Bucolic retreat helps put terror in perspective

For a month now, the president has been urging Americans to go on with their lives as normally as is possible in these terrorism-filled times. It has been sound advice from the start, considering that the alternative is to live in a state of fear and panic, where suspicion reigns and evil lurks in every shadow.

And after the initial shock and grief of the Sept. 11 attacks had eased a bit, and we awaited the next stage of this mysterious new war whose outcome we still can barely fathom, we seemed to be doing a pretty good job of living normally, too. In the brief lull before the bombing began, we waved our flags and sang our songs of patriotism and unity and began getting on with business as usual, or nearly so. Then last week the FBI set our collective confidence back a few giant steps by announcing that further terrorist attacks on our country were possible over the next few days, although it was impossible to know exactly where they might take place and who might perpetrate them. In the meantime, we were all reminded to stay on high alert.

In a recent interview, Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to explain that being on high alert meant that we all must now keep our eyes and ears open to anything out of the ordinary as we attempted to go on living our supposedly normal lives. You might want to call the authorities, he said, if you see someone taking pictures of a petrochemical plant or any other type of installation that is not standard snapshot fare. High alert, it also turns out, means being increasingly mindful of those ordinary-looking letters and packages that arrive in our mail at home, lest they contain the anthrax spores that have afflicted a dozen people so far. High alert means accepting the terrifying fact that bioterrorism in our own back yards is not out of the question anymore, that our public water supply could be at risk of contamination by lethal agents. High alert, in other words, means being always on our guard.

How, then, are we supposed to reconcile this strange dichotomy that now confronts us, and probably will for a long time to come? How can we possibly hope to live normal lives again while also remaining constantly alert to myriad dangers that not even the experts can anticipate? Engaged in a war that has no discernible end and where victory is an elusive concept, at best, how are we supposed to get through the next months or years without lapsing into a kind of existential dread on a national scale?

Frankly, I don’t tend to operate well in extended periods of high alert. So, desperate to escape the obsessive talk of terrorism, the incessant whirl of real threats and silly Internet rumors, I recently headed to the woods and waters around Greenville for a few days. Up there, being on alert simply meant being careful not to drown in a river or to run your car into one of the many moose that wander along the sides of the road. Although I went up there looking for fish, I managed to find a unique promise instead, a valuable reminder of another reality that Maine’s natural world offers in abundance to anyone who looks for it. It was in there in every brilliantly colored leaf reflected in the river and in the soothing rush of sun-dappled water. It was in the breezes that whispered through the trees and in the soaring elegance of the geese and ducks that flew high overhead in a perfect blue sky.

It was normalcy, in other words, in all its unadulterated, old-fashioned, immutable, life-affirming splendor, and it was everywhere for the taking.

No matter what the grim 24-hour news broadcasts might lead us to believe, the evil of terrorism is not really lurking around us at every moment of our lives, waiting to pounce. It just feels that way when we allow fear to cloud our senses and to hijack that precious normalcy we can’t live without.

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.