Usher In 2000 With Comforts That You Enjoy

She had been offered a tempting all-expenses-paid trip to Orlando, Fla., for New Year’s 2000.

I struggled with what to tell my 21-year-old sister when she called for advice a few weeks ago.

She was torn about going and I understand why.

While Wired magazine runs Y2K panic stories about computer techies scurrying to their bunkers in Nevada, women’s magazines are publishing tips on what to wear and how to book trips to the world’s biggest New Year’s Eve 2000 bashes.

It seems there are three main paths leading into the millennium: prepare, panic or party.

She wanted to know which way I was going, what my plans were. She wondered what she should do.

I had been reluctant to even ask myself such questions secretly resenting the compulsory importance of all those centuries piled on top of one another. It’s hard not to succumb to that nagging expectation of grandness for its own sake, especially when everyone’s plans seem more exciting than yours.

On the one hand I wanted to tell her to go for it. That it would be memorable to spend the millennium with the masses, celebrating as digital computer chimes ring in a new globally interconnected age.

Then I shuddered.

She can’t seriously be thinking about flying! She should stay home, safe, in case that pesky Y2K bug brings Western civilization to the brink of chaos, perilously close to the dark abyss of time and technology.

“Uggh,” I think. I sound like the Unabomber.

But there’s a lot of wiggle room between apocalypse and jubilee.

A year from now, I’m going to try to focus my festivities around resilient things that have persevered centuries already: nature, spirituality, family and tradition.

Vital connections that endure.

I plan to draw my bow across Grandpa’s fiddle to savor the sweet tones of old wood.

Propose a toast with grandmother’s homemade wine, improved each year since we picked the huckleberries in the summer of ‘81.

Think hard about the place you love most, Sis, and spend that time there, whether it’s the mountains, Manhattan or your living room sofa.

There is comfort and sacredness in one’s favorite landscape.

You’ll find me snuggled inside the Inland Northwest’s quilt of grassland and timber, someplace where you can’t pick up a cell phone signal but can receive the chickadee’s call.

Nature spins time in her own way, regardless of modern society’s precisions. I’m fascinated that a fern imbedded in Hell’s Canyon rock once grew on an island in the Pacific 180 million years ago. That the red-tailed hawk I saw snatching a field mouse on my way to work could possibly be a descendant of a carnivorous dinosaur.

Yet there are whole days that pass without so much as a glance at the sun, moon and stars that were once our ancestors’ celestial clocks.

Days where I wake to the alarm, am driven by deadlines and closing times, oblivious to the natural clues of time and season everywhere.

So Sis, you wonder what I’m doing when New Year’s 2000 blows in?

No matter what the weather, I’m taking a walk under the old-growth cedars and pines where we played as girls.

I’m going to listen as time groans through their huge trunks, that strange sound of whole centuries being carried away in the wind.

In my pocket I’ll have that leaf fossil I found years ago, a reminder that whole millenniums are swallowed by lakes, transported by rivers and deposited in the West’s canyon walls.

I want my millennium wrapped in a familiar, breathtaking landscape, ushered in by aged things, like the comforting, creaking bones of ancient timber.