Our Times are Everywhere

5 July 2011, Boise

In early morning the first light stirs the birds and their various calls – lush, clattering, whistling, begging – wake me with the dream-sensation I'm somewhere in Brazil, in a dripping rain forest and not the high desert of Idaho. After a few thunderstorms to bring in the solstice, summer is finally here. We leave the windows open to the cool air until mid-morning when the sun flashes off the trees and makes you glad for their shade. In the afternoon it's best to be down by the river or in the hammock on the north side of the house, where you can see through the leaves to the hills in the sun losing their wild-flower mauves to that sandy beige that is the color of heat in this town. Stegner called the West a semi-desert with a desert heart. It's in summer here that that heart starts to beat robustly, pumping salt from your slick limbs and buzzing a dry heat in your ears if you're not lucky enough to be under trees or in water. You've got to do like the birds do around here: sing in the mornings and wait till sundown to dive after your dinner.

Do we Americans tend to be less satisfied with our stations in life than those of other societies? And are we Far-Westerners still less satisfied when it comes to where we live? How much of that insatiability is human nature – our evolved tendencies to roam, to chase the horizon – and how much of it is a product of our consumer culture? Humans are a restless, curious, imaginative bunch: dreamers of distant lands, greener meadows, better-protected mountain passes. And the constant advertising and materialism thrown at us only adds fuel to that fire. So it's sometimes hard to know what's a genuine urge of the spirit and what's a whim blown your way from an ad while you weren't paying attention.

Anna and I wonder a lot about this restlessness, especially because we're in a constant state of it. We're fairly happy here in Boise, what with a good house on the edge of the hills under the trees. We've good friends and a great active community of artists and parents and outdoorsy types around us. And vitally, Ada is happy here. There are all the parks and trails and kid friends in the neighborhood she could want. If we were having more success in our fields of writing and painting would we be more content? We might be a bit happier, or filled with a larger sense of purpose, but I doubt we'd feel more content. We might then merely want more. I don't mean a larger house or better car. Not that kind of stuff. But more of the success that acts as an inlet to relevance in the world – more relevance and more importance. I won't kid myself: I'm no genius who deserves to be canonized. I'd just like to be better involved in, and pertinent to, our times.

So how do we do that? Where are our times and when is the next direct flight there? Jump over to the Middle East and report directly from the Arab Spring? Get down to New Orleans to see the transformation of the city after Katrina? Hurry over to Montana to moniter the Exxon pipeline spill into the Yellowstone River? Sell everything and move to Berlin and join the amazing scene there? I envy journalists for their always being on the front edge of history, reporting from the first page of the next big story.

But our times are everywhere; our times are what we make of them, are the significance we create in the place we're living. It's not a question of moving geographically but conceptually within the moment of the age. When you get into step with a great idea or solution or movement of the day you're suddenly whisked ahead at the speed of the present, in touch with the horizons of the zeitgeist, and there's no need to go anywhere else but more deeply into where you are.