It’s always a good idea to watch the weather in the mountains.
A few months ago, Jessica & I loaded up the 4Runner for the last wheeled expedition down the ranch. We’re used to doing this trip every year now, but it never has a set date. Let’s call it a planned spur of the moment trip. It all depends on the weather. We head out with a few cases of beer, dried foods, snacks, and any materials we might want for winter projects. We put away the equipment, roll up the hoses, stack up the firewood, and make sure everything we don’t want crushed is under a roof. The next time we visit, we plan on skiing down. This year our weather window came at the beginning of November.
It’s been a weird year. I know a lot of people are still feeling 2020 and I’m betting we’ll always have this year in our memories as a special one. But this Fall — this fucking Fall. It was a lot.
Here in California, fire season raged full force into November with storm after storm of high winds and no rain. Nine months into our pandemic journey, the whole world collectively said fuck it and celebrated Thanksgiving together with their friends, family, and coronavirus. And of course: the election.
As the day wound down, with the firewood stacked and the hoses put away, the news came through the struggling satellite connection that Biden had officially won the election. A small, but welcome piece of relief. We enjoyed a warm dinner, some spicy cocktails, and hunkered down in the cabin to watch the snow fall. That evening we fired up the propane water heater, filled up the claw foot tub one last time and enjoyed an extra-steamy soak in the bath house while the snow piled up outside.
The next morning, we woke up to Winter: a foot of snow had fallen while we were asleep, and it was still coming down. The first real snowstorm of the season is always something special, and I can’t imagine a more magical setting to experience it.
And a little nerve-wracking when you’re in a wheeled vehicle. But I’ve learned a lot about getting stuck over the years. The important part isn’t avoiding getting stuck — it’s practicing getting un-stuck. But you know, try not to get stuck anyway.
When I think about what these past few months have felt like, the word that most often comes to mind is fractured. My life has been pretty good this year! I’ve been able to spend my time doing things I love in beautiful places. That’s… not how most people have experienced this pandemic. Some have been slowly going insane as their children enter the 827th month of Zoomschooling. Some have been going hopelessly into debt. Some have been bored at home binging stupid TV. Some have been driving trucks filled with packages around. Some have been stuck in hospitals caring for people dying of a disease they don’t believe exists.
You’d think that a pandemic would be a powerful force for a shared experience, but instead we’ve retreated further into our own fractured realities. I guess that’s what happens when you live in a culture without safety nets.
For me, this Fall was when things kind of broke. I’ve always had a realist view on the world: I don’t think people are good by default, I think most of our motive is driven by greed, and I don’t think our large problems are just going to magically disappear. But I do believe in our resourcefulness. I know we are a tremendously capable species, we have vast resources at our disposal, and we can accomplish great feats when our wills are aligned. That’s always been my last hope for humankind — because let’s be honest: we’ve got some big challenges ahead.
This Fall defeated that hope. There’s always been this theory that if Americans were presented with a universal threat — something like a deadly virus — the culture war fueling our partisanship might take a step back to work toward a common good. That’s not quite what happened.
It feels like instead, liberty became the defining weapon of our culture war. A great number of Americans came to believe that any personal sacrifice — no matter how small or inconsequential — is a threat to their liberty, and liberty must prevail against all else. Their definition of liberty has been twisted into a place where it means I got mine, fuck everyone else. It is the culmination of a worldview defined by false scarcity: common good is something to be fought against because anything good for someone else is by definition bad for me.
How do you affect positive change in a world that does not believe in common good?
We made it out of the ranch just fine. Hell, it was a fucking blast. Barreling through twelve miles of forest roads covered in snow was no problem. I don’t know if it was the high of the season’s first snowfall, the tension of wondering if we’d make it out, or just watching the snow spray past the windows — but it was something I’m still thinking about today.
As I think back to this morning, what strikes me most is the sense of nowness of it all. Fresh snow breeds a special kind of atmosphere. Sounds get closer. Every footprint and pawprint leaves a mark. The landscape gets smoothed out. Everything even smells different. It’s totally engrossing and I fucking love it. It’s a big part of what draws me to the mountains.
This is my definition of liberty. It is entirely dependent on the protection of the common good from those who would otherwise destroy it for their personal gain. It’s regulating loggers from clear-cutting our forests. It’s restricting development so the wilderness remains. It’s limiting fishing and hunting so we don’t exterminate the creatures of the forest.
Protecting and fostering the common good, that is the only path toward liberty.
It’s been hard to find now lately. In some ways it’s felt almost impossible. Every moment I feel like I grab a foothold of control on my attention, it gets ripped away again. This isn’t a new struggle, but it does feel like the challenge has been cranked up a few thousand percent in the past few months. It’s why you’re getting this newsletter so much later than anticipated. As I struggled to make final edits, insurrectionists flew bastardized American flags and stormed the capitol building to kidnap and murder our congressional leaders. So you know? I gave myself a break. It’s all kind of a lot.
This is something I’ve been trying to work on this year. Giving myself a break. Giving other people a break. A lot of people can’t take a break, and I get that. Kids have to eat. Rent has to be paid. Roads need to be plowed. That only makes it more important to give yourself and others a break when you can afford it.
This isn’t something I’m particularly practiced in, especially towards myself. It’s been the source of a lot of struggle this year. I’ve always had this mindset that I need to be winning on every transaction, that I need to be putting whatever skills and resources to their maximum use, that I need to make my mark for whatever that means. But I couldn’t even start to explain what I mean by those things, and I definitely don’t believe they are important.
One of my favorite books of 2020 was How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. In her own words:
The book is an argument about what productivity is for. One risk of being caught up with the idea of productivity is not asking questions like, “productive of what?” and “for whom and why?” It’s bound up with this critique of ideas of progress and innovation that don’t acknowledge what is already around us and that might need to be repaired and cared for.
And it’s obviously not about actually doing nothing. It’s really more about inhabiting a mindset that is different from the one that is pushed on us all the time. We’re asked to make judgments and to produce statements, opinions and knee-jerk reactions pretty frequently. Ultimately, we’re asked to have something to show for our time. Doing nothing is my shorthand for other ways of thinking and being.
My how that hits home.
When I was working at GitHub, I slotted into the capitalist idea of productivity perfectly. I was building a new company to be bigger, more profitable, with more impact on the world. It was a very comfortable way to be in the world. It was easy to answer what do you do?
I don’t live that way anymore, but I do live in a way that’s a lot easier to answer what are you excited about? And I’m thinking that’s a good thing.
This idea of resisting in place is something I’m working on. I don’t see it as fighting the system nor about reinforcing the system but more about seeking a third option: being stubbornly ambiguous and living life on my own terms. Enjoying the good parts of life, helping where I can, and working on putting myself in a better place to help when the time comes that my input is useful.
Speaking of enjoying the good parts, we bought a house in Palm Springs!
It’s a beautifully renovated mid-century house in the Twin Palms neighborhood designed by William Kriesel. The whole neighborhood is something out of a post-war catalog — a whole neighborhood of beautifully restored mid-century houses set amidst immaculate landscaping and palm trees with the San Jacinto mountains looming above.
It’s still a little more than weird to have a house that’s… finished? And nice? With a pool too? I’ve never had a house that’s any of those things and it still feels a bit wrong to have something this nice that I didn’t have to put blood sweat or tears into.
We don’t plan to move there or become snowbirds any time soon. For now, it’s just our own little private resort in the sunshine that we can bring the animals and enjoy some pool weather every now and then. And enjoy guests! Well, some day. Do you remember guests?
In most years, after we batten up the ranch for the winter we grab a pair of Christmas Trees and load them up on the truck as we say farewell to wheeled trips. One of them goes to our house in Tahoe, and one of them goes to my parents in Sacramento. Then we drop of the dog and hop on a plane to Ohio to spend Thanksgiving with Jess’ family.
It didn’t really go that way this year.
That early snowstorm meant no Christmas Trees. And of course, the pandemic. So no flights to Ohio. Instead we packed up the animals and drove down past the Eastern Sierras to the base of the San Jacintos, set up our Atomic Christmas Tree, and cooked far too much food for two.
This year’s been weird, sometimes painful, often shitty. I hope you’ve been able to give yourself a break, give others a break, and enjoy whatever good moments came your way.