The Best American Science
I have had some of this written for a long time, but trying to choose the right poem has been harder than usual.
A few weeks ago I read The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2017 essay collection. As one would expect, much of the writing deals with climate change: glaciers shifting and melting, light pollution. I’ve insisted to myself that I’m not reading with the flags and underlining to give myself a break from some of the productivity-oriented navigation of the world that I’m prone to. Sometimes I think I’ve identified the exact thing wrong with the way I’m navigating x or y part of my life and try to turn it on its head to prove that I can, or to test the hypothesis. Well, I can say for certain that my obsessive approach to book reading is NOT my source of stress. I’m more stressed right now because I regret not flagging the hell out of this book.
There was this one essay about rat populations in Vancouver and I want to be able to tell you all about it, and just now flipping through the book I realized that I want to talk about wave piloting, because that essay was so fucking awesome.
But what I really want to talk about is the essay about the changing attitude of the National Parks Service, which has, for much of its history, been about restoring these places to their pre-colonization natural splendor but are having to consider something else of late: with the climate changing, what is ‘natural’ now, and what will be natural in the future, is changed. Michelle Nijhuis writes—“What if Sequoia National Park became too hot and dry for it’s eponymous trees? Should park managers, who are supposed to leave wild nature alone, irrigate sequoias to save them?”
How much energy can we spend trying to restore something to what it used to be, denying that the environment has changed and some things cannot survive as they did? I am thinking about this a lot. The resistance to change, the desire to pour water on withering stalks. The effort to return to a place that no longer exists, another time. The poem “Grace” by Joy Harjo holds the ancient and sacred and the modern in one place. Things can be beautiful even as they get worse. I am trying to make peace with this.
Your prompt is to begin writing about a winter and see where it goes. “It was tne winter when we…” 20 minute timer, move the pen.
Grace
BY JOY HARJOfor Darlene Wind and James Welch
I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.
