A fire break trail on the edge of the Conecuh National Forest: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

CONECUH NATIONAL FOREST – The contrast could not be greater from where we spent this Thanksgiving and the past five on that noisy Texas Street in Mobile, Alabama, where you can’t see the sky for the city lights and the blinking RSA tower and where it rains nearly every day in winter these days, more than Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington.

Walking along a fire break trail on the edge of the national forest here, it’s so quiet you can hear the turkey buzzards way off in the distance hunting dead game in the daytime and the cayotes howling at the moon at night. It’s so dark you can easily make out the big dipper in the sky and even see satellites blinking and speeding across the firmament.

This year marks a humble turning point in our journey, me and my loyal dog Jefferson, as we transition away from just chasing campsites and trying to save democracy and the planet and begin to contend with simply trying to find a way to survive in nature as the human species continues going crazy like these are the “end times.”

My primary objective over the past few days has been to simply get some rest with peace and quiet after a year of moving from one campsite to another in the Washington, D.C. area and then dealing with the death of my friend and colleague in Mobile, David Underhill.

I’ve been taking a break from the Trump news and impeachment as Congress is in recess anyway.

But of course this president just couldn’t help himself. He had to ruin this holiday like every other. Instead of just flying to Afghanistan and getting a photo-op pretending to feed Thanksgiving turkey to the troops, he had to tell another daily lie, contending that the Taliban is ready to agree to a cease fire, even though there is absolutely no evidence that is the case. Military leaders were quoted in the New York Times saying Trump’s stance has the U.S. on the verge of losing the country’s longest war in Afghanistan, drawing comparisons with Vietnam.

Of course this lie was reported as legitimate news by every mainstream newspaper online and television news station in the land, missing another opportunity to simply ignore the most corrupt president in U.S. history by far.

As regular readers here may recognize, this move to an organic farm is part of a new strategy going forward. When I first moved out of the house in Birmingham going on six years ago, I had planned to spend as much time in D.C. as possible but to winter on the Gulf Coast and plan to move out west eventually, hopefully never to come back to the American South.

But as I wrote this summer, after a conversation with a very smart, cool doctor in Maryland, our plans have changed to simply escaping the worst effects of climate change. He pointed out that there is not enough fresh water and local produce in the West, and the wildfires are out of control. He is selling his winter house in Florida to escape the hurricanes and flooding and looking for a place in the mountains of the Northeast.

When that heat dome pressed down on the cities of the Eastern Seaboard back in July, I escaped to the Catoctin Mountains in central Maryland, and found the starting line of escape just south of the Mason-Dixon line. We explored rural Pennsylvania as well, along with New York state.

It has become clear to me that over the next few years we need to figure out ways to support progressive, organic farmers and even create new ones and find places to camp in rural, mountainous areas in spring, summer and fall, and find new warmer places to camp in winter.

While I’m not quite ready to reveal all the details of this plan or name the names of all the other people involved, suffice it to say we have found a winter camp on a farm on the edge of a national forest near the Alabama-Florida line where there is the potential to be of some help in making a difference.

While the politics of Alabama just seems to grow more hopeless all the time, leaving little doubt as to where that red state’s nine electoral votes will go in 2020, there is an active progressive community in Pensacola that seems to hold some hope of helping to turn the battleground state of Florida more blue in the next election cycle.

Florida’s First District in the so-called Panhandle is represented in Congress now by Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s most vocal sycophants, who won election here in 2016 as Trump captured the presidency with the help of the Russians and uber nationalist Steve Bannon.

There is some evidence that people are getting sick and tired of all the lies, fake news and bad policies, although the white, working classes still seem to be going along with this, even farmers who are on the verge of going out of business thanks to Trump’s zany trade war.

The good news is that since the Democrats finally decided to take on an impeachment inquiry of Trump, that has taken over and dominated all the news channels for weeks, putting Trump back on his heels on the defensive saying and doing even more crazy things to get attention and turning even more people off.

When Congress comes back into session next week, this will continue on a daily basis. As the House Intelligence Committee winds down its investigation and issues a report and then turns it over to the House Judiciary Committee to develop articles of impeachment, the drip, drip, drip of evidence about high crimes and misdemeanors will continue to flow, inevitably resulting in a gradual erosion of support for Trump.

We will have to wait and see what happens in the Senate trial, but every day that information about Trump’s corruption floods the airwaves, more Republicans will begin to turn against this president, even elected officials who see their own political futures in jeopardy by standing by Trump.

If Trump is still standing to run for reelection in 2020 by way of an acquittal in the Senate, much will depend on who the Democrats pick to be their nominee next summer. It’s hard to imagine that Trump could win reelection after all the controversies of his first term. He will never get a majority of 51 percent of the national popular vote. But he still has one thing that the Democrats don’t seem to have: A celebrity who can make huge crowds in football stadiums stop watching the game to take selfies of themselves with Trump in the background in a skybox.

If you don’t think fame and celebrity matter in American politics, watch what happens in 2020. It’s a scary thought, but if these voters show up again and turn out to reelect Trump to a second term, we will still be out here in rural America trying to find fresh water and produce and finding a way to make it as climate change consumes the planet. If we had elected Al Gore in 2000 we would be living in an entirely different world now. We would already be on the road to making progress to saving the planet from the worst effects of global warming.

Instead, we spent the Bush years and now the Trump years going off the deep end of more oil and gas drilling and burning fossil fuels and not finding an alternative energy solution. President Obama tried, but he couldn’t get everyone on board reversing this trend.

I don’t know if we can ultimately save democracy or the human species on planet Earth or not at this point. It’s not looking good.

But at the very least, we can get out of the way of the worst of it and find some peace and quiet. The rest is up to “the people.”