Half Baked

I can feel the pain here among sleepless nights.  I keep thinking of the Indian massacre on “Indian island.”  I keep thinking of the crack, meth, heroin in the streets.  The teams of homeless here, migrating through the summer.  The timber men, the jarheads, the big boots.  The monster trucks roaring through the streets.  A culture full of people that have no idea where they are, no idea of the heaven that they are in.  It’s a tearful dadaism to see such hardship in such a heaven.

The trauma of Humboldt County started not so long ago.  White settlers brought with them their ancient wounds and forged them into the landscape.  They came came out here prospecting for gold and ended up finding their gold in the trees.  Back then, though, the whole coast was old growth, unbroken stands of ancient forest.  And then they cut them down.  Who where these loggers?  Illiterate hicks trying to prove something, trying to make a name, claim some property for themselves, trying to be somebody, to get a piece of the pie.  The people now are as the people then, following capital, following “common sense."  But there was the same amount of beer sold.  The same domestic violence.  The same “my axe is bigger than your axe” mentality.  “Hey, I wonder if I can cut down that big-un?!”

And they brought their book, the only book these kind of people read, the Bible.  And they brought their hick religions, their Pentecostal, Seventh-day-Adventist, God-on-the-rock backwoods hick religion.   And the same self-abasement, same resentment, a hatred for all life, and the same alibi of sin and denial about what they really want and what they will do to get it. 

And they came and saw and took what they wanted.  You can see it today.  Look at their decrepit descendents … the old fat slobs gobbing down ice cream in their SUVs, the twenty-year-olds that look forty with their skeleton-walk.  Desperate, searching, yet no one knows for what.  Same thin noses.   Same beady eyes.  Same searching.  Same “I aim to make a name for myself.”  And the ones that are really good at it, the rich hicks, are the most rotten of all.  Shit does float to the top.  The Donald Trumps of this operation.  “It’s gonna be huuuuge!”

It’s the same place as it was a hundred years ago, still a frontier town.  Time moves slower here.  You can see it.  Maybe one day it will all look like Houston or Phoenix or Los Angeles, so covered in billboards and smog and bore-o-cracy that you can’t tell up from down any more.  But that day is, hopefully, still far off.

And then there is that massacre.  The people of Eureka conspired to kill the Wiyots during their sacred ceremony in Humboldt Bay.  The island in the bay was their traditional homeland, the physical place where their culture, here for 12,000 or so years, had worshiped as the center of the world, the emergence point of all living things.  The celebration would mark the annual renewal of the world.  They lived this way for millennia.  No extinctions.  No clearcuts.  No poverty.  No meth.  It was a goddamn paradise compared to what we have wrought.

How drunk were the Eurekans that night they went out there to kill the Wiyot off?  The Eurekans went up there and killed them – gunned them down, slashed them, stamped out their heads, smashing babies, tossing them in the bay.  “Just another ‘small matter’ of business to take care of.  Now sober up and get back to clearing some land!”  (Try replacing the word “clearing” with “redeeming”).

No one was ever prosecuted for this.  And their decedents are here today.  We’ve seen their faces and have heard their names I am sure.   And everyone knows about this.  Or they try to wash it away with the drink and the drugs.

96 percent of the old growth is gone since the white man came.  90 percent of large edible fish are gone.  The dams have brought the salmon runs to a near standstill.

It’s the same everywhere.  Funny how time moves a little different here, in slow motion.  But you can see them.  You can see the trauma of a place, can’t you?  You can see their little boys dressed up in full football gear.  You can hear them shoot their guns in the middle of the night.  You can hear them rev up their monster trucks and jeeps, all these little jack-booted Oedipuses.  Still wandering aimlessly, idiots wanting to make a name for themselves.  And not one of them can recognize what a natural wonder they are living in all the time.  They have no clue.  Like hungry ghosts, they can eat and eat, but they only want deliverance from their own wretchedness from some future messiah.  They will not stop until they have made the world as pale and banal as their own inner life waste.

Can we heal this trauma?  Can we turn about face and really see our world for what it is?  Can we put down our axes and shrug off a past that we fear will destroy us?  Can we lament our crimes and atone for our past?  It’s a collective thing, not just individual.  Don’t feel individually guilty …. that is what history wants you to feel, and that is why we resent history.  History is a house built from the bricks of guilt.  It’s our heritage and culture and economy.  Awareness, baring witness to it is the precious act.  Grief is not passive.  But the lament is the key to opening the heart again.  And from there we can be open to a new vision for living on this planet.

Scorcher

Victorian house