’m a white girl from New Hampshire with an expensive education. I spent most of my time in the mountains. I was not prepared for all of the destruction, for shaking hands with the people who had been left behind or stayed behind or just got back to Biloxi after the storm. I was not prepared for reality.

I came out of all of that, after a few months, with a puppy. Carrie had fallen in love with him at the animal shelter, but whatever home she’d thought to give him to had fallen through. And then when it was time for me to go, the puppy was on the edge of just being a spoiled feral pet of Hurricane Camp, so I adopted him. It wasn’t anything official—I just happened to be the one to take him to the vet, and I happened to write my name down as “owner.” I named him Noah, for the flood. They told me naming him Noaa would have been too much, even for me.

I kept that little guy, and I loved him. And for almost twelve years, he was my constant companion. He went with me across the country six times, saw me through two shattering heartbreaks and some minor heartaches, came with me to grad school, hiked where I hiked, swam where I swam, was where I was, for all that time. When my father died, I regularly cried into Noah’s fur like the world had ended. It has been a roller coaster of a decade, and Noah was there for all of it. We were the most secure daily fixtures in each other’s lives through all the changes I dragged us through, the adventures I sought, the troubles that hit. Until my poor sweet Pet came down with dementia, became uncomfortable, inconsolable, in his own skin and I had to let him go—two months ago now—snuggled in my and my sister’s arms, loved until the last moment he knew and beyond.

As the rain falls and the water rises in Texas, I feel as if no time has passed. Because the news is the same, the pictures are the same, the devastation is the same, the goodwill of neighbors, the kindness of strangers, the imbecility of the leaders, the ovine shock of the rest of the country…all of this is the same. My dog has lived a full life and died, and we—the people—have still not addressed the root causes of why these storms are so devastating.

The climate is changing, and we are changing it. The people we elect to leadership positions are not leading. These storms are not the wrath of God, are not natural—unless you might, as I could be convinced, think that these storms are the divine wrath of the forces of nature rising up against the species that has wrecked and ravaged our way through the world since we first discovered fire.

Storms are more frequent and with heavier loads of water because the planet is warming. The planet is warming because the emissions from making cars go, planes fly, smartphones charge and plastics ubiquitous and life too convenient are thickening the atmosphere and trapping air closer to the planet. We are thickening the air, insulating our planet from the necessary cool of the rest of the universe. And so, in our little chemical hothouse, the warmth begets moisture, the moisture begets storms with greater wallop than ever.

What is stopping us from stopping these things? In part, we are simply a lazy, selfish and unimaginative people. We think such things as Katrina, as Sandy, as Harvey will never happen to us, personally. It’s easier to think that. It’s easier to turn off the imagination, the voice that says “what if…” Horror of our own is incomprehensible, surreal. But, as my friend Mary, reporting from Charlottesville last week said “the thing to say is ‘it’s so surreal’ but that is an utter disservice to the reality that this all is.”

I don’t care if mass flooding and destruction is never going to happen to me. I’d rather it doesn’t, but it’s going to happen and keep happening to others, and there is nothing special about me that is going to make a storm pass me by. Anyone’s reality could easily be my own, if the tides turn, if the weather shifts. When.

If you did know that a storm was about to destroy your life, but could be soothed by taking a bus or putting up solar panels or air-drying your clothes, would you make those changes? Can you go without, can you live smaller, simpler? Could you use electronics less, more wisely? Are you willing to donate not your blood or money to relief efforts, but to make structural changes in your life that will cut the emissions that are increasing the severity of storms?

And then there are our politicians and industrialists. The policy makers seem hamstrung by industries that make money while Rome burns and floods, because they are. Our president cares more for his t.v. ratings than for staffing the agencies that oversee disaster response, never mind his abysmal decisions on loosening regulations on industries that will further increase the cloud envelope around the planet. But, much as I despise Trump, he is not solely responsible for this storm, personally. The fault is with all people who have power and refuse to act responsibly with it. All people. Anyone who makes a choice has power, that is the sort of power that needs to shift, that is the power we all have.

Twelve years. That is the difference between a first grader and a high school senior. That is a lifetime. I simply cannot accept that so little has happened on a large scale when so much happened in the small space between myself and the little dog who came out of the flood with me.

Lastly, a nice man I met in Biloxi, standing outside what had been his house, said that in disasters, people should donate socks and underwear. He could cope with a lot of the troubles, but being able to wear clean underpants just makes a person feel more human. This is the scale that horror happens at. Send underwear. Thank you.

Why the Wilds

Right now, I’m sitting in a big house on the coast of Maine. The breeze is coming off the water, and when the tide goes out again, I’m planning to kayak out to say hello to the seals on the nearby rocks.

And, in the meantime, I’m checking the news and seeing nothing good. Charlottesville is happening—I’ve just read about a car plowing into the crowd of KKK, Neo-Nazis, and their counter demonstrators, showing up for equality. One person has died, and more are injured, and it’s only mid afternoon.

Yesterday, the news was full of the President talking about using fire and fury and something even worse against North Korea.

And that this was, again, the hottest year on record. And refugees are still dying to leave their homes, and unwelcome on more and more shores.

The news, my dear, is as bad as I’ve ever known, and this is not the first time I’ve thought so. The weather is hot, the planet is crowded, resources are scarce, and we are all so frightfully on edge that damages that cannot be undone will be, are being, done.

What place, then, do words about seals and terns, stars and pine martens have? The more I know, the more frequently it feels like treason to still love wilderness, to still use the privileges of my skin and geography and lineage and education and bank accounts to go places, to watch for tides and scramble up mountains. Sometimes I worry that caring about the natural world and ecosystems and wilderness is very much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—if humanity does itself in with race wars or nuclear explosions or anthropogenic catastrophe, how much will the golden slant of sunset or the relationship between blackflies and blueberries or the calming transcendence of being a wild place matter?

I sure as shit don’t think we need a Wilderness Matters movement. Unless the bears and toads and birches are going to start rioting against the rank injustice of how they’ve been treated by humans, that’s just comparing sunlight and humans—as false a dichotomy as pro-life and pro-choice. Personally, I’m both. I’m for all of it. Sunlight and humans, life and choice, nature and culture, town and country, women and men, white and black and all the shades and variances between all of the supposed end points of spectrums.

A renewed appreciation and commitment to all the things is what I get from being out in the world. The scope and scale of the world will blow your mind—we operate so far from mere binaries and three-dimensionality. Recently an old friend and I hiked in the White Mountains. We passed through three major ecosystems and innumerable microhabitats. We’ve hiked the same trail together several times in the fourteen years of our friendship, and each have hiked it other times, with other friends. Our conversation was thick with their names, with stories and catching up have to tell, with the revelations and inanities that accompany any good hike. In one breath, we talked about the alpine plant community and the ways in which media is improving at portrayals of brown women. We hiked a busy trail on a beautiful summer Saturday and the trail was thick with other folks, all out for something like the same reasons we were, all passing over the same roots and stones with different stories and words and histories. All in the same place, yet each hike was distinct to the hiker.

And that’s just the human aspect. The mountain avens—subalpine flowers with a bright yellow buttercupish flower and leaves like spiky strawberry leaves—experienced the same day however flowers do. Maybe that’s just taking in sunlight and nutrients to pump out buds and blooms and fruit and propagate their species as best they can. Maybe plants do more than that, feel more, but even if not, that’s a remarkable amount of life happening in a little patch of the world.

The water rushing by the trail—frigid at the waterfall we stopped to swim in—all of that gushing and glugging along has little bits of life in it as well. And the rocks that the water runs over, that we clamber over—I draw some line at geologic sentience, but still, glaciers passed over those same stones before we ever did and snow sits on top of it every winter, waiting to hatch the mountains anew each spring. There are layers there.

I know, we all know, that human activities are changing the world, the ph of snow and ocean, the climate that ecosystems evolve with, the creation of trails, the pollution of water and air. And yet, I get great, humbling pleasure out of the reality that the mountains and the sea do not care about humanity. If I have a god, it is the ways in which I don’t matter to the rocks and the sea. The world means the world to me, and it doesn’t know or care what I do.

In the Scientific and Industrial Evolutions, there was an idea that God was nothing but a watchmaker, and that if the world could be picked apart and explored and investigated from the largest cogs to the smallest bolt and screw, the world could be known and Man (never Woman—we were busy with herb gardens and healing and raising babies) would be equal to the Divine.

This, I think, is horseshit. Even if I can think of all the cogs and wheels and layers and threads and fantastical tapestry of a single moment of my hike on that busy trail, if I can contemplate the lives of the seals and seabirds and tidal creatures and plants that I have been kayaking out to each morning while I housesit, my head and heart start to explode. If I add in the lives of all the people on the trails, the summer people owners of the moored boats and summer cottages, the people who live here always and maintain the docks and lobster buoys that I see as I sit as the lone human among twenty seals—well. The world is too big and beautiful to be understood taken apart like a simple watch.

I know enough to know I do not know a damn thing. That variety of ignorance brings me the greatest joy, allows me the space to fall in love with the world and all that it holds. Maybe there is something primal out there that rips a few layers of protection off my eyes, off my heart, but I come back from wilder places more able to see the complexities of life where humans live. And that helps, enormously, when reading the news and trying to figure out how to be in a fraught world.

Pine martens will not stop racism. Knowing the constellations will not erase the American caste system. Watching a seal dive will not calm the political discourse. The smell of salt water, of balsam fir will not stop nuclear proliferation.

What the wilds may do is open your eyes to the world so that you may better participate in the wider world. 

Rose Heat

“as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey” is the opening line of Gareth Evan’s poem that opens John Berger’s vital book Hold Everything Dear.

My head changed the words to rose heat for the journey, a small change, really, just one letter more and a bit of reshuffling, and there we are. I think of this when I see leaves soaking in sunlight, when I see logging trucks on my New England highways, when I put wood into fires, when I absorb and absorb and absorb the particular golden light of sunset, when I try to hold onto fierce peace of wild things, when I reach down within the best of myself to do good work in the world, to stretch my hands out like tree branches and become awake and aware and alive in the world.

The certain knowledge that people who live in the same neighborhoods as me, who shop at the same grocery stores, walk the same streets and pause to look up at the same shrieking seagulls and sunlight on the water…that these nearby strangers are having their doors knocked on by the government, that the phrase “show me your papers” isn’t reserved for Nazis in movies anymore, all of this is calling up on all the wells of rose heat I’ve ever stored for any journey. It’s stored up and spilling over—and some days starting to leach away—because I do not know the right outlet for all the love and concern I feel for all this beautiful world.

A student told me the other day that he had been seeing a lot of bald eagles around the college. Maybe, he said, it’s just the same one over and over again, but it’s still pretty amazing to see. I agreed, took heart at the wide-eyed wonder of someone even just a decade younger than me, and thought about how close bald eagles and other birds came to extinction before DDT was banned, before the EPA was formed, and how much love of the world is in real danger. When I lived in Montana and was hiking with a friend, a bald eagle swooped low over our heads and my friend said, sweetly, “Thanks, Rachel Carson!”—almost the way another set of believers would thank something more divine than human for the same gift of wonder.

As an environmentalist, as a human, as a Feminist, as a woman, as an American, as all of the ists and ans that I am, I feel as if I am trying at once to stand my ground, but that ground is being eroded on all sides. I know how the system is supposed to work—and I call my Members of Congress regularly, I attend neighborhood resistance meetings, I work at a college with a refreshingly honest dedication to sustainability—but I still feel beset on all sides and cannot help but see that the system is either broken or atrophied.

At my job, we’ve been discussing the opportunities for increasing the solar capacity of the college, in pursuit of our goal of carbon neutrality. The trouble—aside from the particulars of finding appropriate roof space or expanding a ground array—is that power storage technology is not yet advanced enough to meet what can be produced. On top of the storage, there is an inherent transmission loss of about 5% between production and use.

These all the same problems of storing and carrying rose heat for the journey.

I am at a loss for how to transmit my love and fear into power and change. The infrastructure of democracy seems in disrepair or decay or simply unable to handle the loads we require of it. We must reawaken it even as we seek to rebuild it, put new and different flesh on its bones. As much as I want to stand and speak and write and vote and donate and do all that I feel called to in the service of what I love and long to protect, I feel sometimes like I’m standing on the seashore and the tide is dragging the sand out from under my feet.

The truth with that, though, is if you stand long enough the sand holds your feet and ankles fast. And the tide always returns.

This is when it starts to get hard. The first month of euphoric disbelief and galvanized activism for a just America, that was a special time. Now, nearly two months into the buffeting winds of Muslim bans and abhorrent Cabinet picks and healthcare evaporating for our elders and empty promises of jobs and undeniable ties to a notably violent regime and the re-normalizing and re-institutionalizing of racism that had almost started to poke out into the sunlight and be rectified…now is when the journey really begins. And we must carry our rose heat forward in whatever forms and vessels we each can. It may be pussy hats, it may be daily calls to Members of Congress, it may be entering local politics, it may be opening up our spare rooms as safe havens, it may be increased mindfulness and a falling in love anew with the world so that we recall the value of what we protect, it may be and must be whatever each person has time for, now that the blush and fury of the first romance with activism has worn off with time, and the recognition of how much work this truly entails.

We are all vessels of power.

Muzzled Lions

The Lion Aslan could be a lot of things, beyond being a powerful lion in the land of Narnia. I’ve been told he’s basically Jesus, but as I could never really square the adventurous fun of the Narnia books with the sanctimonious boredom of Sunday School, I always find that part of C.S. Lewis a little irritating.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Aslan is a magical lion who returns to the land of Narnia and breaks the cold misery that the White Witch has cursed the land with for years upon end. Aslan’s revolutionary return doesn’t go smoothly—he is betrayed, and in a trade for the life of his traitor, agrees to be killed by a mob of his opposition.

His sacrifice is done at the Stone Table, and Aslan is tied up and muzzled before he is paraded in front of all the creatures who believe in the creepy darkness of the White Witch’s power. And then the Witch kills him, with a knife made of stone.

The girls, Lucy and Susan, who hid in the shadows and watched their hero be bound and slaughtered wait until the Horribles go hooting away with the Witch. And then they come to him, hold his dead paws through the darkest part of the night, and take off his muzzle with their frozen fingers. Soon, the mice come creeping out of the fields and gnaw off the ropes that tied Aslan down.

And then, when the mice are gone and the girls are looking at the rising sun and imagining a world and a battle without their hero, there is a crack that shakes the earth, and Aslan comes back to life, stronger than ever.

I can, now, see the parallels to Jesus’ death and resurrection. I can also see the parallels to the seasons, to tides, to Apollo 13 slingshoting around the dark side of the moon.

It was the muzzling and the release that I thought of today, though. Science isn’t God, isn’t some sort of untouchable Deity or golden-maned savior in a fairy tale. However, in the work that the EPA, NOAA, and the USDA does, there is the information that can guide our country and culture out of the cursed rut of our own destruction through climate change and the impacts of pollution. Muzzling all of those voices, all those stories, all that information and data and solutions and knowledge, that is muzzling my real-life Aslan.

We need mice and moles and the little fingers of people lurking in the shadows to take off the muzzles and rip the ropes apart with their—our—teeth. The White Witch and the White House, they muzzle their prey before the slaughter.

Aslan explains to the relieved and confused little girls that there was a deeper than time magic that brought him back—that because the sacrifice was his choice in exchange for another’s life, it doesn’t “count.” For Lewis’s purposes of presenting Christian fables, this sacrifice to eternal life works well.

I, however, think more about the actions of the mice and the girls—they freed their hero, even as he seemed dead and gone. I like to believe that this—saving the savior—is part of what gives Aslan back his life. What good would his sacrifice have been if there had been no one at his side, releasing his voice to roar, his paws to crush the White Witch in battle?

I don’t need to spell this out with some fancy metaphor and image. Aslan is the work that the EPA, NOAA, USDA, NASA, and so many others do on behalf of all of us, for our safety and security in a fragile world. Trump and his gag order are the White Witch and her mob and muzzle and stone knife.

And we’re Susan, Lucy, and the Mice. Let’s get going, while we our love and belief can still bring back what we love and need to fight the coming battles.