Report: 100 Days Out

Life on the ground.

THE DAYS ARE FRAGILE and tender. Each one arrives already bruised like an apple someone dropped. The president or one of his men or women says something terrible, that autistic children will never be taxpayers, for example.

No amount of spring flowers erases that from my head.

Early this week I read an article about why some of us need to think about leaving the country, and by “country” I mean the United States.

Hours passed. I went about the morning, caring for Little Fawn, trying to get my work done as she played with a new teddy bear. It was a gift from our library because—at 9 months—she reached 100 books we’ve checked out and read to her.

Soon the baby was fussy. I sat in a rocking chair to rock her to sleep, and looking down at her devastating beauty, her mystical innocence, and her happiness, I surprised myself.

Tears began to boil out of the hot rocks of my chest, steaming down my face.

I had no idea why I was weeping.

Then I remembered the essay.

My politics have become the wrong ones. People are leaving the country and planning to leave the country. Imagine the creepiness of having to leave your own country to protect yourself. The dangers of it. The frozen assets. The starting over. The need to quickly communicate in a new language.

As the author wrote, you leave everything you’ve built “brick by brick.”

I had only read 1/3 of the article before the possibility overwhelmed me, and I quit. Even so. It devastated me.

I turned the baby away from my face so she wouldn’t see my tears boiling. What a terrible time we are in. What awful things are happening and being said.

We can’t turn our heads away from the stories, but lord, they destroy me.

~*~

My friend L is home for spring break. He’s headmaster at a school in Central America. He’s progressive. He’s also gay, and that alone got you exterminated in Nazi Germany.

“I’ve bought a condo in Central America,” he told me this week. “If things really get bad, which I think they will, I’ll hunker down there.” I had banked on him returning to our rural area upon retirement in a few years.

I thought of Trudi, my old friend. Jewish, she got out of Germany at the last minute. Turkey accepted her and her family. All her life she would say, “I was born in Germany but raised in Turkey.”

How to know where to go? When to go?

Were the doors already narrowing?

L had told me to liquidate some cash assets. He thinks the Administration is trying to crash the economy. “Go buy gold and put it in a safety deposit box,” he said.

~*~

I called my friend E In Tallahassee. I knew she would already be thinking about all this. E is Jewish. Her folks were from Hungary, in the textile business. When they were forced into ghettos during World War II, they buried reams of fabric in their yard, hoping to have something to return to. From the ghetto some were shuffled into concentration camps and then to their deaths. E’s parents survived. They arrived in Miami and started a bakery.

I forgot that there had been a shooting at FSU earlier in the day, and I found E panicked. She called the shooting an “implosion,” because the shooter was one of Tallahassee’s own. He was young, white, a Trumper. His mother was a police officer who worked at a middle school, the same one my friend’s children had attended.

As I predicted, E is already prepping. She told me I needed enough food in the house to last 6 months. I needed enough cash to last a month or two. I needed a solar battery charger for my phone.

“Don’t put anything in a safety deposit box,” E said. “Bury it in your yard.”

I can’t remember anything else. It was all too much.

I regretted reading the article about leaving.

~*~

Mr. R stopped by on his way home from work, a roofing job a couple of towns over. He’s Latin, without papers, although he has lived in the U.S. for 30 years. He has four grown children born here and now three grandchildren.

I’ve known him probably 5 years. He and I have worked on many projects together. We’re friends. Good friends.

I asked him how he was doing.

He tried not to seem worried, but he’s driving the back roads. He never goes to Wal-Mart. If he needs anything, he stops at a small store in his neighborhood owned by Latin folks. When he needs building supplies, he goes out before day, as soon as the supply house opens. He’s only taking jobs with people he knows well.

He knows people being deported—lots of them. He doesn’t want to get picked up. When he arrives home, he tells me, his little grandson, who lives with him, comes running down the driveway.

“I love him too much,” Mr. R said. He speaks fantastic English, but in this sentence he meant “so” instead of “too.”

When he said “I love him too much,” I had to turn my face away to hide my eyes.

~*~

Later, articles will pop up: “Top 5 Countries to Escape To.”

All I can figure is that my devices had been listening to me talk to L and then E.

~*~

So you can see that the week was already difficult—bruised, as I said—when I attended a meeting on Tuesday. The meeting went fine except for one small thing. A person said something mean, an unloveliness directed at me.

I work with this person on a local project, and I have thought of her as a close friend. But for years I have watched her becoming more radically conservative. If this were Nazi Germany or Nazi Hungary or Nazi America, I would be her enemy.

It’s a sobering thought.

I came home brooding. Fifty-eight minutes of the meeting brimmed with good ideas and camaraderie, but I focused on two minutes of meanness, unable to get the slur out of my head.

The meanness of Trump. Of RFK. Of the El Salvadorean president. Of the Tallahassee shooter. Of the woman in the meeting.

L. says, “You don’t have to worry about being a danger to the Administration. What you have to worry about is the mob coming for you.”

~*~

I went to the Georgia Coast for the weekend with the baby, the two of us. I have a dear friend who built a sweet cottage near Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, and my friend lets me use the place when she’s not there.

The baby and I arrived early Friday afternoon. The back porch overlooks a glorious marsh threaded with salt creeks, and the tide was high.

I gave Little Fawn a bottle in a rocking chair on the back porch, and while she was feeding a young deer wandered into the yard, picking at greenery. The deer did not see us. I whispered to Little Fawn “Un venado, a deer” because I’ve started speaking also in Spanish to her.

The baby looked up and saw the deer. I’m sure she wondered at first if it were a dog. She followed it with her eyes as the deer wandered around the back yard, nibbling, then disappeared back into the maritime forest standing all around.

Just before sunset I strapped Little Fawn in her stroller and walked down to the marsh along the brackish river. The western sky was pinkish fire, and a giant orange circle of sun hung millimeters above the horizon.

Once the sun is hanging like that, sunset goes fast. In those couple of minutes a person can see how fast the earth is spinning.

We watched the sun sizzle into the river.

I studied the horizon hoping for a flash of green. None.

I held Little Fawn out over the creek and dunked her feet in salt water. Then we sat in the growing darkness and rested.

Tree swallows began coming up the river. At first there was a handful, then dozens, then hundreds.

They came and came, flying up the Julienton just after the sun sank, before all the light went away, then veering off toward some overnight roost. I sat on the dock with the baby as the tide went out beneath us, watching tree swallows coming, as if they were rising out of the river itself, out of the saltmarsh and the dusk settling over us all.

###

What I Am Not Going To Do

1. Leave.

2. Read any more articles about escape.

3. Bury money in my yard.

What I Am Going To Do

1. Start the process to get the baby a passport.

2. Keep listening and reading.

3. Bury some seeds in my garden.