Smoketown blues

Snoop Dogg, it turns out, brought unexpected levity and light to an otherwise smoke-filled summer. His observation that pole vaulters get “high-high” was as prescient as reporting seems to get anymore, and so this space counts it a solid win for the otherwise dismal condition of the fourth estate.

Most of the smoke locally is the result of fire, of course, discounting the tropospheric smoke and radiation from the world’s most embarrassing presidential election cycle. With our political organs — it seems — only capable of producing candidates this bad, this vacuous, it isn’t difficult to predict what the next four years are going to look like, whoever wins. I recommend that you file the next four years, in advance, in the “History Repeating Itself” drawer and move on to other, lighter, Snoop Dogg inspired pursuits.

The internet isn’t working this morning, which is an opportunity because instead of the ritualized masochism of a morning doomscroll I can turn to generative efforts.

This used to be the way we lived and maybe it should be again. It feels like sobriety, this netless world, similar to watching a murder mystery that twists your mind and your guts until at the end you look back and think: I knew it all along. The clues were obvious. How did I miss that?

I probably wouldn’t feel the same way if the power went out for very long—although we do have a backup plan for that — if only because resiliency should be the first hallmark of a registered independent.

Still, it would be nice to once again enjoy a summer that wasn’t simply variations on a theme of smoke. Nobody can do anything about lightning, but the hordes of careless yahoos who invade the woods are an existential menace.

Bill Gates may be right about controlling the population but I just can’t get around the eugenicist foundations of his efforts, which means I’ll have to assume some risk created by all those yahoos incapable of putting out their campfires.

Gates’ good buddy Jeffrey Epstein — before whatever happened to him in jail — was on record for wanting to populate the earth with his own genes, which is a weird and apparently common ambition of the uber rich. The Rockefeller-Gates-Fauci-MicroSoftNBC relationship is worth investigating but I’ve noted that most folks don’t want the responsibility. Or the additional gloom. It takes too much time, especially when people “experiencing homelessness” are lighting big portions of the forest on fire, threatening our homes.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. was producing 35 Liberty Ships every day, but in the mid 2020s we can’t seem to complete a roundabout project.

In normal times that might give us pause to reflect on the actual condition of things, but perhaps we can just stipulate that things aren’t normal. That is, if normal can be characterized as a sustained period of peaceful industry where men battering women is unacceptable everywhere — even the Olympic Games.

A lot of interesting conspiracies are floating around the pot-shot taken at Trump in Pennsylvania, which I learned about while sitting on a ferryboat in the Skagway Fjord, after an attempt to locate and photograph Coastal Brown Bears on Alaska’s Chilkat River. One of my favorite theories is that he arranged it himself. I don’t know who you might trust to shoot you in the ear for a few pro-fracking votes — but speaking as a trained sniper I’d recommend you enlist precisely no one for that gig, no matter how desperately you need the pro-frackers.

Meantime, up in Alaska, we didn’t have any luck finding brown bears. They just weren’t out and about. But I did get to spend some time with our river guide, Captain Richard.

He lives without the internet quite handsomely, guiding the Chilkat, fishing for his dinner, and swimming in a nearby lake. In the evenings he drinks wine and reads books at his campfire surrounded by nine million acres of wilderness inhabited by thousands of bears and moose and eagles — and there is not a single e-bike anywhere because what trails there are belong exclusively to the bears and the moose.

Captain Richard came to his current gig after a career in Naval Special Warfare, which was followed by five years of anti-poaching patrols in Africa, and then anti-kidnapping endeavors in Mexico. In the winter he runs boats in the Caribbean. He eschews the internet as a matter of course which means that at times he seems delightfully unaware of the invisible digital universe, full of its own smoke, bearing down so heavily on the rest of us.

On second thought, that’s not accurate. He’s aware of it. He just doesn’t like it, doesn’t want the unavoidable entanglements that come with it. And so he reads and fishes and looks for bears and lives an embodied life free from doomscrolling and all of our endless personal irony.

Which, back home in the haze, can only serve to inspire. And so I can point to two wonderful things to have emerged from yet another summer full of political radiation and floating ash — Snoop Dogg and Captain Richard.

Not exactly the heroes we’ve all been looking for, perhaps, but then again The Grateful Dead did suggest that we can see the light in the strangest of places — if we look at it right.