I Count None But Sunny Hours

Look, who's giving the report? You chowderheads or me?

Breaking from my standard book plug at the top of the newsletter, I will instead happily announce that A Good Place For Maniacs: Dispatches From The Pacific Crest Trail is now available as an e-book in a non-Kindle format! You can get it through Kobo by clicking the button below.

(Note: I wrote most of this on Tuesday, just before the latest round of awful shit happened in Kenosha. You can donate to Jacob Blake’s GoFundMe here and the Milwaukee Freedom Fund, which is providing protest & bail support to Kenosha, here.)

For the past few days I’ve been back in Fayetteville, NY, the town where I grew up. I come back around this time every year, during the five weeks between the end of summer teaching and the start of fall; for obvious reasons, this trip has already been frustratingly different from all previous editions. It’s one thing to wear a mask in the house. It’s a whole other to see your wife for the first time in two months and not be able to kiss her because you haven’t gotten tested yet.

But like in all things I have basically two options, which amount to “make the most of it” or “succumb to annoyance and misery.” Despite my writing tending toward the latter I am aiming for the former. And there have been plenty of small, pleasant moments to make all the hassle feel worth it. I was out in the backyard sun earlier with my brother’s dog (two small joys right there—a backyard and a dog) and happened to notice the sundial—pictured above—that has rested on our back steps for who knows how many years. I’ve never given it a second glance before, truth be told. Above its bottom curve, it cleverly reads I COUNT NONE BUT SUNNY HOURS.

The joke is a good one. But it also spoke to something I needed to hear at this weird, halting time where no choice feels like the right one. You can’t ignore your problems forever, obviously, and it’s a privilege to be able to ignore them at all for more than a few minutes. Still…I think it’s a necessary thing to do when you can. What if, just for a few days, you only counted the sunny hours, literally or figuratively? You focused on and remembered nothing else but the little good things that have happened? There’s some power in that.

(Easy for me to say. Being a teacher affords me a month off from the real work of my profession every year. Then again, what am I supposed to do, turn it down?)

So. I’ve been trying to make time to sit out in the sunshine and read. I’m currently working my way through Moby-Dick, which I have mentioned in this newsletter seven times by my count despite only having read it once, five years ago. Five years feels like the right gap for Moby-Dick rereads: not so much time that you totally forget the plot or the feeling of reading it, but long enough to recharge and to forget just how much work it is to dive into an old story, even one so funny as this. Because it is a chore! Or at least it is sometimes. To read anything written so long ago (especially written with such drama as Melville utilized) is to have to activate dormant parts of your brain and flex muscles that have gone soft. 19th century literature is not kind to an attention span molded by Twitter, I’m finding. And it’s exactly for that reason that I think it’s so good for me to do it! It’s a small act of healing to digest long and salty monologues by Captain Ahab, to fight my way through pages and pages of zoologically innacurate descriptions of whales. There is so much richness and humor to be pulled out of all of it, and I am finding in Ishmael a ready mirror of parts of myself. He tells us on page one that he escapes to the sea from time to time because it’s the only way he can fend off the stormclouds of depression and misanthropy that would threaten to overtake him otherwise, and…yeah. I get it.

Seriously though this man sucked at zoology.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish…waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

Where have I seen this kind of thing before?

Ah, right.

To put a bow on all this: Wednesday morning I got up and tried to go do a track workout at my old high school, where I was greeted by a locked fence and a sign threatening to prosecute trespassers, which gave me all sorts of fuzzy feelings about my alma mater. Instead I drove down the hill to Mill Run Park, a tucked away little gem where as a kid I learned how to hunt crayfish and play kickball and generally just love being in the trees. It felt good and clean to run through there again with no agenda, no idea of the distance, or what time I’d even started. I paused whenever I wanted to look at the deer or the flowers or take a moment to dunk my hat in the creek. What a welcome change from the constant anxiety about getting stronger and faster, with the clock and my body as obstacles to be conquered rather than tools to be put to use. To forget all of that for a time was the most at peace I’ve felt in weeks.

Sometimes you can go home again.

-Chuck

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