Wednesday, April 20, 2011

This Land Is Your Land


It was evening, the salmon feast had been cleared away, and the hundred or so participants in the annual meeting of the Oregon Natural Desert Association were hanging out, listening to the local country band, the Wheeler County Ramblers, or circling the bonfire outside the dining hall at Hancock Field Station, in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.  We were feeling very good, helped by a keg of microbrew and the righteous tiredness of having toiled on the side of the earth all day.

I had been with a group who hiked a very steep road for two miles to remove a half mile of barbed wire fence.  Most of us had joined ONDA on a fencepull before, so we quickly found an order to the work, first untwisting the metal stays that spread the strands of wire apart, and then unbending the wire clips holding the wire to the metal posts.  Once the wire was hanging limply, we cut it and rolled it into pointy wreaths, piling them for later pickup with a truck.  Finally, the more brawny members of the group used the levered post-puller to wrench the post out of the ground.



The volunteers were mostly from the ranks of the retired and near retired, contrasting with the youthful staff of ONDA.  During the hike and work we compared our lives, finding  intersections in our backgrounds,  and we looked from the high ridge to the vistas surrounding us.  Although the day was mostly cloudy, the brown hills were starkly beautiful,  with outcroppings colored by the volcanic ash formations for which this area is known.  The one stripe of green was in the valley where a curve of the John Day river could be seen, bisecting the spring hayfields. 

I was struck by how capable humans can be, whether in putting up this fence to turn a jumble of contours into a container for cattle, or when removing the same fence, erasing the legacy of exploitation, and giving wildlife another chance to roam free.  Once we have a purpose, we can do most anything we can think of.  This has been our genius and our curse.

Back in the dining hall, the Ramblers were dutifully playing through the top one hundred hits of the 1960's. and '70's.   Of course I  knew them all,  and something in me demands that I move my feet whenever a drumkit starts pumping out a rock beat.  As I was hopping around in some semblance of dancing I perfected around 1975, the band started into the Woody Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."  Although I had never danced to this folk song before, I realized that this song has been the hymn of my whole life.  Whether I first learned it at school, or with the neighborhood activists who gathered the local kids for "Hootenannies," this song has perfectly embodied both my nationalism and revolution in one gesture.  This land will always be yours and mine, and how to have both at once, sharing with others and treasuring it for yourself, is the eternal tension of our life on this planet.



 

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Sleepless In Seattle


     I have spent the last two weeks at the mercy of the flu.  It made me less able to fill my head with busyness, which changed my perspective from relentlessly purposeful to a more passive awareness.     
     "What do you want for dinner?" Robert asks, rising to the role of nurse.
     "I don't care, as long as it isn't a lot," I answer, for once throwing out all the various food rules I might otherwise invoke: as in, nothing we already had this week, nothing flown in from another hemisphere, nothing that swims in the ocean, etc.
 
      In such a mood, I stumbled on the Seattle Area Happiness survey, which I recommend, for a reality check about your own view of yourself. http://www.sustainableseattle.org/survey/GNH/en/.  Apparently, I have been exaggerating my degree of satisfaction with life.  Or more likely, I accept my cynicism as intellectual rigor, rather than the actual damper on pleasure that it is.  Anyway, I scored below average in happiness.
  
      Maybe I am too fond of the scientific method, but taking the survey made me think of the aspects of myself that pull me down.  One of them is the sheer weight of personal history.  Even when life is good in the present, I unconsciously measure today's happiness against the accumulated disappointments that have come before.  This is bolstered by the knowledge that I have proof of such disappointment, filed in shoeboxes in a closet, under the heading of mementos.  I keep cards, letters, ticket stubs, programs, and the like, in order to have a record of my life.  To be certain of my general impression of these materials, I open a box and start going through it.  Evidence of bad choices in love immediately overbalances best wishes in Christmas cards, good grades of my son, and proof of a steady diet of cultural happenings.  Reading such mementos  shows that I have a long history of struggling with disatisfactions, both in myself and others.  I continually resolve to change everything into some ideal that has yet to materialize.  No wonder I am unable to just be.

     Sickness has a way of focusing us back to the physical self.  I can't begin to philosophize about how I should live when coughing makes my ribs hurt.  But getting back to health, I do see a route to more happiness.  I begin to toss the contents of those shoeboxes.  Not everything, but the stuff that makes me feel bad.  Why did I think I would want to refresh those recollections?  After filling a grocery sack, I am starting to feel better.