So, there's a vaccine—two, actually. But not much has changed, here, where one river empties into another. It's easy to suppose that "major breakthroughs" are going to change the state of things. Yet as I look out the window at the fog closing in, at the silhouette of Mt. Hood darkening under dusk, as the snow across the western faces of the eastern hills becomes gilded like white gold... not much has changed.
We took the tyke out today. He left small fishbone boot-prints across the snow. I swear that kid would spend all day outside—in the rain, sleet and snow—if we let him. Our pumpkins were good and frostbitten. Mushy about the tops. I smashed them with the heel of my galoshes and into our new black compost tumbler they went.
Compost is a misunderstood wonder.
In goes garbage, out comes—to a gardener's point of view—black gold.
I'm talking a lot about gold, it seems. About worth, value, promises. I read today about Jean Shepherd, writer and narrator of A Christmas Story. His work often concerned itself with the difference between who we like to think we are and who we actually are—as individuals, society, families, cultures. It can be painful to see yourself from the outside, not unlike how Scrooge is forced to encounter his past self in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. At some point—what with the regrets and repercussions of our past mistakes made vivid before us—we must turn away, beg the spirit to make it stop, because we can no longer bear the sight of our true selves.
Who we actually are...
Someone said somewhere that Christmas time was the best time to be honest, truthful, plainspoken, to ourselves. I'll give it a go.
It's very possible my writing is not anywhere near as good as I like to think! There are manifold moments of despair, actually, when I'm convinced it's all rubbish. Whatever idea I thought clever, whatever stream of words, sentences, paragraphs I've plugged together, whatever story I tell... I tell it to myself, mostly. It's a story of failure and futility. Why keep trying? Rejection after rejection is what you'll always receive. You're just not good enough. Smart enough. Connected enough. Educated enough. Literary enough. You never will be.
Out on the Columbia River, you won't find just one dam, you'll find many. The Army Corps of Engineers actually picks up baby salmon downriver and trucks them westward up I-84, then dumps them upriver a bit, on the other side of the dams, so they can continue their migration and propagate.
It's ridiculous, you might say.
That humanity would destroy a migration route to affect one worthwhile project, namely hydroelectric power, worth a lot of money you can imagine, then spend additional money and effort redressing and reinventing what was destroyed and—before man's intervention—happened of its own course.
I think what I'm trying to get at it is this: nothing's perfect. Even drastic changes and major breakthroughs aren't always what they promise to be. Even if humanity were to go on a wholesale environmentalist, conservationist, naturalist bonanza—with total renewable energy, absolute zero this, one-hundred-and-ten percent that—still we'd make a mess of things. Still, much of the natural world would suffer, change and shift by our mere presence. Still, we'd be making some pollution somewhere, or ending the existence of an entire species elsewhere, or burning down rainforest, or killing innocent whales with giant propellers, or growing, butchering and consuming other life so that we may ourselves be alive.
To be alive, to be human, is to be imperfect, impure, even prone to failure. Perhaps the most human of humans are those who accept and remember their imperfections—their mistakes, their failed dreams, their past delusions. Any one of us has, at times, been rude, mean, hurtful towards others, wasteful, taken the natural world for granted. Any of our lives are at any time ripe for the harvesting of the fruits of guilt, regret and shame.... and how it puckers our mouths to ingest the fruit of our own spoils...
Being human, though... it's alright. I'll take it, and be grateful for it.
And I'll call it there.
That's all from the house between a pear orchard and a cherry orchard tonight. Sing a few more Christmas songs before the holiday wears out, and I'll look forward to hearing them. Till then, good luck and good health, until I see you next time, right here, where one river empties into another. Thanks for reading.