When the world doesn't end

how to make peace with things as they are

just two sport-utility chihuahuas in an autumnal wood

First- there are only a few spots left in my February beginner guided Arizona trips, so get on that if you’re interested- deets are here! And applications have started rolling in for my intermediate Utah trips in April, wherein we’ll practice navigation by wandering cross-country through enchanted canyons and washes, so check that out soon as well if you have interest. Deets here. And if you applied for the Utah trips and haven’t gotten an email back, check your spam folder!

Fall in Fairbanks is beautiful beyond belief. I didn’t know! Fall in Anchorage is a wash, at least in my opinion- oppressive grey clouds, endless heavy rain. But Fairbanks has had so many sunny, warm days this last month, where it still gets to like sixty degrees! And the nights drop down near freezing, and are so cozy, and the sun sets and rises at such a reasonable time. And the trees! The aspens are all flame yellow, and they drop their bright leaves onto the ground, and I get so much dopamine from the things they do with the light. And the tundra is red! I’ve been ecstatic about all of it.

I turned 42. I’d been calling myself 42 in my head for a few months, to prepare. For my birthday I went to the hotsprings outside Fairbanks owned by a wingnut who makes electricity from the thermal energy and uses it to cool a year-round ice bar and also heat a greenhouse where he grows bananas. My friends and I, several of whom are also 42, paddled around in the steaming water and talked about how grateful we are we spent our younger years fucking around, hitchhiking and riding freight trains and living in squalid punk houses and making zines and eating out of dumpsters, centering our lives around friends and music and art projects and adventure. Because now that we’re aging we don’t have to cross our fingers that our health will hold on so that someday we can finally be free, and have adventures. We did that. I realized, as I sat on a rock with my legs in the sulfury water, that I made the right choice. All those years ago, when I was reckless and irresponsible and had no impulse control- I somehow made the right choice. I thought I was just bouncing around like a pinball but really, I was knocking it out of the park. Some deep part of me knew, was born knowing- this life is so short. So I rented the falling-down wooden garage in my friends’ yard in Portland where orb spiders dropped onto my bed at night, picked invasive blackberries and rifled through good-smelling trash in the tazo tea dumpster, and when I got tired of that I rode an intermodal east and slept on a boatshack in the Mississippi that was built out of trash. I used an exacto knife at kinkos to construct a fake greyhound ameripass from a template my friend designed and made my way to North Carolina, where all my friends were in a marching band. We lived on dumpstered bread and spent hours playing cards. I took the bus to Guatemala. I hitch-hiked to Alaska. Everywhere I went I met, was connected to, other young people like me. With black clothes faded to brown from the sun and haircuts we’d given each other on our front porches. We didn’t have money but we had our youth, which was more valuable than the sun, and we knew it. Spend your life, says Annie Dillard. Spend it. (I wrote a book about those years.)

We lived this way because we had poor impulse control but also because we thought the world was ending. Why invest in the institutions of modern human civilization when it’s all just going to be gone soon anyway?

In the hotspring on my birthday a friend said that anarchists believing in near-future collapse, planning their whole lives around it, is similar to evangelicals planning for the rapture. This world is not the real world, anarchist ideology says. This life is not our real life. Real life begins after the collapse. Everything will be different after the collapse.

When I was twenty years old I thought human civilization would unravel within a decade. Now I’m 42 and things are still chugging along. What does it mean to accept the world as it is? Heaven, the rapture, collapse- these are all tools that comfort us in a world full of unimaginable suffering. This world is too painful to bear but this is not the real world, just a stopover we must endure on the way to the real thing.

Ironically, these days it feels like we really are nearing collapse but maybe that’s not the point- suffering won’t end once the dust has settled, once a smaller population of humans is living more communally and closer to the earth, re-learning the bow and arrow and trying to grow penicillin on old bread like Clare in Outlander. Sure there won’t be corporate commodification of literally everything, sucking the goodness out of life and destroying the very fabric of human social networks, nor will there be cheap consumer goods wrought of slave labor, but there will be other injustices- a high infant mortality rate, lack of modern dentistry, life-long obligation to one’s family, no matter how insufferable, crops that fail.

So how, then, do we accept the world as it is? Maybe we just can’t. Our human brains are too simple, our yearnings, worked to a fever pitch by thousands of years of natural selection, are forever at odds with our logical minds. We are nothing but a bunch of urges in a trenchcoat, pretending that everything is fine. And sometimes it is fine. Sometimes it really truly is.

fall colors on the tundra!!

Speaking of things that are fine, my sleep has been bonkers bad, even for me, but then this last week I fixed it thanks to a little pill from the drugstore, unisom. I learned about unisom on my guided trips this year, because several of the hikers were taking it- they kept talking about how great it was, taking it every night and then giving it to the other hikers, who also sang its praises- “I took the sleeping pill and didn’t even worry about bears!” Which I thought was funny at the time but then a month ago when the incoming tide of low progesterone that is perimenopause met my already established life-long sleep issues, creating sleep so bad I wondered if I would ever experience blessed unconsciousness again or if this was the end, a final slide into exhaustion and cognitive decline that would wreck me forever, I remembered about the unisom and picked some up, thinking why not give it a try. Unisom has the same active ingredient as nyquil, which is chill, and I tell you what, it fucking works. I’m sleeping more deeply than I have in recent memory and not only that I have these fully-formed dreams, so I wake up not only rested but feeling like I got to go to a movie theater and watch an entire movie beginning to end. It probably won’t work forever but it is giving me an extremely needed break from the bad-times sleep, and maybe I can use it off and on until I get some blessed HRT for my perimenopause, which I’ve decided that I absolutely want/need and I’ve begun the process of trying to find a provider for.

I’ve been listening to the book The New Menopause by Mary Claire Haver and it’s been so validating and empowering. Dr. Haver starts the book by admitting that she used to be a perimenopause-denier who wouldn’t acknowledge her patients’ symptoms as real and refused to give them any sort of treatment, as was, and still is, the standard in western medicine, until she began to go through perimenopause herself and was like “holy shit this is a real thing that every menstruating person experiences” and now she’s dedicated her life to educating people about it. She writes “this is a time in your life when you need a lot of care” and “perimenopause creates a chronic inflammatory condition that can affect multiple systems of the body” and holy shit, those two things hit home. I do need a lot of care right now, and I could almost cry with gratitude that I’m able to give that to myself. Perimenopause, so far, feels at times like the chronic fatigue I had years ago, another condition of chronic inflammation that can affect multiple systems of the body. And just like when I had chronic fatigue, at times I need to structure my whole life around it. I’m not working much right now- the last four years I’ve shaped my schedule around working on drafts of BETS, but right now BETS is with my editor and I’m just… waiting to get it back, there’s no work I can do on it. And my guiding business, between trips, takes a few hours of work a day, max. Initially I was dreading this relatively empty few months, thinking I’d have an existential crisis or fall into depression around my lack of productivity. But guess what! My health has been all over the place and I need a lot of care right now and so this break is perfect, it couldn’t possibly have come at a better time. For example, much like when I used to have chronic fatigue, big exertions wipe me out- for my birthday I went on a (very slow) eight mile trail run with my friend Kacey, the longest I’ve run in a long time, and then I had a night of (sober) socializing with friends- the next day I felt as though I’d been hit by a truck, that special almost flu-like feeling that differentiates fatigue from regular ol’ tiredness, and I lay down for like twenty-four hours straight. And then I felt better- but only because I was able to give myself that, a full day of laying down. My schedule, currently, is sparse- a few short volunteer shifts a week, a couple of hours of computer work each day. The rest I can fill in or pare back as needed. At a different time in my life, like when I had chronic fatigue eight years ago, these health issues would be so terrifying and scary- but I feel so safe in my life right now, so good and secure about my housing, and my relationships, and my connection to the land, and my ability to do self-care, that instead I can approach the situation with curiosity- how interesting, to experience this thing that all menstruating people must experience! Eventually I’ll get some HRT, and that will hopefully help my symptoms a lot. In the meantime, lots of naps with my dogs, on my perfect couch in my perfect cabin in the perfect, peaceful forest, with the big windows that let in lots of light and wonderful friends nearby.

by “trail running” I mean “laying on the forest floor letting the moss subsume me”

I’m also using this time as an opportunity to dream about my next writing project- now that I write fiction, the sky’s the limit as far as what I can write about, but that also makes it harder to choose a thing- I wrote BETS because, at the time, imagining near-future collapse was the most cathartic thing for me, and I know my writing is best when it’s where my heart is at. So what is cathartic to me now? I think I want my next novel to be about relationships that span time in some way, either through reincarnation into different time periods (like I mentioned in another newsletter) or generations of a family over time. Also, all three of my books are about long overland journeys (on foot, by train, on a bike) and maybe my next novel… will not be? Do I even know how to write a book that’s not structured around a long overland journey? Well, I didn’t know how to write fiction before BETS so maybe I can figure that out too.

Speaking of creative hobbies, I finally finished the most recent sewing project I’ve been working on, the junktrunk bike bag from The Functional Sewing Project. Making this bag on my singer 401a was hard- I broke like eight needles, and had to hand-stitch a few of the corners, but I got it done, and I’m super proud of how it turned out.

You can see more photos and a video of the bag on instagram. I’m really excited about the other sewing projects I’ll get to tackle during this coming long, dark winter.

Another thing I’ve been doing with my time lately is researching my family- one of the presents I got myself for my birthday was a subscription to a geneology website, and I’ve been falling down a rabbit hole figuring out who my ancestors are. In particular my dad’s side, who I don’t know at all- all I have are three names, two of them very common, and two cities. I can pass hours just combing through census records from the 1800s, trying to match dates with names in order to put together pieces of the puzzle. My mom’s side of the family is generations of farmers who eventually become mechanics, and so far I’m learning that my dad’s side is the similar- farmers who eventually become other sorts of laborers- welders and workers for the railroad. They were religious and they had huge quantities of children- In the 1700s and 1800s they didn’t go to school at all, although they could read and write, and in the 1900s they finished highschool at most. They were drafted in both world wars, they moved between (small, cramped) houses a lot but they rarely strayed far from the counties where they were born. All the records dead-end at some point in the 1700s, when they immigrated from various European countries (Ireland mostly but also France, England, Germany, the Netherlands).

Here's a wild tidbit I found about one of my great-great-grandfathers:

I’ve put hours into following the lineages of three out of four of my grandparents, but the fourth grandparent, my dad’s father, has me stumped- he’s not anywhere, I can’t find him in any record except one, a yellow pages listing from the 1990s alongside my dad’s mother. But who was he? Who were his parents, what did they do, where were they all from? One problem is that his name is super common, William Quinn, and the other problem is that I don’t know what city he’s from- my grandmother on that side is from a small town in Pennsylvania where I’ve been able to find yearbook photos of her and lots of documents of her relatives, but without a city to narrow things down my searching for this mysterious William Quinn has been in vain.

I think I’m doing this because I want to figure out at what point in time things went wrong. Both my parents are totally emotionally wrecked in their own ways and in turn traumatized my brother and me, and I want to know why- what waves of trauma ricocheted down through generations, spoiling the whole barrel of apples. Was it the horrors their ancestors fled in Europe, or the soul-death that came from their roles in colonization and the ethnic cleansing of the US? Was it the first world war? The dust bowl? The great depression? The second world war? Or just the unavoidable atrocities of living, that break some people beyond repair and spare others? Who was my dad’s dad? Just another railroad worker who came from a long line of farmers? I’ll let you know if I find out! In the meantime, enjoy these yearbook photos of my two grandmas:

This is Jane. She was hot but mean. And you would never guess from how put-together she is in these photos, but she lived in a two bedroom log house with no running water in Bonne Terre, Missouri that she shared with her many siblings.

Jane’s father worked as a laborer for the railroad. Jane is the grandmother who adopted me when I was fourteen, and I lived with for three years before moving out on my own at seventeen, because of how mean she was. Why so mean, Jane?! Whatever her trauma was, she took it with her to the grave.

This is my other grandma, Ele, who is still alive, but who I have never met. Ele seems nerdy here, which I like. Where are the nerds? I kept thinking, as I dug back through history. Like Jane, Ele lived in a small house with eleventy billion siblings. They lived in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Ele’s father was a welder. Rumor has it that Ele is also mean. In my twenties I looked up her phone number and cold called her and she hung up the phone on me, so that’s probably true. Why so mean? She’s like a hundred years old now, so even if I could finally meet her before she dies, I’m not sure she’d be able to tell me.

In my diggings, I hope to uncover the answers to the questions I have about my family or if nothing else, to learn that there aren’t any answers- that like so many working-class white people of the last several centuries they were simply too poor, bigoted and repressed to do much with their lives besides survive and pass on their traumas to their children. So it goes.

That’s all for now,

Carrot