"Everybody's Getting Along, Mostly": On Being With Strangers
The vibe these days is contentious. There’s road rage and mass shootings and FoxNews and ICE raids and Elon’s Twitter and rap beefs and demented fandoms and protests and cops and capitalist Dems attacking Mamdani and a conflict-loving president and his aggressive sycophants (which I initially spelled sychopants, in perhaps the most Freudian typo ever). I know I’m putting a lot of different things into a single runaway sentence, but I’m trying to capture a vibe, not track moral distinctions.
Counter to the vibe, however, I’ve recently been in a bunch of peaceful situations with strangers, which seemed so not how we supposedly are these days that I had to give them some thought.
Last week, we hiked a couple of miles to spend the night at an AMC hut in New Hampshire’s White Mountains with a couple of friends and a bunch of strangers, maybe 35 people in total, from a seven-year-old with bug bites that woke her up screaming to a bunch of us in our 60s. We ate elbow to elbow and knee to knee at three long tables, obediently passing full plates down and empty plates back up. We shared two bathrooms, men’s and women’s, with two sinks and two stalls apiece. We slept in two co-ed bunk rooms with three tiers of bunks. We frolicked in the waterfalls and pools along the stream that ran by the hut. Most of us went to a great nature presentation by a softspoken geologist. Some of us played board games before bed. We chatted and were nice to each other and helped the seven-year-old when she struggled (not just the bug bites, but also fearing she had lost her parents among the waterfalls and pools, which fortunately she had not). Truly, it was 15 hours of harmonious haven.
Last weekend we went to see the Dropkick Murphys play a free record release party for their new album, For the People, at the Quincy Common. We stood on cement for three and a half hours in the glaring sun. It was hot, crowded, and loud. It was also a raucously good time, peacefully rowdy and rowdily peaceful. To be clear, this was no surprise. The Dropkick Murphys are a fast, loud Irish punk band, but they also have been fighting Nazis since 1996, do a killer singalong of the union staple “Which Side Are You On?”, and are known for stopping their show if anyone is offensive or violent, hurt or sick, or just needs help.
Their audiences take care of each other too. In our little corner, we made space for the guys in wheelchairs - and when one was ready to leave and completely hemmed in, I led him out of the crowd, which parted instantaneously as I called out “Wheelchair coming through.” We made sure everyone could see, especially the short women (of whom I was far from the shortest). We saved each other’s spaces when we went to get t-shirts1 and water. We brought water back for the others. And when one of the daughters of the traditional Boston Irish family in front of us to the left got into some kind of beef with the shortest woman, repeatedly screamed “fuck you” at her father as he tried to calm her down, pushed her father who responded by slapping her in the face, and eventually was walked away by her mother (followed by her father and sister), the rest of us all just backed up as far as we could, which was about one step, and gave them space to work it out. So I can’t say it was 100% harmonious, but on the whole it was pretty darn chill for a scorching Irish punk show, or, as Ken Casey put it from the stage, “Everyone is getting along, mostly!”
Then there is Walden Pond,2 which is where we go swimming. This summer, Main Beach is closed because they are rebuilding the bathhouse, which also means there are no lifeguards,3 which means even more anarchy than usual. Once you get away from Main Beach, Walden is always anarchy, with people setting up wherever they want around the perimeter of the pond, swimming wherever they want all over the pond, playing music as loud as they want whenever they want. But it’s considerate anarchy: people space themselves away from other people, don’t step on each other’s stuff, go somewhere else if they don’t like the music, smile at the antics of other people’s children.4 And now that anarchy has extended to the sliver of Main Beach which you can still get to by walking over from Red Cross Beach, which means it’s everywhere. And it’s the most peaceful, considerate anarchy you’ve ever encountered…or maybe that’s what true anarchy is.
So, what’s going on here? Is it just me, a force of peace, beaming tranquility wherever I go? Um, that would be a loud, aggressive, not-a-chance NO.
At the Zealand Hut, you could definitely say it was homogeneity of the nice, polite, well-off, woodsy white people, along with a lot of explicit guidelines and guardrails to keep us in line, a line we were all happy to follow.
At the Dropkick Murphys, you could say it was a diversity of Bostonians - all ages, all sort of visible class markers, not as universally white as you might expect, various genders5 - who share a sensibility and politics, which is its own kind of homogeneity. Plus, Ken and the band provide a strong model for kindness and mutuality.
At Walden Pond, though, you’ve got everything - Concord Brahmins, old Cambridge hippies, immigrants from every corner of Boston and just about every continent, tattooed youth of all kinds, paper novel readers, boombox afficionados, screaming children, people with beer in koozies, people in wafts of weed, and of course those solitude-seeking tourists - with, this summer at least, little in the way of authority, aside from the rangers who occasionally cruise the pond but generally look the other way. It’s hard to imagine we would keep the peace, and yet we do, because all we really want, every one of us (except maybe the tourists), is to get our feet in that sand, swim in that silken water, look up at that blue sky and those green trees, cool off, and relax.
So maybe we strangers are peaceful in all these places because we are there for the same reasons, shared purpose propelling harmony, as it so often does, even among people who might otherwise be disposed to contention.6 And maybe it’s important that escape, perhaps especially from contention, is central to that purpose, whether we are hiking, bouncing and scream-singing along, or doing our contemporary version of Thoreau. Maybe we can’t make the vibe go away, but if we are lucky we can get away from it, at least for a night, a song, or a pond.
Or maybe it’s just that we were all offline…
Because we still deserve nice things…
Today’s nice thing is my mom, because it is her birthday (I’m not saying which one, but it’s impressive). My mom is an unusual nice thing for this context, as the majority of you may very well deserve her but cannot have her. However, everyone deserves to emulate her, which would certainly be nice, for though she does not one bit like being old, she is doing an incredible job of it. Here are some of her strategies:
Always wear comfortable clothes, but make them cute (with the help of your shopping daughter, who is not me).
Make new friends and keep the old. Even though there is a lot of loss at my mom’s age, she has a way of making new friends - and staying in touch with all her friends, from the ones she met in college to the ones she met last year.
Read lots of books. Like me, my mom knows that there will always be more books to read, which is a solid support when you have no choice but to keep on keeping on.
Keep moving. For the last dozen or so years, my mom has been taking dance classes and performing in dance concerts, not to mention mostly biking or walking to dance class, as well as walking all over the place (except when it is icy, which is another good choice).
Fight the power. My mom has been a major local activist (like award-level) for over 40 years, and she always has a new project, most recently alternative emergency response (look it up, it’s very cool).
Hang with the youth. My mom has made a lot of younger friends from dancing, activism, and ESL tutoring. And of course she has her grandchildren, the apples of her eye and existence, who fortunately adore her too.
So, yeah, today’s nice thing for all but one of you is: be like my mom!
Today’s nice thing for the other one is: Happy Birthday, Mom!
We bought three.
Yes, that Walden Pond. It’s a lively beating heart of a place, not just a literary tourist pilgrimage, and to those who are disappointed not to find Thoreau’s solitude, I say life is for the living and come back in winter.
This decision seems horrifyingly irresponsible to me, as people swim all over the place at Walden Pond. Last summer I was at Main Beach when there was an emergency on the far side of the pond. Two lifeguards took off on paddleboards while a third grabbed a medical kit and ran around on the path. What if there is such an emergency this summer?
Don’t get me wrong: there’s the occasional kid throwing rocks where people are swimming and regular smallbore drama around the boat launch, but my god it could be so much worse and it’s not. Like Ken Casey says, “mostly.”
When I said, “you’re our girl - or whatever you are” to the Latinx Gen Z punk who knew every word of every song and with whom we guarded our little corner of humanity, they were profusely appreciative of the sentiment even as I was mortified by my infelicitous phrasing.
I think of the antifeminist evangelical Christian mom with whom I organized arts programs at the public elementary school our children attended in Ohio and my Massachusetts Trump-supporting colleagues during the first administration, who were as devoted to the work we did as I was - though I also wonder if today it would be so easy to put aside those differences.
Thanks for this! Yes it’s nice to find these moments of connection and peace in these contentious times.
Despite all the horrors in the world and there ARE horrors. And despite the rudeness and selfishness of many, [which by the way as a 311 operator for the City of New York I know a lot about. Stay tuned for the sequel to my first book “ Thank you for Calling 311” (still yet to be written): “Who ARE these people?” ], like Anne Frank, I believe “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."
But when I am thinking, who are these people that park in front of fire hydrants, block the driveways of people‘s homes, use a city street as if it were private property for an auto repair business. I remember how on any given NYC subway car there are people of different cultures and religions speaking different languages and we are all getting along. I don’t know any city more diverse than NYC. It’s one of the reasons despite being a challenging place to live, I call NYC my home. Maybe more so than in the Adirondacks, at Dropkick Murphys concert or at Walden Pond, the fact that NYC is mostly peaceful is quite remarkable. Like you said “Everyone is getting along, mostly.” Sometimes I think maybe the Middle East could learn something from New York City.
PS. I am impressed with your mother’s strategies. She is an inspiration. I aspire to do an incredible job growing old. I hope I succeed.
now if only this kind of community care extended to driving. Why are people at their worst while driving, when they are clearly at their best in so many other difficult situations? (I mean, I think I know, but--sigh--it still gets me every time.)
Also, happy birthday to your mom!!!