The only time I have ever resented my friend Tirzah came on one hot day in January 2019, about halfway up the side of a hill high in the mountains of Haiti, on which we were scraping upward, wrists and ankles lashed by razor-edged grasses, despite the presence below of what was, if nothing else, a ragged but serviceable road.
We had already driven a couple of hours to get there, gripping the bars of a metal cage welded to the back of an old red pick-up truck. The ride was rough. The road, dirt and rock, was winding and misshapen, gouged where rain had gushed down the naked hills and taken big bites of earth with it. From time to time, I peered over the side of the cliff and then had to clench my eyes shut, stomach dropping into the void just a few feet past our wheels. Far below, the narrow coastal plain of Haiti spread out mottled green and brown, with the Caribbean Sea glittering a blue jewel beyond.
At a certain point, the road grew too rugged to continue riding the way we were, so we jumped out of the cage and began to walk, agreeing to meet the driver in a village up around the next series of looping bends. There were six of us altogether, and I took a step to follow the others, then turned to see Tirzah standing in the same spot.
“I’m going up,” she said, or words to that effect, and pointed at the hillside looming above us. “Anyone else coming?”
The others, accustomed to Tirzah’s penchant for taking the roads less travelled, waved her off. I hesitated at first, but the thought of letting her go alone rankled, and besides, I wanted to prove, in that moment, that I was just as hardy a traveller. It had already been a challenging trip for a safety-minded city kid; just the day before, getting me to ride in the back of a pick-up, without a seatbelt, had taken coaxing enough.
We began to climb, in our sandals and skirts. Tirzah forged ahead with a sure-footed determination; sometimes, I struggled to keep up. My Birkenstocks kept slipping. My hands scrambled to grab ahold of anything that would give purchase on a slope that seemed, at the time, far closer to vertical than one would hope. Thorns bit my skin. My palms dug into sharp grasses. I winced with the pain that leered with each scratch. I dared not look down, fearing sliding broken back to from where we had come; I dared not look up, cowering at the bulk of the mountain still waiting to be climbed.
At the top of the hill, after passing a few curious children and unimpressed cows, we stood up straight and looked around, and realized that we could not see the others coming up the road. The mountains of Haiti fold into their own inner worlds, and for a few minutes we stood there, alone, not knowing for sure where we were, or whether the rest of the group was ahead of us or behind. Sunbaked, stinging and battered, I was now filled with the fear of being lost; Tirzah was unruffled, taking in the sight with the same bemused half-smile that lives on her face much of the time.
I hated her then. I hated myself more for tagging along.
We eventually found our group, and the rest of the journey was fine. That night, back at the compound where we were staying, I sunk into an old couch on the porch, wincing as my scorched back touched the fabric. I looked at my legs, criss-crossed with the angry red marks left by those razor-sharp grasses. I looked at my hands, decorated with tiny fresh scars from our scramble up the slope. I felt a warmth surging up from the root of my spine to the base of my throat, and then I was grinning, and then I was laughing, and then I realized that all those welts and cuts were nothing less than souvenirs of one of the best days of my life.
In the over 17 months since, the Bad Idea Hill, as we came to call it, has become not just one of my most treasured memories of that Haiti trip, but one of my favourite memories of all time. I still text Tirzah about it on random nights, when I’m out with friends or just lying in bed, my thoughts drifting back to the sting of the nettles and the sweet, smoky smell of dry mountain grasses.
I always tell her the same thing: I am so grateful to her for leading me up there. I am so grateful we didn’t stay on the road. I am so grateful that, at the moments I most feared slipping back into the void, I found enough grip on needle-tipped plants to keep my feet on the slope.
It hurt at the time. But later, it felt so damn good.
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So, let’s be honest about something. When I started this newsletter, I stated my biggest fear was that I’d start something and abandon it, which has, to be fair, been so much a pattern of my creative life before: always a surge of energy followed by doubt, always an ebb and flow, always unsure of whether to build something new, or settle in to the status quo. The latter debate is, essentially, a privileged one. We should all be so lucky as to realize we don’t need any more than to be just where we are.
My last piece on this newsletter came in late March. Then I let it go. I can’t pin down just one reason: pandemic-related ennui set in. Some personal exhaustion. A fallow period, as a friend called it, and I always appreciate the metaphor of giving our own earth a chance to regenerate and heal. I wanted to write, but didn’t. There was too much empty space in my mind.
In the five months since my last edition, much has happened. The surge of collective sentiment that accompanied COVID-19’s arrival in North America disintegrated into typical infighting, along typical political lines: masks or no masks. CERB or no CERB. Save the economy, or save lives.
There were rallies to end police violence. Rallies for justice for Black lives. Rallies met with what can only reasonably be described as riots by the police, who met the citizens they are sworn to serve with a wide array of weapons designed for one thing, which is to force submission: the batons which bruise flesh and crack bone. The “less-lethal rounds” that burst eyeballs. The flash-bangs and clouds of gasses.
Amidst all of this, the United States devolved into outright failed state shit, most recently with the federal government attacking its own postal service, evidently in an attempt to make a vote-by-mail option for November less viable. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government appears to have all but abandoned its people to COVID-19; the only way to read much of what has gone on is that it simply stopped trying.
Just as worrying is the fact that, whatever happens in the next election, there will be no saviours, no rescue crew coming. Think what you will of Biden, but even if he wins, it will take far more than a new administration to repair what has been broken. And in a sociopolitical landscape that’s not just divided but fully warped, with a small but alarming percentage of the population in sway of what can only fairly be described as a fully deranged conspiracy cult, the real reckoning with how to Make America At Least Functional Again goes much deeper than Trump.
Elsewhere, the same new and old problems. Government ineptitude appears to have fuelled the blast that devastated Beirut. In Minsk, surges of protests against a dictator are brutally repressed, though the people march on. Authoritarians grab at power all over the place. Political arrests in Hong Kong.
We sit here in all of this wreckage. This testament to the heights our species has climbed, and the perils that there await us. This roiling sea, These Unprecedented Times, or, with regards to T.S. Eliot: this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
So, with all that in mind, where do we actually find the hope to go on?
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It wasn’t until this past month that I finally understood why I loved the Bad Idea Hill so much, and that realization came one night under the trees, a few cocktails deep but seized, for the first time since the doldrums of pandemic lockdown, with a clarity that at last made the pattern of it all fit its pieces into my mind.
It’s because life itself is just one big Bad Idea Hill, and we’re all stuck on the climb.
There is respite, of course. There are pauses. There are times where we find ourselves settled in the valleys between mountains, more or less content with our lack of upward progress; or, even if not content, at least taking time to amass the courage we need to resume the ascent. Nothing is ever as linear as simply moving straight up; if it was, then we wouldn’t feel so thrilled, so breathless, when we catch a glimpse of the top.
But the real joy and the pain of it, always, is found on the slopes, as we are pushed or prodded or led to go further than our sense of safety wants us to go. God, it can shake us to the core; God, it can make us tremble that at last we are lost; God, it can make us feel, for all things, alone and vulnerable as we plunge through the world.
Yet we keep climbing, because the other option is simply giving up and declining, and because the temptation is so great to try and forge a new path to get to where we want to go. There is no trail up there; we are forced to feel out the path with our knees and our palms. We are cut by sharp rocks and thorns, and the scabs that bloom on our flesh form a tapestry of all the hurts we have borne.
Some of those wounds never fully heal. They leave their little spots of dried blood, their lasting impressions. When we are lost on the hill, we may look at those marks with a swell of resentment, wishing we had chosen something different, wishing we had stayed on the path that was rugged and unlovely but, if nothing else, carried the promise of certainty, of going where it intended to go.
That’s not living though. That’s not trying. I have set out to climb a lot of Bad Idea Hills in my life, and none of them were easy. Sometimes I managed to reach the top; just as often my hands and feet slipped, and I fell into a huddled mass in the valley below. I am still bruised by those attempts, but I never completely broke.
And then, at the top or the bottom, whatever, no difference really, because it’s about the journey and not the outcome: a chance to laugh. To admire how the new scars embroider onto the old. To shake your head and smile to see that, even in a gratuitous mistake of a journey, you found a new view on the world.
So I end this newsletter on a note of gratitude, directed this time not just to the friend who smirked at me as she soldiered up the slope, but to all those clawing their way forward, alone or together. To all those trying, and slipping, and falling. To all those you meet in the heights who, for at least a little time, struggle up the hill beside you.
Above all, to all those who coax you up the hills, even when it hurts to go.
I’m back from the fallow period now, I hope. I will keep writing.
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