The NY Fishwrap's Eags (Timothy Egan) offers a secular homily at the near end of December with the Winter Solstice occurring tomorrow. Eags recounts the struggles and difficulties of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803-1806) in the Pacific Northwest as a powerful lesson for all of us in 2020. In fact, this essay resonated with this blogger a month after November 2020 when the sole positive moment for this blogger was the election news in November 3-4, 2020. For the remaining 27 days of November 2020 this blogger lived at the edge of what he called a "Black Hole" (Major Depression). November 2020 brought horrifying memories of the blogger's horrible life in the last year of his time at the Collegium Excellens. The blogger was encouraged to go on medical leave for the final semester of the 2003-2004 academic year and retired thereafter. November 2020 was frightening in its similarity to November 2003. If this is a (fair & balanced) lesson on living in darkness while alone, so be it. And, as long as The Loser in the 2020 election is plotting to declare martial law in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and stage a "re-vote" under military supervision prior to the Inaugural Ceremony on January 20, 2021...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap] Every five years or so I try to return to land’s end, the continent’s edge, where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean — the final heave of the River of the West. I prefer to go during winter solstice, the long night of the soul in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Next 3 Months Are Going To Be Pure Hell — Lessons From Lewis And Clark On Living Through The Darkest Days And Longest Nights
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Off Cape Disappointment you look out at swells of 20 feet and struggle to walk in the face of a resolute rain and wind gusts that slap you silly. It’s exhilarating.
This year, the mouth of the Columbia serves up a metaphor for these awful times. No, not the shipwreck of the Peter Iredale, embedded offshore since 1906, just to the south of the mouth. The hollowed out skeleton of that four-masted steel bark seems too obvious a symbol of the United States in President Trump’s final weeks.
The better metaphor is the story of the existential crisis that bedeviled Lewis and Clark’s ragged crew, just after they got their first glimpse of the Pacific in November 1805. They were facing an endless and desperate winter in a place they knew nothing about.
But first, they took a vote, on where to build their winter camp. In their crew, York, a slave, and Sacagawea, a Native woman and former slave, were both given a voice on this occasion. The decision was made to cross the Columbia and hunker down near what is now Astoria, OR.
That episode comes with plenty of asterisks. Upon his return, William Clark did not free the enslaved man who had been allowed a momentary vote in the wild. He was property, as before. “If any attempt is made by York to run off, or refuse to provorm his duty as a slave, I wish him sent to New Orleans and sold,” he wrote after the expedition had ended.
And Sacagawea, the only woman in the Corps of Discovery, the special US Army unit led by Lewis and Clark, and the mother of an infant that she carried to the Pacific and back, was initially denied a chance to see the ocean until she insisted.
But as a lesson in our coming catastrophe — a season which could be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation” as Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said earlier this month — the winter of 1805 to 1806 is instructive.
The task of that mildewed crew was to stay alive and alert until the spring, when they planned to return. You can imagine the descent toward misery. The explorers recorded only a dozen days without rain.
As Clark wrote: “O! How disagreeable is our Situation dureing [sic] this dreadful weather.”
For his part, Meriwether Lewis appears to have suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout his life. Three years after completing the expedition he died at the age of 35, of gunshot wounds — what most historians agree was likely a suicide. “I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him,” Clark wrote after hearing the news.
During the Coronavirus Pandemic, the number of adults exhibiting symptoms of depression has tripled, and alcohol consumption has risen. We are prisoners of our homes and our minds, Zoom-fatigued, desperate for social contact. As a nation, we are diminished and exhausted, and millions remain out of work.
Further, it has been a long fall from that crude but egalitarian vote at the mouth of the Columbia to one that is among the nadirs of democracy, when 60 percent of Republican House members joined a court effort this month to negate the sovereign right of the people to elect their leaders. Vladimir Putin acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory before Mitch McConnell did.
It’s equally troubling that Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, but came within 43,000 votes of losing the election because of the anti-democratic relic of the Electoral College.
The Corps of Discovery [official name of the Lewis and Clark Expedition] made it back without losing a person (one man died during the westward half of the expedition). They fared well once they emerged from their long winter. We, on the other hand, face a brutal early spring. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that more than 500,000 Americans likely will have died from COVID-19 by the end of March.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has made similar grim assessments of what lies ahead; in November he predicted December would see “a surge superimposed upon” a surge, not unlike the waves of the Pacific, gray and unrelenting in the December dusk.
Still, we look to the spring, as did they. We rely on our ingenuity, as did they. Even as we mourn the dead, we cheer the first people to get a shot in the arm. “I feel like healing is coming,” said Sandra Lindsay, the Long Island nurse who had the distinction of becoming the first to be vaccinated on our shores, after getting her Coronavirus inoculation.
We cling to the coming spring because it’s far better than thinking about tomorrow’s dreary sameness. We look forward to a new president and the return of the simple joy of human touch.
But before that, we need to be psychologically ready for three months of pure hell. How to get through it? Hibernation — taking a cue from our fellow warm-blooded mammals. Looking inward, discovering the nuance and overlooked dimensions of things long neglected. And a sliver of advice from words attributed to the Irish writer Edna O’Brien — that winter is the real spring [the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature]. ###
[Timothy Egan is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West, and politics at the NY Fishwrap. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is A Pilgrimage to Eternity (2019). See all other books by Eags here.]
Copyright © 2020 The New York Times Company
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
