November 7, 2020

I hadn’t thought myself as open to agitation from the political world as the last week proved me to be. The hours when it looked like Trump might be re-elected were dark. I wondered how to live in a world like that. The remembrance that millions have, in various tyrannies and dictatorships, didn’t help. I’d not planned that for my life. I didn’t have the resources. Would I be a rebel? Would I take up arms? Would I hide? I’d thought America, whatever the swings of its political pendulum, immune, ultimately, to the end of its Democracy. No. The razor’s edge. Worse did not come to worst, but the election was close enough to be almost as dismaying as a loss. Nearly half the people in my country voted not only for a bad choice, but for the worst conceivable one. One time might excused because we didn’t know better. But now he is an abomination self-exposed every day as a greater abomination, and the excuse of ignorance, even of mischief, is gone. Sanity already seeps back a little. The offal-tossing gibbon is replaced by the grandfather. Even after a moment one breathes better. The game now is to sit back and see how much damage the Abomination can do before being pried from the Oval Office.

The official publication date of The One with the Beautiful Necklaces is, then, the same day Joe Biden is declared president-elect.

Hit “goal achieved” twice on my step-counter, largely from walking in the woods. Heading for Lake Powhatan– deflected because I’d have to pay to get in– I found the Hard Times trailhead. I didn’t know it existed. That the trail began somewhere did not enter my imagination, thinking of it as a kind of wooded infinity. Hadn’t walked long before I realized that my hiking and biking in days gone by had brought me to within 1/4 mile of the trailhead, had I just known in which direction to continue. The Bent Creek road and the Hard Times, coming off the mountain, meet at a bridge and a falls of Bent Creek, where I’d been a dozen times before. I oriented. The forest began coming together as a map in my head, after two decades’ neglect. Returned today with a new app on my phone, which identifies organisms you point the phone at. The app is kind of stupid– I started with things I knew but it apparently didn’t, a holly tree, a white pine– the closest it could come was “Vascular plant”-- but it has something to do, I think, with the way I was holding the camera, for it also gave me smooth alder and mountain doghobble, which were new to me, and which it knew pretty quickly. 

Daniel and Michaela came for dinner Thursday, a happy time. Made peanut butter pie for dessert, which, being both easy and delicious, may be the death of me. One minute it’s death by tyranny, the next death by dessert. It’s a perilous world!  They each do things for a living that are difficult to present in a sentence, or even a shapely paragraph. She is a sort of medical concierge; he. . .  does IT. . in some way related to sales. . . . I don’t know. I think a small evil lurks behind a job that cannot quite be put into words. Maybe they are both spies and didn’t want to tell me. David phoned while I was already high on the mountain this morning, so I will see him and Lara next time.