On the banks of Still Creek, on traditional land of the Watlala people.
1×
0:00
-12:01
This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. – Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
On the day after Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral primary, Kyle and I kayaked for about five miles down the Little Deschutes River. We saw one other human being the whole time. This is an annual float for us. We drink Rainier Beer and share our hearts and try to make sense of where we are on the world clock - and what is going to happen next.
This year, we talked about some of the things we need to be prepared for – logistically, emotionally, spiritually, socially – when the power grid goes down. Honestly, I am not ready for this kind of reality. Most of the people I know are not ready for it either.
However, I do know that a lot of right-wingers are stockpiling their guns, canned goods, solar-powered generators and water filters as they eagerly anticipate the apocalypse, whatever that might look like.
It is easy to make fun of the MAGA maniacs and white militias, but it does make sense to me that the next “pandemic” will be a photo negative of Covid lockdown. Instead of being stuck at home communicating online, our screens will become useless and we’ll be stuck with each other, tending to the grief of losing our old life, while we try to figure out how to feed ourselves and stay safe, warm and hydrated.
I have the tools to metabolize grief and trauma. I can be present to others in their process too. But I do not have the skills to take care of my basic survival needs. I do not even know how to survive mornings without coffee. This is why I need friends like Kyle who know how to operate a chainsaw.
****************
Two days after Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral primary, I woke up at the butt crack of dawn and packed up the minivan and drove to Simply Organic, a coffee house wedged between the Old Mill District and downtown. Bend, Oregon bulges with family-owned breweries and coffee roasteries and Simply Organic is one of my favorites because they serve up dark-roasts like Ethiopian Yergecheffe and Sumatra.
Not long after I caught the Delta variant during the summer of 2021, my palette started rejecting the coffee beans I was medium-roasting in my air popcorn popper on our back deck. That’s one of the weirder and least-talked-about legacies of Covid-19. The strange things it has done and is still doing to our systems.
The new dominant coronavirus variant is called Nimbus. Its main symptom is “razor throat.” One friend caught it last week and told us that it is the worst sore throat she’s ever had.
I sipped on dark-roast as I drove north on Highway 97 through towns like Redmond and Madras. It was a marvelously clear and sunny morning. Looking west, I soaked up volcanic snow-covered peaks named after famous white settlers like Washington, Jefferson and Hood.
On the east side of the Cascades, it is a dry, dusty high desert. The sun comes out three hundred days a year. In Madras, I veered on to Highway 26 which took me through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and into the old growth forest that envelopes Mt. Hood.
I stopped at the Pacific Crest Trail and sprinkled some of my dad’s ashes on the mossy trunk of a Douglass Fir. My dad introduced me to trails back in the 1980’s. We hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney the summer before I started high school. I cherish these old memories of time with my dad. He was a quiet and introverted math teacher. But we bonded in the woods and at sporting events.
********************
I was back in the Pacific Northwest this week for the memorial service of my dad’s younger sister. Aunt Vic was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late 2024 and she left the land of the living about ten weeks ago. Lindsay and I know this devastating disease intimately. My father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2011. He was gone in five months.
On my drive to Seattle, I stopped at a sacred site called Still Creek, a trailhead on the traditional land of the Watlala people, about fifty miles southeast of Portland. Chris Dollar and I hiked here a little over a year ago. On the trail, I asked him what he thought about my idea of starting a weekly Substack newsletter dedicated to cultivating spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage during this season of escalating fascism.
One of the things Chris told me was that, right now, maybe more than ever, people are desperately longing for credibility. Not just credible news sources that keep people in the loop on current events, but also credible emotional sources that help people heal, and credible spiritual sources that help people tap into a power generated by Love that is greater than empire.
Since then, the longing for credibility has grown exponentially.
******************
This week, I was solo on the Still Creek Trail. My mind drifted three thousand miles away to the largest city in North America, where 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani pulled off a major upset to defeat former governor and sexual tyrant Andrew Cuomo, who was endorsed by Bill Clinton and Jim Clyburn, and was bought and sold by billionaire Michael Bloomberg and other corporatists.
Zohran Mamdani is credible. The Democratic Party establishment is not.
Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim who is currently representing his district in the state assembly. He previously worked as a counselor helping low-income residents who were evicted from their homes.
Zohran Mamdani’s policy proposals for New York City include free bus transportation and rent freezes, as well as the construction of publicly-owned grocery stores and housing units. He plans to pay for this by increasing the corporate tax rate and implementing a two percent surcharge on all millionaires in the city.
Zohran Mamdani is so credible that he’s been repeatedly called a communist and an antisemite and has endured numerous death threats from those who seek to protect the status quo by any means necessary.
Zohran Mamdani endures this kind of treatment because he unabashedly prioritizes poor and working people, and makes no bones about where he stands on Palestine.
Zohran Mamdani has consistently called Israel’s 20-month assault on Gaza what it is: a genocide. He also says that if Netanyahu comes to New York City, he will arrest him.
For the past forty years, the Democratic Party establishment has responded to the rightward shift of the Republican Party by ratcheting to the right and marketing itself as a more diverse, reasonable brand of neoliberal economics and imperial power games. This is terrible news for poor and working people in the US - and for Palestinians and others living in the Global South.
Zohran Mamdani is not a messiah or superhero. He will not save us. But he does offer the sixty percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck a hopeful, credible blueprint for Something Else rooted in love, truth, compassion and justice.
Zohran Mamdani presents a platform that reflects what Dr. King called “a radical revolution of values.” The needs of everyday people are more important than the profit motives and property rights of the rich and famous.
****************
About a hundred miles north of the Still Creek Trail, I came upon the massive clear-cut lumberyard of RSG Forest Products on the west side of Interstate 5 in Washington. That scene sent me back to a couple of passages from The Overstory, the ridiculously beautiful novel that Richard Powers published in 2018.
In the novel, Powers proposes, quite compellingly, that trees are the protagonists of the planet:
People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures - bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful - call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
Trees talk to each other in frequencies too low for us to hear. Trees take care of each other above and below the surface. The forest is a full-grown ecological model for us to experience what it means to truly live with and for each other, even as the threat of clear-cutting looms large. The forest is credible.
The book says that the inability and unwillingness of a critical mass of human beings to recognize this truth will, most likely, culminate in the collapse of our species:
We don’t make reality. We evade it. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming and we won’t be able to pay.
We do not know how or when it’s going to happen. It will probably involve escalating political fascism, whacky weather events, viral pandemics, and a grinding-down of the power-grid. But the bleak prospects of our future on this planet should not send us into a spiral of cynicism, apathy, paralysis, or paranoia. Because we have access to credibility around every corner.
Powers puts it like this:
There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
In my opinion, this is the most stunning passage in the book.
So I will just leave it at that.
Until next Sunday.
