[Dear Geese]

You were Tortuguita after Little Turtle, the Indigenous Miami leader, war chief, and teetotaler. You were also Three Geese in a Trenchcoat (shortened to Geese), which I find mentioned in what’s your gender forums. Everyone had monikers in the forest. The treehouses you all built were also named. It’s been said that The New Yorker among other media sources covered the forest with almost anthropological interest in the exotic, romantic tree sitters. Indeed, photographs of trees wrapped with string, and the nonidentified defenders, backs to the cameras, elicit whiffs of Zapatistaesque intrigue. The snow is bright today and the wind has stopped blowing. I played a little capoeira by myself in the house, made lunch for my son and me, and we watched Ilia Malinin perform his free skate at Worlds. Meanwhile, Gazans starve, die of preventable illnesses and wounds, are killed ad nausea. The Guardian today has a questionnaire about how climate change is affecting your relationships … Should I write in to say that I’m finding myself so distraught that I’m writing letters to the dead? The tactics you used in the forest remind me of those used in East Kentucky against the mining companies when strip mining first began destroying the mountains. I spent my twenties there, in the Appalachian Mountains, learning about what it means to be an activist. But really, I just want to write to you about my childhood—a childhood you, the step-son of an oil executive, might have wished to replicate as you aged. My childhood was a lot like your decision to take a year off after graduating college and live in the woods before med school. It was your decision, your older brother Daniel says, to be homeless and live there. Vienna Forest says she never felt so free. You are said to have commented that you’d never been so happy. I think about these utterances and I know I want this life again for me. A life that I am not currently living, even if it roughly approximates what my life was … This was the freedom my dad said he found when he spent a year on his bicycle. He always was encouraging me to get free, quit academia. I’ve quit numerous times, but now, when I want to be employed, I face the end of my career. It’s an opportunity, if I decide to see it this way, to do something radical. Yet, at 51, with a kid and a mom who needs care, what does freedom look like? A home in the woods without electricity? All those long walks up an unplowed, mile-long driveway in the deep snow? Cold wooden floorboards underfoot? Barrel drums painted black and filled with water freezing and exploding in the greenhouse? Ammonia leaking from the fridge? Four pigs in a wattle fence woven by hand? Were you one of the 100 Cute Little Ants who moved the barriers, painted them pink and opened up space for civilians to enter the forest? I am sore, chilled, tired. I’m wondering what the future holds, Geese. Not doing enough thinking about now. Soon,

                P.S. It’s a near full moon and the coy dogs are howling.