Competence Lost
Essay
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to be republishing some older essays, revised and updated, for the next few weeks, partly for newer subscribers and partly as a kind of field guide to specific commons- and ownership-related subjects that have been covered here over the last three-plus years. Comments will not be enabled on these, but you’re always welcome to email me.
This first essay, “Competence Lost,” is not from On the Commons. It’s from the Winter 2014 issue of the literary journal The Jabberwock Review and has never been published online. I wanted to include it here because, while it’s more of a personal essay, it was also, I think, one of the seeds for the ideas behind this newsletter, No Trespassing, and my first book, A Walking Life.
Also a reminder that I am now cross-publishing all On the Commons posts on my WordPress site. If you prefer to read these on a non-Substack platform, feel free to subscribe there. You can even comment!
THANK YOU for your support in this work. I look forward to continuing to explore—and create!—commons with you in the coming year.
The snowstorm described in this essay took place in late February 2010, when I was living in barely-upstate New York (Orange County for those who know the area). I’d forgotten how widespread its effects were until I went to look up reports on it, which you can see in the New York Times, CBS Albany, and elsewhere. I forgot to make this comment in the audio version, but it was 3 days before I could get out of the driveway, after a neighbor hitched a ride to his barn a few miles away, drove his front-loader back, and dug everybody out.
Audio version
Competence Lost
9 a.m.
The tires slipped, eager for the ditch that hugged this steep, curvy section of road. I twiddled the steering wheel, resisted tapping the brake pedal. The car made its way to the flat without heading for either the languid, half-frozen river or the snow-crusted cornfield, and my hand shook as I finally shifted down to first.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy?” The o’s drawn out long, nearing a whine, ma-AWmy. My son watched the snowfall from the back seat.
“Can you sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ for me, honey?” The shakiness had migrated to my voice. We reached the end of our road, pitched at an inconvenient incline where it met the hill of the highway. The stop sign was irrelevant. There was no way I was stopping, not until I pulled up in front of our garage. The bald tires of the station wagon protested every time I steered them anywhere but straight, the road so slippery that brakes had become a danger.
It hadn’t looked that bad from the house, when I’d decided to run out for coffee before the snowstorm started in earnest. If the car slid off the road, I’d never be able to explain that idiotic decision to my husband, safe in Toronto on a business trip.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” my son sang. The car waggled its rear end along the highway, eeking as slowly as possible. A plow, its blade raised, passed us going the other direction and the driver shook his head at me.
A journey that should have taken fifteen minutes lasted an hour; we never stopped for coffee. I didn’t dare. My heart thumped in time with attempts to move ever slower; I threw silent apologies at the red light in town where I turned right without pausing. When we got home, I wanted nothing more than to drink something warm and alcoholic, and to curl up in bed, reliving the number of times the car should have slid off the road. But there was my three-year-old son, eager to play, and the five-months-along fetus inside me, not allowed booze.
By afternoon the shakiness had begun to disappear, but it refused to leave completely. Growing up in Montana, I’d spun our rusted-out Suburban around empty parking lots to get the feel of driving on ice. I’d rocked and dug countless cars out of snowdrifts. I’d driven through blizzards so thick that daylight had no effect on visibility. Now I was living in upstate New York, where the difference lay not in the texture of the snow but in the advent of motherhood. Doubt had crept in and stayed, invited during that drive by the constant worry of landing in the ditch and injuring the child in the back seat. The snowstorm felt like a live thing, come to haunt me, to lay its cold fingers on my child and strip away my sense of self.
7 p.m.
The snow came down in thick, fat flakes all day long. My son and I built towers with his blocks, ate scrambled eggs, read Goodnight Moon ten times or maybe twenty. I measured the snow line rising against the deck door and wondered if whisky was healthier for the fetus than stress. I finally put my son to bed and drank a hot cup of chamomile tea before bundling up to wrestle with the snowblower. I’d come to hate chamomile tea during my second pregnancy, but with a little honey it was better than plain hot water.
By the time I got the snowblower started and forded the drift outside the garage, the night was already pitch, the darkness made eerie by continuing heavy snowfall. It piled two feet high and was cemented at the bottom with six inches of freezing rain and sleet that had fallen the day before. It usually took me two hours to clear our five-hundred-foot-long driveway, which cut to our house built in a former cornfield. I could barely see the driveway markers in the snowblower’s headlight, and there was nothing I wanted to be doing less right then than wrangling the gas-guzzling machine with its spinning blades down the driveway—nothing, that is, until twenty feet from the door, the blower sheared a pin. Our route to the outside world was closed off.
When I came back inside, the emotional moorings that had been weakening all day finally broke loose. The lights flickered and flickered again, responding to the outages in the main transformer a few miles away, and I started crying, picturing myself trying to keep my son warm before a fading fire while outside the snow kept falling. Dramatic scenarios that would never come to pass but I couldn’t stop impaling myself on. I sat on the couch wrapped in three blankets, checking the power company’s website every few minutes and crying harder every time the lights wavered.
Buried somewhere in my squishy body and unskilled self are the genes of more resourceful ancestors. Growing up, I learned to embroider using my great-grandmother’s thread, pickled cucumbers in another’s massive crock-pot. When I started learning to ride a horse, I inherited a great-aunt’s saddle. It once seemed to me that if I were to time travel and land at my ancestors’ dugout on the Montana prairie, I’d have no problem contributing something to daily life, being useful. I’d haul water and hew wood, cheerfully clear a trail through snowdrifts to the barn.
I no longer think that self exists. Maybe I’d just freak out, and sit by the fireside rocking my babies, waiting for the loneliness and wind to drive me insane.
After the snowblower gave out, I sat inside staring at the gathering whiteness of the yard and surrounding field, steeped in panic, fighting the bone-tiredness that had possessed me my entire second pregnancy. I wanted to reach back to my ancestors and shake them. Where are my lessons, my skills? Why didn’t you leave anything for me? What happens when the apocalyptic post-oil climate-change future finally heads our way? If it all falls apart, how do I keep my children alive?
Those ancestors of mine didn’t leave much record of themselves. Some photos. A solid barn in eastern Montana that is still intact and in use over a hundred years later. No diaries, no precious letters. Sometimes I browse through the sparse journal excerpts of other women from that time period, looking for the winters, the loneliness, the lost babies. Those who mythologize the earlier histories of those lands both erase the violence inherent in every family with a personal history like mine, and romanticize what life would have been like for them. But there was no romance. There was just life, and hard work. A lot of loneliness, a lot of scraping for survival, frozen cattle, locust-riddled wheat crops, sickened children.
These days, city-dwellers and land-seekers looking for a bit of space, a bit of privacy, air to breathe, are searching, often without realizing it, for what those romanticized histories seem to promise. But we haven’t cut the umbilical cord to modern conveniences and the security they offer: electricity (meaning light and warmth), roads (meaning both escape and connection), and supply lines (meaning food and fuel).
All of which, as demonstrated by the storm that stripped away my self-respect, are easily made inaccessible. The storm left in its wake collapsed barns—four of them within a few miles of us, each standing for a hundred years or more, finally sighing to the ground under the weight of that thirty-six hours of wet, constant snow. It left truck engines blown out, and several communities aching for electricity for nearly a week. At times like these our plump houses set on their own, away from other people, planted in former cornfields, take on an unnerving aspect. They come to represent the past rather than the future.
Overnight three feet of snow, a little more, made the car sitting in front of the garage pointless. What I needed to traverse those five hundred feet were snowshoes and I didn’t own any. In fact, right then, I owned little that was useful. The weather was oppressive, there was no shaking it. The storm’s repeated excitement of panic and worry, its irritation as the snow continued to fall in thick, quiet flakes, was torturous. It seemed almost intentional.
Instinct is to gather oneself in, to fold one’s children into one’s arms and bow one’s head over them. Hoping the storm—whatever storm—will pass over us without notice. Despite my grandmother’s pickle crock and an ability to chop firewood, my upbringing was mostly books and escapism and stories and emotional survival. Nobody ever taught me to do anything truly useful except bake snickerdoodles. Everything else is self-taught and it’s not enough, never enough. To be more, to do more, to grab competence by the tail and swallow it, maybe raw, maybe dripping with blood, that’s what we need to survive what might come, or what we might lose. To tell the elements we see them, and respect them, and are not afraid.
10 p.m.
Before I curled up in bed, I turned the heat way up. Just in case. In case it all fell apart and the residual heat was all we had. I filled up pots of water. In case our option was to die of thirst or freeze to death from trying to eat snow. I mapped out a route to drag my son by sled to a friend’s house a couple miles away. In case the driveway wasn’t clear until spring.
All of which, given the facts, were just plain silly. Even if the driveway stayed blocked, there was no thought of starving, or freezing. Not this time. The fridge was plump with produce, the pantry wedged tight with rice, pasta, beans, and oatmeal, and there was half a deer chopped up and packaged sitting in the deep-freeze. If the electricity went out, it was cold enough in the garage to keep most food, and I didn’t need electricity to light our propane-fueled stove. The basement was stocked with enough canned peaches, tomatoes, jam, and salsa to last a month. And the woodpile outside would have kept us warm enough for a solid week, at which point there was plenty of pre-broken hand-me-down furniture to put under the ax. If I could find the ax and remember how to use it.
But I’d become like an old wheat rancher, rigid in my beliefs, with obsolete fears. That night reminded me that I was tethered not only to the fierce, energetic child sleeping upstairs, but to the incubating little person in the womb who did and did not yet exist. A woman at night, pregnant, is reminded constantly by the discomfort of rearranged organs, by the aches in her back, by the pesky insomnia when sleep is needed most, that her body has been pressed into service.
11 p.m.
Just before I turned off the bedroom light, I opened the blinds. There, lining the driveway parallel to ours, were our neighbor’s big, bright lampposts. I’d been making fun of them for the last two years. Like many of the locals, our neighbors moved out there from New Jersey saying they liked “living in the country,” and immediately turned it into a close approximation of suburbia. They dug a pond, put in a phallic fountain, stripped down their field to achieve a four-acre lawn, and then planted iron lampposts all down the driveway leading up to their spotlit house. It was the lamps I found most irritating. “Drowning out the stars,” I said. “So obnoxious.”
That night, I opened the blinds so I could see them as I fell asleep, their electric filaments burning in the snowstorm. Before daybreak, I woke up several times and searched immediately for the lights leading to the road like they were a signal from the rest of the world. Were they still burning? Were we still here? Had it all fallen apart? But there they were, an anchor to the civilization I never learned to live without.
Twinkle, twinkle.