The struggle was never resolved, through difficulties, through conflicts within the tribe, through changing times, through the arrival of gold mines that scraped and developed and polluted their valley and pumped out its water and flooded the Dann family cemetery. I was sad about their stalemate and the government’s war of attrition and grateful for my time with them. But the larger shift taking place made me hopeful as never before. I saw the power of people on the margins to change foundational stories, saw something absolutely unforeseen emerge, saw how, as those changes spread, signs and school textbooks, monuments, place names, land management practices, and sometimes laws changed, how museums gave back the bones and the relics to the people whose ancestors and treasures they were, how gradually all these tangible things meant something more important and less tangible.
It did not mean that everything was fine, but it was a profound shift with practical consequences, including in the understanding and management of natural systems and places. That transformation convinced me that culture could change politics, that representations could shape realities, that what we did as writers and historians mattered, that changing the story of the past could change the future. It was the genesis of a profound hope for me about the possibility of deep, unanticipated change and the capacity of those deemed marginal or insignificant to bring it about. The rising visibility and power of Native nations in the Americas felt of a piece with the nonviolent revolutions that had toppled the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years later, which I’d followed closely, with exhilaration.
That was my golden age, not because I had escaped the evils of this world but because I had found ways to think about them and sometimes do something about them, valiant companions in the efforts, places to fall in love with, and ideas that transformed me. I had begun returning to the place in which I spent the first two years of my life, Northern New Mexico, where I had the great fortune to be befriended by the older feminist writer Lucy Lippard, whose response to the manuscript of Savage Dreams was, essentially, to give me the key to her little house (and a nice blurb). I began spending part of every summer house-sitting for her out on the prairie, enraptured by the sky, the space, the light, and the thunderstorms. Later in the 1990s, I got involved with a man who lived in southeastern California’s Mojave Desert and spent part of my time there for four years.
Our best as well as our worst emotions are contagious, and I benefited from the gallantry, boldness, dedication, and humor of all these Westerners close to the land (and Lucy’s transplanted New England brisk fearlessness). And I grew close to the places themselves, and drew from them joys and strengths. I had developed the confidence to start moving freely around the West, gotten the pickup truck that let me go farther up dirt roads and into remote places and in whose camper shell I spent many nights, gotten friends in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada to visit. I was now roving across the western United States a lot, not to escape but to arrive in a deeper sense of home and to build and maintain ties across the region. I was cultivating a persona rooted in this place, in nonchalance about physical challenges ranging from driving and walking long distances to living outdoors and facing down the authorities in environmental protests. This was who I wanted to be, and some of it was a performance complete with trappings—pearl-snap shirts, dusty country-music cassette tapes for the pickup truck, a nice camp kit—but some of it went deeper.
The writing was going well enough that I felt hopeful about it and not so well that there were, as there would be later, a lot of demands on me. So I roamed and explored and made the most of the invitations that came my way. I was rich in time, and alive with excitement about the worlds and connections and ideas opening up to me. I miss the ability I had then to jump into my truck and go someplace for a week or two, to take the long way around, to linger and explore and not worry too much about obligations. I was free.
2
In the evenings when the sky near the horizon is apricot and the sky above is still blue I sometimes try to find the seam between the two colors, but in the heavens there is only a pallor between these opposites that is easy not to notice. Sometimes too in the evening I try to watch the colors change or a shadow grow longer across the landscape, and almost always my attention flickers for a moment and then I realize that the tree that was half in light has been swallowed by darkness or the brightness and sharp shadows have suddenly diffused because the sun has dipped or the sky that was cobalt is now midnight blue. Things are one way and then another and the transitions are hard to mark.
The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure; suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived. So much of what changed is hard for those who lived through it to remember and those who came after to imagine. In many parts of American society, kindness has increasingly become a criterion applied to all forms of interaction, but its absence before was elusive, because it’s too easy to not notice who and what is not in the room. Myriad forms of injustice became visible in ways that made it seem normal to recognize them and easy to forget by what toil they became visible (which always raises the question of what else we do not yet see, and for what failings future eras will rebuke us). The evolution of feminism makes some of the formerly nameless unrecognizability of many kinds of discrimination hard to recall, though that is one measure of the difference between then and now.
There were epic public changes that make the era of my youth a foreign country, one in which I no longer live and which the young will never visit, and most will never know how different it was and why it changed and who to thank. My own life metamorphosed by degrees I would only perceive in retrospect. I was almost friendless, and the friends I had made as a teenager and in my early twenties were mostly bad fits; perhaps it was because I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be someone else and so I didn’t know who was like me or who liked me. Or because kindness was not a criterion. Then later in my twenties I made friends who have lasted, and then some more, and then that sense of being on the far edge alone became a sense of being on the borderlands between various realms, so that I began to have the pleasure of bringing ideas, projects, and people from one circle to another, and the lack and loneliness were gone.
I went through a phase of approaching the powers that I had assumed were not for me and maybe not for my gender. I bought a motorcycle at the beginning of the 1990s, and revving the engine and kick-starting it and moving its weight to park it or bring it back upright or pick it up when it got knocked over gave me a kind of macho pleasure (more than riding it, which I always found a little scary, because of cars, before it was stolen nine months after I bought it). I learned to work out with weights and weight machines shortly thereafter, having finally noticed that the body requires maintenance and that the stress that petrified my form yielded at least temporarily to violent exertion.
Two or three years later, the boyfriend who lived in the Mojave taught me to shoot a .22 rifle—we went out into the desert and aimed at Old English malt liquor cans late one beautiful afternoon until evening came and our shadows stretched for a hundred feet and more across the flat ground. I found it alarmingly fun, though when we went shooting with his father, who’d spent his life in the military and a lot of time in combat, he told me the story of being forced by a general’s direct orders to shoot a civilian on a hill a long way away—and how he had nightmares ever after. It was a solemn and graceful warning to take guns seriously. And I studied Shotokan karate for a little while with a world champion fighter who feared nothing when she walked down the street. Just to shout and kick and strike required a different sense of self. Each of these felt like a little usurpation of powers that I had once believed were not for people like me. Things were changing.
Street harassment largely ceased to be a problem, and my wariness softened, though it never went away. It was not a science experiment with a control
, so it’s hard to say what exactly changed. Perhaps I aged out of my prime target years. Perhaps the culture changed in some way, though I know young women still suffer street harassment and assault. Perhaps the ways I became street-smart were a factor: I learned how to give those I encountered respect and acknowledgment, and to not get caught up in anyone else’s drama—to be fluid on the street, moving smoothly without snagging or rushing. White men fell silent. The commentary from the black men in my neighborhood grew uniformly cordial, as some of it always had been, and I tried to say pleasant things back, and enjoyed the interactions.
I published short pieces and reviews and then longer pieces and more ambitious essays. I wrote a book and then a more ambitious book and then another in that vein and then I wrote my history of walking, Wanderlust, which appeared in 2000, the first book for which I got an advance that approximated a living wage, the first book that circulated widely. Each book answered a question I began with and by its end generated other questions. That history of walking made me wonder about two things that I explored in what became my next two books.
I wrote A Field Guide to Getting Lost to go deeper into ideas about wandering, venturing into the unknown, coming to terms with the essential mystery at the heart of things, and about loss. I was not sure whether I would ever show it to anyone, or whether I would finish it or whether it was publishable, or whether I wanted to publish it. Then I did and it had a quiet life at first and then an interesting one as people found it and quoted it and some artists made work in response to it.
The other of the two books to emerge from Wanderlust was about technological change and the disembodiment that came with the transcendence of time and space that machines made possible, and it was centered on Eadweard Muybridge, the British photographer who laid the groundwork for what became motion pictures (and documented San Francisco, where he lived during much of his prime, when he murdered his wife’s lover, made some of the greatest landscape and panoramic photographs of the nineteenth century, and transformed, with high-speed sequential photography, what scientists and artists knew about humans in motion).
Something else shifted in the work around the time the Muybridge book was published in the spring of 2003. It came in part from seeing Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams talk and from meeting Susan Sontag. I asked myself why, though I was writing about politics in various ways, I wasn’t speaking as directly as Sontag was to what was in the news, or as Barry and Terry were to what lay underneath the news, the terrors and yearnings and ideals that drive our public as well as our private selves. And I was beginning to collect stories that illustrated my evolving sense of how the world gets changed and where power lies and what the case for hope is.
Another one of my amusingly awful encounters with older white men helped bring together that collection of ideas into the May 2003 essay “Hope in the Dark” and the 2004 book of that title. One day in the spring of 2003, my work was featured in a university colloquium with a man who launched an extended ad hominem attack on me, my motives, and my hopefulness. I’d arrived at that hopefulness in the course of pursuing a return project in Yosemite National Park. In 2001, with the artists Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, I’d ventured in to rephotograph Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs there and understand what had changed since he made them in 1872. Our project grew into a broader survey of earlier photographers, modernist as well as Victorian, and of what had and had not changed since their times. The exploration gave me a magnificently complex sense of change as something that does not occur at a predictable rate but varies widely from place to place and entity to entity: some trees were still recognizable more than a century later, some arrangements of small boulders had not moved in all that time, but the Merced River had shifted its bed, forests had devoured meadows, and celebrated old landmarks had vanished.
I thought I was there to look at change over the span of 130 years, but I was astonished to find how much had changed in less than a decade since I had scrutinized the place for Savage Dreams. Native people had gained some rights and a lot more representation in the park. Before whites had arrived, they had set fires as part of their land management techniques, and the Park Service had finally recognized fire as part of the place’s ecology after a century of fire suppression. And the park’s visitors were far more ethnically diverse; the sense of one cosmology having been pushed out by another was giving way, or so it seemed to me, to a sense of the coexistence of many worldviews and a big adjustment in the Eurocentric one to recognize—imperfectly, incompletely, but still—the rights and presence of indigenous Americans. California was on its way to becoming a nonwhite-majority state and some of the promise of that I had found in the park this time around.
This was the hopeful vision I’d presented at the university, where the academic man had laid into my motives and my character for half an hour or so, in front of the students I’d brought from the writing class I was teaching at an art school. He was attached to his narratives that everything was getting worse, to his despair (and, I was told by mutual friends, resentful that my pile of publications kept growing). I was appalled I’d brought these young women, at my dean’s urging, to hear elevated discourse and they’d heard this instead. The whole thing churned in my head until a couple of days later when I got up before dawn and returned to that old desk in the east bay window of my home and wrote until sunrise arrived and a raven landed on the telephone wires just beyond the window and I’d made the preliminary case for hope to my satisfaction. “Thank you for sitting all the way through my, um, very interesting colloquium, and a special thanks to Maggie and Kristina for making supportive faces at me from across the room,” I wrote them. “For me, the ultimate subject is what kinds of histories can we imagine and can we tell.”
The academic conflict over my ideas had taken place thirteen days before the Iraq War began in a hail of American bombs on March 20, 2003. Earlier that year I’d put together a group of my friends—a Gulf War vet, a singer who was an old friend from the Nevada Test Site days, a gay Cuban Buddhist, an astrophysicist, a domestic violence advocate—under the rubric B.A.D.A.S.S., the Bay Area Direct Action Secret Society. We were part of a global movement that the month before had held the biggest demonstration in world history, in thousands of locations, hundreds of countries, on all seven continents. We dressed as superheroes, dressed in business casual, dressed in white with our own faces in white masks and the faces of Iraqi children on our chests, dressed in black. We marched, we did street theater, we sang, and then the bombs began falling and, horrorstruck, we helped shut down the city’s financial district.
Many years later I heard a story from Natashia Deón who was then a corporate attorney living in a high-rise near that district. On one of the big days of protest, she came down from her perch to buy a soda, looked around at the throngs on the boulevard, and wondered what she was doing with her life. She decided to change it. She became a lawyer who defends the indigent, passionately, and then, a few years after we became friends, a successful novelist. What she told me years later was the kind of story I’d collected to make the case that you can’t assume that you know why what you’re doing matters. You can’t at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.
When the bombing of Baghdad began, some of the friends I’d protested with and others around me extrapolated from the fact that they had not stopped the war the idea that they had not achieved anything, and sometimes they traveled onward from there to the idea they’d never achieved anything, had no power, and that we were all doomed. Despair became a machine that would grind up anything you fed it. That prompted me to work harder on the case for hope I was building. I’d been informally collecting passages and examples, and on the day after the attack at the university forum I’d written that letter making the case for hope to send to some of the people who’d been in attendance there. Disagreement often prompts clarificat
ion, at least in my case, and it can be useful even when its intention is adversarial. Half my muses have been haters.
After the war began, I worked in a sort of trance all day and into the night for three or four days to shape the material into the essay “Hope in the Dark.” Anecdotes and examples that had been accruing for years suddenly had a pattern to fit into, and the pattern was the case for hope. Some of it was recycled from the letter to my students. It was the first thing I published exclusively online, and it went viral as nothing I’d ever done before had, picked up by alternative weeklies, reprinted as a small booklet by a graphic designer, forwarded over and over by email in those days before social media.
I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while some things were getting worse, the long view—especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite—showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance. They were often not knowable soon afterward and sometimes ever after since great strategists, idealists, and movements sometimes prompt indirect repercussions in other times and places and struggles. I’d seen nonviolent direct action liberate Eastern European countries from their totalitarian governments in 1989, seen the Zapatista insurgency emerge from the Lacandon jungle in 1994, seen the government of Canada create the vast indigenous-governed territory of Nunavut in 1999, seen things I’d never dreamed possible come to pass. In 2004 I turned the essay on hope into a small book, and over the following years it came out in a dozen other countries and languages.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 16
