In America Today

Field Notes, End of April Ed.

The morning air is cold as it passes in the window, and the light breeze flickers the early long shadows in waves across the wall, and the curtains sway. Outside the window I can see blue sky lit with orange light and across our small valley the skeletal tree arms that have been reaching into the sky all winter in lonely hollow are suddenly painted with green on the tips as the valley begins to spring. The sound of the creek, which doesn’t make it over hear most of the year, is strong. The runoff is beginning as the southern snow faces begin their melt in the mountains to our north. The creek carries the melt down our valley towards town where it joins the larger river, and onward towards the Pacific. We are just little temporary humans, but this bigger world goes on, day in and out, night in and out, forgetting all the little creatures like us that are just temporary little motions across the map.

From the sound to the light to the smell, I inhale it all, and set my bare feet to the floor to go make coffee. Acre jumps off the bed from behind me and rushes downstairs and dances excitedly for his breakfast. The boy loves breakfast just as much every single day. And why not? He’s got fancy, slow dried food from Canada, topped with fresh chicken, pumpkin and blueberries. I feed him while I make coffee then go sit in the sun, drunk on the first cup, drunk on the warm sunlight, drunk on watching the steam rise out of the cup and into the mountain air.

I’ve been making a point for the last year to not touch my phone for the first hour of waking. I work from my phone. Sure, I could likely get by mostly with a laptop but the phone does allow incredible freedom of movement while still maintaining much of the work that needs to be done with regards to keeping in various levels of contact with people, from customers to vendors, and the network required to run a business. I absolutely appreciate the freedom the phone offers, but in recent years I’ve really had to recognize and work against the all consuming draw it has and make it work for me, and not vice versa. These tools of this modern age are dangerous in their own ways and we are still early in them, so we don’t even know exactly the harm they are imposing on our society, though many have become glaring.

For one, they distract us from family and friends. Real life time with real life people has been replaced with digital signals sent back and forth. The dopamine makes it feel like it’s ok, but in the big picture it clearly isn’t. It’s not enough. We need real people in our lives. We are told that AI will teach everyone in the future, and I call BS… We will always need people to teach people, for the same reason puppies need their mothers for the first several weeks of life. Only a human can teach a human how to interface with other humans. It’s more than just a book knowledge set. It’s the complexity of interacting with others on a larger societal level that involves not only physical interaction, but emotional interaction, and all the complexities that come with interacting with people that range from joy to sadness to anger to jealousy and everything in between. AI can not teach us how to read faces, not in the interactive, conversational way. We need humans in our lives. We need old people in our lives to clearly portray the history that was built before we came to be. We need young people to offer us the fresh energy and eyes that only the young carry. We need the animals and the birds and the plants, and to know how to interact with them along the way, because these digital signals are not real. They could go away tomorrow. Platforms online will come and go… these fields, forests, mountains, rivers, plants, and animals will remain just like the creek passing though my valley.

After I’ve finished coffee, and El and Simon head off to their respective days I take Acre to the creek. It’s cold enough I put on fleece pants and a vest. The creek is always alive, even in the winter. But the winter dormancy is quiet. Ice and cold slows the water. The rare insect in the cold stand alone. All the surrounding plants and trees lose their leaves in the fall and you can feel that the trees have retreated into the soil, into their roots for the whole of winter. But now, as days are becoming longer and the sun is making its way higher into the sky, driving an arched line further north with each passing day, they have come back above ground. The cottonwoods are finally budding. They started over a week ago down in the main valley along the Clark Fork, but now they are moving northward further into the mountains. The dogwoods are turning red with their own leaves. Even the pines which stay green all winter seem to have a new energy about them and I can smell the sap in the air. And insects, they are everywhere now. Spiders crawl on the log I set my cloths and towel on, and my swim hole feels private with its fresh painted wall of green. It all feels very good and then the sun hits my bare skin, and I can’t help but just stand in it for a few minutes, letting it absorb into my skin, into my veins, into my bones.

Then I step in the creek. Hot damn, it’s still very cold. I walk out towards the stronger flow, reach down and pull a stick and throw it down the bank for Acre, and then submerge myself, belly down, head under, and swim into the strong current and let it wash me down before I swim out of the current. A few breaths in and it feels so refreshing but I’m still catching my breath from the cold. I swim towards a spot I like to sit, deep enough to keep me submerged to my neck but without fighting the current. I sit here for a few minutes with drips of water hanging off my eyelids, and the sun refracting in the water droplets. In my minds eye I’m taking photos. Wondering how I could make these shining drops in an actual image. Two geese fly over. And then down towards Acre, thirty feet or so down stream of me, I see the new resident ducks, two mallards, a couple, one green head and his lady. They have been here most days lately, and I suspect they are building a nest somewhere near here. The first day Acre chased them off, but now he seems more intrigued to just watch them. Last week (I posted a video) the green head flew up and landed in the water directly beside where Acre was standing and the two of them had more than a long moment just checking each other out, completely at peace with one another.

As I sit in the water, I can feel my body getting colder and colder and it feels good.
I sit in here every day, and have for several years now. In the summer it is never as cold as winter, obviously, but for some reason it still sometimes feels colder. Today is one of those days. I felt less cold when the water was ten degrees colder, and the air was 50 degrees colder. I don’t have a good explanation for that but I like the surprise.

While I’m watching the creek pass, watching the duck, getting colder, I’m not thinking about much else, and that is the beauty of the creek swim. As soon as I’m home I’ll be opening my computer and phone and start interacting with the world at large. I’ll inevitably open social media at some point and it will tell me how dire the world has become. But I think it isn’t so any more than any other time on earth. There have always been struggles and wars and weather events. The problem is that we are inundated now, and expected, at least by some, so be ridiculously socially “engaged” with every single event on earth. It’s impossible of course. We rarely do much that affects beyond our arms length, let alone half way around the world.

And that is the crazy part about the digital age that I’m discovering for myself and hoping for more to catch on to… that we can not possibly keep up with the level of information input we receive in a day. And the human never was intended to do so. This is an absolutely modern problem that we are not evolved enough to fully comprehend or take care of. We as individuals desperately need to regain our presence in the world that surrounds us, not the one on the other side of this massive sphere. There is nothing wrong with the global connections we make, and we can interact to a degree with people around the world… On a given day I might be communicating with someone in Colombia about coffee, a friend in England, and bag manufacturer in Taiwan, but in the end, I’m alive and living in Montana, in a small valley to the north of a small town. My actual interactions will be with some people in our coffee shop, and my neighbors I’ll see on the trail and in front of my house. Maybe I’ll go the hardware store later…

Society isn’t getting lost. We aren’t sinking. The world isn’t ending. Wars are happening, but not everywhere. And almost no one on earth likes them but a diabolic few that have figured out how to profit from them. Almost everyone on earth is doing exactly what you and I are doing, which is going about their day, trying to get their work day satisfied so they can enjoy time with their co-workers, their friends, and their families. Add to it a trail run and dog and it’s not a bad day.

But what is frustrating to see is how many have become lost in the device. An incredible number of people are stressing things they have no control over, things they don’t actually even know or understand fully, things they are told to be upset about. And the people telling them to be upset, for the most part, have nothing to do with them short of money, and control. Online, anger sells. How? It keeps people attached, addicted. It’s the reason we have the term “doom scrolling,” because it’s a real thing. We are losing our attention to a fake world, a false narrative, and perhaps most sadly, to data sellers whose currency is our time. And that time, as much as we think it goes on forever, doesn’t. Life passes quickly enough without wasting it in the digital void. Our families get older. Death catches up to all of us eventually. And that time is never given back.

This is what I’ve been working on in my own life, trying to navigate the balance act between working in a digital era, and living in a physical world. As more of society retreats into the digital world it sometimes is tempting to go there with them, but it’s not my bigger goal, so I have to remind myself, close it down when it’s not worthwhile. Don't fall for the doom scroll. Don’t fall for the anger. Don’t get obsessed with “news” that is ever changing and only intended to create outrage.

There is a mentality my wife helped set in our business in the early years, which is to always focus on where we want the business to go, not where others are taking theirs. Don’t look at what works for other people. Don’t do something just because someone else. And I try to live this way with my own day to day life too. I don’t write fiction stories based on what worked for others. I don’t pace my day how others do. I try to keep in mind that as an individual I can do things completely differently than other individuals. It is what defines us, as individuals. This mentality is an extension of the notion that “comparison is the thief of joy.” It’s also an extension of jealousy being one of the deadliest undertakings we can pursue as humans. As soon as we begin comparing ourselves to others we are trying to step out of our own individual lives. And it’s a dangerous step to take. If we focus on what we are doing, and what we want to happen, not what we don’t want to happen, powerful things begin to happen. A similar logic can be seen in skiing/snowboarding and mountain biking. You never look at where you don’t want to go, because you are likely to get drawn there. You don’t look at the two trees you are want to go between, you look at the space in between them, and follow that line, and that line alone. It requires work. And focus. But if you let your eyes drift to one of the trees to either side there is a decent chance you are going to hit it.

Life is the same. We are all individuals. Our line is our own. And that is the best line to stay in. The second you start focusing on obstacles you are likely to hit one. The second you focus on someone else’s line you are likely to hit things you never realized were there.

I crawl out of the water slowly. After 3 or 4 minutes of full submersion I feel good and cold. My breath is calm. I feel refreshed. I linger and dunk under one more time before I crawl up on the bank and the air is warm enough I just sit with the cold dripping for a few minutes, the sun hitting each drop and warming it. Acre has grabbed his stick, and he’ll likely carry this one home where we have a hundred others that are ready to burn after a winter of him carrying one home most days. I’m not sure how or why he loves this so much but this is his thing, and I approve.

We hop the small stream back to the main bank and I ride my orange bike home with him running beside me, stick in mouth. It’s sunny and spring feels as if we may be past the heavy gray of the season. We’ll get more but we are out of the heaviest part for sure. Color is coming back for the season. It’s vivid, and full things alive, from ticks to bees, to moths and flies. In the backyard I’ve got a rabbit or two that I know is going to wreak havoc on my garden, but I’m fine with it. They are cute in their own way. Life is full of these small bumps in the road, and it would be ridiculous to not expect otherwise.