I went to the river too because living in America means absorbing an endless broadcast of technicolor neuroses, like a B-grade drive-in horror movie projected onto a paper screen in the rain. Going outside is the only specific remedy available. To hear a river and smell it, and if you elect to keep the occasional fish, to taste it as well, may put you in relationship to the world again.
Last year I taped two small pieces of paper above my desk. On one I’d written in block letters, REFUSE, and the other, SIMPLIFY. Each of these things, like the Golden Rule, is easy to say and hard to accomplish.
I recently looked back through ten years of journals and letters and found, predictably, that my obsessions didn’t change. Love, death, weather, family, fishing, God, booze, landscape, books, music, history, memory, America, time, all make serial appearances. But what struck home like a harpoon was the litany of complaint, bordering on despair, about digital life, as the culture vanished into parody, like a long joke with no punch line. And through all those years, I stayed in harness. We all did, as our politics darkened and decoupled, and the kids got all fucked up. We kept working for the Corporations, full time. We pay to play, and go on paying. Posting a letter like this to the socials feels like trying to communicate by passenger pigeon, if you strangled the pigeon, and just threw it in the direction you wanted it to go. […]
After a while I sat down on a deadfall, lay the stick at my feet in the shallows, and watched a cloud of minnows negotiate the soft hydraulic that pulled on my boots, as they fed on whatever I’d kicked up. I listened to the buzzing high summer day, the water sliding by, the sounds of birds that don’t know that we name them. I was treasuring up a fund of daylight and silence to get through the fall, and this world we’ve made.
There are places we remember, and things we used to do. Like the river I imagine they change and breathe, in fact and in memory. I think we can go back there and find them. That’s what I’m going to try to do.