Dead Letter Department #49

weather report

Well, friends, we made it through—the doors of 2022 are closed behind us & here we are in a fresh new calendar. My New Year’s Eve was extremely mild, just a long playlist & several bourbon-based drinks. On the first day of the new year, I really wanted to start by the water so I went out to one of the local beaches, finding, to my delight, that The Swimmers were still out there, bobbing around in the icy water with their little orange buoys flashing. This time of year they’re wearing wet suits, sensibly, & I am absolutely wild to know their backstory. How did they decide to get into cold water swimming? Did they know each other before & embark on it together, or were they arriving separately and stepping solo down to the water in their slides, only then realizing someone else was already there to swim? Did they exchange glances across the waves & befriend one another as they bobbed about out there? I’ll probably never know, but they’re quite a vision paddling around in the winter-gray water, chatting as casually as though they were on land.

There were also fleets of bird, huge dark flocks of them, skimming along barely above the water. I kept thinking they must be running out of themselves, and then another hundred would stream by. I couldn’t tell what kind of bird they were, or what they were running out in front of, if they were migrators or local residents all on the move together, but they kept on passing, a black fluttering ribbon over the bay.

Unfortunately there was also a pair of people having an extremely loud fight in their minivan, so I didn’t actually stay by the water as long as I’d wanted, & I was sort of hankering for a new view. I’d seen a reference to a look out point I hadn’t heard of before, & managed to find it on the map, a long green peninsula with the little blue umbrella suggesting there was probably walkable beach access.

It turned out to be in a neighborhood I’d only ever driven through accidentally—Bellingham has some fancy areas, but this might be one of the fanciest, and there’s something about it that seems forbidding. There are rich neighborhoods here where I go & walk because the gardens are lovely or the tiny free libraries are good & never think twice about it, but this one seemed like it was trying to tell outsiders they were unwelcome & had better turn around. When I found what looked like the trailhead, it was at the end of a cul-de-sac that had clearly been meant for accommodating a few parked cars, but was now absolutely papered in no parking signs, so I back-tracked until I found where the no parking signs ran out.

Then, on foot, with a beef jerky in my pocket, I discovered that the road was cut off by a gate claiming that the only access past that point was for residents & guests. I checked the map again—there is clearly public land there, but I couldn’t figure out exactly where the access point was, and the neighborhood was doing its absolute best to disguise the entry points to the trail & make them look like they’re on private land. People were obviously getting there somehow, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do it, so I just got really mad about it & then went home.

When I got home & read up on it, I just got madder—there are in fact two points where you can get onto trails from roughly the spot I was at, but apparently you can walk right by them & not even know. I kept thinking about all the ways that rich people like to plant themselves in beautiful spots & then decide that no one else should be able to see them—there’s all the debate about public lands & hunting right now in places like Montana, & there’s that app for Florida that someone made because so many wealthy homeowners had erected signs & gates & fences to make public beach access look like their private property. There’s a field one of my friends runs her dogs on in a nearby town where someone who lives close has taken it upon themselves to put up a bunch of No Dog signs, even though it’s not their property. Around here anytime someone online mentions a spot that is considered to be a local secret there’s a terrific outcry about how it’s going to get ruined if more people find out about it, so don’t tell anyone about the old growth grove, or the secret beach, or the hot springs.

It’s not like I don’t understand the impulse. Like almost everyone else, I much prefer to be in nature solo, rather than in a crowd. There are places that literally cannot support the numbers of people that are now wanting to access them, places that are fragile & important & in need of protection. However, when it comes to access in general, there is something deeply hypocritical about thinking that I should be allowed to look at the tide pools, I should know where all the secret spots are, I can be trusted, but everyone else should stay away. There’s something rotten in building your own house on the fragile shoreline so that you can have the joys of the daily tides & then getting outraged when other people want to be able to look at the same views.

Now that I’m sure the trails really are there, and really are for the public, which means me & also you, even if they are cleverly disguised, I’ll be going back, armed with extra beef jerky. I’ll report back when I do.

one good thing

Like I mentioned in the last newsletter, I have a little ritual of doing the YearCompass workbook with my friend in early January. It’s a way for us to evaluate the past year & do some real concentrated thinking about what we want to do in the next. We worked through the whole thing together yesterday, & it took almost the entire afternoon with breaks for brunch & coffee & bourbon. There are always a few questions I have to skip because they just don’t apply to my thinking or my work, but I answer almost all of them, & we stop & talk out our answers constantly. I never think I want to go back & evaluate—it’s such a depressing prospect, to see all the things I didn’t manage, all the places I failed, but there’s always more good there than I could see on my own. The very nature of the repetitive questions helps surface my actual priorities & obsessions, remind me of what I’m working towards.

If you decide to try it, all you need is a notebook, a pen, & a downloaded copy of the workbook, but I strongly recommend also bringing a like-minded friend. I am lucky enough to be able to do it with someone who already knows the minutiae of my various ridiculous struggles & wild ambitions, but I could also see it being a good way to deepen a relationship where you don’t know those things about someone & would very much like to.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition, where I’m writing about transition & shifting identity. You can write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you find one of the secret places in your own town, on or off the map.