With Some Grace

I chose the title for the next book in my series about the Mikkelsons, Nature’s Stricter Lessons, from something Gary Snyder wrote. This book chronicles the time in which I became aware of him and his earthy, human, ecological writing. In The Practice of the Wild, which he published in 1990, he writes about place, wilderness and people. “Recollecting that we once lived in places is part of our contemporary self-rediscovery. It grounds what it means to be ‘human.’” He writes that gravity and a livable temperature have given us our bodies. “The ‘place’ gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature’s stricter lessons with some grace.”

For the Mikkelson kids, in the decade roughly between 1979 and 1989, stricter lessons begin to make themselves evident. Line’s kids are growing up and her wildest one, Christopher, remains incorrigible to anyone but her. In her work in a community hospital, she finds death and dying as important as birth. Marty, though she enjoys being a young, upwardly mobile professional, must acknowledge that her marriage has not matured into a partnership, that perhaps it won’t. Paul feels he has finally found the place he should be, but is surprised when family events put more responsibility on him that he ever expected.

As I prepare to write, I am surprised to find that the incidence of both natural and manmade disasters during the decade of the 1980’s is staggering. All over the world! Our awareness of these disasters was intense, though it was well before the internet became available. Mostly it came through newspapers and the occasional television news broadcast. And from each other. It was impossible not to know what was happening if you were out in the world, living and working.

I was at two architectural firms during that time, for approximately five years each. I had a friend who dedicated himself to anti-nuclear activism after the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in 1979. Other friends talked about the ash that lay over northwestern cities as the Mt. St. Helen’s volcano erupted in 1980, and continued to be active, leaving a vast grey landscape. The homeless population was rising, as Reaganomics dictated that social services were too expensive for a wealthy country like ours. I remember walking to work along the Embarcadero every morning, seeing a small population of people who woke up in sleeping bags laid out at the edge of the Bay. I wondered whether living in the open was actually so bad!

During the second half of the decade I worked with many talented architects who were rapidly dying from AIDS. My sister took care of these sufferers at Children’s Hospital, where at first people recognized only the Karposi’s sarcomas and related diseases they were seeing. The breakup of the Challenger Space Shuttle as it rose into orbit cast a pall over all of us, effectively shutting down the space program for several years. The Exxon Valdez spilled 260,000 barrels of oil into Prince William Sound affecting the habitats of fish, sea mammals and birds for many years to come. And I was at work in 1989 when the earth buckled all along the San Andreas fault during the Loma Prieta earthquake.

We were also aware of the many disasters which didn’t touch us quite so closely: the terrifying loss of life from famine in Ethiopia in which a million people died by the end of 1984; earthquakes in southern Italy, Chile, and Mexico City, which killed thousands and left millions homeless; two different cyclone seasons in the intensely populated Bangladesh in which over 10,000 were killed and more millions homeless; the toll of victims of a toxic gas leak in a chemical plant in Bhopal, India reached 23,000; and in Chernobyl, Russia, a nuclear plant meltdown killed 4,000, while 350,000 had to be resettled. The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was first discovered in 1985.

These many disasters, some triggered by men and some not, punctuated the 1980’s. But also, by the end of the decade, the iron curtain which chained in communist countries began to come down and Poland, Estonia, Romania and Czechoslovakia proclaimed their freedom; the Berlin wall came down in Germany; and apartheid, as a policy, failed in South Africa. Even in China, a failed attempt at democracy began with protests by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

It was a tumultuous decade indeed, prompting many of us to think in terms of the “stricter lessons” caused by both men and nature, and reminding us to be grateful for the tenuous net of human life on earth. It is also worth noting that in 1989, a proposal for what was known as the World Wide Web, upon which I am now able to set down these thoughts, was made in Switzerland by Tim Berners-Lee.