Lisa Wells is a poet, non-fiction writer and editor from Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World and The Fix, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have been widely published, including in The New York Times and Harper’s Magazine.
Today, we have an extract from Believers to share with you. Read on …
Lisa Wells (Photo by Jaclyn Campanaro).
A daily surplus of novel experience is one of the pleasures of youth, a pleasure that can be fully appreciated only in retrospect. This must be why early life feels so much longer: novelty elongates the moment, the day, whether that novelty produces joy or agony. The dulling of one’s pain receptors through repetition is one consolation of adulthood. The price of adulthood is the curtailment of possibility, of newness, the exponential dying of time. We realize that what we believed about ourselves in youth—our possibility, our potential power—was in fact overdetermined by larger forces from the outset. We begin to see ourselves in the context of our particular subject positions. We begin to see ourselves in the context of a whole generation: of historical, sociopolitical, and geographic forces beyond our control. We realize we are not so special after all.
In time, I came to see that I was the product of a particular microclimate. I came to see that growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s—a high school dropout with a trauma history and an ax to grind, the daughter of a white, liberal, working-poor single mother who’d relinquished her authority over my life basically the instant I refused it— virtually ensured I’d have at least passing contact with activist movements. Not to say that there wasn’t altruism and genuine feeling for others at the root of my activism, just that the primary animating emotion (rage) was far more personal than I understood at the time. I was primed to reject received authority, but I also happened to be coming of age in an epicenter of radical environmental and animal rights movements.
Plenty of above board environmental organizations and advocacy groups were active in the Pacific Northwest throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, but it was also a hotbed of covert action. In 1995, activists affiliated with the Earth Liberation Army (ELA) burned down a hunting lodge in British Columbia, Canada, the first recorded “earth liberation” action in North America. The first such recorded action in the United States happened the following year, on Columbus Day. Activists from the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) spray-painted the phrase “504 years of genocide” on the walls of a PR firm, a gas station, and several McDonald’s restaurants in Oregon. Over the next thirteen years, Oregon would become a locus of ELF activity. During that period, more than twenty-five ELF actions, ranging from graffiti to arson, were committed in Washington and Oregon alone.
My friends and I were dimly aware of this underground, but our participation in direct activism waned as we became obsessed with a series of memoirs by the naturalist and tracker Tom Brown, Jr., whose stories included descriptions of a childhood apprenticeship to an elder shaman known as Stalking Wolf. (With adult eyes, this premise strikes me as obviously dubious, but the books were gospel to us then.) Brown mourned the destruction of the natural world and predicted the collapse of civilization with the fire-and-brimstone prosody of a pastor. He deplored “the mindless grey masses” that destroyed the earth and warned the reader to wake from civilization’s stupor before the final signs came to pass. One day soon the skies would bleed and great white serpents would traverse the air. He’d seen it in a vision.
But in the same vision, Brown had seen small groups of people turning their backs on the destruction, dressed in the tattered remnants of modern clothing and wielding handmade tools. These groups would disappear into what remained of the wilderness and build a new, sustainable future for humanity. If we hoped to join their ranks, we’d need to shift our energies from public to personal liberation. Sadly, but necessarily, in this version of the future most of humanity would die.
Peter found out that Brown’s Tracker School would run an inaugural youth camp in New Jersey that summer. If we liked the camp, we could enroll full-time in its sister school in Washington State. And so, a month after my seventeenth birthday, the four of us boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the setting of Brown’s 1978 Bildungsroman, a place that had become, in our imaginations, a mythic wilderness …
—Believers by Lisa Wells (Black Inc Books) is out now.
Believers
Making a Life at the End of the World
Discover trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radical new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth.
Like many of us, award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities - outcasts and visionaries - on the margins of society...
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