Better to Have Loved and Lost?

For a long time I've been laying secret plans, Last Call kinds of plans. I have found myself unable to avoid categorizing things as permanent or temporary -- and not by the geologic scale with which those of my generation once had the luxury of perceiving the world, but by one far more immediate. Will this particular glacier still be here in 10 years? Will this species, in 20?

Part of me is made bitter by such accounting, while another part simply struggles to hold on to hope without resorting to denial. The wild salmon surges and the cookouts of late summer -- will my children always know that dense, muscular texture of wild fish, so superior to the pulpy microbe factories of farmed fish, and possessing also (you can taste it) the ineffable signature of the wild?

The floating bogs around the lake we paddle each autumn -- will that lake become, in their lifetime, but a dusty pit? Knowing that it might, what is my moral culpability in going ahead and showing them these things, knowing they may well fall in love with them, as I have?

I didn't so much set out to create a checklist, but as I age, it seems too often that this is what it's becoming. How I wish to pass on, with some semblance of transfer of emotional and ecological currency, the experiences and sensations I've been fortunate enough to know.

Increasingly, I find myself rushing to share things before they are gone, not so much for me -- for I have them in memory, short-lived and impermanent though that vault may be -- but rather for my children.

When the girls were still very young, we snorkeled a living coral reef, and they laughed out loud through their mouthpieces at their first glimpse of those underwater flocks of brilliant fish passing beneath them as we glided above. Must I rush to show them polar bears and the black rhinos of Africa, narwhals and porcupines? Where does the list end these days?

Closer to our home in northwest Montana's Yaak Valley, the going-away glaciers, the great gray owls in the garden, the grizzly tracks at marsh's edge: I would be wrong, wouldn't I, to try to protect my children, to try to prevent them from knowing, and likely loving, these things? For surely the heart cannot help what it loves.

Perhaps most precious of all that I wish to share with them is the daily unquestioned procession, the wax and wane of things, in a landscape still fortunate enough to abide the four full seasons. But now even this richness -- the gracefulness of seasonal change, the elegance and logic of it -- is being skewed, and lost. Some will say, so what? And it is true, surely some beauty and grace will still be present somewhere. But false cheer, like false hope, devalues the real thing, strips dignity from the leave-taking. Such calm acceptance, I think, mutes the deeper love.

Even as the crumbling, the collapse, proceeds, something the girls will be able to take with them into the future, in addition to memory, will be a model, a template, for how to love the world actively -- how to be stimulated, sensate, in the natural world -- regardless of the going-away.

How much of their engagement with the natural world is to be a farewell tour, a litany of the last, and how much a celebration of what is? I do not know. This is the double-edged sword: showing them certain once-permanent wonders even when confronted with the full evidence that so many of these things will not last the rest of our generation, much less theirs and their children's.

Each day I still search in myself for hope, and the courage to play to win -- to work as an activist to hold on to these inestimable beauties, rather than giving up and simply "experiencing" them, and checking them off the list. And here, too, I imagine there is a lesson for the girls, something else to show them; and I hope it, too, is the right choice: to hold back one's despair, but not one's awe or love.