The watercourse, a speeding bullet

I. August 2011

Today I sit in an air-conditioned, boxlike structure, near the edge of a continent, waiting. On the opposite edge of the same continent, a wall of water unleashes its fury on the city on whose contour I was raised. Well-fed, a bit tipsy, lonely, I wait out the gale, wait wondering how the storm will vent its spleen and where and when. This is the second time this summer those I know and love have been evacuated due to natural disaster. The Earth twitches as the dead rattle before succumbing, while two female politicos talk drill, baby, drill and dismantling the EPA, and pretend they’re not women who sustain life.

photo: Heidi Utz

Last night I walked in Lithia Park and watched the Ashland Creek shoot across the rocks in its twisty, curvy trajectory through the woods. Stood on a bridge and looked out with a question on my lips…What will it be like if I stay here? And what will it be if I go back to the desert? Divination came in two eddies, side by side. The first, for staying, was black and flat, with nearly no movement the eye could see. The second, for going, was a gentle circular swim—not a whirlpool or anything close to dramatic, just a foamy, leaf-flecked swirl in the same direction, over and over again. Both seemed like little circles of bathwater, set aside from the main current which seemed to fly. This, something told me, is the current of much of the world. In living here, in this isolated valley, you are set aside, a protected observer.

I walked further through the woods still unsettled, as I could feel a pressure in my body, the foreboding of a wall of water about to upend mile after mile of concrete barriers mortals had placed against her. Waves of a planet that had withstood so much for so long, finally exploding in fury… And soon I heard water splashing loudly, as if dammed and released, dammed and released. Charging through a pipe into the creek.

Thirty-one summers ago, my mom and I sat on the shore of a barrier island, where the waves landed gently inches from our beach chairs, and we read long novels and allowed the water to hypnotize us day after day. The small stores that sold plastic rafts and pails and colorful long towels and suntan lotion felt like innocence. And sometimes I did not know if this was her last summer walking barefoot in the wet sand. But I knew that whatever happened, the land beneath us would not waver. That the shore in Jersey would always remain, year after year, a place of unique identity, escape, a reliable spot to see fishing boats and dirty seagulls and blue sea glass with soft rounded edges.

II.

The storm ducks and weaves through territory I know, the place of my birth, the province of my ancestors, my father’s home now, the dwelling place of friends and former lovers, the streets I’ve walked, the skyscrapers my great-cousin the architect once built. It’s a hot clear day in Oregon, nearly 100, hardly a cloud in the blue sky, a light breeze. I stand in a graveyard ready to harvest blackberries in a spot my love once showed me. I feel more than 3,000 miles from the East as I walk past a pristine duck pond and the residents honk and squawk. The berries are still not quite ripe, sitting red and green and grey in tiny clumps on the vine. Last year this time they were plumper, blacker, and more ready. But spring came late and the whole cycle of nature is thrown off. I walk back up the steep hill to where the graves are. See a stone marked “NOBODY,” with a birthdate in March 1981. Another, more sculpted white stone has no name, but a curved sliver removed: “Passing through.”  

When I left my mother in her human form, she was in a small, medicine-green room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Waiting for a wall of water to carry her war-torn body to higher ground. I stood vigil and could feel her readiness and fear of leaving, the stillness of a life ratcheted down to just its essential operations: breathing, moving blood through small channels, the barely perceptible throbs within organ tissues. A storm that had come to her nine years prior, with black-shrouded visions of apocalypse she gave no quarter. Came as a notice to evacuate, leave her earth-body as a shell, give in to the inevitable. She waved it on as one refusing when all the sheriffs and mayors and official mandates told her she could not stay. And for nine years she sat in her attic ducking waters that kept rising and holding her ground, even when the house was marked “occupants dead.”

photo: caphotosnewyork, Carlos Ayala

III. Bloomberg has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands, and the city that never sleeps has no mass transit, no flights coming or going, no exit routes for thousands sitting waiting in its five boroughs. The streets are empty, subways stopped. Nine are dead. Two million have no power. The rest have no agency. Irene brings tide like no New Yorker has ever seen to its jaded doorstep, commanding respect from even the most cynical. The island is surrounded on every side with water, a fact so easily ignored when you are walking beside a thousand others on their ways to work and play at 8 or 10 or midnight. In a place so given over to the human-made, nature is the animals in the Bronx zoo on a class trip or a skinny sapling tied to a stake with a length of rubber hose every six blocks. Taxi tires may swoosh in a rainstorm, lightning may crackle in a summer sky. Other than that, it’s entirely the man-created world, reminding you of your sinew, your strength, your engineering prowess…at least for a couple hundred years of history. You drive a mile through a tunnel barely remembering that on the other side of that concrete wall is the entire force of the Atlantic Ocean. You travel through it, dry and unscathed, forgetting you are surrounded by sea. Without reminders of your guest status in nature, leaving your primacy in the land human made feels silly and even annoying. How could anything so ridiculous as “nature” threaten these massive 100-story monoliths? How could the splashes of water even touch what all-powerful beings have so carefully constructed? A hurricane? Just another show. We’ll stay home and watch it on our flatscreen TVs, drink beer, light candles. Have a little party. Hey, Irene, show us whatcha got. And get the fuck outta here by tomorrow because this nature shit is a real pain in the ass.

IV.

My favorite photo of my grandmother shows her standing on the beach, Avon-by-the-Sea, wearing ballet shoes, one pointed toward the water. She is in her sixties, sporting cat-eye glasses, smiling wistfully toward the ocean. Even when she was a girl, growing up in Paterson in the early part of the last century, nature and NJ did not often intersect. They sat in different corners of the boxing ring, and usually man came out swinging, while nature cowered and ducked blows. The century was being industrialized and we were winning, triumphing OVER and ABOVE. It was a match, and we were so frequently (albeit ostensibly) victors. Harnessing power of rushing waters. My grandmother and her father and sisters and brothers worked in a mill on the Great Falls using the seas of the Atlantic to make fine silk for the world. My grandmother, a soft, sensible, sweet, and very smart woman, did not see the harm in the illusion of control over—if it crossed her mind at all.

As churchgoing and God-loving as she was, nothing told her that the natural world was not ours to use. Her way was the way of all early-20^th-century city dwellers. When you don’t live in a forest, it’s hard to feel the heartbeat of a tree pulsing through its rings. When there are modernity and Machine Age notions of progress to cater to, those that live and breathe become merely resources.

V. January 2013

I sit behind a wall in a sad, loutish city. It’s winter; the five strands of green in the yard are dead. Drought makes the desert even drier than I’d remembered it, the spirit much more gristly and insular. If you want water here, you need to walk where the earth opens up. In Santa Fe it’s deemed acequia; here it’s just “the ditch.” Under the ugly brown mountain, there are few poets, and the remnants of indigenous identity are discarded somewhere near the confluence of routes 25 and 40. I leave my house seldom because there’s little I’m connected to outside and no one wants to talk, really. They text my avatar and I hit Ignore. People live in condos and shop at Walmart and work for the military-industrial complex or Taco Bell. They get lost in their adobe and concrete microcosms, in their screens and phones, and forget to glance up at the edges of sky and points of stars. When you walk the streets, no one will risk eye contact because you are nondigital and therefore suspect. They mostly look at themselves, and more importantly, themselves.

Last fall, the hurricane of the year before was superseded by an even greater behemoth, one whose wreckage still litters the Jersey shoreline. The patch of coast from which my mom and I surveyed the horizon has washed away. The beach houses we rented each summer, the restaurants we frequented, the pier we played on, all of it, gone. Thousands have been homeless all winter, freezing in tents while Congress equivocates. Twelve-foot waves subsumed everything, pressing southern coastal NJ into memory and memory alone. We are told that this is the way it’s going to be from now on, that the storms will get bigger, the waves mightier and more arrogant, the damage more incalculable—as if incalculability had degrees.

Here in the middle, we die a different death, death of desiccation, of poverty, of people who lack nature and nature that lacks respect. And into this standoff America brings anger and guns, decides that kids are acceptable victims, and vents the collective spleen through bullets and displays of madness and hubris we’ve been told is “our right.” Our children sit in lockdown as our oceans take our homes. And the politicians tell us nothing’s wrong. It’s all as it should be. And in a sense, they’re right. As every reaction demands an equal and opposite reaction, we stand in the path of a balance coming due. As it should be. And despite making baboon-like shows of macho bluster, the AK-47s and overamped testosterone, there is nothing left for us to do but wait in absolute vulnerability for that which will inevitably carry us back into the stream.