I am Uncertain and that is Ok
A version of this essay can also be found in the Whitefish Review’s “Metamorphosis” issue.
Writing & Photos by Nicholas Littman
The snow geese astonish us. If astonishment is that state when you drop what you were doing and thinking and stare gape-mouthed and shout, “The geese! The geese!” as if there were someone to tell besides your wife shouting the same thing beside you and your one-year-old daughter toddling around, wondering what all the commotion is about. We watch, entranced by the waves of white geese that have risen up honking from the nearby ponds. They are an undulation of hundreds—perhaps a thousand—individuals who form and reform their V’s of flight into pulsating rhythms of feather and muscled motion that recede together, heading for the mountains.
We are driving north towards our home of Missoula, Montana, coming back from a desert rendezvous with nearly all of our close family to celebrate our daughter’s first birthday. We left when the virus had not yet reached Montana. The world shifted dramatically in the week we were away. There are few cars on the road. Most people are staying home as they have been told. The virus is spreading exponentially throughout the country. The long-haul trucks are most of our company, transporting the necessary goods that sustain us. We don’t expect to see our family anytime soon.
We stopped at these Warm Springs ponds in the Deer Lodge Valley by chance because they were next to the interstate. That is part of the astonishment, the unexpectedness of the snow geese encounter. Earlier in the day, we were listening to an interview with writer Rebecca Solnit who was speaking about how the unexpected often comes to pass, how changes in history are not linear, how humans are altruistic creatures, and how uncertainty is a necessary part of hope. She has studied human responses to natural disasters and seen how people help each other, how they embrace monumental change, how they adapt to fluid situations.
I’m astonished by how fluid the geese are. Different geese break the wind; lines are not set. The flock is cooperative and cohesive: an aspen grove intertwined as one, a virus proliferating and multiplying itself. Any organism helps their own kind to prosper and multiply as a whole. We are no different.
Thinking of cooperation makes me feel ashamed of an action I took this morning as we left Salt Lake City. I’m ashamed about the middle finger I gave a truck as he roared around me over the centerline at a stoplight I was accelerating from too slowly. I’m ashamed of that finger and know it was in direct reaction to a finger I received the day before from another truck accelerating around my slow van. I was angry at the need to rush. I was angry at the “I’ll look after myself and screw the rest of the world impulse” statement I thought was being made (but perhaps it was: “You have Montana plates and shouldn’t be here” or even “I need to get to the hospital to see my sick mother”). I was indignant at the panic, the fear that seemed to grip so tight and vice-like. I reacted to my own fear: that people would let fear overtake them, that fear would design their future. Anger, of course, is fear’s own brother.
After hearing Solnit, we listened to a podcast that interviewed a Scottish woman who could smell disease-- literally sniff Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or cancer on someone. She could smell how far along a disease was. I thought I could smell fear. I thought it was in the way the men roared their trucks and bought guns and ammunition and hoarded toilet paper and facemasks. It was in the very word—pan-demic—a disease affecting all—pan—people—demos.
This Scottish woman could also smell when a disease had regressed. She encountered one woman whose smell and symptoms of Parkinson’s had almost evaporated in a matter of months. The interviewer asked the recovering woman how she had improved and she responded that she saw Parkinson’s not as a disease but as a condition. She lived each day for what it was, not for the dreadful future it could be. She didn’t indulge her fear, she filled it with activities that delighted her: Tai chi, Taiko drumming. Without the focus on what the disease could do to her future, the symptoms regressed.
This doesn’t mean willfully ignoring the threat of this virus and ceasing the measures we’ve been taking. They are all necessary (and much more) to flatten an exponential line to a linear one. It does mean we unhinge the fear of the virus as a behemoth that will swallow us whole. It means acknowledging that we live one day and moment and action at a time. It means directing attention on the altruism and courage and resiliency around us instead of the doom and paralysis of what is to come. Recently, I’ve been astonished by the common acts of kindness I see everyday on social media: toilet paper showing up on doorknobs, tables full of free food and goods put out on the street, offers to provide delivery services and virtual hugs. On the road at the gas station as I pump with gloves on, strangers smile at me more often and I smile back.
One might say I can distance myself from fear because I am not among the vulnerable and affected. But can I not fear for my parents, or for my father-in-law who is approaching eighty and has a heart condition? Can I not fear for my community suffering unnecessarily? My local and my world community? I can. I do. Yet once I let fear in, it tends to proliferate far faster than hope. If hope is as Solnit says “a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene” then I’d much prefer to go there. I’d prefer to go someplace uncertain and meet it head on, as a cohering whole, rather than dissolve into fear all alone. Have we not known for years, with all the dire prognoses for the future that there was no such thing as a normal, steady state, even though we thought we had created one?
Two more waves of geese pass overhead while we stand between the interstate and the ponds. They prick from sight at the foothills of the Flint Creek Range to the west where the sky is doing spring acrobatics. Snow has just fallen in a flurry of sticky grackle and the clouds are wafting off the hills like delectable wisps. Deep in the mountains, the clouds have their stronghold—a deep slate. The geese rise, honking from these freshwater ponds at Warm Springs, in a place that, downstream from the copper smelter at Anaconda, was once so toxic with arsenic and lead that broad sections of waterfront were bare, empty slick-ins—moonscapes of eerie, neon colors where not even a weed could survive. The ponds are clean now and the Clark Fork River flows clear and cold out of them. People—committed citizens and governments—have made sure those who dirtied it, cleaned it up. We have this ability to repair and remake.
The last interview we listen to is with Robert Macfarlane who self-describes as a writer investigating “the relationship of landscapes and the human heart.” He speaks of the Underland, the space beneath our feet we know nothing about, and the places within it which we have both feared and held as sacred. What emerges from years of probing this dark, forbidding, uncertain space is not fear for Macfarlane, it is the open palm pressed in red ochre and printed on a cave’s walls, “the hand that is reaching across time, that is pressing against rock…the hand of help and of collaboration.”
On November 28, 2016, ten thousand snow geese landed on the wrong pond in this valley, the fatally toxic lake that is the Berkeley Pit in Butte. Nearly 4,000 birds died from drinking the water. Does the old parable lie in this story: that we live and die together and not alone? The geese behind follow the lead goose but that lead is always changing. They make a collective decision of where to go and embody that collective consciousness. The individual influences that collective consciousness with their daily decisions: to give a middle finger or an open hand, to celebrate kindness, astonishment and courage or fear and foreboding. Thus, I delight in the astonishment of seeing the snow geese—their suddenness, their ability to arrest me into the present. I delight in the steps my daughter leaves in the snow, they are regular and confident and were not that way even a week ago. I delight in the uncertainty of knowing what will come next, for I sometimes remember that joy is neither conjured nor created but present right in front of us, ready to snatch us up and make us suck it in until we can only laugh in breathless abandon.
Nick Littman teaches poetry to 4th graders for the Missoula Writing Collaborative. He has also taught human-landscape relationships to college students for the Wild Rockies Field Institute. He has published essays or poetry in The Montana Quarterly, The Hopper, Blueline, and Camas among other places. He lives in Missoula, Montana with his wife and one-year-old daughter. He is currently working on a book about maple syrup, vocation, and the Adirondack Mountains. More of his writing and photography can be found at lotusfromthemud.wordpress.com