The couple times I camped with Appalachians Against Pipelines, I was keenly aware of dipping in and out of a river of resistance. People who hadn't been old enough to vote in the last election and people who could have voted for JFK stopped bulldozers with their bodies. They stayed in tree sits for years. I'm not built for physical heroism so I spent a lot of time cooking. As a result, my experience was more mundane and possibly sweeter for it.
My first day there, a couple people were hanging out in the kitchen tent while everyone else was on the mountain. They told me what it's like to be cut out of the sleeping dragon, the steel pipes welded into a V activists lock their arms into. Apparently, the sparks from the acetylene torch sting but it's not too bad. Just scary. That night, two of the younger people came into the kitchen tent rattled. The bulldozers had chased them that day.
“I don't think they meant to hurt us,” somebody with an abundance of Midwestern good will said. It turned out he was new to camp too. The other just snorted. I'm a mom-shaped person. My body is squishy and my reading glasses live on top of my head. Maybe that's why, despite having just met me, they both accepted hugs and some late dinner.
The next day, people played with Dolly, my little one-eyed pekingese. At some point, I came out of the kitchen tent to find one of them, the youngest, doing a sort of arrhythmic worm, slithering across the stubbly field behind her. She was seeing the world from Dolly's perspective. I pealed garlic in the sun. Somebody sang “Blue Diamond Mines.” Out of nowhere, I heard fine fiddling from somebody else who had learned to play on YouTube. I fell a little bit in love with all of them. Even when I was completely overwhelmed.
I thought I was going back. I don't move well in winter anymore so I thought I would see them again in spring but my season of being in less pain ended right when it was warm enough for me to go. I canceled my visit in April and again in May. It just wasn't possible to be out of bed for that long. In May, a safety test failed spectacularly. Surely, they can't open the pipeline right after a picture of a pipe with an eight foot gash in its side hit the news. Surely, there's more time.
There wasn't.
In their infinite and benevolent wisdom, the powers that be started the fracked gas flowing last Friday. I'll update you when it leaks. Or explodes. Or doesn't and we just keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Things are less than ideal when the best option is slow rolling ecocide.
It is, as the rabbi says, forbidden to despair. It's also the obvious choice sometimes. Being who I am, loving what I love and seeing the world the way I do, I've cast my lot with the long shot. We say, “another world is possible.” We don't say it's likely. When I read that the LLC organized to wreck the mountains had started the gas flowing, I cried. I thought about the pretty little creeks, the communities in the blast zone. I especially thought about comrades who gave so much more than I did, spending cold winters sleeping rough, months in jail, years of their lives fighting that horrible, greedy pipeline. I wished several grizzly things on Joe Biden and Joe Manchin and went outside. The grape leaves on our rickety arbor had broadened into maturity.
I decided to make dolmas. It's much harder to despair when I'm cooking something tricky. Food, making it, sharing it, eating it, is as close as I come to communion, not with God so much as with people. Scooping a little filling into the center of each leaf, tucking in the sides and rolling from the bottom up, I thought about all the people before me who have had to decide how to move through the world. We're here because somebody learned which leaves were poison and which were food. We're here because somebody figured out how to weave saplings into a fence so the beast that comes down from the hills didn't carry off any kids that year. We're here because somebody nursed an orphan, because somebody learned to bake bread. When humans became our own worst beast, we survived because we protected each other, because we showed solidarity and mercy, because we learned, however imperfectly, to get along. We're here because somebody made music so beautiful that somebody else didn't throw themselves in the river. Somebody fought to keep our great great grandparents out of the mines. We're here because somebody loved us.
I don't deceive myself. My ancestors did terrible things. We enslaved people. I call this valley stolen because my ancestors stole it. The parts of my DNA which should be Ashkenazi are largely Cossack. They're unlikely to have gotten there through consensual relationships. We're here because of the horror we inflict on each other as well.
A life is a small thing in the long, broad river of a species. Each life, each decision to stand up, to be kind, to help, to show solidarity or mercy, alters the course of that river by inches, by miles, in ways we may not see until the river has long passed us. I am a small part of that tide. As a small part, it's not my job to win great victories so much as it is to side with the best parts of what brought me here: to mend fences, bake bread, to be brave and love everything I can as well as I can. I don't know how to do that without it breaking my heart at least a little again and again. So it's my job to let my heart get broken. That's alright. It will mend.