Unimprovable Land

Work has been slow but just enough opportunity has remained to pay numerous bills and to continue to eat well. Winter promises a slow down that allows time to think more about work than to do it. With the wood stove glowing and putting off bone warmth, it’s been nice to work contemplatively for a client out of the finished studio, making some built-in dressers of fir and their twenty-four drawers. Slow-downs are nicer every winter and after seventeen of them as a craftsman I have found a way to enjoy.

I approach cross-country skiing on the Methow Valley Sports Trails Association’s machine groomed trails more like a meditation and necessary physical therapy, counteractive to years of bad habits at work on my poor ankles, than the way the fitter get to use the trails for recreation. From the tracks of the Rendezvous that ties Winthrop to Mazama by a higher route there appears to be miles and miles of endlessly exploitable land for human purposes, still untapped. But the best craftsmanship one will see on these trails is the perfect herringbone pattern made by the skate skiers that charge up the elevations, leaving me and Gypsy the dog in the quiet again of rhythmic scraping in the classic tracks. The craftsmanship will live a shorter life than a may fly, and if the skier is better, a perfect pattern will be accomplished thoughtlessly. My still injured left shoulder, though sore, feels better after a ski and I take particular care not to crash onto it when zooming down the black diamond leg of the Cedar Creek trail that leaves Gypsy’s muzzle in a cake of frost.

Silence, the untouchable, and solitude, true loves of mine, cannot be improved by any example of permanent purpose. I am only one degree less inspired by the architecture of sociality: cathedrals, skyscrapers, opera houses, and the order and practicality of a nicely designed and executed family home. There is a misnomer in our capital-driven culture, and it is the idea that when we touch the earth with industry, temples, and homes we have improved upon it. County records should call it altered. It might be altered in a very pleasing way or ravaged for resources, but from the perspective of the rest of pantheistic introspection, humans don’t improve land. We have learned to change it and to convert it for our purposes but only two species of millions could, if they could all consider it, call it improved. The narcissism is available only to us, the willful converters, the craftspeople of materials and souls, and in the case of the Cougar Bait side of the trails, joy is also available to the accomplice: the family dog that would rather skim atop the grooming than break a virgin trail.

I feel profoundly blessed to be the son of a man of character and principle. My work ethic that I inherited from him is similar but lesser than his seemingly tireless and dedicated energy. His life of expertise and leadership is at this moment an immediate and direct offering of love and compassion to his neighbors devastated by a very recent and cataclysmic natural and human disaster. The prolific prosperity of his church enables the giving of monumental gifts. Beyond my birth and rearing, and some very hard years and trials, I feel even more blessed to have a deep and loving relationship with this man even while we disagree thoroughly on many matters of conscience and ideology. Our differences seem every year to come more into focus because of world events, as does our mutual appreciation. My parents intentionally brought half a dozen children into a world they thought would be mostly destroyed before their offspring reached old age by the eagerly awaited Second Coming of their Savior. I call it plain old violent, antisocial thinking to look forward to the end of the world, but I am immeasurably grateful to have been born. I tend to feel guilt easily, and for more and different things than two decades of ideological indoctrination intended.

Foundational and fundamental to my father’s religion, and one aspect of my own religion for that matter, is the belief in an eternal battle for freedom. We were convinced at church and at home that our most important civic responsibility on earth was to defend and protect the liberty of all people to freely choose their salvation. We believed that the freedom to thrive and to worship the God that loves prosperity was to fulfill our eternal and foreordained duty to subdue and hold righteous dominion over the earth and its resources for the greatest of all rights: to bring as many waiting unborn souls as possible into the loving embrace of a righteous and secure Christian home. I have retained some of the things I was taught as a child and rejected others.

Humans are made of the energy of converted food, and that is all. The energy from those kernels of grain or a potato is converted into walking and talking and being productive, and the rest is recycled as fertilizer. But to create potential human energy, the fertilizer, whether human or chicken or fish or bovine or oil, has had an enormous proportion of energy already extracted from it, just from the breathing, not to mention the energy required to produce the food in the first place. Because of arrogant dominion over resources the soil has been irrevocably depleted by stages, every time it is tilled and harvested, for more people all the time. No matter how much fertilizer is applied to formerly arable land there is a net loss of energy because to keep the ideas of how to conserve and preserve energy, however brilliant, take a lot of energy. When the resources available to make food become unequal to the energy required for us to breathe, billions will still prosper, but billions will have to eat something besides food, and die, and then He can no longer be named Providence, except by the eaters. The non-eaters will have to give Him another name.

While Dad was trying to sharpen my view into a narrowly prescribed way that included success for all of eternity, I was going broad with less thought for the eternal and more for this dirty and wet world, this sometimes snow covered Giver, and I realized at the same time that other nations and cultures had beautiful ideas, too, even if irreconcilable to the dogmas of benevolent exceptionalism I inherited. I hope that these societies will have access to food too, for generations more while somehow preserving ethnic and cultural identity, because the prosperous and righteous have considered that those first of God’s commandments, to multiply and to accomplish dominion over all exploitable things, could now be improved by restraint and the more difficult commandment to love, even to love what is instead of what can be changed into the familiar.

When winter is over I hope to work again with fervor at altering this beautiful place, because I am a man and it is what a good lover of the trades does, and people close to me hope to have food to eat and an ample home to live in. But love is not simple and it is full of conflict. I feel incomparably blessed to be able to consider how best to love while others in the world have no choice. Perhaps for them the only thing left to love is the idea of mere survival, partly because of what I love and because of my freedom.