Seeing a Temporary Fix In Hillary

The best summers of my childhood were spent on the west side of Cook Inlet at my family’s fish site. It’s quite possible they were my favorite of my entire life. We would do a food shop for 10 weeks, pack boxes of books and batteries, rain gear and bug dope, work gloves and the La Choy double decker cans for special exotic meals when we weren’t eating what we caught. At one point my little sister asked if we could just have one day without razor clams at a meal. What? My parents figured out we were on day 11 straight. I hadn’t noticed.

My mom kept a record of how many brown bears we would see each day. They were attracted to camp smells so we slept in a different shed than we cooked in. The plywood walls were marked “Property of Columbia Wards Cannery”, and so were our fish after we loaded them on the scow for the Chisik Island tender to pick up after midnight.

Like many times in my life I tend to remember the remarkable and not what it was to come down with appendicitis that far from the road system. Spoiler alert: I made it out on a floatplane for surgery in Soldotna.

In front of our hill-perched camp was one of the most prolific razor clam beaches. You could fill up a 5-gallon bucket in half an hour. Not only were the bears, a walrus and our family digging them, but people would fly in from civilization at low tide and land on the sandbar, hopping out with shovels and buckets. Leaving with big smiles and chowder realities.

One day a plane landed with a sputter and snort. The pilot didn’t have buckets or a shovel. He looked concerned. We were listening to the radio and cleaning nets on the beach. Something wasn’t quite right on his plane. He had the hood popped — OK, it’s not called a hood, but you know what I mean. He wiggled a few things and I looked at the tide coming in. He pulled out a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. He chewed the gum and folded the foil wrapper. Then he reached into where I couldn’t see and placed the foil in carefully.

“Did you fix it?!” I asked him.

“No, little girl. I didn’t fix it. I just got it good enough to get off this beach before the tide comes in. Now I can get to a place where I can really fix it.”

Those were his choices. Have his plane succumb to the tide or get things good enough to keep flying to a later destination of repair.

I’ve thought about the chewing gum airplane repairman a lot this week.

The way I see it, our country has a similar choice. Donald Trump is a tide of narcissism and guano-crazy we aren’t going to fly out of. I don’t even want to try to tread in that slurry for four years. The Republican Party has morphed into a political party unrecognizable to anyone who lived through the Reagan years. It’s a good indicator the country could go the same way as the party — a reactionary and dangerous mob looking for the next group of people to belittle and hate.

Hillary Clinton, to many progressives, isn’t a fix for the issues they hold dear. For those who think she’s a shiny new spark-plug and all you hoped for, I’m happy for you. Please realize many feel voting for her is the Juicy Fruit choice. She can either get us flying long enough to get to the next election and work for those beliefs, or get swamped by the incoming tide.

We’re all on the same plane and don’t want to sink, so let people have the time to get to that choice. It’s pretty tough to do when processing DNC activities that feel like sabotage. What most Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters realize is it’s more than the man — it’s the movement, and we have to get off the beach.

I think of my nephews and niece who have only lived under a black president. Obama’s election was historic. It didn’t fix race relations in this country, just as electing a woman as president isn’t going to eliminate misogyny and sexism. Those are societal traits that really have to die off. A generation of Americans raised with Obama, then a woman president? Well, maybe there’s hope we arrive at income equality and racial justice at some point. Sadly, we aren’t there yet, but it should be the destination.

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