A meadow ends where all the perpendiculars of a leafy brown river throw themselves up towards blue. The fruits are olive and ocher. Sprays of dark leaves shiver and splash with sun. Lightning scars show where the main, once shaped by flames, was not lost but reduced to fine fists, oak tissue under sheets of earth, sleeping through the storm and teeth of quick-heat. Here it is: the world utterly lovely despite the anguish, despite endless battles. Meanwhile, you have slipped away to yours. My phone is still again. I could call back. I could babble about this testimony to resilience, bent limbs and great elbows of trunk leaning against granite in gestures of pondering and reconciliation. I could share the looping and fluttering of flycatchers, grasses fresh with fog-drip and shade, pressed flat where a fox recently turned doglike circles round and round before settling in. I could hold up my phone. among the workings of xylem and phloem so you could hear the rustling, the liquid flow scooping minutes out of the heart’s rocky sloping, terrain and flowing on as only a river can. Or I could stand still and listen.
The world is on fire: right now the Western U.S, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Greece. Where else? It’s possible that Finland is still burning, that the fires of Siberia continue to smother the North Pole with wildfire smoke not seen there, in recorded history, until now. While wildfires burn, ice and frozen ground melts. We cannot be sure, as temperatures continue to climb, that the Arctic tundra will remain permanently frozen year round. And now the air currents over the Atlantic Ocean, including the Gulf Stream, may be shutting down. As these events unfold, it is increasingly difficult to see them as isolated or to deny that we are experiencing their cascading, destabilizing effects in our own backyards.
It can feel almost unbearable to witness at times. Heavy.
So I take a deep breath, exhale, and do it again, each breath a form of resistance to the despair pushing to take residence in my heart. Breathing in: I am here. Breathing out: I am still here. Breathing in: The despair will not crush me. Breathing out: I will not abandon myself.
I take this resistance with me to the park where I find that you, my community, have brought me hope and joy. I see it in your children, smiles so radiant and pure they must contain the same powerful light that shines on us from even the most distant reaches of the universe. I see it in the way you kneel together under the low hanging branches of the cottonwood tree, tugging the blackberry canes nestled there as gently as your heads bow together in the task. I feel it when we gather to see the garter snake you found in the mulch pile and transported to our restoration area by wheel barrow, when we find our snake relation in your gentle pour of wood chips and watch their forked tongue slip from tiny mouth as they seek refuge in the small woody debris once again. I see hope and joy in the diligence with which you work: filling wheel barrel after wheel barrel of mulch with such good cheer and digging blackberry and knotweed with such forbearance, despite the heat, despite the pandemic, despite climate collapse, despite the challenges that surely touch your lives outside this space. Despite everything, you have shown up for me, for our community, for our watershed.
You are hope and joy. I am in awe of and inspired by you. I needed to be with you to see that I am hope and joy, too.
I wanted clear the entire area of Himalayan blackberry regrowth. I wanted to hold my Asian neighbors close, to keep them safe from vitriol and hate. I wanted to dismantle the system that murders black people at the hands of the state. I wanted to shore things up. I wanted to repair the cracks. I wanted to make everything beautiful.
I wanted to protect the salmon, tell them it was safe to come back, that there would be no stormwater runoff or hardened banks or dammed rivers to kill them upon their return. I wanted to reconnect the rivers to their floodplains, wildlife corridors to each other. I wanted to wrap my arms around an old growth tree and stand there forever. I wanted to give the land back to the indigenous people who have been here always. I wanted to keep the forests from being disappeared. I wanted to care, to tend, to mend. I wanted everyone to have enough and then some.
A small wheelbarrow doing big work. An overheard conversation and the pleasure of connection witnessed. A candidate rolling up her sleeves. A story unfolding within the larger unfolding of the universe.
Every time I have started for the Yellow Flower River, I have gone down the Blue-Green Stream, Following the hills, making ten thousand turnings, We go along rapidly, but advance scarcely one hundred li. We are in the midst of a noise of water, Of the confused and mingled sounds of water broken by stones, And in the deep darkness of pine trees. Rocked, rocked, Moving on and on, We float past water-chestnuts Into a still clearness reflecting reeds and rushes. My heart is clean and white as silk; it has already achieved Peace; It is smooth as the placid river. I love to stay here, curled up on the rocks, Dropping my fish-line forever.
Let me begin again as a quiet thought in the shape of a shell slowly examined by a brown child on a beach at dawn straining to see their future. Let me begin this time knowing the drumming in my dreams is me inheriting the earth, is morning lighting up the rivers. Let me burn my vanities: old music in the pines, sifters of scotch, a day moon like a signature of night. This time, let me circle the island of my fears only once then live like a raging waterfall and grow a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be the birdcage or the serrated blade or the empty season. Dear Glacier, Dear Sea of Stars, Dear Leopards disintegrating at the outer limits of our greed; soon we will encounter you only in motivational tweets. Reader, I should have married you sooner. This time, let me not sleep like the prophet who believes he’s seen infinity. Let me run at break-neck speeds toward sceneries of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals to attend. Look closer: I am licking my lips.
***
I have nightmares about knotweed. In my dreams, our trampling on soil above roots awakens a slumbering giant. The knotweed rises slowly, aware of but untroubled by our presence–its will to live is strong and it does not fear us. It silently commands its roots to grow. We dig and pull and cut what we can out of the earth, but our aggressive removal only further provokes the giant. The roots grow faster, visibly tunneling through the dirt, traveling ten, twenty, thirty feet, deftly navigating rocks, tree roots, and other underground obstacles. Shoots push out of the soil along the way to harness energy from the sun. It colonizes the nearby clover field, grows up through the asphalt parking lot, and travels under the road to crumble newly installed concrete sidewalks on the opposite side of the street. It continues to grow even from small fragments we leave behind. We can’t work fast enough to contain its destructive spread and end up standing in a forest of knotweed stretching as far as the eye can see. We drop our tools and stare around us in bewildered defeat.
I wish I could place my knotweed nightmares solidly in the realm of fantasy. These things could actually happen though, and it is enough to paralyze me in my waking hours. Maybe it was a mistake to have begun digging, I think. Maybe I will just tiptoe around the knotweed and hope against hope that it doesn’t spread. I’ve already angered it, I’m sure, but maybe if I stop looking at it directly, it will simply disappear. It’s a holdover strategy from my childhood: If I stay small and quiet, I will be safe. If I stay still and move slowly, I won’t stir up anything painful and bad.
I breathe deeply. It’s the best medicine for moving through the paralysis. As I breathe, I am transported back in time to a classroom where I watched slides showing what white colonizers in the thrall of commerce and industrial ideas of progress did to our watershed. Land was cut to connect water from inland to sound. A big lake dropped 9 feet with the final cut. Wetlands drained. A river lost connection to the lake. The receding waters trapped salmon returning home to spawn. The river dried up. The watershed nature gave us was irrevocably changed.
“That was quite a day for the white people at least,” Joseph Moses of the Duwamish said. “The waters just went down, down, until our landing and canoes stood dry and there was no Black River at all. There were pools, of course, and the struggling fish trapped in them. People came from miles around, laughing and hollering and stuffing fish into gunny sacks.” Henry Moses, Duwamish, dragged his canoe out of the mud and said he never wanted to paddle it again.
By 1920, our tinkering with a watershed of over 2,000 square miles had shrunk it to fewer than 500. Enormous ships and industry forcibly displaced the Duwamish from their homeland. Because of the miracle they are, coho and chinook salmon managed find their way through the changed watershed to their natal home in the Cedar River, though the hardships these changes wrought have helped bring those chinook to the brink of extinction. We may still lose them.
I feel the same burning anger I experienced when I learned all this for the first time. The link between what we did then and the climate and extinction crisis we are living through now becomes newly immediate. It took more or less a hundred years to get into this mess, I remind myself. It will take us time to get ourselves out. I’m not sure if we can, but I do know I get to orient my actions around different values–wholeness, harmony, balance, justice, diversity, equity, inclusion. I get to be an active participant in healing myself, in healing the land, in healing everything I can. Staying small helps no one. So I transmute the anger into determination, stubborn persistence, and dedication to a project that many would say is destined to fail. I will not look away from the knotweed. I will stare it down today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, for years and years and years.
Little hands do important work. They find the smallest friends nestled in the soil and insist on safe haven for them. They stay present and persist and with determination dig roots longer than they are tall from dark, rich earth. They are filled with wisdom. I help, but work mostly to stay present to their journey. It’s an important one. And important for me to practice simply being alongside another–witnessing. Birds call to each other around us, clouds pass through a pale blue sky, robins engage in territorial dispute, a downy woodpecker stands sentinel. For some blissful moments that stretch to hours, it feels like we might just be all right.
