Back to the Future
After three weeks in a national park, it was a bit of a shock to find myself in hot, flat, suburban, central North Carolina for a few days. I know that all too soon I have to return to the flatlands of PA and judging by my reaction to central NC, it’s not going to be a pretty transition. However, I was there for the very best of reasons.
When I studied abroad in Perugia, Italy, I lived in a house with eight women and through some freak accident five of us are still close friends. Kate is one of them. She’s also one of the people I talk politics with who has more sense in her head than the rest of the country combined. I spent a relaxing evening hanging out with Kate and her Mom, who I adore, cooing at Lelu, Kate’s four-month-old, and sleeping in the most comfortable bed I’ve been in in weeks. I woke in the morning to a note and breakfast supplies. Southern hospitality this trip has blown my mind.
I also got to see my former classmate, Chanel! We sat in a park in 90 degree heat watching a squirrel sunbathe and laughing at the absurdity of life in the arts. It did my heart a whole lot of good to see her, as it always does.
Knee deep in a group text with my Italian roomies, I headed into the city proper for the last of my Charlotte engagements. I hadn’t seen Jeff since we both lived in NYC but his fingerprint is all over my current lifestyle as he is the one who inspired me to become a vegan and challenged my presumptions on monogamy. I realized during the course of our conversation that I haven’t even thought about relationship labels in a while. Perhaps it’s because being in grad school doesn’t lend itself to commitment-heavy relationships or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never felt like identifying as monogamous, polyamorous or anything else-ous but I haven’t been looking for a label to fit my life, I’ve just been living it.
When last I saw Jeff I was a few months away from starting grad school and still trying to figure out how to make collaborative, performative work. He inquired as to whether I had learned how to make the kind of work I’d been wanting to make in NYC and the answer was yes; after two years of grad school, I can, indeed, devise theater. “That seems big,” he said.
It’s nice to know that I’ve grown and changed. That’s we’ve all grown and changed. All I’ve done for two years is throw myself into rehearsals and performance styles that I have no experience with. Constant challenge doesn’t leave a lot of time to reflect on growth and progress. My philosophies are not very different than they were when last I saw Chanel, Jeff, or Kate, but in that time my tastes and skills have winnowed and expanded in unexpected ways.
Adding to the expansion, I got back to The Smokies and hopped in a car with a Republican who owns six guns, hunts, fishes, and picks up snakes with his bare hands. Caleb had very generously offered to show me Asheville, which I’d wanted to visit for years thanks to some wild, back burner dreams of starting a theater company there, mainly because it’s close to the mountains but not so far from family as Denver would be. After visiting, I’m afraid that I am in the market for a new dream city. Not that I have anything against late afternoon raves at gas stations but no one looked particularly happy to be there and I don’t want to live in a city where people only do weird things because it’s expected of them.
Caleb, who self-identifies as a “simple, East Tennessee boy” was visibly relieved that I didn’t show any inclination of wanting to join the Shell party and drove us to a less hip part of town for dinner.
Now, as to spending back-to-back meals with a hunter/fisherman and an Ethics and Animal Rights Philosopher, I found myself in an interesting position. I’m vegan, obviously, and hold true to that, but I don’t think Caleb’s interactions with animals are any more or less humane than mine are. Sure, he fishes, but there aren’t enough nutrients in the rivers here to support all the fish so many of them die of starvation. Given the choice between a quick, clean death that serves a purpose and death by starvation, I’d pick the former. Far more humane way to go. Would we enact this system on human beings during a drought or bad harvest year? No, we would not. That, clearly, would be inhumane…
If I am a radical, it is in that I don’t think human lives are inherently more valuable than those of any other species. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to throw down my own life to save the lives of the ants I will inevitably, inadvertently step on this week, death is a part of life, it just means that I’m going to do my very best to live gently and intentionally in the world with the aim of doing good, not causing pain.
I’m not so naive as to think that my own life philosophies are inherently the right ones. I’ve never fished and have no desire to but if Caleb eats the fish he kills, he saves some fish from starvation and he’s not supporting the meat industry during that time. I also don’t support the meat industry but my actions allow fish to starve to death. Who has the moral high ground? These are the things that keep me up at night.
