Cape Fear: The Mornings After

On the morning after Trump’s win, I took a long walk along the Cape Fear River. There, not far from where the river empties into the sea, the water often has had an ocean feel but not that day. It was hot and calm. My feet crunched over the fallen leaves and orange mats of pine needles, while my mind did what minds tend to do: make sense of things, re-order, rationalize, somehow try to fit new facts into old patterns.

It didn’t work.

Like a lot of people, about half the people in this country, I felt unmoored. Overwhelmed, swamped. And yet not entirely. Just as our feet follow familiar trails, our minds beat the same paths over and over. I’ve been through enough of these sort of days—9/11, COVID, Trump I—to know my brain will search for patterns and will try to unscramble what has been scrambled, will try to make this new information fit back into my belief system, hopefully not just a reflexive belief system but one that reflects the world, and one that is willing to change and grow from doubt and questioning and trying to see.

But I was not ready yet to try and put the pieces back together. That would have to be a job for later.

There is a tunnel of dwarf live oaks, miniature hobbit trees, and eastern red cedars that is always one of my favorite parts of the walk. I stopped and listened to a Carolina wren sing from the gnarled and shaggy arm of one of the cedars. I tried to imagine that the bird existed entirely free of the knowledge of our politics, and I could almost feel the faint first twinges of an essay, but then I abandoned that too. Here is what I said into my tape recorder: “Nah. I’m not ready for this shit yet.” That was about as profound as I got that first morning.

The next day I took the same walk at a different tide. The river was pond flat and the groundsel trees, which only the week before had been in their full bloom of white, like rooted clouds, now offered only withered patches of cotton. I went back to the business of putting the pieces back together, the same activity my twenty-one-year-old daughter, after much crying, was engaged in up in New York where she went to college, the same activity half the country was engaged in. I would be teaching an undergrad class later that day, and prepared myself, for the second time in eight years, for what was sure to be an emotional couple of hours. The students, like my daughter, have experienced school years full of hurricanes, COVID, a Trump presidency, and now the prospect of another. They have endured things my generation did not have to endure. And their enduring has just begun.

The students were in my environmental writing class, but I wasn’t going to assume that the whole class shared my politics, and I wrote a careful email letting them know I was open to talk to anyone and that, of course, they didn’t have to talk at all. There were four young men in the class and eight young women, a not unusual ratio these days in creative writing classes and in the liberal arts in general. The role of young men in aiding the Republican victory had been all over the news, and as a teacher I had witnessed firsthand the marginalizing of men in college and grad school, partly in response to the first Trump victory, after which the dogmatism of the left seemed to counter prejudice not with fairness but with new prejudice. It seemed the hardest thing to do with a human mind was keep it open.

Beyond my students, I found myself wondering what it meant to be a man in the age of Trump. I thought of Kent in King Lear, the honest, sensible earl and loyal servant to the king, who tries to navigate the violent and insane world of Lear with commonsense and blunt honesty. He is banished for his efforts, which seems apt. Now that we have our own mad king, one who exemplifies all the worst traits of masculinity, it must be hard for some of these young men to remember, let alone emulate, the better parts of being a man.

But who was I kidding? Like Lear, I was daughter-obsessed. I cared about my students, I really did, but the student I cared most about was the one six hundred miles to the north. How would she fare in this ugly new world?

*

Day Three was better.

After having torn the world down, I tried to tentatively build it back up. You know the feeling. We can only live in chaos for so long. It was an overcast morning and there were birds everywhere, chitting from tree to tree. Eastern bluebirds, red-winged blackbirds, crows, Carolina wrens, yellow-rumped warblers. The highlight was seeing six ibises perched up in a barren tree, a dead live oak that had been killed by saltwater incursion. The birds were grooming themselves, twisting their necks to peck behind their own scapulae. Since moving south to North Carolina—a red state that has only voted blue once, during Obama’s first run, since I moved here—I have become an ibis fan. These birds spend most of their days literally poking around, that is, poking with crazy curved orange-red bills into crab holes in the marsh muck, bills that, thanks to millions of years of evolution, fit those holes like scimitars in sheaths of mud.

I focused in on one ibis at the top of the dead tree, its white feathers gleaming. Don’t worry. My heart didn’t leap. My problems didn’t disappear. I didn’t feel the old exhilaration, the feeling that drew me to birds in the first place. I kept my instinctive romanticism in check, my mind bending toward the tragic not the pastoral. But I will admit that seeing them in profile up in that tree—white wings with black tips, orange bills curving down—was good. Not hopeful. Not profound. Good.

I knew that while it might be nice to believe the birds exist apart from our squabbling politics, that illusion wouldn’t hold on a record breaking 84-degree day with the mosquitoes still out in November. My mind went to the western part of the state, a land devastated by climate disaster and a land where the people—with the exception of the city of Asheville, an island of blue in a sea of red—had overwhelmingly supported the climate-denying candidate.

I had recently read two books, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and Bill McKibben’s Falter, that incisively detailed the dark strange place we are as a society: How, as climate disaster threatens the planet, we have turned away from that crisis and into the twisted hallways of a virtual world, a mirror world. Both of books were scathing in their critique of our politics and society, but both did what a lot of books of their kind do, what my own books usually do: They ended on a note of hope and the belief that we will build something out of the rubble, that we will come together as a people and face the greater global problem. That was the literary and mental move—a turn (at least) toward positive action. It was a move I decided not to make on that hot November morning. Instead I gave over, if not to despair, then to profound sadness. It was the same sadness I heard in my daughter’s voice and saw in the faces of my undergrad class. The creative writing building, Kenan Hall, was a little like Asheville itself, as far as being a blue island. And now for the second time in eight years the students were stumbling back to our building like refugees….  

*

You might be ready for a sprig of hope. Something upbeat perhaps. While I can’t offer you that, I can say that the weather on Day Four was spectacular. The temperature had dropped to a more seasonal number, and there were pelicans and a few herons perched out on the pilings along with cormorants spreading their wings out to dry. The cord grass along the water’s edge bent toward orange, and undulated as the waves quietly lapped.

I was still not sure of my footing, or of the world, but at least some of my identity was coming back. For fifty years or so I have defined myself in opposition. Against. So this was a continuation of that, just on an extreme scale. My students were not so hardened.

The tide was lower than when I’d walked the day before and as I hiked I saw three ibises standing in a couple inches of water on the tidal flats. They poked down into the sand through the water. From my reading I knew that they ate fiddler crabs in the salt marshes all year long, except after their young were born when they flew inland to gather non-brackish crayfish to feed their nestlings who were not yet able to digest salt. An ordinary miracle, behavior that has developed over millions and millions of years.

The three birds fed downward while their reflections fed up at the sky. Dark backs and white glistening bellies mirrored in the water. A stunning sight. Not as a symbol of anything else, but as themselves, just going about their business.

I will not say my darkness lifted. But I will say this. There is no separate world. There never has been. But there are more worlds than the one in which we perpetually live, more ways to be on the planet. I don’t say that as a statement of hope but of fact.

Of course it worries me that the action of one species determines the fate of so many others. But it pleases me that there are lives other than our own. It pleases me that they are living those lives.

That was about as far as I could go on the fourth day.

That was all I could claim from the rubble.

---

DAVID GESSNER is the editor of A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis. He lives in North Carolina.

GIVE TODAY