One Last Run

This is no mere paean to the Sundance Film Festival. Instead, Claire Vaye Watkins endures a series of nature documentaries that confirm our environmental degradation, tosses back drinks at high altitude, and shares a brief and glittering connection with a field biologist, the hub around which this essay turns. Watkins, best known for her fiction, never gets overwrought with the meaning-making of it all; instead, she steadily gathers notes on her days at Sundance, building a little collection of wants and worries before going big in her final lines, setting the storytelling enterprise against a faltering world and wondering whether the former can ever steady the latter.

I’m cold, I’d tell the mental-health professional the Fest presumably has on call. I’m cold and lonely and should have gone to see the wild horses. I’m extremely angry at my evil government and the craven people who control it. I have been watching over and over the essential dying an early, avoidable death. I think some deep shared life force melts away with every dead glacier, evaporates with every drained lake. I feel like a drugged polar bear blindfolded and coming to trapped in a net dangling from a state helicopter. No, I don’t. But the world is suffering and I want to feel it without it killing me. Without it sapping my spirit. I want to feel it and mark it and with the mark help stop it. But I’m afraid I don’t know how.