Sunday evening, the sun lowering, as cool pink-and-oranges reclaimed sky that had been a stronghold of searing heat, and stirrings of air promised unbound potentials of motion, I rocked with the old blue van, as did the others sitting in it, fifteen, just over the legal maximum capacity. We were close.
The brick island of a city we left from had disappeared in the mountain folds, and fields of soy plants waved their dark leaves all around us. I sat between my boyfriend and another. The man behind me- though it was hard, sometimes, to think of him as a gendered being- was a fellow seeker, of political knowledge, of drug-induced visions, of understanding of us, people, beyond the commercial environment that shaped so many of our exchanges. My thoughts about him had never been anywhere along the lines of, “I want to fuck this guy,” and nothing I had done would be considered betrayal in the normal sense, but when his visions mirrored mine with electric rarity, and something leapt in my skull in answer to his words, could I really call the word “love” inapplicable to what I felt? He handed an ear of sweet raw corn to the woman next to me at her request. The box he pulled it from was full of peaches, eggplants, from the local farms, gift from a guy at the house we’d stayed in. Now we were off to our own city, surrounded by overpass-shadowed industries. But it was a long way from here, and we had another town to stop at first. I slipped into something of a trance, watching cows graze on mowed fields, houses appear far below as we went over the hills.
At home, we would have to deal with the local government, which refused to do anything about the corner where kids had to face speeding traffic to get to the park from the low-income housing across the street, until a group of mothers hassled them about it for years. The bigger fight was radically changing how the city government was run, which the medical industry that ran its international headquarters out of our town was trying desperately to stop us from doing. But we were winning.
One of the people now in the van was from the brick city that had vanished behind us in the green. He had left for a few months, to help us out and study our strategies- They could be useful where he lived, too. And for a few days, we’d gone to his town, exchanged ideas (and food, stories, blunts) with his comrades. That behind us, I wondered how many miles I was seeing when I looked at the furthest visible ridge on the horizon, blurry with gathering fog. A shape above it- two, three, what? Hot air balloons! Look, I yell to the rest of the travelers.
Our grey vinyl cocoon is filled with a fuzzy radio broadcast of songs we remember from middle school, and colored with the neon hair of several of its passengers. The driver is a Christian. In circles like this, it’s easy to forget that’s the norm, and think of it as a cute quirk: God wants him to love queers and atheists and stand against global corporatism. He and his girlfriend, this morning, talked us into going to a Unitarian Universalist church they’d seen when we arrived in town.
So I followed them through the unfamiliar streets, looking at the apartments and row houses, nicely kept, holding window box flowers, teenagers, babies, mothers, grandfathers, people alone, people together, got a vision of a complex stone alter, a web of shelves, each holding a holy pulse, ours- In the vaulted room of the church, two older women spoke, they’d done this a long time, they’d thought a lot about this, they radiated reassurance, rooted not in certainty but in ability to live with questions- Light came in through stained glass windows, the one in front an arcade of deep blue; I came to think of it as a tulip, an inverted tulip, that must be rooted in the sky, pollinating this vault.
Reconciliation: how to approach it? I accept that the world is material. Ecstatic reverie is subjective experience, not objective truth. But I am one of the universe’s formations that has become aware that it and the universe exist- and so, subjectively, I call us holy. How does this fit with social science, dialectics? I don’t know, exactly, but I hold nothing against theists as theists. Life is high-impact shit, I’m not interested in yanking away the shock absorbers. More annoyed at fellow organizers who fault groups that provide progressive, open-minded refuge, help with food, rent, likeminded people to talk with, and spaces and hours of serenity for not embroiling themselves in political battles. If they did so, there would be vengeance from reactionary politicians.
The battles are important. Us fighting them is important. But when we are navigating the waters, and rise with tides and waves, there must be a framework to catch us if the water recedes too quickly. On the dry sands, if we charge forward, there must also be still, set walls to preserve things if water rushes in in deep torrents. Society needs people to fight, throw themselves into the currents in a gamble for a fairer world, and contend with the great tidal waves that will happen whether they pay attention or not. But there must also be things that preserve themselves rather than staking themselves in the gamble, because, until we reach the new world, people will need them to survive, to keep human, to keep sane, to keep their kids and lovers and elders together and their lives and interactions coherent, to keep breathing regular, to keep the light, come hell or high water.
Light shone on water winding through the valley we looked out on. In this farm country, it was hard to believe in the city we’d visited, where there was not enough space, or access to it, eviction being an issue, and a renter’s coalition was being put together with some urgency. Even when we got onto a highway, there was green all around.
In the van, there was a friend of mine who had spent years with the gangs of our city, and now looked to build something that would avoid the violence of one marginalized group against another, but would also avoid the mainstream idea of rehabilitation, which meant being a good little worker, rather than uniting, channeling rage to fight for something radically different. Sometimes the things she said didn’t make sense, sometimes she talked over me and mangled every thought I tried to communicate, but her ideas were beautiful.
She was beautiful. More so than I let her know I thought. And then there was the man who we both had crushes on… another friend and I sometimes joked that sexual tension was the only thing holding this group together. “This group” was a weird thing to think about. One had to figure out who was a true friend and who was just a political ally. Difficult. I looked about the van for the bottle of water that I’d seen being passed around earlier. I was beginning to feel a bit carsick.
Fortunately, we stopped at a gas station soon. People got out to pee, to buy soda and half-priced damaged candy and SlimJims. Behind the convenience store I found some wildflowers, put them in an empty beer bottle to take back home. And off we went again. We switched drivers, seats. Our mysticist friend now stretched his legs out in the back, next to a guy who I was a bit surprised had come along. Not that he was less involved in our organization, just that his thing was more going between groups, a free agent looking to build bridges and reconcile various leftist factions he encountered. I wished I could do more of the same, but too many people I organized with in my city would never respect my anarchist friends, who I owe my life to. Well, I guess we all owe our lives to each other.
Now we were headed to a small town where we had to pick up some papers related to our work. We had dipped down between some hills, and now the land ahead rose, the wide slope of a tree-covered mountain that I could see the shadows of clouds on. What a strange web was held inside this van, kept together by people not knowing what other people felt for them, by avoiding certain conversations that could show our worldviews to be less than compatible, by working around the animosity that people had for each others’ friends- I felt myself rock with the potholes that we hit. The people to my left and right rocked too- I looked at them. I looked at the loose strands of hair that drifted across my friend’s face, followed a sun mote past the bridge of my boyfriend’s nose, and noticed that nausea was returning with our motions.
Look out the window, someone told me once, years ago. So- ahead of the windshield, the shadows of clouds could still be seen on the mountainside. After the house that had the documents we needed, it would be back to the city where a long-awaited vote was finally taking place. The van pitched sharply, but the motion sickness stayed away. Don’t look inside for too long. Just keep looking out the window. The peaks that clouds cast shadows on were almost behind us now. We were definitely going forward.
