Make no mistake, it's a disaster.
The last time this happened, I went to Yellowstone for the day. I wanted to hang out with the bison, who have seen and survived so much worse, wanted to be in their presence. They’re calm, bison, until they aren’t. That day, in 2016, I drove down to the Park, climbed in my little Subaru up through Mammoth terraces, and over into the Lamar Valley. Almost no one was there. The skies were that perfect blue they turn in autumn. The aspens were gold. The bison were scattered across the expanse of the Lamar valley, still there despite of us. We tried so hard to exterminate them, in those violent years after our murderous Civil War. The violence didn’t end with the war. Much of it stayed where it was, still determined to dominate a people it deemed subordinate, other, lesser. More of it just moved West, with new targets. Those violent decades when we set out to annihilate indigenous peoples and the animals they relied on.
They’re still here, but that doesn’t make up for it. Doesn’t make any of it okay. Just reminds us that for all our lofty ideals, America has always been a rapacious place, fueled by violence. However, the presence of that big wooly bison bull, a few feet from my car, on that blue sky day in November 2016, did help calm me down, did help convince me that one could endure. Could endure a lot.
This time? This time we both woke up, and I looked at the news, and my teeth started chattering, which is what they do when I’m terrified. Now I’m going to have to buy that house in France , I thought. I’ve been looking at cheap houses in the French countryside for years now, since the pandemic, since the last time They won.
Himself though, he has no interest in moving to France. His heart’s place is that cabin where we woke up, that mountain we look at through the windows while we drink coffee. For decades, he’s rented it to vacationers during the season, and while that was a good, if modest, income stream for him, it was also a pleasure to share the place. We’d get notes from people, maps their kids had drawn to the things they found around the place, sometimes lego constructions made from the vintage cooler full of garage sale legos his mother sent every Christmas.
The last few years though, more people have trashed the cabin than have enjoyed it. We’d come in to a place left a wreck, pillows and blankets in all the wrong rooms, trash on the floors, sticky coating of pop on everything, oven with pools of grease on the bottom where someone cooked ribs without a pan, using just the oven rack. We’ve taken it out of the rental pool, just in the last few weeks.
We woke up to the news that the same kind of destructive, disrespectful, chaos people who have ruined our cabin these past few years are now going to do the same to the nation. But worse. I believe them when they say they want violence. I believe them when they say they want vindication. I believe them when they say they want to delist wolves and bears and mountain lions so they can murder them. I believe them when they say they want to raid people’s homes and split up families and deport immigrants who do all the dirty jobs they don’t want to do themselves. I believe them when they say they want to dismantle the social security and medicare we’re just on the cusp of being able to get, and when they say they want to sell off the public lands that make Montana the wonderful place to live that it is, to sell them off so only the rich can access them. I believe them about all of it.
Am I moving to France? Who knows? Not next week. I’m certainly not going to let these assholes blow up the life I’ve spent 20 years building here, just as I’m primed to live in the house I’ve paid off, on not very much money, and write these three books that are scattered around the place like cars on blocks. …..