Source of book: I own this.
Last summer’s epic camping trip took us to some places in Colorado that we had briefly visited in 2015, but wanted to return to and explore more thoroughly. In that prior trip, we had primarily focused on Mesa Verde National Park, but Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Great Sand Dunes ended up with only a short afternoon.
Combine this with my brother-in-law’s desire to spend some time in the San Juan Range hiking, and we had the makings of a trip.
One mistake I made in my planning was to miss the opening of the Mesa Verde tour reservations by a day, and they were already sold out for the holiday weekend we were there. What this meant was that we needed to find some alternative activities for our full day there. We could see the viewpoints in the evening after the crowds left.
I decided to explore the string of ruins in the valley, both in Hovenweep National Monument, and Canyon of the Ancients. This turned out to be a great decision - little in the way of crowds, a gorgeous drive between sites.
It was at the excellent visitor’s center for Canyon of the Ancients the day before our exploration that I ran across this book. Since I enjoyed Burrillo’s first book, Behind the Bears Ears, I decided to buy the book. The strange turns of fate that result in the events in our lives, I suppose.
First, a bit about the title and the nature of this book. The title comes from a line in the first book, where Burrillo describes the United States as “the backwoods of everywhere” - the place where nearly everyone comes from somewhere else, and where diverse people intermingle. A perpetual borderland, so to speak. I love this idea - it is more accurate than the “melting pot,” which tends to presume that we all turn out to be the same amalgam, rather than a rich dish with a plethora of ingredients. Like Burrillo, I love this part of the American experience - and unlike today’s Republican Party, I very much want all these diverse people as my neighbors.
It isn’t until the Afterword that Burillo explains how the book came to be, which is too bad. I think if he had started with the explanation, the book would have been a bit clearer. He explains that Modest Mouse alternated albums - one was the main album, the next was the collection of B sides that didn’t make it into the album.
This book is the B sides of the first book - the stuff he wrote that didn’t make it into the book. And, like those albums, there is a lot of interesting material that is well worth reading, but didn’t tie in directly with the purpose of the book about the Bears Ears.
It is a collection of essays and stories, and very much an insight into Burrillo’s life and philosophy. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am glad I added it to my collection. You do not need to read the first book to understand this one, but I definitely recommend reading both.
I took a lot of notes - the book isn’t that long, but it is dense with great lines and ideas. Like the first book, it is snarky as hell, and Burrillo doesn’t bother to pretend to be fair and balanced. He is unashamed to be a conservationist (he IS an archeologist after all), a progressive, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-bigotry. He also seems like he would be a bit intimidating to hike with, but a lot of fun to sit down over a beer with. He is a great storyteller, and that is the best part of both books.
I’ll also note that I added a couple of authors to my reading list as a result of this book.
The first essay is entitled “Locals Only,” and it is a rambling look at what it means to be local. And indigenous. Burrillo illuminates these ideas with a bracing clarity of thought. And snark. The opening is excellent, and drew me into the book right from the start.
Few of us live lightly on this world. We interact with our neighbors - both human and nonhuman - to varying degrees of interest or intensity. We have friends, colleagues, and foes within calling and occasionally striking distance. We shop for goods and services locally, or order them only using the local cell towers and a prayer that they won’t be rerouted to Antarctica. We mow or rake our lawns, sweep steps or sidewalks, chase sunbeams around our apartments with desperate houseplants, catch up on local news when nothing better is on, deal with local traffic jams and other local customs, complain about local politics and local weather, throw trash and recycling in local bins, drink at local bars, eat at local restaurants, and in general articulate with the places we live to an extent I’m not sure most people fully appreciate.
The lessons these places have to teach us can be as varied as the places themselves. Sometimes we fit where we are like the teeth of a key in a long-sought lock, high points and low points interdigitating like they were made for each other. Other times, it’s precisely the opposite.
I have been thinking about this quite a bit since the beginning of the Trump Era. For a long time, I fit pretty well here in Bakersfield. It has a good arts and music scene, a good legal community, we had a church family, and so on. I liked (and continue to like) the weather most of the year, and I love the proximity to everything from the beach to the mountains to the desert to the big city. And I very much love the racial diversity and relatively affordable housing.
For those years, I fit in pretty well. But when the Right Wing - and white evangelicals in particular - went full-on fascist, I found that I fit in less with the human denizens of this place than I thought. Plenty of good people here, but GOD there are a lot of really shitty people here too. For my kids, I don’t think any of them really feel they fit here, and I hope they are able to find a place that can be home for them.
For Burrillo, his place of origin - Upstate New York - never felt like home. His years in New Orleans changed him dramatically (one of the great stories in the book), but his true home, where he fit, turned out to be the Southwest.
I love one anecdote from his New Orleans period: the lifelong bachelor who credited fish sauce for his long happy life. (For those who do not know, this Asian sauce is pretty much fish fermented in salt. It is a magic ingredient in cooking, but it is hella strong by itself. This guy did shots of it every morning, which is too hard-core for me.)
Also hilarious is the description of Carnival season.
There were probably two hundred people, including my friends and I, gathered around the social core of the event: earthy, heavily pierced and tattooed freaks, one-part hippie and one-part wolverine. It was like someone had dipped a giant ice-cream scoop into the crowd at Burning Man and upended it just east of the French Quarter.
The next essay, “Darkness and Dust” tells about how Burrillo discovered the Southwest, and a few particular stories - a nighttime encounter with a mountain lion, a visit to an archeological site that turned out to have “bad juju” as a Dine friend of his described it. My favorite line is about why he prefers heat to cold.
I don’t hate winter, necessarily. And I’m not the worst snowboarder I know. But the cold. I’m not big on cold. I have a friend who’s a devotee of the Wim Hof method of physio-psychological enlightenment, which involves extended stays in ice baths, and this has always struck me as practicing for hell. Almost anything involving flames would be preferable.
Also in this chapter is a percipient observation about the white male voters for Trump, and a tie-in with Hunter S. Thompson’s book on the Hells Angels.
We can see this same mental process fueling the various cliques, clubs, and cults that fluoresced under the presidency of Donald Trump. That sense of “I don’t like where all this newfangled progress is headed, dagnabbit, kids these days with purple hair, women in the government, boy I tell you this doesn’t look like my country anymore…” Echoes of Zane Grey’s frontier idyll, these - where a man can hop astride his horse, spend the day shooting bison and brown-skinned people, and then come home to unschooled and totally subservient family members. No wonder Trump was so popular, out here.
Burrillo isn’t making this up. I have heard these things - they are not an exaggeration - from the complaints about hair color to the “this doesn’t look like my country with all these brown people in it” crap. Including from my own parents.
He also has some great thoughts on cultural appropriation. Here are some of the best lines.
In its broadest sense, it refers to the adoption or co-opting of cultural components originating in other cultures, although most critics and scholars understand that this process in itself is all but ubiquitous across all of human existence.
Where it becomes problematic is when members of a dominant culture do it with components of a subordinate, disadvantaged, or otherwise put-upon culture - hence the original term including the more accurate word colonialism. When it isn’t a case of bullies mimicking the downtrodden, it’s usually interpreted as satire or plain old emulation.
Burrillo notes that his own ancestors - Celtic and Latin - were colonized by the Romans back in the day. But that in our own time, appropriation doesn’t affect him or his groups.
How my own pre-colonized ancestors lived is a fun research topic in its own right, but I don’t often see it depicted in sports logos or intellectually menacing Halloween costumes.
Thus, to report that I froth and snarl at the thought of other people appropriating still others’ cultures would be tantamount to appropriating the outrage of the culturally appropriated group. Which strikes me as a tad hypocritical.
This is something I have experienced myself. I live in a place where Latinix people are a plurality - and I grew up in one where they were the majority. A few years ago, the kids and I attended a Dia de los Muertos celebration at the Kern County Museum, sponsored by a local Latinix group. Some of my kids dressed the part - it was really quite fun and cool, and my kids got a lot of positive feedback from people at the event.
It wasn’t until I posted online about it, that I got accusations of “cultural appropriation.” I noted that all of that came from…wait for it…white people. I heard nothing but positives from my Latinix friends.
The difference, I believe, between appropriation and the cross-pollination of cultures that humans have always done, is one of respect. We were not mocking or disrespecting or commercializing the traditions of our neighbors. Rather, we were respectfully learning, and participating alongside them. Rather like the difference between learning to cook Indian food (which I love!) and making racist “jokes” about the White House smelling like curry.
I think Burrillo is spot-on that for white folk to get too worked up about supposed “cultural appropriation” can veer into hypocrisy. By all means, we should take a look at what we do, but perhaps not get too worked up about what other well-meaning people are doing in good faith.
Perhaps the most snarky and strident essay is “What’s In A Name (Or “Don’t Call Me an Archaeologist”)”. In it, Burrillo looks at the problematic origins of his discipline, and the ongoing effort to decolonize it. This line is stunningly good, and really captures the essence of the issue.
Whiteness isn’t a race - there are no separate human races. But nor is it an ethnicity, a nation, or a culture. It’s an ideology. And I’m always wary of anyone whose identity is indistinguishable from their ideology.
I am “white” because of supremacist culture. Ethnically, I am half German, a quarter Swedish, an eighth English (relative of Charles Darwin), and the rest god knows what (unknown father). My nationality is American. My culture is…well, it’s complicated, but one might say ex-evangelical middle-class southern California culture? But I am “white” because our society sees me as white and accords me certain privileges because of that.
One of the most fascinating bits in this essay is the history of ludicrous racism in archeology. Not just in the Southwest, but around the world, there has been this belief that the incredible architecture and infrastructure that has been discovered couldn’t possibly have been built by the indigenous peoples. So, it had to have been built by someone else. Probably someone “white.” Or space aliens. And this has persisted even after open-minded archaeologists concluded the obvious: that the indigenous peoples DID IN FACT create these things.
Not that everyone was convinced, of course. Nor was the Mississippi region the only hotbed for the notion that impressive examples of American material history were the result of more advanced peoples whom the “savage” Native Americans had driven to extinction. Mormon scripture, having congealed in the first third of the 1800s, included this wild historical fiction as literal gospel.
And this is STILL being claimed by conspiracy theorists. This causes problems for legitimate archaeologists.
Skipping forward for a moment: a foul, noisome version of this contention still hangs around in the form of Erich von Daniken, David Hatcher Childress, and everyone else in the Ancient Aliens crowd. As David Holly Jr. pointed out in a fantastic 2012 piece for American Antiquity, for archaeologists to even engage with these people and their idiocy inadvertently legitimizes them by lending credence to the illusion that there is a debate at all. Yet ignoring them isn’t a great tactic, either, because part of the appeal of conspiracy theories to the simpleminded is that they are ignored or shunned by the Establishment.
I think we should just call them “racist dipshits” right to their faces and be done with it. That counts as engagement.
This is a problem for all of us who believe in truth, in evidence, and in the obvious humanity of brown-skinned humans. Fighting pseudoscience is tough, and there are no great answers. I will note that calling my father a racist dipshit (although not using those exact words) to his face and then in public is one reason that we no longer have a relationship. Nothing I said or did was able to save my parents from spiraling down the conspiracy theory drain hole.
Another passage that I thought was excellent was the one on the human superpower: adaptability. We are entering another period of volatility in climate. One we created, but also one that resembles the rapid ice ages of the period in which we evolved.
The strategy that pays best in those circumstances is to become, in effect, a jack-of-all-environments. One more adapted for adaptability itself than for any particular subset of ecological architecture.
To become, in other words, an obligate puzzle-solver.
…
They were all erectus, a species that had evolved to specialize in non-specialization, and to learn and learn and learn and learn in order to adapt to almost any environmental circumstance.
This is something today’s right wingers should take to heart. At its core, the reactionary-turned-fascist approach is a dead end. Adaptability is necessary, not ossification into a long-disappeared (and mostly fictional anyway) past. This is a quality I see in my children’s generation that is rare in my parents’ generation.
The next essay is “Landscape Psychology,” and explores the way landscapes and humans affect each other. And why people fit one place and not another. Like why Burrillo and I don’t tolerate a lack of sunshine well.
There is also a strong cultural connection between sunshine and happiness, and the argument usually touted by naysayers against the correlation between weather and mood is that such a correlation is “all in our heads.” That, if true, is what’s known as a social convention, and for social animals like humans those are sort of a big deal. There is an entire category of people who either ignore or do not recognize the existence of social conventions as real things, and they’re commonly called sociopaths.
This is where extreme individualism as a philosophy tends to veer into sociopathy. In reality, the most “libertarian-individualist” sorts among us turn out to be those who benefit most from our society and government. Rather than acknowledge that, they tend to become sociopathic, eager to deny the benefits they have to others. Trump and MAGA are just the most visible.
The next chapter is more of a personal story - about Burrillo’s hikes in the Grand Canyon. There are a few great lines in the middle of this delightful story.
It is said that history is written by the winners, which is a concise way of saying that historical narratives tend to be biased toward the perspectives of those people who came home from the battle to write about it. It’s tough to do that when you’re dead.
He then extrapolates this to less violent pursuits.
I have long suspected that a similar bias runs through the annals of wilderness literature. Most of it is upbeat in tone, encouraging, lyrical, shot through with excitement or tension but almost always ending on a positive note. If there’s any moral lesson to be learned, it’s less often “there’s danger lurking out there” than it is “embrace the suck.” Again, a tough message to pen when you’re dead.
I am not a natural risk-taker, so hiking with me is significantly less dangerous. Like Rincewind, I have as my goal “do not die.”
One thing I share with Burrillo is that I am too cheap to do fancy prepackaged food on backpack trips. We both tend to cook from scratch, or at least basic shelf stable stuff off the shelf at the grocery store. I also thought it was amusing that he brings a tiny bottle of ghost pepper sauce and bourbon along with him. That’s my kind of luxury too. (Although I go one notch down from ghost peppers.)
Another passage in this chapter involves cows and wilderness grazing. If you want to get a wilderness advocate riled up, mention grazing. Because the damage humans do to wilderness is miniscule compared to that of the damn cows. (And this cuts across the political spectrum too: my conservative father-in-law loathes wilderness grazing too. It’s only welfare queens and social parasites like the Bundys who prop up the practice.)
Cows rule the West. Not people, or at least not average citizens who aren’t caught up in the agro-cowboy bullshit mythology. Nope - cows. The devastation these things wreak on the environment in the West is almost unfathomable.
It’s time to recognize the damage and end wilderness grazing permanently.
Another episode that was fascinating was Burrillo’s bout with Lyme Disease. Which led to an epiphany about toxic masculinity.
I learned a few other things from that horrific episode, as well. Almost all the people who said things like “whatever this takes, however long it lasts, I will be by your side” were women. And almost all the people who said things like “suck it up and stop whining pussy - everyone has problems” were fellow dudes.
And another one about a particular American social problem:
Tricky gender politics aside, the broadest-spectrum lesson from that long and awful episode was simply the extent to which American culture teaches everyone to have little or no regard for the safety and well-being of others.
Covid was a society-wide demonstration of that nasty side of our culture.
This segues into the observation that the world-wide shock of Covid resulted in some unpleasant revelations - something I know first-hand all too well.
As with the Lyme episode, these rude shocks manifested in my personal life as a series of friends revealing their true colors in jarring ways. One fellow, who used to lecture - loudly - at social gatherings about how women are smarter than men, cruelty to animals is the most heinous of crimes, and American wastefulness is destroying our planet, turned out to be an ironclad conspiracy theorist and science-denier. I guess all that progressive soapboxing was nothing more than an attempt (largely successful, if memory serves) to woo grungy and gullible hippies into bed with him.
Burrillo doesn’t neatly sort into either liberal or conservative boxes - perhaps no truly thoughtful person does. You keep finding contradictions and blind spots in every viewpoint, although some are clearly more aligned with reality than others. While a personal libertarian (meaning he doesn’t think government belongs in the bedroom, for example), he also sees that “libertarian” is usually just a code word for…something else.
My problem with textbook libertarianism is the same one I have with other grand narratives: the official charter includes all sorts of components that are equal parts self-contradictory and stupid. How, for example, can a person be both fanatically in favor of free-market capitalism and fanatically opposed to open borders? If the principles of fiscal liberty preclude top-down regulation, and there’s a whole bunch of people willing to work very hard for much lower wages than their competitors, how is legally barring them from doing so not antagonistic to those same principles? I have yet to hear anyone provide an answer to this riddle that doesn’t boil down to either stubborn nationalism or just plain racism.
EXACTLY.
“Libertarianism is really just “I am winning in this particular economic system, and I want to continue to do so. I got mine, sucks to be you.”
Burrillo also ties social unrest to geological events.
Such is the power of sociocultural pressure; it builds over time - piling real or imagined injustice upon real or imagined injustice - until something finally triggers a release. The release itself is often rapid and explosive, and usually quite destructive in the short term. However, from a wider temporal perspective, such events are part of a healthy, functioning natural or political ecosystem. Life as we know it wouldn’t even be possible without them.
This essay is pretty long, and rambles a lot (in a good way), so we also get an examination of the problem of invasive trout in the Colorado River. There is actually a program in place paying people to catch Brown Trout. Similarly, in the high Sierra, there is no limit on Brook Trout - another species that should be diminished or even eliminated in these unnatural habitats.
I also have to mention his observation about the realities of backpacking.
There are various schools of thought on how to properly Tetris a backpack, and pretty much all of it goes right out the window on the last day of the trip. Many long minutes of packing, hoisting, adjusting, unloading, and repacking go into the initial stage, owing to its being conducted in the comfort of one’s own home. When it’s time to depart a beautiful backcountry spot for the long slog back to what currently passes for civilization, however, there’s more often a leaves-in-a-trash-bag theme.
“Quarantine Ecology” is about the lockdown, and it is one of the best things I have read about the experience. Perhaps because I too found loopholes to get outside and hike.
Like me, Burrillo is a cat lover, and his description of his goofus cat, who he says should be classified as Felis doofus, is hilarious.
He also talks about ants. Because, well, we all dealt with ants during the pandemic.
The rigorous hierarchy of ant life is astounding. You can’t beat them for work-life balance, because it’s all work and no life and they seem just fine with that. They can lift up to fifty times their own weight, they “breathe” through holes in their bodies, and they communicate with each other via chemicals. Imagine carrying bottles of liquefied love, hatred, indifference, interest, boredom, repulsion, attraction, anger, surprise, lust, disgust, trust, joy, envy, and fear around with you at all times, and trying to remember which one to spray at whom.
“Salad Days in Scorched Venice” is mostly about the incredible network of canals built in the Phoenix area thousands of years ago by the Hohokam people - thousands of miles worth, all dug by hand, and routed for the perfect slope in a nearly flat valley. It’s incredible engineering - and today’s canals generally follow the same routes.
This leads into the cotton industry in Arizona. Which illustrates a lot about the stupidity of American political discourse.
Leaseholders like those mentioned above shore up these financial shortfalls through federal subsidies…This is a tiresome and all-too-familiar situation in American agri-politics, not unlike the heavily subsidized cows that are, when you get right down to it, being paid by American taxpayers to destroy American public lands. Cotton was grown by ancestral Indigenous peoples in the Sonoran desert, up around Flagstaff, and even in the bottom of the Grand Canyon - but not thousands of acres of the stuff. For that you either need the combination of hot temperatures and steady rainfall they get in the Deep South, or you need Uncle Sam to bail you out on the reg, presumably while raging against the evils of socialism so all the local good old boys know whose side you’re really on.
Burrillo also talks about the inevitability of digging up old native burial sites during development. Fortunately, the trend is toward respectful relocation - something Burrillo worked on as part of his job for a while. But then, there are those people.
The realm of Phoenix-area archaeology certainly contains its own noisome contingent of swine who think it’s “really fun to dig up dead people” and consider the push toward ever more respectful language “a bunch of woke PC bullshit.” I’ve met a few of these characters in the flesh, although I’ve been lucky enough not to work with any - and if you took a stab at their demographic makeup, you’d probably hit a bullseye on the first try. But they are a dwindling minority. A loud, annoying, toxic minority who are often found in positions of dug-in power like the oldest ticks on a suffering dog - but a dwindling one, nonetheless.
The fact that everyone knows exactly what demographic he is talking about says everything.
Another target of his ire is the MAGA assholes who wish to defile one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world with an ugly penis-extender that will not work even as it causes tremendous damage.
And some xenophobic slobs want to construct a big wall straight through the region. All that biodiversity damaged or threatened to keep a few deer, jaguars, and other creatures too cumbersome to squeeze through its slates and too feral to hitch-hike from using the migration routes they’ve used since the Miocene. It won’t deter human migrants, of course - the existing wall segments have proven that already. It’ll just create ecological impacts. Evidently that’s a small price to pay for twitchy people throughout the country to sleep a little easier in what is, after all, stolen land.
“Cattle Ville” is about Burrillo’s heritage. His grandparents lived in Vermont - a place not as known for its cows and cheese as it perhaps should be. He introduces the chapter with a great quote.
Not long ago, my charming friend and colleague Jojo Matson put it this way: “For me, home is a who, not a where. I couldn’t live someplace beautiful if I’m surrounded by awful people, but I can live with great people just about anywhere.”
I very much agree with this. There are places I simply cannot imagine living, despite their beauty, because I can’t even with MAGA racists.
The great revelation of this chapter is what “R. E.” stands for. “Ralph Elmer,” which as you might imagine was a tough name for a kid to have.
As Burrillo eventually explains, however, these names came from ancestors who were pretty badass. Elmer was a World War Two veteran, who lost an arm and injured his remaining hand. He went on to freaking build his own house, and drive a manual transmission delivery truck with only part of a left hand. (If you know you know.) And he was a great person too.
The man’s influence on almost everyone who met him cannot be understated. My own father once said of his former father-in-law, “After all that he went through in the war, you would expect him to be the meanest son of a bitch in the world. But all he ever does is crack jokes and make people smile.”
Including his usual tale of his life:
He used to joke that he left home an orphan, spent some time in a uniform, and came back a pirate.
He was clearly a big positive influence on Burrillo and his siblings. The “Ralph” came from his father, and while he doesn’t have quite the story to tell, his fondness for his father is apparent.
There are also stories about his childhood, his friends, and his influences. I want to mention our shared dislike of certain technologies, but also his view of progress itself. It warms my heart that he cites Umberto Eco’s essay on Ur-Fascism here as well.
I hiss and snarl at sleek modern gadgetry when I’m out pretending to be John Muir in the backcountry, particularly the “convenience” of cameras built into smartphones that track our every movement. Give me paper maps and books I can write on…Give me a good old fashioned fire to cook on…Give me a truck that doesn’t require nanorobots to work on…
Yep. I love my paper maps and magnetic compass.
However, I would eventually realize that, while taking a break from modern life and its many beeping horrors is often a good idea, going backward in any other sense is just as often a bad one. Progress is not often a piecemeal affair, and although the side effects can be brutal, the benefits still outweigh them. I’ll deal with TikTok if it means people of color can vote.
The footnote here is also on point.
Please note, there is a big difference between regressing to past conditions and learning from them. I cannot believe how often I’ve had to explain that.
Burrillo’s thoughts on privilege are also excellent. He grew up working class, but as an academically minded goth, he ended up friends with people above his class.
It was from this group that I learned several important lessons about how society works. First, it is the nature of privilege to make things easier for some people than for others, and when that privilege is anchored to something biological there’s precious little you can do about it. But there are loopholes where social class is concerned. My new friends were upper-middle class, while I was very much not, but they taught me how to dress and act like them in laughably High School Makeover Movie fashion - up to and including giving me expensive clothes they no longer wanted. Only then did I realize that fashion isn’t just about trendiness; it’s also a uniform. Sporting the right one means you’re one of Us.
The goth thing had its own roots, of course.
In much the same way that the hippie subculture was a group response to the overly technical and warmongering mainstream culture of the post-WWII era - and the punk subculture was a group response to the flaccid activism that came to characterize most hippie protestations - the goth subculture can be seen as a group response to the topical repression of sex and death in Western culture. The unique combination of Puritan ethics and vestigial Roman militarism constitute a society where sensitivity is a sign of weakness (particularly in men), nobody fears or even talks about death except in terms of avoiding it, and public displays of sexuality (particularly by women) are verboten. Publicly embracing that suite of taboos is therefore a rebellious act, especially attractive to those of us who are prone to anxiety and depression.
This exploration of American taboos regarding the discussion of sex and death carries over into the next chapter, “Yucatan,” about a formational trip the young Burrillo took there as part of a college archaeological course. I’ll get to that, but first, this great line:
Pinning the formative developments or phases of my life on transformative wilderness or travel experiences is a useful device for resolving it into some kind of sense. Call it narrative bias - I’m fine with that. The die casting of miasmic, meandering life into the structure and soundness of Story. It involves a bit of shoehorning, shearing of jagged edges, and a dash or ten of plain-old hyperbole, but the result is often a genuinely useful narrative rather than simply a stream of stuff that happened. This is probably how a lot of myths were first invented.
That last line! That is exactly how myths happen. Whether in history or our own lives.
Another great scene is Burrillo’s encounter with souvenir salespeople.
Later in the trip, I met a few guys selling hand-carved Mayan masks who bore the obvious marks of woodcarvers, like innumerable nicks fro whittling knives, and we swapped some friendly conversation about the trade. Everyone around them was selling wooden masks of the exact same style, but they bore the obvious marks of salesmen, such as soft hands, distinctive attire, and the fake “American” smile I find so off-putting. Here was a handy insight into my own culture: the US is a land of salespeople.
This is literally what I hate most about American culture. The salesmanship. I hate selling myself, which is why I don’t make the money more aggressive attorneys do. I hate it when people try to sell me stuff. I hate MLM scams. And perhaps more than anything, I loathe the selling that is inherent in “evangelism.” If everyone is selling something, real relationships are impossible. Thank god for the true friends I have found, who have nothing to sell.
As Burrillo explored the Mayan ruins, he noticed that the Indigenous (and indeed even modern Mexican approaches to sex and death were a lot more healthy than the American one. And, like me, he was puzzled. There is nothing inherent in Christianity that makes death and sex taboo. Indeed, quite the opposite. There is a LONG Christian tradition of talking about death, the use of macabre imagery, and centering death as a core human experience. Likewise, the Bible is full of sex, and there is even an entire book that is a celebration of sexuality - including sex for pleasure outside of marriage. (Yeah, that part was really suppressed by Evangelicalism - dangerous thing to read the Bible for one’s self…)
So why the strict taboo against them? Ask the Puritans. The only plausible explanation that comes to mind is that making ubiquitous topics of concern into taboos all but guarantees none of us can ever relax, and anxious people are a lot easier to manipulate.
Hell. Yes. As an ex-evangelical, I can attest that this is exactly the point of the taboos. Power and control. American Evangelicalism is pretty much synonymous with Fundamentalism these days, and is a neo-Puritan movement to its core.
The other thing it guarantees is that certain types of people will rebelliously gravitate toward those topics, sometimes going beyond fascination to the point of fetishization. This is the way it always goes with taboos. It’s why the most sexually repressive ideologies invariably produce the most depraved and exciting hedonists as a side effect. And it’s why a staunch refusal to have candid, sober conversations with young people about the realities of death produces things like serial killer fandom and the fashion sense I had in my own late teens. The whole goth scene is basically a bunch of mostly young Westerners openly acknowledging - and subversively celebrating - the fact that sex and death are all around us whether anyone likes it or not.
I wrote about this a few years ago. Our family gave up Halloween for stupid reasons, not understanding that a healthy outlet regarding death is better than the denialism and forced happiness that Evangelicalism demands.
Being comfortable with death seems about as logical as being comfortable with having to urinate. What doesn’t seem logical is hiding everything that makes us human behind tangible doors, like coffins or bathroom stalls; or behind intangible ones, like cosmetics and spurious friendliness. I don’t advocate reintroducing human sacrifice, by any means, but my fellow Americans could certainly do with a few sexy parties in a few cemeteries now and then.
I agree with this in so many ways. A lot of our “bathroom panic” crap is really about shame surrounding genitals and sexuality, and the myth that men are naturally violent. We could all use a healthier approach to death - and religious people are the worst about dealing with death. (That’s my experience as an attorney and my wife’s experience as a nurse, by the way.) We could also use a far healthier approach to sexuality, understanding our nature as animals (and indeed as living organisms), and acknowledging sexuality as a natural feature of our lived experience. And maybe a few sex parties in the graveyard…
Another passage that I really loved explored the way that Western (meaning white) people tend to think of their own beliefs as “philosophy” or maybe “theology,” while dismissing the thought systems of indigenous peoples as “beliefs” or “teachings” or “mythology.” Condescending as hell, and also inaccurate.
Indigenous peoples have complex moral and philosophical systems too: they are not “primitive” or “savage,” but equally developed. And indeed, there is much to learn from them. (My own view is that humans are humans, and every culture has faced the same challenges and come up with varied yet similar cultural and philosophical ways of addressing those questions.)
Burrillo summarizes Hopi thinking as this, which honestly sounds pretty good - and in some facets better than the very whitewashed - and thus over simplistic - ideas I was raised with.
“The natural world is full of lessons for us to learn, but human beings are inherently flawed and the majority of them will ignore those lessons until it’s too late, so the kindest thing we can do for each other is share loads of laughter and love before the bastards get us all killed.” That might be the greatest philosophy I’ve ever encountered.
Sounds, interestingly enough, kind of similar to stuff Christ said, doesn’t it? What with the parables about the natural world, the “narrow gate,” and “love your neighbor…”
The final essay, “GTFO” - a reference to an outdoors slogan: “Get the Fuck Outdoors” - is about this, but also about American identity. The backwoods of everywhere. A hodgepodge of ethnicities, religions, and philosophies.
Burrillo sees the United States as going through a series of identity crises. “Who ARE we?” Not an easy question to answer, to be sure. In the past, we ended up with cultic groups and new religions like the Latter Day Saints - a way to “americanize” an ancient near eastern book.
World War Two sparked the other crisis, which led to incredible social change - and a profound split between those who embraced our nation’s increasing militarism and empire-building and those who weren’t particularly keen on that idea. Burrillo sees us now in our third major crisis.
Our third great identity crisis is happening right now. The gender revolution - long overdue, in my opinion - has finally erupted. Indigenous sovereignty movements are also erupting throughout the country, as are vociferous efforts to let the world know that the Black community has absolutely had it with being shoved around by authority figures.
In response, nationalism has erupted among those who, like the many religious types in the 1800s, are desperate to maintain their long-held Euro-American picture of the world. Certain far-right types with curious sexual predilections are even seeking to form an Anglo-Saxon Party in American politics, which is more honest than “white” as a descriptor, although it’s a bit on the nose vis-a-vis colonialism….It all boils down to the same question to which it boiled the last two times: Who, exactly, are we?
I think this is indeed the central question of our time, particularly for white people in America. I firmly believe that white supremacy, patriarchy, and reactionary fascism are a dead end, not merely politically, but economically and evolutionarily. The future requires opportunity for everyone, and the talents of all of us will be needed to solve the issues that we face.
I’ll end with something a bit lighter hearted. Near the end, Burrillo discusses the instagramming of everything, and the fallacy which sees causation between this and the increase of people getting out in the outdoors.
As he puts it, there is a really, really strong correlation between ice cream consumption and shark attacks.
This is well known. But does eating ice cream cause shark attacks? Are humans sweeter tasting?
This is obviously silly. What there is is a third variable, the underlying cause of both. People eat more ice cream when it is hot. And they swim in the ocean more when it is hot.
While Burrillo doesn’t claim to understand all of the variables, what is clear is that there is a trend of people wanting to get out and experience nature - which is a good thing, even if it presents challenges. What is needed is better management of people and resources, not screeds against Instagram and social media.
There is a net benefit to all who get out and hike, and we should celebrate that more people are doing it. And, as I have experienced here in California, a huge change is in demographics. When I was a kid, you mostly saw white males on the trail. Men and boys.
But women were starting to be more common. And now, I see people of all colors and ethnicities, out there with their kids. This is something to celebrate. Just like the glorious diversity of America - the Backwoods of Everywhere is something to celebrate.
As my kids responded to the question posed by the racist asshats speaking at Trump rallies, “Are these the people you want as your neighbors?” - they - and I - respond, “HELL YES!!”
Who are we? We are humans. We embrace humanity in its glorious diversity, in its rich variance, and in its endless expressions. This is who we are.
I loved this book, just like I loved Behind the Bears Ears. Burrillo is one of those writers that is just straight up fun to read. And thought provoking and snarky and unexpected. I hope he continues to write, and I strongly recommend everyone take a look at his books.
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