Adaptability of a Cockroach

A few weeks ago I went on a weekend getaway in Guerneville on the Russian River with a dozen close friends from my salad days in Berkeley. If one’s salad days were to refer to days when one eats salad, then I would still be in them. But you know what I mean – the days of my long-ago youth. Our group came from East and West, North and South, and gathered in a big house with not nearly enough bathrooms for so many seniors. We practiced our sharing skills. We also ate heaps of good food and laughed a lot. I did not have the last laugh, however. Roadside mulch had the last laugh. While slowly backing my car out of the tight parking situation at the bathroom-impaired house, I gently slid over the edge of the driveway and sank my rear tire into a comfy bed of damp, broke-down fir needles – in other words, fir mulch.

Stay with me. When this story gets back on the road it will head into climate chaos. And who can resist another story about climate chaos?

Our group almost didn’t meet up as expected at all that weekend because climate-chaos-induced biblical weather (read heavy flooding, downed trees, power outages, hail, sleet, massive snowfall, locusts, frog plague, and almond butter famine) nearly prevented some of us from traveling to our destination. We felt plenty fortunate to have the gang arrive as planned. (Especially when we saw Guerneville evacuated and under water only a week after we met up there.) So a car stuck in a bed of fir mulch was small potatoes. Even so, I needed to get the car out of the muck to drive home. Fortunately, one of the friends is a civil engineer and extremely resourceful when it comes to solving mechanical problems. He orchestrated a group effort to lift the back end of my car (a little Honda Fit, thank goodness), slide it slightly to the right, and set the tire on a wide board, then he managed to slowly back the car out of its predicament. The most miraculous feature of this incident is that no one put their back out. I attribute this to the fact that we had eaten most of the food that had arrived with me so the car weighed much less upon departure than it had upon arrival. And we, of course, weighed more so better leverage. This proves that you can eat your way out of any number of messy situations.

After rescuing my car, my civil engineer friend told me that he had taught both of his daughters that same trick for getting a car out of a ditch. He raised those daughters in the extreme winters of Massachusetts. (Why he and his wife left California to live somewhere where it snows up for half the year remains a mystery to me.) His daughters have used his method on more than one occasion to get out of a fix. He raised them to be resourceful and clever, and to think in terms of solving problems themselves rather than easily declaring defeat and calling AAA, which usually takes about a week to appear. Here is where I’m going with this:  that’s precisely the mindset we need to cultivate in our children and grandchildren so that they have a possibility of surviving the climate chaos beginning to engulf us.

I have spoken out and have worked to preserve and protect our environment for more than half a century now. I went to jail to protest climate destruction. (Where I involuntarily engaged in a hunger strike because the food was inedible for a vegetarian.) Could I have fought harder? Of course. Would it have made a difference? At this point, I have to say I don’t think so. People hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe. But my point is that I have understood the danger and recognized the catastrophic future we face for almost as long as I can remember. Yet I feel proud that I chose not to become a survivalist raising children in the depressing shadow of impending loss. Humans will have plenty of time to mourn when the loss really sets in. Let’s cherish the fragile wonders of this planet for as long as we have them. I want my children to rejoice in the wonder still before us. Although not a survivalist, I did do some things to prepare my children for a challenging future on Earth. Like my friend the civil engineer teaching his daughters how to rescue a car, I have taught my children certain survival skills. I intentionally raised them in a forest, close to the beauty and the ferocious wild energy of nature, where they learned to think for themselves, be resourceful, and find solutions to problems. On occasion they spent days in the wilderness with no electricity and limited water during winter storms. With no TV, they had to find creative ways to amuse themselves. They shared their home with all manner of beasts, requiring them to remain alert to their surroundings. Snakes in the car port (yes, sometimes rattlers), scorpions in the woodpile, skunks under the house, mice in the pantry, frogs in the bathtub (how they got there I’ll never know), insects, bats, birds, raccoons, wild turkeys, deer, wild pigs, and even big felines (bobcats and mountain lions). My children learned how not to panic. They are practical, realistic, and quite capable of putting on their big-person pants and doing whatever needs to get done.

I taught my children basic skills, such as how to grow food, cook, build things, fix things, and approach a problem. Even more than teaching our children and grandchildren basic skills for what lies ahead, we must cultivate in them habits of mind and certain attributes that will help them cope with climate chaos, such as resilience, resourcefulness, creativity, inventiveness, and courage. If they lack a skill they need, such as knowing how to sew on a button or raise chickens, then we want them to just teach themselves how to do it. We want them to know how to think critically and how to come up with solutions. We want them to try to come up with solutions. We want them prepared to make a shift in their thinking, perceptions, and way of living in the world when necessary. They need to have the perseverance to figure out how to make something work when it’s not working. They will need to make things work in ways that they never worked before. They need to stay positive and, most of all, we need to teach them to adapt. The most adaptable creatures on the planet are insects and for this reason they are the ones that have survived the most extreme environmental shifts. I want my grandson to have the adaptability of a cockroach.

The other part of surviving the climate chaos in which we find ourselves is inherent in the story of my friends lifting my car out of the ditch. Not one of us could have rescued my car on our own, but together we could lift it. The entire episode offers a neat allegory for the whole picture. I fell off the road. My friends used resourcefulness and the strength of the communal group to lift me up and set me back on the path. And no one even made fun of me for my foolish maneuver. Although, perhaps I heard a fir tree laughing. I am fortunate to have the community part happening for me in the post-apocalyptic present, but the adaptability part will keep me working. Can I make as much change as will be demanded of me at this late stage in my life? My grandson helps me practice by exercising my creativity muscle. I have to find my cockroach muscle and get it working.

 Guerneville not flooded. So beautiful.

Guerneville flooded -- we drove on this road only the week before.