Rage, Red Hot Chili Peppers, & Frost in the Trees
I don’t know about you, but ice cream isn’t doing it for me these days.
Mild-to-middling alcohol consumption isn’t doing it either, and though it probably isn’t a great thing for a nascent nature blogger to admit, long walks in the woods aren’t that helpful either.
What with the one-year anniversary of coronavirus, an insurgent mob trying to overthrow democracy at the U.S Capitol – and that’s just the very tippy top of my iceberg of personal & political concerns -- I find that I’m feeling a lot of rage. More rage and frustration and maybe just pure impotence than a box of macaroni and cheese can really address.
Part of the problem has to do, I think, with landscape.
Already, we’re almost a year into major landscape changes brought about by the pandemic – changes in both our “natural” and “manmade” landscapes (though as I’ll write about some other time, I tend to find those distinctions a little blurry, and even sometimes disingenuous).
In our urban landscapes, we’ve got boarded over windows and closed family-owned restaurants and shops. As someone lucky enough to be able to work from home, I also get the feeling that I may emerge at some point like a cicada, my city transformed around me while I stayed cocooned.
Our personal landscapes have changed to become tighter & more rigid – what will it be like to look back on this time? Will I remember only my walls, and will all my cozy measures of today – my afternoon tea, my velvet pillow, velvet couch and velvet joggers -- seem hopelessly claustrophobic? How will I think of my bid to bring nature to me, the bird feeder outside my window, and the sparrows that keep me company?
Because our urban landscapes have become so constricted, many folks have fled to the outdoors. I don’t know about you, but I live in Washington, D.C., and this fall, on any pretty or even not-so-pretty day, the parks and hiking paths were absolutely packed with people. This is mostly a joyous thing, except when sometimes it isn’t.
I drive back and forth to Blacksburg, VA to see my Mom on occasion (we quarantine and test beforehand), and I sometimes stop by the side of the road to take pictures of the mountain views I-81 affords in the gaps between the long-haul truckers.
I took this picture after stopping at Natural Bridge State Park. I had just finished the memoir of the photographer, Sally Mann (Hold Still). She wrote about being from this part of the world and so never actually visiting the nearby state park – isn’t that always the way? -- until finally one day she did visit and realized what a doofus she had been – it was spectacular.
She included in her book some of her pictures from the park, and I was hoping both to be able to catch a glimpse of the same beauty she had seen, and also to use the state park bathrooms.
The moment I pulled up, though, I knew I would be frustrated in both goals: the parking lot was so packed, people were parking on grassy areas nearby, and lots weren’t wearing masks. I retreated, found a completely abandoned hiking trail nearby, went a few feet off the path … and used the bathroom “safari style.” It was still a pretty area of Virginia, and hopefully, I’ll be able to return some quieter day and see the Natural Bridge itself.
Another time, I saw a storm moving in, and stopped to take a picture of the highway, the trucks, and the weird light.
On my most recent trip though, on my way down to my Mom’s, I found myself turning the music up to teenager levels. The base was doing that weird thing where it isn’t making music any more, it’s just thumping, like you’re dragging along some heavy, felt-padded object behind you and it’s hitting the car at regular intervals, and it made me smile.
I was listening to the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, an album I had last listened to on repeat on my Walkman when it was competing with Hurricane Andrew’s howls. I had only started high school a few days before when Andrew blew ashore, knocking down power lines, marooning us in our houses.
I listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers watching the neighbors paddle their canoes down the middle of the street; I listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers eating canned food heated up on our gas stove; and I listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers trying to go to sleep downstairs on the floor, where it might be a degree or two cooler. They were my anthem, and they screamed my anger at an unpredictable, unjust world.
Listening to them now, singing and screaming along with them, I felt a little of that teenager energy return – and then, it began to snow. I slowed down.
These were light flakes, and they had fallen earlier too, and made a white crust on the branches of the trees and across every individual pine needle. Imagine if Bob Ross had taken out his exemplary paintbrush and outlined every tree with snow and shadow – that is how it looked.
I can’t show you the picture, though. I turned the music down and didn’t stop.
I was late to see my mother, and sometimes the moment moves forward. Nothing lasts forever, not hurricanes, not teenagers, not even rage — it’s like frost in the trees, it’s as delicate as hope.
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