I’ve always believed that sometimes you simply have to get out of town, burning the bridges behind you if you must. In the weeks following the presidential election, I found myself believing that more strongly than ever. Whenever we feel trapped or powerless, we need to get out of our own heads. We can’t flounder around in our grief. We have to keep moving.
Rocky Mountain National Park is one of my happy places, where a glimpse of the mountains is guaranteed to lift my spirits. We went hiking on Veteran’s Day, and halfway up to Sky Pond, we found gorgeous Loch Vale, seen here with a transparent coating of ice.
This is the aptly named Lake of Glass, located just beneath the glacier. We definitely needed microspikes on our boots to navigate the terrain, having encountered a steep river of sheer ice on the final ascent, which we did not photograph because we were rather busy trying not to kill ourselves.
This spot of light looks like it’s part of a rainbow, but it’s actually one of two faint sun dogs (parhelia) that we glimpsed as we left Rocky Mountain National Park.
The sun dogs in the park reminded me a Norwegian word I recently learned: belyse, which means to illuminate or enlighten. When life seems dark, it’s nice to have a phantom sun.
(Okay, so this isn’t exactly a sun, but it is a super moon rising over the lake near our house. Many bribes were given to a Golden Retriever in order to obtain this photograph.)
No autumn visit to the mountains is complete without an elk fight. Typically, the older males hang out by themselves and practice fighting, hoping someday to overthrow the king of the elk harem. I’m not feeling a lot of charity toward these guys right now–I’ve seriously had it with swaggering macho creeps and their insatiable thirst for power.
The younger males are apparently allowed to stay with the females in the herd and contribute to elk society, which in this case involves trespassing at an Estes Park resort.
Speaking of trespassing, I buried myself in a number of crime novels during the last weeks of the election, and Tana French’s The Trespasser was by far the best of the bunch. At first, The Trespasser seems like it’s just a typical police detective thriller, and then you realize that it’s really about sexism, the glass ceiling, and the desire (expressed all-too-often by men in power) to control women by taking away their choices. The novel wasn’t nearly as escapist as I might have wished, but it did help me get away from politics for a little while.
Another thing that helped me get away from it all was a recent launch party for my friends at Wooden Stake Press, hosted by the Book Bar in Denver. Each of the authors read a short passage from his/her new book, treating us to zombies in trouble, strippers in trouble, Kansas settlers in trouble, dystopian mutants in trouble, and more.
Here I am with my friend Jeff Chacon, whose new novel 50 Shades of Brain is a delightful sequel to his hilarious zombie comedy, American Badass. If I look a bit gleeful in this photograph, it’s because I served as Jeff’s editor, and I’m feeling rather proud.
Whenever I get discouraged about the state of the world, I remind myself that we need art more than ever. I realize I’m making this argument from a position of great privilege, and that there are many who are far more vulnerable to hardship, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in America than I am. Certainly, I’m not trying to claim that telling stories or playing music or baking cookies or crafting things with yarn will magically make everything better.
But art is important. It enlarges our lives in more ways than we can ever know. As Kurt Vonnegut famously observed, “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”
We need to make this world more bearable. That being said, the act of creating art, no matter how humane, will not be sufficient to get us through the next four years. We’ve got to do more, and we’ve got to keep moving. In my next post, I’ll share some of the things I’ve been doing to make a difference.
