Excerpt from Surrender by Joanna Pocock
In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in response to the increasingly urgent climate crisis.ï»ż
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We all hit the middle of our lives at some point. When my sister Mary turned twenty-six did she have any idea she would be dead at fifty-two? Not a clue. What we call our mid-life crisis often doesnât hit at the mid-point of our lives unless we live into our eighties, nineties and beyond â which many of us wonât. A better term for âmid-life crisisâ is the less grandiose-sounding but perhaps more accurate ennui. By a certain age, we simply get bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be: the commute to work on a packed train, the rush to get a child ready for school, the smell of car fumes as we sit in traffic, the dog whining for its walk. We tire of our living spaces and how the light hits a certain wall each afternoon. We sicken at the sight of the same smudge of sky from our beds, the piles of laughing gas canisters in the gutter, the seemingly endless whoosh of greasy Styrofoam fried chicken containers blowing down the pavement after the pubs close. And the pubs â even they seem threadbare and dull or loud and violent. We begin to realize that we have more past than future â the known is eclipsing the unknown. We panic and plan our escape, whether that be via psychedelic drugs, taking up a religion, or ditching the one we have, quitting our jobs, taking up a fresh partner, joining a polyamorous community â all in the belief we are heading towards that magical thing: freedom. Whatever form it takes, mid-life often arrives in a package with a bright red âself-destructâ button attached.
The mid-life crisis package I was handed came in a box marked with one simple word: Montana. Over the years my husband Jason and I had spent time in New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, California, Colorado and Wyoming, either travelling or working on various writing and film projects. Now we were approaching fifty and it was time to leave our small patch of east London. The American West was calling us.
We developed an eccentric but effective process of elimination for finding exactly where in the West we might go. This was partly based on after-school activities for our daughter who was six when the planning began. Who knew that the only club she would be able to join in Alpine, Texas was cheerleading? Through a combination of coincidences and research we settled on the alliterative Missoula, Montana, and cajoled our daughter Eve into thinking this would be a Great Adventure. We packed up our house, filled one suitcase each and left London. I had the idea that we could pare away the superfluities of life, only allowing ourselves the necessities, or what Henry David Thoreau called the ânecessariesâ, the things that over time become âso important to human life that few, if any . . . attempt to do withoutâ.
For Eve, this consisted largely of soft toys. The main player in her menagerie was a large rabbit called Lulu, with a strawberry-scented heart. Luluâs accessories filled half a suitcase. I intervened at times over Eveâs choice of clothing. She had never experienced a North American winter, so I surreptitiously stuffed jumpers and warm socks among her swimming costumes and sundresses.
I found the process of deciding what I needed and what I thought I needed to be the first step in liberating myself from the known. I started with my books: Isabella Birdâs A Ladyâs Life in the Rocky Mountains, Annie Dillardâs The Writing Life, Ralph Waldo Emersonâs Nature, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City by John Tallmadge, The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner and the Moon Guidebook to Montana, which was a last minute gift from a friend.
Jasonâs packing was quick: his camera, the novels he was reading and very few clothes. To Thoreau the ânecessariesâ consisted of food and fuel. Clothing and shelter were only âhalf unnecessaryâ. Among the few implements he had with him at Walden Pond were a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, lamps, stationery and âaccess to a few booksâ.
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We landed in Seattle and spent our first night at the Kings Inn, the last downtown motel in a rapidly gentrifying, or some would say, long gentrified city. We hired a car and drove east the next morning to begin our new life. My vision of Washington state as a lush ambassador of the Pacific Northwest with thick, impenetrable rainforests was challenged as we crested the Cascade Mountain Range. For hours our car windows transmitted a sandy blur of desert and sagebrush, which was replaced by deep green forests and rocky buttes as we hit the Idaho panhandle and then it thinned out again as we edged into western Montana.
It was on a sweltering July day that we took the exit ramp off Interstate 90 down into Missoula, a university town of around 65,000 people. The layout from above was puzzling. It looked as though a giant hand had tossed a bunch of buildings into the air, leaving them where they landed. Missoula now sat in the dried bed of an ancient glacial lake â its name means âplace of the frozen waterâ in the Salish language. I had imagined Missoula to be a pretty town with its ring of mountains and its snaking river, but as we approached, the reality was far from the idyll I had conjured.
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Surrender is available in the United States on April 7, 2020.
