Dear Christopher,
Your mother asked me to write you postcards as I travel. She plans to give you geography lessons to enrich what they already have taught you in elementary school. I have written these. In addition to the history and geography of San Diego, the Imperial Valley, the Algodones Sand Dunes, the Colorado River, and this Arizona desert, I’ve been thinking a lot about a topic inspired by what I see around me. I will not put it on a postcard, but I wish I could tell you about it anyway.
Parents and adults tell you that when you grow up, you can be whatever you like. “If you want to be an astronaut,” someone might tell you, “you should dream of it and work hard. There are no limits.” Everyone is told such things when they are young. For a young person, any young person, it may be true: the young person may become just what the young person dreams of becoming. Only time will tell.
Some young people do grow up to do what they dreamed of. Even adults, if they are youthful, have the potential to change into something more in line with what they believe they might desire. I have a friend who decided at age 30 to train as a nurse. She was successful and is happy about her career now. She travels on contract; today, we talked online about how pleased she is to be in California right now.
My friend Sarah wanted especially to be married to a wonderful man and to raise a family with him. Her husband Chris is smart, sweet, and kind. I watched them fall in love over the course of college parties and joy rides in Chris’ vintage red Mustang. I’ve been with them as they worked hard to develop careers, her in teaching Montessori and him as a city planner. They started out in dingy scarcely-furnished apartments with roommates when they graduated college, and have now been through a series of successively more pleasant living arrangements that have led them to own a fine four bedroom, two bath house in a sought-after suburb of Asheville, NC. Chris and Sarah have three children. The eldest, Maddie, looks a lot like how I remember Sarah having been when we were both teenagers. I think Sarah got what she wanted.
The key to understanding adults when we say that you can grow up to be whatever you want to be must be based on a careful reading of the modal verbs “can” and “may.” We say “can,” but we mean “may” or even “might.” We should say, “If you want to become an astronaut, you very certainly might! You should dream it and work hard. There may not be any limits.” Instead, we use “can” out of a lack of precision.
We hedge our bets. Telling you that you may become anything you might wish as long as you dream and work hard is a proposition with zero risk for us. No one is capable of knowing what will happen to you. If you dream of something and work hard towards it, you may, in fact, realize your dream. In that case, we who now advise you to dream and work hard will then appear vindicated. You will congratulate us for the marvelous advice we gave you as a child.
On the other hand, since we cannot know what will happen to you, there is no risk in saying that, in this example, you may become an astronaut. We don’t know yet if your vision is good enough, or if you will master calculus. We don’t know if you will be selected by an organization that sends people to space to be on a space crew. If you do not become an astronaut, we will tell you that you didn’t dream hard enough or work hard enough, and you will not be able to impeach our claim about would have happened were you to have worked harder or believed in yourself more. Besides, we might say, when we advised you that you could become an astronaut, we had no definitive knowledge of the future, and really, in the strictest use of language, should have said you might.
Again, we are all hedging our bets.
We don’t know the future. Scotty, here in the campground in his SUV, which tows a small teardrop camper, has just sold his cabin in Montana, his primary residence of many years. He has no family to speak of. He had a stroke a few years ago, which makes it hard to chat up new friends. He’s long-ago retired, and lives off of a fixed income that consists mostly of social security.
Scotty lives here in this out-of-the-way camp right now because it’s inexpensive and not so cold as back home. Even when he owned the cabin in Montana, he came down here some winters. Once here, he moves camp from time to time from RV park to RV park. He tells me that thirty years ago, when he was 42, he took a cross-country bike trip just as I am doing now. It seemed important to him that I accept his gift of individually-wrapped American processed cheese food, Kraft brand. He says he has plenty, as he just went to the food bank distribution today.
Arthur jumped out of planes in the Marines. He explains that he trained at Fort Benning at Army Airborne school, even though he was a Marine. He was proud enough of his training that he had the airborne logo, the parachute with wings, tattooed across his chest. He deployed to Iraq. His back, hips, and joints hurt all the time, even though he’s young, because he landed one too many hard jumps out of airplanes. He hopes that the Veteran’s Administration will increase the benefits he receives, as the meager $300 he gets in disability benefits is the only stable income he receives. He continues to be a leader in his community, which is a squatter’s camp. He helps run the so-called library, a big shack with piles and piles of old books and a bar. Some of what people pay for bottled water, beer, and soft drinks lets him have a beer, too, and take his mind off his pain.
Gina (not her real name) worked in food service, and later retail. She landed a job at a comic book and gaming store back in North Carolina. She started a relationship with a man I’ll call Stabby McStabperson. Eight years on in that relationship, things weren’t going well, and she decided to leave Mr. McStabperson. She shortly thereafter took up with John, also not a real name. Mr. McStabperson came around and stabbed both John and Gina multiple times with a large knife, leaving both of them in critical condition. He then went to a secluded place to try and kill himself. He didn’t succeed.
John and Gina knew Mr. McStabperson and had thought of him as a friend. They assumed their stabby buddy was not really essentially violent, but rather had suffered from a temporary psychological problem. When there was a trial, they testified to his character, and begged for leniency for their erstwhile friend, with the result that he was only given two years of confinement. Much to their chagrin, their assailant contacted them repeatedly from jail to let them know that he planned to come back and complete his failed attempt to kill them.
John and Gina disappeared with a trailer to a squatter’s camp in the middle of the desert. It’s hot in the summer, but it’s better than being stabbed.
There are so many of these people all across Imperial, Riverside, Maricopa, and La Paz counties. They have come here with an RV or a trailer, and have set up shop for the winter. This is the best place for them as old or sick or poor. Imperial County, in particular, is one of the country’s poorest counties per capita.
Old, alone, broken down, victimized, poor: if any of these are things you want to become, and you dream it, you certainly might become one of them. In fact, you might become one of these things even if you don’t desire it, dream of it, or work towards it. And that is the sad fact that no adult will likely ever want to tell you, the fact that I am writing about here in my journal instead of putting on a postcard.
Good luck, kid!
Dan
