Passing Through Hinterland

On when things aren't getting better

Watching the world go by in a rectangle of tinted glass: Indiana windmills, snow-dusted Mid-Atlantic flats, the purple curves of the Shenandoah valley. One of my bandmates is playing a video game, another is dozing beneath an eye mask. Each of us numbing out in our own little worlds for a while, separate yet ferried together somewhere.

It’s been a particularly potent time to go on tour. Since we began in early January, we’ve seen Los Angeles burn, a tentative ceasefire in Palestine, David Lynch’s death. We’ve witnessed evil take office and immediately shadow the land, like the demon Hexxus in Fern Gully, a black ooze in a beautiful world, bent on destruction. People have been leaving social media as if leaping off a rotting carcass, and I’m just about ready to jump.

Through it all, I’ve been wanting to write, but morning after morning, I stare at the screen and nothing comes. And nothing comes. I suppose it’s hard to hear words beneath the surface of a scream. The scream is the ice, the words are the water, and in late January, every stream is frozen.

But now I’ve found a trickle of thought to follow, and it’s this:

We are conditioned to believe things will get better. So much of life works that way. Z has a bad burn on his hand—the skin raw and pink as tuna—but it’s getting better. I have yet another daycare head cold, but it’s getting better. It’s gonna get so much better, you’ll see, I sing onstage each night when we perform the song “Figurine.” And The Beatles tell us, above a jangle of jaunty guitar, it’s getting better all the time.

But what about the things that aren’t getting better, that won’t, that can’t? What do we do with that? I remember reading this piece by the brilliant Sophie Strand about how unhelpful and even offensive it is to say to someone who is chronically ill, “I hope you feel better.” It’s as if we’re trying to slap a happy face on everything, instead of truly sitting with and recognizing the kind of pain that defies linear healing. She makes the argument that it’s not so different than our discomfort with the plight of the environment. “Do not go outside,” she cautions, “and say to the clearcut forests, the poisoned East Palestine ecosystem, the microplastic-threaded oceans, ‘Hope you are feeling better!’”

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, having a parent in the early stages of dementia. It’s an impossible reality to sit inside: that things are only going to get harder, that more will be lost. The birds, the mosses, the mind. The black ooze in a beautiful world.

I just don’t want it to get any worse, my father said to me recently on the phone. I was brushing my teeth, racing through my morning routine. Between taking care of a kid and taking care of a parent and (sometimes) taking care of myself, there’s always so much to do. I often feel annoyed with him, frustrated by the constant calamities that I have to correct: he accidentally wiped his email inbox clean, he lost his keys again, he can’t find my sister’s phone number, even though I’ve written everything down in an address book on his desk and reminded him a trillion times. All the systems I’m trying to put in place aren’t working. Though it may seem callous, it’s easier, I’ve come to understand, to feel annoyed when he calls with the latest crisis. It’s a manhole cover for a terror and grief so huge, I can’t bear to peer over the edge of it.

But what he said that day made me pause. I stopped brushing and spat out the toothpaste, a Rorschach of foamy green in the sink. I felt my frustration dissolve, felt myself fall a little into the gaping hole beneath. I couldn’t say to him, it won’t get any worse. I couldn’t give him that assurance. So instead I said, I know it’s scary, Dad. But you won’t be alone.

This time of year, after days of deep freeze, people walk out onto the ice over Queechy Lake. When I was home on a break from tour, I drove by and watched them glide, elegant as birds, across the opaque planet. If the ice is a scream, I thought, then maybe we can’t free what’s underneath but we can learn to skate atop it.

My college roommate Abby and I exchange voice memos regularly. It’s my favorite podcast to listen to whenever I drive anywhere: the voice I love—the voice I remember hearing as I drifted off to sleep in the various dorm rooms we shared over four years—talking as if we’re mid-conversation for a good 20-30 minutes. Abby works for a labor rights organization in Washington DC and has two young kids. This week, over the sudsy clatter of dishes being washed, she talked to me about her fear of what’s going to happen. I’m really struggling to see a world in which things get better, she said. Then she told me that she’s reading her older son a book called The Bear That Wasn’t. In the book, published in 1946, the bear is mistaken for a man and put to work, no matter how much he protests. It’s a kind of marxist allegory, Abby said. Her son was sad that in the end, the bear had to go through all of this by himself. But isn’t it great that that’s not how we live? she told him. We exist together. We don’t have to do any of this alone.

Perhaps this is all we can give each other right now—the promise of support and camaraderie and love. There are things that will not get better—things that will be irrevocably lost—but then there are things, hopefully, that will: our care for each other. Our care for the land. Our involvement in our communities. Our capacity for love.

Getting better at loving, I think, means sitting with the hard stuff, not being afraid of it, not turning away. Maybe we can learn to undo the language of betterment in favor of something more honest and true: not I hope you feel better but I’m with you as things get worse.

The van hums as we hug the road. I look over and see that my bandmate has removed his eye mask. He’s no longer sleeping, he’s crying. He’s got his headphones on, and I think maybe he was listening to something that moved him, or maybe he got an upsetting message, or maybe he’s just overcome by it all. I reach over and stroke his arm, unsure how much he can even feel the pressure beneath the puff of his parka. I give his shoulder a squeeze. Without looking at me, he reaches for my hand and holds it tight, and we sit like that for a while, each of us looking out our windows, passing through this hinterland together, our fingers intertwined.

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Come find us on tour! It feels so good to be together.

1/29 - Brattleboro VT - The Stone Church

1/30 - Portland ME - One Longfellow Square

1/31 - Somerville MA - Arts at the Armory

2/10 - Berlin DE - Privatclub

2/11 - Amsterdam NL - Paradiso

2/12 - Antwerp BE - Trix

2/13 - Paris FR - Le Hasard Ludique

2/14 - London UK - Kings Place

2/22 - Montclair NJ - Outpost in the Burbs

3/1 - Los Angeles CA - Pico Union Project

3/2 - San Francisco CA - Cafe du Nord

3/4 - Portland OR - Polaris Hall

3/5 - Seattle WA - Madame Lou's

Sending you love ❤️