Today is Emily Basham’s Birthday 30th. This was taken in our yard last Fourth of July before she married Finn Straley. Today is also Gary Snyder’s 90th birthday.
Warm today with high clouds. No rain. One of Jan’s students came out for a morning low tide to hunt for abalone from her paddle board. She left her dog on shore to play with Dot and now Dot is napping out on the porch with the door open. Tomorrow the grass will need to be cut again and I will have to set Dan’s (the mower’s) settings lower so I can get a more even trim because the grass grew so high this week, which will work out fine as long as we don’t get any rain to bog Dan’s motor down. Each evening brings a new chorus of songbirds, and it makes me miss Nels all the more. The other thing that makes me miss him is all the news about the Asian Murder Hornets, Oh he would have LOVED that story. He might have even traveled down to western Washington just to take a look at one, and to record their buzzing. Nels had an appetite for the bizarre and dangerous in nature. I would have loved to wasted an hour or two talking and joking with him about Murder Hornets, I would of course taken their side, in the governments attempts to exterminate them.
Nels had led the charge in Sitka to pull up all the Japanese knotweed by the root, organizing pulling parties of conservationists to eradicate the invasive species. Of course Finn was a little boy and we had our own radio show and we made fun of these activists characterizing them as anti immigrant, with a slightly racist WWII era internment camp overtone. Nels understood but still he would get a little prickly at times. Environmentalism can be a very serious business particularly in a small former mill town.
Small town life can be both calm, secure and incredibly taxing. Calm in that certain kinds of crime are very rare. The usual stranger crimes from big cities hardly ever happen. In the forty years I’ve lived here I haven’t seen an armed bank robbery, and I remember only one convenience store armed robbery and that was mostly a drunken escapade with a gun. In fact I would call it an “armed shop lifting with an accidental discharge of a weapon, involving no injuries.” It would really be unfair to call it an armed robbery. We built our new, pretty nice new house, twenty eight years ago and I think I have never seen the keys to our front door in twenty seven years. We used to leave the keys in our car all the time until I finally figured out that the new keys have these electronic things which keep talking to the cars and drain the cheap little battery in our Honda, so now we keep the car key hung on a hook by the door to keep the battery from crapping out every time we listen to the radio with the car off. We still leave the key in the car when we leave it at the airport. Even if someone steals the car they can’t go far. There are only really about 12 miles of main road. (that a correction from my recording from yesterday. I got it right in the details but not in the main part of the paragraph) We put on a good face in small towns. We will have a murder every few years. Some are shocking there is still an unsolved murder of a young woman last seen walking back home late at night and found assaulted and strangled in the park. A young man I knew was tried and found not guilty for the crime and it was pretty clear to everyone that he confessed to the crime because he had been black out drunk and his friends had convinced him that he was the kind of guy who would do such a thing. They charged him even though the DNA evidence didn’t match his and when he sobered up he realized that he wasn’t the kind of guy who would do it and that he in fact didn’t do it. The young woman’s parents suffer horribly to this day, and the young man accused had to move out of town, and there will never be a solution for their pain.
The suffering in small towns is of this complicated and sticky sort. We hurt our loved ones. We have unprecedented domestic violence in Alaska, opium addiction, alcoholism. and now the rampant rape, murder and disappearance of Native Alaskan women. Some blame outside sex traders and that may be true, some blame local men held in the thrall of drugs, alcohol, depression and the never-ending prospect of forever jail and probation violation. In the public defender it was referred to as “life in prison on the installment plan.'“ It is shocking to find human being so hopeless that they cannot go months without breaking a law or having a serious police contact. Again I think of it as a kind of deep depression of the spirt, they don’t have enough spark in life to go out and even try to actually commit a crime and get away with it. They sink down into themselves and violate themselves first, poisoning themselves with whatever is closest at hand:alcohol if they can get it, meth, dope, or gasoline, cleaning products, copier fluid, anything. They destroy their reasoning function, and then they violate the ones nearest them, other users, family, friends, who ever is at hand. Some would sell women to sex traffickers I’m sure but they make terrible, I mean terrible accomplices to such serious crimes, because no one has been born that is so unreliable as this kind of lost soul. The cheapest bottle of booze buy’s their loyally. Horribly. Horribly sad. It is not the story anyone would want to read a locked door mystery about. Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Perot would set food in a room with them. In Alaska many of these hopeless addicts are Native Alaskan but not all, the gravity of this kind of black hole does not discriminate by race. These are the denizens of small town underworlds. They don’t congregate in large crowds out of doors, they couch surf mostly. They have been tough loved out of their family of origin, many of whom have to deal with their own health issues or poverty. There simply isn’t any recourses to help these people. What would it take? Frankly it would a Korean war, Moonshot effort to build separate and isolated long term treatment and live in work facilities. Places where people could do meaningful work and gradually build their dignity back together bit by bit. The usual 12 step religion can help but it is not enough when we live in a capitalist state that judges you mostly by what you “do”. Men and women have to be given a chance to do something meaningful in healthy communities. We have to be willing to help Native people rebuild the healthy communities they want, not the ones we want for them.
Downtown Sitka, Alaska, a few winters ago.
Okay… but small towns can be complex and profoundly beautiful. They are not all Lake Woebegon nor Main Street of Disneyland I would argue that what pressure cooks the steamy underworld of small town America is the insistence that the residence not deal with their tragedy out in the open. That for too long small town life has not had civilized conversations about difficult issues like the difference between sexual aggression and appropriate sexual behavior, or more simply Consent. Neither do we talk about bullying and the hurtfulness of gossip. Not that people are ever going to stop gossiping. I think talking about each other is both natural and useful. I think gossip is THE way we deal with the danger going on in our community, BUT when gossip is misdirected or misused it creates shame and hurt causing more pain and sometimes triggering more violence.
There are people and organizations, some of them in the communities of faith that take on these issues. Some reach out to others across all kinds of scary lines: sexual, gender, racial… any boundary where there is tension there is a need for a frank discussion about bullying, gossip and reality in a small town. In any town really, but when it is done in a small town, the results can sometimes be easily achieved, a handful of people can be reached and one or two suicides can actually be prevented by one or two people of good and generous spirit and this has a tremendous ripple effect.
Just as artists in small town can change a culture, as long as they carry some humility along with them. Any artists has to remember that they alone do not shape culture nor history. They are only one part of a complex equation of, earth, biology, community and history. I know this for a fact, many artists think their work springs whole and new onto the earth and should beheld like a wonder of God. Ah… no. You have to work just as hard to win over Sitkans as you do New Yorkers. In fact New Yorkers can be just as provincial as anyone. They just have been on more Senior trips to Europe.
But I love my small town. I have many talented friends. Great musicians, and writers, wonderful painters, and ceramic makers. I think the rain forest breeds a lot of well read people. I mean really. We have a terrific library here and a great bookstore. A world class chamber music festival. We used to have a famous writers festival here and I’m sure something new will start up again. A terrific fine arts camp with a big campus for students of all ages. There is a college campus and a science center. There are activists of all kinds working on historical, land and sea conservation. There is a tribal organization working on health, and cultural issues. A police academy and a boarding school for students from all over Alaska, and non profits dedicated to trails and indoor recreation as well as Arts, Theater, Music and Culture. You can go to a meeting every night of the week and thats just by volunteering. Small town life here could be as busy as you want.
The light and the dark. The happy, the optimistic as well as the dark and hopeless. It is not easy to characterize in one neat picture. That’s what I like about it. Nice, messy and very real. Like the old forest growing all around it: rising up and falling down.
A trail in the Historical Park right in town.
Someone’s yellow cat
slinking through the berry canes:
a bird in her mouth.
jhs
Here is a recording I made this morning of me reading and talking a bit about the first chapter of Wendell Barry’s Jayber Crow. A richly detailed and moving novel about a small town in northern Kentucky.
