Finding Community at the End of the World
On connection and nature.
Hi Folks,
Last year, just before the pandemic began, I shared a New York Times article on my social media titled “How to Prepare Now for the Complete End of the World”. It was February in New York City, and the world was frozen and grey, the kind of winter that feels as though it will never end, the days stretching into endless years of darkness. I was so lonely back then. I read the article while riding the subway up and down from work, my hair wet with rain, leaning up against the cold metal doors of the 1 train. I remember looking around at families, couples, children, thinking about community and how badly I wanted to belong somewhere. It did not seem possible back then to have that where I was; community seemed both innate and evasive, something we were all built and designed to have and yet something our modern lives rendered impossible. It is funny now, in retrospect, to remember how much thought I lost over this when I had little idea what was to come only a few weeks later.
Nellie Bowles opens the article like this: “When the end comes, some will not be waiting in a bunker for a savior. They will stride out into the wilderness with confidence, ready to hunt and kill a deer, tan its hide and sleep easily in a hand-built shelter, close by a fire they made from the force of their two palms on a stick.” The piece is essentially a profile of Lynx Vilden, who teaches people how to live in the wild out in the woods of Oregon, the way that humans did pre-civilization. If you visit the preserve, you will sleep in a tent, learn to tan hides, communicate in hoots, chop down trees, use an axe and a knife, and survive on food you catch, kill, and cook. I appreciate that the piece refuses to glorify striking out into the woods as so many pieces do. It is not easy to live this way. If it had once been natural, it certainly is not any longer. So why do it at all?
I found the answer I had been seeking in all my woodland experiences in the following paragraph: “We imagine that someone striking out into the wilderness is doing so to get away from everyone, to be alone. The people I met wanted the opposite. They want a life where they cannot survive even a day alone. They cannot get food alone, cannot go to the bathroom, cannot get warm alone. They want to be dependent.”
Rugged individualism has been part of the outdoor narrative for about as long as the narrative has existed in popular American culture. It is Into the Wild, it is Walden, it is Cheryl Strayed on the PCT. It is taking your life into your own hands and turning your back on society and going at it alone. Sometimes community comes along the way; most often these narratives are about searching for some sort of purpose. They are about finding something that you could not find in the thrust of modernity, in the rush and bustle of daily life. There might be a focus on the people met along the way, but they are not the central part of the story. The story is about you. Your own wants, your own needs, and how to find out what those look like when you are entirely out on your own. It is about who you are without all of the distractions, the noise, the other people. These stories, however, leave out something essential, which is that who we are is in fact— and ought to be— made up of who we are in relation to other people. How we act. What we do. How we love. These stories near that line, and if it is missing it feels intentional, because that is the point. We go to look for ourselves alone, but what we often find is that it is impossible to truly do so. Our survival hinges on a lack of isolation. Our survival hinges on community.
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On New Years Eve of 2019 I drank three glasses of wine, cried at the thought of going back to New York in a week, and in the span of a few hours, found and applied to a program that would allow me to live and work in the Canadian woods for the summer. I sent in the application without really thinking about it; there was comfort in entertaining the option of somewhere else. Of being someone new in a new place, of how my life might change and shift in a different location. I don’t think I ever took these things seriously, when I sat and spent hours looking at outdoor jobs, wilderness programs. Even if I wanted it, I had settled into a different life, and that was what laid before me now. But still. The thought of Canada stuck in my mind. When I accepted a job to work at a lakeside summer camp in Ontario three months later, I still don’t think I was serious. Even when my plane touched down in Toronto, I did not understand what I was doing. I had cried going back to the city; now I cried leaving it on a cool, grey June evening, watching the sunrise through the rain clouds.
At the camp I worked out there was a sign that hung over the fireplace in the dining hall that read: We challenge campers and staff to live in harmony with nature and each other.
For three months I looked at that sign three times a day, every day. I thought about what that meant, to exist in community. I ate at a long wooden table with twenty other young adults, passing around plates of food, stacking dishes and leaning into one another. We worked hard. We built things and painted things and rowed to distant islands and cleaned surfaces and played instruments and swam in frozen rivers. I laughed more in those months than I ever have in my life. I danced in rainstorms and went weeks without showering and learned to live without electricity, running water. I met my best friends in the world. I found the community I had searched for for so long. I stopped worrying about the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. For the first time in my life, I just lived. I just woke up and I lived.
Every day I wrote in a journal and when I came home I typed all the entries up into a word document. Today, as I was writing this, I went through to read them once more, knowing that last summer and this summer too, both of which were meant to be spent back in Canada, have fallen to loss, like so many other things this year. It hurts to know that I might never get back to this place. It hurts that I fell in love with a version of myself that I don’t think can exist in the so-called “real world.” It hurts that I cannot seem to bring the rural version of myself back home.
In the notebook I wrote this: “Look to the pines, wilting in the heat. I miss nothing about the person I was before, feel buoyant with possibility. The city is for some, sure, but not for me. I know this now. A clear sense of who I am, what I care about… The future is a blank canvas, mine to etch in. One more year in New York, and then I head for the mountains. My life packed into a van and dispersed. I dream of rivers, floating among them, of teaching others the things I have learned. The world is large; we are only a small part, the littlest of roles to play. And the world will go on long after we are gone from it. I want to see it all and then like dust, settle. Pick a spot and grow my roots. It could be anywhere. I just know this: I need my feet in the dirt, need to feel the soil below. I need to be a part of somewhere and someplace. I need to be a piece of a whole bigger than just myself.”
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We tend to think that community will happen automatically in a rural setting. Or, at least, I did, when I moved to rural North Carolina in late summer of last year. I took the job in this place because I felt that existing in a smaller space would allow me to more easily meet people, have it feel as effortless as it had in other rural settings I had been in. Yale student Marina Keegan once said “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.” I agree. More than anything else, I think I am drawn to rural areas because I do not want to exist in isolation any longer. I keep having this feeling that if I force myself into a place where there are only so many people, surely I will find the ones I belong with. Surely I will find where I fit in.
Of course, it’s not that simple. I have made amazing friends here, and I have also learned that community is work. Whatever grand visions we have for it exist distantly from our reality. As a child I found myself obsessed with dystopian novels, where community happened innately, as I believed it ought to when you were facing the end of the world. A common purpose brought people together; the community then drove the narrative.
When we faced down what, at so many points, felt like the end of the world last year, it was a type of ending that existed in contrast to community. A pandemic inherently includes isolation, quarantine. But I also think there is a point to be made that the isolation made us realize what we value, and we are emerging with more of an effort on community building. PEW reported that while 41% of people felt that the pandemic created a greater isolation, another 33% mentioned a positive impact on their relationships, the fear and proximity allowing them to grow closer to those around them. If this is the end of the world, perhaps it is the beginning of another. Perhaps there is something better we can find at the end of this.
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I am thinking of Czelaw Milozs’ excellent poem, “A Song on the End of the World”, which contains the following verse:
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
The world ends and begins every day, I am starting to believe. It is like any story we tell ourselves. We cannot wait for the end to begin anew. I do not wish to live only at the edge of the world. I wish to live with it, in community, every day I can.
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Your prompt this week is to think about an end of the world. Try writing about a time it felt your life ended, or try writing about the end as a place. It could be a place where something new began for you, or something more fictional, such as a dystopian world where the earth has an edge or each country exists in impossible distance. What does it feel like to be at the end? And are you alone?
See you Friday, friends,
Spencer
This week’s song comes from Lebanon Hanover, a German duo made up of Larissa Iceglass and William Maybelline. They draw inspiration from William Wordsworth, the British seashore and forests, and Berlin’s urbanism. This song feels like what I want playing if the world ever does end. Or just a song I can dance to in the woods at midnight and remember that I am a part of something, I am here, and I exist.