Tents, Eclipses, Bears, and Clouds
Please enjoy this curated assortment of my thoughts this morning.
The thru-hike approaches. My mom sent me money to buy an ultralight tent (thanks mom!), which weighs 15 ounces (this is very very light) and takes two trekking poles and impeccable pitching to set up. It’s also the solo ultralight hiker It tent of the year, so I anticipate a lot of on-trail bros very ready to be mad at me for having it at all (I got the very last one in stock until August) and at the same time eager to tell me what I’m doing wrong in pitching it. Hence, every day I go out to a local park to practice pitching it. I’m down to under 8 minutes; I’d like to get under 5, so as to give them less time in which to decide they need to advise me. (This is also, of course, better for my safety, as it means I can get under shelter more quickly when I need to).
Apropos of tents, here is Anne Helen Peterson of Culture Study talking about the student protests. Highly recommend this.
Duh! We all choose the bear!
Apropos of men in the woods, I was in Vermont with some friends this weekend and was made aware of the Man vs. Bear discourse. If you are not familiar, someone decided to ask a bunch of women the question “Would you rather be alone in the forest with a strange man, or a strange bear?” Overwhelmingly, of course, women chose the bear, for the usual reasons. “The bear won’t sexually assault me before it kills me".” “The bear will keep a respectful distance.” and the most devastatingly true answer “The bear recognizes me as a human.” (A majority of American men agree with the statement ‘Donald Trump Respects Women’. )
I’m not linking here to the original source because I actually don’t know the original source of this discourse, probably tiktok? Just google if you want more deets.
Apropos of bears, I do not think I knew their tongues looked like this:
Which leads to the follow-up: can the man do that with his tongue?
Seriously though, the bear. Every time.
Sad! This woman got FOMO for an event she was actually at!
So, I went to a lot of trouble to go see the eclipse in the path of totality. I did a lot of great planning to make this happen for me and a handful of loved ones, and I did it before most other non-eclipse-chasers realized maybe they wanted to drive up to Vermont and see the thing, so I actually got a reasonable deal on an airbnb in Waterbury, and I booked 2 nights so I wasn’t stuck in hours-long traffic either direction.
I went up with my brother and his gf and my older child, and we had a grand old time. We had my brother’s telescope with the appropriate solar filter, we had eclipse glasses I hadn’t bought last-minute from an amazon seller with too many consonants in its name, we had the makings of nachos and lots of wine. The 2 and a half minutes of totality we experienced was utterly miraculous, just as wild and weird and intense as everyone said it would be. I deliberately decided not to take a lot of photos or focus on capturing the moment and instead just actually experienced the eclipse. I have some Blair Witch style video footage of my feet from the moment of totality; you see that I am running around a yard and that I and some other people are yelling things like “holy fucking shit!” over and over. And I have one photo of a tree, just after totality, looking weird, with my orange eclipse glasses in it.
I was so glad we’d gotten to be there, and I was so proud of myself for making it happen.
Then I went on instagram, and I saw that other people had been in more photogenic locations, and taken better photos, and been with more people, or fewer, or on a mountain or by the sea or or or, and I had this weird sensation, after the fact, that I had not been at the eclipse at all. I did not have an appropriate 3-4 perfect photos to show how perfect my eclipse experience had been.
I don’t have a moral here, I still look at insta, and I want to see what my friends are up to, somehow. But I’m extremely disturbed by what insta did to my experience of the eclipse, and it puts me in a bind: I don’t want to focus on documenting my thru-hike, but what if that means that at the end of it I will somehow, having actually done the thing, have the bizarre, eclipse-like sensation that I didn’t do it at all? The sunlight of the real eclipsed by the simulacrum of the documentation (if I choose to document), or, infuriatingly, just as eclipsed by its absence?
Wow! These Women Discovered This One Weird Trick to Having Thoughtful Conversations about Hard Things!
One of my friends mentioned, over the weekend, while we were lazing around in Vermont not doing much of anything (hiking, eating, stretching and talking, doing laundry), the book How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell, which I am now reading and recommend very much. Odell speaks to my social media FOMO anxieties, sort of, but that’s not really what her book is about. It’s also not about getting off social media in order to be more productive, a la Cal Newport1.
Really what Odell is talking about is how the theft of our attention robs us not only personally, of actually experiencing ourselves in our bodies and our present realities, but also politically and socially, since a constant state of distraction prevents us from thinking, both as individuals AND as groups:
It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to pay attention, then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.
It was only on this trip to Vermont, where I did not much of anything with two of my closest friends for 2 days, that we were able to have a wide-ranging conversation together about Israel and Gaza, about the student encampments, about our political situation generally at this moment in time. This conversation wasn’t the focus of our trip or the main event, because we really had no focus or main event other than just... hanging out.
Still, it couldn’t have happened without the hanging out. These aren’t conversations to have over text (if you value your friendship and actually communicating, at least) or conversations to have when you’re stressed or, well, distracted, as we generally are. It wasn’t the most contentious conversation, exactly, it was more us puzzling over our various thoughts and feelings and knowings and worries and identities together. It was, in the best sense possible, a true conversation: a little meandering, a little uncertain, a little revelatory and yes sometimes a little intense.
It’s the kind of conversation that it feels right to have with people you love, about things that matter, and it required time and energy and our attention. If we had not had these things, we could not have had the conversation, and we would have had no opportunity to have considered thoughts about any of those topics, as a group. We did not come to concrete conclusions, we did not commit to any particular actions, we just talked, but in the absence of time and attention to have such conversations, we certainly are not further equipped to act with intention, are we?
This is precisely the point Odell is making in her book: it’s so convenient for a lot of power structures if we are too busy and too distracted to have such conversations. When we can’t, and don’t, then, she says, “this ‘schizoid’ collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger.”2
I don’t want to react out of fear and anger. I want to feel my fear and anger, acknowledge them, and, in the company of people I love and trust, talk about what’s happening in the world and puzzle together about it, and maybe from there figure out how to move together about it, in love and solidarity.
Boring! This Woman Won’t Stop Telling You What the Clouds Mean.
Finally, I’ve been reading a book about the weather called The Secret World of Weather, by Tristan Gooley. Now I can look up at my sunsets and understand even more about what’s going on. Did you know that you can make predictions about the weather based on the length of contrails? They point to the amount of moisture in the air, which is an important signal of what’s to come.
Prepare to be regaled with more such Weather Facts! in future. If you missed my sunsets essay, here it is:
I hate being interrupted in my own reading by 10 subscribe buttons, but you could subscribe if you like:
I send these missives on no particular schedule and they are all different, so they will be neither overwhelming nor boring.
Also you can smash the reply button, I like when people reply.
Also I need to shill for my part-time job as an engineering career and leadership coach, see more here.
Cheers!
Sorry but his face and his ideas make me want to punch him.
p 81, How To Do Nothing