Make no mistake, it’s a disaster

The last time this happened, I went to Yellowstone for the day. I wanted to hang out with the bison, who have seen and survived so much worse, wanted to be in their presence. They’re calm, bison, until they aren’t. That day, in 2016, I drove down to the Park, climbed in my little Subaru up through Mammoth terraces, and over into the Lamar Valley. Almost no one was there. The skies were that perfect blue they turn in autumn. The aspens were gold. The bison were scattered across the expanse of the Lamar valley, still there despite of us. We tried so hard to exterminate them, in those violent years after our murderous Civil War. The violence didn’t end with the war. Much of it stayed where it was, still determined to dominate a people it deemed subordinate, other, lesser. More of it just moved West, with new targets. Those violent decades when we set out to annihilate indigenous peoples and the animals they relied on.

They’re still here, but that doesn’t make up for it. Doesn’t make any of it okay. Just reminds us that for all our lofty ideals, America has always been a rapacious place, fueled by violence. However, the presence of that big wooly bison bull, a few feet from my car, on that blue sky day in November 2016, did help calm me down, did help convince me that one could endure. Could endure a lot.

This time? This time we both woke up, and I looked at the news, and my teeth started chattering, which is what they do when I’m terrified. Now I’m going to have to buy that house in France, I thought. I’ve been looking at cheap houses in the French countryside for years now, since the pandemic, since the last time They won.

Himself though, he has no interest in moving to France. His heart’s place is that cabin where we woke up, that mountain we look at through the windows while we drink coffee. For decades, he’s rented it to vacationers during the season, and while that was a good, if modest, income stream for him, it was also a pleasure to share the place. We’d get notes from people, maps their kids had drawn to the things they found around the place, sometimes lego constructions made from the vintage cooler full of garage sale legos his mother sent every Christmas.

The last few years though, more people have trashed the cabin than have enjoyed it. We’d come in to a place left a wreck, pillows and blankets in all the wrong rooms, trash on the floors, sticky coating of pop on everything, oven with pools of grease on the bottom where someone cooked ribs without a pan, using just the oven rack. We’ve taken it out of the rental pool, just in the last few weeks.

We woke up to the news that the same kind of destructive, disrespectful, chaos people who have ruined our cabin these past few years are now going to do the same to the nation. But worse. I believe them when they say they want violence. I believe them when they say they want vindication. I believe them when they say they want to delist wolves and bears and mountain lions so they can murder them. I believe them when they say they want to raid people’s homes and split up families and deport immigrants who do all the dirty jobs they don’t want to do themselves. I believe them when they say they want to dismantle the social security and medicare we’re just on the cusp of being able to get, and when they say they want to sell off the public lands that make Montana the wonderful place to live that it is, to sell them off so only the rich can access them. I believe them about all of it.

Am I moving to France? Who knows? Not next week. I’m certainly not going to let these assholes blow up the life I’ve spent 20 years building here, just as I’m primed to live in the house I’ve paid off, on not very much money, and write these three books that are scattered around the place like cars on blocks. But I’m also going to start pulling my paperwork together, getting organized to start the application process for a long-term visa. I had the kind of childhood that leaves you deeply attuned to the vibe shift of disaster, and if I need to go first, to find a place for us all to land, me and Him and our younger friends and whoever else I need to drop a rope down to behind myself? Well yeah, I’m probably going to start all those processes.

Craft Camp

When my classmate Eleanor was diagnosed with a brain tumor mere weeks after my youngest brother Michael, aged two, died of leukemia, my mother’s response was to start a weekly craft camp. My mom called the other moms and said come once a week, does Thursday work? Once a week that fall, even as Mom was having to pack up our house because Dad took it in the divorce, even as our entire world had come crashing around our ears that year — Michael dying, Dad leaving, having to move, the beginning of decades of money troubles — even in the midst of all that my mother invited everyone to our house, and we covered the long dining room table with newspaper, and she gathered a gaggle of little kids and we made crafts. It gave us all something to do that Eleanor could participate in, and it gave the moms a reason to come together.

When I eulogized her two years ago, it was the crafts I brought up. My mother was bad at very many things, but she was very very good at entanglement, at finding things we could all do together in times of trouble, things we could all do while keeping one another company, that made us laugh because we were usually not very good at them, but that were fun. In times of trouble, my mother’s instinct was to get everyone in a room and make something, together. She did it when Tommy, who worked for her when she managed that swimming and tennis club, was about to be orphaned, at 21. She had the group of them who hadn’t gone back to college over to her tiny rental house once a week, and they practiced cooking and taught Tommy how to do laundry, but mostly they all just kept one another company.

None of these things changed the trajectories of the disasters. Eleanor still died, at 10. Tommy was still orphaned. Dad still left and we struggled to keep the lights on for decades after, but we did it all together. It’s one reason we all “come home” for funerals and weddings. We’re still connected to one another. Even though in my case, my mother is gone, my brothers are both gone.

Everyone I love is dead except for Himself. Part of why I’m not leaving him for France. I love him. He loves this place, and loves me. He loves America like a guy raised in Lexington MA loves America, with a deep passion for what we did at the beginning, for the ideals we espoused.

I’m a little more skeptical, but for now I’m here. Still.

What I made this week

We have both taken solace this week in shoring up our spaces for the winter.

I got my wood stacked, and put a new topper on my chicken run, tied it down with new fasteners, got it ready for our everpresent 40-60mph winter winds. I cleaned it out and put in the infrared heating panel and a new red light bulb and ran the long extension cord out there. The heater for their water is set up. and we’re ready for weather.

I did a bunch of outdoor things — planted bulbs in the big planters for spring, and picked another batch of herbs. I covered the strawberries and the herbs and built a little hoop house for them. I did some food prep for the coming weeks — breaded pork chops for the freezer, cooked up another big mess of backyard greens, pulled out the dormant sourdough starter and got it bubbling again.

Himself cooked a turkey last night, one that’s been in the freezer all summer (a summer that seems to have lasted until about two weeks ago). I took Hank-dog out for a walk last night while the cabin was full of the good smell of turkey, and there were coyotes yipping just over the south fencline, and what sounded like two different species of owls having some sort of long and involved conversation, and the moon was out, and although we’re both deeply freaked out, for now, we’re doing what we can, which is making things and fixing things and keeping our people connected.

The newsletter will wander back again into the theoretical territory I’ve been so enjoying exploring this year, but when disaster strikes, I am my mother’s daughter. I turn to making things. Making a home. Making food. Finishing those mittens that have been on my needles for too long. Going downstairs to cut out another pair of pants, a couple of tops from that lovely linen/wool fabric I ordered weeks ago.

These are the reasons I’m interested in materiality in the first place. Because every time there’s been a disaster, and there have been so many of them, the only thing that’s been a solace are the actual material things of the world. The mountains around me. That eagle sitting on that branch overlooking the Yellowstone who I see most mornings driving back into town. Stacking wood and harvesting food out of my garden. Chickens and the dog and the cat. The lovely person beside me in the mornings, drinking coffee, and really hoping I won’t talk to him for another 30 minutes because he is very much not a morning person. My community and all the people I made sure to check in on this week, people who are in varying states of worry and upset. The people I’ll get through this with.

So here’s to each of us identifying our people, shoring up those relationships, and figuring out what the things are that we can do to get through this together, and to sheild those among us who are in so much more danger than we are.