Monday started early, clear gilt sky to the east, giving sunrise a lovely head start. Pumping gas at the Mobile station on the north end was as cold as November but in April, not as uncomfortable. You get used to it but I’m ready to get used to something new. Windy all night, as far as I could tell. Windy at 4 am at least, when I woke in the dark and began fretting about the day. The American flag rippled and snapped, standing resolute over the gas pumps, blowing force 5 at least.

How do you fly the plane if the vandals cut the fuel line? That’s the question now for weeks in my little backwater. Defending institutions is Timothy Snyder’s second lesson. Seems to be my lot now. I think of that often. Gives me some sense of – what? Purpose? Gravity? Certainly not satisfaction. 

Choke back your hopelessness. Bite down and show your teeth. Bitter pills are the most potent. People need you to be strong and stubborn – and creative. You.

A turkey vulture vectored in over the credit union parking lot on the same wind splitting the cedar copse into its component three trees. The landscaper planted them perfunctorily too close together back when. Absent the wind, they stand together like single plant. The day was fresh and traffic was building. Cherokee marsh, to the east, shows itself beyond the cottonwoods at the edge. Phragmites reeds, teasel, and cattails, dry and brown now, clog the ditches. Box elders creep in behind the steel storage buildings, to replace the dead ashes. Probably a marsh or swamp here, before it became a gas station and an access road. 

It’s been a week. Wisconsin’s partisan Supreme Court election attracted national attention and the oligarch’s money was defeated for now. On Monday, I discovered that the ancient basement freezer died. Forty pounds of venison bled through the butcher paper and the liquid component pooled on the basement floor creating a brown, warm-bloody-stinky mess for me to clean. I joke that having a strong stomach is an occupational necessity, but still. 

On Thursday, nearly within sight of the Mobile station, I saw a dead otter on the road. Twenty years of making this commute, twenty years of occasional paddling and sailing nearby and I had never seen an otter. Had you asked me about otters in the upper Yahara, I’d have hedged. Ironically, at dinner with some colleagues the night before they talked about researching rodenticide effects on urban animal food chains. Over Thai food, they talked with excitement about collecting road-killed carnivores to sample their livers (we are an odd bunch sometimes). I called the lead scientist and she wanted it, so I turned around and put it in the back of my car (proper scientific collection permits in place). 

On Saturday and Sunday, I walked. First, up State Street to the capitol to find Carol in the crowd and join hundreds of my neighbors for Madison’s Hands-Off demonstration. Then, the next day, yesterday, I walked to church and back with a long detour to a public greenspace, a park to look for migrants. 

A friend asked me weeks ago now, “what can we do?” and I put him off, promising I’d think about it and write something. But I am stuck. He’s my age but retired early. He worked as a wildlife researcher and his question to me came in the context of widespread layoffs of young professionals in the Federal agencies that do the work of creation-care (and he won’t mind me slipping into church-speak) and the ripple-out effect of disappearing opportunity.

I can parrot the standard answers about applying the levers of citizenship, about showing up, about using the privilege of senior standing in the field to counsel and support. In the abstract, we talk a good game. To the extent we can, we help bear the anxiety and the grief and we remember to take the long view. Snyder’s fifth rule is to “remember professional ethics.” It’s a topic I actually have a lecture for. We curate wise clichés hoping there’s a germ of truth there. Sometimes it’s all we got. I wish I had something more.

Hold on to your faith against the odds. Against those who trade love for something showy and brash in the public square but hollow at core, small, mean, and frightened. Your ancestors know.

The demonstration signs are creative and entertaining. Humor is tactical and I’ve heard that humor draws strength from pain in the shadows. Signs mocked the creeping authoritarianism, the lawlessness, the hypocrisy, the kleptocracy. Some were more direct, condemning the rendition of students without due process, the dehumanization of immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of us (maybe millions) demonstrated in more than 1400 cities in every state and US territory.

Walking home from church, I saw the tail of a mink disappear under a log and boys fishing in Six Mile Creek. I found a pair of nesting white-breasted nuthatches in a bent tree where a branch had rotted away. I saw a groundhog on the west-facing slope, staring me down with one beady eye from behind a maple sapling, flattening itself in the sun and doing its best to turn into a another tawny rock in the gravel. A Canada goose hissed at me, standing up to expose 3 eggs in a downy nest right there in the lawn behind the library. And I saw an eastern phoebe by the community center – a first of the spring. It’s a guilty pleasure to let my mind wander here.

I visit the well every two weeks looking for something to say in these RJ blog posts but lately the bucket comes up muddy at best. Standing at the Mobile station, I thought about the tank of gas I was pumping, another 250 pounds of carbon emissions, the venison putrefying all week in my garage trash can. I thought about how the Saturday and Sunday walks weave together in meditation. I though about the sunlit morning and the otter. It was pregnant with three full-term kits. Dead too, dead and lovely. A sign of spring in the Marsh. 

Fight for a healthy earth. You didn’t ask to be born among those who’ll trade their grandchildren’s future for ease and delusion. But it doesn’t matter, love demands it and that should be enough. Every increment, every remnant.

Chaos and decay assert themselves and muddy April claws its way forward and I think about picking my battles. Our Sunday prayer called Lent a time to “blossom and rise.” I thought about what those verbs could mean – and what it takes to get there. 

Photos:
Capitol square from State Street – Van Deelen
Hybrid Cattail (Typha × glauca) – Guelph, Ontario 2020-04-18.jpg – Ryan Hodnet, Wikimedia Commons, License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Perched Eastern Phoebe. South Meadows Trail, East Hartford, CT USA – Paul Danese,  Wikimedia Commons, License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/