The Snags

I’ve been spending a lot of time with past versions of myself this year. It’s not a new development by any stretch, but it has taken a surprisingly healthy twist in 2020.

In 2019, when I knew I was coming up on the end of an eight-year stint on the East Coast, I recall expressing to a friend that I’d be leaving behind a lot of dead versions of myself. At the time, the tenor of that statement was similar to the kind somebody would use to describe an estranged person in their life as dead to them. The implication was that there would never be a good reason to reconcile with those past versions of myself that I was ashamed of, if not outright wounded by.

It’s interesting to me that within a year, a statement like “I will be leaving a lot of dead versions of myself somewhere” can remain true even while what I mean by it has changed. My feelings toward many of those so-called dead selves have evolved. It’s not as though there’s no real shame and regret in my mammal equivalent of tree rings—whatever our version is, mine have plenty of knots and blemishes to show for shame and regret. And I occasionally dwell on those two things hard enough to wonder how much I can reasonably expect to ever live down or define myself against. I mean, how much lifetime energy does one person have for making amends? If I’m to truly settle up with everyone I owe it to, I guarantee I will exceed my maximum allotment.

Although I can honestly say guilt comes to me as naturally as breathing, I refuse to believe that we’re built to spend our lives feeling like we’re constantly on parole and in debt emotionally (to say nothing of actual parole or debt, functions of our synthetic social order that I also don’t think we’re built for). Nonetheless, that’s how shame and regret make us feel. And at least in my experience, it’s difficult to believe it ought to be different because it’s usually anchored to something I’m technically responsible for. But as one exception, I’m realizing that cases where I’ve wrought real harm upon myself—not just my run-of-the-mill, asinine self-sabotage bullshit, but the stuff that really leaves a mark on my cognitive patterns—that sort of stuff needs to be handled quite differently.

For my part, it’s a fact that I’ve been occupying the same body and mind as my principal abuser for the better part of my life. That, I’ve learned, owes largely to a personality disorder the cosmic lottery dealt me. If you know me (online or IRL), you know my neurodivergence is a pretty consistent talking point of mine these days. It’s a part of me that I wish I’d known more about sooner. But having information around it for just shy of two years has already been strangely healing. One way it’s changed my life rests in how much it’s challenged the program of obsessive personal accountability that I subscribed to earlier in my twenties. At the time, I thought it was the only way for me to tolerate myself and live with the things in my past that I felt responsible for, or just didn’t have the tools to process. In hindsight, the most consequential tool I lacked was the critical understanding of culture, history, and policy that does two vital things: 1.) contextualizes our experiences, and 2.) helps us distinguish between higher-order systemic failures and things that are truly a matter of individual culpability.

Moving beyond mere tolerance for past versions of myself to something approaching a salutary relationship with my knot-prone tree rings of shame and regret has been a process. And I think I’m only just starting to get a handle on this now because I’m learning that I’m somebody who truly needs a hybrid accountability narrative—one that factors in both personal and systemic variables.

As a pretty unobtrusive-presenting white person, yes, systems in the U.S. are tailored to serve me. As a person who lived the first quarter-century of my life with an irresponsible backlog of unprocessed trauma, yes, I’ve hurt and upset a lot of people. I’m largely to blame for who I’ve hurt and I’ve largely benefited from living in a white supremacist society. For those two reasons, the individual accountability narrative has valence for me.

That individual accountability narrative, by the way, looms large in the discourse of addiction recovery and rehab. I think it has its limits and flaws, and to date, substance abuse hasn’t been my predominant beastie. But for the record, I do think many of us would stand to heal a lot more if some of the lexicon of sobriety—particularly around the idea of codependency—were more normalized. In any event, the accountability language hit a nerve early in my adult life, and that was a mostly positive development. But as I said, its application has some limits. As an example, I think it’s definitely not a panacea for habitually self-blaming folks. I can and will speak to that, but I’d be remiss to not mention another common misapplication of this brand of accountability. Namely, in general, it’s abusive and gaslight-y to impose it on marginalized folks. Again, my degree of privilege is such that I need a hybrid accountability narrative, but I say that with a plea to everyone reading this to be skeptical of anybody who tries to chalk up the challenges of BIPOC, disabled, LGQBTQIA+, or poor folks to negligence on the level of individual accountability.

Now, as an instinctively self-blaming person, here’s what I can say: For years, I fixated so obsessively on my role in every sour outcome to a point where I managed to internalize a sense of culpability for two things I had decidedly nothing to do with. Those were the particulars of my brain and birth. And so in 2020, aware that I’m neurodivergent and firmly proletarian in breeding, I now recognize that while most systems are built to serve me as that unobtrusive white person, many are also built to essentially tell me I’m unfit for society, and that it’s somehow my fault. There were people with resources and power in the 20th century who wanted people like me to absorb that message. And with that wider awareness, I think I’m getting closer to a more nuanced relationship to this idea of accountability than what I used to fall back on. To get more specific about that idea, I think it’s worth dredging up how I came to adopt it in the first place, because as I said, it wasn’t through the context of recovery, but it does very much relate to this theme of reckoning with past versions of myself.

There’s a story set in Montana that I think is recklessly overhyped and and irresponsibly overprescribed to general audiences like a dangerous big pharma drug. I can say that—and absolutely mean it—while also stating, unironically, that that same story is of paramount personal significance to me. In a real way, it altered my attitude and certainly some behaviors and choices after I read it for the first time on a flight home to Montana at the end of 2013. And while its meaning evolves for me every few years now, it still bears significantly on how I relate to society as a creative person who grew up on a river, and certainly on how I appreciate the patterns of death and rebirth that exist even in a single terrestrial lifetime. Much as I’d like to keep being cagey and not have to name the damn story, you might’ve already figured out that I’m talking about the volume of Norman Maclean stories that includes A River Runs Through It.

Just to get it all out there, the eponymous story that appears in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was essentially my Al-Anon and A.A. at the ripe age of 20. Everything I’ve since tried to live out along the lines of loving completely without complete understanding, the radical notion of grace, death and rebirth as two sides of the same coin, and the sobering reality that we can’t save everyone we’d like to—all of that comes from Maclean. But I highly doubt that people ever have any of that in mind when they’re reading or lazily recommending the text. The interpretation seems far too beholden to my personal beasties to be what everyone could possibly take away from it—much less a reason to recommend it.

The bottom line is that I hate how A River Runs Through It is positioned in the dominant discourse while simultaneously being deeply indebted to it for very personal reasons. And I have to confess that I’m often troubled by its popularity. There’s a lot in those pages that’s self-critical if not outright satirical, and I fear that it’s often confused as Maclean unilaterally condoning or glamorizing what he’s representing. To make matters more complicated, the majority of those three stories are dead-ass earnest. That’s to say, I think the hallmark of Maclean is that he risks sentimentality without necessarily being unambiguously proud or admiring of every character, attitude, and event he tries to narrativize. Culture is such that I just know that A River Runs Through It and Other Stories isn’t marketed as a multivalent, multidimensional text. I think the people who resonate with its different dimensions do so over time and independently—not because they came by it on a list of titles that are somehow emblematic of the myth that is “the West,” or even Montana specifically.

Now based on that long tangent about my relationship to what’s widely considered Norman Maclean’s magnum opus, it will surprise nobody to know that I really struggle with the general truth that some of the best stories in any medium are high art that have populist appeal. It’s something that’s really hard for me to reconcile because, on one hand, I want to know that what I connect with is finding people with similar values. And on the most basic level, when I encounter something that moves me or makes me feel less alone, I want whoever made it to be recognized and honored so they can continue to make art. But on the other hand, I have a hard time with how a broader discourse tends to assign a narrow perception or value to what I consider a hallowed text. It’s a super pretentious and immature disposition of mine. Believe me when I say it’s not the half of my trash qualities that I really need to work on. Nonetheless, I lay that all out there because Maclean’s been on my mind lately, specifically as I’ve been communing with a particular streak of past versions of myself.

Now, the way life has unfolded as of late, I’ve found myself getting reacquainted with a very specific period in my life. One of my current hustles involves getting a historical society’s archive and collections building prepped for a renovation project. It has kind of transported me back to my years as an NPS seasonal, and specifically the two summers I did prep work for carpenters and painters. That was all before anything written by Norman Maclean came into my life. But even though it wasn’t until late 2013 that the Al-Anon/A.A. energy of A River Runs Through It hijacked my outlook in earnest, I was already headed in that direction.

I think those shame and regret gremlins I’ve already alluded to were getting difficult to live with by my first few years of undergrad between 2011 and early 2013. What I should’ve done—and what I try to do now when I sense those gremlins—is approach them head-on, learn from them, commit to changing course with perspective on who I don’t want to be, pronounce the version of myself I’m retiring dead, and then give her a proper burial. Suffice to say, I didn’t have any healthy, calculated framework like that at age 20. But what Maclean gave me was a metaphor I could recognize as a placeholder.

In talking about the lifecycle of a salmonfly, Maclean has written, “Still, it would be hard to know what gigantic portion of human life is spent in this same ratio of years under water on legs to one premature, exhausted moment on wings.” Earlier, I noted that I tend to blame myself for two things I’ve had no control over: the conditions of my brain and birth. In some instances, the fallout of those things overlap so indecipherably that I can’t tell if or how one has influenced the other. As an example, I feel hardwired to the salmonfly hatch, and I don’t know when that started.

The Yellowstone River is the longest free-flowing river in the contiguous U.S. It bisects my hometown of Gardiner beginning at its confluence with the Gardner River (yes, the river and the town are spelled differently; don’t @ me). The salmonfly hatch on the Yellowstone is the stuff of legend. While its exact timing every summer varies by section and hinges on temperature, the hatch around Gardiner typically follows close after the solstice. Now, I’ve recently hatched my own theory on why I’ve always felt such a primal attachment to summer solstice. It goes like this: I was born right before winter solstice. The first 96 hours of my life coincided with the four shortest days of the year for the Northern Hemisphere. Basically, I think that has induced in me a desperate relationship to the longest days of the year, and by extension, the patterns I associate with them, like the salmonfly hatch on the Yellowstone.

For the uninitiated, the type of salmonly I grew up seeing each summer is a three-inch long stonefly—specifically the adult giant salmonfly (Pteronarcys californica). By the time it’s an adult, it’s rapidly on its way out. Once it emerges from water and its wings dry, the remaining days of its life are devoted to mating and laying eggs. The eggs conceived during the week or so of the hatch constitute the cohort of nymphs that will live underwater for the next three to four years before they emerge. With only three phases in its lifecycle, the salmonfly is the simplest of all aquatic insects.

This is how I know that I’m basic: The giant salmonfly is the simplest of its kind and yet, for many years, I knew of no organism whose death and rebirth patterns I identified more closely with. Apart from Maclean, I don’t know of anybody who’s committed the analogy to literature. And, as these things often go, encountering it in art became an access point of sorts. I think the metaphor of the salmonfly lifecycle—mostly spent underwater, with nary a human being as a witness—was what made me feel like it was okay to look at the majority of my life as somehow dispensable or unworthy of documentation. And I think the individual accountability narrative was compatible with that interpretation. But again, with no difference in the details of the salmonfly lifecycle, I don’t quite see it that way anymore.

I think the flaw with that interpretation was the way I thought about retiring lapsed versions of myself. Namely, I treated them as castoffs to be erased—not necessarily material to be processed, decomposed, and possibly regenerated for a higher function. It was like putting more plastic into a landfill, and that’s not good for the person doing it or anyone else.

As I understand it now, I think the real power of the salmonfly lifecycle as a metaphor has two responsible applications. I think it mimics what we can reasonably expect of our mood in a lifetime. I also think it mimics what we can reasonably expect of the trajectory of any sustainable creative endeavor or practice. That is, the majority of making shit is showing up and doing the work whether or not there are witnesses, and for every few years of doing that every day or week, we might come up with something to share for a few moments of real connection with other folks if we’re lucky.

What’s fascinating to me is that the more useful metaphor for the kind of symbiotic death and rebirth that I’m actively trying to learn and practice was also available in the immediate physical environment I grew up in. I just managed to overlook it in that particular ecosystem, and I only understood it differently when I saw it in a different one at age 26. The phenomena I’m talking about here are snags—in essence, dead trees.

In Greater Yellowstone, a lot of the snags are casualties of an iconic time in the annals of Yellowstone lore. It predates both my older sister and me, but not by much. And it still looms large in the memories of the 80s cohort of Yellowstone seasonals-turned-lifers that includes both of my parents. If you weren’t around for it (like me) or just didn’t follow the news then, here’s an abbreviated history of the 1988 Yellowstone fires: They were a collection of 250 fires that formed the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Greater Yellowstone (so post-national park designation). They lasted over five months and burned well into November, affecting more than a third of the park.

Growing up, the most obvious legacy of the ‘88 fires were the abundance of dead tree stands visible from developed areas throughout the park. And in my adult life, I’d encounter still more of them—albeit more than a decade later—as I waded deeper into the park’s backcountry. At some point, I also became conscious that the fires were the reason I didn’t see many moose north of the Tetons growing up. But the timing of Yellowsonte’s revegetation was such that, by the first half of the 2010s, I saw moose about as often as I saw the Stone’s most notorious adult grizzlies (RIP Scarface). Besides those few obvious relics of the ‘88 fires, I had no real concept of how much they shaped the only iteration of Yellowstone I would ever know. And I definitely had no idea what function all the dead trees served in complex early seral forests—the likes of which Yellowstone has in spades thanks to the ‘88 fires.

In temperate rainforests, as well as coastal and lowland forests that have never been clear-cut, the dead trees blend in. Those three forests correspond to three of five elevation zones present on the Olympic Peninsula, where I’ve lived now for the past year and some change. And maybe it’s just because I’m a simple high-desert kid whose senses have been slowed by my years out East, but I have a hard time spotting snags among the live trees here. They’re so well-integrated into the look and shape of old fir, hemlock, spruce, and cedar stands that I wouldn’t know to look for them if I hadn’t read about them first. And just going off the Wikipedia page version of how snags function in old-growth forests, you don’t have to read too deeply to see how kickass these things are. For what are essentially dead trees, they do a lot of important shit in old-growth forests, which are some of the most resilient, efficient, and physically commanding features on our planet.

In healthy old growth, snags represent 10-20% of the biomass. And in temperate forests, like those on the Peninsula, more than 100 bird and mammal species use snags as homes, including cavity nesters (like woodpeckers) and water hunting birds that use them as perches. The decaying wood of snags also supports a broad spectrum of decomposers that we have to thank for our planet not being one giant landfill. And while this doesn’t come from any deep research, it’s too goddamn poetic to not lift directly from the most basic of snag explanations on the internet:

A snag undergoes a series of changes from the time the tree dies until final collapse, and each stage in the decay process has particular value to certain wildlife species.

Maybe I’m the only person as preoccupied as I am with these different sources of metaphor for what we’re maybe supposed to do with our dead spiritual biomass. That’s fine. And I’m not ashamed to say that reading that for the first time defrosted my icy goth heart and made me a little weepy. But because I was newly aware that snags weren’t exclusive to old growth forests, I also had to see what Wikipedia says about the role of snags in the complex early seral forests. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Now, “complex early seral forest” sounds like a fancy operation. At least it did to me before I knew what it was. But if you’ve been around the block in the western U.S., you’ve probably seen as many stands that fit the complex early seral bill as any other. They’re essentially forests of snags, and they got that way because of natural disturbances (like fire, lightning, disease, and wind). As I understand it, the snags are kind of what’s left holding the soil together and creating a pretty solid habitat for the kind of biodiversity that natural disturbances tend to generate. In short, they don’t look like much, but they’re doing good things. This is the sentence that got me about snags in complex early seral forests:

The residual biomass of snags reduces disturbance stress and provides for the rapid proliferation of new life.

Have you ever sniffed around Wikipedia and found something that sounds like a goddamn tarot reading? I have. This was it. I had to let it sink in, because it is insane to me that what I had always categorized as an uninteresting eyesore from my Yellowstone upbringing are essentially doing the yeoman’s work that I’m currently obsessing over: regeneration. It’s not just that they’re doing more than meets the eye, all of which is cool. Those snags are restoring life. And they’re dead. With all respect to the giant salmonfly—a precious organism to me, ripe with symbolism that can still move me to tears on a given day—these snag forests are the physical manifestation of the actual relationship I want to the dead versions of myself.

Getting reacquainted with past versions of myself was not something I set out to do at the top of the year. I think it’s just happened because, like a lot of folks, I’ve taken the responsibility of sequestering myself to my house in the name of public health seriously. And one side-effect is that I’ve had to sit with myself with more space than I’ve had in recent memory to reflect. Every week this year, I’ve remembered something about myself, or something I’ve done, that makes me cringe. But I know those glitchy backups were doing the best they could at the time, and now being more aware of the repressed trauma and pain in the backdrop, I honestly have to respect what past versions of me did to cope and survive. But again, that’s me merely finding ways to tolerate or qualify what’s there. If it’s possible, I want to figure out how to have a more symbiotic relationship with those glitchy backups. I want to figure out how to incorporate more of those snags into the living biomass. Just because they’re eyesores to me doesn’t mean they can’t be redefined somehow.

When I committed myself to writing something up about what’s been on my mind for September, I didn’t see it going this deep into the discreet virtues of snags. In fact, I was hoping to have something deft and thoughtful to share about three books that I authorized myself to reread for the first time in August. I saw it as my self-prescribed August reread fest, and it came about because I’d just been noticing that my reading habits, though consistent, were becoming progressively obligatory and uninspired.

Essentially, I’ve been going through the motions of being a good literary and eco-citizen—giving my bandwidth to what I feel I have to read and learn and spend time with as a matter of responsibility. Meanwhile, for several months, I’d been dying to reread three books I read non-consecutively between August 2018 and May 2019. And seeing where this has all gone, I still want to make mention of them because they do track with a theme here. Namely, their contents haven’t changed, but upon rereading, my relationship to them—which was already fond and admiring—has deepened and evolved. What’s more, reading them in succession felt a little bit like holding up a mirror and seeing just how much I’ve been leaning into this idea of life and death as two sides of the same coin since 2018.

In order, the books that I deputized myself to reread were Melissa Stephenson’s Driven, Chris La Tray’s One-Sentence Journal, and Jim Harrison’s Dead Man’s Float. Strangely, I first read them in that same order, about four months apart from each other, starting with Driven back in August 2018. What wasn’t obvious to me then that is really striking upon collective reread is why these three probably stood out to me. In overt terms, they all contend with death—of dogs, dads, brothers, and in the case of Harrison, his own terrestrial existence.

My guess is that, as early as August 2018—maybe even as a result of reading Driven for the first time in 2018—I had begun to believe that my lifelong fixation on mortality might have an elevated function that I’d neglected. And while it’s taken me a couple trips around the big star to turn up the wisdom of snags as a new way to think about the dead stuff, I think Stephenson, La Tray, and Harrison all do something really important that left an impression. That is, they’re all extraordinarily sensitive and generous witnesses to patterns of life and death.

I’m beginning to think we all have a responsibility to be attentive witnesses to life and death. I think that’s how we make sure, without hubris, that the stuff that’s going to help our fellow deathward travelers gets passed on. I feel like the anthropocentrism of English and English-speaking cultures is such that it’s tempting to see that labor as an exclusively external endeavor. But I think that’s kind of grounded in our proclivity to objectify everything but ourselves.

In the spirit of bearing witness and taking stock of our own dead biomass, I feel like it behooves us to examine ourselves from a bit of a distance and look for the snags. They might not be immediately visible. We might have to be in a different environment before they’re recognizable or relevant. And even then, I don’t think we should expect them to be sightly. But I do think it’s our job to look out for them.

Figuring out how to get on amicable terms with past versions of myself is very much linked to the idea of finding a healthy relationship with my ego that I was riffing on here last month. My point then was that the value of researching ourselves and getting on good terms with our egos is that it helps us figure out what we have to offer, so we can give it without reservation. I stand by that. And I’m slowly realizing that something I may have to offer is stuff like this—stuff that somehow leaves people with the effect of having had an honest and big-hearted conversation where they don’t usually get it—on the internet, through the lonely filter of a screen (with the candlestick, in the billiard room, etc.).

It’s taken me the better part of 27 years to figure out that much. And it’s taken me a few thousand words to try to say what James Baldwin could in 53 words, and Jim Harrison could in 11. I’ve definitely inherited my paternal grandmother’s terrifying germanic efficiency when it comes to physical tasks. But when it comes to discussing matters of the spirit, brevity has never been my strong suit and I’m done beating myself up over that just because all my formal writing instruction said I should. I just don’t think the realest shit I have to offer is brief, and I’d rather give people the effect of a conversation along with what the pithy, smarter folks have already said on the subject—which is what I’ll leave y’all with. So, in the words of Baldwin:

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

And, in the words of Harrison:

This is my job, to study the universe from my bridge.