hicks
This month I am trying out being a different sort of person, which is to say the sort of person who gets up very early in the morning and goes to yoga every day, who goes to bed early also and eschews vices, just as an experiment; if I don’t like being that person at the end of the month I’ll go back to being the person I was before, no hard feelings. Yesterday, sitting in T.’s kitchen, eating toast and burning bits of sage and talking about what we want to leave behind us in the old year: her, cancer (2015: the year everyone, fucking everyone, got cancer); me, stories about myself that aren’t the ones I want to tell anymore.
Last night and this morning I am thinking a lot about the terrorist occupation in a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, thinking about the way people are talking about it and the way other people think about the west and the people who live there. No white person is from the west; we only live there in willing or unwilling collusion with a long and bloody and ongoing history of violence against indigenous people and people of color: forced arrival, forced departure, forced exclusion, arson, murder (by armed patriot, by police, by erasure, by genocide, by law). But I was born in western Washington and lived there for most of my life, and in western Oregon after that, and though the coast is environmentally dissimilar from the public land where an armed militia of white foreigners is threatening a community (of people, of wildlife, of land) that has no desire to host them, echoing decades of other, similar terrorist invasions by white people determined to take what cannot be owned, the place where I grew up carries a similar history and occupies a similar place in the public imagination. (When I first moved to New York, bitterly broke, desperate for any kind of job, going on interview after interview, I was asked more than once if I’d grown up with electricity, if I was good with horses, if the roads in my hometown were paved. (I did, I have no idea but I assume not, they were. We even read Shakespeare in my high school.))
Y’all Qaeda: it’s funny, I guess, to some people. The first job I had out of high school was on a timber crew (my dad, who ran the development end of the company, got me the job). I wore sandals my first day at work, realized my mistake, and wore boots every day after that. My coworkers didn’t know what to make of me, the boss’s daughter; I didn’t know, at first, what to make of them, second- and third-generation sons of logging families, guys a handful of years older than me who competed in what I guess y’all out east would call the hick Olympics every summer: log-rolling, ax-throwing, tree-climbing, that kind of thing. We figured each other out pretty quick: we had in common a love of the great women of Seattle rock (they left me 7 Year Bitch; we went to Goodness shows together) and a love of the woods (me and B., flagging lines of trees as protected when they should’ve been slated for timber).
I was desperate to make them like me but we ended up friends anyway. Surveying lines with S; to this day, even after years spent hanging around with hippies and hikers and tree-sitters and forest activists, earth-firsters who lived in the woods for months and u-locked themselves to logging road gates, I’ve never met anyone who knew more about that landscape, about the animals who lived there (cocking one ear at a bird’s call, naming its genus and species, its gender, its colors and its migratory patterns) and the traces they left (see this scat: here’s who left it, here’s what they ate), about the plants that grew out of the earth and what you could do with them, heal with this, eat that, stay away from this one, look at this tender-leaved thing so close to flowering. The hell-hot godawful day wood-spirit S., seized by some grim impulse, led me and B. crashing through the undergrowth (have you ever hiked off-trail on the Olympic Peninsula? It’s not for the faint of heart) for miles on end, B. and I secretly certain he was lost, him refusing water breaks, rest, human emotion; black flies biting, mosquitoes whining in my ears and the shhk shhk of their machetes hacking through the brush the only sound louder than our hoarse breath until at long last we came out of the woods to the exact spot on the dirt-track logging road where S.’s truck was parked and he turned around and looked at me and said, unsmiling, “You kept up,” and turned his back on me again, and that was the proudest moment I’d ever known in my entire over-achieving life. S. and I never touched each other—I don’t think we even hugged goodbye when I left for college at the end of the summer, and we never saw each other again, though we wrote each other letters for years, until he met a girl who did know something about horses—but everyone I’ve fallen in love with since I’ve held up to the memory of that summer, the hot sun in the green trees, splitting gas-station brownies on our lunch breaks with our legs dangling off the tailgate of his pride-and-joy truck, the first person I ever met who understood how much you can say with silence.
That piece of my history, and this one: The first neighborhood I lived in as a more-or-less adult on my own had a sundown clause in its constitution forbidding non-white residents from crossing its borders after dark; the neighborhood association ratified that constitution year after year without striking the clause—good-hearted liberals, all of them, I probably don’t have to tell you the color of their skin, or that the land on which we’d stamped the brand of that law was stolen from the Lhaq’temish, a coastal people relocated in 1855 to what is now the Lummi Nation (a people who are currently fighting, along with environmental groups and other sovereign nations of coastal indigenous people, the construction of an export terminal that will further devastate the land they held in stewardship for centuries, that will massively impact their treaty rights, that will decimate their hard-won fishing areas). You say hick; I say genocide, erasure, force, I say whiteness unparalleled, one more link in a long chain of blood and damage, one more invasion. It’s funny to you, I guess, but it’s not funny to me that the sons of Cliven Bundy—the legion sons of Cliven Bundy, the sons and brothers and fathers, the kindred in hate, the legacy and the history of those white faces, of those guns—are the reason the place I love best will never hold safety for so many of the people I love best. The sons of Cliven Bundy, the white faces who built an imagined landscape out of violence so fierce that the tide of their imagination has made that bloody-minded world a real one, a world with real consequences for real people’s lives, a pale brutal west cut out of hatred and greed and laid full force over the dark, rich earth.
When you know what it feels like to belong to a landscape with your whole being while knowing it can never truly be a home to you because damage is written into every letter of its laws; because the people you care about will never be safe there, because the people you love who still live there talk in terms of how they will survive as often as they talk about how much they hope; because the moment you try and make a life with a partner of the wrong gender, the wrong body, the wrong skin, you will likely no longer be safe there either; when the people who would harm you look like your family, could easily be of your own blood; when you’ve stood on the rocky edge of the Pacific with a wall of green at your back and no sound other than the crows in the high branches and the cool seaweed-tangled waves shucking pebbles back and forth; when your neighbors (indigenous, of color) have come together to organize in the face of relentless police harassment, unchecked violence, treaty violations, relocation, redlining, theft, death; when your neighbors refuse to back down; when you’ve been a hundred yards behind your partner flagging survey lines and watched him stumble, falter, yell Oh shit BEES as the earth around him erupts into a buzzing swarm and you flail madly backwards as he stumbles past you, both of you yelling Fuck! FUCK! and laughing like fools; when you’ve worked overnight shifts at the emergency shelter, driven out to the middle of the county in the pitch black four in the morning to wait for a terrified woman in a parking lot, the trees around you no comfort then, knowing that if her boyfriend shows up with a gun you’ll likely both end up dead; when you carry that with you, all of it, all that pain and love and loss, the wounds of your history and the wounds your history has inflicted and the blessings of the land that raised you, the salt of your own skin matching the salt wind off the grey ocean—then you can make jokes about hicks with guns what don’t know the difference between the bird refuge and the city. But I’m guessing, then, you won’t be laughing either.
This is perfect.
