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Since the day the firefighters were marching up those steps - the ones everyone else was pouring down - it's been hard for me to make believe that fiction matters as much as is necessary to bring it to life; which is to say, to treat it as seriously as life - as seriously as death. And the same is true for me as an activist. (Next to life and death, doesn't activism really become more like a hobby?)
A week after September 11, one of my editors closed her letter to me with, "I have not spoken of the events of last week simply because any words I can think of seem too inadequate." I think this is near the heart of what I have been feeling, as an artist and an activist, and that because of it - because of that powerlessness - I am resting now. I find myself sitting quietly in front of the fire, or staring out the winter window (am I the only one? surely not) waiting for...something.
I am waiting to believe again in the myth of short story writing, or the dream world of novels, or of music, or of painting, and waiting to believe again, too, in the myth of my activism - the belief that a river can be saved, or a mountain range, or an entire species; and believing that, while not as immediately primal as yesterday's or today's or tomorrow's life or death, these things still matter fiercely.
WHERE I LIVE, WE EAT DEER, elk, morels, huckleberries, trout - all from the woods. We have gardens, and saw our own wood, sometimes tote our water from the creek, or from a well. Other than being somewhat downwind of the Hanford nuclear plant, which is leaking anyway, there are thankfully moments in nearly every day in which the events of September 11 seem far away - not as distant as Somalia, or northern Ireland, or Israel, or Yugoslavia, but distant. Sure, we feel guilty and lucky both.
Here now is the hard part to write: the part that might at first sound unpatriotic. It is the part that is in me, as I slowly awaken, or reawaken, from the nightmare, and the part that I need to say to myself, and to someone else - the part that many of us have been too shell-shocked to say. And that is: Which is the dream, and which is the real-life?
What if there were an enemy among us, a corporation, (like W.R. Grace, for instance), possessing the rights of an individual but none of the responsibility, that willfully spread the spores, the phantom dust, the tiny fibers of a material - call it tremolite - so deadly that there is no cure? And that this enemy killed hundreds of people with that contamination, and inflicted some degree of damage upon, perhaps, a third of an entire American town?
Suppose some foreign aggressor were to threaten to cut us off from our power, our energy supply? Or suppose that supply was commandeered by profiteers, (like PP&L, say), whose earnings ballooned by 1200% on the resale to us of power generated from our own rivers, our own wind, our sun?
What if there were an attack - in Montana - on one of the nation's first ten wilderness areas? What if some crazed throng plotted to blast a tunnel beneath this wilderness, ferrying away the stone heart of the mountain, pouring their poisonous slurry into the pristine Rock Creek, and into the Clark Fork, where we just spent $132 million taxpayer dollars cleaning up after the last such attack?
Suppose bombs were dropped from the sky - smart bombs, dumb bombs - which leveled nearly all of our big trees, leaving behind only the small and the sick, the overstocked - the flammable, unmarketable fine fuels - and forced our sawmills to flee to the Southeast?
What if the nation's unemployment rate were to suddenly rise into the double digits, which is what it has averaged in Lincoln County now for the better part of two decades - the legacy of a boom-and-bust commodity-based culture that has placed its bet for too long on the mercy of cutthroat corporations?
Homeland defense? Tell it to the Gwich'in people, whose culture and livelihood have relied on the Porcupine Caribou herd for the last ten thousand years, which calves on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the present Chief Executive and his House of Republicans wish to drill in the hopes of extracting another two months worth of oil, ten years from now.
Homeland defense? Am I the only one who has dreams, strangely specific, once every few weeks, about being on a plane and wrestling with the attackers, trying to change the outcome - trying to protect things, trying to be a hero?
AS WE SLOWLY RE-EMERGE back into that surreal, so-called normal world, broadcasters will once more begin the news at the top of the hour with a report on how the stock market is doing, continuing to assume that it is our heart's desire. Banality will return, but so too will the sweet and the powerful, and we will return to engage the lesser terrors. The necessity of things like kestrels and coral reefs, grizzlies and whitebark pine trees, and concerts and museums, will come slowly back into focus.
We cannot force it, this return to quiet, confident, assured, and abiding activism. But it will return, on its own, like any of an infinite number of the other natural phenomena, natural processes. It will return like pride, like faith or trust. Like joy. Like love.
This is one of the luxurious myths of life itself: a belief that beauty matters, that music matters, clean air and water matter, wild strawberries matter, elk matter, communities matter, mountains matter, wilderness matters; and that while we cannot control the comings and goings of life and death, we can choose to participate in - and defend, or not defend - beauty, and the innocence of a nature that tries, even still, not just to accommodate, but even to celebrate, our presence in the world.
In her poem, "The Wild Geese," Mary Oliver writes,
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
I BEGIN, SLOWLY, TO LISTEN to music; to read a few pages each night solely for pleasure. I pause to watch the snow falling, like a kind of healing. But there is much to be done; still so much to defend in all directions, and the enemies of patriotism are so many and so powerful. They seem to prefer to operate as if within a dream, as if none of it - the insidiousness of the loss - were noticeable. They prefer to continue working beneath the clamor and confusion of our pain, as if beneath radar, and with the subtlety offered by time's accrual.
They would prefer that we not awaken. They would prefer that we not ask questions or make demands. They would prefer that we not notice any of the losses: that we remain sleeping. They would prefer that we leave the defense of the homeland entirely up to them.
The evil side wins if we forget to create beauty, a friend wrote recently, and I expect the same is true of protecting it. Rest as long as you need, would be my advice, and then come back. And bring a friend. There are greater and lesser terrors in the world. Some of them will be as horrible as the blackest heart of man. But against such iniquity, the sight of our mountains, and of the wild nature within them - unharmed, enduring - seems at least as important to me now as it ever did.
Wendell Berry | Alison Deming | William Kittredge
Richard Nelson | David W. Orr | Chet Raymo | Pattiann Rogers
Scott Russell Sanders
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