Valentine’s on Leap Day – I heart the Sierra

I am on a train to Sacramento, making Valentine’s Day cards for state legislators. The cards are handmade, and I’m adorning them with sparkling hearts, personal handwritten love notes, and chocolates. I got a little over-excited at Target, saw all the hearts and glitter, and I went all in, I am even wearing heart-shaped earrings. 

Valentine’s Day has always been a mixed bag for me – and probably for a lot of people. But this year, I decided to make hearts for the staff I might meet at the State Capitol – and ask for their support of the Range of Light National Monument.

Who doesn’t love a heart and a little chocolate on Valentine’s Day?

I’ve been working on this tumultuous project about 11 years, and nothing, I mean nothing is guaranteed, no matter how hard I work or carefully I plan… so the very least I can do is make it fun, and making politics fun is a challenge.

But I have flair for drama on the day of hearts.

On Valentine’s Day two decades ago, I left Silicon Valley, and quit my tech job to work as a waitress in Death Valley. I wanted to watch the sun set and rise in a desert canyon, untethered to time, and sip my coffee in the predawn light with my tiny butane flame flickering across a black ocean of sand and rock in the silence of the Mojave.

My boyfriend (at the time) was an anti-Valentine’s-Day-guy. “It’s a Hallmark holiday,” he said, and he said that for three consecutive years and no chocolate was ever delivered. So, I said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to celebrate in the desert.”

I left him on February 14 at a coffee shop in Cupertino, and drove for nine hours (crying) in the pouring rain. When I arrived in Death Valley, the hottest, driest place on earth, it was flooding, flashing warning signs were everywhere, rivers ran with the gullies, and snow topped the passes. The only radio station I could get was Las Vegas NPR, and they were playing opera. I got out and ran my hand through the cold fluff, delighted, like this was a good omen, freedom and adventure at my fingertips.

Back then, I had $120,000 in savings and a brand-new Tacoma fully equipped, and I was going to do whatever I imagined, and I could imagine a lot.

But as usual, when I imagine that my life is going to pivot in a major way, it’s just a small turn. The desert adventure lasted two months, and no big changes occurred, though I did learn to change a tire in uncomfortable spots on remote roadsides. I busted all four, shredded them on volcanic rocks in those canyons, and destroyed my shocks.

Why did I think it was this big end? Too many Edward Abbey fiction books (*which is all of them) and not enough time outside with reality.

The real end of that journey came 10 years later, when that same truck, now with Colorado license plates, expired registration, no heat, no AC, and only a groaning gurgle coming from the engine, could be seen chugging across the Central Valley headed to the mountains, with me at the helm, wearing wool socks for gloves and two coats to keep warm, and carrying a petition regarding the Range of Light. When you finally get clarity on something of the highest importance, you get started right away. And I did.

I had seen all the places I craved, lived in different cities, climbed mountains in New Zealand and South America, been a ranger and a river guide, danced tango in Argentina, surfed in Costa Rica, and got engaged three times, only to realize that there is one place I love above all others, and it is the glorious Sierra Nevada. I want to spend all my summers wandering among its majestic and outstanding trees, climbing over passes to descend to hidden high alpine lakes, swimming in its emerald pools, sun bathing on granite, letting the warm breeze brush my hair back as the pine needles dance in the sky.

I love those mountains, and my life mission is to express that passion.

So, I have 80 love letters to write and design, candy to carefully attach, with bows, hearts, and a spreadsheet with names and details. It’s 1 a.m. late night project for a several nights, followed by days of entering the very quiet and proper offices of the state legislature – and announcing – not that I have a meeting and a business card – but I have a Valentine.

The smiles made it absolutely worth the effort.

We humans are supremely smart and creative. We can imagine, plan, and build entire worlds in our minds, each one of us. We are the most powerful creatures on this planet, and all around us is beauty: the sound and shape of ocean waves, the complexity and intricacy of a single feather on a bluebird soaring through the sky, the wonder and mystery of the bright stars twinkling in the heavens. It’s all right there in front us, reminding us of how special it is to be alive.

We just can’t see it. We’ve lost our sight.

Saint Valentine’s Day comes with a lot of legends, but according to respected lore, to win back his freedom, an imprisoned saint blessed his jailer’s daughter and gave her back her sight, and he signed a letter to her, “from your Valentine.” Another legend states that the saint defied the emperor’s orders and secretly married couples to spare the husbands from being conscripted to serve in war.

In any case, it’s about love.

Happy Valentine’s Day – Belated.

I’m sitting next to a Trump Voter

I’m sitting next to a Trump voter on a five-hour flight. He’s wearing cowboy boots bigger than he is tall, a shiny belt buckle, and a red ballcap, and he is eating a bag of fast-food, which fills the plane with French Fry smell. There is a seat between us, and I offer to share the middle tray so we can put our drinks there, and he takes this as an invitation to chat.

He tells me about his farm and his family. He grows specialty fruits and nuts. He married his high school sweetheart, and he has three kids, plus an adopted nephew. He’s been having indigestion, lately. He says he drinks too much after work, socially. He lost a lot of money on crypto.

He voted for Trump, mostly, because he makes him feel represented and safe in the world. He says, “I felt better with him in charge.”

This is familiar to me. I spent the first years of the monument campaign 2013 and 2014, and last bit of 2015, in the rural southern Sierra Nevada, mostly listening to Republicans.

The task of a grassroots advocate (or any advocate who seeks to persuade anyone), is not to talk, but to listen deeply until a person feels fully understood and you understand them. This gives people the emotional capacity to hear you. It’s like a good campfire chat, relaxed and easy, though counterintuitive in the world of politics.

I’m not campaigning here. I’m on a flight to paradise so I can climb up and down volcanoes, swim in tropical waters, and forget about everything for a while, though I do truly enjoy listening to people. So I listen.

A couple of hours later, he asks about me.

I tell him straight up that I run a nonprofit, I’m a tree hugging environmentalist trying to save the forest between Yosemite and Sequoia, and I want to make a big park for people and wildlife.

He googles me, stares at his phone, and looks me over.

“Well, you seem trustworthy and authentic,” he says. He owns a cabin at Shaver Lake, which is in the center of the proposed monument. After pausing a moment, “Would you allow hunting?”

“Yes, I would. But hunting groups never return my calls.”

“Well,” he says. “If you allow hunting, I’d support you.”

I laugh. I’ve learned so much in these conversations with people, and I’ve made a few friends along the way, too. Giving speeches, and all the rest of pushing policy change is another thing…and we’ll get to that.

When you talk to people one on one, about specific issues that affect us all, like the homelessness, healthcare for all (not what we have), immigration, fair pay, clean air, pure water, and parks, you’ll find that we mostly agree. (I’m fairly certain Republicans go to Yosemite.) I discovered this in the early part of the campaign, that about 90 percent of people agree on most things, which surprised me, given the optics of division so prevalent in social media.

The heart of our problem in America is that we live in an oligarchy. The rich and powerful set most of our nation’s public policies and determine how we communicate and what we discuss, and this doesn’t serve most of us very well. Facebook fuels conflict and spreads misinformation (more on this later). The two-party system encourages division. And, the Citizen United ruling allowed unrestricted spending on political campaigns by corporations, which have their own interests at the forefront.

It’s hard to know how much we have in common. As I consider this, he says, “You seem a bit tired.”

After 10 years on the campaign, I’m more exasperated than tired, and it’s not because of Trump voters – they are a reflection of the state of this country and our failure to enact meaningful changes and build a future that includes and serves most regular people. On “my side of the aisle,” there is a lack of vision and courage, which I am quite familiar with.

The first Range of Light bill was gutted into a “nothing burger.” When I discovered this (and that’s another story too), I pulled my support, and thankfully, that first bill was quietly crushed. But it was a four-year setback for me. To get the right bill, I had to climb back up that ladder.

Most of us don’t understand how our government works. It’s complex, and when we are filled with emotion and anger, we show up at the polls. We make noise at a rally. But after that, we leave it to the legislators and lobbyists, and things don’t turn out right. A sense of helplessness sets in.

Then, the angry ones show up at the polls, and who will they vote for?

Take a guess.

At the end of the flight, my cowboy companion walks me to my bags and gives me with a hug goodbye, which surprises me, and then disappears.

People are mostly decent. Not all. But most.

Trump is not the answer, but Biden isn’t offering a response to him that addresses the bread and butter of most Americans, who want a President who cares for them as his first priority. We want a President who articulates that with charisma and vision and acts on his policies with integrity and courage.

That’s what people really want.

Nine years later…

I am on a date with an Australian man, who has read all of my blog posts prior to meeting me; and he abruptly asks, “Why did you just stop?” First of all, there aren’t many posts here, and they’re short, but it’s true. I stopped publicly writing about my life March 1, 2015, about 9 years ago.

I don’t answer, but instead stare at the murky walls of the speakeasy in downtown San Jose, mentally surveying my life.

In the beginning, I was all hope and no experience. I had clarity and vision, but I faced a long gut-wrenching battle to create the Range of Light National Monument. And I was naive. I even believed the Forest Service could reform itself (read that last post). My goal was (and is) to protect 1.4 million acres of federal land between the parks, an area twice as big as Yosemite; something like that hasn’t happened in the Sierra Nevada in a century, not since John Muir, and to be successful, the U.S. President must sign a proclamation, declaring the land protected. Forever.

What happened in that nine years? Why the silence for nearly a decade? I let the question hang in the air. Glasses clink.

Here’s what I don’t say… Because I experienced one trauma after another, one brutal political lesson after another, one personal loss after another, and I was too busy hemorrhaging and trying to control the bleeding to speak about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. Period.

At one point, I forgot how to breathe.

Two days before I gave a speech at the Democratic Delegation Luncheon in Washington DC, an ER doctor told me, I was alternating between hyperventilating and holding my breath, so my lips, fingers, and feet were going numb from lack of oxygen. It was one of my first speeches ever, and it was a rare invitation. Congressional representatives meet to share lunch together at the Capitol and invited guests (that was me) get 5 minutes to convince them to do something while they dine and stare at their phones (like the rest of us).

At that point, I was nearly out of money, my husband had recently sent me an Excel spreadsheet with our expenses itemized including the weekly date dinner (so I would know exactly how much I must pay monthly to continue the campaign and contribute to the household costs).

I had two months of savings left.  

Also, about that time, I discovered that my nagging back pain wasn’t because I was sitting too much (driving to the mountains and working tech jobs) – it was because my lower vertebrae are massively deformed; the MRI showed that they’re smashed together, and they squeeze my spinal cord and bend it the wrong way, affecting my ability to move and sit still. The doctor said, “I’ve seen one worse; at least you can still walk.” Then he said, “Don’t drive and don’t sit.” Really? These activities are fundamental to both earning income and getting to the mountains.

In a nutshell, I didn’t have money, I didn’t have an emotional or financial support system, and I didn’t have my health. I had no structural integrity in my body or outside in the world. So, as I built a massive grassroots campaign, sprawling over the mountains, I had to rebuild myself and my entire life from the spine outward.

The caterpillar in its cocoon phase is entirely vulnerable; it is a mushy mass of liquid with imaginal cells that shape its future as a butterfly. If you cut into it then, it will ooze out and its life will end. When metaphorizing, it burrows inward, dissolves into a liquid, and reshapes itself, until it’s fully formed and ready to fly. The butterfly does this in two weeks though, not nine years.

What was I actually doing during that time? I sip my Manhattan and ponder; my drinks have gotten progressively stronger through those years, too, numbing.

I was quietly reshaping everything in my life in an ongoing unprotected state. So, yes, silence. Politically and personally, exposing your weaknesses doesn’t help you in this realm; you just make yourself an easy target for people on “your side” and “the other side.” In the political realm, people will poke the life out of you, without a second thought.

James Carville, the political strategist who ran Bill Clinton’s campaign, recently said, “The DNC, the state party chairs, the labor people, the progressive advocacy groups, they all want a seat at the table. You can have a seat as long as you keep your mouth shut. I’m old and I can say it because I’ve been around, but that’s the truth.”

Yes. It’s the truth at certain moments in certain places, particularly Washington DC.

That’s how I got the Range of Light bill introduced by Congress, working behind the scenes for years, with focus and a few friends across the spectrum. I didn’t say anything about that bill while working on it, until it became public in the final hours of the 2022 congressional session. It was introduced nearly exactly as I had written it, and that is a seat at the table.

But the value of silence is a half-truth, which works in distinct moments and places. For our country, this is not that moment.

The people, who Carville says should remain silent while Biden’s DC team figures out what to say and do, are exactly the ones who should start talking, and the DC policy wonks and think-tank strategists should actually listen to them (and not via a political survey or phone call or text message, but by going out into the field and talking to people, face to face). The President and his team must understand what people need and articulate a future for them, with power, passion, and clarity.

Only that will prevent the end of our democracy and the beginning of American despotism. Make no mistake, this is exactly where we are. Right on the edge. Dramatic, I know.

Anyway.  

That unanswered question still hangs in the air, politely asked by a curious man who I’ll never see again. All I say is, “There was too much happening at the same time, for all nine years, actually 10, and I was not prepared to share the experience publicly.”

Now, however, I am.