Allison Green

I opened the Zoom meeting on March 9, and as my students’ faces appeared before bedroom walls, living room windows, and closets, one blurted, “How sad that we aren’t together!” Sorrow washed over me. It was the last Monday of the last week of the quarter of English 101 Plus, a ten-credit option for students who want extra support. It draws recent immigrants, international students, returning students who have earned their GEDs, and teenagers swapping high school for college. We had spent ten hours a week together for nine weeks, and we had forged a community.

During the quarter, M had passed her citizenship test, and we celebrated with cake and soda at 8 in the morning. D’s wife had an aneurysm, and he moved into a hotel room near her hospital; we checked in with him every day he was able to attend. L told us about the kidney transplant she was waiting for. P let me practice Spanish with him for a few minutes in the computer lab each week.

Now there would be no end-of-quarter party, no hugs and photos, no celebratory gallery walk, where students post their last essays on the walls and we write compliments on blue and green sticky notes. My last communication with them would be over email.

I felt less emotional about my students in the advanced writing class that had been online all quarter — until I read their end-of-quarter posts about next steps. Some students plan to transfer soon to four-year schools. A pre-nursing student will volunteer in a hospital. Another wants to take her younger siblings to Disneyland.

My heart hurt as I wondered whether these dreams would be realized. Only one student, older than most of the others, commented directly on current events. He noted that we have no idea how the pandemic will affect our work and careers, whether the government will handle it well, and if our lives will be irrevocably changed. He said, “We have to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.”

And I realized then that I’ve been grieving a lost future. Whatever certainty I had about how I would spend the last decade of my career; how I would soon celebrate birthdays with grandchildren and drink wine with my parents on their patio; travel, go to music festivals, write another novel – the certainty is gone.

Certainty was always an illusion; I know that. But at least the future I imagined was within the range of the possible. Now it’s hard to know what that range even encompasses.

At the end of the quarter, I often tell my English 101 students that they will likely forget everything they wrote in this class. They won’t remember what their response paper responded to or what their rhetorical analysis analyzed. I certainly have forgotten most of my college assignments. But hopefully they will remember that they have learned how to learn, how to figure out a new genre, draft and revise and edit, ask for feedback, tap resources, revise again.

Someday those of us who survive will look back on this time, and we will have forgotten many things. We will forget the news report that kept us awake one night, the anxiety-ridden decision about whether to eat at a restaurant, the days counted after a possible exposure to the virus.

Maybe we will even forget the dreams we once had, the ones that never came true. But we will still have dreams. That’s what I keep telling myself.

Forest fire haze on the Oregon Coast, September 2017

A week ago, the sky above Seattle turned hazy, and an eerie orange sunlight fell across our hardwood floors. The air smelled burnt, toasted. Yesterday, we had the worst air quality for a twenty-four-hour period in recorded history.

Almost exactly a year ago, Arline and I were camping with friends in a forest service campground near Mount Rainier when we noticed a brown haze high above our Eurovan. A construction worker from the highway came through and said smoke from British Columbia fires was coming our way. The camp host had been that morning to Yakima, east of us, and said it wasn’t possible to see ahead more than a city block, the smoke was so thick. It was over ninety degrees next to our river, and we were hot and irritable. We headed to Packwood for the air-conditioned Mountain Goat Coffee and Bakery, where we researched the fires online. Could we find somewhere else to go, less hazy? Even the beaches looked bad.

Arline was six weeks out from cancer surgery, and the smoky air worried her. We decided to cut short the trip. Our friends stayed but we packed up and headed to Seattle. I was so exhausted emotionally and physically from coping with the cancer, and so in need of a vacation, that I cried as we left the campground.

But as we traveled home, the air got worse. Enumclaw sat under a dirty haze. On the approach to Seattle, we couldn’t see the skyscrapers; it was as if the city was socked in with fog, orange instead of white.

That night, we got online again. The dot over Seattle was bright red: unhealthy for all. But Mount Rainier had some of the best air in the state. Our friends texted that it wasn’t bad. The next morning, we packed again and returned.

This year, we took into account the possibility of forest fire smoke when planning our August vacation with our friends. Instead of the Cascades, we’re going to a tiny island in British Columbia, 170 miles northwest of here, as the crow flies. There’s no guarantee it, too, won’t be in the path of smoke, but we’re hoping.

And so we begin to adapt. It’s a sickening feeling, remembering the years and years of Seattle summers, when heat didn’t climb until after Fourth of July, and for two glorious months the sky was almost always the purest blue. Where will these changes take us? How will we adapt? For how long?

When I returned from that trip last year, something kept bugging me. Although the campground was stiflingly hot, and the sky never turned fully blue again, at night campers all around us built fires in their pits and sat around them, roasting marshmallows. The entire state was under a burn ban but not the national forests; they were guided by federal policy.

Finally, I called the ranger’s office in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and asked why there was no burn ban in the national forest campgrounds. The man who answered said that campfires were perfectly safe. The trees were difficult to ignite, and it was extremely unlikely a campfire would start a fire in the forest. Also, he said, the forest service has a different mission than the state parks and serves a different constituency; “we serve the people,” he said. The people want campfires. They call him up and ask if they can have a campfire, and if they can’t, they won’t go camping. I was so astounded I just said, “Well, now I understand the reasoning.”

I get that the forest service is involved in commerce and industry in ways that state parks are not. But surely there is a general consensus on when a burn ban is a good idea. And you can’t tell me there’s a huge difference between people who camp in forests owned by the national government and those who camp in forests owned by the state. Perhaps most significantly, burn bans “serve the people,” too.

What I heard from the ranger was an ideological bias against regulation, a willingness to risk our trees and our health. Because as long as campers can have the same camping experience they’ve always had, they’ll be happy. They’ll ignore the orange skies, the burning forests, and the warming planet. They’ll adapt.

Recent events have reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s much-anthologized story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in which a utopian society depends for its continued existence on the suffering of one child. Some, when they learn of this requirement, leave in search of a different kind of society, but most stay.

Of course, our society is no utopia, and more than one child suffers; more than the two thousand children taken from their parents at the border suffer. But Le Guin knew that. Her parable brings us face-to-face with our complicity: At first, when young people of Omelas learn of the suffering child, they are shocked. But then they begin to rationalize. Isn’t it better that one child suffers so that everyone else may prosper? If the child were released from the dungeon, surely it could no longer function: “Indeed,” Le Guin writes, “after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in.” And so the people of Omelas accept the child’s suffering and even believe their own lies about it.

One version of this utopia is white supremacy. People who can justify separating brown children from their parents have already decided that these people are not as worthy, perhaps not even as capable of feeling, as white children and white parents. They imagine an Edenic United States, when it was whiter and more powerful and more prosperous. That this country never existed does not seem to bother them. They believe that, if the children suffer, their city on a hill will shine on.

But I don’t want to let myself off the hook here. As much as I protest this white supremacist utopian ideal, I benefit from it. I’m like the citizens of Omelas who wake from bad dreams in the night but continue to partake in the joys of utopia — in my case, vegetables picked by migrant farm workers, electronics made under grueling conditions, the legacy of wealth and education that came from my homesteading ancestors, etc. and more etc. I read the news. I go to an occasional protest and send an occasional donation. But I don’t walk away.

Last week I attended a tribute to Le Guin in Portland, an evening of love and laughter in an elegant theater from the 1920s. Editors read funny emails they’d received from her, and writers shared reminiscences (China Miéville said Le Guin told him the description of the scary Shadow in The Wizard of Earthsea was based on the tardigrade, a microscopic animal). Margaret Atwood attended via prerecorded video. She said she was talking to us from a planet called “Canada”; the universal translator was translating her words so we could understand them. She told a story about asking Le Guin: “Where do the ones who walk away from Omelas go?” Le Guin couldn’t answer.

And where would I go if I walked away? Justice, of course, is not a place. I find myself tossing and turning. I don’t believe the lie that the child suffering for Omelas is better off in the dungeon, but I have trouble walking away from the benefits I accrue from that suffering. Someone, I keep thinking, will show me the way out. Meanwhile, I guiltily sleep.

New Year’s Eve 2018, Panama City

At midnight on December 31st, Arline and I followed her cousins out of the house where we’d been eating tamales and into the empty residential street to watch fireworks bloom over the neighborhood. We toasted. We hugged and wished each other a feliz año. In the distance, several golden lights floated in the sky. What were they? Lanterns. On New Year’s Eve, many Panamanians send a lantern into the sky with a wish. Within a few minutes, dozens of lanterns were rising in every direction.

Arline and I made the same wish as we clanked our glasses: for a better year. We will always remember 2017 as the year of the cancer. Arline found the lump in her leg in January, was diagnosed in March, had five weeks of radiation, and endured two surgeries in May and June that removed parts of her quadriceps muscle and rectus tendon. The rest of the year she did physical therapy exercises every day to regain function in her leg.

Some people see cancer as a gift that reminds us of all that is precious. I can’t see it that way. Cancer spiked our lives with moments of terror and sorrow so acute they left us sobbing and breathless. If I could return such a gift, I would.

But as I thought back on the year, I realized how many moments of joy and pleasure we had during an otherwise challenging time. On the day Arline returned home after the first surgery, a flock of grandchildren fluttered around, laughing and joking and asking questions about the brace on her leg. We managed to make our annual camping trip with friends in August, and Arline hiked with her walking poles at Sunrise on Mount Rainier. In fact, we took several camping trips this year — to Deception Pass, the Olympic Peninsula, and Mount Saint Helens.

We also celebrated birthdays with family and friends, went to a retreat for cancer patients at a beautiful center on Hood Canal, spent several days with my parents on the Oregon Coast, took a trip to Los Angeles to walk on the beach, and, in the last days of the year, returned to Panama, where we hadn’t been in almost a decade. Everywhere we went, Arline was embraced by long-unseen relatives and friends who reminded her of what her home country had given her, even as her adopted country feels as much, if not more, like home now.

What I want to remember about 2017, then, is that, while cancer shredded the fabric of our lives, our community of friends and family and the solace of oceans, trees, and mountains knitted it back together. What gets unraveled gets continuously re-raveled. Regardless of the sorrows that may await us, we will laugh again.