Insomnia might not be the right word for it, but you wake up much too early in the morning wondering if this political predicament is real. If it happens to me, an independent, it must hit Democrats, too.
Even if you’re a supporter of President Trump, the frenzied barrage of executive orders alone might keep you awake. The president proposes to reduce environmental and financial regulations, restructure the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council, suspend the refugee program, ban travel to the U.S. from various countries, build a U.S.-Mexico border wall, hire 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, revive the Keystone XL pipeline, give notice that the U.S. will withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, begin a hiring freeze for some federal workers, ease the “regulatory burdens” of the Affordable Care Act before helping Congress repeal it, and much else.
Many among us are finding ways to join the opposition, but we seek distractions to let us sleep. Deep breathing helps, and I calm myself with Mary Holland’s “Naturally Curious” blog. Holland’s photographs and explanations of the wildlife and plants around us in Vermont and New Hampshire are comforting reminders of a world always changing but essentially unchanged, at least for now.
Before we came to the Upper Valley, my wife and I used to find such comfort in our annual visits to old college friends in Tennessee near the Smoky Mountains. We drove south into early spring from Ohio through Kentucky to walk with our friends on Tennessee mountain trails with names like Roundtop, Porter’s Creek and Little River Trail, looking for flowers and other plants with memorable names like rattlesnake hawkweed, Nuttall’s pussytoes, meadow parsnip, squirrel corn and white trout lily. Spring warblers were mostly flitting shadows high in the trees, but sometimes their songs would reveal a name, too. The only one I remember now is the black and white warbler’s song like a squeaky wheel.
There was something reassuring, too, in the names of little churches we saw along the roads in Tennessee: Good Ship Grace Family Church, River of Life, Mother Love, Piney Level, Morning Star, Lamplight Full Gospel, Carpenters Campground, Sycamore Tree, Shepherd’s Glory and Wings of Faith.
We will set out soon to visit this place where springtime is sure to be well along, and I wonder if we can put our country’s grim circumstance aside for a few days. We’ll travel through West Virginia, where Donald Trump got almost 70 percent of the popular vote, and we’ll hike in Tennessee, where he won more than 60 percent. Will these beautiful places feel unfriendly?
And what will we talk about with our old friends, who have surely been losing sleep too? They grew up in Ferguson, Mo., where the killing of Michael Brown in August 2014, and its aftermath alerted millions of us to racial problems unlikely to be addressed by our new attorney general. Our friends worked with the Presbyterian Church for two years in the Philippines, where the president elected last spring, Rodrigo Duterte, another leader given to wild exaggeration, addresses his country’s drug problem by encouraging extra-judicial killings. He has already talked on the phone with our new president, and Duterte claims his approach to the drug problem has Trump’s support. If our president objects to that claim, he has yet to say so.
Since 2008 our friends have made yearly trips to Taguasco, Cuba, where a Presbyterian congregation provides help to many poor people, some not Presbyterians. But President Trump has promised to shut down the rapprochement with Cuba negotiated by the Obama administration, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott has volunteered to help him get it done. Our friends may soon have trouble returning to the Cuban town they’ve come to love.
We’ll probably steer clear of the day’s headlines as we talk in Tennessee, but the past, which can be a conversational refuge for people our age, might be as troubling as the headlines. Maybe we’ll just walk among birds and trees and flowers, and we might even pretend it’s August, when we could look for a beautiful vine with white flowers sometimes called virgin’s bower, sometimes pepper vine, and, most promising of all, travelers’ joy.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.