TIPPING TOWARDS SUMMER

This is the day of the solstice, the shortest day of the year, when the whole planet on its wobbly axis pauses and then begins to tip towards summer. The weather out the window looks like a replay of yesterday, blowing hard. It wasn’t supposed to. The winds stopped in the night and it was supposed to quietly snow today, but one weatherman said frankly it was anyone’s guess. Too turbulent to tell. Just like politics.

Change is incessant. For the second time this month the Sunday Great Falls Tribune ran a local story on HIV-AIDS. There are about 500 people known to have HIV or AIDS in Montana with about 20 new diagnoses every year. The Metropolitan Community Church in Great Falls has NO members who are positive for HIV. The disease has drifted from gays to illegal injected drug users, who are not gay but must stay covert to evade the law.

For this story by Erin Madison only one man was willing to be identified and photographed as a person with HIV positive status. He’s Greg Smith, a mental health counselor who grew up in Montana but has spent a lot of time in Seattle where he has a practice. Sitting behind his array of daily pills, he’s a big handsome guy with glasses whose home is in Bozeman, one of the university towns where people are generally sophisticated and traveled enough to accept his status.

We’re on a cusp with HIV-AIDS -- it's tipping. For the first time there has been someone cured of AIDS, almost accidentally because of a bone marrow transplant. The meds are sophisticated enough to maintain a rich person or one in a country that subsidizes them. The sheets have been pulled away, revealing that people’s sex practices are more various than we thought. Many women now have HIV, possibly brought home by husbands or lovers, that they transmit to their babies unless there is treatment. Some African countries now have shockingly high fractions of their population infected with HIV. Orphans are becoming adults in institutions.

Those who have been paying attention know that I’ve been writing at the periphery of a group of “lost boys” who have now grown up. They were handsome, intelligent, seductive and wicked as well as gifted: survivors have turned out well. The time went quickly. That stage has been replaced by an AIDS activism-through-arts website and a Tribeca art gallery sponsored by an Englishwoman. I’m separated from that but continue to read TheBody.com. This year they lost “Dr. Bob,” one of the charismatic and endlessly energized leaders. He died of septic shock, which we used to call blood poisoning. He was gay and in a committed relationship with another male doctor but got the virus from a deep fingerstick when treating an AIDS patient.

When I first moved back to Valier over ten years ago, I worked as a ward clerk for a short time. A nurse there had sustained a similar fingerstick and was sweating out the six month’s wait before tests would show whether the virus had jumped to her. The first AIDS death of a friend was a Canadian ministerial colleague, a young handsome man in a relationship with a doctor who could not save him. At ministerial meetings where he was present, we grew used to the sound of his pill dispenser, which chimed to remind him. I cannot pretend that HIV only infects the “Other.”

This is not our first pandemic: plague in Europe wiped out one third of the people and left the land standing empty. Tuberculosis -- still not eradicated -- took a whole generation. The Spanish Flu, connected to WWI, nearly killed my mother as a child and did kill her doctor. One cannot live by a reservation without awareness of the Euro-introduced diseases, mostly smallpox, that killed far more people than any massacre. The United States kills more people by withholding subsidies for HIV drugs than it does by waging war. There are 26 people in Montana on the waiting list for med subsidies for their HIV.

The planet tips on its axis in the middle of winter. Need and chaos are everywhere. Another article in the paper suggested that times have rarely been so polarized, ignorant, punishing and vitriolic. The papers themselves are in deep trouble. Internet webs have revealed us to each other more deeply than any other media, from our naked silliness to our esoteric piercing sciences. The response of the government has been to try to block, to tax, to regulate -- while our political representatives still include many who refuse to touch a keyboard. Never learned to type anyway. (Only girls type.)

I have not continued to be active with AIDS groups, not because I’ve lost sympathy but because I’m not a one-issue person. I don’t see AIDS as a virus alone but as a complex of forces interacting to alienate people, stunt their growth, wall them off from each other. I don’t see HIV as a gay disease or even as a human disease. (Though Dr. Bob would reassure worrywarts that you can’t catch HIV from a bedbug and if you could, it would be BIV -- not Human Immunosuppressive Virus but Bedbug Immunosuppressive Virus.) I see it as a bit of planetary code -- a bit of the genetic life blueprint of every living being since the first eukaryote grabbed a mitochondria and started building a creature. Now that we begin to read the molecular blueprint, we can intervene more effectively.

If we WILL. We aren’t using the knowledge we already have to make life more human-friendly. We’re told what we need to do -- we just don’t want to do it, mostly because it means change, it means understanding “the Other,” it means giving up our grasping and commodifying that is both based on and built from maintaining a gulch between the haves and the have nots and dominating whatever bridges are thrown up. I’m only a cultural Christian -- my doctrine is everythingist, transcultural. Jesus’ claim that “what you do to the least of these you do also to me” is not that that different from the motto of the Bioneers: “It is all connected, it is all alive, it is all changing.”

Another story in the paper today is about avian flu and our ability to make it jump species. That’s where smallpox and HIV came from. It’s a very dangerous thing to tinker with -- but how else can we find out about it? We are still eukaryotes grabbing mitochondria before we know what to do with them. The planet has tipped many times since that started happening. It tips towards summer as well as winter. Now the light begins to grow in Montana. A hard wind is blowing.

GRIPPED BY DEATH

A couple of days ago a fifty year old man hiking alone in Glacier Park, which is near here, encountered a female grizzly with a second bear.  She bit his arm and leg, picked him up by the foot and shook him, then dropped him and left.  He had been making noise but didn’t have time to use his bear spray.  He hiked back on the trail, met a ranger who called for help and was treated in Browning at the Indian Health Service hospital.  Everyone took care of business, including the bear.  This happens at least once a year.  The bear was considered to be defensive and will not be shot, though the trail is closed.

A few days earlier a 17-year-old boy, part of an adventure group on a remote Norwegian island doing studies and reclamation, was dragged out of his tent in the middle of the night by a polar bear and killed.  Four others were badly hurt.  Their early warning trip-wire surround had either malfunctioned or been evaded somehow.  They were equipped with rifles and shot the bear in the act.  They had been trained for this.  In future a night sentry will be posted.   Present camping is closed.

Polar bears are protected from hunting on this island, but they themselves are arguably the most dangerous predator on the planet.  DNA analysis only recently revealed that they evolved from big brown bears (grizzlies) in Ireland a very long time ago when one of the periodic millenial glaciers moved down to cover Britain.  Now the polar ice pack is withdrawing so that the way of life that sustained them -- riding the ice to prey on seals -- is leaving them starved and even more relentless than before.  There is evidence that they are remixing with the circumpolar grizzlies and brown bears.  Human behavior has not redeveloped to meet the challenge.

When I was a little child, right after WWII, the Portland OR zoo was old-fashioned.  The cages had bars wide-enough apart that one day a big male lion was sleeping with his huge paw stuck out through the bars.  A railing that was supposed to keep the patrons back was easy to duck under.  So I petted the lion’s paw.  He jerked it away, staring at me with big orange eyes like any startled cat.  Then he went back to sleep.

Nearby was the polar bear.  Its bars were wrapped with strong wire mesh because not long before a little boy had done something like what I did and the bear grabbed him, dragged him through the bars, and killed him.  I stood close to the cage and stared a long time.  Waves of morose hatred and insanity came off that bear.

Polar bear cubs are white, fluffy, and, like any predator baby, very playful.  Our media abounds with video of their antics.  There is a YouTube of a woman so escaped from reality that she jumped into the polar bear tank of a major zoo.  She was barely rescued.  The last polar bear display that I saw had the bears behind thick glass walls, the inaccessibility being compensated by the ability to see the bears underwater.  They are excellent swimmers but now the distances between ice floes are too much, even for them.  The seals don’t like the distances either.

The British culture of adventure and exploration is saturated with notions of bravery, risk, and the science of the planet in the 19th century, the sailing years.  Robert Falcon Scott has always been a hero of mine, partly because of a 1948 movie called “Scott of the Antarctic” that was played over and over at my brothers’ scout meetings as an example of stubborn persistence in the face of all discouragement and calm acceptance of his own death.  These were qualities crucial to winning WWII.  Roald Amundson, the competing explorer who made it to the South Pole first, was Norwegian and the film was made in Norway.  Scott was played by John Mills, whose daughter Hayley Mills is inextricably mixed in my mind with the African “Flames Trees of Thika,” part of the same British colonial drive to inhabit far lands.

We are coming close to the limits of this near-religious understanding of life as something that must be dominated according to a hierachy using science and profit as a sword.  Horatio Chapple, the boy killed by the polar bear if you are remembering, belonged to a family strongly imbued with Victorian values of bravery and action.  The shocking comments of many Brits in the blogosphere -- cheering for the bear because the boy was at school at Eton, an elite school -- are part of the post-colonial world, roiling with newly released planet-wide class rage over oppression.

But also they represent raw fear in an overwhelming world as the "polar bear" of unknown fate grips them world wide.  They are flailing and screaming in a wilderness they don’t know how to leave.  Ironically, it might be the stubborn persistence of a man like Scott that would let them hike out in spite of their wounds.  Instead, exceeding the deadliness of polar bears, they are like the Norway killer who gunned down scores of young people out of insane resentment of privilege.  Lest Americans think they are off the hook, let me remind you that Glenn Beck was quick to attack these young people as privileged “Hitler youth” who deserved to die.  Since he is a multimillionaire, he gets away with it.

There is another example Norway was quick to hold up:  Hege Dalen and her same-sex marriage partner, Toril Hansen, were part of a group picnicking on the back of the island where Anders Breivik was systematically murdering youngsters.  In an eerie echo of Dunkirk the group used their small boats to ferry kids to the nearby mainland, picking many out of the water where they had jumped to evade bullets.  The rescuers returned and returned in spite of bullet holes in their boats.  

They tell me that Robert Falcon Scott is a special hero of lesbians.  Ursula LeQuin’s feminist novels, particularly “Left Hand of Darkness” draws on polar imagery.  Certainly we are all in uncharted territory now, desperate for role models.  Who cares what gender or nationality they are, or whether they are rich or poor, liberal or conservative?  The lucky have partners and use their small boats to save others.  Even polar bears.  Horatio’s grandfather was not only a top army commander in England but active in many conservation organizations working hard to save endangered species.  Like the rest of us, he lives on the cusp of the transition and pays a high price.  

I have never forgotten that feel of that lion’s paw under my child hand.  Nor the image of Scott struggling to write in his journal as he froze to death.