In 1972, I drove across the country with my grandfather’s third wife Genevieve to a sheep farm in Kansas. I had never been over the Rockies before that. Vietnam was at war, I learned to spin wool that summer, and when I got back Gary and I moved in together on the 4th of July. We would both be Juniors at the University of Washington that fall.

But in June, Gen and I crossed the plains. It felt foreign-strange to me to see no mountains on the horizon in any direction—no mountains at all in the last days headed to Kansas. All around, open sky. At one point, we pulled over to the side of the highway while a storm passed overhead.

We stayed in a local home in tiny town of Peabody and I saw fireflies for the first time. I learned how to spin on several kinds of spinning wheels and with drop and hip spindles. I watched a sheep being sheered, and used various plants and flowers to dye my yarn violet and green and bright orange, red, blue and brown. I traded life stories with a dancer from Vermont. We walked in the soft dusk, and I heard a whippoorwill.

Gen and I drove on from there into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, where we stayed with a woman Genevieve knew from the Army Nurse Corps in WWII. She was from Arkansas, I remember, and Gen was from Iowa. But Genevieve flew planes and married a widower and moved to the Oregon Coast. Her friend married a hog farmer in Missouri.

I never saw the hogs because they lived back up in forest. The farmer-husband was the local Purina distributor, but he was most proud of his cattle, and especially his Hereford/Angus crosses. I kept that man up too late talking, and his wife came out to remind us how early he had to get up in the morning. Because I’d said how much I loved goats, they served me goat milk at breakfast and watched me to see if I’d notice. I did.

This was one of the great experiences of my life. I remember Iowa as beautiful and green. I met two elderly cousins of Genevieve’s who had cared for their aging parents and now in their 80s survived only by selling their hand sewing. One of them was going blind. I would later meet other elderly women without Social Security, born in families that didn’t accept charity, struggling to live.

But I’m stalling.

And I saw a parade in eastern Washington, which is what I’m stalling to tell about.

There were horses—so many gorgeous horses! I had never attended a parade with so many horses instead of marching bands, though there must have been bands too.

I’m still stalling.

This was 1972, and our war in Vietnam was still raging, the war Vietnamese call The American War. The French had warred for a decade and we thought we would easily end that conflict militarily, but we didn’t. A great many people died, mostly Vietnamese people. I had been demonstrating against war since I was sixteen. I would turn twenty in 1972.

So many beautiful horses. We couldn’t drive through town, but watched them all parade past. Flashy pintos and appaloosas and buckskins. Bays and chestnuts and white horses with pink noses. Horses under saddles and bareback and pulling a stagecoach. Horses jogging at an angle as they showed off to the admiring crowds.

And then a massive piece of military hardware (a rocket launcher?) on a flatbed trailer with the banner: “SHOOT FOR A BETTER TOMORROW.”

When has that ever worked? Lasting peace? When have we ever known enough to set weapons down, to stop shooting in time, to talk and make equitable choices based on human rights and needs. I try to imagine the best man always wins.

We have to imagine it first. We have to believe it’s possible. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was published in 1973, a year after my cross-country trip and four years after her breakout novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. “Omelas” is arguably Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous work. The link will take you to the story, it’s only a few pages.

It’s always seemed to me the most telling lines in are direct address:

“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

The “one more thing” is suffering to pay for joy. Le Guin’s narrator assumes we will not trust a story of joy without payment through pain.

How has that been working out for us?

Can we walk away?

Imagine a world where military might were redirected toward actual peace, that instead of marching and shooting, soldiers were retrained and paid to help people, grow clean food, and rebuild bridges, offer care and compassion. Imagine that instead of developing firepower, our taxes and everyone’s taxes went only to the things people need to live. Imagine that keeping score was not about building bigger bombs but about building better lives, not about how rich some of us are but the richness where every individual is allowed to live. Joy without payment through others’ suffering.