On Recreation and Conservation

(From the rebuild of Madison Springs Hut, 2010)

Some of my earliest memories are of being at Mizpah Spring Hut when I was two years old. These are not clear memories—I have scraps of images of being in a bunkroom, in a bunk bed, of the place being filled with men with beards and women with braids—but they are distinct from the photographs my parents took of my older sister and I on the trail and around the hut, so I trust them to be real memories and not re-imagined creations from the pictures.

I don’t know if it is the semi-primal nature of my earliest memories, but I have been drawn to wilderness and wildness all my life. Growing up, the huts themselves carried totemic significance to me as pinnacles within wilderness and mountains. I went to Lonesome when I was an infant, Mizpah when I was two, and Mizpah and Lakes of the Clouds when I was ten. That was all it took for me to fall hard for these beautiful and weather-battered places set amid the mountains. I wanted to be of that world, but saw the whole operation as something like aspiring to have Mt. Olympus as a neighborhood. My eyes perked up when I spotted patches from the huts on other kids bags at school, at summer camp, at college. I thought better of classmates from 4th grade through grad school when they knew anything about locations in the White Mountains.

When I was twenty-one, I began working in the AMC huts. That time of my life has been more formative than any other thus far. Many of my most cherished friendships come from those years, all those hikes, busy nights, and the quiet riot of watching sunset gold become starlight. In those many seasons, I learned to live in questioning balance with wilderness and sustainability, with conservation and recreation, and to appreciate the many uses of the National Forests. These mountains were what I thought of in order to live simply, think global, and act local. The thought of the migratory songbird Bicknell’s Thrush—who’s breeding grounds are the climatically endangered boreal zone of New England—have kept my electrical use low, bike use high, and put up more than one clothesline. With others, I helped to rename a mountain for Abigail Adams as a small act of equality up there. I have lived above treeline in three seasons, hiked tough and beautiful miles, and done some of the hard, strange, wonderful and dirty work that keeps these huts running.

Partly, of course, I was there for my own selfish love and for the all-defying joy of being in those wilder places. For a time, I felt I could no more leave the Whites than I could live without my skin. Partly, though, I was there because, as I cannot imagine my face or heart without them, I want to keep those doors open and latchstrings out for others to come into wildness.

And so, hearing of a proposal for a ninth hut, I am torn between wanting more openings to wildness for more people, and worrying about the ecological impact of further backcountry construction and appropriation for high-impact use.

The AMC and New Hampshire State Parks are proposing an additional hut to be built in Crawford Notch State Park. From what I understand, it would be staffed and operated by the AMC with a highly nuanced special use permit from the State, much as is used for Lonesome Lake Hut. The hut would sleep about 50 people, be staffed for full-service in summer and self-service in fall, winter and spring, and be a less than two-mile hike from Rte. 302.

When I think of all the young children who could fall in love with the wilds by coming to this place, who could grow up to be passionate, stumbling advocates for wildness, I soften towards the idea. Opposing it feels a bit like slamming the door to wilderness behind me, which is unkind and unfair.

However, one of the most important things I have learned because of loving the wilderness, that I learned whilst living cheek by jowl by septic field and gray water system and helicopter-removed human waste and solar panels alongside wilderness in the huts, is that these wild places in the woods and mountains are fragile. Resilient, too, but I truly cannot see enough reason to stretch the ecological forgiveness of wild places to new limits by building additional high-impact structures within their already much trammeled boundaries.

I can be defensive, selfish, and cynical regarding the protection and use of public lands. I know this. I do not have all the facts regarding this ninth hut, its conception, design, purpose or function. What I do know is that eight such highly impacted sites, as well as many campsites—staffed and unmanaged, legal and illegal—already exist in the relatively small area of the White Mountain National Forest. What I do know is that the cost of staying at a hut—adult member prices are over $100 per person on a weekday night in summer—is that they are increasingly prohibitively expensive for many , especially local or even in-state families. I believe it is reprehensible to continue to tie wilderness experiences, environmental education and outreach to socioeconomic class in an era of increasing awareness of climate change, classism, and culturally pervasive racism. Shall only the rich be allowed easy access to the soul-changing experience of a mountain sunrise, of the dawn chorus of birdsongs?

I know that the building of a hut is physically and ecologically hard, and that the workers are there for the love of the work, the place, and each other, not for munificent (or even consistent, year-round, living) wages.

I know that the NH State Park system has had some financial difficulties in recent years and budget cycles and perhaps whatever the agency might garner from a very special use permit seems like a solution in that regard. I know that hut occupancy has been on the rise, even as the rates increase, and perhaps another hut does seem the easiest answer to satisfy demand. I know that I find it strange how little publicity this proposal has had—the public comment period runs from July 17^th-August 15^th and two public meetings were held in New Hampshire. AMC members with young children, in the greater Boston area—the demographic most likely to support another family friendly hut destination—do not seem aware of this proposal.

I know that I—as an environmentalist who believes that much of climate change is the bastard offspring of our unquestioned cultural demand for “more”—am inherently distrustful of anything that involves more and bigger and new. I believe it would be better to work with what resources are already built—huts, campsites, hotels, and lodges—to achieve the goals of this proposed hut.

What I know most surely is that the thought of breaking new ground in protected landscapes flies in the face of what I learned to value intrinsically within those landscapes. I have loved seeing and being part of the AMC huts’ attempts to transition toward ever greener energies, design, and ideals. As mainstream culture chugs unchecked towards more, these places continually push for efficiency, for shrinking the ecological footprint, for protecting the landscapes even as they draw people deeper in. As a naturalist—both front and backcountry—I felt that it was part of my job to help people fall in love with the mountains and woods and lakes and starlight around the huts. As noted ecologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber has said, “what we love, we must protect.”

Even, I believe, from ourselves.

I write this achingly aware of the privilege I have had in all my mountain life—from my infanthood to Hutmaster-ships. I want those hills wild and open to the wise use of everyone. I want what happens to my heart at the sound of a white-throated sparrow above treeline to happen to everyone. I want as much of that landscape untouched as possible, because I believe it does us good and better as a people to let more wildness remain.

Until August 15th, public comments can be emailed to Johanna.lyons@dred.nh.gov or mailed to the Dept of Resources & Economic Development, Crawford Notch State Park Comments, 172 Pembroke Rd, PO Box 1856, Concord, NH 03302. If you have an opinion, share it there where it will do good. The public process is nil without an active and engaged public.

Of Farms and Fathers

Tonight, as I am preparing to return to the farm, I feel like the selfish boy from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, that I may be asking too much from something that only has so much to give.

All spring, through everything, I’ve been taking deep breaths and thinking that everything will be better, will get better, once I get back to the farm. The thought of the farmers already at work, of the seeds they’ve planted since March sprouting and growing has been a source of enormous comfort and an active hope that life will go on, that joy persists and will bloom.

But now here it is the night before and while I have my water bottle filled and my snacks packed and both my rain pants and sunhat dug out, I am afraid that I have leaned to much on the possibilities of a few acres, some friends, and hundreds of hours of work and pounds of vegetables.

Last year, working on the farm nicely popped me out of a funk following a bad breakup. People talk about the healing, grounding power of growing things. What I found was the delight of new skills and capabilities that expanded my bruised identity and a deep recalibration of what honesty looks like in the world. Those were good and great pieces to find then. In fact, I’d recommend farmwork for anyone who’s heart has been broken. 

However, all that foolish heartbreak and confusion barely even signifies beside what I am asking of the land this time around—to help me with the sadness of my father’s death. We have been saying it is like losing half the North Star.

To remedy that deep a sense of loss, a confusion of primal identity and omnipresent guidance seems too much to ask of anything—kindly tree, living person, or beautiful landscape.

When I lived in the mountains, there was tremendous temptation to anthropomorphize them, to believe that those mountains somehow cared as much for me as I did for them. While the farmland is a little more interactive, it still is a landscape with its own ecology, cycles and systems. True, my actions on the farmscape play more immediately into the layers of systems—human, vegetable, economic, woodchuck, etc.—than my actions on a mountaintop or beside the ocean do, but still, the land itself does not, will not, cannot feel empathy. The eggplants will not grow more beautifully in an attempt to comfort me, the potato beetles will not take the summer off out of respect for the bereaved, and so on.

This winter, when we thought my dad was merely depressed from retiring, he and I talked a few times about how excited he was to get back to building rock walls at the farm near my parents’ house and how excited I was to get back to my farm this summer. We missed our farm friends and we missed working with our hands and being able to see how we were useful. My mom put natural bug spray and poison ivy repelling soaps in both our stockings at Christmas.

Until last summer, neither my father nor I had ever worked on farms, or really expressed much interest in it. He was always busy saving New Hampshire and I was usually busy in the mountains. And, even though we talked over each other more than we listened to each other, it was more special than I realized at the time to have that common ground with him, even if our farms were in different states, even if he eschewed having anything to do with the vegetable side of farming, even if I told him he wasn’t really a farmer but a stonemason on a farm. He was a stickler for correctness and passed that critical nature right on down. The important things, though, the true things, are that we each made farm friends and did a lot of good soul searching and were delighted to put our hands in the dirt with other people every day.

At the hospital, there was a window that Dad could walk to for most of his first week there. The window looked west from Concord Hospital, up the hill towards my parents’ house, not quite visible beyond the crest of trees. The farm my dad had fallen in love with, though, was right at the top of the hill, its big yellow house and barn fully visible. On the wonderful day when my sisters and mother and I managed, with the help of some kind and resourceful nurses, to get Dad outside in a wheelchair for some fresh air and to see his beloved dog, as I wheeled him back up, I took him past the window to see the farm.

“I want to get back there,” he said, his voice raspy with dehydration and hope and fear.

“Okay,” I said. “Then you will. And we’ll compare notes from our farms all summer.”

I am not sure, but I do not think he went back to that window again.

One of my saner coping strategies, from even a few days before he died has, been to try to enjoy things twice as much, because the world has lost one of its biggest, loudest, most exuberant fans. As I have been taking my deep breaths and ticking off days on the calendar until I get to the farm, part of the hopeful belief that working on the farm can heal some part of this grief is the need to get back to a hue of joy that I shared with my dad. Even if I can’t call him to swap stories about blisters and hear what’s growing there.

And that is bittersweet.

But, fortunately, this joy is not something that is beyond the land’s capacity to give. To receive that, all I have to do is follow my family’s de facto motto and just show up. 

Accident, Boylston Street

Twenty-five months and two days is a long time. Think of the thousand visions and revisions that your life has gone through in those hours. Babies have learned to run, trees have put forth blossoms and born fruit—twice, birds have flown and returned and flown and returned, tides have ebbed and flowed, people I loved have left my life and others have arrived, and all the rest that happens in the minutes of life.

 

On Friday, just minutes before I heard from a student that Dhzokhar Tsarnaev is to be killed for the acts he committed those same twenty-five months and two days ago, I read one of my most favorite poems at a library event. Jill McDonough’s beautiful “Accident, Mass. Ave.” In May of 2013, just a few weeks after the Marathon Bombings of April 15, when much of Boston was posturing pain and confusion behind angry words of pride and vengeance, when crowds gathered to protest outside the funeral home where the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev lay, I heard McDonough read her poem.
 

I love it because it has the funny, knowing belligerence of Boston drivers, and the deeper resonance of how to be a human, anywhere.

 

Her words changed how I see the world, how I try to encounter challenges and upsets, how I try to distill my anger to an empathy for another’s fear.  It is uphill work, it does not work every time, and I contain far too much passion to lose all my anger, all the time, forever.

 

Yet, here we are, twenty-five months and two days later and the news is again full rehashing the bombings, full of the death penalty, full of what I suspect to be hope-desperate statements about how Boston is a strong and resilient city, how now we can put this horror behind us, how now everyone can move on in peace, now that the young man behind this circus of horror will be gone.

Couldn’t the strong and resilient people have found in their hearts and minds to not kill another person? Vengeance and honor killings, these are weak and medieval.  

 

To me, this sentence looks to be the work of vengeful and furious and frightened people, not wise and loving and resilient.

 

One friend, as we grapple with the sadness of all of this, says that one source of comfort to her is that the conditions of life in prison are so deplorable that it makes Death Row look a little more humane. We wince at this—the recognition that the conditions of our justice system make death preferable to life.

I am going through the grieving process for my own father—who probably wouldn’t agree with much of what I am writing here about the Marathon Bombings, except for the healing power of the McDonough poem—and I think of how death does and does not erase the living. In some ways, my father is more present in my thoughts now than any time while he lived. I know too that a natural death, brought on by a pernicious disease, is different than a State mandated death.

 

But, in the end, not so very different. Someone who was there, breathing air and looking at the world, suddenly is not.

 

My father is not erased. The echo of his laughter, of his actions, of his struggles and successes and passions will linger—thankfully—as long as anyone remembers him. The impact he had on those around him did not disappear when he drew his last breath.

 

This is not unique to my father and his death.

The Death Penalty, also, does not erase the actions in life of the condemned. My heart hurts when I see people around Boston, running and walking on prosthetic legs. I have started running in part because I can and recognize it as a privilege—much like voting or the other perks of a non-persecuted and free life. I am not ignorant or immune to the effects of the Marathon Bombings on the lives of those in this city, in this world. I do not think that Tsarnaev should walk free into the world and if we surround him with light and love and forgiveness, legs and arms will grow back and the world will be at peace.

The ghosts and bogeymen of his actions will outlive him, would have outlived him if he lived in solitary confinement to be a thousand.

One of the falsest things I’ve heard on the news is the statement about how we are not afraid, how the terrorists failed because we are not afraid.

 

Look at gun laws and the lack of them, at increased security measures in all corners, at the hyper-emotional level of newscasts, at panicky headlines, at increasing religious and racial and political intolerance, and all the rest of the news and changes in how we are in this world, on this planet, towards each other…these, to me, appear to be actions of extreme fear, not of resilience or strength. We are trying to protect against the threats of a world.

We are just scared, aren’t we?

 

Do you breath a sigh of relief when you say this? To admit fear feels, to me, like dropping the posturing and the pretense, like being honest and finally able to advance to somewhere useful and real.

Death does not solve fear. We push away, kill, hide what we cannot comprehend, what we fear. This buries it, puts the monsters under the bed, the witches in the forests, the ghosts in our nightmares, the seeds of violence in the dreams of the marginalized. We will not become a safer and kinder people in a grander and more understanding society by killing what we fear.

 

I believe we would be on the road to being a safer and kinder people on a more peaceful world by seeking to live in the present we’ve created, by using our strength as a bastion of world power and culture to demonstrate mercy, to value all life, to admit, accept, and move forward from fear.

(Also, if you haven't read this from the Boston Globe a few weeks ago, do.)

Silver Bullets, Wool Coats, and Love

The last afternoon before spring vacation, an assembly at the middle school where I work made me cry. Technically, the assembly was full of announcements and reminders about cleaning out their lockers before going on vacation, about not texting at school, and about the upcoming construction project at the school which will require patience, obedience, and flexibility on everyone’s part.

If it were just announcements, I wouldn’t have found myself tearing up. All of this information was presented in a series of short funny videos that teachers had made. The final one was a music video of various teachers lip-synching to Wilson Phillips “Hold on For One More Day.” It was absurd and beautiful and filled with the joy that these teachers find and make among their students.

We rarely see the love that holds the world together, that shapes our lives. Those hundred seventh and eighth graders have no concept of how dearly their teachers love them, what joy they have in teaching them. And it is too heavy and strange a thing to place on students to say: “we are here for you, we are rooting for you, we love how and who you are now, and how and who you will be later.” You can’t say that in a way they will understand. But you can take a few hours and create a video and make them laugh and feel safe. And that is something the same as love.

A week or so after that middle school assembly, I was in the hospital, visiting my dad. With the fresh recognition that most actions worth noting are an articulation and permutation of love, I began to see the tubes of medicine and oxygen pumping into his ailing self as some medical transmogrification of love. What the flowers on the windowsill said was love, the pictures on the wall, the cards, the strangeness of his own prayers over each course of drugs, the nervous, hopeful footsteps of his visiting friends, his ability to still make jokes with his daughters, his own need for my mom to hold his hand until he slept and to write down all his plans for their house—all of it was love being poured into different shapes and containers.

Lately, my favorite line from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is when Emily revisits her twelfth birthday and, with the poetic clarity of a dead character, can see the amorphous, omnipresent love imbued in every mundane word and gesture and action on an ordinary morning. “So,” she sobs, “all of that was going on and we never noticed…”

It’s hard to notice, all the time. And, much as I might hope otherwise, I know that love is so deeply buried under all sorts of other harder emotions and motivations that we need mining gear and scuba suits to find it. But I believe love is there, is always there, and going on all the time if only we can believe it.

I think of love much like I think of the limited, shifting, innumerable molecules of known elements in this world. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and nor is love. Like the twisting chains of molecules that become a leaf, a robin, a plastic i.v. bag of saline, an ocean, so love morphs and grows and braids among everything that is and was.

Love, though, is not a panacea. A chirpy video does not insulate middle school students from the personal struggle of adolescence. Love in all its many forms and immeasurable volume, and from so many hearts, did not keep my dad alive.

Still, it is the best thing we have. Love doesn’t halt or erase the awfulness of life. Rather, love highlights and is the wonderfulness of it all. Love is a thick wool coat against the cold, not a stopping of the howling winds.

In these first weeks of learning how to live with a Dad-sized hole in my life, I am trying to be better at seeing all the love that is always going on. I want to use my words and actions and life to wrap around who and what I love so that fewer sharp or icy or unwelcome troubles touch them. I want to be patient and grateful and dig deep to see the love underneath everything. Following another line of Wilder’s advice, I hope to slow down and take the time to look at everyone, knowing how little time we have. I know I will fail and fall down on this task, but I trust that I will always rise up and try again another day.

One morning in the hospital, my dad was opening a sheaf of cards that had just arrived. “Jesus Christ,” he joked with his singular gleam in the eye and glittering chuckle, “I can’t possibly owe this many people money…they must actually like me.”

Let’s no longer wait for the crises and eleventh hours to wrap each other up in love. Love may not be going anywhere, and will not stop the winds outright, but we will not always be here to say and do what we might, however the words come out of our hearts and minds and hands.

My wonderful dad, bull-trout riding in Missoula, Montana, in 2009.

The Powerful Play

(from NASA.gov, and while I have questions about exploring other worlds when we aren't treating this one and all the life on it with respect, it is still a beautiful picture.)

Sometimes, like today, when the sun is shining and I have yet to hear any truly horrible news for the day, it begins to seem that we are going to win. We, to me, are the loose collective of people working across all continents and disciplines to make the world a better and cleaner and more just place for all living things. Some of us are working in offices, filing papers and lawsuits against unjust entities and laws. Some of us are artists, stretching the materials of this world into shapes and sounds and stories that make other believe in our wildest imaginings of better. Some are teachers, are builders and farmers and activists and researchers and scientists and mentors and all the wide range of hues that it takes to sustain and build this necessary revolution that we hope and hunger and act for.

Too often when we speak of doing enough, of doing all that we can, there is a thread of guilt weaving it all together, that more must be done on both the individual level and the global level. Somehow, between dire news reports and a culture of multi-tasking absurdity, there is a pervasive sense that we must each be passionately able and willing to chain ourselves to a coal mine, participate in the somewhat damaged political system we could still salvage, march in the streets for racial justice, procure food from local sources that do no harm, see the world, maintain loving and supportive relationships, remain financially solvent and constantly informed on the issues of the world, and keep the carbon footprint of a sparrow. Trying to balance all of those pieces will make a person crazy. I regularly worry that I am not hitting the right balance between all the things I try to and would love to do. And I know that I am not the only one who feels stymied in resisting, in being part of a revolution, in living the life I believe possible.

My real worry is this: that some bright day I’ll wake up and the world will be better, that the need and chance to resist and revolt and rebuild will have passed, a new era dawned, and the further shore will have been reached and I will have not done what I most wanted to. That Walt Whitman’s powerful play will have gone on and I will have not contributed my verse. It is not the contribution itself that matters as much, I think, as the personal act of contributing to this amorphous revolution for a better way of life on Earth for the planet and all people. The revolution will happen without me, of course, but out of love and celebration for all that is at stake, I do not want to let my verse go unsung.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Mary Oliver’s question of what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life. Again, I know I am not alone in this—my life is full of brilliant people trying to find the best home for their gifts and love of the world and to live the lives we want and believe in. Sometimes it seems like there is a divide in how we each live—that one can either live change on a large or small scale. In the large scale are the standard-bearers and martyrs and the public figures who we all follow, who’s words and example drive a great deal of inspiration and change. They act and speak for causes that live deep in the hearts of many, and become the names and faces of change and resistance and revolution.

And then there are the people who cannot attend marches because they have to tend their loved ones, who cannot afford to get arrested for civil disobedience because of the responsibilities they bear to others. Or the people who are beautifully suited for the rigors of research, or who delight in the arcane details of law and policy and find ways to weave justice back into our world’s systems. Or people who shun the spotlight but can grow anything on a patch of land. Or who repair bicycles or run thrift stores or wait tables in the cafés where revolutionaries plot their deeds. Or people who are able to shift out of the structures and shoulds of the mainstream world and go off the grid.

There are so many right answers of how to live. Our verses, and we all have them, come in as many tunes and lengths as we like. The important thing is to listen, hard and close, for your own. I believe that we all know, intuitively, the difference between what is right, authentic, and true, and what is not. Perhaps delivering your verse—in whatever form—to the world will make a splash, perhaps everyone will stop and see the fury and love behind your contribution, and this will be the pivot that turns the world in that direction. More likely, the world will absorb your verse as gently as a rising tide. It will matter most to yourself what you said or did, what the action clarified in your soul, and what truths you now know as well as your bones.

The reasons that we are winning, will win, are because more and more people of the seven billion of us are contributing our verses. The play becomes more powerful, and goes on in a different direction than had no one lived in faith and action of a better world. The world needs your verse exactly as desperately, as sweetly, as you hunger to contribute it—whatever form it takes.

International Women's Day: On Prom-Posals and A Time for Outrage

For my recent birthday, some dear friends gave me a t-shirt celebrating Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As you can see, it is fire-engine red and amazing.

I wore it the morning after my birthday to clean up the minor wreckage of a good dinner party. This sartorial choice wasn’t a statement open to some post-umpteenth-wave of Feminism ironic interpretation along the lines of, "we’re now so evolved as society in terms of gender equality and identity, a lady such as myself can freely choose to do the duties of a repressed housewife, even while wearing the garb of revolutionary propaganda." That is silly bullshit that I hope you read in a funny snooty parody voice. 

I was thus garbed because I wanted to wear my new shirt, the kitchen was littered with dirty dishes and I don’t much like living in filth, and it was my mess to clean up.

I find even the ghost of an idea that we’re in a post-Feminist society absurd.

We aren’t.

As an example of how I fear we’re backsliding as Feminists in important and emotional ways, working at the high school, I keep overhearing clusters of boys worrying about how to pull off a good “prom-posal,” which is apparently now a thing. I hear girls giggling about how they hope they’ll be asked. One boy is making a daily series of riddles and clues for his date—presumably him actually asking her to prom is the treasure. Another is planning to buy red roses for everyone in his math class, have them one by one present the roses to his girlfriend—also in math class—and then he would come in last and give her a white rose and ask her to prom.

Prom is not my issue here—if teenagers want to get gussied up and dance and canoodle and have healthy consensual sex lives, more power to them. Similarly, I am 100% on board with Romance—although I’m guessing that these kids haven’t learned yet that Romance is not really rose petals and pink hearts and proms, but someone bringing you Gatorade in the middle of the night when you have a violent stomach flu, or waiting up for your bus until dawn, or putting tennis balls on your walker and salt on the icy steps, or any of the other millions of ways that people demonstrate their actual, practical, messy love for each other.

In fairness, I didn’t go to my high school prom and so have no frame of reference on this allegedly all-important aspect of high school life in America. Aside from being painfully—almost snobbishly—shy, I had a track meet the next day and, while I was a lackadaisical athlete, that was a simple excuse to avoid what I at seventeen suspected would be a lot of fuss over nothing. The school dances that I had attended always ended up with me in the bathroom with one upset friend or another, dealing with some mismatch of expectations and reality. No matter how many teen-age rom-coms I watched, I suspected that real prom wouldn’t be much different than past dances, and having my mum make me a beautiful dress just to hang out in a fancier bathroom somehow didn’t appeal.

So, really, I’m not one to talk about proms per se. But, my issue with the prom-posal situation is that is seems both horribly stressful and indicative of trends that cauterize teenage girls as passive Princesses in need of asking, with the expectation that they will be asked and in a certain way, or they are not correct. Flipping that, this script for life requires that teenage boys are the actors, the one who gets to make the choice of what lady to ask, who pick the cast and create the lines. Ladies should just sit around and wait with absurd culturally engrained expectations to be asked to the dance, to life. Dudes should steel up against any fears of rejection, but remain emotionally open and Romantic, and pick a lady by doing something traditional but unique, memorable but not super weird. To culturally pressurize these traditional gender roles at young and emotionally fragile ages seems cruel and, therefore, against the Feminist agenda I believe in.

At the same time, I am mentoring a trio of high school students in a Feminism seminar this spring. We are compiling a list of readings and videos and music to study and explore. We’ve got Emmaline Pankhurst and Ida B. Wells and bell hooks and Betty Friedan and Wonder Woman and videos of 100 years of beauty in Black-American, White-American, and Iranian culture and more all set up and ready to go.

These students already know so much more than I did at their age about Feminist history and literature. On the other hand, I grew up with red and yellow and blue Legos and no Disney princesses. They are at once reading Angela Davis, and expecting rose petaled prom-posals.

Their emotional dichotomy seems different and somewhat more dire, to me, than cleaning the kitchen while wearing my Betty Friedan t-shirt. Or the common challenge of hating the Patriarchy and loving men.

If we read and know these things, but do not articulate them through our lives, does it matter?

Stéphane Hessel was part of the French Resistance in WWII and spent his long life working to resist various threats to human life and dignity. In his small and effective book, Indignez-Vous!: A Time for Outrage, he wrote about how, when he was young and resisting Nazis, it was almost easy because the enemy was so clear cut. Now, with globalization, instant communications, climate change, mass-marketing, and all the rest, the outrage is still easy, but knowing where to direct one’s indignation and action is more nebulous.

Last summer, someone asked me if I could give some examples of sexism and gender inequality still happening in this world. Similar to and as a part of Hessel’s nebulous enemies to be resisted, I feel that sexism is so subliminally and systemically omnipresent that it took me a minute to catch my breath and form words.

Sexism is everywhere and Feminism needs everyone—women, men, and those who have yet to make up their minds, as Lola says in Kinky Boots.

How we respond to this need depends on how we each get up every morning, what we put on and how we are in the world, what we ask for and what we expect from each other every day. Never mind International Women’s Day, it’s always Human Day.

Wildness and Place, Gypsies and Homebodies

“With environmental writing,” I explained to someone recently, “if you’re not writing about climate change and pollution, you’re writing about the importance of Place.”

Truly, those darker options are branches on the same tree—they are the threats and the shadows that seek to erase and ravage the refuge of a right Place.

I used to say that nothing in this world compares to the alpine zone of the mountains of New Hampshire, that up there is my best Place. That, it seems, is not quite true. Whatever the wild and holy thing that lurks in the rocks and krummholtz and ridgelines and alpine plants is undeniably of that geography, but I’ve found fractals of that same sense of wonder and practical sublimity—a wonder that to me feels like my heart opens like a drawbridge to let the greatness of the world pour in and if joy grew feathers, I could swoop around like the ravens—in other quarters, too. I’ve come across that same magic at the ocean, in snowstorms, in being love, in farming, in both the laughter and silence of good friends.

When I go, like a hopeful gypsy, looking for Place, for my Place in the world to send out roots, what I am looking for is some configuration of all that wildness and wonder and love and community.

It is a hard thing to look for and I worry that either it cannot be found, or does not exist, or—most bittersweetly—my expectations have been raised to impossible heights because of the quality of what I have witnessed before.

But that is ridiculous.

When I have been away from the wilds for too long, I begin to think that however wonderful I believe the mountains or the sea or thunder and lightning or the sweetness of a friend or the look of Orion on a cold night to be, absence must have made my heart grow imaginative and too fond. Reality, I tell myself in these dim times, cannot compete with hope and memory. The mountains, they do not really do that to your breath. To watch an osprey dive into the ocean does not make your heart skip a beat, every time. People, even the oldest and dearest friends, change and the next meeting could be strained and awkward. And so on.

I sell myself short. Reality, nearly always, exceeds both expectation and memory. The relief and surprise at this truth is one of the sweetest things I know.

There is nothing I can ever write that will come close to the shivering thrill of being above treeline. No one, yet, has adequately portrayed the comforting, urgent wildness of the sea. And there are no right words for how the kindness of a friend changes the color of the sky. The reason that everyone, for better or worse, writes about love is that it is at once the most important and least describable thing in this world. Wildness—in the sense of being joyfully and fiercely immersed in love when surrounded by sublime aspects of life—is only another iteration of the puzzle and glue of love.

I have come as close as I know how to living immersed in natural wildness, and for all that I ache for and am the best version of myself in places where the stars are clear and the world yawns before me in ridgeline or forest or roiling sea, I recognize that—corporally, at least—it is impractical as a human-mammal craving food, shelter, love, purpose and community, to seek for my home Place in the wilderness.

Perhaps that sense of eternal but impermanent belonging is part of the allure of wild places.

Regardless, it does leave the actual question of practical geographic place to become home Place open to debate.

On that subject, I’ve read maybe too much Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry. They make for a confusing pair—I am tugged one way to be a gypsy wandering in search of moments of wildness and torn the other direction to come and be home already.

I know as well as I know the undeniable alpine zone that I am not alone in this tug-torn struggle.

What, then, I wonder makes the wanderers stop? The troupe of gypsies seems to shrink a little every year. I see people around me settle—in the best way—into good paid jobs or satisfying creative outlets or balancing a beloved partner’s yearnings with their own independence or raising beautiful babies, and so their wandering becomes more complicated, even if pieces of their heart still hunger for different wilds. Or, did they find their Place and all other necessary aspects to their life kaleidoscoped into roots, the sum of all the parts as rich and true as a newly discovered wilderness? Or did everyone just get tired from ripping up roots and setting them down in new soil every few months or years, just dipping in the toes and never committing to the downs as well as the ups?

I don’t know, but I want to know how to wander home to something still wild.

My Place, when I find it, I know will be a compromise and a balance off all the kinds of wildness I love and crave. I do not look for perfection—there is nowhere on earth where I can have the Presidential and Franconia Ridges, the Maine coastline, a New England hardwood forest, a farm with stonewalls, work that satisfies but does not sap my soul, and a town knotted full of people I love all within a few miles.

Now, I don’t know quite where to look, where the found is to my lost, where wild and home and love and Place will lead me or anyone else but experience makes me hopefully believe that the reality can be sweeter than even our wildest imaginings.