Thank you for reading, and a warm welcome to everyone who has just signed up to allow my motley missives to find your inbox. I wrote the two dispatches that I’m going to share this week (on water and prairies) more than a week ago, but I held them back because, frankly, I was overwhelmed by the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and LGBTQ wedding websites. I felt that I needed time to process the most recent evidence contributing to my sense that our society is turning the legal clock back fifty+ years at a time when we need to be thinking ahead to try to ameliorate current and coming dangers. So, what you’ll read below and next comes from a late June frame of mind. Soon, I’ll be putting together another batch of “Hope Notes.”
Lately I have been thinking about water. And shouldn’t we all, at least some of the time? Over the last two weeks I’ve spent time on Nantucket Island and driven cross-country from Massachusetts to Montana. Water – its beauty and its dangers -- was a prominent feature of those trips. On Nantucket, I spent an afternoon at the Linda Loring Nature Foundation, a lovely preserve on the western side of the tiny island tucked in between a brackish pond and the glimmering sea. The 275+ acres had been purchased gradually over time by the namesake of the foundation, Linda Loring (deceased), who, I was told, let deer and swans come inside her house when she lived beside the pond. I learned from Sarah Bois and Seth Engelbourg, scientists and educators there, and my guides on a nature walk, that this was a sandplain grassland, a kind of coastal prairie. I had never associated northern isles with northern plains, and I was captivated. The landscape was low, green, and wind-swept, bursting with wild edibles -- huckleberry bushes, blueberry bushes, cherry trees -- and equally wild but less enticing varieties of poison ivy.
As we walked a dirt trail among rare wildflowers drawing nearer to Long Pond, we spoke about climate change. I asked how sea level rise would affect the conservation land, a rich ecosystem and important resource for ongoing scientific research projects. Sarah said something that struck me then. She attributed will to the water. She said the Foundation would need to adjust to “where the water wants to go,” recognizing the water’s will and bending with it. She said they had the ability to take on water in ways that homes and businesses could not and that their conserved acreage could function like a safety valve for the island. Yes, their land borders would shrink as the pond (connected to the ocean through a channel) rose, but that was part of the process of change that they were trying to plan for and adjust to. As we wound our way from the pond’s edge and walked among the dense cherry trees, we lost the sea breeze to the thicket of branches. The balmy day suddenly felt sweltering as the landscape changed around us. “This is what two degrees difference feels like,” Sarah said. We hiked to a breathtaking ocean view, relieved at the feel of the free-flowing breeze restored. I was struck by how only a slight rise in temperature had left its mark on my skin and would, over time, call this tame pond toward the sea.
Four days later, I was contemplating another water body – the Yellowstone River of southern Montana. I was driving cross-country with one of my children and our Labrador retriever. This was the fifteenth hour of our third day on the road. In other words, I was tired and desperate to arrive. As we cut through the city of Billings and made our way west on I-90, we picked up the trail of the river. It was 10pm by the time we reached the city’s outskirts, pressing onward from rimrocks to mountains. The sun had set but left behind a lingering light that I clung to but knew would fade before we reached the Bozeman Pass. With my two companions, human and canine, asleep in the back, I counted on the river for company. Every few moments I glanced at it flowing beside and beneath the highway, grateful for its reflection of semi-truck and cabin lights. We passed by small towns and over bridges as the night grew longer and darker, until the river handed us off to the crevice of the mountains.
This morning, I awoke to news of the river from the first online paper I happened to open – The Boston Globe, which was carrying the AP story about an accident. A bridge on the route we had taken near Columbus, Montana had collapsed beneath the weight of a freight train. The train cars and toxic chemicals they were transporting had crashed into the river. The toll on my sense of stability was great. The toll on the river, animals, and land has yet to be measured.
We depend on the waters around us, and maybe we think we have them corralled, but human control is an illusion. Our bridges collapse and our dams break while in the background seas rise. How do we learn to listen to the wishes of the water? And how do we alter our own ways of life to accommodate what we hear?
For those of you with an interest, a sharing of my latest events and essays:
-A piece on the hidden histories of Juneteenth for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opinion/hidden-juneteenth-history.html
-A visit to the Nantucket Book Festival (where Imani Perry also spoke!):
https://nantucketbookfestival.org/
https://nantucketbookfestival.org/authors/tiya-miles
https://www.ack.net/stories/black-history-beyond-the-wall-of-slavery,32344
"How do we learn to listen to the wishes of the water? And how do we alter our own ways of life to accommodate what we hear?"
I've been really thinking about your questions, Tiya. Recently, I spent a day listening to the wishes of water. I was camped near the headwaters of a tributary to the Snake River in northeastern Oregon. The sound of the cascade was constant — or so I thought. But as the day warmed, I noticed the pitch of the water getting lower and louder. I heard a deep rumbling and occasional thunks, like the distant closing of car doors.
I walked over to the river bank and really paid attention. The water level had risen with the melting snow from the peaks upstream. With the increase in flow, the water was able to roll rocks the size of my head. In the heat of afternoon, this river really worked at moving mountains! I’d read about the erosive force of water but I don't remember ever hearing it at work before.
Which led me to your next question, "how do we alter our own ways of life to accommodate what we hear?" Downstream from this rumbling river are four dams on the Lower Snake that are primarily used for power generation. There's a lot of discussion right now about whether we should remove these dams to save the endangered salmon runs of the huge Snake River drainage. The day I listened to the river tearing down the mountains, there were a few wild Chinook salmon swimming up that river to spawn. These powerful fish go from sea level to 5,000-feet-elevation in a matter of weeks! The rivers bring the salmon to the mountains and the mountains to the sea. Who are we to get in the way of this ancient exchange? Advocating for the breaching of those four dams on the Lower Snake has become a high priority for me — that, and being frugal in my use of electricity. Thanks for challenging us into action, Tiya.