Earthquake

I remember, once, watching the front yard ripple like a wave heading for shore – except it was heading for the living room in which I stood. Then the earthquake met the leading edge of the house and the sound of a freight train filled my ears, and I could hear my mother’s dishes and my father’s cathode ray tube collection crashing to the floor in the dining room. I wanted to sprout wings and fly. Get away, get away!

It’s dangerous out there.

I felt almost the same way today, reading the New York Times. I quit watching the news years ago, when I realized just how incomplete and slanted and “watch the birdie!” it was. Besides, it was really depressing. And I may have to start spooning the print news out into more easily digestible portions, too. Really. Arizona’s new immigration laws, the Birthers, a far-right conservative who isn’t re-elected because he’s not conservative enough. They say that one of the ways to be most at risk to be manipulated by others is to be governed by fear and uncertainty. Well, a lot of us must be scared and uncertain, because a few noisy angry people are having an outsize effect on the rest of the country. Tea Partiers “taking back our country”? It’s my country too, and I don’t want you to have it.

I used to say to myself that when the Homeland Security Act and the far-right made my beautiful home too threatening to live in, that I might take a break and go live in Canada for awhile. Or Europe. But now we’re looking at the collapse of countries, and perhaps of whole regional economic systems. Global warming – yes, I know we like to call it climate change, but it’s global warming, folks – as well as unwatched aging nuclear stores and computer systems – threaten us all.

Jeez, it's not just dangerous out there -- the whole GLOBE is perilous.

And for most people, always has been and always will be. As I sit here, harrowed up with angst about Apocalypse Sometime Soon, I need to remember that for the majority of people on the planet, clean water is a hard-to-come-by luxury and one good meal a day is all you can hope for. That students are walking ten miles to get to a school with no books. They’re not living in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s just home.

It’s a beautiful day. I live in a neighborhood just south of Portland, Oregon, and my city sits down and across a little river, and I can walk to a bluff and admire it from afar. I planted spinach and carrots yesterday. I’ve got a fortune in leeks growing in one garden bed, and the garlic is coming on. The farmer’s market meets today, about five blocks from my house. Today is a good day to be alive.

But I see the earthquake rippling toward us. In times like these, when I see the ground rushing up toward us and I can no longer say, like the guy whose parachute didn’t open, “So far, so good,” it’s taking some mulling over – how do I continue to live with hope and purpose? J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the popular “Lord of the Rings” and a survivor of the First World War, once wrote that the English shared a common attitude – being essentially cheerful people, they can stay happy as long as despair can be postponed. (And, presumably, maintaining a stiff upper lip even when it can’t.)

Meanwhile, I plant my raspberries and asparagus and the new apple tree, teach my daughter how to drive a stick shift and my son how to write a five-paragraph essay – and prepare to enjoy the fruit of my labors for the next forty years or so.

Yes, it’s a dangerous planet, but it’s the only one we’ve got. And it’s home.