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. 

Three Branches in Mud Time

Robert Frost, with an incongruous tool of unity, but he's a poet so it'll make sense somehow.
image from poemshape.wordpress.com

Taylor Family lore is that Dad lulled my sisters and I to sleep as babies by explaining the tripartite system of Federal government. There is something to the idea of imagining us as fussy babies being swaddled up and held by a mustachioed man in a flannel shirt, talking about the differences between the Judicial, Executive and Legislative branches of government, rather than cooing about good-night moons and Pat the Bunnies.

The nuances, of course, were lost on our young minds, but when the system of checks and balances, of the interconnecting functions of a working system of government are some of your bedtime stories, you grow up believing in justice, compromise, and the possibility of good governance. Thanks to Dad’s reverence for the system—and irreverence for many of the players—and Mom’s practical liberalism, my sisters and I all lean towards common sense, fairness, and Socialism. (That is, unless anyone is offering any of us the Executive Queenship.)

Given my history, beliefs and hopes, I found myself in the strange position of running through the roster of GOP candidates to see if there was anyone, anyone, I could vote for in the State Primary this Tuesday. I want a bland but unifying candidate. I want someone who is a unifier, a compromiser, a person who understands give and take, and gets things done. I want a boring moderate, a kind person. I do not need to agree on all their talking points, I care more about how they work—if they work, that they work well with others, for others—than what they brashly promise they will do.

I am a Feminist, I am an Environmentalist, I am a Socialist. I want universal healthcare, I want freedom from religious persecution, I want global equity, I want a clean planet and an educated, engaged fulfilled workforce. I want world peace and the right to be left alone. I want taxes raised and people employed to fix our nations infrastructure. I want abortion to be safe, legal, rare, and paid for by universal single-payer healthcare. I want biologically and emotionally grounded sex-education available to everyone. I want gun use regulated. I want poverty eliminated. I want the stigma of addiction erased so people aren’t to death embarrassed about needing medical help for this condition. I want comprehensive action on climate change. I want us as citizens to stop being such sandy-eyed ostriches about the ways in which our own daily lives, actions, and insulating choices feed the evils of the world.

But, more than anything, I want a government that works, that unites the people, represents our best selves to the world, and takes care of those who are struggling. And for that, I want not a fiery passionate presidential candidate who can rally a base, rock the vote, or rattle the establishment.

I want an adult.

And not just one adult. I want 546 adults: one in the White House, nine at the Supreme Court, a hundred in the Senate, 535 in the House of Representatives, and one Vice-President as a security measure.

Further, I’d like this team of people to do their jobs.

Which is to work together to govern these United States. There are certain responsibilities of each branch of government, things that they can and cannot do, things that they can only do with the permission of other branches.

Being the middle of three sisters, my role was not exactly a peacemaker. I did not mediate between disagreements with a distant sanctity. Keeping peace and good enough relations with a tripartite of sisters is more a mutual dance of calculating compromise, a sororial Machiavellianism. I ate Hannah’s peas so we could all go out for ice cream—if those peas didn’t leave her plate, I wasn’t getting ice cream either. There is sort of a running score card of who needs to get her own way today, and who needs to get her only pair of clean underpants stuck in the freezer on the last day of vacation. The system breaks down when one person takes up all the airtime with tantrums or tyrannical blindness or selfish dramatics. The system functions beautifully on empathy, compromise, and fairness.

Right now, our government is broken. With an even number of Supreme Court Justices, that branch is wounded, unable to play its full part in fleshing out the laws that do change people’s lives, that I non-denominationally pray will pull the arc of history ever more and quickly towards justice.

And then we have the President, who is in his final months in office and, while he hasn’t governed with the spark and fire of his 2008 campaign, has done many things I support. But, that is me, a liberal Socialist from New England with a Masters degree and a fundamental belief in the human necessity of racial justice. The fact remains that it is difficult, has been difficult, for President Obama to accomplish much in part because of the intense opposition of the Republican controlled Congress. I hate to think that some of this opposition is racially, rather than merely politically motivated, but I think so nonetheless. Regardless, we are at a point where the Executive Branch is shorn of the office’s potential.

Meanwhile, the men and women in Congress are so deadlocked that I suspect a bill to rescue kittens from trees would die on the floor. Meanwhile, people are dying of gun violence, disease, post-war trauma, and health problems relating to pollution, and Congress seems as if all it does is point fingers across the aisle and at the White House and at the Supreme Court and yell that it is all their fault, they started it, those horrible Wall Street bankers or Muslims or Women or Christian Fundamentalists or Liberals or Conservatives or Blacks or Whites or Media Elite or Immigrants or The Patriarchy or Welfare Dependents or Unions or Abortionists or Jews or LGBTQs or Multinational Corporations or anyone on Earth who is not me and my little tribe. We are blameless, we are the saviors, and we will yell the loudest and drum up the most support and then we will have political clout and when we get to Washington, we’ll change everything!

Thus, the Legislative Branch yells itself into disfunction.

As for these angry candidates who promise to change everything, unless we are going to have a major political coup—which is unlikely given inherent inability within our geography to gather enough True Believers of any cause to logistically coordinate an effective overthrow—then I find it difficult to put my faith in anyone’s word about fomenting political change based on personal ideology and rhetoric.

Nothing will change if we keep electing people who yell more than listen, who would rather commit seppuku than compromise, who either do not know the checks and balances and responsibilities and limits and realities of the offices they seek, or are flagrant liars. A President cannot—without the cooperation of at least one other branch—build a wall, underwrite college, fund healthcare, stop cancer, go back to the moon, eliminate ISIS, obliterate racism, screen all borders for people of a single and beautiful faith, create jobs, fix dangerous infrastructure, stop climate change, or purify the waters of our country.

Voting, participating in the political system is not an ala carte burrito where you personally get to select and approve all the ingredients. Unless you are running for Dictator of your own country, you will not love everything about a candidate. You can vote for a person who you disagree with on some issues. You can vote for a person who you think, given the realities of the role, would make a good president even if you don’t want to get a beer with them—odds are, you won’t be having a beer with the President. You can vote for a person who’s tie or pantsuit or social media presence or race or gender you aren’t comfortable with—the person and their abilities to listen and  compromise, balance and unify are what matter.

Along with the U.S. Government 101, we Taylor babies were tucked in at night with a healthy dose of Robert Frost. One of my mother’s favorites is from Two Tramps in Mud Time, which contains this line: My object in living is to unite.

I will vote for anyone and everyone who lives by those words.