Do I have a value for independence?

Look, I hate to make this a trilogy, but I gotta build on the last two: Freedom and Choice of Own Goals. We have established that I value Freedom (the environment) and Agency (the action). But when I pull this card—Independence—I find myself pausing.

I guess my question is: What the heck is independence good for? What is it used for? You can’t live in it. In fact, it feels like a myth to me.

Are you a mountain man? Are you a recluse living in a cave-hovel? Are you a holy woman living out her days in a hermitage tucked away in a corner of obscurity? Who among us can even comprehend true independence, anyway?

I read once about a family in deepest Russia who’d had a belly full of society and moved, right and properly, out to the woods. They were called the Lykov family. They are my best guess as to how “True Independence” works. They fled into the Siberian wilderness to practice their religious beliefs without interference. They achieved near total independence.

And the result? They essentially starved to death. The mother died of starvation to save the children. The sons died of illness because they had no medicine. The lone survivor, Agafia, eventually had to accept help from geologists and the very world they tried to escape just to stay alive. Independence cost the Lykov family everything.

I pause to think of Independence Day. The day we celebrate independence from Britain. We claimed to be self-sufficient, self-reliant as a young nation. We’d had enough of being taxed without representation, so we declared independence.

But in that independence, did we not discover newer and higher levels of interdependence? Wasn’t the issue ultimately not King George in particular, but our devastating voicelessness in the relationship? Perhaps this is an oversimplification. But think as I may, I cannot find a way for Independence to be a virtuous value in the face of so much loneliness and isolation in the world.

This may be among the most objectionable cards in the deck for me. Because I see the people who value their independence above all else, and it always seems to come at a great cost to themselves and others. It always seems to come from a place of fear. And it is difficult for me to square that up with my chief value—a value not even found in this deck: Kindness.

My own foray into independence, thankfully, lasted a very short time, and I was not really that independent.

When I was seventeen I moved out of my parents home, off the farm where I’d grown up. It was time, it was decided, for me to be a man, and to grow strong and independent. It was time for me to stretch my wings and, hopefully, time for me to fly away.

I slept in my car. I slept at friends houses. I moved in with the son of a childhood babysitter.

Three of us lived in the house and we all worked on a grass seed farm. One guy was the farm foreman. He oversaw the whole operation, and he was strong and independent. He didn’t date the entire time I lived there. He ate steak every single night. He was kind and friendly enough, but he was distant and distracted and did not show an interest in me, personally. That was an example of independence to me. Steak and silence.

The other guy who lived with us was a whole ‘nother level. He and his dog split the year into quarters. For one season he fished commercially in Alaska. Another season he spent farming grass seed in the Willamette Valley. He spent a third season commercially fishing in the gulf of Mexico, and the fourth season he laid on the beach and engaged in all manner of debauchery and spent the totality if his erstwhile earnings.

He was mean. He was cruel to women, and ugly in his words. He was as much an island as any person I’ve ever known. He drove his pickup truck from Alaska to to Louisiana and back every year, stopping off in Oregon. But his dog was with him at all times. The dog sat on the beach and drank beer with him for three months every year. The dog rode around in farm implements with him. The dog had it’s sea legs, it knew how to behave on a fishing boat. The dog slept with him, and went into the bathroom with him. I’m not joking. Even he wasn’t independent when it came to the dog.

I, for my part, tried my hand at independence as well. With roommates like these it was relatively easy to get my hands on as much cheap, garbage-beer as I could drink, and so that became the staple of my diet—that and off-brand Lucky Charms. I think they were called “Marshmallow Mateys”.

Nothing says “I’m a grownup now” like Marshmallow Mateys and the Champaign of Beers. And Totino’s pizzas. I’d buy two of them in the morning first thing, and throw them unwrapped up on the hood of my car on my way into the warehouse. And by noon they were hot and covered with bugs, and I ate them. Because I was nasty.

My job was sacking seed for twelve hours each day. Trucks would roll in and dump seed down into a grate over a big hopper in the driveway. And the seed would be conveyed up, up, up to the top of a series of seed cleaning apparatus. The seed would gravity feed back down the building, cycling through various machines designed to clean it and separate weed seeds, etc. until finally it landed at the bagging machine, where I stood, filling sacks and stacking them on pallets. It was long, dusty, hot, mind-numbingly boring, miserable work. But the worst part of it was the loneliness.

Because when you get up at 5:15 to get to work at 6:00 in the morning, and you sack seed for twelve hours, and then you get home at 6:15 and gorge yourself on garbage and then pour yourself into bed, and when the morning light comes streamin’ in, you get up and do it again, you lose yourself in the loneliness. I did.

And eventually the summer ended, and I escaped that season. And I bounced around some more, and eventually that’s when I landed with my friends. The ones I stole $250 from. (More on that later.) And their home was more than a spot to land, (though that’s what I was accustomed to, and for a while that’s what I tried to make of it.) It was a home though, a family, and I wasn’t alone anymore, and I wasn’t independent. I began to live.

We need each other. And more than that, we are fools not to want one another. We’re better together. Better in pairs, in groups, in community.

We’re better when we’re able to go through life circled up like lady elephants.

Recently, a friend sent me an article about how female elephants protect one another. When a female is giving birth or suffering an injury, the others circle up around her. They face outward, creating a wall of protection, while the vulnerable one rests in the center.

It was beautiful. And it was a picture of community that I’m carrying forward with me.

I don’t know what else to say about independence. Am I functionally independent? Yes. I am self-sufficient to a degree, I suppose. But I see that independence as a liability more than an asset most of the time.

In a cultural moment that values the One over the Many, I am wary of the person who wants to stand alone. I would rather stand in the circle.

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