That’s the theme of this issue. It was inspired by S.J. Tucker in a song I came across during the last few days of the 2020 quarantine.
All the old familiar rhymes are not gonna fit these wild, wild times.
What’s familiar’s gotta be run out on a rail. (Tucker, 2020)
We have all walked into a strange and unfamiliar place this past year and some, as the world around us changed. It felt like everything stopped and all that was familiar… Just. Went. Away.
We all wanted to head to our local music venue and dance to our favorite bands.
I wanted to call my friends and organize a camping trip to the redwoods.
The trip across the Bay to San Francisco and to my daughter and her husband seemed a hundred miles away.
Memories emerge as I write.
I have a micro business selling handcrafted hats. Fun fantasy hats, at art fairs and in small shops. Of course that all just vanished, and with it, my income. No one was buying hats. However, I am lucky. I have a good, secure living situation and know that dinner will be on the table each night. My partner and I learned to navigate the curbside pick up and home delivery options to get our groceries. We were OK. I repurposed my crafting area for masks and PPE creation.
In July, the fires began. The sky turned red and we watched as the wild places we loved became ash.
In October, an emergency trip to Oregon through the smoke and ash, with the flames from the wildfires in Mendocino threatening to close the highways (again), to aid a friend in the hospital with stage four cancer. No one was allowed inside to see her. I left the things she asked for with a social worker. I texted numerous times with her daughter and, when she was well enough, with my friend. I never said goodbye in person.
As September 2021 came and my mask began to show too much wear to be useful, I stitched together a new one. I remembered, as I did, the hundreds of masks that had gone through this machine in 2020.
Boxes and boxes of filtered masks carefully washed, then steam ironed for sterilization and packed in sterile plastic while wearing gloves, labeled for size, then given to Dames Who Care Motorcycle Delivery to get into the hands of nurses. More boxes, quickly delivered to a shopping basket set out on Anne, my colleague’s driveway to be sent to agricultural workers, and boxes filled to the top sent to the Zuni and Hopi nations and the Rancherias of Northern Ca.
Notes left in each other’s mailboxes requesting more supplies, or leaving supplies on doorsteps. Emails requesting more PPE and PayPal was my friend. Never meeting in person.
I gave a young volunteer at the hospital struggling with an ill-fitting surgical mask one of the ones our group designed and I’d brought for that purpose. It was made from quilting cotton printed with the map from Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I could see her smile through the layers of fabric and filters. For today, she could walk the wooded lanes and by-ways of Middle Earth, a place where the ordinary is the strength of the land and 2nd breakfast is a given. Where The Wild is in capital letters and there are Elves.
A fisherman in the little dock at Newport, OR wearing a Game of Thrones T-shirt and an overused, ragged disposable mask. I handed him a new one with red dragons and lined in black. His eyes lit up, and for that day, he, too, could fly the skies on dragonback.
And, then, a day came and no one asked for any more. I cleaned up the sewing room and put away the filtering materials, the ⅛” elastic, the strings, the bias tape and the squares of quilting cotton and the rhythm of my hours changed again.
For some it has been a time of loneliness and wandering in a wilderness bounded by the walls of our houses and apartments. We tried to find the comforting familiar in things: that quilt, those pillows, a favorite show, a well loved novel by a window, a game of chess or Dungeons & Dragons over Zoom. Or by trying out new skills or returning to something one loved and set aside as the adult world of work and family and commitments took up our time. While also missing all those everyday things that gave shape and contour to our days. In June of 2020, what I wanted, desperately, was to walk to a cafe and sit and listen to jazz over the PA and savor a cappuccino. I remember saying, “I miss the city I live in.”
For others it was a pause to reflect and change the things in our lives that just were not working.
In too many places, the sirens cry, and hospitals fill to overflowing, and we all witness exhausted doctors, nurses, and medical professionals begging for basic supplies and equipment.
The wilderness deepens around us as we enter the autumn of 2021, not knowing what will come next.
It remains a time of fear as relatives and friends are whisked away to hospital beds, maybe never to return.
For too many it continues to be a time of worry and uncertainty as our resources, financial and emotional, are depleted to the breaking point.
And, for far, far too many, it remains a time of grief beyond measure as the dead are buried.
Outside, the word is changing as well.
The global climate crisis continues unabated.
In this issue, hurricane Ida crashed into New Orleans, and in this interconnected age we live in, into our copy-editor, Laurie’s, neighborhood, delaying publication of this journal. It’s bleak and predicted to become bleaker, still. One writer in this issue cleaned up after both Ida and Nickolas. In the 100 + degree heat of the desert SW, a writer didn’t make her deadline but spent the time in a hospital bed recovering from heat stroke with her mother, dying of cancer, in the next bed.
It’s easy to lose hope in this uncharted place we find ourselves in. This mapless wilderness where the way forward seems occluded by an impenetrable thicket of thorns: Civil unrest, the rising fascist and theocratic oppressive regimes, the seeming lack of caring by monied interests and politicians who invade the airwaves with false information and agendas that are (literally) killing our neighbors, friends, colleagues, families, and ruining our businesses.
Where do we go from here? I keep asking this question. I know you do, too.
This summer I attended the SFWA’s online Nebula Awards and the Mythopoeic Society’s annual conference, also online, and immersed myself in speculative fiction. My first love. There, I reclaimed that love and started writing stories again. So: I find a path through the wilderness for myself.
As writer and naturalist, Thea Boodhoo, said in a personal conversation recently, “Literary fiction makes the familiar strange and speculative fiction makes the strange familiar.” In speculative fiction, the dystopian scenario takes many forms, from post-nuclear holocaust landscapes to extreme oppression (as in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Tepper’s body of work). There is always some protagonist who finds a path forward. These paths are never straightforward or easy, and some are exceedingly strange including total transformations of entire species and ecosystems. In these stories we find the artist’s ability to evoke new conversations and ideas. To imagine a way forward. This is one purpose of the creative: To give voice and vision to new ways of thinking and perceiving and imagining what would happen if… It’s a powerful thing when a story becomes an idea and an idea becomes manifested.
We remain in a wilderness, even now, looking for an end to this pandemic and the resulting economic and emotional distress. Looking for solutions that will create a more just and better world to live in. Looking to find the harder solutions needed to keep our planet a living biosphere. Let us all become artists and imagine our path from here.
One day, the wild will be safe from human interference and home to the many creatures of our planet and the familiar world of 2nd breakfasts and good books and that cafe where there is jazz and cappuccinos and friends will be ours again. In a new shape. A different way. No less loved for that. It’s not going to be easy or straightforward.
I imagine that, when I am very old and a child born this year grows up and asks (if they ever do), “What was it like, then…? When we nearly lost it all? How did you feel? How did you ever survive?”
I will say, “We never forgot that time when we nearly lost it all. It is all in this picture I carry with me: Scientists under the charred remains of ancient giant sequoias weeping for their loss. In the mountains wearing masks against Covid-19. No one would ever think to create the conditions of that loss, now. It took a lot of people working very hard to make that happen, and the work continues. We should never try to forget, because it really took everyone to get it done.”
September 22, Autumn Equinox (Northern Hemisphere) 2021
“Wild Times” was written and performed by S.J. Tucker, released July 3, 2020. It can be found here: https://skinnywhitechick.bandcamp.com/track/wild-times
I referenced these news reports about the giant sequoias of the Sierras killed in the 2020 Castle fire and threatened in September by the 2021 KNP Complex fire that is burning as I write in Sequoia National Park:
Sommer, L. (2021). A Single Fire Killed Thousands of Sequoias. Scientists Are Racing to Save the Rest. KQED News; National Public Radio, 9/17/21 https://www.kqed.org/news/11889023/a-single-fire-killed-thousands-of-sequoias-scientists-are-racing-to-save-the-rest
InciWeb developed and maintained by Forest Service, F. and A. M. (2021, September 22). Knp complex. KNP Complex Daily Update September 22, 2021 – InciWeb the Incident Information System. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/article/7838/66652/.
Poet, writer, artist in fabric, editor, Coreopsis Journal of Myth & Theatre