“I know, it’s nuts up there.” Claudia Heath agreeing with Michele that the Tahoe area is crowded.
Michele and I are at the Heath family cabin in Squaw Valley – soon to be “the place formally known as Squaw Valley”, I guess – and it is packed. The whole Tahoe basin is packed; like Strasberg in July packed. The Truckee River is stuffed with shore to shore groups of rafts and it makes me wonder how virus safe it is. Sure, they are outside and the clusters of people are probably pods of people that probably already know each other and already feel safe together but California had 4,380 new Covid-19 cases yesterday with 35 deaths and this can’t be helping.
We decide our best bet in taking a lonely walk is at the Donner Camp Picnic Area by Alder Creek.
I have been here before and going back during this time of Black Lives Matter protests reminded me of a post I wrote six years ago. I’ve reposted it here with some minor changes:
As I left Truckee, I passed by Alder Creek, one of the two sites where the Donner Party was stuck over the winter of 1846-47. Tamzene Donner and her husband, George, died here as well as George’s brother, Jacob, and his wife, Elizabeth. Still, all five of Tamzene and George’s children lived as did three of Jacob and Elizabeth’s seven kids. In addition, there was one single woman who lived. But, out of the seven single men who were with the party as teamsters and animal handlers, only two lived.
Two of the children who lived were only three years old. The five teamsters who died ranged in age from 23 to 30, the two who lived were both 16. The only person over 16, who lived, was Dorothea Wolfinger, the single women (who had been widowed on the trail). Clearly, this was not survival of the fittest. Rather, this was a case of the fittest sacrificing for the least fit. If it had been any other way, the survivors would have been considered beasts. But I don’t think that is the reason they saved the children, I think that they considered themselves as part of a large family. Family might not be the right word; maybe Community would be better.
Going into nearby Sierra Valley, it struck me that this was a community also.
It is a community that is spread out, but – in my imagination, at least – a community that would not let its three-year old children starve to death.
As I drove through the Sierra Valley, passing ranches, separated by miles of seemingly nothingness, I kept mulling over the idea of Community and how it affects its member’s actions. When Romney was running for president, he seemed particularly hard-hearted and out of touch, but people who knew him thought that he was generous to a fault. However, his generosity was to people that he knew or were in the same church, in other words, in his Community. When I think back on the Conservatives I know and have known, they are all generous. Indeed, they are often more generous than many of the Liberals I know but, they are only generous to members of what they consider to be their community. Liberals, the Progressive wing at least, tend to consider their Community the entirety of Humankind making it more diverse and larger than Conservatives so that their Community includes homeless Guatemalan children trying to get back to their parents as well as Palestinians fighting the Israeli takeover of their land (although Progressives are not so diverse that they would want to give money to the Westboro Baptist Church).
I entered Sierra Valley from Truckee, going through Sierraville and as I left it at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a train loaded with Armored Cars. They fascinated me, they seemed so out-of-place and, in a very strange way, so lovingly conceived. They were brutal with exquisite detailing, the kind of that can only happen when something is built with, close to, an unlimited budget.
It also struck me that anybody inside that armored car – looking out through the bulletproof windows – was completely separated from whomever was outside. They are in a different community. Soldiers, riding in those behemoths, in Iraq or Afghanistan, are saying “We are not you, we are separate, and we can do anything we want”. Cops riding in those mobile forts on city streets are saying the same thing, not only to the citizens outside, but to themselves and so do cops behind face shields encased in helmets and bulletproof vests.
One reason the police are so militarized, it turns out, is that the Armored Cars, M16 assault rifles, bulletproof vests, Kevlar helmets, et al, were pretty much free through a Department of Homeland Security program to fund military equipment to police departments after 9/11 – so they are hard to turn down. But, again, they are actually bad for everybody concerned. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; this equipment gets used. The police, looking through the windows of an armored car or military grade visor under a Kevlar helmet, are no longer part of the community, they have become an occupying army. They say things like “Bring it, you fucking animals!“
That’s the problem, the militarization of the police is not good for anybody except the people actually selling the military equipment. Armored Cars don’t help deter crime, they don’t help catch criminals, Armored Cars don’t help with crowd control, they don’t even help in riot control (although, I guess, one could argue that they would help in a mass zombie attack).
