February Field Notes

On a February day a long time ago, Mom was driving a grade school version of me west on I-105. For reasons I can’t remember, we were alone in the car without my three younger brothers. The freeway bent behind the pulp mill, where towering stacks billowed clouds of sulfurous smoke beneath a steely sky. If you didn’t see the peeling paint on downwind cars or the cottonwoods along the river with bark becoming orange, if you didn’t see the sudsy detergent spewing just downstream into the McKenzie River or were too young to know that even in an otherwise all-white rock-solid blue-collar town it was the poor people who lived next to that stinking gray pall; if you didn’t smell it and held your eyes just right … it could be beautiful.

Mom was in a teachable moment. She asked if I knew any kids at school who didn’t have friends. Told me I needed to be kind to them. Back then I couldn’t have known that Mom was a fierce advocate for the underdog, a champion of the have-nots. She had terrific empathy for the downtrodden who struggled along in the muddy ruts of life. Mom understood intuitively that we all writhe within the straightjacket of a caste system rigidly imposed by shaming. She knew the cruelty of people because she grew up on the other side of the hill. The kids who bussed to school from Upper Smith River were considered hicks, even in the little town of Drain. Never mind that she became valedictorian or that I have her sports letterperson jacket folded in a box in my office. Mom internalized all of this injustice, sometimes with tragic outcomes. Yet there she was, driving me around the pulp mill and doing what she could to sabotage human cruelty by insisting her eldest son be kind. I wouldn’t say this childhood conversation was an epiphany. Yet here in the dark predawn of my birthday with streetlights glistening on pavement still soaked from yesterday’s twelve-hour deluge, I remember that drive.

Over the decades, I have taught myself to piss into the wind of cultural norms. This can be messy, but it’s worth it. As a result, one of my unwritten jobs in life is loving the unloved. I love to love the beings who make many people turn up their noses and turn their backs. Those that make them say “eeewwww!” Salamanders, snakes, slugs, and stinging nettles are all within my purview. Mom didn’t teach me everything in this regard. She detested snakes and taught her boys to be afraid. Nevertheless, I became an amphibian and reptile biologist and chose to reach beyond this intergenerational anxiety.

Younger daze …

One of my finest parenting moments was watching my then three-year-old daughter weave through a family gathering in Mom and Dad’s backyard with a two-foot Northwestern garter snake draped over her forearm. Mom didn’t scream. This was her granddaughter, and grandkids could do no wrong. I’ve not forgotten the feeling of intergenerational healing from seeing my little curly-haired girl with a snake on her arm trying to hold its bobbing head above the grass.

And I love February. The dwarf month in late winter when people join hands and stare at their navels in communal depression. I have my reasons for embracing this maligned month. Daylight is beginning to stretch its winter arms, and even at 5:30 in the evening colors are still visible outside. My honeybees are stirring, dragging their winter dead from the hive and making foraging flights to harvest pollen from blooming crocuses and the golden dangles of hazel catkins. Buttery wood violets will begin to bloom in the moss between the muddy tracks of the driveway to the Johnny Gunter place. February also is the anniversary of my new life, the time when I surfaced from months of clinical malaise and hucked my antidepressants into the bathroom wastebasket (don’t try this at home). February is also my birthday month.

Even in the caste system of seasons, there is always something lesser to beat up on. This year February cut a break because it followed a January ice storm that beat down trees, knocked out electricity, and sent aging boomers like me slipping and falling, sometimes to serious injury. Around here, people are saying thank god it’s February because January was a long damned year! As my therapist once joked, isn’t it amazing how the elevator always goes another floor down? This February I’ve even given myself over to mild belligerence. When someone complains about the weather, I politely suggest they find a sunnier place to live and leave me be. This could be construed as passive-aggressive. Whatever.

Yes, I have a contrarian spirit that runs as deep and wide as the battleship sky now gathering light outside my window. But it has energy that can be captured and spun into acts of emotional judo. While rebelliousness feeds my love for the unloved, it also leads to some uncomfortable paradoxes. I love trees but own two chainsaws and a portable sawmill; nothing beats the sweet turpentine smell of freshly-milled Douglas-fir.

I've grown to dislike that pulp mill but understand that it directly or indirectly employed half the families I grew up with. I’m a perfectionist without patience. I love my friends and family (even when they gripe about the weather), but choose to spend my birthday on a solo trip to Upper Smith River. This morning I miss Mom’s wisdom and empathy for the underdog, while understanding the angry damage from which that compassion was spawned. A wise person once told me they could measure the depth of a person’s positive mental health by their ability to shoulder unresolved cognitive dissonance. That line caused me to scratch my head for a bit. Apparently, I’m an accidental champion.

This year I’m not having a birthday party. Nevertheless, I am asking my readers for a gift. In honor of my mother, sometime in this downtrodden month of February, look up, force a smile, and choose to open your arms to the unloved. Kindness has become vastly underrated.