Hope, Disaster, and New Stories with Rebecca Solnit
A postcard from Cataldo Mission in Idaho.
I listened to Rebecca Solnit’s On Being interview, “Falling Together” while writing get-out-the-votes reminders to the D. Johnsons of Florida. The list was alphabetical and there are a lot of them. Desiree Johnson, Diane Johnson, Dustin Johnson. Do you have the right ID to cast your ballot? You matter, and so does your voice. Please vote. Each missive informative, with a thread of desperation. Can’t you see, we’re falling together? In the interview, Solnit talks about forming a spiritual life in opposition to her experience, on hope as a verb, and the urgent joy and community compassion that pops up in times of disaster. I pasted stamps to envelopes and wondered if this was an act of community compassion in disaster, too. Can the principle hold when we don’t all agree on what the disaster exactly is?
Solnit is an essayist, broadly concerned with feminism, optimism, and the forthcoming climate apocalypse. In past encounters with Solnit’s work, I’ve found her brilliant but grating, I think because of that thread of optimism that runs through her work. As an east coast transplant living out west, my cynicism is a part of my identity, and I have always assumed that it’s protected me, preparing me, perpetually, for the worst. I’m not a curmudgeon, but I often feel like the sooner we reckon with the worst, the better we can be prepared for it.
All the same, in the interview, Solnit named an experience that was familiar to me, a feeling that I’ve even had some guilt about. She talks about love and joy in catastrophe at the large scale of a natural disaster, namely during Hurricane Katrina. It made me think of the smaller more intimate catastrophes I have been a party to, and how, like some maddened tornado chaser, I sometimes feel at my best in crisis. I’m a good man in a storm, as the saying goes.
Crises offer me the kind of clarity, purpose, and grounded generosity that is hard to conjure in day-to-day life. The “Falling Together” interview made me think of times I’ve stepped in and stepped up for friends in crisis, and the sacrifices made and expenses incurred without question because, in my family, that’s just what you do. A part of that is wealth and privilege — so much of the friction of missing work, jumping on the plane, being there (wherever there is), is smoothed over with money — but part of it just because I saw that modeled in my childhood. Showing up when the stakes are highest is, in my personal value system, the ultimate expression of love and loyalty.
Because I live far away from so many people who are important to me, my in-person support almost always includes an arrival and a departure, like the volunteers Solnit describes descending on post-Katrina New Orleans. In a crisis, the story snaps into focus: beginning, middle, end. Other people’s crises, though always multifaceted, so often show up in my life as episodes with their own tidy denouement. There’s always some degree of resolution, and then I go home. And so they sometimes make me feel like the protagonist.
Licking envelopes bound for the land of hanging chads, I wondered about what it would be like to expand the sense of loyalty and duty beyond my family and my friends who are like family. Might that help change the narrative about the kind of world we all share? It is, candidly, hard to imagine in our current moment. I feel no kinship of country with Trump supporters, even when I dig for it. It is part of why the letter-writing volunteering appeals to me. Phone canvassing yields a lot of heartbreaks and hangups. The letters allow for ignorance, imagination, and hope.
I read another article by Solnit, “Whose Story (and Country) is This” while my family watched the vice presidential debate in the next room. We all met in Whitefish, Montana for a vacation with middling COVID risk, my fiance and I driving the nine hours from Seattle. All along the route, there were a lot more Trump signs than I’m used to seeing at home.
In the essay, Solnit writes about telling different kinds of stories, stories where white Protestant men aren’t the only protagonists deserving of sympathy. Telling different stories felt all the more vital and impossible in a landscape littered with Trump signs. Solnit’s article starts with Phantom Thread, a movie I have not seen, but hilariously replaced with Phantom of the Opera for a moment while reading this essay. Another story that centers (apparently) on an exacting and obsessive white man. There are so many of them.
On our long drive to Montana, a jolly old-fashioned-sounding song came on the radio about a man who lost “his woman” to another man — a common theme in popular music, no doubt. It sounded disarmingly low-stakes, like, oh-rats-I-missed-out-oh-well. It was a lot less threatening and violent than a song Spotify recommended to me the day before, which I’d been humming to myself on-and-off, “You Missed My Heart.” Phoebe Bridgers covered it recently, but the Spotify algorithm sent me the 2013 version by Jimmy LaValle and Mark Kozelek, probably because “Ben’s My Friend” was basically my song of the summer. In “You Missed My Heart” a man stabs his ex’s new boyfriend, then attacks her, then dies in jail for his crimes. You got me good/I knew you would/but you missed my heart/you missed my heart.
In the car, scrubby Idaho glowing golden around us, the song on the radio jangled on. This song is so cheerful. Do you think it was less of a big deal, in the ‘50s or whatever? Was dating culture just less obsessive? I asked Alexander. He said, I think people who have desired other people have felt that way throughout all of time. We need new stories, and new protagonists.
We had just stopped to stretch our legs at Cataldo Mission, a Catholic missionary church dubbed "the oldest building in Idaho," — a distinction that ignores untold centuries of structures built by the Nez Pierce and Flathead tribes of the region. The apse was breath-taking; the gift shop was full of rosary beads and crosses. No doubt the site was beautiful, holy even, but the historical interpretation glossed over or ignored the violence that must have begat such beauty. A "native" canoe was relegated to a grass median in the parking lot. I thought of Solnit's call for new stories (and of her under-valued museum workers). We need new stories, so desperately, and better versions of the old ones, too.
This essay is inspired by coursework I completed for the University of Washington Communication Leadership Masters program. Thanks to instructor Anita Verna Crofts, master reader Guillaume Tourniaire, and my peers in cohort20. Double thanks to Alexander Mostov and Enrica Shimizu for reading and responding to early drafts, and my mom for making Montana happen.