This Place in Nevada City is One Way Out
Yes, it's a move of cowardice to go sit on 115 acres and a stream, but also ...maybe the only move
This past weekend was the first time I ventured out of an eight-mile radius of my home on my own since the Before Times. The last time I was in a car by myself or going to do something that was specifically for me was the fall of 2019. I'm surprised I knew how to function—maybe I don’t. Judging by my city driving it’s a no.
It was for a concert down in LA. I made plans to do this with a few friends from college late in the spring, back when vaccines were rolling out, and a new administration was taking shape. Remember that time? I know it’s easy to forget now, but something in the form of hope from the ashes was palpable—at least for a moment.
I thought, upon clicking the buy button, that maybe we weren’t fully through the looking glass. That maybe January 6 was the nadir. That perhaps all those people who’d ingested whole the hate and the bile and the Nazi-style rhetoric in exchange for what? Shitty T-shirts and shitty flags and shitty bodies and shitty melted minds would somehow snap out of it, would realize that we really, in fact, are in this together and that people were dying all around us, every day, who didn’t need to.
Maybe, just maybe, they could glimpse a past that at least had commonality. America has never been perfect, and it’s worth arguing that there’s nothing about it initially to make great again—but maybe we could take this opportunity to finally reconcile with the hundreds of years of oppression and malfeasance but take the framework that got us here (and at the same time is failing us) and build something new. Tear it down to the studs and start over and blah blah blah.
But it didn’t happen, and it isn’t happening, for myriad reasons. Pick one. A misinformation for profit machine that is bigger than any single empire on Earth has ever been, whose founder yells “companies over countries” to close meetings is one. Politicians beholden to the lobbies of coal, oil, big pharma, tech, the military-industrial complex, anything that churns out a profit in exchange for killing whatever’s left of our invaluable and irreplaceable natural resources is another.
And the third, the combination of both of the above, living in a society where there is no common narrative, no shared truth and seeing, first-hand, people around you get sick and perish, to live in a time when the building’s crumbling and everyone’s jamming the exits—well, it breaks everyone a little. And because people are fragile, when they break, they shatter—so that’s what we’re trying to sidestep when we dare venture outside.
The concert was lovely, I will say. LA County’s protocols are good. Multiple people without vax cards were turned away at the door. Those who couldn’t get in didn’t put up a stink. The venue, small but ventilated, was sold at one-third capacity, and everyone did their best to fake it; we bobbed and weaved and jumped up and down in our own space. The singer stopped the show to make someone in the front row put their mask back on. “It’s for my safety, too,” she said. She wasn’t annoyed, but she was dead-serious.
But the world I stepped back into for that moment was not the world I left. There were moments of joy, that feeling you get at a good show or when you’re tucked into your seat in a movie and the popcorn bucket is still warm in your hands when anticipation meets the reality of seeing something great for the first time. I don’t think the desire to be there ever really leaves us, but the reality is—as we approach our third Covid winter—some of it is gone for good. Everything’s harder, everything has barriers and hurdles, and even if you get a room full of people who are down to be compliant just so they and their fellow humans can live to see another Thanksgiving, there are many others (tens of millions) who don’t want that. They want to burn it down.
They are angry, and they are tired, but they’ve been fed and fueled by hate and untruths. They’ve been led to believe that magic is the answer, and they are horny for the rapture. What filling up with all the malice and practicing the opposite of what their bible teaches them in the interim, I don’t know. They probably couldn’t tell you either. They’d say something garbled about freedom instead. They are, to a person, the reason we’re not functioning and may never again.
The band only encored with a single song. “It takes a lot for us to come back out here,” the singer said. “I know it takes a lot for you too.” Then they played, took a bow, put their masks back on, and escaped into the darkness.
12800 Diamond Creek Rd Nevada City, CA 95959
I guess I can’t leave that up there without fully leaning into getting lost in a little cabin in the woods Jeremiah Johnson/Grizzly Adams trope. So here it is, the best living metaphor for escaping whatever this whole thing is that I’ve run across quite some time.
There’s not a whole lot to it, really. This is a 115-acre parcel in the high country of the Sierra Nevada about 50 miles west of Truckee. You could even recreate the Donner Party from here if it ever snowed. The property has its own water source in the form of Diamond Creek, a year-round tributary right out the back door (is there a back door? The single picture of the cabin says probably not.)
Along with YOUR 115 acres, there are another 633 acres of Forest Service land to basically gather wood, set traps, chop endless amounts of firewood, and get lost in your spring thaw. There’s an old logging road that gets you there and back, and the rest is up to you.
Of course, there is more than a little bit of cowardice taking the slingshot me into the wilderness and hope I don’t turn into Ted Kaczynski (hint: you won’t, for starters, he was much, much smarter) mentality. We’re taught to stay and fight. The systems we have are broken but can be fixed.
The internet in and of itself is OK, but the business model Facebook uses to breed hate for profit is not. Police are necessary, but the way we do cops with corruption, systemic racism, and brute military force is not. Politics will always be bad and filled with dark money, but the grift of so many outside influences and the money sloshing through their coffers while they strip away whatever’s left of the environment and our rights—a New New Deal eschewed for decades more of extraction from the wan Earth, mega-polluters, and end-of-empire-style militarization just has be stopped. We’re already living the effects of unchecked greed.
Can you do all this from your cabin? Can you link arms and say we’re not at the end of the ending but at the cusp of a new beginning? No, you can’t. Consider this instead a relatively small investment in a very large and woodsy safety net for when it really goes down, and things like concerts or eating outside in groups fully become what they’re trending towards now: a sweet memory.