Everyone I know is weary of it, exasperated,
taking great lengths to ease conversations around the subject like unwinding a
hose on the edge of a fire. Don’t get too close. Shutdown. There, I said it. Very
sorry. Stay with me.
Even the fact that National Parks, about which I
care a lot, are at the center of it rankles. What about National Forests that
cover more acreage nationally? Not a single news show I’ve listened to has
mentioned that the United States Forest Service is shutdown. Why? Because the
Forests are less glamorous, less high-profile, and therefore less essential than
the Parks even though, for example, the trail workers we know who work for the
Forest Service do the same work for the same reasons as Park Service crews do, except
for less pay … a point which is moot right now because no trail workers for
either agency are getting paid.
Why? Because work is non-essential.
What’s essential? Carrying a gun. Pasting up
closed signs. Handling the media. What’s essential, apparently, is how things
look from the outside, not how they work on the inside.
Which reminds me a little of writing.
Conversations about writing inevitably lead to
talk about publishing or agents or marketing. All of that is important, I know.
You want your books to reach readers the same way we want National Parks to be
user-friendly. But people go to National Parks because of what’s actually there. And people read books for what’s actually
there. The present, not the wrapping paper. The content, not the elevator
speech.
There are many people who see this position as old-fashioned
and unrealistic. Which is exactly what doing trail work is like. Or maintaining
an apple orchard. Or doing carpentry on historic buildings. Or planting willows
along a salmon stream. Everyone I know who does that kind of work is shutdown
right now. They are pawns, and they are angry … but not as angry as you might
think. They know exactly where they sit on the totem pole, and they’ve chosen
to sit there. They take enough pride in the good work they do that it doesn’t
matter that they’re deemed non-essential. (Besides, they worked seasonally for
so long they learned to save pennies, and crucially, few of them have families
to support.)
I’ve decided that’s what I aspire to. Non-essentiality.
I realized with considerable shame a few years ago that many of the people I
admire most in the world—and nearly all the people I did trail work with—don’t
have Facebook accounts and never will. The fact that I do, that I always try to
straddle these worlds, sometimes concerns me. I can see the value in reaching
out even as I work. But I never want that to be the end in itself. The work is
the end: trails brushed, trees pruned or planted, boards nailed, words written,
then revised. That’s what matters to me.
