“What’s Roe v. Wade?” my friend asked, coming up behind us. I exchanged glances angrily with the other friend standing next to me. 

“This isn’t a conversation you want to be part of, trust me,” I said tensely. 

“It’s easy to be ignorant when you’re unaffected,” someone else snapped at him. 

He took in the circle of us and seemed to understand at least the mood of the conversation, because a moment later he nodded and walked away. We all paused. I stared angrily in front of me, my eyes unfocused, and then kicked my foot out at the ground. 

This wasn’t the first time this issue had come up. He and I were part of a group of ten, living and working together in Oregon as part of a crew for a conservation corps. The ten of us talked about everything from communism to our favorite chili recipes, but early on it had become clear that abortion was a contentious topic. In the first few days, he interrupted a conversation about abortion rights, telling the group that he knew he wasn’t going to agree with us and just didn’t want to talk about it.

“If you knew where I was coming from, you’d understand,” he said.

So that was that. Most of us didn’t love it, but it seemed worth it to keep the peace, and I personally wasn’t eager to talk about abortion anyway. I had left home in early June, when it was clear that Roe v. Wade was probably all but over, and it was easy enough to pretend it wasn’t happening if I just relegated it to the back of my mind.

This was made easier by how little contact we had with news from the outside world. We camped in the field for over a month, often without service, and talked to our families on the weekends. I broke this safe bubble when I went home for a family obligation in the middle of the session. The first thing my friend from home said to me when I called her was:

“Isabella! Roe v. Wade was overturned yesterday.” 

I flew home on a Saturday and was back by Tuesday night, but even those few days at home were enough for the information to flood my brain. Apocalyptic predictions about the future were all over the news and my Instagram feed. Even my friends couldn’t stop talking about it. It’s one thing to know something is coming and a very different thing to have it actually happen. It felt surreal, like the kind of thing you hear about from your grandparents. I had grown up taking a lot of things for granted, and the protections afforded by Roe v. Wade were definitely some of them. But, reading about the logic behind the Dobbs decision, with its lack of respect for our bodies and lives, as well as the chosen ignorance towards all the people that would be harmed, that was the worst.

Returning to Oregon was a welcome relief for many reasons, but I couldn’t get the Dobbs decision out of my head. I realized that most, if not all, of the crew probably didn’t know what had happened. After only a few days, I desperately wanted to talk about it, but I wasn’t sure they would even want to know until the session ended, and I also wanted to avoid antagonizing him.

It might seem ridiculous that I was worried about keeping the peace. I know many people who would say that they couldn’t even see themselves being friends with someone who disagreed with them on abortion, especially now. In many circumstances, I would have been one of them. But the conservation corps wasn’t the real world. Our tents were a few feet away from each other, we cooked dinner together, saw the sunrise every morning on our way to work, sat crammed in a sweaty van on the weekends, and talked for hours about our lives. He sometimes made me so angry that I wanted to scream, but he was also actively a part of many of my very best memories. I could have tried to argue with him more, to challenge him. Maybe I should have. In some ways, I may have been disrespecting him by just assuming that he wouldn’t listen to me, although he was pretty clear that it was not something he wanted to talk about. The idea of an argument was exhausting, and I didn’t want to lose the friendship we had. 

It’s been several months since my summer in Oregon, and I still haven’t decided how I feel. I don’t have to deal with these issues much at home, or at Wesleyan. Now, whether it’s intentional or just a byproduct of the bubble that I live in, I avoid many of the people who would infuriate me the way he did. This situation only came about because we had no choice. We were going to be living and working side by side for over a month, so we knew it would be in everyone’s best interest if we just got along. I don’t talk to him much anymore either. The kind of intimacy was so easy to maintain when we could hardly spend a moment apart, but it fell apart pretty quickly when everyone had to return to their lives in the real world. 

This isn’t just a piece about how we can all learn something from a situation that forces people with differing opinions to be together, although I know that can be true. I’m not sure that I handled this experience particularly well, yet I don’t know that I would have done anything differently. I don’t find it particularly hard to condemn a group of people for their views, especially when those views are causing harm to people all over the country. Writing this article made me feel infuriated and threatened all over again, and I am far less vulnerable than many. But I find it very hard to just dismiss my friend. There’s no easy resolution or lesson here, and I think this situation might be too specific to be applied to other instances anyway. Right now, I’m left with a lot of anger at the state of the country. Yet, despite all of these barriers and contradictions, I still miss my friend.  

Isabella Caro can be reached at icaro@wesleyan.edu.