When A Wave Comes That Might Be Too Big For Me I Don’t Fight It

This is a place that feels like it might roll on forever

Lately I have been retreating within myself.

For a long time what got me going—out of bed in the morning, on the written page, etc.—was my fervent belief in the collective project of liberation, grounded in the knowledge that any kind of meaningful political work required subsuming oneself in a larger organization working on projects that moved and mobilized the masses.

I still think all of those things are true. But lately—as my term in union leadership comes to an end after two exhausting years, and as the socialist organization I’m in continues to seek direction in the wake of the Bernie campaign’s defeat and the ravages of COVID—I have found myself turning away from my long-held visions of the future that centered on the successes of those things.

I am back to wondering: what might I be like as a parent, and how can I take steps now to be better? What kind of literal garden can I grow, what will I plant in it, what can I learn now and what will I learn in the future? Where will I put down roots and raise a family, where can I see myself ever buying a home or being comfortable with permanence, where am I meant for, if such a thing is even possible?

It’s a far cry from what my fantasies were even just a few months ago. But it is a very real shift and one I am paying attention to. I think I deserve a break, honestly; it has been years since I let myself do only the things that nourished me personally. In the intervening period I have grown to discover the different but no less fulfilling activities that make up the slow work of liberatory politics. But I’m worn out, plain and simple, and high on my list of priorities is being a better husband and a better dog dad.

In keeping with all that, my wife and I are currently in the middle of a cross-country road trip with our dog. Our first night we made it from Seattle to a KOA campground in Butte, Montana. We had been in our tent for all of two minutes when an enormous thunderstorm started. We don’t really get thunderstorms in Seattle, nor has our dog ever slept in a tent before, so it was an evening of firsts as the black sky split open again and again. (The next morning we threw away our tent, which in its old age had failed to provide even modest protection against the sheets of rain that came down. It perhaps deserved a more ceremonious end after its years of service to us but there was just no way we were going to cram that dripping mass into the fully-loaded car.)

Under clear skies we drove east across the Continental Divide, through the Tobacco Root Mountains, through the Absarokas I have read so much about. Driving days are longer than normal days especially when you have an antsy dog cooped up in a crate behind your seat but it still remains a shame that there is never enough time to stop and soak things in to the degree they deserve.

The first and only other time I have driven cross-country, right before my Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike, the geography of that area struck me deeply enough to make me scribble the following passage down in my notebook. I liked it well enough to preserve without changes in the PCT book I finished several years later.

I try to push these thoughts from my mind as we roll across Montana at 85 mph and instead look at the landscape, one I’ve read about in Hemingway’s and Harrison’s pages so many times but never once seen. I think about what my notion of God might really look like, or perhaps gods. I think of the gods of the land and the peculiar collisions they must’ve had: the stolid goddesses of stone and ice, the sharp god of lightning and the soft god of wheat; the god of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen that breathed life into the ponderosa pines and the antelope and cattle that dot the landscape. The goddess of black soil, black hills, black sky.

This is a place that feels like it might roll on forever.

We passed the next night in Bismarck, North Dakota, after an accidental stop for a surprisingly satisfactory pizza dinner in Teddy Roosevelt National Park, which neither of us knew existed. The highways in North Dakota are lined on both sides with gumweed and blanketflower and black-eyed susan which make for a pleasant yellow kaleidoscope effect. They are also punctuated at regular intervals with the kind of faux-cheery billboards directed toward the vanishingly small percentage of people who are looking to be talked out of getting an abortion by a road sign. These billboards dot the length of I-94, through North Dakota and Minnesota and Wisconsin.

You notice other commonalities and oddities about places as you drive cross-country. Every highway-adjacent town in Wisconsin, for example, appears to have an identical water tower with the town name painted in block letters on the front of it. Water towers are not some new phenomenon to me obviously but they are something of a rarity in my day-to-day. Another thing: interstate gas stations tend to have big swaths of grass running behind them, and occasionally even little streams or creeks. Despite being the Protagonists of Reality we are clearly not the first people to ever take a dog for a long drive and I am grateful to the trailblazers before us who thought of such things. Some gas stations even have actual dog parks, which we have had a nose for finding completely by accident.

Now we are resting for a few days in Southwest Detroit, staying with a dear friend and taking a welcome respite from driving around. I had almost forgotten what it was like to spend time in a city with old bones and real distinct character. It’s not that Seattle has no culture; it’s just that the ravening maw of progress has devoured any semblance of old buildings and old neighborhoods, and has eroded most of the ethnic enclaves that give other big cities such unique and vibrant subsections.

Through all of this driving I have had time to reflect on the reality of all these dreams, which is simply this: they will not be what I imagine them to be, and that’s okay. Nothing ever is, really, at least not the things we imagine out of whole cloth when we’re dreaming big. I will continue to fail as a dog parent and husband and gardener and teacher and socialist and whatever else it is I decide to do with myself. As long as those failures lead to improvements there’s less to beat myself up over than what I typically imagine. I remind myself to think of it like baseball: Ted Williams, the most precise hitter ever to live, still only had an OBP of .482.

And suddenly I know that I will learn this someday. Accepting the inevitability of failing is teaching me to right myself with grace. I realize that I don’t care if I get it today. My blundering, the cold and the constant drip of salt down my throat, the choice to do it at all—they’ve given me a new way of being on the water, of dancing with forces that are beyond my control. I’m out of air, so I reach for the surface and twist my hips—my ear cradled in my shoulder, the back of my life jacket flush with the deck of the boat—and roll up. I’m so surprised I almost tip onto my other side. My numb cheeks stretch into a smile.

…Now when a wave comes that might be too big for me, I don’t fight it. I choose to capsize, trusting that I can right myself. Knowing that, for me, there is a joy in this. A wave is a wing extended, downy feathers ruffled in the wind, and I circle beneath it like a rising eddy of air.

That passage comes from a beautiful little piece about learning to roll a kayak, which is one of those things you have to practice doing even though when it happens and you weren’t trying for it it constitutes a failure. There’s something beautiful in that, I think: you have to actively practice at failing, at succeeding at failing, rather than failing at failing, which is what will drown you.

In a few days we will keep driving east and we will see more beautiful places and people we love. In doing so we will probably dissolve into helpless frustration another time or two, we will probably fail at patience or kindness or something else necessary a time or two. That’s okay. The trick is to learn from it. To get better at failing—to choose to capsize, knowing you can right yourself.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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