Already Here, Just Unevenly Distributed

Since I was in college I've been dreaming of a girls' weekend, the kind you see advertised with idealistic spreads in women's magazines, in glossy tones that match the pearlescent, early-2000s lens of Thirteen Going on Thirty. The right kind of girls' weekend would include lots of coffee, wine, fabulous outfits, effortless makeup, and we'd all be (somewhere near) "thirty, flirty and thriving!” 

This past weekend two friends, Leah and Abbey, flew from opposite sides of the country to converge in Denver, and we spent three days gallivanting around the Front Range, laughing and swapping stories and cackling like chickadees. The three of us met years ago through the volunteer service corps that lured us from our respective geographic homes to Houston in the first place. Girls' weekend was a reunion, complete with plant shops, living room karaoke, and pedicures.

We sat in the living room talking and sipping coffee, and when Michael passed through, we paused our conversation to ask him for updates and clarification on the economic sanctions directed at Russia. Leah, Abbey, and I walked to the Pearl Street mall and bought pastries from a coffee shop while the Russian ruble collapsed. 

We went hiking at an overlook on the western edge of town: a geological formation made of iron-rich red rocks jutting towards the sky. For years, the area has been called Settler’s Park, as a tone-deaf homage to the white settlers who trespassed on sacred Native land and claimed Boulder Valley as their own. Recently, the city renamed the landmark to The People’s Crossing. The new designation, chosen by representatives from different Native tribes, honors the site’s history as a crossroads for Indigenous people, the original residents of this region. We perched in the crux of the rocks and while we sat there talking, a red-tailed hawk circled the summit and alighted on a rocky precipice a few feet away.

On Sunday morning, I woke to a text message from the woman who lives next door. “ALERT: mountain lion under neighbor’s porch.”

I staked out the couch, which sits underneath the picture window in the living room. When Abbey and Leah trudged up from the basement, they joined me in watching Colorado Wildlife Rangers line the cul-de-sac with their trucks. Rangers with pistols strapped onto their belts walked confidently into the neighbor's backyard and we waited to see what would happen. One ranger--a woman with a thick blond braid—carried a shotgun. (“Protocol," she explained later. "I would never discharge that in a residential area.”) Other wildlife officers carried a strappy muzzle, a tarp, and a long red-and-white implement that looked like a pool cleaner minus the net. (A jab tranquilizer, I later learned.) After an hour and a half of watching from the couch, a huddle of rangers emerged from the far side of the neighbor’s house, carrying the tarp which cradled the sedated mountain lion like a hammock. Its tail, longer and thicker around than my husband’s arm, draped over the edge, nearly dragging on the ground. The rangers hauled their quarry to a massive steel cage mounted on a trailer and somehow transferred the sleeping animal inside. 

“We can go outside now," I called, and we scurried to throw shoes and jackets on over our pajamas. In the street, we watched the caged mountain lion wake up and realize his capture. The neighbors kids held a council and announced the result: they named the lion Jeffrey. One of the rangers explained that mountain lions weren’t wandering into human territory so much as we humans had built our towns in mountain lion territory. 
“They're around here,” he shrugged. “And they were here first.” 

On Monday night we watched Don't Look Up, an Oscar-nominated satire about our political leaders' failure to reckon with coming disaster. (Is it fair to pin the blame on our leaders? Would the sentence be more accurate if I just said our failure?) 
“I thought it would have more jokes," Abbey told me the next morning. 

In the movie, a comet--ten to fifteen miles wide—is hurtling directly towards earth. Unless diverted, a global extinction event will occur in a few months’ time. The movie is riddled with shifting loyalties and the fifteen-second news cycle we all know too well. After much deliberation and political finagling, a rocket is launched to divert the comet. Launch is successful; audiences around the world clamor in relief. But before accomplishing its mission, the rocket turns around at the behest of billionaire tech investor Peter Isherwell (a cautionary tale about overweening philanthropy, among other things). His private researchers have discovered that the comet is made of valuable metals, he wants to mine it. Isherwell is willing to risk global destruction for the sake of potential profit. 

Tuesday afternoon found me back in my living room, freshly emptied of friends and guests. I’d driven Abbey directly into the sunrise to get her to the airport that morning, and while I drove back to Boulder, butter-yellow daylight spilled across the landscape and NPR journalists discussed the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Girls’ Weekend was over: whatever squealing we'd done about new boyfriends in a hole-in-the-wall Denver ramen shop was pressed into memory like a wildflower between the pages of a book. 

I tried to focus on my normal rhythms, but routine eluded me, hovering on the other side of a clean kitchen and a clear mind. I flipped back and forth between Jennine Capó Crucet’s essay about the election of Donald Trump and the Poetry Unbound episode featuring Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War”(1)(2).

Capó Crucet, in her essay "The Country We Now Call Home,” writes about driving past red-and-white billboards that proclaim, "THIS IS TRUMP COUNTRY!” She's in eastern Washington State, on her way to a rally in support of DACA. Some of the rally attendees wear facemarks to protect themselves from inhaling smoke from wildfires—much like the one that ravaged part of Boulder County over New Year’s. 

"How big do the signs have to be before we take the warnings seriously?” she asks.

She's writing about Trump's election. She's writing about hurricane warnings in Miami. She doesn't know how her words will echo in the age of covid, as climate crisis intensifies with more hurricanes, more fires, more exploitative politicians, more refugees, more wars. 

We've been living inside disaster for so long. Whose disaster, I want to ask.

“These questions are no longer rhetorical,” Jennine Capó Crucet writes. “Our answers depend on how immediate the threat to our survival feels, and for many of us, the immediacy of that threat has already mobilized us towards revolutionary action. And then there are those of us who can keep ignoring the signs, for now.”

Back in 2017, I fell in love with the work of DS4SI, the Design Studio for Social Innovation, and their project, “Social Emergency Response Centers.” They used the tagline, "The social emergency is already here; it's just unevenly distributed”(3).

I flipped the book closed, turned to my phone and pressed play on "We Lived Happily During the War." About Kaminsky's poem, Pádraig Ó Tuama--the host of Poetry Unbound--says, “I think what he's doing is highlighting over and over again, in so many places of war, that while some people are wondering, "Will I survive the day?” somebody else is wondering what color to paint the kitchen or whether they should reupholster the chairs or what choice to make about holiday. There's a brutality about that.”  

But is that the brutality of war, or the brutality of inequality?

Privilege, not peace, is what enables you—what enables me—to ignore and to escape consequences. Privilege is a get-out-of-jail free card, a live-happily-during-the-war card. 

"I took my chair outside and watched the sun," Ilya Kaminsky writes. 

That's what I did on Tuesday, after taking my friends to the airport: I strung up my hammock—hunter’s orange, the color of alert—in the backyard and I swayed in the sun and read a book. I watched my cat roll in the winter-dry grass. 

Right now, we’re only letting the cat go outside when we can go with her to supervise. The mountain lion that the rangers relocated—Jeffrey--had a brother, and now he’s prowling around the neighborhood, looking for his litter-mate. The other night I was sitting in the kitchen and I glanced out the window to see the brother mountain lion halfway up the public stairs that go alongside our house. 

The rangers reminded us that mountain lions are stealth animals. They're ambush predators, and their greatest advantage lies in our unpreparedness. 

Capó Crucet writes, in 2017: “At least it's an acknowledgement of our new not-normal, this era brought on by our very denial that the storms were on their way. The very least we can do now is accept that the disaster is here, but the fastest way to guarantee our peril is to do nothing in the face of it. No matter how dark it leaves the house, it's time to put up the shutters. Take a deep breath and notice what you taste; no matter how uncomfortable it feels, it's time to put on the face masks. In fact, it's already too late.” 

NOTES

(1) In her collection, My Time Among the Whites, the essay is titled "The Country We Now Call Home.” Portions of the essay appeared in earlier forms in The New York Times, including “Convincing my Cuban Mom to Vote for Hillary,” “An Unimaginable Day Arrives in Miami,” and "Miami Always Thinks the Storm Will Turn." https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/opinion/campaign-stops/winning-my-moms-vote.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/an-unimaginable-day-arrives-in-miami.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/sunday/miami-hurricane-irma.html
(2) https://onbeing.org/programs/ilya-kaminsky-we-lived-happily-during-the-war/ 
(3) DS4SI is the Boston-based Design Studio for Social Intervention. https://www.ds4si.org/interventions/serc