Humans write. The process is a journey—and we feel it. Can I poke the process? Where are the handles and buttons? Why do it at all? There are many useful metrics, but the mind matters more. Your best writing hits the page as ideas or feelings escape your mind. That stems from experience—your personal collision with the Universe. That’s the source, without which there is no journey.
Last fall, my wife and I took our longest car journey in years, to Arizona. Pandemic tamed, we would pick up where we left off. The West we knew would be undimmed—unchanged, glorious, seductive. It wasn't there. Or it was altered. We crossed a wild, hilly area west of Denver with stunning rocks, the forested parts largely burnt. Fires happen, right?
Two mountains later, sand dunes taller than city blocks faded behind us. In the twilight, satellite radio slaked our desiccated boredom with a program on Musk and what made him. We crossed a mighty pass and halted in a touristy town for supplies. During an unpaved adventure down a long river valley, we witnessed the quiet beauty of two wading elk where the road neared the river. But a reservoir at the valley bottom trumpeted change, a diminished lake surrounded by ugly, menacing mud flats. Who stole a big chunk of water?
One ice cream sandwich later, Shiprock loomed, whispering, "Nothing I care about ever changes." Crumbling roads with loose joints replaced fresh pavement of a few years earlier, giving our drive a cadence akin to horseback riding. We crossed another mountain to our hotel, welcoming as ever. The Navajo still mask. There it made sense—revered elders lost. Obedience was law and honored the grief.
Desert became forested hills, punctuated by a mind-numbing construction delay. Price of progress? We flew down long, cactus-studded hills toward the Phoenix metro. Ahead, a tilted pickup flung sparks from an empty wheel hub. Its rogue tire bounced down the pavement, caroming off guardrails. As we approached the flats, satellite radio entertained us again, about chess masters with AI assistants who "cheat" during matches. A game once learned from books boasts online tools making books obsolete faster than written.
After our beehive business in the city, we rewound the journey. A picnic by a lake on a basin rim at seven-thousand-plus cold and windy feet preceded an unpaved road through forest in light rain. Made it, perhaps because we didn’t stop. At Winslow, a handful of quarters and a car wash sloughed the mud.
Next night a mountain cabin in New Mexico, good times with a nephew and his bae. We crossed forested heights to impressive cliff dwellings inhabited less than a century. We don’t experience them as descendants do, linkage to ancestors who walked the ground—living, laughing, loving, hunting. Did climate change prod them to go?
I craved the majesty of an isolated road through a forest but a ranger dissuaded me, "More rain than ever since February, and road damage. All bets are off.” Eden was blown—wilderness access was no longer a given. Expectations popped like a soap bubble striking a rock.
In Albuquerque, we met a farmer whose family worked land near there for generations. He lamented, "Every year I spend months glued to equipment seats scratching a living. It gets harder and harder. Climate change isn’t new, but we accelerated the process." He wants a new job. This begs the question, what do we eat when farmers quit? Our chipper motel clerk left a young daughter at night. After work, she would be too sleepy to play with her child. But it was her first good job in two years!
Near Las Vegas (New Mexico) was a national forest linked by two paved roads. A mother deer on the road regarded us, like immigrants it might turn away should it possess the force to do so. She jumped a fence to join her young one. Another fence ahead blocked the road. Fire-fighting equipment lay about. As we prepared to retreat, a couple in a truck visited, perhaps making certain we weren't vandals or thieves. The pain of damage tainted their eyes and stained their voices. No big deal to flat-land outsiders, but forests need years to recover their glory.
That evening at a motel popular with workmen, automatic night lights were two hours out of adjustment. I fumbled to get my ice bucket to the correct room, wishing I had my phone flashlight. The juice machine had a sign at breakfast, "Out of order.” Three words encapsulated the trip now. We saw them over and over.
We have war, famines, fires, floods, inflation, shootings, climate change on steroids. No one knows if there is a new normal. Turmoil was pervasive, yet friendly, cheerful people were everywhere. Do we whistle past a graveyard? James Cameron says we suffer from a collective nature deficit. Like fish in a pond, we stew in our own poisons. Old institutions like church and government disappoint and politics grows ever more shrill. Our relationship with Earth requires intervention, hopefully not from Klatu. I don’t worry about the planet. Earth will be fine—it’s us that concerns me. Apocalypse stories never appealed, but now? What will sustain us?
Brandi Carlile sang about a different failed relationship, "You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you stay in the eye.” Can we have serenity? Can we make our eye, and dance in it? Fiction writers have an app for that. A friend mentioned something Vonnegut wrote, "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of." So we sadists spin tales about fictitious people overcoming imaginary challenges. Might that neutralize feelings that roil our own lives? Can writing become a serenity aid? Yeah. At the same time, we may inspire others to find their own eye, so they can dance, too.
Photo by Karthik Sreenivas on Unsplash