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Viewed from a great height, the Eureka Creek watershed looks a bit like a human ear. You can see the ear from a jet plane, or in a satellite photograph, or on a topographical map. You can’t see the ear when you are in it. In fact, in the North Cascades, you can seldom see the true and complete shape of a watershed while you are in it—especially if you are below timberline. You must get above it.

Like all metaphors, this one requires imagination; the watershed is not exactly like an ear. It could be a kidney bean, or a backwards numeral 3. Fair enough. Nothing is exactly like anything else, and metaphors demonstrate the limitations of language. But because I want to hear what this landscape has to say to me, I’ll choose to see an ear.

One of the first impressions urban folks have of alpine places is that they are quiet. But when, with time, the ears are gently opened, countless distinct sounds fill them: streams under snow, wing-beats of a ruffed grouse, chirp of a marmot, clatter of rock fall, muffled hoot of ptarmigan, buzzing of horseflies.

It is in the almost quiet that hearing becomes most acute and discerning. A breeze through trees, for instance, is not one sound, but many. Is the wind threading through larch needles, or through the gnarled mat of subalpine fir at timberline? Through a grove of aspens, or cottonwoods along a river? The shape of a leaf and the way it is attached at the petiole to a supple stem alters the timbre of the wind’s voice. With my eyes closed, can I tell the difference?

The ear-shaped basin has two lobes—so in this way it’s more like a backwards 3 than an ear, although I prefer the image of an ear. In the course of five or six miles, the south fork of eureka Creek almost completes a counter-clockwise spiral, flowing at some stage of its journey toward every point of the compass. Meanwhile, its partnered stream in the north half of the basin spirals clockwise in similar fashion. Where the two forks meet, the creek then flows straight southeast (like a eustachian tube?) through a steep valley toward its confluence with the Methow River.

Imagine two explorers in the watershed. Let’s say that like many explorers, they have navigated by rivers. Now they find themselves in the middle of the ear, where the two forks converge. They are headed upstream, searching for a way across the Cascade divide. They intend to drop into a watershed on the west side of the divide, the wet side, to find a different river that will tumble through dense and lush forests and deliver them to Puget Sound, where they will find seafood, the New York Times, and good coffee.

But first, they have to find their way. So, they split up; one goes south and one north, following each fork to its headwaters. The one who goes south will be spun counter-clockwise. If he follows the main stem all the way to the highest little rivulet, eventually he’ll get to a ridge on the shoulder of massive Robinson Mountain. He’ll drop down the other side, then follow a short and steep stream that all too quickly delivers him into territory that is familiar: Eureka Creek. He ends where he began, at the Methow.

Meanwhile, our intrepid north fork explorer has a disconcertingly similar, albeit clockwise, adventure. The ridge and the river nudge her steadily to the right until she reaches a pass on the shoulder of an attractive peak. Perhaps she doesn’t know it (and the knowledge wouldn’t help her anyway) but the peak looking down at her misadventures bears the odd name of Mount Lago.

Disoriented but hoping for the best, she drops from the pass into the watershed on the other side. If she’s paying attention to the sun, she knows that something has gone wrong. And although the journey takes longer than that of her southern compadre, she eventually finds herself—exasperated, sweaty, and besmirched—on the banks of Eureka Creek as it tumbles headlong toward its marriage with the Methow.

It is, of course, possible that explorers going up either fork of the Eureka might cross the rim of the ear before completing the spiral, and find a way to the west side. Then they might follow the north-flowing Pasayten River, which might seem to promise a journey to the ocean, but would also end up swinging them east again, whence they came.

It helps to have a view from above. But even from above, this landscape is a puzzle. It must have seemed diabolically complicated to early explorers. This part of the Cascade Range offers perhaps the most confounding bit of watershed geography in the United States, if not all of North America. Mountains sprawl in no discernible pattern. Rivers go every-which-way, and frequently change direction. It is a landscape turned and folded on itself, much like the folded and buckled metamorphic rocks of which the mountains are composed.

Of course, these days, route-finding is easier. We have GPS, we have guidebooks, we have trip reports. We have Highway 20. And we have maps. A map is a way to see connections, to understand how parts come together to form… well, if not a whole, then at least larger parts. A map provides orientation, perspective, coherence and understanding. An overview.

If I could calculate how many hours of my life have been spent poring over maps—topographic maps, climate maps, soils maps, vegetation zone maps—it would be a stunning figure. It might be equivalent to the hours some people spend watching television or playing video games. However, even if the number of hours surprised me, I wouldn’t consider it wasted time.

My wife often asks me if I’m planning a trip when my gaze is glued to maps. Sometimes this is the case, but more often it’s not. Usually I’m just contemplating them—often the same ones I’ve studied hundreds of times before. Although it’s not an explicit intention, what I’m doing is memorizing. In my mind’s eye, I flit back and forth between the arrangement of lines and colors on the map, and a picture of the landscape as I imagine it or know it to be.

Most likely I’m looking at certain pockets of the North Cascades for which I hold a special affection. What I am committing to memory are watersheds. Through the map I am trying to absorb the orientation and arrangement of watersheds: what ridges separate them, what passes provide passage between them, what obstacles to or opportunities for cross-country travel exist within them.

Of course, studying a map is no guarantee that things will be clear on the ground. Far from it. For instance, it always seems, from looking at a topo, that it will be easy to discern the lay of the land. It seems that ridges will be distinct, that obstacles will be apparent from a distance. The reality in thickly forested terrain, however, is that rocky outcrops or impenetrable thickets will conspire to nudge me, imperceptibly, off of my carefully planned course. Before I know it, I’m not where I intended to be. Before I know it, I find myself in the middle of an unstable avalanche slope, or on a ledge that cliffs out, or in a gully that is desperately hard to escape. Now how did that happen? Somewhere along the line, I made a poor choice.

The phrase watershed moment is both literally and metaphorically apt. It can describe a journey in the mountains—and so much more. It is a moment in which a fateful decision is made that commits the chooser to a course that is increasingly hard to reverse. In landscapes where vision is hampered, these moments often happen before I think they will happen, before I notice that they already have happened.

Looking back over a sequence of choices, I may not recall the moment I entered disastrous terrain. Perhaps the ridge was sort of flat, nondescript, its contours subtle and obscured by timber. I didn’t know I was on the wrong side of it. Or perhaps I was seduced by a fun and apparently easy glissade down a snowfield: Wheeee! It looked so much better than that unpleasant traverse across scree or shattered ledges. And now… I am in the wrong gully. It is a perilously steep chute, with scary snow bridges through which I could plunge into a raging creek. Or I am vertically bush-whacking through a mat of yellow cedar and the ground has dropped away. I can’t see the ground. I’ve been sort of half down-climbing and half falling through the canopy of spindly cedar branches. I am in deep shit.

This has happened to me. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I’ve been lucky. I’ve learned to be better not only at reading maps, but at reading landscape. I’ve learned to be better at look- ing ahead. I’ve learned to sometimes take the hard way when it preserves my options, provides a clear view of the next step, and leads to a better place from which to take that next step. I’ve gotten better, but that still doesn’t mean I am very good at it. Route-finding is an art. I’m learning, and I benefit from good examples.

If route-finding is an art, one of the master artists was the man after whom that peculiar mountain in the Eureka Creek watershed—Mt. Lago—is named. Lage Wernstedt was a Swedish immigrant who graduated from Yale with a degree in Forestry in 1903, and then worked as a surveyor for the United States Forest Service. He was one of the toughest, most persistent, resourceful, adventurous and indefatigable of the early mountaineers who pioneered the Cascades. He looms large in the history of Cascades exploration, cartography, mountaineering and firefighting.

Over the course of his career, Lage (pronounced Loggy) would become one of the west’s most knowledgeable and experienced foresters. He was rich in both scientific knowledge and practical skills, from the application of new methods in mapping, to techniques of firefighting, to how to efficiently pack a mule train. He entered the ear of the Eureka Creek watershed in 1925 with his mule train, his surveying tools, his tripod, heavy camera, and photographic plates. I like to think his ears were open to what the land had to say to him as he traversed the length and breadth of the watershed, climbing all the high peaks that shaped the rim of the ear.

Along with Herman Ulrichs and Fred Beckey—Washington’s most famous early mountaineers—Wernstedt rounds out a trinity of climbers who can claim most of the first ascents of the highest and most prominent peaks in Washington’s North Cascades. Wernstedt was the first of the three. Unlike Ulrichs and Beckey, he didn’t think of himself as a climber in the recreational sense. He didn’t care much about the attention that comes from a community of climbers who consider first ascents a prize. Perhaps he was simply humble, perhaps he was just doing his job without fuss, or perhaps he never considered himself first, regardless of the record, given the presence of Native Americans, miners and settlers in the area.

At any rate, he didn’t care much for claiming credit. There are plenty of peaks under Lage’s belt that we know are first (recorded) ascents, a number that Lage probably climbed first, and an even greater number that he possibly climbed first. He didn’t always build cairns, and he didn’t leave notes. What he did do is leave photographic evidence; careful examination of his photographs proves that he was on several summits that were claimed as first ascents by later climbers. Also unlike Beckey and Ulrichs, Wernstedt didn’t particularly care if a mountain offered interesting climbing. While his ascents were definitely hard work, especially given their remoteness at the time, they didn’t often present technical challenges.

So, if he wasn’t after glory and he wasn’t after difficulty, what was he after? Well, primarily, a good view. As a man bestowed by the Forest Service with a mission to survey and map this rugged, convoluted, geologically complex and still largely unknown terrain, he was looking for summits from which he could triangulate locations and begin to understand what we call “the lay of the land.” He was piecing together a puzzle. In an age before Google earth, GPS, satellite imagery or even aerial photography, the way to gain this understanding was to get to the high points on foot. No one in the Cascades was more single-minded in pursuit of this goal than Lage Wernstedt.

And no one was more discerning in knowing which peaks to climb. Although elevation was an obvious factor, it was not as simple as going for the highest or even the most prominent summits. He chose strategically located surveying locations from which he could begin to understand the logic of the watersheds and ridge lines. He could begin to understand the influence of topography as it affected the movement of water, weather, people, and even fire across the terrain.

He had a long career with the Forest Service, from 1908 to his retirement in 1943. During that time, he added much to the body of knowledge about mountains in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Much of the backcountry was still terra incognita. His most active years in the North Cascades were 1925 and 1926. During these years, he focused on the high peaks north and west of the Methow valley, in what is now the Pasayten Wilderness and in the area of Washington Pass, along the spectacular spine of the North Cascades.

The list of first ascents that either definitely or probably belong to him goes on and on. It includes the big ones: Logan, Black, Silver Star, Osceola, Carru, Lago, Monument, Blackcap, Lake, Robinson, and Big Craggy. If a modern-day Cascades hiker wanted to compile a list of summits likely to provide both a superlative view and a strategic location from which to see and understand watershed boundaries, choosing Lage Wernstedt’s first ascents wouldn’t be a bad way to go about it.

I feel an affinity for the tough Swede in his cork boots and cowboy hat—not because I am in any sense his equal, but because this region that I think of as Lage’s country is my favorite part of the range. In 1925, long before roads penetrated this area, it took an extraordinary level of fitness, skill, confidence and determination to reach these high peaks. I also admire the curiosity, the thirst for understanding that drove him not only to explore the mountains, but also to develop new techniques of mapmaking using aerial photography and to pioneer bold new ways to fight fire. Lage Wernstedt was a great mapmaker and mountaineer; he was also one of the co-inventors of smokejumping.

It may seem obvious in 2015 that maps can be made, checked and improved through the use of aerial photography. It may also seem obvious in 2015 that forest fires can be attacked from the air and that firefighters can jump from airplanes. But neither proposition was obvious in 1925. The first use of aircraft by the forest service, in 1917, was simply for fire detection. In the following decade, planes were used to battle fire by dropping water on flames and supplies to firefighters on the ground. But in 1939, an experimental program was established in the Methow valley to see if firefighters could parachute successfully and safely, with their tools, into rugged country. Lage Wernstedt, along with Assistant Chief of Fire Control David P. Godwin and USFS pilot Harold King, introduced these concepts. His vision came to pass: aerial photography was used in mapmaking, and an elite group of firefighters trained at the newly established smokejumper base in Winthrop did indeed start to jump out of airplanes.

He was a true route-finder in numerous ways. He was a discerning observer and a creative thinker. In his day, he was at the forefront of attempts to manage the forest by wisely applying the best tools of science and technology. He combined this approach with an intimate knowledge of the patterns in nature, gained through many years of putting his boots on the ground. He came up with entirely new ways of thinking about the forestry problems of his time.

If Lage Wernstedt were with us today, I wonder if he would conceive of new methods for our time. Would he shift some paradigms in land management? Would he guide us into a different watershed? I can’t help but think that his familiarity with the patterns of landscape, born of countless forays on foot into some of the most rugged terrain in North America, would give him invaluable insights into the behavior of both water and fire. He would be a wise man to have in the Forest Service.

I wonder what insights he might have to offer regarding some of the challenges we face today: bigger and hotter fires, diminishing snowpack, collapsing fisheries, the depletion and poisoning of both groundwater and soil, the crashing population of pollinators, the loss of biodiversity, and (last but certainly not least) increasingly unpredictable climate. I have no idea what he would have to say about any of these things, but I know this: He’d seek a perspective that reveals connections between disparate parts. He’d pay attention to the landscape. And he’d seek to understand, always, the big picture, the view from above, the way things are connected.

Not far to the southwest of Mount Lago, perhaps 20 miles as the crow flies, is a beautiful, dominant peak that rises above the many peaks in its neighborhood. It is Tower Mountain, and it is one of my favorite summits in a region where spectacular peaks are abundant. Tower is smack-dab in the center of Lage Wernstedt’s territory. In every direction from Tower’s summit, the highest and most splendid summits visible all felt the footprint of Lage’s boots ninety years ago.

To the north are the relatively gentle summits of the Pasayten wilderness, with their glorious meadows and larch-lined lakes. The Eureka Creek peaks are prominent in this direction. Immediately to the southeast is the massive, crenellated escarpment of Silver Star. Beyond it is the high peak of North Gardner. And to the west and southwest are two of the highest and grandest of all the mountains that Lage Wernstedt summitted in those incredible years of 1925 and 1926: Black Peak and Mount Logan—without a doubt, two of the best viewpoints in the Cascades. Tower is right in the center of it all.

Although it would please me if Wernstedt made the first ascent of Tower, there is no evidence that he did so. He did indeed survey from it, in 1926, but it is not clear that he attained the summit. He may have. It’s not known who made the first ascent; it may have been surveyors from the United States Geodetic Survey. At any rate, Wernstedt was one of the first on the mountain. It is good to remember that Lage himself would not have cared if he was first.

Rugged Tower presents a sheer face on its east side, and a steep but fractured complex of gullies, ramps and cliffs on its west. The peak prominently juts above its neighbors. It is a hub, a kind of nexus in the geography of watersheds in the Washington Pass region. In an aerial photograph, the five ridges that radiate from Tower Mountain resemble (to my overactive imagination) the splayed arms of a starfish. Between each of the starfish’s arms is a sharply incised valley with a creek tumbling vigorously in its own damned direction.

It is an amazing and satisfying sight to see five valleys spread in five directions, separated by ridges that spread like dendrites from a peak that sharply and splendidly pierces the sky. The radiating ridges connect the sharp horns of surrounding lesser peaks: Golden Horn, Cutthroat, Hardy, and The Needles. The creeks head every which way; the spires rise in all directions. But among them, Tower Mountain is the queen, the apogee of the Methow River watershed.

On a clear day, from a great height, all of it makes sense. It’s possible to see how the pieces fit together. But even by North Cascades standards, the drainage patterns surrounding Tower are convoluted. The general principle is clear: streams must either drain to the west, into early Winters Creek, which feeds the Skagit, or to the east, into the Methow River. Sure, this is how divides are supposed to work. It’s simple. And beyond that, all the unruly waters that cascade down the slopes of Tower Mountain will meet in the Pacific Ocean. Eventually. But before the eventual, there is the immediate, and at its headwaters, the Methow perversely flows west, before curving north and spiraling until it flows southeast.

It begins in larch and heather meadows near the lovely Snowy Lakes, at the base of Tower Mountain. In a curious similarity to the South Fork of Eureka Creek, the valley of the upper Methow also looks sort of like an ear—a gracefully curved ear. On its curious journey, it is joined by three more of the creeks that start on Tower’s flanks, and when all of these waters are gathered together, the Methow becomes a gem of Washington’s “dry side” rivers. In the chilled air of autumn, when the cottonwoods have turned gold, the banks of the Methow is a glorious place to be. It flows past wide-open glades, under black and tan tiered hills of Ponderosa pine, grass, and basalt.

Only one of Tower’s five streams, Swamp Creek, manages to find a different gravitational allegiance, contributing its water to the magnificent Skagit, the “wet side” river, which swells quickly from the relentless rain and heavy snowpack of the west-side Cascades, one of the wettest mountainous regions on earth. The Skagit’s banks, more densely crowded with alder, maple and cedar, host a large bald eagle population in the winter. In fall, the river is alive with salmon and steelhead.

Watersheds show us that the world is both complex and simple. But on the way to simplicity, the waters demonstrate the dance between pattern and variation that makes life interesting. It is a delightful thing to be perched on the ragged edge of understanding something about how the world is put together, but still be perplexed by nature’s unconformities, anomalies, and asymmetries. 

To observe nature carefully, as Lage Wernstedt undoubtedly did on his many sojourns into the wilderness, is to be teased by the simultaneous suggestion of order and randomness. Looking upstream, we see divisions and distinctions, diversity beyond measure, endless branching, tributaries beyond counting. But looking downstream, we see merging and confluence. The Many becoming One. Everything is connected, and we are a part of it. This is part of what Lage’s Country has to say to me, if my ears are open to hear.

On New Year’s Eve, the question hovers above us: What next? I think what we do next, both as individuals and as a culture, is shaped by what we consider essential. In one sense, no one knows for sure what will come next. Uncertainty is part of the human condition. In another sense, what comes next is up to us. Each one of us.

As I welcome the new year, I will start with memories, because where we are and where we will go next are an extension of where we have been. Of course, I remember lots of things, just like all of us. I suspect that with the inevitable accumulation of plaque in the arteries and synapses of my aging brain, many memories that are now sharp and detailed may spread thin and become diffuse. 

Looking back on my life may be like looking at a familiar landscape through mist. Images adrift, unmoored from names and dates. I imagine it to be like kayaking, alone, on an open ocean, in a fog bank. Even as it is now, certain memories from my life stand out in greater relief than others, like icons detached from narrative. They are often memories of small moments rather than dramatic ones. Here are two such moments: 

The first is from a trip I took to Iceland in June, 2019. I came one night to a beach at the end of a long and rugged dirt road that crossed a mountain pass in one of the most remote parts of the island. I arrived nearly at midnight, in unsettled weather, after driving for hours and seeing not another human soul. The midnight sun occasionally pierced the clouds, which shrouded steep basalt buttresses. 

As soon as I stepped out of the car, I was greeted by two sheep-herding dogs. They were clearly working dogs from a nearby farm, but they were off duty, and an unexpected visitor had come to their valley. They came with a stick, and were ready to play. And so we played. I threw the stick over and over and over. One of the dogs was black and one was brown. The brown one always got the stick, but the black one seemed happy enough to be in the chase. 

Although they had personalities all their own, they reminded me of my own dogs, far away in Seattle. I felt boundless affection for those two Icelandic dogs, but it was the kind of affection that expanded in my heart to include my own dogs at home, Rosie and Cooper, which, at that moment, I loved more than ever, rather than less. 

Funny how feeling love for one creature just opens you up to other ones as well. Each dog contains all dogs, and in each one the world itself is made manifest.

As the two dogs gamboled in the surf, chasing each other in circles and nipping at each other and then exploding in a furious sprint down the beach, there was no mistaking the sheer joy of being alive on this exceptional planet. Joy that came from a mysterious place inside the dog, a place beyond all anatomy, a place called consciousness. 

That joy animated a body of bones and muscle and fur, a body that in a few short years will die, as will we all. Those two rambunctious dogs seemed to incarnate all of nature. And they represented, also, the capacity for me to enter into relationship to the rest of the living world, to rejoice in the connection.

The ocean is part of this memory, just as much as the dogs. The turquoise water and golden sand were incongruous with the temperature. Still, it was a deserted beach on the Arctic Ocean at midnight, so of course I stripped naked and entered the surf. I ran as fast as I could through the sand, the two dogs at my heels. Then I put my clothes back on because it was windy and cold as hell. 

The second memory is this: a moment on a trail in Zion National Park, twenty-nine years ago, with an open-hearted woman wearing blue jeans and a bandana on her head, a woman with kindness and laughter in her deep brown eyes. She was a northwest girl, from the land of water and giant trees.

We wanted to get to know each other, but we didn’t know each other all that well, yet. What better way to increase the knowledge than a road trip? So we went to northern Arizona and southern Utah, the stomping grounds of my youth. I wanted to share with her the country of red rocks and aching blue sky. I brought her to high and exposed places, and I told her to look for scorpions in her shoes after a night of camping in the desert.

We were hiking on the East Rim Trail, on a part of the trail cut right into the side of the sandstone cliff. I turned to speak to her and she wasn’t there. She had stopped a few paces back, and I found her standing still and facing the cliff, her eyes maybe eight inches from the stone. Just intently staring. Lost in the crosshatching, the delicate striations, the warm and subtle variations in color. 

That very sandstone is one of the things I had wanted to share with her, but even so, the intensity of her engagement took me by surprise. The look on her face was the kind of focus that can be mistaken for a frown, but really is the deepest kind of concentration.

As much as I loved sandstone, I had seen it all of my life—but it was new to her. That whole trip to Zion is a series of good memories, but that singular moment of radical attentiveness to the stone is what stands out to me the most. 

It was also one of those moments when we really understand—and let it sink in—that another person is another world, and within her is an ocean of feeling and experience. She is a holy and wholly distinct being, a spirit. She is a Thou, as Martin Buber said. As are we all. 

I may think I know her, yet I can never really know her completely. And yet… we overlap. Or, I should say, we can choose to overlap. We are sometimes invited to overlap. We can grant each other that honor, that gift.

***

I will move now from memories to resolutions. I don’t know if I have resolutions or not, but at the beginning of every year, I make lists. All kinds of lists: mountains I want to climb, people I want to visit, track meets I want to participate in, varieties of tomato for the garden, alpine flowers that I hope to find in the wild, activities I want to do with my daughters, hot springs I want to soak in, skills I want to practice or learn. 

Since I’m not a big fan of burdens, I shy away from the word resolutions when I make these lists, and I just call them intentions. They are not “to do” lists. They are simply a way to sit with a notebook and a cup of coffee on a wet wintry morning and think about what sorts of things make me happy. I’ve not made my intention lists for 2025, but I know at least two things that will be included.

In the summer, I intend to return to a place where I have unfinished business. It is a high ridge in the North Cascades, the ridge between the watershed of Grizzly Creek, which flows into the Stehekin River, and the watershed of Fisher Creek, a remote valley that feeds Thunder River, a major tributary of the Skagit River. 

Nestled into a rocky depression right on top of the ridge is one of my sacred places: Upper Silent Lake. I intend to return to this lake, to baptize myself in its icy water, and then to climb the west ridge of Fisher Peak, a climb that I left unfinished fifteen years ago and that has been calling to me ever since.

Upper Silent Lake is one of my favorite places on Earth. It is easy to fall into clichés; finding the right language for matters of the heart is a challenge. When I say this place is holy, what I mean is that for whatever reason, the wholeness of the world has been made manifest to me here. 

I like to swim in it, although it is frigid. I feel, in this water, that I am partaking in something more interesting and significant than my own paltry and fleeting life. This water will make an extraordinary journey. First, it will drop a few hundred feet into Lower Silent Lake. Then, as Grizzly Creek, it will tumble with great enthusiasm to the wild Stehekin River. It will enter Lake Chelan—a stunning and very deep inland fresh-water fjord. Then it will join the mighty Columbia, and, eventually, enter the Pacific. 

Upper Silent Lake is a synecdoche: a small mountain lake, yes, but also the whole watershed. It is the whole world; it lets me in.

And a second intention is this: I intend to spend time—much more time than in the past few years—with those friends of mine who lift me up and help me inhabit the best version of myself. I am thinking of those friends who “restoreth my soul,” those who are like a deep drink of cold mountain water to my spirit when I am suffering thirst. I intend to visit these friends unhurriedly, and to let them know how much they matter to me. 

There is a Buddhist concept known as sangha; in its strictest and most traditional usage, it refers to a community of monks or nuns who help each other on a spiritual path. In a broader sense, it might mean any group of people who help each other grow in a spirit of kindness, humility, compassion, and—for me—humor. 

Thich Nhat Hanh has described sangha as a “beloved community.” I like that. I’m not a Buddhist, but I will borrow the word sangha, just as I pilfered the word grace from the church I no longer belong to, and I apply it, loosely and in my own fashion, to my life. 

As I’m using it, the word applies to those people in my life in whom I find support, refuge, and growth. Some of them are family, and some are friends. Some live far away from me. I hope that I can be sangha to them in return. As a part of this intention, I intend to have no intentions, to have no expectations, regarding these visits. I wish not to squeeze benefit from people; I wish only to enjoy them in a spirit of gratitude.

***

And now, let me speak of loves and griefs and fears, for the three are tightly braided. I don’t know how it is possible, in 2025, for a thinking person to move into the future without feeling some grief and fear, but I will lead—and end—with what I love rather than what I fear.  

I’ll begin with some simple tasks that feed my soul, draw me away from phone and computer screens, and connect me to the living, breathing world. I’m talking about the endlessly entertaining business of growing flowers and nurturing bees. I’m talking about California poppies, fuzzy-horned bumblebees, tansy phacelia, and blue orchard mason bees. 

Nothing can pull me out of existential despair better than watching mason bees hatch and scuttle their little blue-green butts in and out of the nesting tubes, laying eggs for the next year. And when I take a day away from the city, away from my garden, and hike up into the high country, nothing is a better remedy for anxiety than to see a fat alpine bumblebee feeding from and pollinating a vibrantly purple Phacelia sericea.

Next up: Something that might strike some readers as trivial or not serious enough for a reflective essay, but is a matter of utmost seriousness to me, a “pearl of great price,” so to speak. This thing has been a life-saver to me in times of depression so deep that life was drained (almost completely) of joy. I’m talking about music. 

So, let me praise music that has blood and soul and passion in it, music that eschews the auto-tune, the drum machine, the beat equalizer. Give me, instead, music that is rife with flaws, with botched notes and serendipitous mistakes, unplanned spurts of inspiration. Give me instruments descended from the horn of a ram, the skin of a goat, horse’s hair, and a donkey’s jawbone. Give me breath, which is spirit.

Give me music dripping with desire. Give me a rock & roll scream that can pack an ocean’s worth of pain or pleasure into three seconds. I want it funky, rollicking, joyful, heartbroken, sexy, wide-open, full-throttle, raging, gentle, and sometimes as simple and uncluttered as birdsong. 

From the bottom of my heart, I thank the friends of mine who make music.

There are times when I am sinking into despair and disillusionment, times when I think humans aren’t going to survive the catastrophic mess we are creating for ourselves—and that we don’t deserve to. But then… music lifts me. Even music that expresses deep sorrow, doubt, pain, or rage can lift me in a way I don’t quite understand.

A species that can produce Johann Sebastian Bach, Ella Fitzgerald, Steely Dan, Patsy Cline, Yo-Yo-Ma, Aretha Franklin, Chris Cornell, Susana Baca, George Frideric Handel, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Derek Trucks, Tom Petty, Bonnie Raitt, Urbie Green, Wynton Marsalis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendricks, Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash, and Bob Marley can’t be all bad. 

***

And now, a confession: On this night when we are supposed to be optimistic, to be fun, to lift our glasses of spiked eggnog or champagne, I’d be lying if I said I was completely okay. So, I will mention some fears. I won’t go into excruciating detail, and I won’t make arguments. My purpose here is simpler. Call it emotional testimony.

I fear that my children—and my children’s children—will inherit a world that is damaged and degraded far beyond our capacity to restore it to health. 

I fear that in our culture we are more disconnected from other living creatures than at any other time in human history—at precisely the moment in history when we need to understand our interdependence and to re-establish connection. 

We are rapidly killing what sustains us. The stock market does not sustain us.

Climate change is only one aspect of this damage, but it is perhaps the most serious aspect. About a decade ago, climate researchers were predicting a summertime ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2040. My fear is that an ice-free Arctic will be a reality in the next decade. 

I’m not going to explain why I think an ice-free Arctic spells trouble for Miami, or Houston, or Phoenix, or Bangladesh, or Samoa, or my children’s children. I will just say that all things are connected, that boundaries are an illusion, that everything is part of everything else. 

Another fear: Democracy could easily slip away. If it goes, we can also give our goodbye kiss to the notion of a government that actually takes care of its people and its land. We can kiss goodbye to the confidence that our leaders will tell us the truth, ever. And we can kiss goodbye to the notion that all of us are equal under the law. 

Finally, we can kiss goodbye to the expectation that anything of lasting value will be conserved; value will be monetized and squeezed out of every living organism that is deemed useful. The organisms (including people) that are considered useless will be assaulted out of sheer, gratuitous meanness.

It’s not my intention to be a “buzz kill” on New Year’s Day, but I want to say that those who wield the wrecking ball are counting on the rest of us to grow tired and give up the fight. The destroyers, the exploiters, the dominators… they want us to shut up and drink our eggnog.

***

You may be wondering, at this point, if I’m going to wish you a Happy New Year. I am, from the bottom of my heart. I want it to be happy for me as well. I will work, diligently, toward that end. But the honest expression of my fears is an essential part of my New Year’s reflection. What should we expect, as we move into 2025? How do we shape it?

I often think about life in climbing metaphors. And so, on New Year’s Eve of 2025, I am thinking in terms of cultural route-finding errors. In an outdoor adventure that goes disastrously wrong, there may be what we call a watershed moment. It is a moment in which a route-finding error dooms the adventurer. 

A watershed moment means, literally, a moment of choice that commits the adventurer to the wrong course. Perhaps there is a sequence of several seemingly insignificant and subtle misreadings of the landscape that eventually turn your head around completely, and lead you to follow the wrong stream down the wrong drainage. Perhaps to a cliff edge, or into a box canyon. 

One of the common themes in disaster narratives is that once a course is chosen, it becomes increasingly difficult to retrace your steps and undo unfortunate choices. Often, this watershed moment goes unnoticed, its import under-appreciated, its consequences not clearly understood. It is often only recognized as a defining moment in hindsight… if it is recognized at all.

Here are some cultural route-finding errors: To assume that economic growth is the same thing as economic health. To mistake power for greatness—in an economy, a military, or even in a family. To conflate the flow of money with free speech—especially in a society with enormous wealth disparities. To mistake belligerence for strength. To mistake a dominator for a protector. 

To view vulnerability as a weakness and an embarrassment, or—even worse—to see it as a condition to be exploited and despised. To value competition over cooperation. To choose selfishness over generosity and cruelty over kindness when times get hard. To place our faith in leaders who view us as a commodity to be exploited, consumers to be manipulated, a resource to be mined, a host to be parasitized, a herd of passive bovines to be milked for money and votes.

And, for believers in a religion that is based on the teachings of a certain Galilean, it is an especially egregious route-finding error to think that seeking the power of Caesar is the best path to ushering in a society that honors the one who gave us the Sermon on the Mount. 

To evangelicals: Jesus is not going to rescue you from your own decision to ignore his teaching, and your children will suffer along with everyone else’s children as we slip into the aftermath of our route-finding errors. Having secured your deal with Caesar, you may find that power was the wrong thing to seek.

***

We are on the wrong course. 

At the same time that we are destroying the very conditions that sustain us—fertile soil, clean water, predictable climate—we are making a greater god than ever out of money and the power that money can buy. An ever-smaller sliver of humanity—a tiny, tiny sliver—is accumulating wealth, depleting resources, and exploiting the rest of us in a manner that can only be described as obscene. Artificial Intelligence will only assist them in doing it faster. 

What sense is there in having a billion dollars? Or ten billion? Or 430 billion? It can’t end well.

How much is a billion? I have been thinking a lot, lately, of birds. In particular, I have been reading accounts of migratory water birds, endless rafts of them, migrating along flyways from the Arctic to the tropics, along corridors of wetlands. They used to fly, in inconceivable numbers, through the central valley of California. 

I have read about how they descended upon the wetlands of the Skagit estuary, here in my beloved Puget Sound. Feeding on an equally uncountable number of fish and insects. The abundance. The sheer profligate abundance. Uncountable birds, more numerous and glorious than flying dollar bills.

That abundance is passing from our lives. Who would have thought it possible, even a generation or two ago? In its place, we can wonder how it is that one man can have 430 billion dollars. We can wonder to what use those 430 billion dollars are being put. 

A billion birds, at least, are connected to the salmon, the bears, the fishermen, the orcas, the forest. The nutritious shit of a billion birds feeds the soil, and the soil feeds the rest of us.

***

I want to end with love and hope. We have choices. We can change course. We can choose—individually and as a culture—to reject the destroyers, the exploiters, the dominators. We do not need to follow, elect, enrich, fear, or celebrate them. 

We do not need to hold money as the best measure of value, and we do not need to get hoodwinked by manipulative salesmen on screens. 

Let me choose music, bees, dogs, soil, birds. And water. Outside my window tonight, on New Year’s Eve, it is lightly raining. I am reminded of the sacredness of water, how it is both essential to life and indifferent to it. I hope that snow is falling in the mountains. If it happens, I will call that snow grace.

I’m grateful for my sangha—especially the phenomenal women who surround me in this life I’ve stumbled into. The woman who stared intently at the sandstone walls of Zion, and who has now been my companion for 30 years. The two daughters of exceptional insight, compassion, and discernment. 

We now have two grandsons. One is an infant, and the other is just learning words. He greets the world with bright eyes and an enthusiastic Okay! as he investigates everything under the sun. Rosie and Cooper have passed on, but a different dog, Sam, has filled our house and our hearts with his boundless goofiness and joy. 

Dogs, bees, and very young children live in the eternal now. I spend much of my time in the future, and I’m no stranger to dread. 

I feel that we all have some route-finding to do. I know I do. But there is also the moment we are in, the joy we take in each other, the commitments we can make to live with, through, and for each other. 

Tonight and tomorrow, the question hovers over me: What next? It is up to me what I will do.

I remember that dog who greeted me on that Arctic beach: his eyes, intelligent and lively. What next?

You have a stick. Are you going to throw it?

Yes.

Happy New Year.

(This essay was written in 2017, and is included in my book “Sanctuary.” I’m reposting it here on July 20, 2024, on the anniversary of “the fire mass.”)

The miraculous part of the story, in a highly condensed version, goes like this: On July 20, in the year 1783, an Icelandic volcano known as Laki sent a greedy tongue of lava toward the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. When lava threatened to engulf the church—with all of the villagers inside—the Lutheran pastor Jón Steingrímsson prayed and preached with great passion and vigor until the river of molten rock hardened into a wall, sparing the huddled parishioners.

These days, travelers passing through this small village in the south of Iceland can visit a wooden cross memorializing “the fire mass,” as Jón Steingrímsson’s famous sermon is known. There are no plaques offering an explanation, no displays. Simply a metal plate that says: “Hér Var Eldmassan 20 Juli 1783.” At dawn, when no one is around, the cross seems to bear witness in much the same way as a tree or a stone.

Stopped the lava. Sure, he did. I don’t expect you to believe it. Or you may believe, as I do, that the approaching lava hardened, sparing the church, but not at the prompting of prayer. (The ice-cold waters of the Skafta River might have had something to do with it.) Nevertheless, it is a compelling story. And, as is usually the case, the miracle is both the most dubious and the least interesting part of the story.

In 2017, Iceland is a largely secular and scientifically literate nation, with a definite streak of practicality when it comes to volcanoes. It is not likely that many Icelanders actually believe that the good pastor’s prayers stopped the lava. It’s not even clear that the people of Jón’s time believed it. Maybe some did and some didn’t. I’d venture to guess that Icelanders, throughout their history, have often prayed to stop lava, and usually to no avail. They had prayed to their Norse Gods before the year 900, and they had prayed to their Christian God after that, with no discernable change in result.

One famous story gives insight into the attitudes of Icelanders toward their troublesome mountains. In the year 900, at the annual gathering called the Althing that brought together families and factions from all parts of the island together to settle feuds and establish treaties, a very important order of business rose to the top of the agenda: whether or not to keep the old Norse Gods, or adopt the new religion of Christianity.

The Althing was really Europe’s first parliamentary democracy, and the chieftains were debating policy. Passionate speeches were given both for and against the new religion. Stakes were high. In the middle of the deliberations, Hekla, the island’s most notorious volcano, ominously began to rumble and smoke. The defenders of the Norse Gods said “See! It is a sign of Odin’s anger! We must not do this thing!” When a man named Snorri Godi, a respected cheiftain, ascended to the law rock to speak, he said, “What angered the Gods when the lava burnt which we are standing on now?”

In other words: Don’t our mountains erupt all the time? After their long experience with volcanoes, it’s fair to say Icelanders probably understand the behavior of lava as well as anyone on earth. They understood it pretty well even in the year 900. So, it is hard to know what the farmers in 1783 really thought.

Nonetheless, the “Fire Priest” is a celebrated and beloved figure, a national hero. He is acknowledged as much for what he did after the eruption, as for what he did during it. To put it in a nutshell: with persistence and knowledge, and over the long haul, he tended to his neighbors. And that is an understatement.

As I write this 226 years later, Seattle, where I live, is choking on smoke—not from a volcano, but from hundreds of massive fires that are burning across the Canadian border, as British Columbia suffers its worst fire year in history (so far). In complicated ways, humans have power over nature, and at the same time nature has power over us. It’s easy, in our era, to forget the second part of that truth.

Calamity comes in many forms. Meanwhile: daily life continues for those outside of calamity’s immediate reach. We may wonder, if we have time for it, how we will behave when we are in calamity’s reach. While I’m doubtful of the miracle, the story of the Fire Priest speaks to me. It asks the question: How do we take care of each other in times of deteriorating circumstances?

***

It is a peculiar truth of human nature that people are more often moved by the suffering of one person than by the suffering of many. Our reactions are out of proportion because there is only so much room in our hearts for grief. Our eyes and our minds become glazed over by statistics.

For instance, a lone small Syrian girl washed up upon a beach in Cypress may be a cause for tears, while ship after capsized ship of refugees may be, merely, a cause to turn off the television. A person who may shrug with indifference at the horror of Aleppo may rise in indignation when a refugee is assaulted on a city bus. Is it because we don’t really care about Aleppo, or is it because we are touched, mainly, by what is right in front of us?

Maybe reports of a massacre in Aleppo, or a tsunami in Indonesia, or a famine in Somalia strike most of us as happening in some other world, while what happens on a bus in our city is in our world. We seem to understand best the pain that we see, and to sympathize most with the pain that we share. When the scale of suffering is too large, the location too distant in time or geography, the victims too unlike us in culture or belief, it all becomes a blur.

But every world is someone’s world. There is only one world, and we are part of it. We are more connected than we may think.

***

On June 8, 1783, Laki erupted. It continued to erupt for the next eight months. This volcano did not consult the monarchs of Britain or France, or the Founding Fathers of America. These men of consequence on both sides of the Atlantic knew nothing about it. They knew only that it had become hard to breathe in Paris and London. By September, they would hear rumors of cataclysm, but at first, only a smattering of farmers and fishermen knew about the eruption, as they hunkered down in their sod houses and prayed for deliverance.

In the highlands of Iceland, far from the capitols and parliaments and the armies of men, the skin of the earth split open along a 16-mile seam. The resulting outpouring of lava from this open gash in the earth was one of the most significant geological events in several thousand years.

To be clear, no pyroclastic cloud swallowed cities whole. There was no tsunami wiping out harbors full of ships. In terms of magnitude, Laki was not as explosive as the more famous eruptions of Krakatoa and Tambora, which happened in the same century. But here’s the thing: Laki kept going. After eight months, Laki had created the largest lava flow in historic times.

So the eruption of Laki is every bit as significant as the eruptions of Krakatoa and Tambora. Arguably, it is more so, because it was the beginning of an ordeal that would affect more lives than any other volcano. While Laki was not spectacularly explosive, it to this day counts as the deadliest instance of atmospheric pollution in the past few thousand years.

Air knows no boundaries. What happens in one place, no matter how removed from the centers of people and power, affects all the others. Few people knew about the presence of Laki, because few people lived on the Southern coast of Iceland in 1783. But as the toxic cloud from the eruption spread—first over Europe, and then Africa, Asia, and America—Laki made its presence known to them.

Suffering is both universal and personal. It both isolates and unites us. The farmers in Egypt and Japan who starved by the hundreds of thousands in the year following Laki’s eruption had no idea why the air was bad and the rains failed. They did not even know about a place called Iceland. And on that small island nation, in the aftermath of catastrophe, an obscure Lutheran pastor demonstrated, as well as anyone I can think of, care in the face of deteriorating circumstances.

He is rather unique, as national heroes go. He declared nothing, he conquered no territory, he made no one rich, and he commanded no army. He was never a head-of-state. He was not particularly forceful or intimidating. Yet every schoolchild in Iceland learns his name. He is as integral to their story of themselves as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are to us. What he was, above all, was a healer, a binder of wounds. A shepherd.

***

First, back to the beginning, and with some context: It is interesting to know when things happen, as well as why and how. The Reverend was a man of his time and place, with one foot in the Enlightenment, and one in the Reformation. Can we imagine what it would be like to be him? How would he see the world?

Jón Steingrímsson was born in 1728 on a hardscrabble Icelandic farm. This puts him, more or less, into the same time period as the Founding Fathers of our nation: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the rest. It also places him alongside of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—David Hume, Francis Bacon, John Locke. Although he was a contemporary of these men, in circumstance he could hardly be further apart.

In the salons of Paris and London, men more “cultured” (and wealthier and certainly more powerful) than Jón were debating ideas that would transform Western civilization. In what would soon become the United States, Benjamin Franklin had already distinguished himself as a leading example of an enlightened thinker. And a young Thomas Paine, still in Britain, was developing the political theories that would soon give birth to his tract ‘Common Sense,’ which would in turn spark the American Revolution.

Rural Iceland, at this time, was reeling from a century of non-stop misfortune: eruptions, smallpox, livestock diseases, famine. The country was poor and isolated, the settlements were small. In the mid-eighteenth century, it was a far cry from the salons of Paris or London.

Still, compared to his neighbors, Jón was literate and well-educated. He was a keen observer of nature, and would employ this gift in a way that would make geologists happy in future centuries, providing them with a first-rate and first-hand account of the deadliest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

Jon’s account of the Laki eruption is one of the best primary sources in volcanology. His record-keeping was meticulous and detailed, and his precise observation of natural phenomena leading up to, during, and after the eruption have given scientists and historians the best information they have about this mysterious event.

And yet, Jón was not a scientist. He was a believer in signs and visions, a man who felt that God spoke to him through dreams, and who believed that he was perceptive of the presence of ghosts. He was not, by any means, a man of reason in the mold of Hume, Franklin, or Paine.

His path to this vocation began in dire poverty and hard work, after his father died young. By the age of nine, Jón had already become adept at working pasturage and running livestock. It was probably not unusual for Icelandic boys to be astute about sheep and horses. But he had more in mind for himself: He was curious about both the natural and the supernatural world, so he left the farm for the diocese school in Hólar, and began to study.

His start at the school was inauspicious. As skilled as the boy may have been with livestock, his interactions with humans were hampered by an awkward stammer. Initially, the teachers were not impressed with the stuttering boy.

But he proved to be determined. He had an interest in both natural science (such as it was in 1745) and theology. He learned Latin and read classical literature. He developed a keen interest in herbal medicine. And he must have possessed something else, something hard to define. A certain aptitude for dealing with difficult people, for caring about and calming others. Because upon his graduation, he was tapped by the Bishop of Hólar for a peculiar task.

Near Hólar, a certain wealthy farmer and former soldier by the name of Jón Vigfússon was known for his explosive temper, excessive drinking, and brutality. Vigfússon also had a wife named Þórunn, and he was known to abuse her. There was a church on this man’s property.

The peculiar task the bishop had chosen was this: The Bishop asked Jón to become the deacon of this church, hoping that Jón’s calm and steady presence might encourage some piety in Vigfússon, and stem the man’s violence toward both his neighbors and his wife.

Although it doesn’t seem to me like the most promising job for a bright young scholar who could have easily left Iceland for the University of Copenhagen, Jón said yes to the Bishop.

The rest is fairly predictable, but no less true. Þórunn Hannesdóttir, the unfortunate wife of Jon Vigfússon, was considered something less than a beauty. She was described as “sway-backed, with a protruding stomach, a receding hairline, and a face scarred by smallpox.” And Jón Steingrímsson fell deeply in love with her.

Adultery would probably have been inevitable, had the hard-drinking Vigfússon not died in his sleep, probably of liver failure. Earnest young Jon wasted no time with the widow Vigfússon, and one year after the irascible farmer’s death, Jon and Þórunn were married. Unfortunately, a daughter was born only a few months after the wedding. The Bishop considered the timing clear evidence of sin, and Jon was removed from his position as deacon. He had to move. The year was 1755.

Also in 1755, a volcanic eruption of Katla, a volcano along Iceland’s southern coast, unleashed what is possibly the earth’s largest flood in historic times. Hardly anyone in America or Europe knew about it or comprehended its scope. Few people lived in the flood’s path. In the same year, an earthquake unleashed a tsunami off the coast of Portugal that devastated Lisbon, killing upwards of 50,000 people. (You’d think this event might make it into the history books, but I don’t remember learning about it in school.)

In North America, Great Britain and France jockeyed for control of the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley, in what would become known as the French and Indian War. Colonists were expanding into the same region, and within a decade, as a result of the Stamp Act, would begin to chafe under British Rule. The first steam engine in America was installed in a mine. Trains would not be far behind. In the West Indies, Alexander Hamilton was born. And in far-away Iceland, Jón, with his new wife and daughter, made an arduous trek to the south of Iceland (not far from the volcano Katla), nearly freezing to death along the way.

He was not interested in starting a revolution, changing the culture, controlling trade, or questioning his religion. His goal, simply stated, was to have a successful farm with a woman he had seen abused by another man, and now loved as his wife.

***

There is more to say about both the Fire Priest and the eruption of Laki, but first, let me say a thing or two about Icelandic churches. I don’t mean the giant church in the center of Reykjavik, the one on all the postcards, the one with its towering gothic ramparts. No, I mean the small chapels that are scattered across the rural landscape and that are not much different now than they were two hundred years ago.

I will confess that I once was, but no longer am, a religious man. American evangelical Christianity, especially, does not impress me. But I will also confess that on a recent trip to Iceland, something in my soul was stirred by the small chapels that are scattered across the landscape of Iceland. Both the chapels and cemeteries that accompany them. It was almost enough to make me want to find some kind of faith again. Almost.

These chapels are small. They are one-room affairs, built according to a common template. They look, more or less, like a child’s Christmas tree ornament. Many of them would hold no more than 30 people. They are, to me, the perfect antidote to the “mega-churches” of our current culture. They seem to be built, intentionally, in places where they are dwarfed by the landscape.

While it might have been the intention of the architects of Europe’s great cathedrals to give glory to God by raising structures of unparalleled magnificence, it seems to have been the intention of Icelanders to give glory to God by building structures of simplicity and modesty. These lovely buildings speak, to me, more of humility than of dominion. They speak to me of community and care.

These churches were not built by slaves, nor were they commissioned by kings. They were built by free men and women, farmers and shepherds and fishermen, people who lived and died in these rocky valleys. None of them were built out of marble; through the centuries, they decomposed, and then were rebuilt in the same spot over and over and over again. A church that dates back to the year 1200 may be still, in 2017, cleaned and maintained and ready for use.

Most of the churches are built next to farms, as the priests who served here for countless generations have been farmers. After completing the same work in pasture and field and fishing boat as their neighbors, these clergymen would tend to the needs of their neighbors: a baptism, a marriage, a confession, last rites, a burial.

Pews, altars, chalices, and other instruments of worship are well and lovingly crafted. These churches seem hallowed by centuries of prayer paired with communal care and struggle. Inside, the air is still and waiting.

It was into such a church that pastor Jón gathered his flock on July 20, 1783, as the sky darkened and the gray ash fell, and an enormous river of lava threatened to obliterate his church, his farm, his animals, his village, and all the people he called friend and neighbor.

***

Let me now bridge the gap between Jón and Þórunn’s arrival in the south, in 1755, and the famous day of July 20, 1783, when Jón, filled with the Spirit of The Lord, is said to have stopped the lava in its relentless march to the Atlantic Ocean. In a way, it’s a shame to skip over the years lightly. In our telling of history, we focus on dramatic days, fateful moments, while giving short-shrift to day-to-day living. But isn’t daily life the crucible in which lives and loves are shaped?

Nevertheless, here’s the short version: In 1755, Jón and his new wife headed for the remote south, where, over time, they established a prosperous farm. His neighbors saw in him a steady and dependable man. He was a skilled and observant farmer and fisherman. He understood the care of and the habits of livestock. In addition, he put to use what he had learned at school, and broadened his knowledge and experience with medicine. He understood a great deal about plants, and the use of healing herbs. His parishioners came to him not only for good advice, but for physical healing as well; he became the region’s doctor, and over the course of his life, assisted over 2000 patients. Considering that Iceland at the time had fewer than 50,000 residents, it’s clear that people came from near and far.

In time, his natural inclination to be a peacemaker, healer, and leader attracted the attention of his neighbors. It also attracted the attention of the church that initially educated him and placed him in a role of service—and then later removed him from service for the sin of loving his wife too ardently, too soon. Once again, he was persuaded—although he at first was reluctant—to step into a difficult situation for the good of others. 

This time, he was conscripted to assist a cantankerous and drunken priest who was in failing health. He was made an “assistant” priest and given one half of the parish. In time, the people in the parishes of the south petitioned the church to make Jón their primary priest. And so, despite his earlier disbarment, he was ordained in 1760.

As well as understanding animals, Jón knew the habits of people—how they bickered, how they sometimes hated and sometimes loved one another. His neighbors looked to him for leadership, and by all accounts he provided it; he performed their weddings, christened and baptized their babies, treated their illnesses, advised them in their trials, and buried them when they died.

Although he liked his neighbors, he was disturbed by what he considered “moral laxity and ingratitude” during times of plenty, and he felt that he had been warned in dreams about an approaching time of hardship. He began to feel uneasy. In 1783, he began to have strange and troubling dreams. And on June 8, the earth split open.

***

Of course, other things of consequence were also happening in 1783. One of the most important things, from an American point of view, happened in Paris, on September 8. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay signed a piece of paper, and the United States of America officially became a nation.

Wait a minute, you might protest. Didn’t that happen on July 4, 1776? Well, no. While July 4 marked the beginning of America’s labor pains (or maybe we could say the start of labor was as early as 1765, with the Stamp Act), it wasn’t until 1783 that the difficult birth of our nation was over. It was not until 1787 that we had a constitution.

It took some time and effort for Americans to get free. (Just as it may take some time and effort to stay free.) The United States declared its independence in 1776, but just saying something doesn’t make it so; a war still needed to be fought. Finally, on September 8, 1783, at the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain relinquished its hold on its former colony, and recognized the United States as an independent nation. And then another struggle began, for the ideals and the identity of the new nation. Would it live up to its own expectations?

At the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the American delegation made note of the malignant air that hung thickly over Paris. If they had known about the reason for the acrid air, they might have reflected on the truth that nature is unconcerned with the ideological conflicts of men. No doubt, there was some discussion about the weather. It had been a disastrous summer, with crop failures, unexplained malignancies, and strangely-colored “fogs” that burned the lungs.

The dignitaries assembled in Paris might have heard rumors about a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland. It is doubtful they had much understanding of how this eruption was affecting the whole world. In fact, the bad air had been killing Europeans all summer long. Before long, it would kill people all over the world.

As a person obsessed with Iceland, I have for a long time been familiar with the eruption of Laki in 1783. What had not occurred to me before writing this essay was the curious juxtaposition of this eruption with the birth of our nation. Is it coincidental? It is the complex way of the world that what may be a year of hope and birth in one nation may be a year of despair and death in another. It is also the complex way of the world that people are never quite as independent as they think they are.

In 1783, The United States of America—manifestly destined, perhaps, to become a superpower in world affairs—celebrated its birth. At the same moment in history, Iceland—neither a new nor a great country in the sense of economic or military might—faced its gravest challenge and most devastating catastrophe.

In both nations, remarkable people rose to the occasion in their country’s time of need. In the smaller nation ravaged by the whims of nature, a man of extraordinary character would be forced to confront a kind of despair most of us will never experience. In his own country, the Fire Priest is revered. But outside of his homeland, he would never achieve the fame of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton.

How do we measure greatness? How do we measure patriotism?

***

To explain the global consequences of Laki in a brief phrase: A large volcanic eruption affects weather. And because of how long it lasted, the volume of gases it put into the air, and the peculiar chemical composition of those gases, the eruption of Laki affected weather to a great and deadly degree. It’s hard to calculate with certainty how many people died, directly and indirectly, from the Laki eruption. If famine is taken into account, certainly, millions—first in Europe, and later in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

The year following Laki was known, in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, as the year without a summer. But in Europe, the summer of 1783 began, in fact, with stifling heat. A strangely yellowish miasma slithered with a kind of quiet malice across the continent, starting first in the British Isles and Norway, and spreading inexorably south and east. Sunsets were unnaturally red. The “dry fogs,” as they were known, stung the eyes and burned the nose, throat, and lungs. Crops in the field took on a withered and bleached appearance. These caustic fogs shrouded London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Rome: everywhere. People began to die in unusual numbers. The malady struck the healthy and hale as well as the weak, particularly affecting those who worked in the fields.

John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin breathed this sinister air as they signed, on Sept 8, the treaty that gave them and their fellow patriots a country. The people on the south coast of Iceland had no knowledge of such events, and by September they were just trying really really hard not to die.

Eventually, the foul air even reached Turkey, Cairo, and beyond. Some places that suffered greatly were far from the source of the pollution, and could never have guessed its cause. In Egypt, crops failed and one sixth of the population died of famine. In Japan, tens of thousands starved. In France, social distress caused in part by famine made the country ripe for revolution.

Winter arrived with a vengeance. After catastrophic harvests, Europe was in poor shape to withstand a harsh winter. When it came, the cold was so beyond the range of normal variance that those inclined to see “signs and portents” in the weather had a field day. The predictable panic led to both political strife and religious zealotry. Surely, God must be speaking. But was it a judgment, or was it a test of resolve? No doubt many believed that the end of the world was nigh.

Those with scientific curiosity and some knowledge of world affairs, like Benjamin Franklin, probably understood that a disastrous eruption had occurred in Iceland, and suspected this as a cause both of the noxious vapors and the crazy weather. But they had no understanding, yet, of the precise mechanisms by which such things could happen.

America felt the effects too. It turns out that in some senses, no place is independent. And that all places are vulnerable.

The western hemisphere had been spared the toxic clouds, but still had to endure a harder winter in the New World than any of the colonists had ever experienced. To say that the winter of 83-84 was bitterly cold in the United States would be an understatement. Ice floes choked the Mississippi and actually floated into the Gulf of Mexico. The harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, froze solidly enough to skate on. Can anyone in 2017 imagine this? The next year, a horde of New Englanders—a hardy lot, not easily intimidated by cold—were chastened enough to pick up stakes and migrate to the Ohio Valley.

But no place on earth suffered—and in isolation, with neither comfort nor aid from any outside source—as acutely as Iceland. And in Iceland, the epicenter of the pain was the parish of Jón Steingrímsson.

***

In speaking of the winter, I have jumped ahead of the day on which Jón Steingrímsson earned the name Eldprestur: The Fire Priest. So let me now go back to July 20, 1783.

This is how I imagine it: Jón closed the door. The air was acrid with fumes and fear. And then, filled with the Spirit of The Lord, Jon preached and prayed. Sweat beaded his brow. He prayed for a long time. (After all, where else was there to go, and what else was there to do? It’s not like people could go home for lunch.) This has been immortalized as Eldmessa: The Fire Mass. When the people finally opened the door of the church, they saw that what had been a river of molten rock had hardened into a wall of protection.

It’s the miraculous version of events: How, when the sky darkened and the world seemed about to end, when the air burned the lungs and smelled of sulfur, when streams of lava surrounded the farmers and left them no means of escape, Jón gathered his people into his small church and began to pray for mercy. And mercy was granted!

Only… it wasn’t.

And here is where the story gets interesting. If the story of the Fire Priest was simply the hagiography of an Icelandic Moses, it would not be so compelling. No, the story matters precisely because it is not miraculous.

Jón Steingrímsson could not stop the lava, any more than he could stop the pain that would follow. Deliverance happens all in a rush, but suffering unfolds slowly.

The famous scene at the church was only one small slice of the story, taken from the middle. The eruptions didn’t stop; Laki belched lava and toxic fumes from June to February. Earthquakes rumbled incessantly, plumes of choking smoke darkened the sky, grey ash fell like sleet, and caustic rains burned holes in the leaves of plants. More and more farms succumbed to relentlessly advancing tongues of lava.

After the farmers at the church were spared, they had to continue living, and there was nowhere to escape to. Their pastor had no more influence over the elements than they did. From this point on, it is less a story of a powerful Moses, and more a story of a tired and human and increasingly heartbroken man who, nevertheless, did not let his decency rest. His job was to shepherd his flock.

In carrying out this task, he did not seem to get much help from the Almighty. God, as He or She is sometimes inclined to do, spared the farmers a quick death in order to give them a lingering and gruesome one instead. Having survived the eruption, the unfortunate Icelanders had to endure its aftermath.

Poisonous ash, slick as viscera from the acid rain, coated every plant that an animal or human might consider eating. Flourine in the water killed the fish. There was no escaping the necessity of breath, which burned a person’s lungs on every inhalation. At times, the eruption plume obscured the sun, making mid-day as dark as night.

Weeks turned to months, and the lava that spared the church continued to consume farms, pastures, lives. From June to February, Laki belched sulphuric acid, fluorine, and other noxious gases, leaving the air, water, and plant life poisoned. While the land eventually recovered, people suffered from starvation and flourinosis for several years. These years have been christened Móðuharðindin: The Mist Hardships.

The poison began to take its toll on both animal and human bodies. Sharp pains in the stomach, excruciating muscle contractions, swelling of joints, bleeding gums. Farmers watched their animals gradually die from the fluorine, their bodies sloughing skin and flesh, their bones and cartilage becoming freakishly bendable and malformed, their teeth and tongues falling out of their mouths.

The farmers had to know that their children would be next.

There was no refuge. No place to go. To some degree, the whole island was affected. The only food for a farmer’s livestock and family was what he had put away in the cellar and barn—and since the eruption began on June 8, not much was in the cellar or the barn. All fresh water was probably contaminated.

And then: winter. A long tunnel with no light at its end.

It might be a bit easier to imagine this for people who have traveled the southern coast of Iceland. There are no trees. There is nothing to stop the never-ending wind. And when winter comes, a merciless blankness of white. (Beautiful, yes, but merciless.) And that winter, just as in Europe, New Orleans, and Japan, would be the worst Iceland had experienced in centuries.

To those who have read accounts of the Donner Party, some of the details of that winter might be familiar: After animals died, people ate the hay—moldy and contaminated as it was—intended for their horses. They scoured beaches for fish bones, and boiled them down into thin gruel. Some chose to take their chances on the putrid flesh of their dead horses, salting it as best they could; others preferred starvation to this unbearable fare. Those who ate it doubled over in bizarre contractions that folded them up before they died. People boiled and ate leather from shoes, bridles, and farm implements. Accounts from the time don’t mention cannibalism… but who knows?

Between one fourth and one fifth of the population of Iceland starved. What is surprising is that more did not. It helped that food from the ocean—cod, seals, whales—was still edible. But it was hard to fish in the brutal winter. Along the south coast, in Jón’s parish, which was closest to Laki, certainly more than a fourth of the people died.

The volcano finally decided to rest in February, 1874. But it was a long road back to health, for both the land and its people. All through 1874 and 1875, people continued to starve; homeless and hungry refugees wandered the countryside, looking for mercy.

Those who found Jón, found mercy.

As desperation grew, social order began to disintegrate. Farms were looted and burned; people without farms wandered aimlessly. Jón traveled up and down the district, using his knowledge of herbal cures to do what he could, wherever he could.

Through the winter of 83-84, people kept dying. Jón buried them. He built their caskets.

A strange twist in the story, and one that I find more mysterious and more compelling than the story of the halted lava flow, is this: Out of all the horses in the district, the only horse that remained healthy enough to carry dead bodies was Jón’s own horse, which, though not exactly energetic, somehow didn’t succumb to fluorine poisoning, even though it ate the same contaminated grass. 

If God is in this story, He may be in that horse.

Finally, Jón decided to leave his struggling family and people in order to make a difficult trek westward to seek help from the Danish officials in Reykjavik. (Iceland at this time was under the authority of the Danish king.) His appeal was heard, and he was granted a sealed money box with significant funds, to take to the Danish district overseer in the town of Vik, to distribute as the overseer saw fit.

On his way to Vik, while Jón was attending to a sick man, someone broke into the money box and stole just enough money to buy a cow. But the seal to the box was broken, and Jón was now likely to be in big trouble with the Danish overseer.

Traveling alone toward Vik, Jón then came upon a large company of his own parishioners, traveling west in search of livestock. Hungry, weak, and dead broke, his people were hoping to be able to buy animals on credit—an unlikely transaction, given the economic state of the whole island.

The seal to the box was already broken. Knowing that he would be adding bigger trouble to already-present trouble with the Danish overseer, Jón distributed the money anyway. When he arrived in Vik, he was, indeed, in big trouble. Fortunately, his bishop vouched for him before the Danish governor, and Jón was spared serious consequences.

Somewhere in the deep pit of the winter, his beloved wife Þórunn died. Jón wrote, “When I lost my wonderful wife, everything… collapsed around me.” In time, he began to sicken too. After ministering to his neighbors’ needs, he returned home only to lay in the dark and cold, without lighting his lamps. He fell into a deep depression. He badly injured his arm, and could barely dress himself.

Still, he continued to care for others. He gathered the herbs for healing tinctures, he nursed them, bathed putrid sores, splinted limbs, and when his ministrations failed, he built the caskets for them and he buried them. And he kept a record. In typically Icelandic fashion, he recorded and he remembered everything. How many buried. Their names.

I have no idea if, at some point during the long winter of 83-84, the good reverend Jón cursed his God. I have no idea how he understood his faith, or if he was tempted to discard it. I know only this: He kept going.

More than two years after the Eldmessa, and once again in a role reminiscent of Moses, Jón was leading a group of hungry refugees eastward along the coast in search of food. And a second “miracle” occurred: advance scouts of the party came upon 70 adult seals and 150 pups. While it might, to our modern sensibilities, seem awful to club baby seals, it was salvation to the long-suffering men, women, and children who had huddled, two years earlier, in Jón’s church to be delivered from the lava. It was the turning point. Jón held an impromptu service of thanksgiving on the beach, and it was, finally, the beginning of the end of the Móðuharðindin: The Mist Hardships.

And when things finally got better, not the next spring, but the one after that, when the grass grew once again green and fresh and unpolluted, and the sheep no longer had teeth falling out of their mouths, and the human survivors once again found joy and vitality enough to fall in love and get married and have children, he recorded their births and baptisms. Their names.

***

We get to choose our heroes—not only for what they do, but for why.

For two desperate years after the eruption, while the land was poisoned and people died in cold houses, and the most selfish of men raided their neighbors for the slightest scrap of food or a still-living horse or sheep to butcher, Jón was the strong and humane presence that held together the community.

It would have been tempting to just take care of himself and his family. In an unraveling world, in a situation of little hope and apparently limitless suffering, he exhibited a kind of leadership that is all too rare in politicians and corporate tycoons—a kind that grows out of love and is manifested in acts of generosity and sacrifice.

We have our Jón Steingrímssons too; every country does. We can find them and honor them. We may get the dubious privilege to be them. I don’t want this privilege; who does? Americans may not have to endure anything as difficult as the Laki winter of 1783. We haven’t had to yet, although we have had some hard times; in my lifetime, Hurricane Katrina comes to mind—but it was short. The Dust Bowl was longer. I didn’t have to go through either of these. I’m humbled by how little I’ve had to endure; when I let this realization sink fully in, it tempers both pride and self-pity.

We are vulnerable. All of us, whether we are from the most powerful nation in the world, or a small island in the North Atlantic.

Power and toughness are not the same thing.

It is possible to be both gentle and tough. We may be called upon to be both. No amount of hubris or wealth should lead us to believe that we are great enough to resist nature, which surely has something planned for us.

Nature gives us beauty beyond measure, as well as the water, soil, and patterns of weather that sustain us. It gives us life, but it does not necessarily give us mercy. That is something we must provide for each other. Sometime soon, we may have to be self-sufficient enough to take care of ourselves, and generous enough to take care of our neighbors.

And, always, let us hold on to the belief that everyone matters. Every birth, every marriage, every death, breath, kiss, bite of food, drink of clean water, animal companion, friend at the door, lover in the night, flower in the meadow—recorded and remembered, held in the heart with tenderness.

I’m not going to start with politics. Instead, I’m going to start with something that we often consider small talk, although there is nothing small about it: the weather. 

I am what you might call a weather geek. This means I obsessively track the movement of ridges and troughs, highs and lows. I follow the melting of the snowpack (in multiple states), and water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. I get excited about a derecho in Indiana, a cluster of super-cells in Oklahoma, a Nor’easter in Maine, or an atmospheric river pummeling the mountains of Northern California. For some reason, I sort of expect others to get excited about these developments too. Most folks don’t get too excited—unless they are directly affected. 

In the winter, I know where the polar vortex will park its frigid ass, predictably prompting soft-minded politicians to scoff at scientists warning us about the warming atmosphere and oceans. Unlike those politicians, I’m also paying attention to blobs of unseasonably warm temperate air that settle over Greenland, making it hard for both bears and Inuit hunters to depend on sea ice. And starting about this time of year, I spend quite a bit of time tracking what is going on in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. I always follow the tropical update.

So I’ve known for a while that this summer’s Atlantic hurricane season doesn’t look good. That’s kind of an understatement. There are a number of contributing factors, but the most important one is this: water temperatures in early May that are as high as they typically are in late July. Of course, there are some variables that could inhibit storm development no matter how warm the water is. It’s also possible that a majority of storms veer off to the northeast and remain what forecasters call “fish storms,” never reaching our coast. But still… we could be in for a rough ride.

***

Another guy who pays close attention to the weather is a fellow on Youtube who goes by the name of Beau of the Fifth Column. You may know him—if you know him—as a keen observer of the political weather in our country. He tackles every subject from LGBTQ rights to foreign policy to race to gender to guns. But he wears another hat as well: he offers clear and practical guidance when it comes to helping people prepare for the literal weather. Based as he is in Florida, he is especially attuned to the threats posed by hurricanes.

Beau occupies a peculiar cultural niche; he is white, rural, southern, and undeniably left-leaning in his views. Considering his politics, a surprising number of conservatives are in his audience, and they predictably write angry and insulting letters to him, but apparently keep on watching. Maybe one reason they keep watching is because of his excellent videos on survival skills and emergency preparedness. To date, he has posted about 100 such videos—most of them fairly short, but at least ten that go into a lot of depth and specificity. 

He is, in other words, a “prepper,” a person who values and teaches self-sufficiency and thinks it’s a good idea to be ready for when the shit hits the fan. His approach, however, is a far cry from the kind of swagger (tinged with meanness) that can go hand-in-hand with the “I’ll take care of me and my own” mentality. What he also teaches—passionately and unequivocally—is the importance of community. For every video that teaches survival skills, he’s got one that emphasizes community-networking. Neighbors helping neighbors. Again, about 100 in all. 

One of Beau’s videos helped me when I wanted to create a top-notch emergency kit (or “bug-out bag” as the preppers call it) in the event of an earthquake in Seattle. But I also consult Beau’s videos when I want to think in a deeper way about what resilience looks like—not just for myself, but for a neighborhood, a city, or a country. Part of Beau’s message is this: We don’t get through disasters on our own, no matter how dialed-in we are with our skills, no matter how well-stocked our cellars. And the more sizable the disaster, the more true this is.

***

Between now and November, I’ll be sharing some writing that expresses what I think is at stake in the coming elections. When I say this, I have in mind all elections, not just the big one—because what and who we choose at the city, county, and state level influences the direction of the nation.  

The ability and the willingness of government (at all levels, from city to nation) to effectively cope with natural disasters strikes me as one of the rock-solid obligations that any government has towards its citizens. And when I say cope with I mean more than respond to. I also mean doing our best to predict these events, prepare for them, and minimize their effects. It is a multi-faceted task that requires money, commitment, and expertise both before and after the disaster.

This is where I’m going to bend my thoughts to the 2024 elections, because how well (or how poorly) our society deals with these events is absolutely connected to who we put in office and what policies those people enact. And we need to think broadly about those policies, because what we choose to do before a disaster strikes is as important as what we do after one strikes. 

The government’s approach to natural disasters is not an issue that is likely to raise anyone’s blood pressure. It’s not a ferocious skirmish in the culture wars. It seldom gets mentioned in a campaign speech or an angry tweet. And yet, it matters—a lot. In fact, when the time comes for it to matter personally to you (or me), it may matter as much as anything in the world. 

***

The term natural disaster includes hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, eruptions, tornados, tsunamis, ice storms, and any number of dramatic and oddball things that nature can throw at us. It can also include phenomena that cause damage cumulatively rather than in one dramatic event—such as drought, or an extended heat wave. A pandemic, though not weather-related, is certainly also a natural disaster. And I’d include human-caused changes to the environment that magnify the harm caused by natural events. 

We don’t usually think of these as disasters, but they contribute to them. Case in point: The Louisiana wetlands provide a buffer for New Orleans and other cities and towns when a powerful hurricane brings storm surge, wind, and waves; the loss of those wetlands amplifies a hurricane’s impact. Consider how a ravaged watershed in mountainous terrain can lead to disastrous erosion, flooding, and mudslides. Consider how the over-drafting of an aquifer is an act that can’t be undone.

And then there is the slow-motion but also irreversible and inescapable reality of sea-level rise—a looming disaster for coastal cities. About 40% of Americans live on the coast, mostly in cities. As a threat, sea-level rise is completely intertwined with weather-induced flooding. And it’s not a one-time event; it’s a disaster that continues—not just for weeks or months, but indefinitely. In cities such as Miami, New Orleans, Boston, and New York, this disaster is not as far off in the future as we may think. And the scope of it is mind-boggling.

***

It is a certainty that extreme weather events will increase in both frequency and severity. In fact, they already have—and the increase will only accelerate. Given this certainty, I want a government that will work to make our communities more resilient as we move into this difficult future. I want people in office who understand the connections between careful planning, responsible development, good design, and the intelligent management of land and water. At every level of government, from the city to the nation, I will support candidates and policies that enable us to predict, prevent (when possible), and prepare for natural disasters. 

At the helm of our ship of state, I want people who respond with expertise, commitment, and compassion to any natural disaster in any city, state, or region—regardless of the political slant of the region. In other words, I want them to be apolitical in the pursuit of their primary goal, which is to help all communities deal with the trouble nature throws at us. This means they must display a willingness to cooperate and coordinate with their political adversaries. A hurricane in Texas, wildfires in California, tornadoes in Oklahoma, ice storms or floods in New England, or a massive earthquake in my home town of Seattle: all of these merit the same level of commitment from agencies tasked with disaster response. 

These disasters hurt everybody. They are not partisan. They are not selective. (Well, maybe they are selective in one way: They disproportionately hurt the poor—those with flimsy housing, for instance. Or those with no insurance, or no money in the bank to start anew.) A storm is not a ‘respecter of persons,’ to use the old-timey church phrase. When the cat 5 storm slams into your town, it doesn’t matter if you are urban, rural, liberal, conservative, Christian, pagan, atheist, white, black, brown, straight, gay, young, or old. No one gets a pass.

***

Nature doesn’t threaten, it doesn’t bluster, it doesn’t air its grievances on social media. Nature doesn’t take sides in a heated debate about socialism, capitalism, or any other kind of -ism. It doesn’t say “I’m going to kick your ass soon.” In fact, in between disasters, it bestows on us the same quiet grace it always has: a gentle rain in April, buds on the fruit trees. In the time between disasters, nature doesn’t get as much news coverage as a salacious trial involving a porn star, protests on college campuses, or the latest outrageous statement by someone-or-other. 

Nature doesn’t draw attention to itself, and so we take it for granted. We go back to the default assumption that nature is the stable and reliable and mostly benevolent backdrop to our lives. It is a mistaken assumption. This is the reality we inhabit: From California to Tennessee, from Houston to New York City, extreme rainfall events have turned what used to be considered 100-year floods into 7-year floods. The Gulf of Mexico approaches the temperature of bath water in summer, making the rapid intensification of hurricanes a common occurrence.

Permafrost is melting in Alaska. Sea level is rising, as is the acidity of the ocean. Fire seasons in the western US and Canada in recent years  have been far worse than I ever thought possible when I was a firefighter in the 1980s. The Gulf Stream is slowing down, and the increasingly erratic Polar Jet Stream is becoming loopy, allowing warm temperate air to spill into the Arctic, while displaced Arctic air (the infamous Polar Vortex) spills farther south than we are used to.

What is the upshot of all this? In various ways, nature is kicking our asses. The consequences are not theoretical. People suffer. We need to pay attention, we need to build resilience into our communities, and we need to have a national commitment to take care of one another—as well as a national commitment to address the causes of our ever-more-frequent disasters. It is a huge task with a huge price tag—but the cost of neglecting the task is greater.   

***

A reader might wonder at this point why I bother to write these things. Haven’t we all made up our minds already about how we are going to vote? Maybe for the presidency that is the case, and I’m certain that my essays are not going to sway (or even reach) any true believers in the Orange One. But there are down-ballot races and local elections, and all of them matter. And in many of those other races, there are people who follow a certain strain of thinking that I think will take us in a very bad direction—you might say a disastrous direction—when it comes to dealing with natural disasters. 

If you’ve been paying attention to the Supreme Court’s decisions that don’t have to do with abortion or the former president, and if you’ve been learning about the game plan of Project 2025, you’ll know what I mean when I say that a primary goal of many current GOP politicians is what they call ‘the dismantling of the regulatory state.’ While this might sound attractive if you have a Libertarian bent, the implications of it are god-awful if you actually care about climate, disaster preparation, and the well-being of people—or the well-being of all creatures, for that matter.

Grover Norquist, that shriveled prophet of the gospel of unfettered selfishness, famously said that his goal was to shrink government to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub. Catchy little phrase, that. It especially appeals to wealthy sociopaths who want to behave without restraint. But what about the rest of us? Right after a category 5 hurricane or a 9.0 earthquake, no one (except perhaps a billionaire who can retreat to a very comfortable bunker) wants government so small that it could be drowned in a bathtub. 

***

Budgets are moral documents. They reflect our collective priorities. I support the generous funding of agencies that help us take of each other, as well as taking care of the land and water on which we all depend. 

Given that extreme weather events are increasing, adequate funding for FEMA, NOAA, the Weather Service, the CDC, (and other research, land management, and public health agencies) means more than maintaining the budgets of these agencies at current levels. It means a significant boost in funding. It also means help for cities in dealing with sea level rise. It also means adequate funding for the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers. In the coming years, they will have a lot of work to do. 

These agencies need to be well-funded and staffed by men and women with expertise in their respective fields. It is madness to starve the budgets of these agencies at a time when they are needed more than ever. It is also absolute madness to purge the civil service of competent professionals, as Trump has threatened to do. An agency that is tasked with something as complex as understanding what is going on in the atmosphere and the ocean, or carrying out logistically daunting disaster response, must not be run by political hacks, grifters, and ass-kissers.

I intend to vote—at every level of government—for people who demonstrate a commitment to land and water management principles that support nature’s amazing ability to heal itself and reverse the damage we have inflicted upon it. I intend to vote—again, at every level—for people who care about what sort of world my grandchildren will inherit. People who put long-term responsible action above short-term economic gain for those who profit from deregulation and the abuse of nature. 

I want people in charge who are long-range planners and whole systems thinkers. I want them to believe in the importance of building codes, zoning, and environmental regulations. I also want them to be compassionate. I want them to care. It’s a plus if they have kids or grandkids, and are determined to pass on a world that is not hopelessly damaged.

I want leaders who understand that the work of disaster preparation and response is completely intertwined with the work of environmental stewardship. Here’s an example: Good urban planning that incorporates a lot of green space, street trees, and features like swales and green roofs significantly alleviates problems with flooding when a city is hit with extreme rain. These same features also cool a city during heat waves. It is hard to calculate the worth of such features, but they save both lives and money. They also are not a given; they are choice made by municipal governments. They are sometimes vociferously opposed by some folks who don’t want any demands placed on them when it comes to how they develop property.

In the aftermath of a catastrophe, we all praise the courage of first responders, and acknowledge their necessity. Do we also praise the foresight, wisdom, and necessity of those who help us avert a catastrophe or lessen its impact? 

***

Some folks with a lot of wealth and power see government regulation primarily as a thing that exists only to restrain them from making as much money as they possibly can. They choose not to see (or not to care about) how regulations can be the avenue through which Americans take care of each other. In fact, they treat the care-taking roles of government with derision, calling it “the nanny state.” 

They cloak their goals in the rhetoric of freedom. They frequently put the word burdensome in front of the word regulation, hoping that we will get used to the words always being yoked together. They hope we’ll forget the many ways in which appropriate regulation of powerful people has lifted many of the burdens that have, throughout history, afflicted less powerful people.

Here is a quick example of beneficial regulation that has nothing at all to do with weather: In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, requiring a wide range of institutions to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. If you share your life with someone who has, say, cerebral palsy, you know how profoundly the ADA affected their life. For more than a decade, I worked as a group home manager, job coach, recreation therapist, and physical therapist’s aide for people who had both developmental and physical disabilities. I saw first-hand how the ADA transformed their lives, and I feel deep appreciation for this act of government.

We should not forget that the ADA was opposed by many who considered it burdensome regulation that limited the freedom of developers and business owners to construct buildings as they saw fit. But from the point of view of those with disabilities, the ADA opened the doors of freedom, equality, dignity, and inclusion. 

The feudal lords of the middle ages were not saddled with “burdensome regulation.” It worked out quite well for them; for the peasants, not so much. 

In contrast to the toxic selfishness of Grover Norquist and his ilk, effective disaster response (and preparation, for that matter) is a cooperative exercise in community building. It’s an opportunity for mutual care-giving at a time in our cultural history when the bonds of neighborliness are increasingly frayed. It’s an opportunity for both physical and spiritual connection between people. The work brings together people of all types: hydrologists, engineers, urban planners, first responders, public health officials, cooks, carpenters, mechanics, local merchants, Search and Rescue teams, and all manner of volunteers. 

***

I’m now going to briefly address the man at the top of the GOP ticket—and what he represents to me when it comes to the issues of disaster response and communal caregiving. And I’m going to veer into personal territory here, because every disaster—for the people experiencing it—is personal. 

If you know anything about me, you may know that I love my city. And if you know anything about my city, you might know that we have a geological sword of Damocles hanging over our skyline. That sword is the threat of an earthquake. And not just any old earthquake—we are overdue for the big one, a quake that might reach a 9.0 on the Richter Scale. 

This is not something that we think about every day up here, but for some of us (particularly geology nerds like me) it is never too far from our consciousness. That’s why I’ve put some attention into assembling a bug-out bag. A 9.0 striking a major city would wreak devastation beyond what Americans are used to—even after Hurricanes Katrina and Maria. The big one might not happen for a century or more. Or… it could happen next year.

A second fact about my city is that we are, in both a geographical and political sense, on the “left coast.” Our political character should not matter in regard to the government’s response to a disaster such as an earthquake. The problematic word in the previous sentence is the word should. I will be forthright about a very real worry that I have: If a 9.0 earthquake strikes my city next year, I have no confidence that a Trump administration would respond in compassionate, admirable fashion. 

For Trump, personal grudges become policy, and he holds grudges not only against individuals that have crossed him, but against whole demographics. One of his favorite words lately is retribution. He has an essentially vengeful nature, and I doubt he would be much motivated to care for suffering people in Seattle—although he might relish the chance to send in troops for some reason not related to relief work.

I’m not saying he’d do nothing for my beloved city in the event of a catastrophic earthquake. Let me just say I don’t think he’d give it his best shot. 

The GOP, which used to describe itself as the party of personal responsibility, has become the party of no restraint. That is what ‘dismantling the regulatory state’ is all about. No one demonstrates this better than the party’s leader, the man who flushes his toilet ten times in a petulant tantrum against water-saving appliances. It is beyond ridiculous. It is also dangerous.

His attitude is that of a spoiled child who resents any sort limit or restraint on his behavior. His message to water: “I’ll show you who is boss!” But beyond this cartoonish need to assert his dominance even over the water in a toilet bowl, there is something more sinister. It is an active malice toward those who don’t worship him, and a contempt for vulnerable people. 

I remember when he threw roles of paper towels at the suffering people of Puerto Rico. 

***

This seems like a good place to take a tangent that may seem, at first, to have little to do with natural disasters—although, in fact, it has a lot to do with them. I want to speak about the phrase ‘dismantling the regulatory state,’ and what I think it means to the people who frequently use it.

And I’ll begin with this exhortation: Every American, before voting this year, should become thoroughly familiar with the goals of Project 2025, the document put out by the Heritage Foundation that is functioning as a blueprint for what we can expect, should the GOP prevail in the upcoming election.  

Lurking beneath the debate about the proper size of government is a perhaps more important question: What is government for? Whose interests should it serve? 

We should not be fooled by the rhetoric of people who characterize regulation that ensures that our food is safe, our water is clean, our workplaces are non-discriminatory, and our labor practices are non-exploitive as some sort of oppression. It is not. 

Nor should we be fooled when they tell us that they are motivated by a burning love of liberty. Not when the same people who want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency (because, you know, freedom) are pretty determined to intrusively regulate many aspects of both our private and communal lives. 

These folks disguised as proponents of self-sufficiency and responsibility would have us believe that their intent to drown government in a bathtub is grounded in noble sentiments about individual liberty. But it’s not about liberty at all. It’s about power: who holds it, who doesn’t, and who benefits from it. A closer look reveals that they don’t really want to dismantle the regulatory state—they just want to redirect it. 

The politicians who sign on to Project 2025 want a government that will keep its nose out of issues like water pollution, tax evasion, food and drug safety, resource depletion, workplace conditions, minimum wages, and discriminatory practices in both lending and hiring. In other words, they want a government that no longer inhibits their worst behavior, and frees them from any obligation to care about others. 

They want a government that will keep its nose out of corporate boardrooms, but they are perfectly willing to have that same government stick its nose into our bedrooms… and classrooms, and libraries, and doctor’s offices. 

I hope we all remember that the people behind Project 2025 who talk about over-reach (and define it primarily as an issue that impacts business) are the same folks who applaud recent court decisions that are incredibly intrusive and controlling of the private lives of Americans. They have every intention of extending that intrusion even further. They have embraced the goals of Dominionism, a particularly strange (and, to me, frightening) strain of evangelical faith that is hostile to the ideas of separation between church and state, diversity, and many cherished notions about privacy and personal liberty.

Make no mistake—the people who want to dismantle the regulatory state when it comes to the EPA or the CDC or OSHA are the same ones who empower religious zealots to call the shots from the courtroom to the classroom to the library to the doctor’s office. The choice they present us with is not between an intrusive regulatory state on the left, and a government that cherishes individual liberty and personal responsibility on the right. No, the choice is between two drastically different visions regarding what sort of regulations the government should impose. 

Take a close look at Project 2025. Please. Here’s my take on it: The politicians who embrace this manifesto will go after any policy designed to protect vulnerable Americans from predatory ones, defining such policies as “over-reach,” or—to use the most effective scare word in politics—socialism. At the same time, they have every intention of dictating the most private aspects of our personal lives, taking away civil rights that are grounded in the 14th Amendment—an amendment, by the way, they would undo if they could.

***

How am I going to sum this up?

Until the last section, the focus of this essay has been somewhat narrow: natural disasters and the government’s role in preparing for them and responding to them. Sure, it’s an issue about money, and science, and logistics. In some ways, it is also an issue about efficiency, scale, and coordination between levels of government. But at heart, it is an issue about care.

In terms of how we decide who and what to vote for, it is only one issue among many, and all the issues are connected. 

When I broaden my view to consider all the issues, I see a profound difference between the two paths ahead of us in November. I see a difference between those who essentially understand themselves as public servants, and those who essentially understand themselves as rulers who can shape a society so that they have unchecked power and are responsible to no one. 

I know which version of government I will choose—in every election, not just the big one. 

In the past few days, my friends from the desert have been messaging me. “You okay up there? You treading water?”

Seattle is in the news, thanks to an “atmospheric river” that has been aimed like a firehose at western Washington for a few days now. Atmospheric rivers are nothing new in early December, although this one is pretty damn wet, even by Pacific Northwest standards. I don’t mind. I like the rain. Rain is the soul of this place.

The river in the sky feeds the terrestrial rivers — both in the moment, and through the snowpack that will feed them come July. Rain down here in the lowlands means snow in the high country, which means that on the other side of the year, the sunny side, rivers will maintain a healthy flow for salmon, for orchards, for people, for all creatures.

Out walking my dog through a forest of towering Douglas fir and Western hemlock, I found myself singing a truly great song, The River Knows Your Name, by John Hiatt. For anyone who has ever loved a river and felt peace along its banks, this song will ring true. “In the silence, darling, let us pray… Let the river take it all away.”

Hiatt mentions particular rivers in the song: the Brazos, the Wabash, the Seine. No doubt these are significant in his life. If the song were mine, I’d sing of the rivers of my home in the Pacific Northwest: The Skagit, the Methow, the Nooksak, the Skykomish, the Stillaguamish, the Baker, Icicle Creek. Old and true friends.

The first Washington river that knew and spoke my name isn’t even called a river, although in Arizona, where I was raised, it would be considered a river of magnitude and consequence. I first met Icicle Creek in 1994, when I had just moved to Seattle. I remember driving up the canyon feeling the kind of growing excitement that one feels upon first meeting a person who might become a beloved partner.

Located on the eastern dry side of the Cascade Range, Icicle Creek Canyon seemed a perfect blend of the alpine Cascades and the semi-arid country where I had grown up. It was a deep and steep canyon — over a mile deep, in fact — with rugged snowy peaks above. On the south-facing slope, open Ponderosa glades and granite benches made me think of the canyons of Central Idaho, where I had fought fires years ago.

A recent forest fire had denuded the north-facing slope, revealing countless outcrops and scattered boulders of perfect granite: a rock-climber’s paradise. The canyon made me think of the Pearl Jam lyric: “I will walk into your garden of stone.” I parked the car, scrambled down a steep bank, and sat for a long while by the raging creek. Yep, I thought, I could call this place home.

In the next few years, Icicle Canyon became a refuge. It was both church and playground. Being on the dry side of the mountains, “the Icicle” melted out earlier than other areas, making it an ideal location for late spring and early summer adventures.

At low flow, Icicle Creek threads its way through car-sized boulders. Gates and chutes and eddies challenge the skills of expert kayakers. At high flow, it is something else altogether. Swollen with all of the melted snow from the Stuart Range, the “creek” completely inundates the boulders, creating massive billows of frothy green water and fearsome boat-swallowing holes.

Despite the canyon’s name, on summer days it could be hot to go rock-climbing in the Icicle. Dust and rattlers. Yellow Jackets and Poison Ivy. South-facing crags like convection ovens. But always, Icicle Creek down below, a noisy silver ribbon threading the rocks. Glistening like the promise of paradise when you’ve been roasting in purgatory for a few hours.

While I went cragging with friends, I sought out the high peaks alone. My eyes and feet were drawn to the summits of the Stuart Range, especially the rugged and complex massif of Dragontail, with its knife-edged aretes and steep snow chutes. I craved long days with no speech and no people — only the sound of wind and water. And at the end of a very long day, or couple of days, Icicle Creek welcomed me down.

I associated the sound of that water with the joy and relief of a successful ascent. The river seemed a paradoxical embodiment of both ferocity and peace. It always seemed to me that the creek was offering a greeting. So you’ve come back. Often I would spend an hour or two at the creek, cleaning myself, dunking my head, soaking my feet in water that was not long ago part of the Colchuck glacier, and that would soon nourish an orchard of sweet apples downstream. Sometimes I would take a nap.

One such nap stands out in memory. It came at the end of a long day. I had left the trailhead at 3 AM, trudging through the forest with my headlamp. My goal was to climb and link together a series of summits: Enchantment, Dragontail, The Witches Tower, and Little Annapurna. It was a day of scrambling on loose talus, kicking steps up steep ice, and post-holing in deep snow. When I made it back down to the creek fourteen hours later, I was utterly thrashed.

There is nothing quite like the incomparable beauty of mountain water. I found an isolated little alcove with a sandbar where beams of warm late afternoon sunlight slanted through the trees, stripped down to my skivvies, and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, I was blissfully disoriented. Wasn’t sure where I was, when it was, or maybe even who I was. I felt like a leaf floating down a river.

---

We each have our own rivers, the ones that speak our names. Icicle Creek is one for me. For some of my river-running friends back in my original hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona, the Colorado is a sacred river, particularly where it flows through the depths of the Grand Canyon. They are more at home on its sandy beaches than anywhere else on earth.

The Colorado is a sacred river to me, too. As a teenager, I spent some blessed days along its banks. Under a full moon, I sat on rocks in the river at Hance Rapids, Sockdolager Rapids, and Tanner Rapids.

Before I was old enough to backpack into the Grand Canyon, other more modest but also lovely desert rivers spoke my name. These were rivers that began in mystery somewhere in the Ponderosa pine forest, then carved their way through rusty sandstone on their way to the desert. Oak Creek, Sycamore Creek, West Clear Creek, Beaver Creek, and Fossil Creek. These delightful creeks along the Mogollon Rim held many surprises: perfect swimming holes, pockets of lushness, elegantly sculpted slots, deep potholes.

---

It is remarkable to me how vivid and visceral my memories of childhood remain. We are, each of us, part of a chain.

Is it possible to look forward and backward at the same time? And to still be solidly and peacefully in the present moment? My life is tethered to those who came before me and those who will come after.

As I get older, it seems that the years go by so quickly.

Time is sort of like a river. I apologize for the cliche, and this is not a new observation. But still. It is, with each instant, a different river, but you can revisit rivers from your youth. How easily I can close my eyes and be on the riverbanks of my Arizona childhood, camping at Tanner Rapids in the Grand Canyon, or jumping off a log into the welcoming water of Fossil Creek.

In the same way, my daughter Jordan’s memories will be of cold Cascade rivers. Jordan was my frequent rock-climbing partner, and many of her memories of being with me by flowing water will be linked to our time on the rope. For instance, she might remember a nice swimming hole on the Snoqualmie, right by the bridge, with a rope swing, where we would stop for a dip after a day of climbing at Exit 38. Or she might, like me, smile at the recollection of Icicle Creek after a day of hot and dusty bouldering.

Her son — my grandson — is just over one year old. He will be shaped by his own rivers. Which ones will speak his name?

Here is a vision of something I would like to do a decade from now, when my grandson is eleven: I would like to take him to a mellow spot by a river. It doesn’t matter which one. A place where the light is dappled by the flitting leaves of birch or sycamore, where the sunlight perceived through closed eyelids is the warmest and gentlest color imaginable.

I’d like to catch crawdads in a cup. Splash in the river, skip flat stones. Notice the herring-bone pattern on a spider’s abdomen. Teach him to identify trees by the bark. Help him work up the courage to jump off a rock ledge into the water. Find ripe berries and the prettiest autumn leaves.

Then, when we get hungry, grill some burgers. Maybe they will be kelp burgers, which will perhaps not be weird for either him or me in 2033. Baked beans and watermelon. On a nice tablecloth, in honor of my mother who taught me that any picnic, even if you are eating on a log, benefits from such presentation. Dos Equis for me, sweet tea for him.

After dinner, I’d teach my grandson the guitar riffs from Back In Black and the solo from Stairway to Heaven (well, air guitar). Some music never dies. I’d teach him the backing vocals on Midnight Train to Georgia (You and me, boy, we’re The Pips.)

He might be amused at the kind of music that grandpa liked. He’d fall asleep in the car on the way home. Maybe dreams would swirl around in his head, like trout in the shadowy place beneath a cutbank.

An electric car, to go with the kelp burger.

This is what I would like to do, in 2033.

My mother is 93 years old, and her memories are less distinct with each passing day. Even so, she remembers much of her childhood. From time to time, amusing stories pop out. For instance, she remembers stealing watermelons from a neighbor’s garden, and how she and her sisters in the magical thinking of childhood assumed that if they took their shoes off, they would leave no footprints.

And how the crusty old neighbor discovered their shoes at the garden’s edge, and left a sloppy plug of chewing tobacco in every shoe. That’ll learn ya. She remembers working as a teenager in cherry orchards and in a perfume factory. She remembers eating squirrels during the Great Depression. With her twin sister Rhoda, she sang duets in churches. Once, she sang for Brenda Lee, who was in the front pew.

My mother also has memories of water. They are not like mine. She never saw a river that tumbled ass-over-teakettle out of the mountains or carved its way deep into sandstone until she journeyed out west as a young bride in 1950, moving with my father first to California, and then to the Zuni Indian Reservation, in New Mexico.

The river of her Michigan childhood, called the Grand, was part of her everyday life. It was slow-moving and placid, meandering through flat country, in no hurry to get anywhere. After heavy rains, the Grand would sometimes flood the marshy field in front of her house, and if the water in the flooded field froze over, she and her sisters would ice-skate on it, as you might expect from the children of Dutch immigrants. I can easily imagine this ice-skating girl.

There was also a nameless creek in the woods, where, on Saturday nights, the whole family (seven girls and a boy) would go to take their weekly baths. It was a time and place with no running water. A few years ago, we went ambling down an endless network of country roads in Plainfield Township, looking for that particular bathing spot in the woods. We didn’t find it. The memory was so clear in my mother’s mind, but hard to reconcile to the actual landscape.

I wonder if, in her mind, time is compressed. If it all seems not so long ago, or even if it will on her deathbed seem that everything in her life will be present all at once. As if she is a leaf on a river. Carried by water.

Diverse currents flow into us, merge, make us who we are. The currents move through us, and contribute to someone else’s story. Downstream.

My father also grew up in Michigan, but I have a hard time imagining him there. He was most at home in the high desert of Arizona and New Mexico, where he lived for most of his life. When I think of my father, I think of three rivers. His ashes were scattered into the waters of two of them. The third river often holds no water at all.

He was a modest man in every respect. He had an open ear and an open mind. He was gentle. He loved the earth and all of its creatures. He loved the Grand Canyon and the river at the bottom of it with all of his very large heart. In his later years, he lived along Oak Creek, spending many quiet mornings on its banks. Both of these streams carried his ashes away.

He was in some ways a paradoxical man, blending his religious upbringing with his career as a mathematician. He believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, but was doubtful that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. He believed in an orderly and logical universe and he wanted to understand things. When the Apollo astronauts came out to Flagstaff to train on the lava flows, he worked on a team attempting to predict what the surface of the moon might be like, and how vehicles could navigate it.

As my father lost himself to Alzheimer’s, he didn’t remember much. He could no longer clearly tell me about the work he did for USGS with the space program. He forgot who my mother was.

Near the end, when things had become very confusing, my father leaned heavily on music. At bedtime, he listened to hymns sung by the country singer Jim Reeves. Take My Hand, Precious Lord was a favorite. “Through the storm, through the night, Lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.”

On the final road trip of his life, we rode together in a moving van across New Mexico. He insisted on it, even though I was sick with the Swine Flu, and I gave it to him, and it hit his old body very hard. As we drove, he remembered all he could about living in Zuni in the 1950s. Names of kids. The choir, the track team, the basketball team.

Not long after that trip, the riverbed of his memory went dry, but I can’t help but think that in his body was residual memory. In the body itself, not just in the brain’s neural connections.

The Zuni River is a most-often dry wash that runs right through the old pueblo of Zuni, where my father spent some of the happiest years of his life. It leads eventually to the also usually dry river bed of the Little Colorado, winding its dusty orange way through the desert until it meets the big Colorado in the heart of the Grand Canyon.

Maybe a dry arroyo holds the memory of the water that once filled it.

Maybe the Zuni River remembered my father’s name.

---

In the year 2040, my daughters Jordan and Monty will be 50 and 41, respectively. My grandson will be 18.

I’d like to spend time with him by the river. Any river. It might be a river that means the world to me, or it might be a river that will come to mean the world to him, and that he, in due time, will want to share with his children.

In the year 2060, Monty will be 61 — the same age that I am right now. My grandson who was 18 in 2040 will be only 38 in 2060. I say only. This is not very old; this grandchild of mine might have children of his own by then.

It is strange to think of it, but in the year 2083, my grandson will be the age I am as I write this. Maybe he’ll be noticing, also, how time goes by so quickly. By the year 2100, if he’s still living, he will be 78. Not really all that old. I think of my grandparents. It is amazing to be interwoven with someone who lived in 1900, and someone else who may be alive in 2100.

The lives of those we love stretch into the future. How fleeting the time, and how present we will still be in the memories of those who follow — even if we have passed away by then.

I don’t know if I’ll ever go to Michigan again, but if I do, I’d like to find that creek in the woods.

I can go to the sycamore tree by the creek where my father’s ashes are scattered, and still feel him there.

---

The town of Lytton, British Columbia, sits at the confluence of two of North America’s great rivers, the Fraser and the Thompson. Among rivers, they are jewels, on par with the Colorado, the Columbia, the Stikine, and the Yukon. They are the arteries of Western Canada. Although it doesn’t carry the number of fish it used to, the Fraser historically is one of the great salmon rivers of the world.

Both are large and forceful, especially in spring when swollen with snowmelt. Both cut through deep, dramatic canyons and offer powerful, exciting rapids. Both are borne of glaciers in the Canadian Rockies.

When Jordan was a teenager, she and I took a guided raft trip down the Thompson. I remember the rugged bluffs, the noble ponderosas, the roller-coaster ride through huge standing waves. Massive pillows of water. But mostly I remember this:

On a calm stretch, as we drifted past some streaked, rusty hills, we looked up at some mine shafts, black holes bored into the slope. Cinnabar, I presumed. “What are those?” asked a woman on the raft. “Paprika mines,” answered the guide. The woman looked up at the hill in wonder and appreciation. “Ooohh,” she said slowly. “So that’s where it comes from!” The guide didn’t even crack a smile.

About 100 miles due south of Lytton, as the crow flies, is the Baker River. It is just shy of the Canada/US border, smack-dab in the pocket of the world that feels most like home to me. Like Icicle Creek, it is one of my favorite rivers.

The Baker is small, unlike the Fraser and the Thompson. It has a small watershed. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in sheer loveliness and richness of life. In its lower half, the Baker is impounded by dams. But in its upper half, the Baker runs wild and free through some of the most rugged alpine terrain in North America. Its upper watershed is roadless and trail-less. Pristine. Wet, steep, and green.

The river moves through enormous old-growth trees, Western Red Cedar, Western Hemlock, and many other species, both deciduous and conifers. There are woodland flowers such as red columbine, bunchberry, and false Solomon’s seal. Red huckleberries and purple ones, thimbleberries, salmonberries. In the cool forest, lichens and mushrooms and mosses do their all-important work. Everything is layered, intricate, interwoven. Somewhere under the mat of life there is ground, but it’s hard to find it.

The Baker is birthed under the aptly-named Picket Range, a row of serrated peaks in the hard-to-reach heart of the North Cascades. The peaks that surround the upper Baker watershed have names like Mount Despair and Mount Fury. Snowpack tends to be deeper and last longer here than anywhere else in the lower 48 states. More than a dozen glaciers feed the stream.

By late summer, in a dry year, glaciers might account for as much as half of the river’s flow. The beautiful blue-green tinge of the water is due to suspended silt from the glaciers that feed it. Such silt, called glacial flour, is so fine that the water appears crystal-clear up close, but imparts a slight milkiness when seen from greater distance.

The Baker supports runs of all five kinds of Pacific salmon: Chinook, Sockeye, Coho, Chum, and Pink. Also Steelhead. This is a point of distinction for such a small river. A river fed by glaciers is advantageous for salmon. It has a more even flow and a reliably colder temperature than a river fed primarily by snow and rain.

That color. Glacial water flowing over stones. Clear with a hint of teal, deepening where there are pools.

A couple of years ago, I hiked up the Baker River with Monty. They seemed like part of the forest to me, belonging there as much as the berries and mushrooms and towering Western Hemlock. Belonging there as much as the nurse logs.

A nurse log is a fallen tree that decomposes into the ground, in the process providing a nutrient-rich place for saplings to grow. A nurse log holds, pound for pound, more life than any place in the forest. A nurse log is how one generation of trees passes along its life force to the next, how it nurtures the young, even in death.

I would like to do this hike with Monty every year, or as often as we possibly can, for as long as my legs work. In 2040, if I’m still around, I’ll be 78. Monty will be 41.

---

It is expected that in in 2040, unless our path changes in a significant way, all summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will be a thing of the past. Oceans will be increasingly acidic and increasingly bereft of life. All across the globe, mountain glaciers will vanish.

The most important word in the previous paragraph is the word unless.

It may seem that I’ve made, with no transition, an abrupt shift from personal stories to the “political” issue of climate change. My view is that I didn’t change the subject.

Because this is precisely how I understand the subject: My daughters will be 50 and 41 in 2040. My grandson will be 18. He will be the age I am now in 2083.

The year 2023 has been, world-wide, the hottest on record. This is true of both land and sea temperatures.

But the summer I want to talk about was in 2021. That was one that Northwesterners will not forget. It reached 118 in parts of Washington, and it might have been close to that at the bottom of the canyon where Icicle Creek tumbles through the pines beneath snow-capped peaks.

It was even worse to the north. On June 29, the temperature reached 121.3 Fahrenheit in Lytton, where the Thompson meets the Fraser. The day after this modest town at the confluence of two majestic rivers set this unenviable Canadian record, it burned to the ground.

Lytton is (was) on the east side of the mountains, so it can get hot. Hotter than Seattle or Vancouver, anyway. It was often the hot spot in British Columbia. But historically, hot has meant 95 and, more rarely, 100 or 105. More akin to Missoula, Montana, than to Phoenix or Bagdad. Lytton’s average high in July is a mere 82. That means that on June 29, 2021, Lytton was 40 degrees hotter than their average high for July.

In forested places, especially in arid regions, temperature should never be considered by itself. It should always be coupled with soil moisture. Think about soil moisture as a critical measure of the land’s health. Its ability to sustain plant life, fungal life, insect life, and microbial soil life. Human life.

The scenery and topography surrounding what once was Lytton is stellar. Snowcapped mountains rise nine thousand feet above the Fraser. It’s a bit like Icicle Creek, or a bit like western Montana on steroids. It is hard to over-praise this country. The slopes are draped in ponderosa pine at the bottom of the canyon, transitioning with elevation to spruce and fir and eventually alpine tundra and glaciers.

A temperature 40 degrees above the average July high. Imagine that, wherever you live. In Phoenix, that would be a temperature of 146. In Denver, 132. In Dallas, 136. In Las Vegas, 147. In Washington DC, 129. And in the mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona, where I grew up, 122.

A “freak” heatwave. Words like “unprecedented” and “historic” were used to describe it. Before it happened, I think many would have considered it inconceivable. But will it be unusual in 2040? Temperatures 40 or even 50 degrees above normal have been occurring with some frequency in the Arctic for several years now.

Climate change is not in the far distance. It is bearing down on us now. It will get persistently worse in the next few decades. What we could lose is incalculable, and cannot be reduced to dollars. I think, for most of us, it is inconceivable. But we had better conceive of it.

The years go by quickly.

---

There is no clear line separating the personal from the political. My love of a river is personal. Icicle Creek. The Baker. The Thompson. The Colorado. And of course nothing in my life is more personal and more important than my children and their future.

2040 is not that far away. The path we are on is not in doubt — at least not to anyone who has their eyes open. It’s not my intent, in this note, to go into too much detail about the global consequences of this change. I’ve done that elsewhere, and I’ll do it again.

I will say this. The Baker River will be different in 20 years. Unless we change the path we are on, it won’t support five species of salmon. Will it support even one? I don’t know. The Thompson will be different too, although the paprika mines will still probably be there.

The year 2040 does not seem imminent, but it will come upon us before we know it. The current is moving quickly. Twenty years ago seems like yesterday to me. Heck, I played some Fleetwood Mac on Spotify, and 40 years ago seemed like yesterday.

Maybe 2100 seems like really a long ways off, but people you love will inhabit that year. Unless our path changes, they will inherit a world damaged beyond what we are willing to think about.

Unless. Unless is the key word.

What that future will be like is determined not just by me or you, but by the whole society. It is not at all clear that Americans — or humans generally, for that matter — truly grasp the nature and the scope of this challenge. If we did fully grasp it, what would we do differently?

I don’t know. Eschew cheeseburgers? Travel by horse? Change lightbulbs? There is no single action. No single answer. Many things can be done; taken alone, none of them are adequate, or even very measurable.

If creativity and money and political influence are necessary to lead us toward solutions, then I wonder how the people who have the creativity and money and influence can be moved—by love—to apply it. Where is the fulcrum?

It may be that the most impactful thing we can do is to refuse to extend power to leaders who are neither generous nor careful. It is an unfortunate truth that some people really don’t give a shit about the future — even though their own children may inhabit it.

We need to not allow such people to advance beyond high school student council in their political aspirations.

Beyond that, it is not my intention (at least in this note) to tell people exactly what I think they should do about climate change. We will all decide for ourselves. Feeling guilty and distraught and filled with dread doesn’t help. (Trust me on that one.)

The future is not set in stone. Consequence is always downstream from choice. Think of a river. We are not only riding the current; we are the current.

Maybe my main point is this: Action is rooted in love.

We are connected to those who came before us — and to those who come after. I would like to walk with Monty up the Baker River in 2040, and see salmon in the pools. I’d like to take my grandson to a river.

I don’t know if my father’s spirit is somewhere in the universe, sentient still. If so, it would make him smile if he could see me catching crawdads with my grandson.

That is what I would like to be doing in 2040.

This is an essay about artificial intelligence, but I am going to begin with orcas.

An orca is an apex predator. It takes from the sea what it needs to live — salmon, tuna, seals, and so on. It is a beautiful animal, as well as intelligent and fearsomely efficient. But as intelligent as it may be, it does not invent a trawler that rakes the ocean floor, destroying the habitat of countless creatures that it doesn’t even eat.

The kind of power that humans exercise, through our use of tools, is different in both scale and quality than the hunting behavior of an orca, or tiger, or any other apex predator.

The orca has neither the means nor the inclination to destroy the complex network of life upon which it depends. Homo sapiens stands alone in this regard. No animal besides us has ever had the ability to decimate the biosphere itself.

Maybe this is what the biblical phrase dominion over the earth means. It is not, in my view, such a good thing.

For most of human history, we also did not have this ability. But we have it now. Our ability to do harm — to other humans and all creatures — has been accelerating since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The speed of that acceleration increased exponentially with the invention of the atomic bomb around 70 years ago.

With the development of artificial intelligence, the acceleration of technology — and particularly of technology that has the capacity to make our civilization self-terminating — has reached the stage where, on a graph, the curve goes nearly vertical. In our cleverness, we have created tools of such power that they can fundamentally alter the planet itself.

These tools have the bizarre capability to improve themselves, without our input. While the power of these tools is increasing at a rate we can barely comprehend, what has not kept pace is our capacity to exercise wisdom, restraint, and discernment in the use of such tools, as we make decisions regarding how we will live in relation to each other and to the rest of the living world.

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A couple of nights ago, I was listening to an interview with the social philosopher and systems thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger. It was a long and wide-ranging interview, and at one point he was talking about ways in which past powerful civilizations crashed and burned.

Throughout history, civilizations that have attained great power have also been self-terminating. Even when they were conquered by an outside force, their downfall was partially or mostly because they were ripe for collapse.

The reasons are various, but also similar from case to case: They ruined their land, depleted their resources, overextended their reach, exploited their workers, corrupted their own institutions, or exhausted the morale and good will of their own citizens.

He asked a question that slipped under my skin like a splinter: “Why have we humans not been good stewards of power?”

I can hardly think of a more important question.

It’s interesting that Schmachtenberger used the word stewards in framing his question. Implicit in that word steward is the assumption that we are responsible to someone other than ourselves. We are, in other words, caretakers. We bear responsibility for the well-being of others.

To whom might we be responsible? Our children and grandchildren? Our communities? Does it go beyond that, to all humans? Or to other living creatures? Might we bear a responsibility to a deity? Or to a river that provides us with water, or to the soil from which our food grows?

Of course, if we are responsible to no one, then the future beyond our own short lives need not concern us. But most people I know are not content with that. Even if we draw our circle pretty tightly, unless we are soul-dead, most of us care about someone besides ourselves.

We all may have different notions regarding how far our responsibility extends, but I suspect most of us feel a responsibility toward our most direct descendants, at least. Our children, our grandchildren.

In this context, the word responsibility may seem a bit stiff; what we more often call it is love.

How do we become better stewards of power? Or, to frame the question a bit differently: How do we find and channel the power to become better caretakers of that which we love?

I believe that we will not be able to navigate the coming years without a substantial shift in how we exercise power — both in regard to how we treat other humans, and in how we treat the other living beings that share this planet with us.

This has everything to do with artificial intelligence.

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Let me offer a brief introduction to Daniel Schmachtenberger, although it will be inadequate. I’ll start by stating that for anyone interested in how we might navigate our way through a perilous future, he is worth listening to.

In speaking to friends, I’ve described him as a social philosopher and a systems thinker. I’m not at all sure that this is how he would describe himself. In addition to those descriptors, I’d also add risk analyst. Maybe the best thing to call him is “thoughtful dude with a good heart.”

By risk analyst, I don’t mean what an insurance adjustor or stock broker does. Think bigger than that. Think about species survival. Think about ecological and civilizational collapse. Think existential risk.

Simply put, an existential risk is something that could spell disaster for everyone, everywhere.

(For example: Climate change and all of its subsidiary effects, runaway artificial intelligence, the unravelling of both ecosystems and social systems, loss of biodiversity, nuclear war, and last but not least, an economy based on limitless growth taking us past planetary limits.)

In examining these issues, Schmachtenberger often employs concepts of game theory, which is a branch of philosophy that can apply to poker, fantasy football, or even flirting with someone in a bar — but in a wider sense is about how people make choices, and how they weigh the benefits and costs of those choices.

He thinks a lot about three interlocking questions: What kind of predicament are we in? How did we get here? Where are we headed? One of my favorite quotes of his is “If we do not immediately and completely change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are going.”

Let that one sink in.

A concept from game theory that Schmachtenberger often works with is the idea of multi-polar traps. A multi-polar trap is any kind of situation in which people acting in their own self-interest make choices that harm the wider community — including, in the long run, themselves.

Multi-polar traps are characterized by a lack of trust, transparency, and coordination. A classic example from ecology is the tragedy of the commons, in which people deplete a resource for short-term gain, rather than cooperating to find a level of sustainable use that insures the resource will be available to them (and their children) in the future.

As in “Damn! No more fish in the lake! How come we didn’t see that coming?”

A classic example from social science is the prisoner’s dilemma, in which two people driven by self-interest and distrust of each other fail to behave in a way that gives the best outcome to them both.

Also, arms races in general are variations of a multi-polar trap. This includes the theory of deterrence through escalating retaliation. It may work for a while, but when it fails, it can fail catastrophically.

In a multi-polar trap, what benefits the individual (or small group) in the short-term actually harms everyone in the long-term. Thus it is that we are seduced into going down a path that leads us all to a destination no one really wants to arrive at.

(Who among us actually wants ocean acidification? Mass extinctions? Depleted topsoil? Stronger hurricanes? Who wants the ocean to hold more plastic than fish? And yet we relentlessly persist in our march toward these outcomes.)

One way to think about it: We are trapped in patterns of behavior that are self-destructive. Why? Part of the answer is that we operate within systems and institutions that are, at best, poorly designed, and at worst, downright sociopathic.

If we look for technological solutions to our problems without changing the underlying behavioral patterns that brought us to where we are, we are likely to find those very technological solutions contributing to the problems. This is because the self-destructiveness lies less in the technology itself than in the incentives that determine its use.

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In addition to multi-polar trap, Daniel Schmactenberger uses another ten-dollar term: The meta-crisis. Consider this a fancy phrase for the crisis behind the crisis.

Think not of a single problem — like climate change, or nuclear war, or topsoil depletion — but rather of the recurrent patterns that give rise to our self-destructive behaviors that lead to such problems.

There are several existential threats that face humans (not just Americans) in 2024. These threats are intertwined, and they amplify each other. They can’t be solved separately; there needs to be a coordinated, whole-systems approach.

We won’t make much (if any) progress in addressing these threats as long as we operate within systems — economic systems, political systems, religious systems — that offer perverse incentives and reward destructive and exploitive behavior.

Daniel Schmachtenberger (and others) apply the principles of game theory to the open question of whether or not humans can survive our own cleverness at using tools, and our own insatiable desire to dominate one another and gobble up the rest of the living world.

When I was a teenager, the existential threat we (sometimes) worried about was nuclear war. These days, nuclear war is just one of several existential threats, and not even the one that seems most likely. Climate change and all of its subsidiary effects comes immediately to mind, of course.

And then there are ecological dominoes falling that are spoken of less often — things like topsoil depletion, dead zones in the ocean, persistent toxins in the water we drink and the air we breathe. Perhaps most disastrous: Loss of biodiversity, from insects on up. (It turns out that insects are a lot more necessary for the continuation of life as we know it than we are.)

At the intersection of environment and technology, disturbing new possibilities lurk: Engineered (or resurrected) viruses can be used as bio-weapons. The same techniques of genetic modification that can be used to enhance the nutritional value of a grain of rice can be used to make seeds sterile, so that they must be purchased, yearly, from corporations.

Are we not the masters of the world? Can we survive the bitter fruit of our own brilliance? How shall we live with ourselves?

A paradigm shift has to occur if we are to make it beyond the next couple of decades.

That paradigm shift has to involve how we understand and apply power — not only among our fellow humans, but in relationship to all other creatures. What sort of power destroys the possibility of a livable future, and what sort of power can bring us into a livable future?

In the realm of technology, who wants immensely powerful and insidious artificial intelligence, developed by people who do not have our best interests at heart, to shape our reality? Who wants a media landscape in which no one can distinguish accurate reporting from deep fakes?

Who wants a society in which people are hopelessly confused, outraged, manipulated, and fearful?

Nevertheless, we are headed, lemming-like, into that very future. “If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are going.”

We need better route-finders. Where will we find them?

I think it is best that we not give the task to machines — or to sociopathic billionaires, or authoritarian strongmen, or ambitious politicians, or the wizards in silicon valley who blessed us all with algorithms that “maximize engagement” on social media, regardless of the effect these algorithms have on the health of our society.

It is a route-finding task for all of us, guided by our meager organic intelligence.

And motivated by our sense of love, tenderness, and responsibility to those who live downstream from us and will inherit the mess we’ve made of the world.

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In the popular imagination, the AI threat seems to be the specter of a super-computer run amok, a kind of overlord who either enslaves or eliminates us. I don’t know how likely this is. Some thinkers in the field of AI are concerned about it. It’s not really my primary worry.

The moment at which we are eclipsed by our machines is often referred to by the somewhat mystical term The Singularity. The word seems to be uttered with either a sense of doom or a sense of deliverance, depending on one’s view of AI. (As a recovering evangelical, I can’t help but feel a familiar vibe, as if The Singularity might be a technological equivalent of The Rapture.)

A slightly different concern is that AI will be so freakishly efficient at the tasks we give it that we will be sorry to get what we ask for. Imagine Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, unable to control the out-of-control brooms.

(For an amusing thought experiment, google “AI and the paper clip problem”.)

As dramatic as these scenarios are, they do not express my main concern about AI. I think that long before it turns us into slaves, or simply wipes us out, or turns the world into paper clips, it is likely to be harnessed by a small group of humans driven not by the desire to shape a better and more sustainable future, but rather to gather wealth, power, and control for themselves — at the expense of the rest of us.

The same old goal, but on steroids.

It’s far more banal than Total Domination. It is likely to be, simply, the accumulation of money and influence. But banal or not, with AI at their disposal, they will be ruthlessly efficient. One of the first effects of AI may be the devaluation and impoverishment of workers whose skills will no longer be considered relevant. It is hard to predict just who these people will be.

An awful lot of rapacious human behavior and undoable damage — assisted by AI — can occur long before we reach The Singularity. AI can (and will) be directed toward more effectively exploiting and manipulating both humans and non-human nature, turning everything under the sun into… well, not paper clips necessarily, but some sort of a commodity.

If AI is developed and funded by people who seek market (or military, or electoral) advantage over their rivals, it will amplify all of the other already-present existential threats. It is an accelerant, like gasoline on a fire.

And there is my concern, in a nutshell: AI is an accelerant to every other existential risk.

The last thing we need, in 2024, is an accelerant. In addition to turbo-charging exploitation and manipulation, AI can accelerate every variety of arms race, including the development of biological weapons, surveilance tools, drone weapons, and cyber-attacks. The right to privacy is already on thin ice; with AI it will be drowned.

And let’s not forget propaganda: AI will shape what we see on our screens, and people will be deceived by disinformation more effortlessly and more easily than we already are. Convincing ‘deep fakes’ may render the idea of visual and auditory recorded evidence meaningless.

It will not surprise me if this AI capacity is used extensively within a year’s time, affecting both electoral and judicial processes.

If our primary way of apprehending truth is through our screens, we are in deep trouble.

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Yes, I’m painting a grim picture. Too grim, perhaps, in the view of AI apologists.

After all, couldn’t AI be used to do marvelous things, like cure cancer, design resilient and adaptive cities, more quickly deliver us from fossil fuels, improve the efficiency and reliability of supply chains, or find an alternative to plastic?

Well, sure it could. I hope it will. All technology is available for multiple uses.

A claim I often hear is that AI, like any tool, is morally neutral. I’m not sure that I accept that claim, but I won’t argue the point here. Instead, I will make two observations: First, AI is likely to be used in any way that it can be used. And second, it is generally quicker and easier to unravel a rug than to weave one.

If AI can be used to design more efficient supply chains, for instance, it can also be used to disrupt them. If it can be used to cure a virus, it can be used to create and spread one as well. To what use shall AI be put? This question begs others: Who has the power to determine its use? Who has the wisdom? Are the power and the wisdom in the same hands?

Consider this: AI promises to deliver nearly unlimited power to the relatively small number of people who are at the spearhead of its development and deployment. Who are these people?

Well, I guess we don’t know, for sure. But they are embedded in one of three places: they work for corporations like Google and Microsoft, or are in the employ of obscenely wealthy individuals, or they are in the security/intelligence apparatus of any nation state that has the budget and the expertise to pursue the research. In all three settings, no doubt, there is a race to develop and deploy AI before adversaries/competitors do so.

Whether the goal is to increase market share or to have the most advanced weaponry, the imperative is to win against the competition. So… don’t expect cautious restraint to govern the development of AI. There is no incentive to show restraint. Those who show restraint lose the race. Your competitors (or enemies, if you want to use the word) will move ahead of you.

It doesn’t matter how many respected scientists and philosophers sign a letter warning of the dangers and urging caution.

Along with restraint, both trust and transparency will also be sacrificed. Between governments, between corporations, there will be secrecy rather than coordination. It should go without saying that the general public will not know what is happening. Most of us won’t ever know the extent to which AI manipulates us.

What sort of hunger drives people to win when the cost of winning is perhaps greater than anyone (everyone) can afford to pay? Liv Boeree, a professional poker player, has valuable insights about game theory, zero-sum games, perverse economic incentives, and how these intersect with the pursuit of power through artificial intelligence.

Boeree has memorably personified this hunger as Moloch, which she characterizes as the god of unhealthy competition. Historically, Moloch was the insatiable bull-headed god of the ancient Canaanites, who supposedly granted success and power to his worshippers — in exchange for the sacrifice of their own children.

It’s a pretty damn good metaphor.

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All technologies can be (and will be) used for conflict-oriented purposes. AI will, as well. It will be used for purposes of manipulation and disinformation. It will be used to gain political, military, or market advantage.

In other words, it will be used to confer power to some people and to erode the power of other people. And in this regard, it will be more effective — by many orders of magnitude — than any technology in history.

I’m not really sure why I used future tense in the preceding paragraphs.

As we move into exponentially more powerful tech, we can’t continue to use it with the types of conflict-orientation we have used up till now. We can’t continue to use it in a way that is governed by an understanding of our life together as a zero-sum game in which some people win at the expense of others.

Understand: when I say we can’t do this, I mean we can’t do this and expect a livable future for the majority of humanity.

It is perfectly evident that some people think we can do this, and they are already doing it. They intend to be the winners at the game. My contention is that these people are willing to sacrifice a livable future for their own children (and yours) in order to win.

All of the tech we use in some way or another externalizes harm–on other (usually poorer and more vulnerable) people, on other creatures, on the atmosphere, on the oceans. It takes only a little bit of self-reflection to understand that this harm rebounds, eventually, to ourselves.

Think, for a minute, of the rapid pace of AI development. Now think of the next decade, and the capabilities of this AI deployed for the purposes of the authoritarian leaders that seem to be consolidating their grip all over the globe, like mold overcoming a loaf of bread.

But sure, AI might be used to find a cure for cancer, or find an alternative to plastic.

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Whether Google is calling the shots, or Microsoft, or the Pentagon, or bunker-boy billionaires, or the security forces in any number of countries, AI will be put to the service of its developers. (At least initially. At some point, it may slip away from their control and become accessible to any genius in a basement who has the skills to use it.)

But in the meantime, what are the goals of its developers? While the goals of a corporation and the goals of a national government are not quite the same, the word domination applies to both. And that right there is the heart of the problem. It is a behavioral problem, rather than a technological one.

My understanding of how large-language AI models work is that they essentially teach themselves how to converse (and behave?) by examining a huge data set of information, primarily (but not necessarily limited to) what is available on the internet. Given how people behave on the internet, this should not give us comfort.

It may be that we can develop AI in a way that is more likely to bring about positive outcomes, but that seems unlikely unless we first change ourselves. After all, we are the data set.

No doubt, I’ve just oversimplified what they do, but the concept I’m getting at is this: AI is mimetic. It seems to me that the process is computational, not creative. Put another way: It does not seem self-directed. It lacks consciousness, will, self-awareness. It is not reflective. Right?

Right?

The more an AI ‘teaches’ or ‘improves’ itself, the greater its reach. How large can the data set become? Possibly everything ever written or preserved on a computer. An AI could, for example, quickly digest everything written by or about Tolstoy, and then generate new writing that captures the style (and presumably the values) of Tolstoy.

It may not feel what Tolstoy felt, but perhaps it can make decisions as if it felt what Tolstoy felt.

Here are some of my curiosities:

Could AI be ‘trained’ to not only understand humility, but to demonstrate it?

Could it be taught not only the concept of restraint, but the practice of it?

Could it be taught wisdom, (which is, of course, not the same as knowledge)?

To many people, these questions will seem to be odd, maybe even absurd. But I think we had better seriously consider them.

Could AI fully grasp — and not only grasp, but apply to its own behavior — the teaching of Socrates that the acceptance of one’s own limitations is the beginning of wisdom?

As any reader can tell, my disposition toward AI is not favorable. My worries weigh more than my enthusiasm. But the preceding questions are not rhetorical ones. I honestly don’t know the answers.

Could AI be used to nurture and empower people, rather than dominate, manipulate, deceive, surveil, or replace them?

On the surface, this may seem to be a question about AI, but really it is a question about us.

It’s a question about incentives.

Unless we thoughtfully shape the underlying incentives that govern its development and use, AI will be an accelerant to every variety of existential risk.

In the end, the underlying question is more about us than it is about AI: How do we become better caretakers of that which we love?

It’s a human task. It’s not a task we can outsource.

Let me introduce you to some friends of mine, delightful fellows, full of the joy of life. They live at the terminus of the Lower Curtis Glacier, on the jagged western flank of Mount Shuksan, in the North Cascades of Washington state. My bright yellow friend is Mimulus tilingii; my vibrant purple friend is Mimulus lewisii. More casually, they are known as Monkeyflowers. Specifically, they are the Great Purple Monkeyflower and the Mountain Monkeyflower.

I visit them once a year, and both tilingii and lewisii appear to be perfectly happy in the harsh environment of the glacial moraine, which is, essentially, an unconsolidated heap of rubble left behind by a retreating glacier. Some of them, seeking out a gentler neighborhood, choose lush meadows nearby. But whether they choose the moraine or the meadow, my friends are routinely buried under monumental amounts of snow, and they see daylight for just a few months of the year. It’s not any easy place to live.

Although Monkeyflowers are well-suited to the hardscrabble life, they won’t hesitate to choose a cushier location, should one be available. Throughout the Cascades, in the lowlands as well as they highlands, I’ve seen them perched on tiny ledges beside or behind a waterfall; the best real estate a flower could ask for. In this regard, they remind me of a happy-go-lucky traveler who can spread a bivy sack on the barest and most exposed piece of ground and be content, yet can also enjoy a luxurious bed at a five-star resort.

Of all the places I’ve seen Mimulus, none was more memorable than a verdant meadow near the Lower Curtis Glacier, where both yellow and purple Monkeyflowers laid claim to the best spots along a splendid creek that threaded a rock garden. I fell in love with this place, and I make an annual pilgrimage to it. The meadow hosts a party of alpine flowers, and in late August the Monkeyflowers are the life of the party.

The Mimulus sisters have a cousin from California known as Mimulus nanus. This sun-loving Californian cousin lives along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains, in a marvelous volcanic landscape called the Mono Craters. I’ve seen a profusion of gorgeous violet Mimulus nanus growing out a field of loose pumice. It didn’t seem like a growing medium that could support anything at all, and yet the monkeyflowers were happy, along with Gray’s lupine. It was hard to fathom how the tiny plants could take root there, much less thrive.

And yet another place Monkeyflowers live: a crack in a south-facing cliff of basalt on the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge, a place that gets only about 15 inches of annual precipitation and bakes in a level of heat that can be every bit as extreme as the alpine cold of a glacial moraine that is buried in snow for eight or nine months of the year. The Monkeyflowers in the gorge don’t grow out in the open. The common name of these beauties is the Seep Monkeyflower, and as their common name indicates, they prefer to be near a seep or a creek. Any little crack will do, as long as there is some water.

It is a scrappy plant. A resilient plant. A remarkable plant. Here are some cool things to know about the Monkeyflower: It can thrive in inhospitable conditions, such as on the threshold of hot springs, or in serpentine soils that would kill most plants. It is highly adaptable to wide range of harsh climactic conditions and in soils that are heavy-laden with minerals or are just plain impoverished. In fact, Monkeyflowers make themselves at home in the snowiest place in North America, and in some of the hottest corners in the Mojave Desert. It is a pioneer plant in places that are bereft of life for either natural or man-caused reasons, such as glacial moraines or contaminated and toxic mine tailings.

It’s a humble plant, but it harbors a kind of greatness, as humble little plants often do. Its greatness has not been lost on botanists and those who conduct genetic research. In recent years, it has become a bit of a darling to scientists who study plant evolution and adaptation. In fact, if you want to find a hopping good party of cheerful botanists, you might want to find an annual conference of Mimulus researchers. There are many hundreds of scientific papers written about Mimulus guttatus, the Seep Monkeyflower.

So, why is the Monkeyflower such a star? Multiple reasons. First of all, Monkeyflowers grow fast, produce lots of seeds, and have a simple and completely sequenced genome — all traits that make them ideal for genetic study. And, to quote from an article by Elizabeth Pennisi in Science magazine, “their explosion of flower colors and forms, diverse lifestyles, and extraordinary hardiness… have seduced researchers studying plant evolution and adaptations.”

What kind of research have these scientists been seduced into conducting? And what, exactly, does it mean for a species of flower to have diverse lifestyles? Well, in addition to living successfully in drastically different environments, Monkeyflowers exhibit a range of local variation in terms of color and pattern, bloom time, and other characteristics. It turns out that it’s an excellent species to study in terms of genetic mutation and natural selection.

For example, researchers have recently discovered that within a single patch of Mimulus guttatus there will be individual plants with different flowering times, flower sizes, and amount of seed production. The later-blooming plants prefer wet years, while the early bloomers do their best in years when drought makes an early bloom crucial. Both variants coexist in the same population, and seem to have evolved simultaneously, in a process called fluctuating selection.

In a time when changing climate is disrupting formerly predictable patterns of precipitation, when even atmospheric jet streams and ocean currents are increasingly unsure of themselves and what they will do, it seems that one path to resilience is to be prepared for anything. When it isn’t quite clear (to either us or the flowers) how things will go from year to year, and when the only sure bet is an increase in weather anomalies, Monkeyflowers demonstrate the peculiar capability of evolving in multiple directions at the same time. Quite a trick! So don’t be fooled by the simple appearance and meager genome of such a humble little gravel-dwelling flower. It’s got a plan. Better, perhaps, than our plan.

I have been writing quite a bit lately about climate change, and what can be done about it. One of the terms that I use often is “regenerative agriculture.” It may be that this is an unfamiliar term to some people, so I think I’ll give a brief explanation.

First, this: I’d venture to guess that most people consider the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and home heating to be the main contributor of atmospheric carbon. However, the combined effects of a couple of centuries of soil degradation and fossil fuel use associated with agriculture may exceed it. It is hard to overemphasize the role of soil as both a cause of climate change, and a partial remedy for it.

Regenerative agriculture is guided by a straightforward question: What is good for the soil? (This leads to more questions: What is good for water? Pollinators? Invertebrates? Microbes? Birds?) The central principle is that soil is a neighborhood of inter-related creatures, and its continued health can be the primary concern of the farmer, land manager, or even the home gardener.

One way to think of it is that the word “regenerative” is sort of the opposite of “exploitive.” Exploitive and extractive are kindred words, just as regenerative, nurturing, and restorative are kindred words. How can a farmer or gardener relate to his or her soil in a way that is nurturing rather than exploitive? An analogy might help:

Consider a company where the workers are exploited. This might mean underpaid, overworked, harassed, deprived of benefits, and so on. It is quite possible that the company’s short-term profits are impressive, and shareholders are happy. The bank is happy.

However, the company’s long-term viability is less certain. It might be viable as long as it can get new workers to replace the ones who are burned out, chewed up, and spit out. But can it keep on doing this, indefinitely?

In a similar way, farming that exhausts soil can be quite productive in the short term. In places and times where people find it easy to leave exhausted soil behind, and simply move on to fertile virgin soil, techniques of building soil are not often considered important.

As it turns out, feeding soil a steady diet of ammonium nitrate fertilizer is like giving your employees endless cans of Red Bull rather than food. And using vast amounts of pesticide and herbicide is like flooding antibiotics into a person who is perpetually sick, with no concern about gut flora. There is a better way.

Regenerative Agriculture is not new wisdom. In fact, it is old wisdom. The farmer and author Wendell Berry (among many others) has been describing it to American audiences for the past half-century. Its principles include (but are not limited to): use of cover crops, crop rotation, responsible and appropriate management of livestock, no-till or minimum-till methods, a minimum of chemical inputs that harm soil life and water, and growing a diversity of crops rather than a single crop.

The practices of regenerative agriculture help to address some of the causes of climate change, and provide relief from some of the consequences. In a nutshell: degraded soil releases carbon into the atmosphere, while healthy soil absorbs and holds it.

Just as importantly, healthy soil holds more water than degraded soil, recharging groundwater, and decreasing ground surface temperature. A soil that holds carbon also holds water and resists compaction. It acts like a sponge, and it harbors life. Organic matter and air pockets separate mineral grains.

It is in this space that threads of fungi forge the way, and plant roots follow. Soil with higher moisture, especially if it has something growing on it, heats up more slowly than dry, bare soil. Transpiration cools the air above it. On a wide scale, this is a climate-affecting difference.

The persistent “heat domes” that increasingly plague the arid Western US are absolutely related to a deficit of soil moisture. As are, of course, wildfires. Paradoxically, compacted soil that has poor water retention can lead to problems caused by too much water pooling in fields or running off of denuded slopes: salinization, erosion, flooding.

Regenerative practices can alleviate some of the consequences of climate change. They lower soil temperature and raise soil moisture. They reduce erosion. They improve soil fertility and tilth. This has cascading effects: more microbes, more invertebrates, more pollinators, more birds, and more of everything that depends on soil life, right on up the food chain.

In the past few centuries, the ruination of soil has contributed more C02 to the atmosphere than the burning of fossil fuels. It has contributed to drought, heat waves, and famine. Rehabilitation of soil could do as much as any single action to slow down climate change. This is a huge deal.

Many people are sliding into hopelessness, as they feel that we have passed tipping points. Even if we could halt greenhouse gas emissions now, they fear, there is simply too much C02 and methane in the atmosphere already. But it is too soon to lose hope.

Regenerative agriculture — on both land and at sea — can remove C02 and break down methane. To get a handle on climate change, humans need to understand and work with — rather than against — the natural processes of the carbon cycle and the hydrological cycle. Regenerative agriculture does both.

I have written before and will write again about regenerative agriculture in the oceans, in the form of a very particular style of kelp and shellfish farming. The benefits are similar to regenerative practices on land: more biodiversity, carbon sequestration, cleaner water, and healthy food for people.

We fret over carbon dioxide and methane. Regenerative agriculture reduces both. But in regard to climate change mitigation, the chemical compound we don’t talk about nearly enough is actually good old H20. Water. And regenerative agriculture does something about that, too.

I’ll make a point that seems more ‘spiritual’ than scientific: the practices that improve soil’s ability to absorb both water and carbon are the very same practices that reflect a benevolent attitude toward life of all kinds: animals, plants, fungi, and invertebrates.

In other words, generosity matters. The project of improving soil has everything to do with our treatment of other living creatures. We have a damaged relationship to our fellow creatures. We have a damaged relationship to soil. To water. We can repair it.

Many of us hold deep anxiety about our future; we know we have put ourselves on a path of self-destruction. Curiously enough, the path that leads to our deliverance is the path of caring for other creatures as much as we care for ourselves. This is a beautiful truth.

Anyone can play a role in caring for soil. No role is too small. If you have a yard, you can decide to forego chemicals that harm soil life. You can put away the leaf-blower. You can raise flowers that feed pollinators. You can participate in and advocate for community gardens, school gardens, food forests, rooftop gardens, church gardens.

When you vote, you can pay attention to a candidate’s views on land and water management. You can support businesses that do the right thing when it comes to soil. You can find ways to support local, small farmers, especially those that treat land, water, plants, and animals with respect.

There is hope for our children and grandchildren if we can shift our thinking. We need to work with the earth. Stewardship can replace exploitation; reciprocal relationship with other living beings can replace domination. Love can be our guiding star.

The title of this essay might lead a reader to expect a literary journey to someplace tropical, someplace in the South Pacific, someplace with coconut palms and a hammock. That might be a welcome diversion to readers who are weary of winter. Alas, this is not a journey that escapes the cold. On the contrary, it is a journey that heads straight into it. And there will be trees, but they are not palms.

This essay is indeed about atolls — but not ones formed by a coral reef. The atolls of which I speak are formed by a cluster of remarkable, resilient trees called Tsuga mertensia: the mountain hemlock. They occur not in the South Pacific, but in the Pacific Northwest, high up in the rugged, cold, and snowy North Cascade mountains of Washington state.

Like their tropical counterparts, these alpine atolls are small islands surrounded by water — only the water, in this case, is snow. And also like their tropical counterparts, they form through a process of gradual accretion, as life builds upon life.

Of course, they are not really atolls at all. It’s a metaphor, first employed by an alpine botanist in the 1930s. But it is an apt metaphor. They look like islands in the summer, when the meadows around them are a sea of wildflowers. And they look even more like islands from October to June, when they are surrounded by billowing waves of snow.

How do these atolls form? And why, among all possible distribution patterns that a tree species might adopt, does the mountain hemlock adopt this one?

The answer comes into clarity at the nexus of several key facts about climate, topography, and biology. First of all, snow is very, very deep here. The growing season is short. There are hazards to be avoided. It can be tough for any living thing to go it alone in such a place. In the subalpine zone, a seedling is more likely to survive if it is in the lee of a larger tree. Hence, the presence of one tree makes life easier for the next one, and the next one.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First let me introduce you to the tree itself. To my mind, the mountain hemlock captures the spirit of the North Cascades as well as any tree. If you’ve ever taken a day trip to Mount Rainier, or went skiing at the Mount Baker Ski Area, you’ve seen it. It is the snow-plastered tree that graces the January picture on a calendar.

In fall and winter, atmospheric rivers from the Pacific take aim at the Northwest coast, giving the lowland forests a long, deep drink. These forests host behemoth trees like the coast redwood, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, and Douglas fir. Along the rivers, big leaf maples drop their dinner-plate-sized leaves. All of these are magnificent trees. In fact, in terms of both diversity and sheer majesty, I can’t think of any place with better trees.

But where the Pacific storms bump up against the steep slopes of the North Cascades, where the wind picks up speed as it sweeps upslope, where mist wraps around ridge lines, and where the dense clouds drop heavy wet snow — tons of it — a different tree comes into its own. A tree that was built for just this climate and just this topography. It is not as big as the lowland trees, but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for in character.

It is the quintessential tree of the wet, western slope of the mountains. It is the brooding tree that so often is shrouded in mist, the one with the dark and hoary silhouette up on a ridge line. It is a dignified tree, maybe even somber. At lower elevations, mountain hemlock drapes the slopes in a dense and continuous forest. In the hours before dawn, it can be a bit spooky to hike through a forest of mountain hemlock. The word primeval comes to mind.

At higher elevations, it diminishes in size and grows more sparse. It often forms attractive clumps—atolls—in a meadow. One of the most distinctive features of the tree is a droopy leader at the top. It also has graceful branches that subdivide at the end into many small, supple twigs, creating a web-like bough that can hold big loads of snow (until a skier or climber happens to be directly underneath them). This leader and branches give it a distinctly different profile than the stiff and prickly spruces that occur in the subalpine zone on the dry eastern side of the Cascades.

The tree produces tons of small, narrow cones that are brown with papery scales when mature, and a beautiful luminescent shade of purple when immature. The bark is grey and shallowly furrowed. The needles are bluish-green, short, and flat, reminiscent of rosemary. They are arranged spirally around the twig, creating a ‘bottlebrush’ appearance which is accentuated in midsummer, when the growing tip erupts in bright new growth, like little stars at the end of each twig.

It’s clear from its name that it is not a flatlander. It inhabits coastal ranges from Southeast Alaska to California, where it is found in only the wettest parts of the Sierra Nevada. Aside from a few pockets in Northern Idaho and the northwest corner of Montana, it is not a Rocky Mountain tree. It likes things damp, shall we say. And, even though it is superbly adapted to snow, it is not a tree that wants its roots in frozen soil.

In the North Cascades it starts as low as 3000 feet, where it mixes with Pacific silver fir, and extends all the way to timberline, which is generally between 6000 and 7000 feet. Mountain hemlock inhabits the middle kingdom, between the giant trees of the valley bottoms and the wilderness of rock and ice above. On these startlingly steep slopes, it forms extensive, dense stands.

If you are hiking up into the high country from one of the valley bottoms, it will take a long time. For several miles and for an elevation gain of four thousand feet, you will see a lot of tree trunks. At first, you’ll be in the lowland forest of the western hemlock, the western red cedar, and the Douglas fir. It’s a lush forest, filled with mossy nurse logs, and the dense understory of salmonberry, red huckleberry, thimbleberry, devil’s club, salal, and various other shrubs.

After you’ve gained about 1000 feet (depending on your trailhead elevation), you will notice a change in the trees; you’ve entered the silver fir zone. You’ll be in this domain for a long time, and for a lot of switchbacks. Gradually as you ascend, mountain hemlocks will appear, and after gaining about 1500 feet, they will predominate. It will remain so until timberline.

At the lower end of its range mountain hemlock is a large tree, though not as large as its sibling, the western hemlock. The largest known mountain hemlocks in Washington approach 200 feet and are about 6 feet in diameter. (This is big, but not nearly as big as the lowland and coastal behemoths of the aforementioned species, some of which can reach 300 feet and be nearly 20 feet in diameter.) A typical large mountain hemlock might be 100 feet tall with a trunk a couple feet wide. Like the western hemlock, it is a tall, straight tree with a cylindrical form.

In the mountain hemlock zone, the forest is somber and dark. There isn’t as much of much of an understory as in the lower forest (although there are delicious huckleberries!). Brief and occasional glimpses of the snowy peaks above will tantalize you, through the thick trunks and heavy boughs of the hemlocks. Ever so gradually as you ascend, the hemlocks get smaller, but it’s only noticeable over miles and hours.

Now and then you may emerge from the forest into an avalanche path, a brief and chaotic strip of sudden sunlight, Sitka alder, downed trees and debris. Kind of a battle zone. Tongues of snow will last well into late summer. As much as any tree, mountain hemlock bears the brunt of natural violence. Avalanches routinely rip through timber, leaving behind a tapestry of bright and dark green stripes. It’s common to see large trunks snapped in two, like toothpicks. But this destruction notwithstanding, Tsuga mertensia has made its peace with snow.

At the upper extent of its range, as it approaches timberline, the mountain hemlock can appear to be a whole different character. The higher you go, the smaller the trees become, both in terms of height and girth. Whereas they are tall and cylindrical at lower elevation, trees in the high country, burdened as they are with deeper loads of snow, can be beautifully misshapen. It is a creature defined by its relationship with snow.

Their crowns may be truncated or their boughs widely splayed. Their trunks may be J-rooted or bent. Without the benefit of a human pruner, these trees in the subalpine zone can become a piece of bonsai art. And like other trees that live at timberline, mountain hemlock can take on a gnarled, stunted form (known as krummholz) where it hunkers down in deference to fierce weather.

In the upper drainages of the Nooksack, the Baker, and the North Fork of the Skykomish, mountains of startling vertical relief form pockets that catch the prevailing southwesterly winds. These topographical catcher’s mitts bear the full force of the atmospheric rivers that hit the Cascade range. As a result, these watersheds are among the wettest places in North America.

Annual precipitation in these places can easily exceed 140 inches. Most of it comes in the winter. At the Mt. Baker ski area, annual snowfall averages around 600 inches and in many winters exceeds 800 inches. In the winter of 1998–99, the ski area recorded 1140 inches of snow — a world record. These are conditions in which the mountain hemlock thrives.

In one quite distinctive way, Tsuga mertensia demonstrates how it has evolved to succeed in such a snowy place. A very high sugary sap content imparts unusual flexibility in the trunk of the tree. This renders them extremely ‘bendy,’ so that they can be held down all the way to the ground by heavy snow loads, and then spring back up when the snow melts. BOING!!! Backcountry travelers are familiar with these ‘catapults,’ and are careful to walk around them rather than straddle them.

The Cascades are so effective at wringing moisture out of the atmosphere that the country on the leeward side, the eastern slope, is a spacious dryland forest of ponderosa pine. Not far beyond that, it is essentially a treeless grassland, thick with ticks and rattlesnakes (but not without its charms). But on the western slope where the mountain hemlock lives, the situation is steep, wet, and green. Cross-country travel is diabolically difficult. The North Cascades are a stand-offish range, not offering their treasures easily. But the treasures are sublime.

I’ve been speaking in a somewhat inexact way about ‘zones’ of vegetation. The concept is familiar to anyone who has driven a highway that goes from a low place to a high place. In each zone, there are not only characteristic trees, but shrubs, berries, flowers, fungi, birds, mammals, and all manner of living things. As elevation is gained, the species change, and so do the patterns of growth, of size, of density and spacial arrangement.

For many human travelers, the zone that is most sublime is what is known as the subalpine. The word ‘subalpine’ simply means below the alpine, which is accurate enough but not very poetic. What it is: slopes of butter-yellow avalanche lilies, timbered knolls, waterfalls, boulder gardens threaded by chattering streams, and glorious cirques jeweled with lakes that mirror snowcapped peaks.

It’s where you camp the night before you attempt one of those high peaks, and wake up to a frosted world. Frozen or flowing, water infuses the landscape; it is in tiny pools, rivulets that gather into streams that tumble and plunge toward the rivers down below. It’s in dewdrops that bead the leaves of every flower and bush.

From high summer to the first snows of October, it’s a place of extravagant life. A lot of living is packed into a few short months. A whole lot of procreating. A lot of interspecies drama. A lot of color. The wildflowers waste no time, and neither do the bumblebees, butterflies, and birds. Tiny pollinated urns turn into plump berries on scarlet bushes. Ptarmigan chicks scuttle about in the heather, and marmots hoot at intruders.

Many modest summits top out in the subalpine, offering views that rival those from any hard-gained alpine peak. Glorious undulating ridges offer miles of delightful scrambling, alternating between rocky outcrops, meadows, and dense thickets of scrappy, dwarfish trees. Sibley Ridge and Trapper Peak are two of my favorite destinations in the subalpine.

At a lower elevation Tsuga mertensia thickly carpets the slopes, but in the subalpine it is sparser, more widely scattered. It lives in clusters that are most often situated on small rises or ridges. In other words — atolls. The trees do not populate bowls or depressions; they are staking out the high ground. Why?

Because that is where the snowpack is thinnest, which means that is where the growing season is the longest. It’s where young trees are safe from avalanches that sweep away or bury everything in their path, and it’s where tiny saplings feel the warmth of the June sun, long before the surrounding meadow is free from its heavy blanket of snow.

Despite how these outcrops and promontories are exposed to the full force of winter gales, it is precisely here that young mountain hemlocks find a hospitable place to get started in life. Especially if they can grow close in the orbit of an old survivor. The typical pattern is that there are, within a small atoll, one or two trees that are significantly older and larger than the rest.

In any atoll, one intrepid tree had to start things off. If the winged seed from a Tsuga mertensia cone was lucky enough to land on a good spot, it might make it. The first years would have been the hardest. Then there comes a time when this persistent pioneer tree becomes shelter for another. And so the atoll begins.

Once a single tree is tall enough to poke out above the winter snowpack, it creates conditions favorable for the growth of new trees. The dark foliage of the tree speeds melting around its base, allowing for patches of warm, bare ground while an adjacent meadow is still blanketed in snow.

There is a correlation between snowpack and the establishment and expansion of atolls. In an extended period of drier and warmer winters, atolls are likely to expand and new ones will become established. When there is a longer growing season, trees stake out new ground. These trailblazers will survive and grow tall enough to establish a safe harbor for subsequent seedlings. On the other hand, a string of heavy snow winters will inhibit the expansion of atolls and prevent new ones from getting started.

The way these mountain hemlock atolls are dispersed across the landscape is very satisfying to the eye. It is as aesthetic as any designed garden. One way to think of it is that this particular instance of beauty is shaped by hardship. Or, to be more precise, it is shaped by Tsuga mertensia’s response to hardship.

In our thinking about evolution and adaptation, we often recognize the importance of competition — especially in situations where life is particularly precarious. Do we appreciate, also, the importance of cooperation? Do we understand the ways in which one tree grows in the grace of another?

Hidden away in a dresser drawer, I have a beautiful hand-made bowl that was given to me as a gift about two decades ago, from an old friend of mine, a fine woodworker. It really should not be in a dresser drawer. It should be where people can see it, and I have determined that it now will be.

I had invited my friend to Washington to climb Mount Shuksan, a glorious peak that rivals, to my mind, the Grand Teton in both its rugged profile and extraordinary dignity. It was such a pleasure to climb it with my friend. Although it was not explicitly stated, I felt that the bowl he gave me was kind of an exchange; I shared with him a sacred place, a place that I dearly love, and he shared with me an exquisite expression of his love of wood.  

Inside the bowl, also hidden from view, are a couple hundred stones. To be more specific, they are semi-precious stones that I had gathered, shaped, and polished over a few years. I intended to fashion them into jewelry, particularly earrings to adorn the lovely ears of my wife and daughters. Intended is the key word in that last sentence.

Leopardskin jasper, intricately-branched moss agates, citron with rutile inclusions, tiger’s eye and hawk’s eye, rare and lovely Biggs jasper, jade, serpentine, hematite banded with iron, rhodonite and delicate pink rhodochrosite, pearly-blue chalcedony, deep blue sodalite laced with veins of milky quartz, softly-glowing green amazonite.

I dabbled for a while in lapidary work, but never acquired the skills and expensive equipment necessary to become serious about it. To my recollection, all I ever made was earrings. When we moved to a house that didn’t have a good space for a grinding wheel, I put the unfinished stones in the wooden bowl, and that was the end of that. I’ve not worked with them since.

I rarely think about these stones. Whenever I happened to open the drawer and see them—always incidentally, while looking for something like toenail clippers—they have felt symbolic of the unfinished bits of my life. The intention I once had of turning them into jewelry has slipped, like an unreturned phone call, into oblivion.

This tendency to begin something and not to finish it is part of my nature. It manifests in so many ways: Doing the dishes, reading Tolstoy, finishing up a degree in Restoration Horticulture. Learning to build a cob house and a green roof. Grafting fruit trees, cultivating mushrooms, making stone jewelry, playing the trombone. Half-done. Half-learned.

Enough learned to know and appreciate what is possible. When I look at the bowl of stones, a little zing goes through me, a little moment of enthusiasm. What if I set up my grinder again, turned these stones into something finished? But I suspect I won’t do it. Yes, yes, I could, if only I set my mind to it. But there are so many books to (not) read first. 

Despite the fact that they never became jewelry, I don’t regret any of the time spent on those stones. Both effort and joy went into the process. I loved finding rough-cut slabs at some funky little rock shop. Rummaging through crates at estate sales. Spending the day at some obscure creek or beach looking for water-polished treasures, or chipping away at outcrops for agates.

And then the pleasure of finding just the perfect little square inch of beauty in the stone that I could chisel out, then grind into the shape I wanted, then polish until it shimmered. It was an activity I could get lost in, an activity that kept me in the moment and quieted the mind. In this way, it was like making music, or shaping a poem, or climbing a cliff.

Maybe at some point I will actually make a few more pairs of earrings. The rest of the stones I may just give away, unfinished. They serve no practical purpose. I guess you could put one in your pocket and rub it. See what it does for you. Throughout history, people in many cultures invested stones with symbolic meaning.

According to Wikipedia, worry stones are “smooth, polished gemstones, usually in the shape of an oval with a thumb-sized indentation, used for relaxation or anxiety relief. The smoothness of the stone is most often created naturally by running water. The size of a worry stone is often about half the size of a silver dollar coin…”

This use of the stone is reminiscent of many ancient beliefs about stones conferring certain powers or protections upon those who are adorned with them. I don’t know about that. But I do know that working with these stones did my spirit some good, in much the same way that growing a garden and keeping bees does my spirit good.

Making money from the sale of jewelry was never the goal. In fact, making the jewelry was never even the goal. What was the goal? I suppose I don’t really know, but it’s sort of like this: I remember the way my dog Rosie, who has moved on now, would gnaw at a bone for hours, lost to everything but the visceral pleasure of crunching on a pig’s knuckle.

A dog who worries at a bone has not a care in the world. When I was hunched over a work bench, chipping away at a hunk of stone, there was no room in my mind for anxiety about the future, or disappointment with myself, or gripes aimed at the Creator.

A dog “worries at a bone,” we say. Funny that this word worry applies to both a mental state of anxiety and the verb that can also describe what we do (or at least what I do) to banish it. Maybe the stones in this gorgeous little bowl are worry stones. A way to calm the spirit. 

A kind of pig’s knuckle. The mineral manifestation of prayer. A way to feel connected to the earth. A way to pay attention. A way to show gratitude.