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What we choose to carry: Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit and the Monarchs
Oct 9
10 min read
It’s been a while since our last dispatch. We have a few excuses, which isn’t the best way to start a neglected book blog, but let’s just say some of the past 18 months kinda sucked.
Not entirely. Heather worked incredibly hard, night and day, to bring two new Quiet Shelters homes to life, and they’re both extraordinary. Her ability to see what a place could become still amazes me. We also recently adopted a new pup, Lincoln, who has brought a great deal of joy and chaos into our lives, and a not insignificant number of rocks and sticks into our living room.
But there has also been serious illness in both of our families. The kinds of illnesses that consume whatever emotional bandwidth you thought you possessed and distract from all the other ordinary concerns of life. And, in the middle of all of this, we lost our dog, Vivian.
In an earlier book review, I jokingly called Edward Abbey the patron saint of our library. That’s probably wrong. Or at least incomplete. There are a number of patron saints around here, literary and otherwise. But Viv will always be the undisputed patron dog. That’s a little silly to write, but she truly was the animating force behind an astonishing amount of what we did. It’s fitting that she is next to the Christopher Alexander quote on the About page. Text can’t fully capture Viv’s qualities. She was quiet, stubborn, extremely sensitive, curious and independent, always motivated by good meals, new trails and unfamiliar dirt roads, but equally welcoming of rest, comfort, familiarity and routine. Viv liked going somewhere, and she liked coming home.
Her absence has made me realize how much a home is built from so many nearly invisible daily repetitions. Her asleep in that particular spot, her nails clicking across the hardwood at that particular pace, where she would wait by the fence for me to get home from work. It’ll be hard to forget how she would sit by the unlit wood-burning stove on a cold morning and fix her eyes on me, telepathically muttering, “You still don’t understand winter, dummy?” None of these things seemed especially memorable as they happened. Then one day, only memory was left.
A few months back, we brought Lincoln home. How he would measure up to Viv was, unfairly for him, a serious question for me. Heather says she thinks Viv sent him to us because he arrived equipped with several qualities she either lacked or, more likely, considered beneath her. He cuddles. He comes when called. He is deeply interested in whatever we are doing. Vivian loved us but maintained the perfectly reasonable and respectable position that humans and dogs should occasionally have separate interests.
Lincoln believes every decision and step, no matter where it takes us, should be a collaborative project.
He is considerably more work. Viv entered our lives with a general understanding of how everything worked and an uncanny ability to filter for what mattered. Lincoln has an idea of how things work, but he insists on interrogating every premise and investigating every object, no matter how insignificant, and preferably with his mouth. In other words, I suppose, he’s a puppy. But he has been a tremendous addition to the family and, importantly, he’s not Viv. I resisted that initially. Now, I’m grateful.
Maybe this was all in my head last week, when I was driving to work and heard an Iron & Wine song I used to listen to a lot, “Naked as We Came.” That particular genre of indie folk, quiet, introspective, lo-fi, was everywhere twenty years ago, and I liked it. Still do. I’ve heard that particular song countless times. I’ve definitely played it badly on a guitar. I can tap the steering wheel in rhythm. I have sung along for years without paying much attention to what I was singing. Then, for some reason last week, I heard it differently.
That happens to me occasionally with music. Familiarity puts some kind of coating over a song, and then one day something wears through, and suddenly I realize the plain meaning. “Naked as We Came” says something almost embarrassingly simple about love and mortality. We arrive here with nothing, find one another, share whatever portion of life we are given, and eventually one of us leaves the other behind. Nothing revolutionary there. Artists, philosophers, et al., have been inspired by this for a few millennia. I don’t know. Profound truths become clichés because you can't avoid them. Maybe much of being alive consists of discovering or experiencing the same few things over and over.
We are told versions of the same advice constantly. Life is short. Be present. Spend time with friends and family, the people you love. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Nobody on his deathbed wishes he had worked more. We repeat these things so often they become nearly useless. They decorate mugs, walls, social media posts. Sure, I believe most of them. I suspect most people do.
And then we live real life. We worry about money. Get annoyed by an email or marketing call. We replay some stupid conversation from earlier in the day. Stare at our phones. We hurry through one thing to get to the next, then hurry through that too. I’m not sure this makes us hypocrites. I think it just makes us human. But something fascinating lies in the gap between what we claim matters and what actually receives our attention.
Annie Dillard noticed that gap in her essay “An Expedition to the Pole,” from Teaching a Stone to Talk. It’s a strange essay, which is part of why I love it. Dillard moves back and forth between accounts of polar exploration and observations from the church she attends. The explorers head toward one of the great unknowns, danger, mystery, death, perhaps the sublime, and insist on carrying ridiculous quantities of the civilization they supposedly left behind. Fine clothes, elaborate provisions, all the ordinary furnishings of respectable life dragged toward one of the least hospitable places on earth. They are heading toward the Absolute while dragging the furniture.
Then Dillard looks around at her fellow churchgoers during a service. Here are people who claim, at least nominally, to be there to approach God, eternity, judgment, salvation, the mystery at the center of existence. Whatever your theology, these are massive things to be contemplating and grasping after. One might reasonably expect the congregation to show a little awe, solemnity, or fear. Instead, somebody just sings badly and merrily about being at the mercy of an all-powerful being. Someone else claps off-beat to the tune. Something, maybe important, is forgotten, and shoulders are shrugged. People lose their place, start thinking about what happens after the service. Everyone seems remarkably uninterested.
Dillard finds this very funny. But she also seems kind of appalled. And her question is hard to avoid, everything is at stake, and this is how we act? Why are we carrying all this crap? Why are we approaching the absolute so casually?
I would argue that these questions apply whether or not you share Dillard’s worldview. Most of us claim that something is at stake. Our families matter. Friendship matters. Love matters. Places matter. Time matters. We tell ourselves that our days are finite and precious. Some people see this brief life in relation to eternity; others believe its very brevity gives it significance. Either way, you might expect us to be a little more careful about what we load onto the sled.
Instead, we carry grievances. We carry anxieties about money that often bear little relation to our actual financial circumstances. We carry imaginary arguments, old embarrassments, professional ambitions that seemed extremely important at one point and have become impossible to explain five years later. We carry the opinions of strangers who, before social media, could never have reached us.
I’m definitely not excluding myself. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of my finite life thinking about the crap I’m dragging towards the absolute. And there are only so many mornings, only so many dinners with people we love, only so many times the dog will appear when we pick up the leash. We know this. “Naked as We Came” knows it. Dillard knows it. Everybody knows it. So why does knowing it change so little?
Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows, which I recently finished, makes that question even more interesting because she reminds us that our experience of time itself has a history. The book follows Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century photographer who experimented with panoramic and sequential photography and helped give birth to motion-picture technology. His story is pretty wild, and it’s told very well. But what was fascinating in the book was the story happening around Muybridge, the larger transformation of the late nineteenth century. Musings on photography, railroads, industrialization, speed, the compression of distance, and the changing experience of time itself are on every page of this book, and they are as thought-provoking as anything I’ve read in a while.
It’s hard to imagine how radical some of this was because we simply inherited it. Time had to be standardized so trains could run on schedules. Photography could stop fractions of a second that the human eye experienced only as continuous movement. Industrial work increasingly divided hours into measurable and analyzable units. Distances shrank as travel accelerated. Increasingly, time became something that could be measured, synchronized, and divided more precisely. And, we were told, it was now saved.
But was it? It seems like we’re still trying to save it. Everything around us promises to do so. Faster transportation. Instant communication. Online shopping. Productivity apps. Artificial intelligence. We have become extraordinarily good at shaving minutes from ordinary tasks. But I’m not sure we feel rich in time. We speak constantly of being busy. We schedule ourselves into pieces. Our phones tell us where to be, remind us what we forgot, preserve photographs of places we barely remember visiting, and provide an infinite supply of distractions for the next five minutes. There’s a strange irony here. The more successfully we learned to measure and manage time, the more conscious we became of wasting it.
Muybridge could stop movement, or at least make an image that looked as though he had. The phone in my pocket can preserve more moments in an afternoon than a nineteenth-century photographer might have made in a lifetime. I have thousands of photographs, dogs, dinners, sunsets, vacations, people standing in front of things, beside things, on top of things. If I scroll through them right now, I’ll likely see photographic proof of afternoons I barely remember. I guess the phone paid more attention than I did.
An image isn't the same as the moment. Recording something is not the same as noticing it. And perhaps that is where Solnit’s history and Dillard’s explorers meet for me. We have developed astonishing ways of measuring, preserving, scheduling, and saving time, but none of them tells us what deserves to be carried through it.
I don’t think the answer is to abandon ordinary life and spend the rest of our lives watching sunsets with our loved ones. Besides being impractical, I suspect our loved ones would ask us to find a hobby after about a week. Work matters. Money matters. Emails do occasionally require a response. We have errands to run, bills to pay, houses to repair, and obligations to keep. Much of a good life comes from these ordinary responsibilities.
But the questions we ask might have interesting answers. Are we carrying anything we no longer need? Have we mistaken something as important simply because it’s urgent, profitable, or difficult to ignore? Are we failing to carry something because we might have to slow down enough to notice it?
I think these questions overlap nicely with Vann R. Newkirk II's “The Return of the Monarch” in the September issue of The Atlantic. The monarch story is not, despite the title, an uncomplicated recovery story. Their numbers collapsed over the past few decades as milkweed disappeared, forests were cut, habitat was developed, and climate change made an already improbable migration more difficult. The average size of the Mexican winter colonies remains dramatically below where it stood in the mid-1990s. Plenty of reasons remain to worry.
But there are also signs of something better. The 2025-26's overwintering population in Mexico increased substantially from the previous year, and the generation leaving Mexico was the largest in several years. Nobody sensible is declaring victory. The whole thing remains precarious.
What struck me, though, was how much of the story focused on people deciding the monarchs were worth their time. Researchers follow their migration. Communities and conservationists replant forests in Mexico. Governments protect wintering grounds. Everyday people plant milkweed in yards and schools across the United States. Individuals spend hours tagging butterflies that weigh less than a paperclip, knowing they may never learn what became of them.
The butterflies themselves perform an almost absurd journey. One monarch Newkirk followed, Cinderella, traveled from the Great Lakes to the mountains of Mexico, then began heading north again. By the time her tracker last detected her in Arkansas, she had likely flown more than 3,000 miles during her short life, leaving eggs along the way, some tiny fraction of which may survive to continue a migration no individual monarch ever completes by itself.
The threats haven't gone away just because people planted some milkweed. The recovery may reverse. Most monarchs actually don’t survive the journey. Storms, heat, birds, windshields, pesticides, and a thousand other hazards stand between them and wherever they are trying to go.
But some make it. And enough people have decided that making it matters, and that spending portions of their own finite lives trying to improve the odds is worth it. I find something wonderfully hopeful in that. Not because it teaches us how to spend our time. I will always be suspicious of essays that try to turn seemingly unconnected experiences into useful habits for living a more meaningful life.
But it does offer an example. Dillard’s explorers drag furniture toward the Pole. The monarch people carry milkweed. Maybe that distinction is too cute, but we all carry something. Some of it was given to us. Some of it we chose long ago and have forgotten why. Some of it matters enormously. Some of it probably should have been abandoned.
Perhaps part of living is learning the difference.
That may also be one of the quieter ambitions behind Quiet Shelters. Not to provide some grand spiritual correction to modern life. Most days we’re just trying to keep the smart locks working and the toilet paper stocked. But maybe we can make a space where people can put some things down for a few days. Read a book somebody loved. Walk somewhere without trying to improve your pace. Look at the landscape out the window. Make dinner. Fix a drink. Listen to a familiar song closely enough that you finally hear it.
I don’t know of a neat conclusion beyond that. We came naked. We leave carrying none of it. Somewhere between those two facts we accumulate an astonishing amount of baggage. Much of it is necessary, some of it precious. Some of it is certainly ridiculous. I guess the question is what we choose to carry.
Take care of each other. Keep reading.
Cheers to you all.
Dave
Quiet Shelters is a boutique collection of vacation rentals in Kanab, Utah: four lodgings, each on two acres or more, between Zion, Bryce Canyon and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. This journal is where we write about the land around them and the things we care about.