week of 1/22/03
 
 
 

Washing away the excess with a dose of minimalism
By Dawn Gilchrist-Young

I behaved well during the holidays this year. From Thanksgiving until December 25, I kept at bay my usual holiday persona, a giggle-a-minute mix with all the humor of Ralph Nader, the social charm of the ACLU, and the party hardiness of Euell Gibbons and a box of Grape Nuts. On mine and my husband’s once-a-year shopping trip for our daughter, I chose to say little about ruining her character with too many gifts, instead enjoying watching him sort through stacks of little girls’ clothes, balancing his practical nature with a somewhat-less-than-adequate knowledge of “tween” fashion. At my extended family’s annual Christmas Eve gathering, I kept to myself my usual caustic comments about excess consumption and obesity in the South, relishing my brother’s and his fiancée’s bon-bons, a sister’s bow-and-arrow-killed venison, another sister’s punch, and stuffing myself with my mother’s excellent dish of the same name. When my in-laws and my husband discussed George W.’s fame or infamy in the eyes of future historians, I quietly sipped yet another glass of my father-in-law’s good choice in wines, feeling more tolerant and open-minded with each glass I drank.

As I said, I behaved well. But I only did so because I was anticipating something better. Like a drunk who only bides his time until the next drink is available, my “good” behavior was possible because I was only biding my time until Dec. 26, the day my family and I would leave for our semi-annual backpacking trip to Cumberland Island National Seashore.

In the working days that remained before the actual holiday began, overwhelmed colleagues asked me if I’d finished my shopping, and I cheerfully shook my head, thinking of seagulls careening above the wake the Park Service ferry creates on the St. Mary’s River and the intercoastal waterway. When my daughter reminded me that her thinness necessitated buying her only “Abercrombie & Fitch’s” “slim” clothing line, I envisioned myself shouldering my pack and heading north on an empty beach. When I opened Christmas cards bearing naught but a commercial message and a family’s name stamped below it, rather than dwelling on how little time we give one another, I thought instead of small herds of feral horses feeding in the shelter of the East Coast’s highest natural sand dunes. In short, Cumberland Island allowed me to smile my way through the season, albeit with a faraway look in my eyes.

Last year at this time, I told a Buddhist friend that I wished, at least during the holidays, I could put my critical skepticism on hold and actually experience what most people around me seemed to be enjoying, but I couldn’t, just as I couldn’t understand the culture that inspires in me such ambivalence. His enigmatic Buddhist response, that “The world keeps getting worse, and everything is fine,” (besides making me want to burst into R.E.M.’s song with the line “It’s the end of the world as we know it/ and I’m just fine”), made no sense to me. But this year, even with nirvana as elusive as ever, I had a more substantial place in mind and everything was just fine, or soon would be.

And so, on the morning of Dec. 26, while my brother and husband shopped for camping groceries, our combined three children argued happily over a game at our kitchen table, and I tore through the house, removing every vestige of Christmas (except the wreath — I like its Druid ambiance). I stored them out of sight, reveling in the knowledge that they would remain out of sight for another year.

By the next day at the same time, we were disembarking from the “Cumberland Queen,” and minutes after that we stood watching the wintry Atlantic break on a beach that has changed little since Indians chose the island as a living, hunting, and burial site. John McPhee, in his extraordinary book Encounters with the Archdruid, describes Cumberland Island as “a third larger than Manhattan.” To give you a better picture, he also says of the island that, “[a] generally high bluff rims the western shore of the island, and along it are irregular humps — Indian burial mounds that have never been opened. Watched from the bluff, sunsets gradually spread out over a salt marsh five miles wide. The distance from the mainland in part explains why Cumberland Island remains as it is at this apparently late date in the history of the world. There is no bridge. The salt marsh is the most extensive one south of the Chesapeake. It is dominated by cord grass that rises higher than a man’s head ... [and] if a quarter acre of marsh could be lifted up and shaken in the air, anchovies would fall out, and crabs, menhaden, croakers, butterfish, flounders, tonguefish, squid.” Further, he says, “[T]he island as a whole is a reclaimed wilderness. Orange and olive groves stood there once, and plantations of rice, indigo, and cotton. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the sea islands were abandoned.” And since that time, nature has indeed exhibited its capacity for renewing itself, whether it be through the palmettos growing amid the Carnegie ruins or the loggerhead turtles that lay their eggs on the beaches in the fall. It’s this lovely reminder of the brevity of human endeavors that I find hopeful. It’s this renewal, this re-creation that interests people like I am, not exactly misanthropes, but more than ready to criticize our own species.

Nonetheless, I do not think our species is hopeless. As I watched our children play, even over the four brief days we were there, I saw them drop many of the trappings our culture has taught them are necessary for happiness. Maybe if our stay had been longer, and certainly if the weather had been bad, we would have heard complaining. But as it was, we had the great privilege of watching two 10-year-olds and a 7-year-old momentarily forget “Toys-R-Us” and “Gap for Kids.” In place of “Data Girl” and “Game Boy,” they had the leaning live oaks as a place to employ their digits, crawling and balancing their way to the ends of limbs that pushed their way into high dunes. And rather than board games at the kitchen table, they created imagined worlds in sand and buried one another, fully clothed, up to the neck. Instead of flipping through a catalog, turning down pages and circling in ink the objects most desired, they flipped over dead jellyfish, examined them, sniffed them, and sometimes threw them at one another. They circled and peered into the exoskeletons of horseshoe crabs, and my nephew fashioned horns for himself out of their tails, tucking them into a fold in his knit cap. Seated on a bench handily created for them by tree trunks, and with an appetite created only by living outdoors for days, they ate whatever my husband concocted, a completely different sort of happy meal.

Finally, as connoisseurs of scatological humor, they gloried in who could find the best digging stick, the best spot hidden in the palmettos, and who dug the best holes in which to bury their human waste. But the jokes that made them laugh hardest were always those concerning aim, and all three of them became braggarts in this area. My nephew particularly, because he obviously could relieve himself in a way that the girls could not, became almost insufferable. When he pointed out to us one of his damp creations on a park service sign as we went on a late evening walk, my husband dubbed him “Pee-casso,” and he proudly accepted the new name.

But if the children left behind the mores and manners of our society, the adults did so even more, having even more to leave behind. I found the children’s humor as amusing as they did, and I added my own. One afternoon I spent sculpting a beached mermaid, complete with fins and scales, though her hair and tragic repose were more reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallott.” On the one night we had a campfire, my husband demonstrated how to create paintings with the light created by the glowing ends of sticks held in the fire. And the same night, my brother let down his ponytail, beat a rhythm on “Skoal” cans in his pockets, and danced his own brand of abandon and lawlessness around the fire ring, maybe temporarily forgetting laborious work, a contentious shared custody of two children, and too many “dreams deferred.” As for my own left behind baggage, I promised myself that for these four days I would not think about a moronic president (to borrow an apt though unlucky phrase), presidential advisors who see no reason to hide an imperial agenda, a toadying UN, or 350,000 dead Iraqi children. And, for the most part, I kept that promise, letting rustling palmettos and living children quietly stalking wild horses erase almost everything else from my mind.

I suppose the word “almost” is key here. The Old Testament’s Yahweh spews from his mouth those who are lukewarm. And I am lukewarm, in my actions if not in my thoughts. I lack the fortitude and stubbornness to abandon a culture I largely despise, but just the knowledge that places like Cumberland Island exist allow me to tolerate what I lack the commitment to change. Knowing that there are places untouched by humans would be best of all, but the next best thing is a place that has recovered from the human industry of the last two centuries. I have settled for the next best thing. I wish I could make a clear choice — either embrace the contradictions of my time, or remove myself from it. I wish I could say that I will again be pleasant next year during the holidays, but I probably won’t.

In McPhee’s book, he quotes David Brower, then president of the Sierra Club, talking to a Realtor who wanted to develop Cumberland Island. “Life began Tuesday noon, and the beautiful organic wholeness developed over the next four days. At three minutes before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began ....” And he goes on to say that, unless we change, “God will say that man should be thrown away as an experiment that didn’t work. The system must be used to reform the system.” I doubt that my curmudgeonish comments at Christmas time, or my requests that I not be given mass-produced gifts are part of that reform, but it would be pleasant to think so.

When one looks at the big picture as scientists and historians see it, the fact is clear that we westerners have only been celebrating Jesus’ birth for a short time, and it has been an even shorter time since we have been celebrating with mass consumption a holiday that is meant to be about unselfishness. As for my own attempts at unselfishness, I know I was only good this year because Cumberland Island was my reward. But it never hurts to be optimistic. Maybe next year the rest of America will fall in line behind me, since, of course, I believe my views are right. Or maybe next year I will suddenly understand that there is something deeper than greed behind all of the excess. Or maybe next year I will behave myself without the promise of a reward. Who knows? Maybe next year I will be good for goodness’ sake.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in Swain County and lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)