Opinion: To Grow a Healthy Forest, Stay Connected
“The old world is dying and the New World struggles to be born.
Now is the time of monsters.”
— Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian communist imprisoned by Mussolini.
I spend as much time as I can in places like Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. No knock-on California, but I haven’t found the dry-fly fishing that I grew up knowing in Upper Michigan here. Other Western places provide that, and in a more magnificent setting than the lush, green, heavily forested, largely unpopulated landscapes I long called home.
Having family near the over-peopled Yellowstone, I mostly stay out of the park and hike and fish nearby places that scurrilous travel writers have not yet found.
Boarding a plane in Wyoming, the woman who had checked me in for my flight back to California an hour earlier was about to record my ticket. She remarked to the person in front of me, “Nothing but Lauras today. That’s three in a row with the same first name.”
Not content to mind my own business, I stepped forward and said, “I’m not a Laura.”
Her reply was instant: “Not yet!” Oh boy! In a place where billboards say, “Don’t Californicate God’s Country,” I often wonder just how hostile Wyoming is to certain outsiders?
I paused, not to respond with anger, and smiled. With some considerable embarrassment, the ticket agent hastened to say, “I’m so sorry.”
“No, that’s funny as hell. Yeah, we’re all transitioning, we just don’t have a clue about what comes next.”
Transitioning. So much seems to have changed and so quickly. Are we supposed to love Russia now? To hate education? To eschew decency at every turn?
I have read stories about stands of aspen where each tree is connected to every tree in such a way that one might accurately say that there’s only one tree, but it springs up from the Earth in 10,000 different spots, making a forest. Is it absurd to think people might, at some level, be connected in a similar way?
With human longevity being tied so significantly to having good relationships with other human beings, unity, rather than division, seems to be the predicate to peaceable living. That’s my lived experience. I have paid a price when I have sown division.
The decades-old political divisions in America fail to make us happy. But they certainly keep some people in office and put money in the hands of those who choose to exploit the separation caused by hateful rhetoric.
If I were making a resolution for the new year, it would be simple: I must remind myself every day of the rare gift that life is, and to live the words of Charles Dickens: “No one is useless if he lightens the burden of another.”
A modest undertaking, promoting something akin to a healthy forest.
Steven Pence reflects on the world in Ferndale.
