We walk by Ti’s house, the light is on, the dogs are quiet for once. Thunder, aptly named, normally has a fit as we walk by and Chico taunts him sometimes, but all is quiet now. It’s really strange how little I know about her, but I can’t help but think about her in the bed at the hospital. Chico and I walk by her house twice a day and she walks by mine at least twice a day. We’ve talked, and her English is pretty good, even if she looks at me quizzically often. She has two teenage kids raised here in America. She brings food to her Dad each day, and often walks with him or her mother back and forth between the two houses, on either side of me. Ti’s house is three down from mine and her father lives right next door along with her brother. The rain has stopped, and leaves silent the sidewalk. When we get back to my house, I swing open the gate and Chico runs from behind where he has just marked the corner of our property again, and up to the porch to be let in.
I am not thinking and open the door and he walks right into the house. I am sure he knows by now that if his paws are wet, then he needs to wait for me. I might just start making him wipe his paws each time he comes in. But he walks into the house crosses the wood floors and stops at his food dish to point out that it is empty.
“God damnit Chico. I know you know better than this.” He looks at me from behind eyebrows grown too long now. For the last week he has started to hold his head higher in order to see my face.
“I am sure by now, you must notice that I am taking off my shoes and I tell you to stop each time we come in the door and it is wet outside.” That probably isn’t true, but I am sure I am a good enough liar to full my dog, or fool enough to believe that.
I pull off the neoprene slip on boots I had learned to love in Alaska by watching, and Utah after purchasing them, that they make life easy in inclimate weather when you are going in and out of the house. Mud rooms really make the most sense. My teacher is always telling me how I have to frame in the porch, and then extend a second porch out. It could be a good mudroom. But, I probably should just learn to walk around through the gate to the backyard.
I don’t write often about my teacher. My martial arts teacher, Ti’s brother. And while I am no great student, that is for sure, he is my neighbor and has become family to me. I moved here, partly because he is my neighbor, fully knowing what I was getting in for. Well, I should rephrase that, fully knowing that I was entering into something I don’t know fully about. And that is the point, sort of.
I don’t write much of the stories down yet about him because I know he wouldn’t like me writing about him. And most of my life knowing him, now about 15 years or so, I thought most of the stories were bullshit, but I am learning not to.
Tomorrow he heads down to Sacramento with his wife and brother to talk to the doctor about his sister in the hospital.
*
I am kind of late getting to the office, but I don’t have any official hours per se. Part of that is because my teaching has a lot of grading and I can grade from anywhere or do it at other times too. The flexibility of teaching is wonderful that way. And I might be giving that up soon.
I sit down, open up my laptop, the office is a mess, filled with boxes from another professor, retired, who has gifted me his life of work in some ways. He has been a force for the Park program at Chico, and most of my friends took classes from him and think of him fondly. I knew him from stories other people would tell before actually meeting him. He sees me as someone that might carry the torch for the program. I am in, but I don’t see that happening. I am not really sure what to do with a lot of it. It is mostly for environmental education teachers. And a lot of it is really good stuff. In some ways, I think libraries in schools should house a lot of this stuff. Put it into an archive of sorts for the people who once taught here, and gave their lives to these institutions. When our recent college president left, he donated to the school in exchange for them naming the new performing arts building after him and his wife. It is strange the things we sell, and the ways we hold on to hope that we won’t be forgotten completely by history. Save these boxes of manuals, and lesson plans, and books. Hooper was a recent fellow of the National Association of Interpretation. And more than anything, he has been teaching environmental education for over 30 years at the University level, training other teachers, and still seems excited each day to be with his students.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and I know who is calling. My teacher is pretty much the only person that calls me directly these days. The phone actually says, teacher or curtis lamalfa. I am guessing that Curtis’s number is stored in my phone as my teacher’s number, and that story, of why that is, is a longer story that tells a bit about my relationship with my teacher, or another student’s story really.
I answer the phone, “hi, sir.”
“Nate.” sounds always more like Ned. “Are you at work?”
“Yes sir, just got here.”
“I need you to drive me and my family down to Sacramento.”
“OK.”
“When can you do that.”
“Oh…” I kind of hesitate, wondering what I am getting roped into doing now. “I have maybe a few hours of work I need to do then I could probably take off.”
He interrupts me, “my sister had an aneurysm, and they sent her on the helicopter to UC Davis Hospital in Sacramento.”
I snap to from my selfish thoughts, and tell him actually, I am just sitting here all day to collect student drafts of essays. I have promised to read them all and comment over the weekend and return them on Monday. I will leave a box, send an email to my students explaining, and I will pick up the papers later tonight. He has a car and can drive, but he tells me he wants someone level-headed to drive and help at the hospital to ask questions.
He tells me, “it doesn’t look like she is going to make it.”
I ride home quickly. When I get there, he is waiting, a dark blue Ford Explorer is in my extra driveway space behind the gate. My teacher has all the keys to my house and everything. I am not worried. He tells me that he needs me to drive with his brother, Son, to the hospital. He is not going; he isn’t well. I tell him I will just drive my car, but he says no. I tell him they might end up wanting to stay over-night and I can’t stay overnight sir. But I will do it. I usually voice my concern with his plans and tell him that I will do it his way, but I registered my complaint, so to speak. We do this often, usually while building things on his house.
I don’t know his brother, and I have never met him before, but I know the story, sort of. His brother moved here first, their father was a banker in Vietnam and knew this American guy that lived, or maybe retired to Paradise, CA. So, when Son was able to get out of Vietnam, out from the refugee camps, he came to Paradise, and slowly the whole family has come here now.
My teacher’s Dad and Mom, I know already, and Ti, of course too, and her two kids a very little bit, but not very well. I think they all know who I am quite well. I am over at the house with my teacher most days.
*
The rivers are rising right now. Flood warning all over the valley. I am curious to see it all. Chico and I walk into work and stop at Little Chico Creek. It is as high as I have ever seen it. I imagine jumping in the river to ride it down to the Sacramento River. I think about Muir in a pine tree riding out a thunderstorm. I get that. There is something about the unpredictability of life that excites me. Maybe, it is humbling to feel nature in wrath and destruction. To watch landslides and erosion, and buildings torn away. I watched a recent video of a landslide falling onto Highway 299, a highway I have driven lots of times, and still I wanted to see the destruction. I wanted the see, not the boulder, but the force of nature humbling man. And next to the landslide was a tractor. It looked like a tonka toy next to the mountain. The side gave way, the dirt falling, until an avalanche of soil and rock, with one large boulder cleaving from the mountain, it rolls and crushes onto the pavement before rolling off towards the creek. I wanted to see it take out the road, or dam the river and watch the river swell up over the road, and erode it from underneath. I have always imagined the earth in all her power. I think I love surfing so much is because you are riding the energy waves of a storm. The spinning yell of merging pressure systems and temperature gradients, a tantrum from earth, and with it moves mountains, carries water deep onto land, hammers the coast lines, and washes away the earth, dragging it back into itself. Not scared of earthquakes, but wishing I could have felt it, rode it...witnessed it. Bare testimony to power. But there is death.
Aleppo worries me. Any situation where a more compassionate and obvious method seems like it must exist, but none that don’t require power to relent power, the right by power to admit being wrong to the weak, to attempt real remorse and forgiveness. Do large groups of people really want death to others? And if we head towards a projected 9 billion people on earth before maybe leveling out even if we all decided to do that right now, we are going to have to live together and in closer proximity to each other. And yet, I see these images of a city decimated, beautiful cathedrals and stone walls, and intricately laid tiles, turned to rubble. Then you hear the people, crying out that their city is about to fall. I don’t know what to do, because I feel that so much of the military advancements that have allowed this level of destruction came from our country and the people who lived here. Not that killing, or slaughter, or genocide was ever an American invention or thought...that seems to be as old as humankind, it is biblical and mythical.
*
Chico and I walk the cold night, the front past, the cold trailing the storm; I think about all the water, using the sun to dry now; the water is mostly just passing through. I put on the heavy down jacket, and walk out into the night. As I walk by my teacher’s house, I see that his sister, Po, I think that is her nickname, left a stack of blankets sitting on the sidewalk. I saw them earlier today, but assumed they were picking them up, or taking them somewhere, but now I wonder if they sat them out for the homeless on this very cold night. I hope someone comes by and sees them and takes them. Usually two homeless people sit on the stoop in front of their house, often with a drink in their hands. I am learning a lot about life watching the homeless each and every day living across from the Jesus Center. My teacher has lived here for over 20 years now. He has mostly fortressed himself in. My teacher’s other sister came down from Seattle to help take care of the parents and wait for news. His Mom, Dad, and sister are living in the front house now. Ti is still in the hospital, breathing on her own, in a coma.
*
You know, JFK supposedly had a big turnaround in his thinking about nuclear war and weapons, and such. He gave a speech, The American University address, and it was that something changed, I think it had to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the fear the created in so many people, the thought of annihilation, and winter, a dark winter. He said this:
“What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace – the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living – the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”
He won election being hawkish and promising to be tougher. And maybe, if not Obama, than maybe Trump could see this and change too. Maybe, for once, down from his golden tower, he will be forced to really see things like Aleppo, and realize that the world is looking to him now for help. People are dying and you have some of the most power on the earth now if used right. It is like melting the grinch’s heart or something. It seems not fathomable, but I am hoping for that Xmas miracle.
*
When I drove down with Son and my teacher’s parents to the hospital, my teacher told me he wanted a white person to go because he thought the doctors would try harder. He didn’t go with us. He said, he couldn’t. He was a mess. He said, the whole family has PTSD from the Vietnam War, and the worker’s camps, the refugee camps, being split apart for so long. He said, I needed to go just to be a calming voice. I did, but as I told him, they aren’t going to invite me back to talk with the doctor. Who am I? When the doctor came out after surgery, I stayed with the parents in the waiting room while Ti’s ex-husband, her kids, and Son, went into the room to talk.
After it all, after the sobbing, after my teacher's mother was admitted to the ER and then released, we all drove down to the Vietnamese section of Sacramento to look for a pho restaurant they knew and liked. We sat around vinyl topped sticky table together in a vietnamese market and restaurant together. The mother, between her pulsating sobs, would look up and make sure I was eating, or had tea, or tried another new strange food. I kept thinking about everything this family has been through, and thinking about Syrian refugees. I looked around and everywhere there were Vietnamese people, the products and heritage of a war torn country.
My teacher would later tell me, maybe this is all best for Ti. Life has been so hard for her, she has worked like a slave her whole life, maybe this is best. I told him, I emphatically disagree. Yes, it should have been better. Maybe it isn't that I like seeing wrath and destruction upon humanity, it is that afterwards, humans come together, in empathy and love. These outstretched hands give me hope. I have always been a positive person. I have always assumed that people can and will. People will see the value in protecting water, or trying to use renewable resources. That people will adopt a land ethic if they just get out and see it. That war is not inevitable, and that dictators will change, and billionaires will donate, and that even when the doctor says there is a 1% chance, that it is better than no chance at all because you are saying that it is possible.
Sometimes, when the night is quietest, I will lay on Chico. My head listening to his breath, his heartbeat in my ear. I pet him. I feel another new lump, he turns 10 soon, and I think about life without him. Sometimes, loneliness abounds. I don’t mind it entirely. All emotions have purpose. Often, in the expanse of the world, I am mostly saddened about how little I get to experience. It’s all of history, not just the next century, but the next epoch. Everything seems too magical about life, it is hard to imagine not seeing it to some sort of end, but maybe that is the catch to it all. We hope there is no end. We want life to perpetuate, ageless, beyond the eras and into the eons.
I have such an immense love for life, beyond the biological, from before the Hadean to beyond the Holocene, from Planck, primordial, to present and into the a time when the stars all begin to fade and the universe goes dark. Sometimes I think all of existence is a fraction of a moment, one burst in the universe like a child blowing a soapy bubble exploding out, the big bang, and that inside the bubble's burst, a jiffy, the time it takes light to travel one fermi, the size of a nucleon, a light-foot, a nanosecond, in that explosion is every galaxy expanding, stars forming, black holes, elements condensing to planets, tectonic plates, water, life, plants, dinosaurs, humans, wars, religions, politicians, petty hate and greedy money, and love, all the love, and the water falls to the ground, the bubble dissipates and the whole thing is over, in that one burst of a bubble, and we are watching it so amazingly slow that we can’t fathom how short it all really is. Gone. Like that. All of imaginable life isn’t the actual bubble, but the brief explosion of the bubble; and here I am, in some fraction of existence when compared to stratification of rocks, of condensing of planets, of supernovae stars, and expanding galaxies, and what I get is me, and my dog, curled up fretting about not having each other. This moment I matter to this dog, but it is all just a bubble, a bang, a yoctosecond, one septillionth of a second, and all we think is so important is gone. We are not even an inhale of breath on a clock of eons.
I nudge Chico awake, ask him if he wants to go for a walk; his eyes expand out to the whites, his eyelids disappearing into black holes, he jumps to his feat, shakes off the slumber and we walk out into the stars.
Today, we sat with students in tears. Already some of our students have been harassed, told to “go back to Mexico” even if they were born right here. I’m afraid that I’m afraid. Politically, or legally, nothing has happened yet. In schools kids are emboldened to say things they might not fully understand or believe. For some reason, hispanics have become the scapegoat of economic insecurities. The African-American, the Muslim, and the LGBTQ communities are not without fear, and for many it is a fear they have known their whole lives. Obama emboldened some to come out of the shadows, DACA encouraged them they too could go to school. Some now fear the very act that got them to give up addresses and information will now be used to break their families apart and send them back to a land they never knew.
I keep thinking about how we all come from immigrants. My mother is really involved with ancestry and tracing roots back. Some of my ancestors crossed on the Mayflower to come to an unknown land to escape the oppression of elite landowners. They risked everything in a journey few survived. But even more amazing, I used to dream about the very first migrants that came to the Americas. I have written about it, about an ocean that was 30-50 feet lower because more water was locked up in the falling ice age, about the theory that the first Americans came across by boat following kelp beds and chasing fish and food. And another wave, many more, that walked across an ice bridge between what is now Alaska and Russia. I have thought a lot about how difficult it is to migrate north to south when you must rely on your foraging and hunting skills and as you move north to south drastic changes come to the landscape. Humans followed the migration routes of animals, birds, and even trees. There is evidence to suggest that early mesoamericans, before grinding maize in metates, they were grinding acorns and that human migration followed oak migrations. Fremont, when he first landed in California, would see elevated silos of acorns drying along the Sierra Foothills.
When I was in the fifth grade, my grandmother and grandfather took me to Washington D.C. My grandfather worked for the Schilling Mccormick spice company and had a conference in Baltimore. My grandmother and I saw the monuments and museums. I fell in love Abraham Lincoln on this trip. We went to Gettysburg and the sound of the Battle Hymn of the Republic still gives me chills. We looked across the blood consecrated field and imagined the battles, imagined the lives and dreams that fell in that battle, thought of all the loss of life, and it become incomprehensible to me that so many people would fight and die to keep other people in slavery. It is a bit more complicated than that, but in the end, many people were fighting to free people. We went to Ford’s theater and saw the balcony and imagined John Wilkes Boothe leaping from where on the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead. We went across the street to see where he gave his last breath and imagined his wife there. The blood stained pillow preserved in a glass case. What dedication to a proposition of equality.
When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers in 2001, there was no amount of war, no amount of death or killing, not one single person, no Bin Laden, no Hussein, not even the systematic killing of every single person of a religion would bring back what was lost...not just lives, but security. Fear is an idea that gets into you. I have seen the way it has now permeated into my young and brave students of color, students of immigrants, students of various gender and sexuality. We sit and wrestle together with how do you move forward. I try to tell them that those people who hate just don’t know you. I tell them you have to meet them, you have to tell your story, but you also have to listen. You can’t meet people thinking you will change them. You have to enter into that moment accepting they will change you. To love is to accept change. That is the only space you can hold inside of yourself. The other is hope. But we don’t hope for change, we work towards creating it.
All semester, we have worked in my course to understand identity and where it comes from, how it changes, and how some parts are very deep-rooted and hard to change. Religion, culture, politics, these things don’t change easily, and new research, logic, statistics, facts, doesn’t change these things. Instead, your brain works to remove the cognitive dissonance and find excuses, find justifications. Threshold concepts are hard, paradigm shifts don’t happen easily, they are bred out of society over time, not the individual. Some have awakenings; however many people know, logically what they should do, but still don’t. Some say humans are lazy, but I disagree. I think we resist change vehemently. I argue that it is a biological response. We are not meant to change quickly because it leaves a species vulnerable. Nostalgia is part of this mechanism; we long for the past, we hold on to what once was to remember. And yet, somewhere deep inside our bird brain we migrate.
I have lived my life around migrations in some way. In my youth, we used to go count Monarch butterflies at their wintering grounds. Clusters of hundreds to thousands of butterflies cascade down Cypress and Eucalyptus trees along the foggy shores in Pismo every winter. Their migration is one internally from caterpillar, to chrysalis to butterfly and externally as they move thousands of miles each year. Some say they follow milkweed blooms, but that isn’t known. The generation that begins the migration isn’t the same that returns. They are not alone in this unique characteristic. When I moved to Alaska to work with my Aunt, my life followed the migration of salmon. Their sole purpose in life is a migration; spawn until you die, used to read a favorite shirt my Aunt would wear. Tonight, while I sing songs out into the dark night, songs that I wrote at other hard times in my life, the snow geese are returning and they cacophony the night as bad as my own singing. They say that change is the only real constant and maybe everything migrates just at time scales we can’t fully understand. Trees migrate. Redwoods were once found in Yellowstone and now only in a pocket on the Pacific Coast. When I was younger the mountain chains going from Bishop Peak out to Morro Rock was explained to me as volcanic hot spots, places where magma vented through the tectonic plate as the plate migrated north along the San Andreas Fault. Perhaps they are in fact volcanic plugs, a place where the crust bubbled out and cooled to igneous rock, and the land around it eroded as the the last glaciers migrated back north 20 million years ago. And our own earth, it too is in a constant migration towards some unknown destination, spiraling out, an entire galaxy corkscrewing out into abyss.
A few weeks ago, I sat down and listened to the stories of dreamer students, undocumented students who came to the US when they were children, or babies, when their own parents fled across the border in hopes to find a better land and better future. They told their stories in tears, about the pressure to do better and provide for their family. They talked about just wanting to make life easier for their parents who mostly worked in fields, long hours under the sun, and with Obama they got to follow that dream towards education and a better life. One of my students told me the other day that he has been picking bell peppers alongside his parent since he can remember. Now he is bigger and stronger and can earn more than anyone else in his family. All the money goes to the family too. He invited me to come and see the work and try it out. This summer he also picked oranges for a while he told me when he returned from summer break. He comes into my office each day and shakes my hand and acts with more respect than I think I deserve. Many of them want to get an education only to go back and get a job back home and help the family. They make me feel so selfish about my life. I try to hold a space for them, something my boss first did and now I follow. We try to create a space for them to be their best. Yesterday, they sat in the office with fears and tears. I wanted to lash out at this world. I want to tell everyone to buy guns and train to use them. I want to use the very laws the Republicans fear being taken away against them. I want violent revolution. I want battles on the fields and to say that this isn’t acceptable anymore. I want succession for California and blockades on the ports, and taxes on agriculture, taxes on technology, taxes on movies and music and television. We will take Washington and Oregon, and their only West Coast port can be Lewiston, Idaho.
But I don’t say that. I tell them that they must learn to love. I tell them they must tell their story. I tell them they must use this education to bring more people together, to educate more people, to find things to advocate for, and communities to advocate with. We grieve for a while and then get back to work doing the same work they have been doing. I am thinking about butterflies, not the cliched metamorphosis, but that inside the chrysalis the caterpillar completely melts into some goopy mass of DNA and then begins to rebuild inside of it into something entirely different. It isn’t just wings coming out from the caterpillar, it is a new being emerging from a soup of what once was. Migration changes us all. In migration, new DNA is mixed, new food is eaten, new relationships are formed. I am consoled by the youth. They say the millennials are the most tolerant and accepting generation of Americans. I can’t keep them from fear, or anger, or frustration, or even love. I can only say I want them to be bold, to be creative, to be critical, to be articulate, to be present. Yes, I want them to be here, right now. Migration is a dangerous affair. Many die in the process. But the risk of staying put, ignoring the seasons around you, the senesce, and the first flakes of winter, must be worse. And when you migrate, it is the strong, and persistent that prevail, but it mostly hinges on all going together. As my poetry/dog mentor tells me, “with you.” That is to say, I am with you.
bare boughs, both the streetlamps and starlight shine
in hope’s space, even as temperatures fall.
I remember the moment well. I was walking around the park next to my house in Logan, UT. It was dark, and a storm had just passed as Chico and I rambled around and we sighed some sense of relief, some sense of the eight prior years being over. Stars were emerging after a storm and looking out to space, looking out to light from stars that have already long gone extinct, looking at light hopelessly traveling across an abyss where the origins of that same light has fizzled and gone, puts all things into perspective for me. The eight years to follow that lead up to now have been unpredictable, confusing, lonely, frustrating, and enlightening too. I have travelled and loved and lost and hurt and laughed and been with most of you.
Today, soon, I will walk into my sustainability class with my first-year students and try to keep being positive about how we come together to try and make the world more sustainable. I am not sure exactly what I will do. I have tried to hold this space of hope for them each and every day. I will still try. Last night, I sat with students who worked all semester trying to get people informed and excited to vote. They made posters about the propositions, and posters about the different candidates, and created forums about their stances on issues. They put on a huge event where they helped get people informed. For many students, it is their first election. For almost all of them, it is there first presidential election. Last night, we turned on the news on twelve different monitors that covered the political gamut from FOX, to CNN, to Al Jazeera, to Univision, and more. We watched together as the results came in. There was a lot of silence in the room.
I’ve tried so hard to hold hope’s space over the last eight years...years where wars didn’t end, years where inequities didn’t get better, years where CO2 increased, years where extinction rates spiked, years where hate and separation has grown and culminated into this. I know we persist. I know we will come together and find ways to fight to protect people and the earth. I know we won’t give up. I know we won’t really run away.
Tonight, I will go watch the sunset like I always do. Feel the earth spin again and know that this won’t end, not yet. In parts of the world, kids fear blue skies because that is when drones come out. In parts of the world, the sun is cracking the mud of empty lakebeds. In parts of the world, parents send their kids off and hope they will be safe, but have no guarantee. In parts of the world, people flee wars and bombing and extremists. In too many parts of this world, women don’t have equal rights. And right now, right where I am, my life is easy. There won’t be any big immediate change, but I feel it. Because when I watch the earth spin away from our sun I can’t help but understand how fragile it all is, and how much we are all on this little rock spinning in space together. And the stars will emerge again and there will be that light that I see that has travelled across the ages, light that is billions of years old just now at this exact moment entering into my eye, processed in my brain, and emotions will emerge. Memories will be pulled from my own past, a past that doesn’t exist either anymore. I will be thinking of you all because I have found that hope isn’t out in the world, it is in you.
As the sun sets out across the valley, Venus shortly afterwards reflects back to earth the sun gone around the corner. The full moon rises like a mirror into a hallway, like a night light beacon to all the life the sun gives to us, as our view spins us around to look out infinitely beyond our solar system. There is no more important star in the galaxy and beyond that we know of than ours, but there they are each night. Perhaps there is a distant creator far beyond our telescopes and satellites. We see pixelated light and artists renditions of things that exist only in the minds of imagination and speculation. While we might witness the entire universe in metaphoric and microscopic ways, what I would do to get the grand tour beyond time and space. If these are human limitations, that we exist in this moment and in this location in a vast and expanding universe, and that other ways of being persist, regardless of our measurements, then surely this moment, me writing in my underwear on a laptop computer powered by ancient sun energy, connected to a world that feels immense but shadowed by the emptiness of the universe beyond, is unbelievably absurd. Yet, here I write, calling out to you, because you make the whole thing worth it.
Before leaving, I work in the mornings and evenings, between the heat, to sand and prep the wood on the back porch, before quickly painting the bare wood. I switch from right hand to left hand and back to right as each get too tired to keep painting, but I can’t quit. I must finish this. It wasn’t neat, it wasn’t pretty, but it was done, and I loaded up the truck, and drove out of town as the sun was setting out across the valley heading north. My summer vacation had begun. I was heading to be with my family at my grandfather’s memorial service.
Judge Learned Hand (1944)
“We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty - freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves.”
Chico and I pull over along the Pit River. I saw it on the Google satellite image as a possible place to camp for the night. The Milky Way stripes the moonless sky, the centrifugal facture of the universe. I used to look up and think of the night sky as infinite chaos, but I look around now to the fractured United States, the broken world, and the night sky feels ordered, ancient, and comforting. While personally, the abyss of space makes me feel unimportant and meaningless, this feeling helps me deal with the politics of the world around me now. I try to say that it all doesn’t matter, but I can’t make myself believe that.
President Obama (2016)
“Scripture tells us that in our sufferings, there is glory, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. Sometimes the truths of these words are hard to see.”
My Aunts and Uncles tell stories. Stories about my grandfather and his love of nature and his desire to take them out there to experience. Hunting, fishing, rafting, backpacking…long before it was popular. The service is good. The military shows up to unfold a flag, play taps, fold it up, and hand it to my Uncle John. I never thought so much about what the flag represents. My grandmother once took me to the Smithsonian to see the original Star-spangled banner that flew over Fort McHenry during the war of 1812. General Armistead ordered the largest flag ever made so that the British could see it from their ships. I remember sitting through a talk at Fort McHenry as they told the story of the hours of bombardment and as the morning of September 14th came, the smoke cleared and the flag was still there. Not since that day over 30 years ago have I felt so enamored with a flag. The flag is folded so that only the stars shine through. This flag, today, represents my grandfather. Taps resounds across the empty air. The last note lingers almost too long. I once worked all summer trying to learn to play taps on the bugle. I cry as they fold it up, walk it over to my Uncle who stoically stands in salute as they present the flag to him. He says to my uncle, “On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service.” Salutes, turns, walks away, and we all breathe. Day is done, gone the sun, from the lake, from the hills, from the sky. All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.
“I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few - as we have learned to our sorrow.” Learned Hand
Why do we fight so fervently with each other? Deaths have been stacking up in the news filled with hate and frustration. Rhetoric is spilling over into the streets. Bombs are not bursting in air, they burst in our hearts and our homes. We expect for smoke to clear over and over again and from that smoke, from “morning’s first beam” we expect that flag to wave. I keep thinking about “the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion.” No, it is not in God that we trust, but in each other.
“Now, I’m not naive. I have spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency. I’ve hugged too many families who have lost a loved one to senseless violence. And I’ve seen how a spirit of unity, born of tragedy, can gradually dissipate, overtaken by the return to business as usual, by inertia and old habits and expediency. I see how easily we slip back into our old notions, because they’re comfortable, we’re used to them. I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been. And so, I’m reminded of a passage in John’s Gospel, “let us love, not with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.” President Obama
The family all decides to go camping because Grandpa would have wanted that. I am not sure I really knew my grandfather that much. He wasn’t around. But he is more like a mythical person to me. A shadow figure. He would send me letters he wrote to congressmen about logging areas, forests in need of better conservation, rivers in need of preservation, trout runs threatened. He would send me articles from newspapers about environmental problems. He would send me books. Ever since I was young I would receive a new book each Christmas from him. They are books that would shape me. Two Years Before the Mast, Huckleberry Finn, By The Great Horn Spoon, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Mutiny on the Bounty. Stories that, in some ways, would later define me, or give me some sense of wonder and desire for exploration into the world. I would read the stories he wrote of growing up in rural Oregon at the turn of the century, his father a local pastor and mailman delivering mail by horse and buggy and his own embarrassment at the horse that would fart all the time. He would write about logging the old growth, about searching for remote trout streams in mapless areas. He would write about Pinchot and going to school for forestry. Later, he would give me all his topographic maps he had collected of California over the years. I still cherish them even if many of them are outdated now. Maps have always felt like treasures, as if I am still reading Treasure Island as I would scour the maps for remote lakes high in the Sierras, places to go where others would not. Mostly, I think of how he would fight to protect these wild spaces of the world. He is the true heir of Muir in my mind. A boy, born along with the National Parks, he would fight too for protection. He thought the Bald Eagle was done; he thought he would never see a bear or elk. We the people, with his help, have proved him wrong. The delisting of the bald eagle is perhaps one of the most amazing aspects of what an informed public can do. We did that with our government, with good policy, with good education, and with a realization that the chemicals we were using were not good for us, not good for ecosystems, and that those corporations didn’t want us to know that.
“What then is the spirit of liberty?
I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten - that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an American which has never been, and which may never be - nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it - yet in the spirit of America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America so prosperous, and safe, and contented, we shall have failed to grasp its meaning, and shall have been truant to its promise, except as we strive to make it a signal, a beacon, a standard to which the best hopes of mankind will ever turn; In confidence that you share that belief, I now ask you to raise you hand and repeat with me this pledge:
I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands--One nation, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Learned Hand.
I camp with my cousin Larry. We have done so many adventures together over the years. He is the closest I have had to a big brother growing up. He picked on me as such, but also he took me with him. We would fish streams, lakes, canals, ponds; hunt ducks, chukar, and grouse. We have had some devastating days where we would spend all night cleaning our catches. Larry is a hunter through and through. Once, on one of my summer visits to Boise we were driving through town. A crow was in the street, Larry swerved over and hit it. He looked at me and said, “always hunting.” I shouldn’t laugh, but I still do. Larry has taught me to be true to me, to be fearless of others thoughts.
Everything has changed so much now. He recently went through a divorce but that is nothing new. We all sit around the campfire and start to try and count the different wives my grandfather had. My Aunt, the oldest sibling there (Steve is the oldest, but he has stopped talking to everyone in the family. The family thinks he might have moved to Europe) seems to think that my Grandpa was on his 7th or 8th marriage. Every single one of my Aunts and Uncles have gone through at least one divorce. And those numbers seem to be mirrored in the grandkids too. I have no misconception that love is solitary. Like my grandfather I don't think about a god or a resurrection. Love might be boundless, but not about one person, not until death do we part. I believe in community. I believe in diversity. I believe in creativity.
“In the end, it’s not about finding policies that work. It’s about forging consensus and fighting cynicism and finding the will to make change.
Can we do this? Can we find the character, as Americans, to open our hearts to each other? Can we see in each other a common humanity and a shared dignity, and recognize how our different experiences have shaped us? And it doesn’t make anybody perfectly good or perfectly bad, it just makes us human.
I don’t know. I confess that sometimes I, too, experience doubt. I’ve been to too many of these things. I’ve seen too many families go through this.
But then I am reminded of what the Lord tells Ezekiel. “I will give you a new heart,” the Lord says, “and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh.”
That’s what we must pray for, each of us. A new heart. Not a heart of stone, but a heart open to the fears and hopes and challenges of our fellow citizens.” President Obama
My Uncle John doesn’t make it to the camping trip. I guess, in his attempts to be more like my grandfather, a person that repaired everything he could, never gave up on a piece of clothing because it might have some wear to it, once bragged that everything he was wearing he found, left behind, discarded by those who no longer wanted it, Uncle John, although he can afford whatever he wants, he chooses to try and fix and repair. His latest invention is a coffin like box he hauls behind his truck in the remains of an old pop-up tent trailer. Everyone jokes with him about it. John is a decorated war vet, a lifer in the military, a green beret in Vietnam, Major Millard. He jumped at the chance to head to Afghanistan long after he had retired. “War” he would say, like some character from Full Metal Jacket. My grandfather would say that he understood that draw to go to war. Stationed in London during the V2 rocket bombings, the camaraderie of war left an impact on him. In his final days his mind kept taking him back to London.
John doesn’t make it camping because he left a few days early to go fishing up near Stanley, in the wind, the pop-up top collapsed on the coffin and locked him inside. He yelled for help for almost two hours until someone came to rescue him from his self-built box. We all laugh good at the thought of him there. His brothers joke about him. Everyone tells stories.
“We turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout. We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold and that things might get worse.” President Obama
Eventually, everyone goes home. I watch Larry pack up his camp, load up his truck, with his new girlfriend and her kids, and drive off. I decide to stop by myself at some hot springs and soak. Nobody is there and I have them to myself for a while, but eventually people show up. I am in the largest pool alone and everyone tries to be respectful, they find other pools, but eventually one family stops and asks to join. I say, please.
We talk, he is a war veteran, from Iraq. But also a fisherman and hunter. We have a good conversation, a conversation of friends that are strangers, but find commonality in a love for the world around us, the ecosystems and beauty of mountains and rivers and oceans. I don’t know his political affiliation and I worry about it. I want so badly to talk about it because I am so worried about which way our country is going. I am so afraid that people can’t see how fragile these ecosystems are and how much we need to protect them. I am too afraid to be put into a subgroup, too often have I been called “a liberal” or “a democrat” as if they are derogatory terms, and perhaps I have done the same. I prefer to share this idea that we are fishermen. I get into my car and drive back to my Dad’s house.
“We also glory in our suffers because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. For all of us, life presents challenges and suffering. Accidents, illnesses, the loss of loved ones; there are times when we are overwhelmed by sudden calamity, natural or man-made. All of us, we make mistakes, and at times we are lost.
And as we get older, we learn we don’t always have control of things, not even a president does. But we do have control over how we respond to the world. We do have control or how we treat one another.
America does not ask us to be perfect, precisely because of our individual imperfections, our founders gave us institutions to guard against tyranny and ensure no one is above the law. A democracy that gives us the space to work through our differences and debate them peacefully, to make things better, even if it doesn’t always happen as fast as we’d like. America gives us the capacity to change.” President Obama.
My brother, my Dad, and I pack up for our annual backpacking trip. This year, we actually are not backpacking. My Dad’s recent heart attack has him a little spooked, and I can understand. I think I am too. A little more afraid of death, afraid of leaving the world when there is so much more to see, so many more people to love. We decide to make a home base and do a lot of day hikes to different lakes and scout a new area up in the Payette National Forest. The forest is filled with tarns, lakes left behind when glaciers slid down from the mountains, remnants of an icy past. I take to the mountains to find some center, to find footing, to let go of the world out there that fills my mind, to find perseverance and hope. It isn’t coming.
It is beautiful, each lake we visit, the long hard hike up to Box Lake, the short but steep climb to Snowslide Lake, where we off-trail to a summit. Each day is glorious and fun. My brother and I jump into the lakes while my dad catches his fill of trout. We decide to move base camp and pack up to drive to another lake. We are scouting for short hikes where we could take the next generation of Millards out into the wilderness. We drive down to an easy hike at Boulder Lake, and find it filled with people. It is easy and beautiful, but there is something about the ease of it all that doesn’t sit with us. Sometimes I feel like Abbey that you have to crawl on your bloodied knees. Maybe that is my own problem too.
On the walk back, I realize that I forgot some small solar panels sitting in the sun at our last base camp. Damn! It was over an hour back, but we load up in the car and drive back there. We race back up the creek, the dirt roads, the peaks; they feel familiar now, our campground, not a hunter’s space, but our own. Shaun runs up to get my left behind solar panel. We decide to travel over the saddle and down the other drainage. As we crest the saddle we hang out the windows in awe of the peaks and escarpments, the creeks, and rugged terrain. I joke that I left the solar panel on purpose. We were so close to this place and almost missed it. We drive over the saddle and into the Lick Creek Watershed. We look at the maps for lakes tucked up into granite cirques. We are sure we will return here. We camp for the night and plan to hike into Hum Lake the next day.
In the morning, we drive to the trailhead, and begin the long hike up to Hum Lake. A forest fire burned through here some time ago, and the wind through the dead trees seems to cry out. As we crest the saddle to look down to Hum Lake, we decide not to hike down, but once again go off-trail and hike for the nearby summit. We sit on the summit and watch clouds form across the range; Shaun trundles rocks down the empty scree fields below. We are in the heart of the Payette now. This land is so amazing. I am not sure how many more summer the three of us will get to go hiking together, but I am doing my best to be grateful for what I have right now. On the walk back, I stop at a water crossing to let Chico drink and to take pictures. My Dad and brother go ahead of me. I have been injured for a while, but I feel better. I decide to start a short run to catch up to my Dad and Brother. Chico is clearly excited to run. When Dad and my brother see me coming, they too begin to run. All four of us, trundle our own way down off this mountain. Maybe god doesn’t change our heart from rock to flesh, but gravity and the mountains erode the stone away to reveal the heart that lies beneath. Suffering doesn’t produce perseverance, desire does. Liberty isn’t in the heart of people, it is out in the land around us. We come back down that mountain because there is another mountain out there waiting.
“Weeping may endure for a night but I’m convinced joy comes in the morning.” President Obama
We stop, out of breath, and I can see my own father, a glow in his blue eyes, a red smile on his face, his heart, not of stone, his heart, not broken, his heart not failing. My Dad stops and thanks both me and my brother. He says, he felt alive again. Someday, if I’m lucky enough to live to old age, I too will cope with the loss of my father. We fold the flag to hide all the stripes, all the harsh lines that divide us are gone and only the stars remain. Stars have always been reminders of those who have past, they are like mnemonic devices to remember the stories of those that came before us. Those stars are unfathomable. The universe is unfathomable. The light is older than any story we can tell and what might be out there waiting is a great mystery that humans must seek to explore. We can change the stories. I can blend the story of Orion with that of my grandfather, the great hunter. Maybe Pisces is better. The strange duality of fish tied together swimming in different directions. Some have argued that we are leaving the age of Pisces, or already left it. I don’t think it has ended yet, not when I look around at the world. The next age is the age of Aquarius, the age of water. Water. That is when we realize how interconnected we all are. That is when we stop fighting, stop swimming in circles around each other, leave silly religions behind and see each other, see how the universe spins around, and how we are just a small fish swimming in a cosmic sea. I look up at stars like I look across the ocean. The vastness does calm me from the news, from the killings, from the bickering, from the death, and fighting, and meaningless attempts at controlling some small part of this rock. You can’t really control water. Water doesn’t know the boundaries of states and nations. The clouds lift up from the great seas and rain down upon land, erode rock, and carry away sediment. Dams can stop it for a little while, but even the land floats upon a sea of liquid magma, and the earth floats upon an endless sea of space, and this solar system spins in the rising tides of a galaxy we barely understand.
Maybe we shouldn’t seek joy in the rising sun and dawn of a new day, but instead, be OK with weeping into the night, be OK with what we see around us. Understand that the sun doesn’t illuminate; it actually blinds us from seeing out further to a universe much larger than our petty wars, our meaningless green pieces of paper, and bank accounts. When the sun sets, we can look out to see so much further. We can see the stories of the past wrapped up in the stars and know that the light is old, and there is more still coming. We share this. Can the stories of the stars remind us of how many wars we have fought, how many people we have killed, how much power we have sought, and how little it means? Shouldn’t looking up cause us to look in? There they are, every night, we can predict where they will be and when they will be there. Pisces, the two fish strung up, caught, out of water, tied up, soon to be eaten, fried. Perhaps when I look up and see Pisces, I will imagine my grandfather, his logging boots on, jumping from rock to rock, a pole in his hand, tempting fish with a fly. Perhaps, I will use it to think of my own father, and his joy of the fish he catches. Inside Pisces is a whole other galaxy, a spiraling galaxy with billions and billions of more stars inside that galaxy that we see as perhaps a minor star in the tail of the fish. Perhaps the suicide bombers, the cowardly shooters, and even the egotistical leaders of nations will think that they can write their stories into the stars, but they won’t be there. All that they deem so important right now will just spin out off this world, consumed in supernova, eaten in a black hole. What they do means so little in the end? Instead, they just cause momentary grief, pain, and sadness. When things break, we sometimes think they are then broken. No wall will keep you safe. No gun will ease your fears. There is nothing safe about living. There are no good ways to die, only good ways to live. If we only would look up and see. There are stars shining all around you right now. Their light is upon you.
