Resilience: Lessons Learned from Lichens

Preparing for storms and danger, April 7, 2024

All day Wednesday, before the Northeaster hit, I watched the birds prepare for the storm.  Bluebirds, bright yellow finches, juncos, tufted titmice, cardinals, hairy woodpeckers flew down from the spruce like feathered missiles and landed on the bird feeders. Greedily they dug sunflower seeds from inside the wire mesh and insects from the suet, flew off to stash their bounty in the cricks of trees, then quickly returned for more.  Endowed with the capacity to read falls in barometric pressure, they knew this one would be bad.  And they were right. 

It’s 9:06 on Thursday morning.  The storm hit Maine overnight, gifting us here with over a foot of heavy wet snow and winds gusting to 40 mph.  One of the good things about being old is that I can no longer hear the wind screeching through the forest that surrounds us here at the end of our long dirt road.  Nothing scares me more and makes me want to suck my thumb and hold onto the silk edge of a pink binky than snarling wind that transforms the giant hemlocks and white pines into frenzied acrobats whose severed arms could, at any moment, descend on us from the angry sky and crash through the window.     

 “We still have power and internet!” I text my daughter whose house is just down the road from ours.  Seconds later, a loud sigh fills the room as the heat pumps exhale their last breath and shut down.  “You jinxed it,” she texts back.  By that evening over 330,000 households in Maine will go to sleep not knowing when the power or internet will be turned back on.  By Saturday morning, 170,000 of those households, called customers on CMP’s website, will still be powerless.  We will be one of those households. 

Fortunately, we have a generator we activate with the turn of a key and the push of a button that not only heats our whole house but makes the induction stove work and hot water fill the bath.  Unfortunately, it is nasty gasoline which powers that generator.  We have plenty of that smelly fossil fuel sitting in red plastic gas cans in the garage, left over from the last storm that knocked the power out two weeks ago.  We are lucky to have the resources to purchase and operate this generator.  I have no idea what the numbers are, but I would doubt that the majority of those 330,000 without power are as fortunate as we. 

Now is a time of storms and dangers.  At no other time in recorded history have conditions been what they are lining up to be in the months ahead.  “Barring surprising changes, Americans should prepare for a potentially expensive, damaging — and life-threatening — Atlantic hurricane season,” reads a piece in Axios about the dire predictions of weathermen and climate scientists for hurricane season this coming summer and fall.

Resilience. 

Even before this storm, the word resilience was tumbling in the forefront of my mind.  On Monday, I attended a monthly Zoom meeting hosted by A Climate to Thrive, ACTT, the wonderfully inimitable climate action organization on Mount Desert Island.  The topic of that meeting was…resilience. “What does resilience mean to you?”, asks Angie Flores, a College of the Atlantic student and former ACTT intern, who is doing research on the topic of community resilience and leading this discussion.  What kinds of resilience will we need to develop for the climate crises that face us now and will only worsen in the future? 

The dictionary defines resilience as the ability to recover quickly or to bounce back.  The thesaurus gives us these words: hardiness, mettle, persistence, stoicism, backbone, pluckiness, will, doggedness. As a therapist trained in the Western ideals of self-determination and autonomy, I thought of resilience as an individual’s capacity to adapt to difficult or challenging life experiences through mental, emotional, and behavioral coping strategies. 

“Close your eyes”, the workshop leader tells the climate activists sitting at home before our computers, “imagine you are a member of the lichen family.” Lichens are a composite, a partnership of a fungus and an algae which exist in a mutualistic relationship because, she tells us, together they have the ability to deal with ecological conditions that neither part would be able to handle on its own!  I chuckle to myself as I close my eyes and without much luck try to imagine myself as a lichen on a rock, one of the thousands of lichen neighbors synthesizing sunlight and water just outside my window. 

Mutualistic relationships!  Until that very hour, I had thought of climate resilience in terms of infrastructure: how do we keep the roads from flooding, the coastline from eroding, the power on? What about the word care she asked us? What about communities of care? 

In the town where I grew up, modest two-story brick and shingled homes we called bungalows, all built in the 1920’s and 30’s, sit snugly nestled side by side like glum relatives.  A concrete sidewalk is all that connected us. The Pitellis, the Casos, the O’Briens, I know their names, but my family never shares a meal with our neighbors or loans them a ladder or stops to inquire about how they are doing.  We “keep to ourselves” and “mind our own business”, values that were important to my mother who extolled independence as the highest form of personal development and civic life.  Everyone in my neighborhood is first- or second-generation immigrants from Ireland or Italy or Germany; many have, like my own parents, moved to the suburbs from ethnic enclaves in Brooklyn.

How many times have these families had to say goodbye before they landed on the South Shore of Long Island, halfway between New York City on the west and Montauk Point on the East?  First, they said goodbye to homelands, many for reasons of religious persecution that some have called genocide.  Left behind in those homelands were grandparents, farms that smelled of dirt, their dirt, ancient rituals for spring and winter, connections to birds and plants and trees and weather, language, family stories.  All lost.  Once here they were desperate to become “white” which meant not being Irish or Italian, which meant cutting off from their past.

Imagine the enormous amount of loss in the hearts of these families, then imagine the emotional hardening, the deadening, the turning away from all those connections necessary for one to become an American?  Reaction formation is the term my profession uses for this: devalue what is lost and overvalue its opposite! 

Autonomy, independence, self-sufficiency, separation: it was in the air I breathed, the food I ate, the land I lived on and from the very beginning it was the organizing principle of my mental life.  And now, here I am at the end of my life, trying to become a lichen. 

My son-in-law has already performed well appreciated lichen tasks by taking his chainsaw to downed trees and limbs which would otherwise have made the road impassable.  There is one tree resting on the power line which we must drive under to reach the road into town.  I hold my breath as I drive under it.  I’ve checked in with my daughter to see if her family needs anything and she has done the same with us. 

It is as a lichen that I head uptown on Friday morning. As always, all of Maine street around the LLBean campus has power. I am worried about the thousands of people in town who don’t have power and don’t have generators to pump their water or keep them warm.  I stop at Town Hall to see if it is open as a warming center but at 10:30 the door is locked and there is no sign on it instructing anyone about what to do if they need any help.  I drive to the library and a sign on the door says it will open at noon.  But when I go back at noon, no one will be there and no sign on the door will tell us when it will open.  The lichen spirit in me resolves to bring this question of establishing community resilience through caring networks of neighbors to Town Council members and the new Town Manager and the Regeneration Workshop I wrote about last week.  I’ll ask them all to close their eyes and pretend to be lichens! Then together we can scheme new webs of mutuality.

The town’s two coffee shops are the only public spaces open with both heat and internet. Inside The Met almost every table and overstuffed couch and chair are occupied.  There is an unusual silence in the room as people stare at their laptops while frantically typing, trying to get their work done and get home before the fire in their wood stoves go out or a family left behind needs help.  There are empty chairs at a table, and I ask the woman who occupies it if I can share the table with her.  She nods her head and says it’s fine.  She’s in her early sixties with long blonde hair going white and she isn’t smiling, and her eyes look worried, and her hands shake.  She types on her computer at warp speed. 

“Are you okay?” I ask her, breaking the silence between us after five or ten minutes.  I feel not like a lichen but like a finely tuned violin reverberating to the cacophony of distress her body is emitting.  “I don’t mean to be intrusive, but you seem upset, and this is a hard time and I just thought I’d check on you”, I add.  Her face softens, I think she might cry.  She thanks me for my concern and acknowledges the fact that this is a hard time for her.  She’s spent a lot of money wiring her whole house with batteries to store power from her solar panels, but those batteries ran out of power within hours.  

Shortly, a tall man with a ready smile comes into the shop and wanders through looking for a seat.  I’ve met J. before at the Farmers Market when he came last year to tell us about the SNAP food program his organization represents.  I invite him to sit with us as there is still an empty chair at our table.  We introduce ourselves, exchange storm stories.  He doesn’t have a generator because he hates the idea of burning all that gasoline. I tell the woman who it turns out does some environmental activism about Third Act, invite her to attend our next stand-out in front of Beans.  She brightens at the idea.  We exchange emails.  She’s Irish too.  Her email to me says, “Happy to meet a fellow Irish woman.” 

It is so much more fun being a lichen than a self-sufficient, independent human.  Is it okay to call this moment of lichenism, of mutuality in the face of all this worry and destruction, fun?  Is that the right word?  Maybe meaningful is the right word, or joyful.  No matter.  This time of Code Red has brought me so many gifts, so many new ways to see the world and my place in it and I am grateful for those seeds now cached inside my brain, changing the very way I see the world.

The power is back on this morning at our house, but 806 households in town are still without it. The work of cleaning up from the storm which took down thousands of trees will take weeks, but the work of connecting to each other for mutual aid will, I hope, never end.