Acrasiating Pt 2: Back Into The Blog

It’s not that I’m actually in a morass, or bog, or fen, right now, but it’s a swirl to think about all of the things we are doing for our plan to leave the United States.  We’re using ClickUp for a load of outlined tasks, Reminders for some more immediate tasks; we put stuff on calendars (Proton and paper); we call up yard services and house inspectors; the kids are busily packing or learning Spanish on DuoLingo.  (I prefer Babbel, but kids like games.)

I like bogs, though.  Or fens.  Which one is alkaline again?  I forget.  Anyhow.  The mood is hopeful, and hey, I like dark and gloomy songs like “The Bog”.  It’s a fantastic song in case you haven’t heard it.  The lead singer/narrator is some sort of swamp creature getting ready to pull someone into their tentacled clutches, and it’s the wonderful Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzenden Neubauten.    In swamps there are life.  

California’s main wetlands were drained a century and a half ago ago to make room for arable farmland in the San Joaquin Valley.  It used to be an enormous delta of water and marsh.  Elsewhere, they  were destroyed to bring water to Los Angeles—the Owens Valley once had a lake; now it’s just dust that occasionally materializes into a temporary watery muddy mass that echoes its past as a mighty water source for the Nüümü, the Paiute of the area.  The region was Payahuunadü, Land of the Flowing Water.  Taboose Pass, an incredibly steep pass into the Sierras I wanted to scale (and won’t; no time), is named after the taboose plant, a nutritious tuberaceous flowering plant that filled Payahuunadü with a nutritious staple for the Indigenous people of the Valley, both Paiute and Shoshone.  It was swampy with little creeks that flowed through there.  During the Pleistocene, Lake Owens was 200 feet deep.     Have you driven through Independence, Lone Pine, Olancha, and of course, American-as-pie Manzanar?  I can’t even imagine a 200 foot deep lake in those areas.  It must have been vast, sprawling, with miles of taboose and reeds and flowers on its margins, and the skies full of waterbirds and migratory birds stopping by this gigantic drink of water.  A blue shimmering rest stop. Now it’s dust that blows heavy metal contaminants onto nearby communities, a slap in the face after Mulholland’s promises to get a thirsty Los Angeles what it wanted.  

Now we have the second coming of that rough orange beast, whose first term was all about the truthy phrase “draining the swamp”.  He never really elaborated what that swamp was, but it’s clear in Term Two, Electric Fashaloo, that it’s anyone who isn’t loyal, anyone who isn’t a sycophant, anyone who isn’t white or agrees with a nationalist white agenda.  Is it coincidence that swamps are seen as the realm of monsters, backwards people, uncivilized savages?  Here in supposedly progressive California, we aren’t even done with draining the San Joaquin aquifer, and the result is that the already damaged land is subsiding, literally sinking, in some places as much as 30 feet.  We could stop this; we could stop overpumping water.  We could stop growing water-hungry crops.  We could stop raising livestock in places that could have never sustained that number of large ungulates—a stinking biota anyone who has driven down that stretch of the 5 knows about.  And those are the “free-range” cattle!  We could stop all these things, but we don’t want to.  

That’s pretty much America in a nutshell, eh?  We could stop being horrible consumers that are warping the earth, but we don’t want to.  And I don’t pretend that moving to another country will take me to a place that is not also extractive, colonial, capitalist, but by all the tiny spirits of the land, at least they’re thinking about how not to follow in the footsteps of Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and yep, “Americans” (USAnians) in really, truly scarring their land.  Costa Rica suffered deforestation and is turning that around.  The USA suffered deforestation and is not turning that around.  The lumbering hubris of the red state-led United States is a book unto itself, but suffice to say, it won’t turn from its course of destruction until something well and truly bops it on the nose—either an external force (doubtful) or an uprising not seen since…well, not seen since ever.  Something like the Haymarket Affair, but everywhere, continually, for months.  A general strike and general disobedience.  …yeah.  I’m not holding my breath.  

As I am already in my sixth decade and don’t care to see myself or my kids in Alligator Alcatraz (which is ironically, a swamp), I am choosing to move to a place that is wetter, wilder, and listens to its citizens more.  It is not a decision everyone will cheer.  I worry sometimes that I am abandoning this place, the land where I was born.  That said, most every activist I talk to nods sagely and tells me their own plans to leave.  We’re marked, or at least some of us are, by ICE, by Andy Ngô, by the FBI, by Proud Boys.  There’s a militia brewing up in Shasta County.  Some of my ancestors came here for “a better life”, whatever that meant.  Some came to flee the Mexican Revolution.  And some came over by canoe, I suppose, long, long ago, perhaps 20, 30, 40 thousand years ago, skirting the shores of Beringia, ever southward, then inland, to incubate in the Southwest before heading into the foothills and canyons of Sierra Madre Occidental.   It’s in the nature of people to move.  We move to escape drought.  We move to escape war (sometimes caused by drought.)  We move as nomads.  We move as colonizers.  We move as refugees.  I suppose I’m a refugee as well, not in the strict legal sense, but certainly in the spiritual, metaphorical sense.  I don’t like the word “expat”.  Americans fleeing abroad are not special.  We will be immigrants, me a stranger in a strange land, but my wife and children returning to a land that holds their ancient DNA, that of the Huetáres, and I will turn an eye to the drier north, the last boundary of Uto-Nahuan language, Guanacaste, the qah-nekatxtli, the land of the ear-trees, and then turn back to where we will go, into the rain forest and rainy mountains.  

If I run into an actual bog I’ll let you know.  :)