The Walk for Democracy: Journal

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in a journal being kept on-line at the url listed at the end of the article. I introduce Jeanette in "Thoughts of a Seeker."]

Pardon this long period of silence! As usual - there's much to update you on, but access to computers has been scarce until about a week ago, when I was suddenly loaded down with press releases, interviews, meetings, and socializing with some of the Colorado's finest here in the Ft. Collins/Boulder/Denver area. Today's my day off, and fortunately it's too hot to go outside. I can finally catch up with mail and write an extremely abbreviated summary of events. Please be patient if I haven't returned your e-mail yet! It is important to me to reply to everyone, but there haven't been enough hours in the day lately.

I'm going to do something a little different with this update to address some feedback I've received. I'll start with "just the facts, ma'am" for those of you who find these journal entries a little too long. After relating a couple of stories from the road, I'll give you fair warning before delving into these observations. Personally, I think the lessons learned are always more important -- but perhaps not as fun as reading stories about things like my breakfast with Hunter S. Thompson.

For the record, I do not recommend any communication with this nefarious writer, as he is considered armed and extremely dangerous. There is a reason he chose to invite us down to his high security mountain compound... but I'll never tell. After the obligatory threats of imminent death if we even thought about stealing from him, the good doctor relaxed a bit. I had written him on a whim with only a vague outline of what I was doing, but he seemed to like the whole idea of democracy, and even gave me a grievance. He took us out to breakfast in his cherry red Caprice Classic convertible, and we discussed tactics over soggy bacon that he sent back three times before it reached perfection in the form of leathery crispness.

"What you need is more DRAMA!" he offered, citing several delicate and highly classified incidents in which he publicly expressed his discontent with leaders in the past. I had to politely reject some of his suggestions ("WALK NAKED!") - but in the end, he helped me more than he'll know. Barreling down a country road at excessive speeds in the backseat of Gonzo's convertible - music blaring, skies cool and blue - was just about the best gift a gal like me could've received. I felt like anything was possible - which, of course, is true. I found Mr. H. S. Thompson to be a very kind and generous man, though of course he'd shoot me for saying so. That's about all I can say for now. Must save some things for the book, eh?

Around the same time, I met an equally fascinating man outside of Maybell, Colorado. Ray is 93 years young, and he was pointed out to me by a waitress in a small café where he eats every morning. I had told her about my walk, and she insisted that I meet this gentle soul sitting in the corner. Ray's wife died a few years back (as have most of his friends), and he decided that if he stopped walking, he'd surely die, too. So he keeps walking... up to 8 miles a day, actually. I asked him if I could join him on one of his strolls, and he lit up - eager to show me around. Sherpa and I piled into the dusty truck cab with his nameless dog (their picture is on the "Journey" page), and we struck out to explore the vast Sand Wash Basin.

The basin, Ray recalled, used to be a lushly grassed plain, home to the Fremont tribe of Native Americans, bison, and scores of wild horses. He remembered horses by the thousands roaming the green hills before the cattle and sheep arrived. Ray worked with the Forest Service for 30 years building roads, so he's not an advocate for what environmentalists call "deep ecology." He believes that the land should be harvested for certain things, but certainly not destroyed for the benefit of only a few people. He spoke of fierce battles over grazing rights between the two types of ranchers, neither of which seemed to care when the fields of high grass became the barren desert of juniper and sage we were now driving through. They simply moved on to other public lands.

We looked everywhere for the horses. There was no sign of them for miles, which distressed poor Ray to the verge of tears. He used to take his wife and children out here to see them many years ago, and the way he described it as we were driving made me believe we'd be impeded by a dozen wild horse barricades in the roads. As we drove on - Ray insisting that they were "around here somewhere" - I began to worry that his mind was playing tricks on him. Perhaps the horses only existed in the time inside his head - a time long past, but as vivid as yesterday. I wondered if I should continue humoring him by scanning the high hills for these phantom mustangs, when I finally caught sight of a small group far in the distance. We giddily pulled over and took turns capturing the herd in Ray's antique binoculars. There were only a dozen or so - thin and listless. I realized we had been driving for some time without seeing any streams or ponds. Was their decline in numbers the result of drought and famine?

Just then, Ray remembered where they'd gone. An outfit out of Denver has been running an annual round-up of these wild creatures, using helicopters in recent years to chase panicked horses up to 30 miles to a tiny corral close to the highway. Many horses die of exhaustion from the dead run. Others perish in the cramped corral waiting up to a week for the auction with little food or water. He remembers years when they'd sold up to 600, though last year only netted 165. Ray had voiced his grievance many times with the cowboys running this outfit, warning them that their greed could cause the extinction of this unique breed. One of them replied, "Hell - I don't care if they go extinct, long as I can make a profit on `em now." Ray figures there's only around a hundred of these beautiful creatures left, and he's certain that the city-folk will round up every last one of them. He continues to speak out against it each year. It's almost as if Ray's longevity is connected to the horses he's roamed with all these years. When they're gone, I expect Ray won't feel the need to stick around any more.

One more thing about Ray: he loves to collect antiques. Not one to waste a dime on frivolities, he finds these treasures at their source. Exploring the basin over many years, Ray has unearthed many treasures from abandoned homesteads and old Fremont camps far from any BLM road. He proudly showed me around the house he and his wife built, every nook occupied by a little trinket coupled with a long story regarding its origin.

Back in town, one of the waitresses told me a shocking story about these antiques. Good-natured Ray made the mistake of chatting with a BLM ranger one day - no doubt weaving the same stories of found treasures as he did with me. The ranger, however, was not as impressed as I. He arranged a raid of Ray's house, confiscating nearly every item in his collection. It was all the old man had left in his life. Years of lonely exploration lost to an uncaring automaton of a bureaucratic system. Even a speck of human decency would determine Ray's case as special - one best served by looking the other way. In the end, the town rallied together, and the raid was found to be illegal (the by-the-rules bureaucrat didn't bother to get a warrant). Not all of the property was returned, however. I suppose they figured an old man wouldn't notice a few missing pieces of junk, but Ray noticed. He mourned their loss almost as much as his wife's death. I can't imagine how anyone could be so heartless.

Each person I meet along the way has an important story to tell. Living this lifestyle of mine means a new town with fascinating portraits of American life every day, but I suppose I must maintain some degree of brevity with these updates. With that, I'll close this chapter with the promise of many stories like Ray's to share with you at the end of this campaign - if you care to hear them.

And now I'll share some of my thoughts from this last month or two.

My passage through the Rocky Mountains via Rabbit Ears and Cameron Pass was achingly beautiful in more ways than one. I took some time off after reaching the base of the mountains to attend my brother's wedding in Michigan and returned to a nasty bout with altitude sickness from losing my acclimation. I don't want to delve into the subject at length, but I did cry at one point.

When I finally reached the summit of Cameron Pass (10,276 feet!), I lingered for a while on a log among the pristine alpine flowers. I imagined myself straddled not between halves of a continent but between passages in time. On one side was the era of the indigenous people who have always inhabited this land. Their connection to the earth is one I have only come to understand and appreciate through this slow gait across the nation. I tried to imagine a time when the air, water, trees and ground were not commodified resources, but gifts from the creator. I realized, as have so many of the authors of the letters I carry have, that we have lost that sense of stewardship.

I believe that the notion of having dominion over the earth was meant to be practiced as the same kind of dominion you would have over a child entrusted to your care. As I have walked past the strip mines, clearcuts, barbed wire fences, "No Trespassing" signs, and endless miles of long-abandoned concrete and tangled rebar structures, and I can't help but wonder how this kid is going to turn out. There are days when I can't escape the steady vroom-vroom of traffic on account of all the "Private Property" warnings. I've stared longingly, past fences of varying designs, at lakes surrounded by homes whose residents would never dare to jump in and cool off on a hot summer day, as I would have done. More than once, I've set off with insufficient water for Sherpa, thinking she'd be able to slurp out of a river that was shown on the map, and it ended up being inaccessible to pedestrians and animals alike. It saddens me, almost as much as have the thousands of people who sped by without so much as a smile for a girl and her dog walking along the side of the road.

In the other era, I remembered the time of the American pioneer. I have plenty of criticism for the heavy-handed violence and lies used to usurp land from an indigenous people, but I do respect the spirit that would move a soul into the wilds with little more than a dream for a better life. Theses pioneers overcame impossible odds to endure the harsh journey across this nation. In contemporary society, how can one drop everything and set out into the unknown in search of a better life? Our responsibilities to the mortgage companies, credit cards, insurance plans and student loans ensure that we are relegated to a life of false stability. Try to escape, and your punishment will be severe. You can't escape anyway. All lands have been conquered.

This may seem like fatalistic thinking from someone who's been out in the sun too long, but this does have a point. I do still believe in the pioneering spirit, just as much as I believe in our capacity to form a more healthy connection with the earth. The two are compatible. As I talk to more and more people, I see how both exist in our shared humanity. In most folks I meet, those qualities are latent. Like me, we all need a personal experience to jolt us out of our complicity with the very injustices we abhor.

People often ask me: "What can I do to make a difference?" The answer is always simple: you make the difference in your own environment. You can only effect change if you are directly connected with the change you wish to see. As an example, I've known of and have participated in the struggles of indigenous people all over the world, but not once did I see how their struggle was directly related to mine. I thought I was advocating for them out of compassion for a people who did not enjoy the same freedom I had, and I wanted to use that freedom to give voice to their cause. While this is certainly admirable (and I wish more people did it), I failed to realize that my "freedom" is just as illusory as theirs.

I speak to many people who feel trapped into compliance with laws and politicians they disagree with. "I WOULD do something about this or that issue, but I don't have the time/ resources/ energy, etc...." As I sat on that log high atop the Rockies, it occurred to me that - like the pioneers and indigenous people fighting to maintain their identity - we still have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Perspective is all that is necessary.

If you don't have time to take action for causes which are important to you, you need to take serious inventory of your time. I believe each of us has a mission here on this earth, and it does not involve anything your Human Resources Representative would keep in a file. I believe that if we are not participating in our own human revolution, then we must spend each day for the rest of our lives grieving. We must grieve for the people around the world who suffer as a result of our need for MP3 players and cheap gas. We must grieve for the souls of thousands of innocent civilians who die at the hands of young soldiers who just wanted a little help with tuition. We can, of course, support and finance humanitarian efforts, but the key lies in our own sense of humanity.

We must ask ourselves if change is needed not only in our communities, but in our own homes. We mustn't make any distinction between injustices in our communities and those occurring thousands of miles away. We mustn't have any less compassion for the suburbanite driving the SUV than we would for the young woman working in a maquiladora. I realize that many will find that observation difficult to understand, but the quick transition from the mountains to the `burbs brought recognition that the loss of autonomy and connection to the earth deserves as much attention as the financial poverty suffered by most of the world.

Another example lies in my difficulty finding support. I began this walk looking for and appealing to those I thought believed in the same things that I did. When I got rejected by the very people and organizations I was encouraging people to support, I felt a deep sense of anger and resentment towards them. I stopped looking for people I suspected of being "liberals" or "progressives" and started talking to everybody. Aid and comfort turned up in the oddest places. Knee-jerk reactionary judgements about people were almost never accurate. I began looking at the people around me differently, and in doing so, realized that the cause of much of my rejection from like-minded people was not me, personally, but the loss of autonomy and connection to this notion of solidarity they claim to believe in.

I've called most every "progressive" organization here in Denver - and in a city of two million, the only ones who have offered shelter and comfort have been an office manager for an environmental organization, a handful of Steelworkers, two IWW members ("Wobblies"), and a Zen Buddhist. Yes, even my own Buddhist organization - which has an enormous chapter here in Denver - blew me off. Despite my calls and requests for aid, they've ignored the one member who's walked 1,700 miles on faith alone - not just here, but in Seattle, Portland, and Salt Lake. "It's not the philosophy!" I tell myself, but it's still supremely disappointing.

Now the old Jeanette would have been discouraged, but because I believe in taking responsibility for my own life, I believe that it must be my mission to help some of these organizations live by the values they claim to believe in. If you're working for a humanitarian or religious organization and you fail to offer comfort to a sister in solidarity with your own goals, then you might as well close up shop. You have seriously lost sight of your reasons for forming an organization.

Many I have met here in the big cities speak endlessly of campaigns and actions they support based on what they have read about in books or seen on TV, but reply with indignant defensiveness at my suggestion that knowledge without action is not simply ineffective but futile. Folks - it is. You can harbor the deepest convictions and greatest arguments against injustice, but the world will continue to suffer if you don't match your lifestyle with your convictions. I was guilty of this, too. I've walked nearly 2,000 miles figuring it out.