“The Tree Whale” painted by Jessica Bromley Bartram
(jessicabartram.ca)
Good morning everyone who loves the earth. Greetings from Appalachia, where I’m helping Mom endure bedfast living on hospice. She watches a lot of television, and her condition mirrors news of what’s happening to the world.
Our planet would be in much better shape if we’d emulate the caregivers who’ve helped Mom over the past couple of years. They’ve taught me how to support her needs. Their art inspires my writing.
Since Mom’s mobility plummeted I’ve split time between two corners of the continent: tending a bookshop on the hilly coast of Oregon, reconnecting with roots in Tennessee. Due to travel I’ve missed some public meetings, yet the word-work never stops. Careful attention gathers medicine, stirs up insight made of back-and-forth perspective.
Right now I’m drinking coffee near an old Oak that was scheduled to die last fall on the day before Dad’s funeral. The tree embodies activism. Some family members believed her sacrifice was necessary to safeguard our homeplace, so I secured bills of health from two certified arborists. Prayers up for a tomorrow where supply serves the demands of stewardship in every neighborhood of old ones.
Grief permeates this effort for me; few victories feel long-term now. Often after some small success I feel like a salmon who’s spawned just in time for heat domes to scorch the forest. What will happen to our offspring when climate change rids home watersheds of life-sustaining shade?
Recently friends gathered in Cannon Beach, hoping to prevent the premature death of a large Spruce that helps stabilize a tricky slope. People discussed the tree’s fate at public meetings I was unable to attend, though I’m well-versed in the dynamics. Stakeholders who want to walk gently on the earth counter those who’re eager to pick up the pace. Over time gentle-folk surrender ground. Village scale is traded for a marching urban bootprint. This script starts to seem pre-ordained, as conveyed in the modern maxim “you can’t stop progress.”
At a recent book-sale I bumped into my arborist friend Joe. I was so busy buying inventory all I did was offer a quick greeting. Joe mentioned that he’d weighed in on the Spruce debate, but we didn’t discuss it. Another friend later informed me that the tree might have been unharmed if everyone had followed Joe’s advice. But that didn’t happen, and now folks pray for her recovery.
The story reminds me of a time when Joe assessed the health of trees at a small school in the area. His recommendations were shared in tandem with a written statement from students. We passed around the talking stick, and the group consented to selectively cut and thin rather than pursue more extensive removal. The trees many of us were grateful to save were later sacrificed, nevertheless. I still feel that loss whenever I visit the school grounds.
Government decisions are often even more grief-inducing. Citizens provide input to staff and contractors who recommend options for officials. Experts render opinions on behalf of various interests. Once a political trajectory is set, additional considerations are seldom accommodated. Deals move ahead, come hell or earthquakes or high water.
At the end of the day, our society is largely driven by transactional customs that underlie a culture of consumption. Count me among the perpetrators of this norm. I’m in the process of listing Dad’s family farm with realtors, for example. In my youth I defended this beloved place from urbanization-as-usual, advocated for a plan that would integrate development with the rural landscape.
Now I’m spearheading the land’s potential sale, diving into real estate dealings because a co-owner needs money and because management of the place will become even more complex and challenging for the next generation. This is one of the few ways I know to continue my relationship with Dad following his death.
I’ll never forget the words of a talking-stick friend who spoke in favor of more speedy and extensive tree-cutting at that small school gathering. “If you want to make an omelet,” he said, “you’ve got to break some eggs.”
Such plainspoken logic seems so practical at face value. Consumption means trade-offs, and I reckon man’s appetite for big breakfasts has been around for a long time. The language of trade has enabled empires to flourish, especially around ports connected to major travel routes. This included the capture of humans to manufacture wealth for overlords who shunned manual labor yet excelled in courtly protocol.
On good mornings I imagine old pockets of culture that escaped the transactional networks of empire. Hills make good places for folks to hide. I reckon that applies to Appalachia and the rugged coast of Oregon. Do echoes of knowledge persist in special landscapes even after wisdom-keepers die?
Creation can inspire us to revive caring ways that mend broken bonds. In Cannon Beach she’s called folks to rejuvenate the grounds of a pre-colonial village and decommissioned school at the mouth of Ecola Creek. The place is notable for once hosting famous explorers who traded with Indigenous families for the gift of whale meat.
For decades my wife Jennifer and I pursued this dream of rejuvenation, working with resident activists and descendants of that village. We’ve striven to revive traditions of respect for nature, celebrating the return of local salmon for example. If necessary, we were prepared to buy the school property with our savings as a step in the transfer of ownership to Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes.
This bridge-purchase seemed like a sensible risk, because grant funding was available from a major archeological foundation. I was struck by how much the foundation was willing to invest to preserve the site’s archeological integrity by keeping it capped under existing structures. My hopes rose that the whole site could be carefully adapted for multiple uses without any additional digging.
Clatsop-Nehalem friends chose not to pursue that path ownership, a decision that felt disappointing yet was logical. Government would have continued to wield authority over land-use decisions, raising liability concerns. In addition, costs of upkeep could drain any group’s finances.
Flash forward, and now the local government has approved a budget for constructing an elegant facility at the location. Everyone I know is as pleased as me that Clatsop-Nehalem history will be prominently featured. Many are also saddened that the projected cost of the facility has more than doubled and is now pegged at 12 million dollars. I was praying a less costly option that required less digging would be adopted.
Word has it the first people to inhabit this continent carefully considered how decisions would impact the next seven generations. In recent centuries many descendants of those inhabitants have been pressured and lured into deals with government agents bearing material enticements and promises. I pray recent decisions about the mouth of Ecola Creek will honor creation’s offerings. When I think on that historic place where people gathered around the beached body of a whale, I reflect on the humbling relationship between gifts and trade.
Recently I was speaking with a friend on the grounds of the old village and school. He was pointing to the planned location for a storyteller’s circle, close to where Jennifer and I have hosted ceremonial fires on the weekend of the salmon celebration. One year several enrolled members of Clatsop-Nehalem showed up. Together we offered gobs of Appalachian tobacco, grown for the express purpose of honoring Indigenous people. I sang a medicine song I learned while gathering Cedar in the nearby hills.
As my friend spoke I thought about the importance of upkeep and cross-cultural programming, how spirit embodies living creatures more than buildings. At the same time this thought came to me I looked down and saw an exquisite feather near our feet.
Now the memory of that moment mixes with morning light on an old Oak. Here I pray shared care will motivate ongoing reflection and storytelling. I pray today’s cultural tilt toward transactions and monuments ceases to distract from our stewardship of limited revenues and natural resources. I pray for these things as I celebrate Lightning Bugs and Thunderbirds, the former being far fewer in number than they were during my childhood. I pray as I remember watching Nighthawks with Jennifer, hearing them boom over the clearcut behind our home and also the half-deserted mall where woods were razed despite the letter I co-wrote with my fourth grade class.
And I’ll keep working in the midst of loss, finding perspective in the journey, knowing grief is as important as hope when gathering medicine.
Watt, your open letter gave me pause and inspired these thoughts.
When the spaces we inhabit are in decline, it is time to be a caregiver to inspire and support renewal. We hope we are not too late. As busy as we may be, we must not simply watch the world go by unattended. We must take time to be aware of what is happening around us by staying active and offering stewardship. But sadness can strain our trying. Hearts may break over death’s knell. Is all lost? Old ways give way to new. A virgin forest gave way to a lone cabin. The cabin was joined by others. A village was born. The village is giving way to modern influences. The force that is homo sapiens lays out a path of destruction in the name of progress and consumption. Why settle for enough when you can get more? Where is the wisdom of simple living and stewardship of nature? We may grieve for our plight on a warming planet, but species have come and gone for millennia. The evolution of humans into other than sapiens may be forthcoming. Time will tell. Meanwhile, we struggle to hold back the tides of our own folly.
Thank you, Watt, for reminding us to care about the future of where we live.
Gratitude for this exchange of words is mutual Darrell. Threaded letters regale our friendship, like a necklace to be passed around and beaded by anyone who wants.
Sadness is natural in tandem with loss, yet this healthy human emotion is commonly shunned. “Take hope,” I’ve heard at funerals. “They’re in a better place.”
Many of us have received and offered that well-intentioned consolation. It’s easy to conflate grief with depression, to counter sadness with hope in a greater plan. This impulse is understandable, for depression can indeed cripple attention, inhibit our ability to learn and communicate.
Yet sadness isn’t the same thing as depression. Grief can also motivate us to address destructive patterns, not just in abstract terms but in the close quarters of local relationships where shovels hit the ground. Often my process includes a kind of proactive remorse. There are so many ways I can be a better caregiver.
“Proactive remorse” leaps off the page as possibility in so many sorrowful situations. Life’s events seem to bring either pleasure or pain, or happiness or sorrow. We swing from one emotion to another depending on what just happened. Which emotion arises depends often on expectation. Did the event go our way or not? We don’t wish for loved ones to die, and we feel sadness and grief when they do. Even when a death is for the best, it hurts. Proactive remorse gives us cause to accept the loss, feel the pain, and observe that it is there without getting crushed by it. We can witness grief as a natural occurrence. I have found during my hardest times with grief that there is an underlying joy which seems to be my better nature. To feel, to observe, to accept grief often lets that joy rise from the depths of despair, especially in the loss of loved ones. I like the possibility of proactive remorse being key to letting joy trump the agony of grief. Thanks, Watt, for this insight.
The words “proactive remorse” came to me during the 1990s, while I was writing about a gathering of rural organizers hosted by the East Tennessee Foundation. About twenty of us converged at Max Patch, a bald mountain peak widely celebrated for her beauty and also believed to be a nexus of natural energy.
At one point during the retreat participants sat in a circle and spoke about our most sacred places. For many of us that meant sharing memories of worlds that were lost to urban development. I recall one elder trying to talk about her homeplace and then having to stop because she was so choked up.
Remorse flows as I accept my part in a consumptive culture of growth that undoes the life quality experienced in small-town rural communities. Being proactive counters this consumption with creative engagement in other modes of culture. “Organizing” is an upbeat term for this undertaking. I’d love to honestly call this work joyful. Friends like you raise that possibility.
Mighty grateful for our exchange here that’s led me to memories of a sacred spot where our oldest child celebrated her fourth birthday. My heart lifts in the knowledge that Max Patch hasn’t been displaced by a fancy event center.
https://appalachiantrail.org/official-blog/the-rewilding-of-max-patch/
When I first read your use of the word remorse it was in the context of sadness and grief. I took sorrow as its meaning. As we all know, it is more than that. It conveys guilt as well. You say that your friend at the storytelling on Max Patch was taken up by sorrow while remembering her home place, but you also convey that other side of loss which is guilt. People not only show sorrow for the loss of our environment to industry, but also share guilt over our consumption of the environment in the name of progress. John Prine said it well in his song about Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauling away paradise. When I hear those lyrics, I cringe with sorrow and guilt. I once stood near the Arch in St. Louis looking across the river at endless rows of coal cars with “Peabody” stamped on the side. I felt a deep sadness for what they represented. Yet, I consume fossil fuels in a dying environment. Alas, though, I feel enough guilt that I make great efforts to live simply and walk softly on the land. I could live in sorrow and guilt for much in my life, but in the end, I find it better to reach for the joy; not joy found in the world, but the joy that is deep within. This is the joy that places such as Max Patch arouse in us. You say Max Patch is a nexus of natural energy. That, I believe, is the true energy of our humanity. It is the joyful energy that keeps us believing in better possibilities.