María Lionza and I left Missouri in April, as spring storms electrified the sky, tornadoes rocked the landscape and daffodils waved a bright yellow farewell. Dry soil gave way to grassy fields and gnarled trees revealed their first shoots of green. Eastern Redbud trees lined the roadsides with pale pink buds that resembled miniature Japanese cherry blossoms.

A daffodil bouquet from a neighbor, and the first signs of “green-up” along the Joplin trails.

Driving westward, the landscape gave way to the vast, brown plains of Oklahoma, the pine-filled hills and snow-topped peaks of northern New Mexico, and soon, the wildflower-speckled desert, prickly Dr. Seuss-like cacti and dry red rocks of Sedona. In these shifting surroundings we reacquainted ourselves with old friends – human companions we’d accumulated along the way; mountains and rivers we’d explored and come to know; four-legged creatures we’d encountered only in their youth. (Yoda, the stunted goat at Taos Goji, had transformed, in the many months we’d been absent, into a fully grown – and fully horned – adult.)

The rocky landscape and cacti of Sedona.

California, too, had changed. Far from the drought-brown wasteland we’d left behind, the hills lining Highway 101 resembled a lush tropical paradise. We wound our way up along an emerald coast, circumvented the Bay Area, and settled down among the walnut groves, family-run vineyards and oak-lined streets of Lakeport.

There, Mostafa welcomed us to his garden – some three acres of fruit trees, vegetable beds and sheep pasture, lined with lavender bushes and decorated with a deliberate care. Mostafa – a passionate, lifelong gardener – had been inspired by Michael Pollan’s writings to move from Seattle to a place where he could raise, cook and eat his own food. He and his wife had settled on Lakeport, partly because of the surrounding landscape and superior air quality, and he’d transformed their property into a personal paradise. (The word “paradise,” I later learned, comes from an old Persian word for gardens.)

I was the eager beneficiary of Mostafa’s culinary efforts – lamb dishes, crunchy tahdig and fresh salads filled with steamed beets, mangoes, and his special avocado, feta and roasted garlic dressing. Making the evening salad was one of my duties, and, as I was informed prior to my arrival, “the fancier, the better.” Each day at mid-morning, we paused for “juice time” – a delicious ritual involving freshly juiced carrots, beets and ginger. And in the evening, Mostafa never failed to offer me ice cream, Persian sweets, or the pistachios and dried dates that he’d magically coaxed from his own trees – despite the fact that many of them were designed for different climes.

Mostafa’s diverse and carefully tended garden was a natural expression of his own fascinating and highly varied life. Born to a traditional Muslim family in Iran, he spent just over a year in the U.S., where he met a Persian woman and fell in love. Both returned to Iran to participate in the Iranian Revolution, and were married. Mostafa and his socialist friends were some of the Revolution’s first political targets – once, a Mullah burst into the room where they were meeting, along with several guardsmen, and demanded somebody’s name. When the person refused to provide it without a lawyer present, Mostafa told me, one of the guardsmen shouted: “Wow, it’s just like the movies!” His companions laughed.

Mostafa and his friends were arrested soon after, and quickly discovered that prison in Iran had little in common with the American movies. The following morning, a man was shot right in front of them. Two female prisoners were sentenced to life in prison (women at the time had not been executed). Mostafa and the others struggled to prepare their own defenses against a laundry list of accusations, hoping desperately to receive the same sentence – they’d seen the execution chamber, and the ambulance waiting outside. The court tried to push them through, but the proceedings went late into the night – then spilled over into the next day, the next week. Eventually, the twelve of them were sent back to prison, where they continued to lobby for their release. But in the midst of the advocating and pleading and half-hearted hunger strikes, Mostafa, somehow, found a way to thrive. He toasted bread on a tiny rooftop stove, and spread it with butter, honey and feta cheese – a delicacy he still enjoys today. “My friends would joke that I was doing so well, if they set me free I’d choose to stay,” Mostafa said. After nine months of this, for reasons that seemed as opaque as their arrests, they were released.

Almost immediately, Mostafa was drafted to fight in the Iran-Iraq war – his second stint in the army – where he took a bullet in one side. And after further difficulties, including a tumultuous four months during which his pregnant wife was also imprisoned, the couple struggled to return to the U.S. While they suffered several misadventures, they eventually succeeded. They settled in Seattle, where his wife worked as a software engineer at IBM, and Mostafa, at first without a green card, traveled the country to earn money as a skilled face painter at Renaissance fairs. Ultimately, Mostafa learned to build computers, and was employed for much of his adult life as a software test engineer at Microsoft and a systems and software engineer at Compaq / Hewlett Packard.

When his wife passed away two years ago, leaving Mostafa alone with his garden, he focused on raising game birds and lambs, and hosting farm help – like myself – for company. While he missed his wife terribly, Mostafa possessed a profound zest for life, and yearned to share it with others – ideally, gardening, hiking, biking, or otherwise enjoying the outdoors. I mostly assisted with weeding, salad making, and bottle-feeding a little lamb I named Sylvester. (Mostafa, who sometimes had trouble recalling the name, would occasionally refer to him as “Stallone.”) Each morning before dawn, when the sky was grey and the dew thick on the grass, I would trudge out to the sheep pasture and call Sylvester, and he would run over on eager, wobbly legs to greet me. And at lunch and dinner, he would stand by the gate, informing me that I was taking far too long to feed him.

But Mostafa’s garden, I soon realized, extended far beyond the confines of his property to encompass the hills, valleys, and assorted flora of Mendocino county. Several mornings, we trekked the eight miles to his favorite destination, Goat Rock – a large boulder nestled in the hollows of Cow Mountain – and I struggled to keep pace as he and his trusted dog, Balla, led the way. Luckily there were plenty of opportunities to catch my breath, as Mostafa regularly paused to exclaim in childlike wonder over oak leaves, creek beds, and newly blossoming flowers. He meticulously photographed the most recent blooms to identify later, and when his phone died, he insisted that I do the same. “You should really photograph that bunch,” he would tell me. “They are just so beautiful.”

Mostafa’s enthusiasm was contagious. And it didn’t just apply to the natural world, but also to his wide-ranging interests – skiing, movies, music, podcasts; even, to my surprise, American democracy. He stressed that the current U.S. president, no matter how unfortunate, had been democratically elected, and, while saddened by the hate crimes that were reported with increasing frequency around the country, seemed relatively unfazed. Having struggled against the Shah, languished for months in an Iranian prison and narrowly escaped execution, Mostafa had a refreshingly positive appreciation for our choice-based system, electoral college notwithstanding. And he was equally enthusiastic about exercising his democratic right to protest, working hard to drum up support in his small, conservative town to find somebody – anybody – to accompany him to marches in Santa Rosa and beyond.

Mostafa spoke often and fondly of Iran – of the mountains, where, he told me, you could go for long, extended hikes to the most remote places, and still find a café that would serve you fresh juice. He even had good things to say about Iran’s political development –despite the fact that two of his distant family members had been recently imprisoned on unwarranted charges of espionage, and could face execution themselves. He saw it as a slow progression forward. “Iran is like a baby democracy,” he told me.

Having lived life, Mostafa had seen that one dramatic action does not necessarily solve everything – certainly not immediately. Instead, he saw democracy as something to nurture, to develop, to grow. Like one of the blooms in Mendocino county, on the way to Goat Rock, that takes its time to flower; that is to be appreciated at every stage along the way.

Flowers blossoming on Cow Mountain.

Because no matter how bad things are looking, if we can count on anything, it’s that they’ll change – and not always for the worse. A pending execution can be pardoned. Stunted goats like Yoda at Taos Goji can grow into healthy, flourishing adults. A drought-stricken coastline can, after an extensive season of rainfall, become a verdant green. And a federal decision to remove a nation from a worldwide climate agreement can always prompt better decision-making from local, state and business leaders. Mostafa treated our political situation the way he did his plants, his animals, his surroundings: with the unwavering hope and optimistic belief that, given the right conditions – the sun; the rain; a handheld bottle of lamb’s milk replacer – it, too, could find its way.

“All beings do not see mountains and waters in the same way. Some beings see water as a jeweled ornament, but they do not regard jeweled ornaments as water. What in the human realm corresponds to their water? We only see their jeweled ornaments as water. Some beings see water as wondrous blossoms, but they do not use blossoms as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or pus and blood. Dragons see water as a palace or a pavilion. Some beings see water as the seven treasures or a wish-granting jewel. Some beings see water as a forest or a wall. Some see it as the Dharma nature of pure liberation, the true human body, or as the form of body and essence of mind. Human beings see water as water. Water is seen as dead or alive depending on causes and conditions. Thus the views of all beings are not the same. You should question this matter now. Are there many ways to see one thing, or is it a mistake to see many forms as one thing? You should pursue this beyond the limit of pursuit.”  – Zen Master Dogen, The Mountains and Rivers Sutra.

María Lionza and I arrived in Missouri in early December, with little but my GPS to go on. I’d been told the Ozark Mountains were breathtaking, and was eager to explore them. After all, my entire 18-month journey had begun with an urge to go to the mountains. And these were the mountains, weren’t they? From Google maps, it was rather hard to tell. Put “Sierra Nevada Mountains” or “Rocky Mountains” into Google, and it pulls up vast expanses of green, with prominent peaks and valleys; individual mountains identified by name. Put “Ozark Mountains” into Google, and the indicator plops itself down, unconvincingly, into a flat, beige area near Arkansas. Sure, there are splashes of green throughout southern Missouri and northern Arkansas that seem to indicate some kind of forest. There’s an enormous reservoir, Lake of the Ozarks, in the state’s central region. But I simply couldn’t pinpoint any mountains.

If I thought my arrival would dispel this mystery, I was wrong. As I drove down into Missouri’s southwestern corner, the land around me remained flat but for brief, rolling hills. Cows mooed out across lonely fields; the earth was dusty and dry; grey trees clutched to the last of their crinkled brown leaves. And upon my arrival in Branson – a Bible Belt-inspired Las Vegas, Disneyland and Broadway musical mecca combined – I grew increasingly disoriented. Perhaps it was the inquisitive rooster and fork-stabbed bloody meatballs that urged me into restaurants, the celebrity-studded Mt. Rushmore with its plaster cast veneer, or the King Kong raging above the Hollywood Wax Museum, but I could never seem to figure out exactly where I was – or where I should be going.

Come hang out here! You know you want to.

When I finally set out to explore the Ozarks, they remained elusive. The most obvious location, Dogwood Canyon – overly accessible with its motorized tram, paved walkways and manicured lawns – was beautiful, but hardly felt wild. And when I followed my GPS to a hiking trail I’d identified online, it took me to the middle of a dirt road where I ground to a halt in a patch of dust, surrounded by dreary trees. There was no trail in sight. Defeated, I turned back to Route 76, with its flashing lights, imposing billboards and Titanic-sized, roadside entertainment.

In search of answers, I visited the Branson History Museum, where I viewed an hour-long film on the area’s history and culture. Many people had moved to Ozark country, the film explained, on the strength of a novel – “The Shepherd of the Hills,” written by Harold Bell Wright and published in 1907. The tale has since inspired a televised version as well as four movies – including a 1941 adaptation starring John Wayne. In terms of sales, the museum claimed, the book is second only to the Bible (a claim I was unable to verify).

We left Branson several days later for our new home, two hours north – an ancient cottage outside the small town of Sarcoxie, built in the early 1800s. And once we’d settled in – María Lionza lounging comfortably in our shared “Lavender Room”– I ventured forth to the Sarcoxie Library, to find a copy.

“The Shepherd of the Hills” is a story that revolves around a mysterious, cultured stranger with a secret who leaves the far-off and nebulous “city” for the peace and beauty of the Ozarks, and quickly endears himself to the local mountaineers. The characters – including a strapping young man and his beautiful love interest, a whimsical young boy named Pete, and a sturdy, elderly couple – are said to have been based on the author’s own encounters with the region’s early mountain dwellers. Many of them – Pete in particular – encounter ghosts, and other unseen forces, on a regular basis. “A lot of people in the Ozarks still hold onto these superstitions,” the librarians told me. “They still believe in these things.”

Did these “things” include the mountains, I wondered? Because I still didn’t see them. Was I – like Mugatu – taking crazy pills? I’d been in Missouri a month when I finally worked up the courage to ask. As we drove into Springfield for ballroom dance class one evening, I took a deep breath and turned to my landlady – a sweet, retired schoolteacher named Candy. “OK,” I said. “Everyone’s always talking about the Ozark mountains. People call this Ozark country. But I simply don’t see any mountains. Where ARE they?”

Candy laughed at me. “Oh, they’re not really mountains,” she said, as though explaining things to one of her schoolchildren. “They’re more like hills.” I gazed out, confused, at the flat land all around me. What hills? “People say we shouldn’t call this Ozark country,” Candy added, referring to the area we were traversing between Sarcoxie and Springfield. “It’s not, really. But everybody does. It’s kind of a joke.”

Clearly, the joke was on me. The “Ozark Mountains,” I finally managed to ascertain, were, according to Wikipedia, “actually a high and deeply dissected plateau” covering most of southern Missouri, as well as parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma. They were also considered “by far the most extensive and mountainous region between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains.” Their highest point could well be the rolling hills I had navigated near Branson. So, as it turned out, the Ozark Mountains weren’t really mountains at all. Or were they?

I set out to explore them one warm winter day, as bold patches of yellow daffodils pierced through the grey landscape. The Hercules Glades Wilderness, northeast of Branson, is a 12,000+ acre area full of cedars, waterfalls, bald rugged hilltops and prairie-like grasslands. It’s Missouri’s oldest designated wilderness, and is said to be exemplary of the Ozarks’ unique ecosystem.

As I navigated dirt trails covered in dead leaves, stood inspired before limestone cliffs and dry creek beds, and listened to wild winds in thick trees, I began to see the hills in a different light. They rose and fell like the earth’s steady breath – constant, present, reliable. Perhaps their grounded nature, their earthy presence – not their appearance – was what made them mountains. There I’d been, looking for the familiar characteristics of the West –green forests; jagged outcroppings of rock; snowy peaks that asserted themselves high above me. And as a result, I’d failed to notice what lay directly underfoot.

When I came upon a small, painted rock in a wide-open glade, urging me to “Be still,” I sat for a time, gazing out toward the distant hills. And I recalled Harold Bell Wright’s whimsical, misunderstood character – the young outdoor adventurer and enthusiast named Pete, a “wandering spirit of the woods and hills” who was more at home among the trees than beneath a roof.

“Here and there among men,” Wright wrote of Pete, “there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real. How often have we seen them … jostled and ridiculed by their fellows, pushed aside and forgotten, as incompetent or unworthy. He who sees and hears too much is cursed for a dreamer, a fanatic, or a fool, by the mad mob, who, having eyes, see not, ears and hear not, and refuse to understand.

“We build temples and churches, but will not worship in them; we hire spiritual advisers, but refuse to heed them; we buy bibles, but will not read them; believing in God, we do not fear Him; acknowledging Christ, we neither follow nor obey Him. Only when we can no longer strive in the battle for earthly honors or material wealth, do we turn to the unseen but more enduring things of life; and, with ears deafened by the din of selfish war and cruel violence, and eyes blinded by the glare of passing pomp and folly, we strive to hear and see the things we have so long refused to consider.

“Pete knew a world unseen by us, and we, therefore, fancied ourselves wiser than he. The wind in the pines, the rustle of the leaves, the murmur of the brook, the growl of the thunder, and the voices of the night were all understood and answered by him. The flowers, the trees, the rocks, the hills, the clouds were to him, not lifeless things, but living friends, who laughed and wept with him as he was gay or sorrowful.”

Pete, it seemed, had seen things differently from many of us. And, as the librarians in Sarcoxie had assured me, there were many who continued to do so today. Were the Ozarks mountains, or weren’t they? Were there many ways to see one thing, or was it a mistake to see many forms as one thing? The answer, it seemed, lay in the small, red stone; that admonition, placed there by some far-seeing stranger – some whimsical character, some elusive Pete – urging us to finally, for once, “be still.”

 

 

As I drove to my new home – an old cottage in southwestern Missouri – a sign on the freeway caught my attention: Gun and Knife Show, at the Ozarks Empire Fairgrounds in Springfield.

I’ve never shot a gun – or even held one – but they’ve nevertheless impacted my life. I’ve lost a family member in the U.S. to gun suicide. I was present for a drive-by shooting at my high school in Vancouver, Canada, when one student was shot in the leg. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint while hiking in Venezuela. And like many other people, I’ve been horrified by the mass shootings that have taken place in schools, night clubs, churches and shopping malls across the nation.

Guns for sale at the RK Gun and Knife Show in Springfield, Mo.

I’ve also worked on farms across the U.S., where gun ownership was often considered a normal and necessary aspect of everyday existence. I’ve camped alongside hunters, who used a range of rifles to hunt deer and bear. And I’ve lived with people who believed that high capacity, military-style weapons were an important right for people who wished to ensure their own survival in an unstable world.

As someone who generally aspires to be a peaceful person, I have no real desire to own or operate a weapon – particularly one that is semiautomatic, like an AR-15. Yet considering the divisiveness of the issue, and the strong opinions held by many individuals on either side, I decided to attend the Gun Show to enhance my own perspective.

Here’s what some people had to say.

Donald Collins

My business here is sharpening knives and selling knife sharpening systems, but I relate to the gun show crowd, for the simple fact that I grew up in rural Texas, hunting and fishing. That was a part of life, a way of life, because we had five sisters growing up. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, my dad was a hardworking man, and we supplemented the grocery bill with what we could hunt and gather from the land. So for us, guns were a part of our household culture. Now we didn’t go out raising Cain shooting everything up – they were secured, put away. Actually they weren’t even what we’d call secure today, just hung on a gun rack on the wall. And Dad raised us kids to know that those weren’t toys. They were a tool, and they presented a potential danger if mishandled, and he taught us how to handle them. Most of all he taught us to respect them and everything that comes with that. You know – Know your target. Don’t point a gun at anything you’re not willing to shoot. And only use it for the purpose of gathering food that you’re going to eat, or if need be, when you have no other option, to defend yourself. We never had an issue with a gun in the house, and Dad had a few.

So for me, I’ve always been around them so they don’t bother me. I understand that every gun has the potential to kill, and ultimately that’s their purpose, whether that’s the intent of the owner or not – they were designed for killing. But for me, I believe it’s how you’re taught and how you’re raised. If you grow up in an environment where life is not respected and, I’m not sure how to say it – if killing people is more common than it should be – then problems are going to arise. But I see that as a societal issue far more than I see it as a way of life. I guess you could say that it’s a way of life for some.

I didn’t grow up that way. And my sons – I have two sons, a four-year-old and an eight-year-old – and I have a few guns in the house. They both know where they’re at, and they’re secured away from them, but they know they don’t get to touch them without Dad being there. And all of the safety issues that go along with that – we teach them respect. What our intent is for, what our way of life is for. I took my son, my eight-year-old, out for his first hunting trip last year, and we spent months prior to that teaching him how to shoot, how to care for the gun, how to handle the weapon. And then we also spent an equal amount of time talking about the ethics of hunting. We don’t go out and kill living creatures just for the fun of it. We eat what we kill. So he knows that even if he’s out in the yard with a BB gun and decides to take a potshot at a bird, to be prepared to eat that, because we’re not wasting life. We also teach them to pay respect in our own way to the animals that we take when hunting, to be thankful to God for providing them.

As far as the 2^nd Amendment goes, I’m a history student, I have a bachelor’s degree in history, and I’ve done some research and have spent some time studying and reading. And I perfectly believe that the Founding Fathers intended for every citizen to have a gun – not just the standing militia, not just those involved in defending the country. But it’s every person’s right to own a gun, with responsibility. Now, times have obviously changed since then. It looks a lot different – we’re not a country trying to establish itself. But in today’s climate we are a country trying to protect our future existence. Now, is an average hunting rifle or an AR-15 going to be sufficient to defend against an invading force? Probably not. It’s certainly not going to be enough to defend against a tyrannical government with some of the most advanced technological weapons in the world.

Personally, I believe that back in ‘07, ‘08 when the economy crashed, we were far closer to a total economic meltdown than most people realized. And I believe that’s not an unlikely event at some point in the future. Tomorrow, next week, probably not, but ten years from now, I don’t know. I believe it has its potential. And I believe that within that time frame, should that happen, what you’ll find is local chaos – where once the grocery stores run out of food, the money’s no good to buy food, then folks that aren’t versed in providing for their own, gathering for their own, are going to be looking for ways to secure food for survival. And I think that’s where weapons such as that come into play. Defending your home, defending your property, in that situation. That perspective is a little bit conspiracy theorist, some would say. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I see the potential for economic fallout should we ever approach that brink again and potentially fall over. So I do own what some would call an assault rifle – which is a huge misnomer. I believe it’s my right to own it, but I also believe that I have a huge responsibility to protect that right with the proper handling of any firearm that I have, and teaching my sons how to properly handle and respect any firearm. And ultimately, the respect for life itself.

What a lot of people consider an assault rifle is not really an assault rifle. It has a military look to it, but it’s really, other than the amount of rounds that it can carry in a magazine, it’s not really different from the hunting rifle that’s laying over there on the counter. This hunting rifle is what we call a bolt-action rifle. Meaning that for each shot you have to cycle the bolt, ejecting the spent round and chambering a new round. Now this hunting rifle will hold three rounds – maybe four or five, depending on its design. Most hunting rifles hold 3-5 rounds. Whereas an AR-15 or an AR-10, which is commonly mistaken for an assault rifle, has a bolt that will automatically cycle, but it’s one trigger pull, one shot. It’s not pull the trigger and it empties the magazine. You have to pull it for each shot. So the biggest difference there is the magazine capacity. You can get large capacity clips. For most of us that have those style of rifles, they’re for fun. We go out into the woods, we load it up, and we find a target and we unload the gun on the target as fast as we can. It’s a rush, it’s a thrill. But the vast majority of people that I know, and all of the people with whom I associate and enjoy that kind of entertainment, there is no ill-will or intent involved. It’s just – we’re going out to have some good ol’ boy fun.

But you know, you have that responsibility. No matter what the weapon is – whether it’s a single shot, and you can only load one round at a time, or if it’s a handgun, a semiautomatic or a revolver – whatever style of weapon that you have, you have the responsibility with the right to own that gun. It’s a burden, I would call it – you have the burden of responsible ownership. You keep them secured, you make sure that nobody can get to them that shouldn’t have their hands on them, you teach those within the household proper operations. Just like if I, you know, bought a new lawnmower for my son to go out and mow the lawn with, I’m going to teach him how to safely operate that piece of equipment. And so that’s the way I view this – as another tool and another piece of equipment that people should be taught how to handle properly.

I haven’t really known any victims of gun violence. Self-inflicted – I’ve known a couple of people. I did have a buddy in high school, years ago, he was a star basketball player, and him and his younger brother were in the yard shooting a BB gun. And his younger brother shot at a Frisbee that was laying on the ground, and the BB deflected off the Frisbee and hit him in the eye, and that ended his basketball career. But other than that, no.

People are talking about needing to change the system to prevent the wrong people from their hands on firearms. And of course people are always saying that guns don’t kill, people kill – and I agree with that. But at the same time, when guns are so prevalent and easily obtained in our society … they talk about the gun show loophole. Its not really a loophole here. If you’re buying from any licensed dealer in here, yes, you have to fill out a background report and pass it to get a gun. Now, it’s probably more correctly described as the private sell loophole. What that means is I can take any one of my guns and sell it to anybody as a private seller without them having to pass a background check. I’m uncertain about that. I see the potential pitfalls there. And so perhaps yes, we do need to tighten that up some way, somehow. But what I do know is, whatever regulation, restriction, law – whatever you want to put out there – those with the intent of creating harm, they’re going to find a way around it. If there’s not a loophole they’re going to create a loophole. They’re going to figure out how to get what they want, to do what they choose to do.

With the simple number of firearms that are out there and available, some of them not so difficult to obtain, we probably need to do something. But I’m leery of doing anything that infringes on the right of the lawful owner – that infringes on their right to own and use firearms as well. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword.

Dwaine Murphy

I served in the navy out in Norfolk, Virginia, out on a tin can –the USS Basilone. It’s a small ship. I was in the navy for just five years. I wanted to ship over, but they wouldn’t do it – I went in through the naval reserves. And when they wouldn’t let me ship over I came home. I was planning to go back in again, but I met a woman, and she said, “I will not be married to a sailor.” So that was the end of that! It was all good, though, because I’ve got two wonderful daughters, and a son – he’s a good one, too. He’s traveled with Bob Hope, going to these different countries. He was quite an actor. One of his main shows was “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” He was really good.

I do have guns at home, and I had to bring this one in to show people. It’s really old and it’s called a thumb trigger. See, there’s no trigger down here, there’s a pull-back. It’s the first one I learned how to shoot, so I’ve just held onto it all these years. I used to hunt with that gun – rabbits, squirrels. If I killed it, we ate it. I’m not one to go out and shoot them and leave them. I’m 82 and soon to be 83, so I don’t hunt anymore. But these people up and down the line, when I told them how a thumb trigger worked, they said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” So I brought her in today to show them. It’s from 1908, I think. It’s older than me.

I have mixed feelings about [gun ownership], but I know that I don’t want my guns taken away from me. Because I have quite a few guns. I have shotguns, and I’ve got .22 rifles – that’s what this is. There’s just so much orneriness going on right now. And the thing I’d hate to see worse than anything is for people to gang up on our police departments and shoot and kill them. But I’d probably cry if someone took my guns away.

I’ve got another story about a gun. My dad used to work for the state of Missouri, and he was working at a weigh station. He was going to leave them and go be a guard out at one of their stations in Kansas City. And this state patrolman, he used to come in there all the time. And he sold my dad this pistol, and he said, “It’s one that Pretty Boy Floyd dropped in a bank.” And so whether that’s true or not, I have no clue. But when I watched the American Heroes Channel, and they had him on there, the gun – a long barrel – that Pretty Boy Floyd dropped, it was that type of gun. I’ve got a lot of stories like that to tell, about old guns.

Charlie Green

I’m not purchasing a gun, I’m trying to sell one [a Winchester .270 hunting rifle]. I’m from 20 miles north of Springfield.

I was raised with guns, and I’ve hunted since I was 10 years old. I own mostly hunting rifles. I’ve got a few pistols and some for personal protection, but mostly just for hunting. If you’re legal to have a gun, I think you should have the right to keep one. As long as they’re not fully automatic, I think each individual should be able to have whatever their taste can afford.

I don’t have any children at home, but I have gun safe, and I keep them locked up to where people couldn’t just come and just break in and take the and use them illegally. I make sure that they’re put away.

I think [regulation] is really a deterrent. I don’t agree with open carry. Because if you allow open carry, then anybody can carry, and I think you ought to have some kind of training. If anybody can carry, then – you know, a lot of people are not qualified to safely carry a gun.

My training started with my dad growing up. I was taught not to touch a gun. But I’ve seen people buy guns, and I’ve sold guns to people, that had no clue how to load them or anything else. So they ought to have instructions on how to safely load one, unload one, and carry one. Whether it’s paid for, or some other way – they ought to be trained, some way, somehow.

I’m a little bit hesitant to have a background check on individual guns, because to be honest with you, I don’t trust the government enough to where they wouldn’t come in and tax everything – any guns that you’ve got. And if they know exactly what you’ve got, then they can come and confiscate them. So I’ve got really mixed emotions about that. If you inherit a gun then I don’t believe the government ought to be able to tax you on that. If you’re buying and selling for a living, then yeah, sure.

Would it help with safety concerns? Yeah, it probably would.

Shane Morelan

I sell rifles and pistols to the general public. I’ve been doing it for about six months. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and then moved to southeastern Missouri in 1988.

I do have guns at home – all kinds of guns, pistols and long guns. I use them for hunting. I think having guns in the home is a personal choice for each individual, and each family member.

I use an AR-15 for hunting and shooting – I hunt deer. I also have a .22 that’s based on an AR-15 platform that I use to hunt squirrels and rabbits. AR stands for Armalite Rifle, the inventor of this style of platform. There’s no such thing as an assault rifle. The term assault came up in 1994, from Diane Feinstein, to get the Weapons Ban passed. The military has one weapon that has “assault” in its name, and it’s a rocket launcher. There are no weapons on my table that are called assault rifles. AR-15s are called semi-automatic firearms. [Read a history of Armalite Rifle, including its development of the AR-15, here.]

There’s no such thing as an assault weapon. Anything can be classified as an assault weapon. If I pick up a soda bottle and I beat you with it, it becomes an assault bottle. So people use these words without knowing – the mainstream media, and the news – it’s sensationalized, because that’s what draws people in. It creates an audible gasp from the people that don’t know.

Automatic rifles have been heavily regulated since 1986 – you cannot just go and buy those. They are heavily regulated by the government as it is. So the fact that people interchange the words for assault rifles, machine guns and automatic rifles shows the lack of intelligence on their part, because they want to talk about stuff about which they have no clue.

You ought to ask the government [about background checks]. For the last eight years they’ve dropped the ball on keeping people informed. Terrorists just use different methods. Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel. He killed 168 people, including [19] kids, but you don’t hear about that on the news. Because it’s not sensationalistic enough. They used an airplane full of jet fuel to take out a building – two buildings, actually – and kill 3,000 people, but you can still go buy diesel fuel, you can still go buy fertilizer, you can still board a plane.

I take my daughters out to go hunting and go shooting. One of the first things that we did was go over gun safety. That was two hours before we ever did anything. Do I think that gun safety is paramount? Absolutely, I do. They’re not play toys – people need to realize that. They’re always as dangerous as you make them. I’ve never seen a gun automatically just go off and kill people. Just like you’re not going to see a car start up and run through a festival like you did in France. But I can go up to the truck stop here and spend $100,000 and buy a truck that weighs 40,000 lbs. That’s just one point. I’m a retired police officer, and the average response time is somewhere in the neighborhood of four minutes. A lot can happen in four minutes.

Everybody says that it’s easy to buy a gun. It’s not easy to buy a gun. There are all kinds of forms that you have to fill out. You have to get run through the background check, through the FBI. I don’t do private sales. But they talk about private sales where you don’t know who you’re selling it to, right? Well, what happens if you sell your car to somebody that has 12 DWIs and is not supposed to be driving? And what you didn’t know is that they just got out of prison for vehicular homicide, and you just sold them a car. Next thing you know, they go out and have an accident and kill three people. It’s one of those things. There’s nothing in this world that is going to make anything perfect. There are no perfect answers to anything. They say, “Hey, make it illegal so nobody can get it.” Works wonders with drugs, doesn’t it?

But you have to mitigate. Do I think that background checks need to be a little more stringent? Absolutely not. Departments all need to start sharing the information the way they should be. Mental health, criminal justice – all of those need to be reported the way that they should, and then we won’t have the problems that we do. As far as expanding background checks – it’s not going to do any good. We need to fix what we have now as opposed to regulating more. More regulations aren’t going to help.

Treasa Porter

I didn’t buy anything today, but my husband bought something.

I do have guns at home – yes. I’m really not sure what kind mine is, because my dad gave it to me when I was little. He gave it to me when I was in my 20s, because he bought it the year I was born – ‘69.

I hunt deer. We have rifles – deer rifles, pistols. I’m not sure what else my husband has. But it’s a lot of different guns.

I don’t think they should regulate gun ownership. It should be a right to have one if you want one. There is gun violence, but if criminals want to get ahold of guns, they’re going to get ahold of guns – no matter how they regulate them.

We do have children at home – two of them will be 15 tomorrow and one’s 11. The guns are locked up. They also deer hunt, but they don’t go without an adult.

Mica Williams

I sell high-capacity drum magazines for AR-15s, AK – Basically, if it’s out there, we can find it. It’s been too long to count – I’ve been doing the shows for about a year, but altogether it’s been six or seven years. A long time. I can’t even keep up with how long it’s been. My boyfriend and I went to a gun show at one particular time and they didn’t have what we were looking for. Now, I can honestly say we are probably the only people who have the range of high-capacity drums that we have.

I’m from Kansas City, Missouri. I have a Glock – I don’t recall the number, but it’s one of the smaller ones – and then I have a revolver. It’s little, and pink – it’s cute.

I can’t hunt because I don’t like the whole shooting animals thing – I couldn’t do that. No. It’s for safety – home invasion and stuff like that, safety-wise. But no sport shooting. There’s one in the car and one at home, or they’re both at home. It makes me feel a lot safer compared to going out there without one. I guess I’ve had one for so long, that it wouldn’t feel right to just go out there – I would say naked. If you just have that one opportunity, and you have to protect yourself by any means, I don’t know karate or any other self-defense. I doubt as women that we would have to use it. But you still need it, just in case.

I have no feelings toward [stricter gun control] at all. Business-wise, yes, it would impact me. But honestly, I don’t see it happening. Nope – I just don’t see it happening.

I arrived at the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, NY in late October, as the last of fall’s brightly colored leaves drifted from bare branches to the ground. After a whirlwind trip across the country – visiting a vet clinic in Watford City, North Dakota; farming vegetables in Hermosa, South Dakota; building wheelchair ramps and bunk beds on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; visiting the pipeline protest at Standing Rock; camping in parks and on roadsides in the northernmost parts of the northernmost U.S. states – I had deposited María Lionza at a “Cat Lodge” in upstate New York so that I could spend a month in residence there.

María Lionza living it up in her private suite.

The imposing grey building – built by a Catholic priest and Norwegian craftspeople in the 1930s – today provides a home and meeting place for a handful of monastics, some yearlong residents, and numerous weekend and weekly retreatants. Our group of eight, short-term “monthers” had joined them in a rigorous training program to experience traditional Zen practice and learn how to incorporate it into our daily lives.

We were quickly absorbed into the monastery’s routine – a tight schedule that had us up early every morning, and seated in the zendo, wearing long, grey-blue monks’ robes, well before 5 a.m. We spent several hours a day meditating; the rest of our time was consumed by work practice, body practice, art practice, or preparing, eating (and cleaning up after) delicious, home-cooked vegetarian meals. By lights-out at 9:30 p.m., we were more than ready to collapse onto the wooden bunk beds in our hillside cabins, absorbing as much rest as possible before our alarms sounded again, a few hours later, ushering in yet another day.

I entered the monastery with the election looming, and when I told a friend, she laughed. “You’re getting Zen about it,” she said. “When people bring up the election, I’m going to tell them I have a friend who is literally getting Zen about it.” While I laughed along with her, I wondered: What, exactly, does that mean? Would I have immediate access to the results? Would we be sequestered away in silence, and come stumbling out of a dark grey meditation hall one morning to find the world an unrecognizable place? Would we discuss what the results meant – for us, for the country, for the world – or simply try to meditate it all away?

Regardless, I wasn’t too worried. While I’d long ago lost faith in politics, I was hopeful that Clinton would win. I’d read a scattering of news articles, followed a few polls, and submitted my mail-in ballot with weeks to spare. The results were assured, I told myself – despite what I’d seen during my drive through the rural communities of northern Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois: the Trump/Pence signs that sat planted in yards, hung boldly from billboards, and rose up along backcountry roads. Whatever America’s problems, whatever Clinton’s failures, whatever the issues at hand, I hoped – I believed – that a man who espoused such hatred could never hold our country’s highest office.

Many of the monastics seemed to share my optimism, and announced that they would be setting up a television in the community building for those who wanted to watch the results. Far from the isolated, offline environment I had imagined, the Zen Mountain Monastery – first founded as a Zen Arts Center in 1980 – provided an unusual mixture of silence, stillness, and connection to the outside world. I was impressed by the organization’s ability to balance a rigorous training schedule – one that adhered closely to ceremony, ritual and punctuality – with the inclusion of art and Chi Gong, as well as weekly time off to go hiking, attend to personal business, or even travel. I was impressed with the leadership’s and practitioners’ concentrated efforts to address racism, sexism and other issues – within themselves, within their community, and beyond the monastery’s walls – and inspired by the strong, grounded presence of the female monks.

The weekend prior to the election, the other female residents and I had the opportunity to attend a women’s sesshin (meditation intensive). The gathering of some 70 female practitioners took place with the full support the men – who abdicated the building, cooked our meals, and otherwise assisted us – and was an incredibly powerful experience. Hojin Osho, who led the retreat, rearranged the zendo in the shape of a womb, and as we chanted a poem by one of her heroes – the badass 19^th century Buddhist nun Ōtagaki Rengetsu – I found myself in tears.

The women at Zen Mountain Monastery chanting “Field of Wild Grasses.”

The opportunity to experience such a feminine gathering within a male-dominated tradition was not only profound and impactful, but also seemed indicative of the way our society at large was breaking down barriers to become more inclusive and connected; more willing to celebrate differences; more attuned to the benefits of diversity and balance.

So on the fateful night of Tuesday, November 8, I chose to go to bed, fairly confident of the results I would encounter in the morning. It was a shock, then, to wake up, break silence to check my phone, and find that Donald Trump – according to all reliable predictions – would be our next president. That morning’s meditation in the zendo was somber, solemn and emotionally charged. Afterward, when we had traipsed over to the community building for Chi Gong, I fought back tears as we went through the movements, wondering if I should escape to the bathroom for a good cry. I was heartbroken that we, as a populace, had chosen to embrace a leader who embodied such hatred, division and cruelty, and felt that an immense amount of suffering would result – not only for my fellow humans, but for the world in general.

After breakfast, after the announcement of the day’s work assignments, Hojin Osho stated: “A lot of us are feeling quite shell-shocked right now. So let’s just acknowledge that.” Later, in the afternoon, we met to chant the Karaniya Metta Sutta, and in the evening, we gathered in a circle, by candlelight; creating a safe space for people to share their feelings. And while we continued to sit, for hours – including a week-long intensive – on end, to encounter those places inside ourselves that were equally confused and divided, there was also much discussion of how to move in this new world, in Trump’s new America. Tables were set up to write letters to senators and other political representatives, defending civil liberties. One student, undergoing an elaborate ceremony to become a senior, gave a talk in which he suggested that there were times, in our current political climate, to stand up and not back down. “Yes, yes,” he said, referring to a koan he had been discussing, “can sometimes be a resounding ‘No!’”

I’d shared my own thoughts with one of the monks that morning, as we’d cleared pathways and weeded the garden. “I don’t think that we can begin to understand the implications of what we’ve done,” I told him. “All bets are off; anything can happen.”

“Absolutely,” he’d agreed. “And,” he added, “there are a lot of people out there whom we’ve failed to take care of.”

His words struck me. They rang in my ears as I left the monastery in late November. They echoed in my heart as I drove down through Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana – camping in cold forests populated by gun-toting men in camouflage, hunting deer and bear; men who treated me with nothing but courtesy and respect. I passed signs for Trump/Pence in all shapes and sizes; navigated through rusty red territories; sidled my way into rural convenience stores, aware that I was likely the only liberal there.

And as I settled down into Missouri, my home for the next few months, I wondered about my new neighbors, my roommates – those who had voted, overwhelmingly, for Trump. How had we gotten here? Why had we, as a people, chosen this path, of all paths? What could I learn from such choices? What could I do differently? This, it seemed, was getting Zen about it – not only sitting on a cushion, focusing exclusively on inner revolution at the expense of engaging with the world outside, however interconnected they may be. Rather, it was making an effort to understand; taking responsibility for our own mistakes and delusions; working together; moving forward. And yes, sitting. But when sitting proved not to be enough? Standing up, giving voice, and refusing to back down.

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For another take on residency at Zen Mountain Monastery, check out Where is Loo?

This October, María Lionza and I had an opportunity to visit those opposing the Dakota Access pipeline near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The 1,170-mile pipeline connecting North Dakota’s Bakken and Three Forks production areas to Illinois is expected to transport 470,000 barrels of oil per day, starting as early as the end of this year. Its construction  has been highly controversial. Originally slated to cross the Missouri River north of Bismark, it was rerouted partially due to the potential threat to the city’s water supply. Native American groups say that the new route, which will cross the Missouri River near Lake Oahe, threatens the water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and other tribal groups, and overturns many of their sacred burial sites.

Thousands of indigenous people from all over the U.S. – and the world – have since converged at the camp along the Missouri River. While I was there, an aboriginal woman from Australia arrived to present a kangaroo skin and an aboriginal flag, and a group of Mexica (formerly Aztec) people with huge, feathered headdresses performed a dance. One speaker commented on a prophecy that one day, the condor and the eagle would come together. “We are seeing this prophecy fulfilled,” he said.

I spoke to several people at the camp, and asked them two questions: “Why are you here?” and “What do you want to say to those who aren’t here?” These are their responses.

Wilfred Jones

Standing Rock Lakota, South Dakota

My name is Wilfred Jones (original surname: Mahpiya Takica, or “Different Cloud”) and I’m from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. I came from the South Dakota part of it, and I’m a grandson of Chief Gall. He used to live along the river down in South Dakota. Now the people that live along the river know the value of the land, and how important the water is for their crops and for their lives.

Our people, they use the water. We use a lot of water in our ceremonies. My friend, he has a sweat lodge, and we use a lot of water inside the sweat lodge – to purify ourselves, to take care of ourselves – and we know the value of water. A lot of the tribes that are coming here, they also value the water, like we do. We say that it’s mni wiconi, which means “water of life.” And we use water in all of our ceremonies. The other tribes do too – they have their own ceremonies but they also use the water and they know how holy it is. The non-Natives, they really couldn’t care less.

A lot of the farmers that live along the river are for the pipeline, but they don’t understand that the pipeline is going to affect them, because they use the water to irrigate, to feed their cattle. It’s going to be affected all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. I grew up here in this area, and I know how the people react here – because it’s not their ideal, it’s a Native American ideal, and so now the non-Natives are against the Natives for protesting this pipeline. A lot of people don’t know what’s going on here at the camp. They’re making us look like radicals, like we’re here to pick a fight or do harm, but we’re not. We’re here to do this in a peaceful and a prayerful way.

This is an awesome thing that is going on. I think this is really going to make history, because never before has there been this many tribes coming together. There are over 300 of them. All of these people are coming together, the tribes, and some of them used to be our enemies – enemies of the Sioux – but now they’re all working together, which is really an amazing thing. I just don’t know how to explain it, but I’m in awe.

We’ve got a lot of friends that come here from different states to see what it’s about, what it’s like, how people are fighting for the water rights. And a lot of them are going back and they’re bringing back some knowledge. Getting the camps here ready for the winter. So they’re going to bring back supplies, sleeping bags, winter coats. Some of them are going to bring back lumber – so they can start building some kind of structure for the winter.

I hope we stop the pipeline. With all of these other pipelines breaking, people should be able to see that it’s damaging to the land.

Robert White

Ojibwe, Minnesota

I’m just here to work and show my support. I’m making teepee poles and whatever else is needed so that people can have a place to stay; so that kids, elders and women can have a regular place to sleep instead of a tent. That’s pretty much all I’m doing.

I heard about it online, through social media. I used to have a lot of anger, but since I’ve been here my whole mentality has changed. Just the unity – these are all my people. So I’m going to be here to do whatever I can to support them, in whatever way I can.

Welana Fields

Osage/Creek/Cherokee, Oklahoma

I came here with my brothers. We felt like we really just needed to be here. We needed to support other nations for this cause – it’s very important. It’s an issue that’s happening all around the world for everyone, and I know that things happen in numbers; when you get more people gathering together it has a greater impact. It felt like we needed to come support our relatives. Even though we’re Osage and Creek and Cherokee from Oklahoma, we’re all the same here in the United States, in the Americas. We’re all indigenous people.

It’s been wonderful. I’ve never experienced anything like this before – such a large gathering of people. You can go to a powwow and see a bunch of different tribes, but this is a different experience. You’re all here for a really important purpose, to bring awareness to this pipeline, and the protection of our land – everyone’s land. Not just our land as Indian people, but our land as human beings. We need to protect the environment, the water – we need that to sustain ourselves, and to live, for future generations.

What do I want to say to people outside of here? That’s a really heavy question. It sounds so simple but it’s kind of big. That we can change. We can make a difference, we can change these big corporations. We really need to figure out how to take them back as people, to get out of the kind of government that’s controlled by big corporations. And even beyond that, the world infrastructure, the big corporate giant. We just really need to take that back.

Audri Scott Williams

Lumbee/Cherokee/West African, Alabama

My name is Audri Scott Williams, and I’m a global trustee with the United Religions Initiative, which is an organization in 98 countries around the world. We have about 800 of what we call cooperation circles – grassroot groups. One of our primary objectives is to end religiously motivated violence by building bridges of peace and justice. And when we say religions, we’re talking about every religion – every form of indigenous spirituality, no exceptions. We figure that if we can make it happen on that level, we can be so far-reaching. So we came here to read a letter from the organization in support of what’s happening here at Standing Rock, in terms of preserving our environment and protecting the sacred waters of life.

I’ve walked around the world, on all six continents, and no matter where it was, especially in indigenous communities and poor communities, you see the impact of dumping and extractive industries. Most often, it’s occurring in places where there is no voice or a silenced voice. And so, here – I feel like this is a spark. And that flame is going out to all those communities, and raising them up, raising all of those voices up in a way that I haven’t seen done before, ever, in my lifetime.

I’ve been an organizer of indigenous programs for a long time – co-convener of the global indigenous network and a member of the indigenous science network. So I’ve traveled on this path for a long time. I’m of both African and Native American ancestry. And as I’m here I’m realizing that as I go back out to different places in the world, I get to bring this message with me. Even if I don’t speak it, it’s in me now – it’s in my presence. So that’s a reason for being here, too.

This is contagious. So many of us have been struggling – I mean, really struggling – to bring the environment, the water issues that galvanize the support of communities across the board, to the forefront. To somehow communicate that expediting the flow of oil and the proceeds and the profits isn’t the way to preserve Mother Earth. If we really want to do that we need to slow things down, to be clear about our intention and what we’re doing, what we’re supporting. To do what’s right for Mother Earth. Because never before have we stood so close to the edge, to the possibility that our children and grandchildren won’t even have a place to grow and to be nurtured and supported in this world.

When I say that, some people think I’m getting a little too extreme. But we’ve never had so much power in our hands as we do right now – the power to destroy the world in an instant. And from what I’ve seen on a global level, especially at a political level, there’s not the maturity to go along with that level of responsibility. So we as earth people, earth keepers, wisdom carriers, water protectors, indigenous folks – we have to rise together and put the spiritual essence back into this. To bring it all back into balance.

Chas Jewett

Cheyenne River Lakota, South Dakota

I’ve been working on environmental issues for twenty years now, and this is kind of the culmination of my career. I’ve been organizing Indians for a long time. I started out with the Sierra Club, but working with Indian people, trying to organize them. I was pretty involved with the Keystone pipeline, too, and this is really a continuation of that fight. A lot of the same people are here.

I’m here because I’m afraid that the planet’s going to be destroyed because of the fossil fuel industry, and I’m also here because it’s about time that we as tribal people were respected. That when we say no to something, it can mean no, instead of the authorities simply consulting us and then doing what they want to anyway, which is what they’ve been doing to us for 180 years. When they got us onto the reservations and they started assimilating us – we just wanted to go about our business and to be left alone. But we didn’t get to be left alone, because of all of the federal policies, and the shrinking of the reservations and other such actions.

Now, we’re at a point where we can’t leave things alone. We can’t stay isolated, because the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial folks are destroying the earth, destroying the fresh water; destroying the fact that we as a sovereign people have a right to fresh water. That’s part of our religion – you know, we’ve only been able to practice our religion since 1978. In 1978 they passed the Religious Freedom Act – for a country founded on religious liberty, it’s really funny that we’ve just been able to do that in my lifetime.

So a lot of this has been about prayer, and a lot of it has been led by the youth. The young people have never not been able to pray the way that our people do. So I think a lot of that energy and a lot of that power – that spiritual power – is coming from them. And I also think a lot of it’s coming from the ancestors. I think there’s a lot of unrest on the other side, and that they want us to fix things and do what we’re supposed to do. To heal ourselves, and to heal the earth.

Natalie Stites

Cheyenne River Lakota, South Dakota

For me this is a family issue. I came with a sister of mine through the making-of-relatives ceremony, a sacred ceremony. When we started seeing the armed guards on social media, and the arrests, we were very concerned. After two days of arrests our sisters told us that there wasn’t any legal support or attorneys on the ground. I think at that time there had been about 13 arrests. I have a law degree and my friend is a licensed attorney. So while we were hesitant because both my sister and I have children – she’s in Denver and I’m in Rapid City – when we heard that they had no legal support we decided to drive out. We tried to do just an initial assessment of what we thought were legal issues at the time and what we thought would need to be addressed. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to respond efficiently should the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe officially request support.

I feel like it’s a phenomenon. Talking to some of the professional activists that are here – and I am not a professional activist – they say that there’s really nothing comparable to what’s happening here. Maybe some of the stuff going on post-Katrina in the Gulf might be comparable. But the size of the protest and the way in which it’s being supported is just phenomenal and amazing, and I feel like that everybody has a role in trying to protect the water that supplies the two reservations. Really it’s not an exaggeration to say that if you eliminate somebody’s water supply or a people’s water supply, that you are enacting genocide against them. Everyone thinks the Holocaust was this horrifying incident – unprecedented – but there are never all of these red flags waving, letting you know: You’re going the wrong way here, you’re going the wrong way there. Instead, it’s this seeping thing that happens. And I hope that they remember their place in history when we look to the future. If this pipeline prevails – and it will break – see if their children can drink water, because ours won’t be able to, either.

There is a really simple, beautiful message here: Protect the water, and Come stand with us. Those two things carry a lot of weight, and are clearly important to a lot of people. The fact that so many people are here together and there’s very little violence – there’s very little conflict, or trash, even – it’s just amazing. Even in the face of the state violence that has upset everybody, we’re still managing to stay peaceful. I really do think that all professionals and all officials and all government employees and everybody who works for the various federal agencies have a duty to help to protect every single one of the people who are here making this stand.

I think it’s important for indigenous peoples to take the leadership on these issues, with the violence against Mother Earth, because it ends up playing out as violence against the people as well. Because of our ancestral knowledge and our philosophy as a whole, we have an understanding of what’s at stake, I think, in a way that other traditions do not. Particularly a tradition like the Western tradition which has created these extractive industries, and the greed and the hubris that’s normalized as though this is a normal way to be, a normal way to live, without any regard for the future.

As a Native American woman, as a Lakota woman, I know that nonviolent direct action isn’t necessarily a part of Lakota thought and philosophy, but I think it comes from its own proud tradition in the Western sense, and certainly we’ve been borrowing and using these type of methods. I don’t have any problem with the idea of being a protester. Martin Luther King was a protester. And I think it would serve us well to embrace that term. But I like protector as well – whatever people are comfortable with. And I feel like you can’t stop the people. You can’t stop the people from expressing themselves, from standing against the pipeline at this point. And then on the other side I’m like, well, you can stop the people by killing them and imprisoning them and cutting out their leadership – there are all of these different ways that they’re trying to stop the people.

The people out on the front lines and the protest sites – they’re taking the heat of it. But just camping here on this occupied territory – while the Army Corps has jurisdiction over this area, we as peoples never agreed to it. This is part of the original treaty boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation. If I could impart one thing it’s that while there may be multiple camps here, the biggest camp is a family camp. Just family and friends. That’s really what a tribe is, too – it’s a common kinship among people. So I think that we’re being perfectly consistent with our philosophy, despite being colonized.

All of this is a really amazing and emotional decolonization process for a lot of people – myself included. A lot of people are healing here. I know people who have lost loved ones and were facing a lot of depression and anxiety, and all those issues, and they’re here now, and they’re experiencing something that they haven’t experienced in so long. Friends of mine were saying that these might be the best days of our lives, something that we remember forever. I’m really glad to have my daughter here experiencing this. She’s young, but just impressing this upon her while her mind is developing will help insulate her for the future against what we face as women, as indigenous people.

I don’t know what the future holds, and this standoff – I just want it to end peacefully; I want it to end with accountability. I want the state of North Dakota to be held accountable for its criminal conspiracy with Dakota Access to not just oppose us or not just have an actual negotiation or consultation or consent-type solution – they’re trying to just destroy and annihilate any type of opposition to anything that they’re doing. Those sacred sites that were plowed – that was really demoralizing for a lot of people. So there’s this psychological component – the helicopters constantly flying over us, we’re all on edge, anxious. This pipeline is over 60 percent complete from what I’ve heard, and best believe they’ve plowed up a lot of sacred sites and a lot of our graves along the way. As do all of these projects. And so it’s not just an isolated incident that’s happened – that’s their protocol.

But to say that this is just about Native Americans defending our treaty territory or to say that it’s just an indigenous issue, or that it’s defined by graves or sacred sites being plowed by this heavy machinery is only one part of the story. Because really, we’re doing this for all of humanity. And even for that North Dakota governor who’s disgusting, despicable, and the entire arm of his government that’s complying with this – we’re doing it for them, too, so that they have healthy water, and their descendants have healthy water, clean water – that they have any water at all. None of them can drink oil.

Eduardo Ocampo

Navajo/Mexican, Nevada

I felt the need to be out here. I’m originally from Vegas, so that’s probably a 1,200 mile drive. It took me 25 hours to get here. I’m half Navajo, half Mexican, but I embrace both cultures equally because I’m both bloods. Something just told me to come out here, and so I came.

I feel at home here – like I belong. I’m here to help protect this land, protect the water, because without the water none of us would be here. Seeing all of these people around me – everyone’s here for the same reason. And it’s amazing to see all of these nations and tribes gathering together. Probably the last time this happened was over 150 years ago. And we’re all doing it for one purpose, and it’s water. That’s the reason why I’m out here.

People that have seen us in the news, they’ve seen us portrayed us as savages, like always – which isn’t true. They say we have weapons, and we’re unarmed. We’re peaceful protesters just protesting for our water. That’s all we’re doing.

David Claymore

Cheyenne River Lakota, South Dakota

The people have been suffering for a long time. It’s just the second coming of Custer – they think they can run over us all the time. And they’ve done it in the past, and they’re still working on doing it today. It’s hard to watch – you know, the people are going to be suffering because of the oil spills. In Alabama last week an oil line broke, I was watching that on the news before I came up here. I’ve heard the crews say, “Oh, they’re made the best way possible.” But there are still spills, so it’s just a matter of time. It might not be me, but my grandchildren, who will have to suffer because of the pipeline.

Watching everybody here – it’s amazing. I’ve heard people say that once you get here you won’t want to leave. And as a Sundancer, that’s the way you feel when you’re getting toward the end of the Sundance. I mean, you’ve been suffering for days, and then all of a sudden at the end of the Sundance, it’s like, can we do that for four more days? You want to stay even longer. And that’s how it feels here, because we were supposed to leave today, and now we’re leaving Tuesday. Because of that feeling, because of the camaraderie of everyone working together, helping each other. Sure, there are a few problems here and there, but that just comes with being a family. Last night we had to look for a little child that was missing. And everyone just turned into this big search crew – you know, just going all over camp and calling the little girl’s name and everyone had their flashlights, everybody turned their car lights on. So all of a sudden it was just this huge search and rescue for this little girl, and eventually they did find her and she was all right. It’s like the camp is just bringing the whole world together, and it’s amazing. We’ve even brought all the tribes together, to where they’re working together today to help each other and help Standing Rock. It’s amazing because the Lakotas weren’t even together in the sense that we are now. That’s something that hasn’t been done since way back in the late 1800s.

I’m from this reservation, and my grandpa is Chief Gall. He was on this reservation in the beginning, and then Sitting Bull came back from Canada and he stayed. There’s a French fur trapper on my Dad’s side, one who came and married a Lakota woman, but I found out that Chief Gall and one of my Claymore grandfathers were best friends. And they both spoke Lakota – the Claymore, he could only say “yes” in English. And here I am today, struggling myself because my Mom didn’t teach me how to speak Lakota because of the boarding schools. She can understand, from her Mom and Dad, but my Dad never really knew too much. And then my Dad’s side of the family were the adapters – they were the ranchers, they were the farmers, and they didn’t really want to be Lakota. Same with my Mom – she was kind of just existing. But my adopted Dad told me, “If you don’t know your culture, if you don’t know your language, then you’re just a brown American. You’re not a Lakota.” So I took that on, and I had this deep-felt desire to be Lakota.

When my Mom and Dad grew up – and when we started the first Sundance in ‘68 – it was against the law to be Lakota. You couldn’t pray in your language, they washed your mouth out with soap; they whipped you and punished you for being Lakota. They said, “Kill the Indian, Save the man.” That was their motto back then. So even my Mom, even though her Mom and Dad spoke Lakota to her all the time, and I was a little boy running around playing and I’d come in and listen to them talking to her, after they left I’d come back in and I’d say, “Mom, how come Grandma and Grandpa talk funny?” I didn’t even know what it was. And she would say, “Oh, they’re just talking Indian.” She never went beyond that. And so there I was, this young man, young boy, having a desire deep inside, this instinct, to be Lakota. When I was 10 years old, I even asked my Mom, “How much Indian would my children be if I married a full blood?” Because my Mom was 3/4, my Dad was 1/2, so then that made me 5/8, a fraction. The white man did that to us – fractioned us out. So when I asked her that she was like, “Fractions, I don’t know, go ask your Dad.” So then I did, and I found out that my children would be 13/16. Which – you know, they’re more Indian than I am because I married a full blood.

My wife and have been together since she was 12 and I was 14, and now we’re 52 and 53. And we’ve got four children, we’ve got five grandchildren, but we met, and then just hit it off and stayed together. And we’re both very cultural, very spiritual. This is my grandson. He’s four years old, and he’s got his own drum – the spirits told us to get him ready, because he’s going to have an altar to help and doctor the people. And he’s only four years old. So we’ve been teaching him – he sings, he prays, and he knows his culture. And he hasn’t even gone to school yet. So we’re busy instilling in our little ones to be Lakota. People today, they still don’t know quite how to nurture a spiritual youth. We have to remember – they’re spiritual beings. I sat at the fire last night talking to some 18-year-olds, 21-year-olds, 25-year-olds – they were starving for knowledge. I ended up sitting up with them until 6 a.m. this morning, visiting with them, teaching them and telling the stories. And they were just all absorbing it.

As a human being, everyone comes across difficulties – death, and depression, and all of these different problems. And we use the ceremonies to overcome them. I have years of experience doing these ceremonies. The White Buffalo Calf Woman brought us seven ceremonies. It would be like the Christians’ Ten Commandments. So I learned the seven rites in my early 20s. I told my father-in-law, “Hey I’ve been through the seven ceremonies, and I’m just excited. How do you keep that good feeling alive?” And he said, “Just keep doing the ceremonies!” So I’ve been doing them ever since.

Even as a young person, when I was very active in alcohol and drugs, I listened to this Sundancer – he had a dream that if you pray to this Blue Eagle, to this spirit, and ask for help with alcohol, drugs, or anything like that – addiction – this Blue Eagle would help you. This Blue Eagle said, “Make me seven blue tobacco ties, and I’ll help you. And if your relatives are sick and suffering with that disease, I’ll help them.” This was in the 80s. So I prayed for my Mom and Dad, and they both sobered up. My Mom died 28 years sober, and my Dad died 11 years sober. Then I sobered up a few years later, in ‘92, and now I’ve been sober 23 years, alcohol and drug free, using this spirit – Blue Eagle.

At that time when I heard about this guy having this vision, they put me on a vision quest – a Hamblecha, they call it. And I had a vision – the spirit came to me and gave me the name Blue Eagle. So here I am, 23 years later, sober, using this spirit’s help, and then also going to treatment and learning about the addiction and why I have it. So now I’m busy teaching those that are suffering with that, too, by spreading this vision and this word that you can get help spiritually. And you can go and get help at a treatment center. Everybody’s scared of the word “treatment.” Shoot, you break your leg, you’ve got to go get it set. You got to get a cast, you’ve got to get it treated. But the spiritual bankruptcy that alcoholics feel, they feel: Wow, I don’t want to go to treatment, that’s something bad. And it’s not, but in their mind, it is. I had the same feelings when I first thought about going in – that it’s not good. But over time, it is. So it takes an addict some time just to get over that little bit of fear. Everybody hates change. And even when you’re changing to be something good, you’re still scared and still don’t want to do it because it’s unknown. You don’t know what the outcome’s going to be. But once you get on the other side of that feeling, you realize that you should have done it a long time ago. I run across that a lot – people who have that same fear I did.

Right now we just came back from a Grand Opening of a sculpture that’s 50 feet high, a Lakota woman, with a star quilt on her back. I designed the star quilt. And I was working with the sculptor, we’ve known him 30 years, and he did two sculptures of our oldest daughter, which are in Rapid City. So we’ve known him 30 years or so, and we had a sweat lodge on his land for quite a while. So we’re going back and forth with this Dignity sculpture and working on the star quilt, and all of a sudden he was like, “Sydney (my wife), you’re a full blood aren’t you?” And he said, “Well, you know the first woman that I did, she was Lakota, but she’s part German and Hispanic, so her features aren’t a true Lakota. So would you mind sitting for me to do this face?” So Sydney said, “Sure,” and we got to go down and do the opening with Sydney’s face 50 feet in the air, and my star quilt on the back. And then the sculpture’s name is “Dignity.” When Lewis & Clark came – the Missouri river, where the sculpture is? There’s a rest area, Lewis & Clark rest area. So then a reporter asked me, “How do you feel about that Dignity sculpture going where Lewis & Clark came up the river?” I said, “Well, if you talk to our elders, that was the first disturbance of our culture and our way of life, when they came up that river. So then that’s the best place to put it because, seven generations after Lewis & Clark, they say, our whole life was disrupted.” Totally chaotic, and people didn’t know how to be. So now they’ve adapted, and they’ve become doctors, and lawyers, and nurses, and mechanics – and all this different educational teaching, so now it’s flipped over seven generations later to where we are in that prosperity. We’re picking ourselves up off the ground. And now we’re becoming – we’re getting our dignity back, as Lakota people. So now we have the strength and the courage to be, as you say, Wakan Tanka, Tunkashila or God – who they intended us to be. We weren’t supposed to be alcoholic drug addicts and abusive to our own people. That was put on us. So now we’re becoming sober and living a better life than they ever expected us to live. They wanted to get rid of us – genocide. They wanted to kill us all off, just like the buffalo. And the buffalo came back from just a very few. The people say that they were praying 100 years ago for us. And here it is 100 years later, you’ve got all these buffalo ranches, the buffalo being raised by Indian tribes all over the country – there are over 46 tribes raising buffalo. And then you’ve got the eagle off the endangered species list, and you’ve got the Lakota off the endangered species list. So here we are, coming back – and then they want to run oil through our water. And they’re like, “Well, the farmers and ranchers didn’t want it where we were going to put it – let’s go put it through the Indians’ land, they don’t care.” And so they made an attempt, and we’re attempting to stop it. And we’re just going to keep working on it and working on it until we get it done.

There’s my other grandson – his name is Cassius Claymore, like Cassius Clay. I keep telling everybody, “When he gets older we’re going to rename him Muhammad Ali Claymore – Muhammad Alimore.” His Lakota name is Iya Galeshka, which means “Spotted Stone.” And he talks to the stones, those little round stones. You can find them in the earth all over, from the meteors – they just form because they’re coming down so fast and hot that they just stay round. This guy, he talks to them, and we have to nurture that in him so that he can use those stones to help the people. If I give him one, he’ll sit there and whisper to it, and then he’ll put it to his ear like he’s listening and responding and then he’ll say something else. If you told a psychologist or a psychiatrist, they would say, “Oh, schizophrenia.” Right away they’ve got to demean them for having something that the psychiatrist doesn’t have. They’re educated severely, yet they can’t talk to a stone. So then the kids have got to be bad, and it’s got to be wicked or witchcraft, or some kind of craziness. Whereas – Shoot, that’s the way the people are.

There was a really good statement made in the movie “Greyeagle,” where kind of the bad Indian guy was feeling bad about the way the situation was for the Indian people. He said, “The wolves won’t even talk to us anymore. Having contact with the white people has dirtied us up to where the wolves don’t even respect us anymore.” And you know, being able to communicate with the spirits, being able to communicate with the stone, the earth, the plants – all of those things is one of our abilities. And if you look back far enough in European history, they had the same tools. I mean, they could do the same thing, but they didn’t want the people to follow their traditional ways, they wanted them to follow the Bible, and Jesus – Christianity. So then they killed a whole bunch of their own people, to shut them up and get rid of them so that they could follow the Bible. And it’s just crazy that they would go around killing their own people just to control them. So it’s a sad deal that happened to them. So they’re coming to us, asking us for help – How do we get connected? There’s another movie, “Dreamkeeper,” where the young guy’s mad, saying, “Oh these white people, they’re all wannabes. They all want to be Lakota.” And the old man says, “No, it wasn’t them that took our land. It wasn’t them that took our buffalo, it was their ancestors. And if they’d seen them today saying they want to be Indian – they’d turn over in their graves. Yet you call them wannabes,” he said – “they want to be connected. Just like us. They’ve lost their way.”

So now, they’re coming from all over the world. I deal with Japanese, and Chinese, and Australians, and Germans and French. And I keep telling them, see, you dig deep enough in your own cultures, you’re going to find the same things that we have here. It’s just that we’ve been disrupted for the last 150 years. You’ve had thousands of years of disruption. So if you look back far enough you’re going to find the same things you find here. You’ve just got to dig a little deeper. And then they all want to be medicine men, they all want to be medicine women, you know, and it’s like – go find your own culture, and use that to help your people. Use us as a catapult, or whatever you want to call it, to get involved in doing that for yourself, for your own people. We’ll help you, we’ll show you, we’ll teach you.

My father-in-law was a really giving traditional man. He was born in 1919, so his parents, his grandparents, were free people, before the reservation lifestyle. So they were very generous. Some of the people today, they have their medicine, or their power, and they’ll let you peek at it. You know, “Check it out – look what I’ve got.” And they’ll let you kind of get a glimpse of it – but no, it’s mine. I’m the medicine man, I’m the powerful one here. But my father-in-law would say, “No, you give it away. It doesn’t belong to an individual, it belongs to the people.” So he would teach anybody. That’s where I learned that.

You know, we’ve got to nurture the whole planet. We’ve got to get us all back to living in a spiritual way – a true spiritual way. Because you can have faith, and you can have belief, but those are sissy words, my father-in-law would say. Because once you learn the truth – then you’re going to stay with the truth, because that doesn’t waver. Your faith can change, your belief can change. But once you learn that this is the truth, then you’re not going to falter, you’re not going to sway, because now you know the truth. That this is a powerful way of life, and this is a connection that can’t be changed or maneuvered. So then that’s going to help you to live your life better, and you’re going to teach your children better, and you’re going to teach your grandchildren. And there are great-grandchildren now that are coming, that we have to prepare for. Lakotas always say, seven generations ahead, you’ve got to think about them. And take care of them. That’s why it’s important for this oil not to be continued.

And they’ll probably end up going around or doing whatever they do, because that’s the way they are. And the Almighty Dollar, they say, is what’s prompting them. I mean, they’ve got security guards hired with dogs biting people. That’s how far they’re willing to go to dampen our spirits. But it’s just fired everybody back up again. It’s like, “How dare you sic your dogs on us?” So we just keep praying and everything seems to be falling into place. It’s just a matter of time, and it’s all going to work out.

I celebrated my birthday among the slim cedars of McCroskey State Park, with sunlight easing down through bristly branches and enlivening the grass all around me. I turned 38 among trees that were easily double my age – trees that had found a home there, and would remain there for hundreds of years to come. As I sat in my camping chair – a $10 mishmash of plastic and fabric, made in China, María Lionza in my lap – I marveled at the cedars’ relative permanence; their friendly shade and ever-present generosity. I marveled at the bundle of fur curled up on my thighs; at the way this creature of another species, so bound to me, had traveled with me across continents, huddled next to me for warmth in sub-zero temperatures, and entrusted me daily with her life and livelihood.

McCroskey State Park was created by Virgil T. McCroskey, a local conservationist who amassed 4,400 acres on the slopes of Mineral Mountain – a transitional zone between the prairies and the Rockies filled with cedars, ponderosa pines, deer, black bears and other wildlife. When McCroskey approached the Idaho state legislature about donating the land to create a park in 1955, they declined – fearing it would only drain their resources – unless he maintained it at his own expense for the next 15 years. McCroskey agreed, and kindly kept his promise by living exactly 15 years more, to the ripe old age of 93. The result is a beautiful ridgeline retreat along a modest dirt road; a quiet place for fresh air, reflection and unorthodox birthday celebrations.

When María Lionza and I reemerged – somewhat reluctantly – a few days later, we found our way north, to Talus Rock Retreat, in Sandpoint. Nestled alongside Lake Pend Oreille in the Idaho Panhandle, Sandpoint is a mixture of beach town – pedestrians in flip flops; kids in bikinis; beach cruisers winding through traffic – and gateway to the wild. The lake is the fifth deepest in the U.S.; its shores are largely unpopulated, and it’s surrounded by national forests and the jagged peaks of nearby Rocky Mountains.

Just up highway 2, tucked away among 30 acres of woodland, Talus Rock Retreat is an eclectic lodging villa. The castle-like inn is furnished with items salvaged from surprising locales – two trees form a love-locked embrace near the fireside, and each self-styled room contains treasures hand-carried from around the world. Owners Bruce and Heather Pederson and their three children had full rein over the place for several months before converting their home into a business; now, they float between rooms or hang out in the garage, fondly known as the “Garage Mahal.” Guests visit to hold weddings, attend yoga retreats, or simply enjoy the luxury of a weekend getaway. The proceeds help to keep the place running, and to support Heather’s work with the International Children’s Network.

Heather, as the property’s creative visionary (she designed the unique interior herself), had marked out a trail that covered much of its forested area. And soon, after I’d settled María Lionza and I into our small trailer, near the top of the property, Brian – one of the caretakers – and I began working to make her vision a reality. We soon settled into a rhythm – lopping off cedar branches; yanking up trailing blackberries and Oregon grapes by their roots; hauling birch branches off to one side. It was cool and fresh among the trees, and as we labored we sometimes chatted about religion, politics, or less contentious topics; others, we simply fell into silence.

As the days went on, I began to feel that there was something more to what I was doing, the manner in which we were uprooting the vines and branches and furnishing a clean, pine needle-cushioned trail through the woods. It felt as though I was clearing a path not just through the trees, but also through the thickets of my mind, or even that of our collective humanity – the increasingly volatile mix of political opinions and strife splashed all over my Facebook newsfeed; my own confused ideas about what was happening in the world. One night, I had a dream in which talking heads were loudly asserting their opinions all around me as I crept my way forward, uprooting one vine at a time, easing my way toward a place that was balanced and sane; a haven amid the mayhem; a respite from this topsy-turvy world.

One morning as we were working, on our knees in the dirt and our gloved hands grasping at the roots, yanking them from the soil, Brian asked me: “Do you ever think about the role of humans on the earth?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you know how everything in nature has its role – the trees, the plants, the animals – each species has its place in the planet’s ecology and serves a specific purpose. Do you ever think about how humans fit in – what our role might be?”

I considered the question. Immediately, I thought of all of the destruction and devastation that we cause; the upheaval and the violence; our tendency to push our own self-righteous agendas on others. I was having a hard time coming up with a way that we, as a species, had benefited the global ecology, or even one another. “I’m not sure,” I said.

“There’s a book called ‘Tending the Wild,’” Brian said. “It’s all about how Native American groups in California worked with nature to help it flourish. There’s this idea that Native groups didn’t do anything to nature, that they left it untouched. But in reality they were stewards of the land – tending the environment around them.” I thought back to McCroskey State Park, and to Virgil, who had devoted the last 15 years of his life to the park. “I think that’s what we’re here to do,” Brian said. “To take care of the planet.”

I looked around at the trail we were forging through the woods. Here we were, uprooting plants, severing tree roots and removing young seedlings. But despite the violence involved, the result would hopefully benefit the forest as well as ourselves. It would not only provide a cool path through leafy trees, a place for quiet reflection, but also create a space for the forest to interact with its human providers. Hopefully, this would encourage better maintenance and care; an improved relationship. “That makes a lot of sense,” I agreed. “I guess the tricky part is to tend nature in a way that serves it, without trying to change it into what we want it to be. After all, we humans have a tendency to do that.”

Later, I found the book Brian had mentioned, authored by Kat Anderson, at the Sandpoint library. But it languished on the small shelf in my trailer as I focused on other options: a stack of books on art and creativity, writing and Zen. One of these, “Wild Mind” by Natalie Goldberg – a writer I’d heard read in Taos – spoke to the very phenomenon I’d been considering as we forged our way through the trees. “If it is true that we are all interpenetrated and interconnected,” she wrote, “then wild mind includes mountains, rivers, Cadillacs, humidity, plains, emeralds, poverty, old streets in London, snow, and moon. A river and a tree are not unconscious. They are part of wild mind.”

Often, as we worked, we’d see wildlife – a spotted fawn; a curious doe; a mother moose with two young cubs. And one hot day in late July, near the end of my two months at Talus Rock, an orphaned raccoon found us – just a few weeks old, craving attention and care. We named him Hakuna, and he quickly became a family favorite. I spent my last two days there with Hakuna, and while he was in many ways still wild – attacking and biting me viciously when I tried to take away a sugary plastic wrapper – he was also incredibly affectionate. He would climb up over my shoulders, spread himself around my neck, and cuddle up on my lap to sleep. As I was preparing to leave, Hakuna followed me from my trailer to the car – back and forth, repeatedly, as I packed up my belongings. When I sat for a brief rest, he collapsed next to me, nuzzling up against my leg.

Our impact on the plants and animals around us is inevitable. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re constantly interrupting their environments – bringing them into our homes; making trails through their territory; relying on their presence for food or inspiration, labor or companionship. We are increasingly interconnected, and my relationship with María Lionza is just one example of that. When it finally came time for us to bid farewell – to Brian and his lovely wife Alex, to Heather and to Bruce, and yes – to Hakuna – we packed ourselves up into the car and headed north for the Canadian border. As we left town, I dropped my stack of books into the return slot at the library – including “Tending the Wild,” still unread.

Several days later, in Penticton, Canada, I searched for the book again at a used bookstore, but couldn’t find it. Instead, I came across Diane Ackerman’s “The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds.” I’d long enjoyed Ackerman’s writings on the natural world, so I purchased her treatise in its place. Soon, I found myself enthralled by her poetic descriptions of endangered creatures and the unique environments in which they lived: Monk seals in Hawaii; golden lion tamarin monkeys in the Brazilian Amazon; short-tailed albatrosses, sequestered away on Japanese islands. She spoke to her own version of humans’ role in the natural ecosystem, of their responsibility to care for the plants and creatures around them.

“At some point, one asks, ‘Toward what end is my life lived?’” Ackerman wrote. “A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on the morning watch, for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that are not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves.”

Her words rang true – not only for the rare, endangered species across the globe, but also for the various plants and animals we encounter regularly – and often automatically – in our own mundane, day-to-day existence. In the way that we tend to our gardens and care for our pets; the way we treat the young raccoon who shows up one day on our doorstep, or the decisions we make regarding the many creatures whose environments we inevitably disturb. (As I later learned, the family found Hakuna a home at a nearby rehabilitation center, where, I was told, he seemed happy among the other “orphans and misfits.”) It holds true in the way we navigate the many challenges that we face – socially, environmentally, politically, globally – as well as in the trails and roads we forge through forests, through our lives, through the thickets of our own conditioned minds. Trails we would do well to maintain, as Virgil T. McCroskey did, in the final years of his life, if for no other reason than to preserve a place of sanity; a home for cedars, pines, deer and bears; a place where the  occasional human – and her cat – can find retreat.

 

As I drove up into Idaho, winding my way north through green forests on empty roads, I pondered my next temporary home. María Lionza and I had spent a month visiting friends in Portland, Oakland and Boise, and were now heading to Lifewater Ranch, near the small town of Kooskia. I’d been told that the people in central and northern Idaho were “out there” in more ways than one. That they were libertarians, anti-government advocates, conspiracy theorists and doomsday preppers. They saw the world differently, I’d been told; as something much more dangerous and terrifying. Or at least, as something that was dangerous and terrifying for very different reasons.

Fear was a phenomenon I’d lately found intriguing. Perhaps it was all the free time I’d had in April, but I’d been watching my own mind’s tendency to grab onto something – anything – that could possibly make it afraid. In the absence of any real threat – I’d had perfect weather, no car problems, and nothing but positive experiences while traveling – it would reach for anything that seemed plausible, no matter how remote. Some of these were relatively rational (What if I was spending too much money, and didn’t make enough next month? What if something happened to my car? What if I spun off on treacherous mountain roads?) Others started off somewhat rationally, and then veered off into the absurd. Probably the most obvious of these was a new and rather ridiculous obsession with my bear spray.

I’d been planning to get bear spray for months – not only would it protect me from grizzlies in Yellowstone, which I imagined I’d visit at some point, but it would also, I reasoned, prove useful on the off chance that I encountered a human predator. So when Bill, a wildlife biologist whose place I’d been housesitting in Wyoming, offered me a free can to take with me, I jumped on the opportunity. “Don’t threaten somebody with it,” he advised. “Just use it if you have to. This will bring a man to his knees.” I reassured him that I’d pepper-sprayed someone before and would be more than willing to bear spray someone if necessary. But then, he added the following warning: “And, make sure you don’t leave it in a hot car. I knew a girl who did that once and it exploded. The vehicle was useless after that.”

Well, this was concerning. How hot was hot? What if it went off while I was driving? I looked for more information on the Internet (always a dangerous venture in and of itself) and found myself ogling over photos of bear spray canisters that had lodged themselves in car roofs; videos of them wreaking havoc in moving cars; lengthy descriptions that likened them to “projectile missiles.” Soon, I found myself obsessing over the temperature outside, and what my bear spray might be doing in my trunk – actively plotting, I was sure, to demolish my only means of transportation. As I confided to friends: “I think I’m more afraid of my bear spray than I am of an actual bear.”

I was aware that this obsessive consideration was at best, unproductive, and at worst, totally crazy. As one friend advised, “that’s just one of those things you have to leave up to fate.” So why was I trying so hard control it? Perhaps it was that I’d given up control in so many other ways. Everything else was uncertain – I had no idea where I was going, or what I’d be doing more than a few months into the future. I never knew how much my next paycheck would be, or where it would come from. I didn’t know what my next home would be like – who I’d be living with, or where I’d be sleeping. And mostly, that was fine – it was exciting, even; invigorating. But maybe the fact that the bear spray – the one thing that was supposed to provide a certain sense of reassurance, a backup plan, a safety net – had morphed into another potentially dangerous uncertainty, was simply…well, simply too much to bear.

When I reached Lifewater Ranch, at the beginning of May, my host, Sandy, welcomed me to his own, personally designed safe space. He gave me a tour of his home – a beautifully constructed, four-bedroom house that he’d purchased prior to Y2K – and his property – 160 acres of forest filled with ponds, streams and wildflowers. As a former Microsoft engineer and graduate of UC Berkeley, he’d been convinced that Y2K would lead to a serious collapse. “I worked for Microsoft, and I knew how many glitches they had in their system,” he told me. “So I bought this place.” Lifewater Ranch was supposed to be a safe haven; a remote retreat; a self-sustaining stronghold. Sandy stocked up on dried goods and weapons, and built a hydraulic system that would convert running water into electricity. Then, three short days before Y2K, the inverter broke. “There was nothing I could do,” Sandy said. “All of this preparation, and the inverter breaks. I think it was God telling me that I had to trust in him, instead of trying to prepare for every possible outcome.”

When January 1, 2000 came and went with no serious repercussions, Sandy went back to work in Seattle. And then, eventually, he retired out here, on his property in idyllic central Idaho. While he’s no longer preparing for a large catastrophic event (“I’m almost sixty, I don’t even know at this point if I’d want to survive,” he says) the area has drawn many who consider themselves survivalists. Many, like Sandy, feel disconnected from mainstream American culture, and some believe that our current economic and political climate could be paving the way for an apocalyptic disaster. Some were drawn to the area as a result of a novel, first officially published in 1998, called “Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse.”

Sandy gave me an early, pre-publication copy of the book, titled “Teotwawki – The End of the World As We Know It.” Written by James Wesley Rawles (Sandy attended high school with the author in Livermore, California), the tale charts the journey of a 9+ member survivalist group that holes up in central Idaho with a cache of food and weapons following a massive economic meltdown. The group manages to survive by employing their diverse skills – skills such as medical care, food storage, vehicle mechanics and weaponry. And they choose central Idaho specifically, for its high precipitation levels and relative remoteness. The book is something of a logistical how-to, and its reasoning has appealed to many similarly minded people. Enough of them have since moved out here that Rawles has himself abandoned the area for an undisclosed location west of the Rockies. “Even now I’ll meet someone new,” Sandy told me. “And I’ll ask them what brought them here. And they’ll say ‘Well, there’s this great novel…’”

But even here, in the Promised Land – even here, there are threats beyond one’s control. Last summer, wildfires swept the area, and a number of people lost their homes, including some of Sandy’s friends; a couple named Jay and Pearl.

The close-knit community banded together to help them, and one afternoon, Sandy and I joined several others in an effort to sheetrock the couple’s new home. We were working on the upstairs (myself harder than necessary, as I prove to be rather inefficient at driving screws), when Pearl called up to say that one of their Nigerian Dwarf goats was giving birth. Jay had stepped out for some supplies, and she needed help – its second baby was stuck inside.

I quickly volunteered – when would I ever have another chance to birth a Nigerian Dwarf goat, after all? – but when I hurried down the ladder, to find Pearl with her hands deep inside the goat and the distressed baby with its head out, bleating, I quickly grasped the situation’s gravity. Its forelegs were positioned backward rather than forward, and it was stuck, unable to fit through the opening. After six months at the Becker Family Stock Farm in Wyoming, I had no illusions about the fragility of newborn lives – despite our best efforts, some of them simply didn’t make it. And this situation was a threat not only to the baby, but to its mother as well. Still, there wasn’t time to think about it – all we could do was try.

I held the mother’s head and steadied it while Pearl continued to slip around inside, attempting to bring the baby out. The mother was pushing as hard as she could, but it wasn’t working. “I can’t feel the legs,” Pearl said finally. “Do you want to try?” I nodded and we switched positions. My hands slipped up inside, and both goats bleated loudly. “Sorry,” I muttered. Everything was wet and gooey; there was nothing to hold on to. Finally, though, I seemed to feel something bony – a shoulder. I grasped at it with wet fingers, and pulled, and suddenly, the baby goat slid out and onto the straw. It lay there, panting, encased in the wetness, and I looked up at Pearl in gratitude. Our eyes were filled with wonder. This time, things had gone the way we’d hoped – but we were both aware that they could have ended very differently. And no amount of preparation would have helped us.

In recent years, Sandy has stopped trying so hard to plan for every eventuality. Instead, he’s been working through his dried foods, and has bartered away most of his guns and ammo. After all, even if we can anticipate every possible outcome and every potential danger, we still can’t control our surroundings, or ensure any intended outcome of our own. We can’t make ourselves secure or guarantee our survival, as Sandy has learned from his inverter, and I’ve learned from my bear spray. Often, we can’t even control the way our minds interpret such dangers. When Sandy suggested that I take his gun to go hiking around the property – to protect myself from wolves, and other predators – I declined. Not only have I never shot a gun, but, in a manner very similar to the bear spray, I’m much more afraid of handling one than I am of any animal.

So until that day comes – until the world collapses, the bear attacks, the fire sweeps through, or our prized goat dies – until then, we may as well enjoy the life we’re living, right now. Because while there may be some sensible means of action, some preventative options worth considering (such as burning debris to prevent wildfires), in the grand scheme of things, most of our fears are never realized; and those that are, well, they’ll be realized anyway. So instead of excessive prepping and planning and worrying – or worse, requiring that others suffer in an effort to ensure our own personal welfare – we may as well dance, sing and frolic with baby dwarf goats in green pastures. And offer solace, and comfort, and love. And yes, when necessary, grieve.

Because there’s very little we can do – and even if we could, if the past is any indication, we’ll likely get it all wrong anyway. We’ll end up wrecked on the side of the freeway, inhaling bear spray, or isolated in central Idaho with a broken inverter. We’ll impose our fears on anybody who seems strange or different or refuses to agree with us, or elect a president willing to go to any lengths, override any sense of humanity, for one last slippery grasp at control. Better just to trust that life will take us where it will – because it’s going there regardless, and we can either go along with it, frolicking merrily down the stream, or it will drag us behind it, kicking and screaming and fighting all the way.

 

 

Can you make a movie trailer for a blog? Apparently you can, because I have. Enjoy!

(Ensure settings are at 1080p HD for best image quality.)

 

 

So my human has asked me to write a guest blog, about what she calls the “Magic Ubiquitous Cat Carrier.” When she was young, she tells me, she once read a book by Enid Blyton called “The Magic Faraway Tree,” about a bunch of kids who found a tree in the middle of the woods. All of these bizarre characters lived in the tree, and at its top were all of these different worlds that would visit and stay for a while, and then move on.

My human thinks that the Magic Ubiquitous Cat Carrier is similar to this tree. Every time that we arrive in a new place, she opens the carrier and I step out into another world (usually with only one bizarre character – her). Since leaving Wyoming a month ago, we’ve visited at least 10 worlds in four different states, including multiple houses, several campsites and a treehouse. While I’m very much aware that this carrier isn’t magic, and that she’s transporting me very un-magically in her car to new places (I’m doubtful that she even understands what magic is), I’ve decided to humor her – mostly in the hope that she’ll give me extra treats or a least increase the size of my rather measly meals.

The so-called Magic Ubiquitous Cat Carrier is really just a bright red duffel bag with a piece of fuzzy fabric on the bottom. It’s mostly a pleasant place to recline, unless the fabric gets bunched up in one corner, and I don’t mind hanging out in there for five or six hours as my human “magically” transports us to our next location. Any longer than that, and I make my displeasure known. My human generally responds with vague assurances like “Don’t worry, we’re almost there,” or even more annoyingly, “What are you saying, María?” We’ve been together nine years; she should really understand me by now.

World 1: Logan Canyon

The first world that we encountered after leaving Wyoming was Utah’s Logan Canyon, surrounded by the Bear River mountains. The trip wasn’t too bad – only a half day, with none of those bumpy dirt roads that I so despise – but I was disappointed, upon exiting the carrier, to find that we were camping in a parking lot. We’d reached a whole new level of vagrancy. My human tried to explain that all of the other areas were snow-covered, that we had the place to ourselves, and that there were open bathrooms and beautiful views, but I was not impressed. I am not a street cat.

World 2: Boise National Forest

Our second world was a great improvement. Originally my human had been planning to stop near Malta, Idaho, but when she realized that thundershowers were expected all evening, she wisely chose to keep going. We drove up a winding road from the interstate, toward Idaho City, and turned into the first marked campsite in Boise National Forest. The site was empty, and filled with beautiful pine trees and interesting animal smells. I explored the whole area before expressing my approval, and making it clear that I didn’t want any repeat of the parking lot fiasco. She agreed to do her best to accommodate.

World 3: Roosevelt Park

It was mid-afternoon when we pulled into Roosevelt Park in Washington – a picnic-style park on the Colombia River, near a rather desultory town. At first we had the place to ourselves, and I enjoyed rolling around in the sun and smelling all of the unusual odors blowing in off the water. We were just chilling out, enjoying the scenery, when some guy showed up on a motorcycle. Great. We watched him suspiciously as he wandered around the grass, and then, over to us. Luckily, he turned out to be harmless – a substitute teacher on spring break who was riding around on his motorcycle, camping and visiting museums. He stayed on the other side of the park, and in the morning, my human went with him to visit a concrete replica of Stonehenge, and then the Maryhill Museum. She left me in the car, which is very much against the rules, but as it was a cool day I was actually quite happy napping in the back seat. When we got back on the road she tried to tell me about Sam Hill, who was apparently responsible for building many of the roads in Oregon, and his giant concrete mansion-turned-museum – but I soon fell asleep. Humans really like to drone on sometimes. 

Worlds 4-6: The City

We spent two weeks in Portland and Oakland, where my human mostly ran off with her friends, leaving me to fend for myself in a large Portland house and two separate Oakland apartments. These were quite pleasant, though I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the small humans I encountered quite regularly. I generally love two-legged creatures, but the young ones are highly unpredictable, and despite my best efforts, I’m doubtful of their desire or ability to provide me with food. Then again, if my own human can’t even understand me after nine years, I have very little hope for the small ones.

In Oakland, I soon realized that I was staying just above where my human and I used to live. I repeatedly asked to go outside, but was denied – something to do with “fleas” and the lack of a “cat door.” These things were never an issue before, so I’m not sure why they are now. Then again, it’s been a while since my human gave me one of those nasty-tasting meals full of flea medication, so maybe that has something to do with it. I could also smell Ninja on the streets outside, and while part of me wanted to see him, I was also fine with not seeing him at all. I have mixed feelings about that rather abusive relationship. My human did visit him at the Kaiser garden – the one he’s greedily claimed for himself, in addition to his new home – and reported that he’s a little chubby, but doing fine. She was sad to see him go, but I was highly relieved that she didn’t try to bring him with us.

World 6: Napa Valley

Napa Valley was a bit of a disaster. My human was enamored with the place – we followed her friends for an hour and a half past what she said were beautiful vineyards and magical, lush green hills. But I couldn’t see any of that, thanks to the red carrier prison, and was instead relegated to bouncing up and down over the rough mountain roads. I’m pretty I yelped a couple of times when she banged the bottom of her car, forged the small creeks, or spun her tires in the loose soil – but somehow, surprisingly, we made it.

Once we arrived, there were immediately two of those small humans, clamoring to see me (“Where’s the kitty? Can we see the kitty?”) Ugh. My human trundled me up a long dirt path and finally opened the carrier, only for me to emerge into – a treehouse. Now I’ve adapted pretty well to traveling. I stay in all kinds of houses and apartments, even campsites, with very little complaint. But a treehouse? That’s just too much to ask. I only climb trees when I want to – of my own volition.

I promptly retired underneath the bed, and stayed there until later that evening, when one of the small humans sought me out. He insisted on patting me repeatedly and exclaiming, “She’s so cute!” I put it up with it for about five minutes before swiping at his finger – drawing one tiny drop of blood, which he seemed to find rather fascinating. Still, he stopped petting me, so I guess it did the job.

World 7: Bear River Campground

The following day my human took me to a park where she ate lunch with her friends, and we visited the nearby Nature Museum. I’m not sure what she was thinking, as it was filled with predators – mountain lions, coyotes, hawks and eagles. Was she trying to give me a heart attack? She told me that the animals were taxidermied and couldn’t harm me, and besides, I was in my carrier, but as I’m already aware that the carrier is not magical (it’s not even ubiquitous – did you see it in any of the photos aside from the first? I didn’t think so), her words were hardly reassuring. I was relieved when we left for Lake Tahoe, with plenty of time to spare.

The Bear River campsite was pretty – right on the river – but there were lots of other humans and dogs nearby, and every time I tried to explore my human collected me and brought me back to our campsite. Which was annoying. The woman next to us said that another woman had recently been “86’ed” for failing to pay (it was the only pay campsite we’ve stayed at, costing $11 a night). She invited us to go check out a bag of clothing the 86’ed woman had left behind, but my human explained that we were preparing to leave. The stranger then offered us some change to help pay for another night. The people who have the least, it seems, are often the most generous – but it was time for us to move on.

World 8: Antelope Reservoir

The last world we visited before reaching Idaho was Antelope Reservoir in southern Oregon. The campsite was just off the freeway, but appeared remote and beautifully serene, with water lapping at the shore, birds screeching above and gophers scuttling across the ground. I stalked some of the gophers, but lost interest when I realized that they weren’t afraid of me at all – they would simply stand on their hind legs and stare at me, sniffing at the air. It made me miss the old days, back in Oakland, when the mice would flee from me in terror. Perhaps I’m just getting old.

World 9: Idaho

Since we’ve arrived in Boise, things have been falling into place. My human and our hosts seem to have learned to cater to my every demand (aside, sadly, from those for more food). My human tells me that we are leaving soon, for another farm in central Idaho, but I’m quite confident now that despite the treehouses, parking lots and other bumps along the road, things will go as they are meant to go. There is a magic involved – it’s true – but it’s not the kind of magic that can be controlled by any human, or found in any cat carrier. It’s more like a breeze that blows, urging mice to their holes and gophers to their burrows; a flailing branch, swept up by the river; a claw that scratches, drawing blood to warn you when you’ve gone the wrong way, yet again.

 

Papa Karl has been a farmer all his life. He grew up on a livestock farm in Wisconsin, where his chores included milking cows, mending fences and raising baby chicks. After high school, he spent four years in the Coast Guard, including a year in Vietnam, before leaving to marry and father three children. He worked for more than a decade at a dairy farm in Georgia, and eventually took over operations of his parents’ 190+ acres in Mineral Point, WI. When they decided to sell the place six years ago, Papa Karl held an auction, and sold many of his Jersey cows to Sonja’s then husband Jon, who passed away shortly after. Papa Karl ended up coming out to the Becker Family Stock Farm in Wyoming to help Sonja keep the place running, and he now shares her grandparents’ old house with other, more temporary help such as myself.

As my roommate and coworker over the past six months, Papa Karl has taught me much. It was from him that I learned to drive the tractor and the Bobcat, and picked up some basic farm lingo: Eggs are “cackleberries,” milking cows is “juicing some moos” and “CBM Farmers” are the sort that grow Corn and Beans in the summer, and head off to Miami for the winter. Papa Karl taught me that bib overalls are the only practical option when tramping through mud and manure, and that there’s a song for every situation in life – whether it’s a dead skunk in the middle of the road, a possibility of escaping the draft or a lamentable lack of ripe bananas.

At 71, Papa Karl is a friendly but solitary soul, who’s lived life the way he wants to – he chose not to attend college, reside in a large city, or spend his time traveling and seeing the world. Instead, he prefers a simpler existence – caring for farm animals, the land and the few people close to him. To Papa Karl, the way that many humans choose to operate in the world remains a mystery.

Here are some of his insights.

On Bestsellers:

“I don’t read any of those bestsellers, the ones that get those reviews. Do you? I don’t see the point. There are lots of good books – old books, ones that are really good and that nobody even knows about.”

On Preserving Furniture:

 “Some people like to keep coverings on their couch, to protect it. Why? Protect it from what? What’s the point of having a couch if you can’t sit on it?”

On Tourism:

“You know how people travel places and see things. Why do they do that? I’d rather be doing something useful.”

“People go off to Paris, to Rome. See the Roman ruins, go to art galleries. But they’re so….overwhelming! Don’t you think they’re overwhelming? I’m not sure I know what the point is. I’d rather go somewhere quiet and stay with ordinary people.”

On Politicians:

“They’re like children. ‘This is my toy, you can’t have it! Stay on your side of the line!’ It’s too much.”

 On Immigration:

“How can they just draw a line and say, you can’t be here? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“You know, with the Berlin wall, Reagan went over and told Gorbachev, ‘You have to take this wall down!’ They were trying to keep people in. And now they want to build a wall to keep people out. What’s the difference?”

On School:

“I’ve had to sit at a desk before. I sat at a desk for 12 years.”

“My high school keeps contacting me, trying to get me to come back for reunions. Why would I want to do that? Do cellmates in prison have reunions?”

On Careers:

“A lot of employers say they want a ‘work ethic.’ And then you can’t take a vacation, can’t take a sick day. They want you to hand over your life.”

On Homes:

“A house and a home are two different things. Anything can be homey. Some people can make a little shack feel like a real comfortable home.”

“Somebody once invited me to see their house. They kept saying, ‘Come see my house.’ Well, if they’re calling it a ‘house,’ I’m not sure I want to see it.”

While Papa Karl often finds human activity mystifying, animal behavior makes much more sense. He has no problem explaining why cows are missing tufts of fur (they’re shedding their winter coats), kicking (their teats may be sore) or raising their tails (they’re going to poop). Often, he’d observe María Lionza as she wandered around the house, doing the things that cats do, and comment matter-of-factly on her behavior (As she scratched at the floor mat: “Well, she has to do a certain amount of that.” As she rolled around on her back: “She’s rolling back and forth, scratching her back.” As she groomed herself: “She’s licking her fur. You know how she does that. She’s taking a bath.”).

The more time I spent with Papa Karl, the more I found myself easing into the simple, healthy rhythms of farm life – rising at 6 a.m. every morning, and in bed by 9 p.m. every night. At breakfast (usually with Oreo, the lamb, on my lap) we’d discuss the weather – for once, a relevant topic – and which tasks we planned to accomplish that day. At dinner, we’d share the animals’ most recent antics; updates on old friends (Was Bella taking to the new calf, the one we’d recently gotten to replace hers, who’d died? Did Lewis, the dog, manage to catch another chicken, and if so, how much longer would he be staying? Did we both see Queenie, the dog, and Tricksy, the cat, cuddling that morning?). And in the evenings, over hot chocolate made from fresh cows’ milk, we’d share bits and pieces of our lives, or simply sit quietly together – both of us reading, or Papa Karl piecing puzzles together on his computer.

In his own way, just by being himself, Papa Karl taught me that the world around me has its own pace, its own rhythm; that the simplest way is often the best; and that life is too short not to be who you are.