by Jenny Forrester

Summer is brutal with tourists–the town borders one of the most popular national parks in the United States. I have to get away from them, these tourists, their way of making too much light, polluting the dark starry skies with their potentially wildfire-sparking campfires. They’re getting too close to the wildlife, feeding chocolate and high fructose corn syrup products to the silly, hungry chipmunks. The tourists are too much aggression, their way of becoming some kind of western they’ve seen in the movies, read about in books. They’re too much John Wayne-ness–thousands of MAGA Men with their MAGA hats, their awful co-option, capture, and degradation of red, white, and blue, of stars and stripes, of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the pocket-sized documents peeking from their breast pockets, showing their awful nationalism, deforming patriotism into white christian nationalist supremacy. Neofascism. Christo-fascism. There’s some debate on terms. But, the important part is that to support a monster like Tru*p, there’s a larger force afoot, fueled, by biases, the systematic biases–homophobia, sexism, racism.They’re wearing pro-gun rights and anti-choice apparel with the phrase pro-life, but pro-life for whom, I think. It wears on my nerves. Firearm homicides are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States. The important part is that the rights hard-won by all women globally are under threat. It’s constant, for sure, but the backlash of the moment is extreme. It’s not just my opinion.

These MAGA Men tourists blend into the MAGA Men locals.

 It’s too much.

Their literal gun-toting. 

Their NRA t-shirts. 

Their anti-snowflake slogans. 

It goes on and on. I overhear the phrases “blood on the sixth” and “wrongfully imprisoned” and a lot of hateful rhetoric about Taylor Swift. From the locals. From the tourists. The Taylor Swift thing is just so weird. Also terrifying if you take into account the ways that violence always trickles down, reverberates outward. 

It’s all so heartless. So cruel.

But they believe they’re good. They don’t see themselves this way. 

I want to opt out of their world.

They should have to ask permission. It should be an opt-in, consent-driven world.

I used to head to Picnic Table, a place by a bend in the Big River and away from the center of town, where I had a very deep encounter with a mama duck, injured by an opened fire hydrant. That’s another story. I wrote many books at Picnic Table, read many books, had a few conversations with wayward passers-by. Then the town started work on the bypass so tourists could more easily zoom through on their travels. I said good-bye to the trees cut down, watched the river get re-routed many times. I dreamed once that I drove my truck through the construction site and made a mess of everything with my big beefy tires, tracks on everything I could get through, the destruction was so much they decided to stop the bypass, cease their own destruction, their aggression against the river. You’d think it was a happy dream but I woke up thinking about how angry everyone was. How aggressive. Disgusted with each other. Disgust is a powerful step towards violence and allowing it. Just check Brene Brown’s work on this subject. Helpful.

I’ve been driving to other small towns more often since Picnic Table was killed and listening to audio books, great feminist minds talking about everything that needs talked about. I want to know everything, I need to know everything so I can create a proper narrative of all the big ideas together–social change, the structure of economic systems throughout history, all the theories of everything everywhere, what’s possible, my dream of democracy, wisdom, the thread of feminism woven through the fabric of everything. I need rhetorical knowledge–phrases like straw men and steel men and all the fallacies and zombie values. All about bias and cult-creation and what can be done through feminist eco-poetics with solid ways forward for supporting deprogramming poetics in nonviolent, noncoercive, sustainable ways. Nothing will escape my efforts in this goal. 

I’m determined but more so, I’m compelled. Tears fill my eyes sometimes when I learn a new thing, when I make a new connection. Everything could be so beautiful like Maggie Smith wrote. So equal like Langston Hughes wrote. So hopeful like Rebeca Solnit writes. Terry Tempest Williams. Joyful like Ross Gay writes. 

If only… 

But there’s also my side of the political spectrum. My mind reels sometimes with the political progressive revolutionary discord, too, truth be told. I pick up on zero sum bias–a kind of territorialism, according to Amanda Montell in her excellent book The Age of Magical Overthinking. It’s “anchored in millennia of stiff resource competition. When small, cloistered communities were our only way of life, another’s gain often did mean your loss.” And when you combine this bias with the trillions of dollars behind the Outrage Industrial Complex, wherein cynicism and fatalism reign supreme as, somehow, the most progressive–perfection being the goal–feels like church felt. Like the Order of the Rainbow for Girls and church and virgin purity. It’s not church, not organized. It’s full of anarchists and self-aggrandizement. Who’s the best white person? Who gets to tell which stories? Who gets to say what and when? It’s lots of important things made impossible to talk about. It’s exhausting. 

I need to get away from all of it. I head to the peaks, one of which rises to over 14,000 feet.

Horse, my truck, winds up the winding road up past tree line to the tundra, rocky outcroppings dot the skyline, valleys plunge to meet massive peaks rising across valleys. Rows of the Rocky Mountains form jagged lines and lines and lines for miles and miles. The sky is lightning and thunder, pounding rain, and sun showers. Wind. Stillness. Colorado. 

Today, I listen to Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior in which she uses song, poetry, and prose to re-story everything. First she contextualizes: She dedicates the book then articulates the inciting event–the story that began the story then she tells her story of who she is writing about and then who the reader might be and then she tells a story of what might come to pass in the near and far futures. 

Harjo’s voice is deep and round. 

She re-stories and re-histories and re-minds, walking through memories, some of which she re-arranges and re-tells. There’s a mythology–a big story about a little girl. There’s a story about being quiet but also being known as talkers. I feel that deep in my softest most raw wounds. I know my wounds are small compared but Harjo just doesn’t hit me as someone who compares. I don’t know though…I only know her books. This book particularly touches me.

I take a dirt road to the place where I can stand and turn a 360-degree turn and see west beyond the front range of the rockies and out to the eastern plains and then can look every other direction towards the rows of peaks. Marmots squeak. My mind filled with wind and cold even on a hot day. It’s too hot, even with this kind of cold–I need a windbreaker. The glaciers are smaller than last year. I’m keeping a photographic log and matching it up to other photos by other photographers throughout the era of The Camera. You’d think we’d have less of a problem with shifting baseline syndrome with the meticulous records we keep. 

The wind, the altitude–12,000 feet plus, the giving and taking of my breath, the peaks. I feel the kind of awe I know is rare. Wind forces tears from my eyes. 

I’m happy. A bull elk is coming around. He could kick my ass, but he’s got ancestral memories of what humans are capable of so we’re a good match psychically. I sing You are My Sunshine so he won’t be scared. I sing it to all the animals who are bigger than I am. In my mind I tell him, I’ll go now. You eat. As I head back down the stony path, he goes back to eating. Marmots squeak.

I get home and Joy Harjo’s reading a re-storying of her story, the part where her mother has died, again, Harjo having washed her body this time. I park Truck and go walking and listening through my headphones. There’s a stump who looks like a woman holding a tall walking stick. She looks more like a stump as I get closer, walking down the slope of our little parking lot down the road towards the river. 

I think about my mother, how many stories I’ve told myself about her, how we still converse often, how I miss her now, how I write her forgiveness in every story, nearly every day now, for almost three decades. I think about my daughter–the world I’ve left her.

I think about how I get to vote for a Black Woman for president. I think about what the MAGA men say about her…I won’t repeat it all here.

I take out my phone and type: Harjo says, “you’ll have to navigate by your mother’s voice” and she talks about “cities of artificial light” and she says, “we were never perfect.”

This wisdom is calming and also revolutionary. We were never perfect. We can navigate. We can hear and listen and story and re-story whatever comes to pass.

I make my way back home after my walk. A magpie picks bugs from an elk’s back. 

I got away from Them, the MAGA hats, the hateful hate cloaked in an evil-soaked idea of love and away from the betrayal I feel sometimes from the progressive pursuit of, what exactly, I don’t know. Whatever happens with the upcoming election, I know they’ll still be out here…but…

Now, being back, I’m rested. Ready. 

Marmots squeak.

About the Author