contemplating September

I have three options for sleeping on the road. The first option, which I seek out when I need to shower, want to sleep on something soft, or am craving the intimate touch of a bedbug, is a motel. No frills, $50-70 a night, the faint fear of a midnight murder always lingering just when you finally feel ready to surrender to sleep - you couldn't ask for much more. As I write this from the bed of my Kalkaska, Michigan motel, a man down the hall is yelling at someone cowering behind a locked door. Apparently, he knows Jessica is in there. Why won't she come out, he begs. Through wafer-thin walls, the answer couldn't be more clear.

The second possibility is sleeping in my car, parked in the forsaken corner of some Walmart parking lot, or hidden behind a church. I haven't gone down the car-sleeping route just yet, mostly out of fear of the consequences it will impose upon my long-afflicted back, but I'm confident that I'll get to pay homage to my beloved Clarence Thomas someday soon. But that's the option of last resort.

The third choice, camping, is by far the most romantic. A good night spent camping features a technicolor sunset quickly replaced by a resplendent array of stars, the soothing screeches of owls and other wildfowl that graciously lull you to sleep, and the thrill of cooking your own dinner on a stove in the middle of the woods. Unfortunately, when I'm added to this equation, things tend to go awry. I've camped three nights since I set out six days ago and in that time, I left the rain cover off my tent the night of a thunderstorm, spilled my water bottle inside my tent, and set my stove on fire, requiring a deeply humbling next-day visit to REI where numerous supervisors were consulted to laugh at my ineptitude and a whole new stove was purchased, the first one never used for anything other than flare-adjacent purposes. But in all, camping...lovely.

The morning after my second camping experience (the thunderstorm), I sat at a picnic table while I waited for my tent to dry out. If you don't let a tent dry, it will accumulate mildew and break down the chemical coatings that keep the tent together, or so they say. On all things that pertain to tents - or the outdoors, generally - this indoor child has learned to listen to the experts. The one time I didn't read the instructions, my stove spontaneously combusted.

I've been making my way through Jenny Offill's Weather, a really curious novel. I was reading it that morning and while I won't go too much into it (read it for yourselves), as my legs dangled off the end of the table, the sun progressively tracking its way up dew-laden fields, the below passage stuck with me. It still sticks with me.

"When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.

Hahaha!

(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)"

I wondered why that passage resonated as much as it did. Maybe because I had spent the evening before with no internet service and nothing to do but watch the sky move, contemplating dusk? That's part of it, undoubtedly. I found a certain restoration alone, watching the dusk descend and settle, that felt rare, equal parts precious and precarious. Maybe we have lost some connection after all, staring down at our phones and refreshing and refreshing and refreshing. But now I'm starting to sound like a collective societal dad, begging you to leave the phone in your bedroom before you come to dinner. It's tiring and trite. And that wasn't why the passage lingered.

I was considering dusk as I drove off from the campsite, (relatively) dry tent stowed in the trunk. I was thinking about it when I pulled into Ann Arbor and navigated the throngs of Labor Day students and visitors and I was still mulling it as I coursed down the highway to Detroit. It was somewhere off Jefferson Avenue, as I reckoned with my guilt over the inherent exploitative implications to touristically driving around depressed Detroit, that I figured out why it had the staying power it did. September.

I left on this trip on September 2nd, ostensibly because the national parks would be less crowded now than during the summer, the weather would be at its loveliest, and because, well, I was still employed until the end of August. It didn't hurt that September is a wonderful month, arguably the most wonderful, filled with long sunny days that don't make you sweat and flowing water you can still swim in. What I hadn't considered was that September is also the dusk of months, the final month with vestiges of summertime warmth and diminishing remnants of sunshine before the curtain drops in October and the sweaters emerge. In September, you feel like you're on the precipice of something because, in more ways than one, you are. Summer vacation is over - kids are back at school, Congress returns from recess, the movies that might be in Oscar contention start coming to the fore. Beach bodies are surrendered, crops go out of season. September is a month of equal parts rededication and exhalation.

Contemplation is all around me this September as I circumnavigate our great, sickly country. In the barbershop in Ionia, Michigan that I sat in for a little under an hour, I was practically inundated by it. Contemplation lay heavy in the gaze of the retired man - only just retired, he insisted, when the barber asked - who stared out the window with focused intent, watching an empty street, waiting for something, anything to tiptoe down silent sidewalks. Contemplation, in its more concretized, pernicious form, dripped from the tongue of the barber when she sat me in her chair and her first words to me, before even asking what I wanted done with the floppy mop on my head, were "can you believe what this crazy President of ours is doing?" Bad faith contemplation, the rhetorical kind where you know your answer already, but contemplation all the same. And contemplation was ripe and abundant within me as I weighed how to respond to such a brazen opening salvo, eventually going with the overwhelmingly courageous response "yeah, Afghanistan is a disaster, huh?"

That's just one encounter, the micro manifestation of contemplation. But the macro exists as well, even if it's a little harder to notice than hardened glares and uncomfortable inquiries. We all came into the summer full of bravado and expectation, hoping for a return to indoor dining, airplanes where you didn't have to double mask, and a reinvigorated, reckless dating scene. We got it for a month, maybe six weeks, before the delta variant forced us to beat a hasty retreat, back to too-familiar couches and socially distanced outdoor patios. What was supposed to be dawn is instead a renewed dusk. We're in September again, on the edge of winter, and very little feels like it has even begun to thaw.

The consequence, at least among so many young people (the demographic that psychologist was so worried about a century ago) I know, has been constant, deep, existential contemplation. Things feel more fragile and temporary now, so many people I know are weighing the merits of a career, debating whether it's worth making that kind of sacrifice when our youth is fleeting and so is everything else. I have many friends who loved their urban lives now wondering if it's feasible to decamp for the woods before they turn thirty, questioning how they can balance certain cosmpolitan expectations with newfound claustrophobia and recently heightened social anxiety. Many people I know don't see the question of having children as an inevitabillity or even a possibility; when it's contemplated now, it's perceived as an act of either gross irresponsibility or wanton cruelty as our world steadily smolders and floods. Folks are quitting jobs, moving house, ending long-term relationships and abruptly changing long-held plans - in short, doing whatever they can to either carve out the space needed to contemplate or carve out the space that said contemplation has made them realize they need.

When you camp out and watch the sunset in the final moments of dusk, the colors seem to be holding hands. Roasted oranges intermingle with indecisive blues trying to figure out if they're cerulean or purple. Before they can make up their mind, they're black. That moment - and it really is just a moment, no more than ten or fifteen minutes - is a tender, fleeting one. And you know it's fleeting as you hold it in your hands and feel it slip through your fingers. That impermanence is what lends dusk to contemplation, I think. The urgency compels you to think, lest you be plunged into darkness.

I understand the psychologist's concern. To lose the ability to appreciate that supple beauty is to lose something fundamental, something that cannot be rediscovered. But the pyschologist's concern is less that the meaning of dusk would diminish and more that we would be too busy under flickering incandescence to remember to go outside to watch the sky shrink, to notice the colors evaporating. The psychologist was wrong. We don't need to go outside to contemplate. We don't even need to see it with our own eyes. We just need to be standing still at dusk. For most of us, well, standing still comes easily now.