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Spanish moss and resurrection fern carpet an oak tree on Saint Catherine's Island, Georgia.
By William D Bone - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35261473
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And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Mary Oliver, excerpted from "Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?"
Last January, I was driving to Long Beach for my ashtanga practice where I was fortunate to work with teachers Aimee Echo and Sati Ah. It was an indulgence, driving that distance for practice, and one that I would not be able to sustain for long. While it lasted, I soaked up every last routine: the silent walk from my car to the studio along the sidewalks of some of the oldest neighborhood streets in the city, an errant voyeur to the early morning routines of the various households; tailgate conversations with members of the Ashtanga Yoga Long Beach community; and post-practice coffee at the eclectic Viento y Agua Coffee House next door with my favorite anarchist. On Sunday mornings, I would sleep in and enjoy breakfast with my family before taking to the road to attend led practice at noon. During these Sunday drives, I would listen to the stories that had been recorded for The Moth Radio Hour and timed to air--it would seem for my unique pleasure--precisely at the hour of my drive to Long Beach.
This is how I came to know the story of a young archeologist named Hannah Morris, who by this time may have completed the PhD she promised to pursue when her tale came to its end. For the past 14 months, I have kept Morris's story alive by writing on the pages of my desk calendar every month the words "Saint Catherine's Island, Georgia and resurrection fern." These words became the souvenirs of a journey I had taken vicariously with Morris, representative of both the beautiful and the bittersweet not only in Morris's story, but in the universal stories we have collected--every last one of us--from our individual experiences of time and place. They were the first words I recorded each month on the blank calendar pages, before the birthdays to remember, before the notations for appointments and duties and dates due. The words represented an ideal of geography, how it is possible to fall in love with a complete landscape--its scents, its colors, its plants, its animals, its man-made structures--and the reality of losing it all to a climate in the throes of changing. Like postcard words, they told the entire story in the briefest space. They stood for disappearance and reclamation.
Appropriate words, it occurs to me now, for an archeologist.
Morris is the daughter of a geologist. Growing up, she remembers being told bedtime stories of peak oil and environmental catastrophe. She remembers spending many a night on the porch with her dad discussing big oil, pollution and global warming. These conversations not only made her think, they made her afraid. The monster that came to live under her childhood bed was the threat of climate change. I recognized that fear, like a curtain coming down. It reminded me of the ever-present feeling of quiet unease I felt as a child awaiting the routine air raid siren drills. One Friday every month, we huddled under our school desks until the wailing of the siren faded. Our monster did not care to stay under our beds. It followed us to school, and the siren was the voice it used to remind us of the dangers of living in a world armed with nuclear weapons.
It turns out that Morris's monster followed her to school as well, which is where she first confronted it by writing a high school paper on the effects of chlorofluorocarbons. She remembers sitting on her porch one night after the paper was due listening to the frogs and the crickets and the creek rushing by; she remembers feeling a warm breeze come down the mountain and becoming suddenly afraid that one day in her future, there would be no more nights like this.
I did not grow up near a creek or a mountain, but I did chase fireflies and kept turtles in a blow- up swimming pool in the backyard where no fences interrupted our neighborhood games or the dreams we invented for our futures. We spent our summers barefoot, racing our bikes up and down the block, testing the limits of our outside voices. Sometimes we grew quiet and lay in the grass until it got dark enough to try to count the stars. Climate change was not yet part of that starry horizon we examined for signs of constellations we were learning to see.
While Morris inherited the nuclear weapons I feared as a child as part of the deep background of the world, I have come to know her bedtime monster as an adult. I can hear frogs and crickets as part of the canyon life where I live, but I notice that their visits are earlier and briefer than they used to be. Rattlesnakes come out on the trails here in January. Last year, the hills were completely brown by the end of May. The field in the canyon around the corner from my house where many a rainy winter I have seen a large heron stand sentry in the damp grasses has been empty of that bird's company three years now. At the farmer's market, I can no longer gauge the season by the produce being sold; I can buy asparagus in November and strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries all year round.
Saint Catherine's Island is a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. In the 1600s, the Guale Indians lived on Saint Catherine's Island. Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1700s and built the Mission Santa Catalina de Guale in an effort to convert the indigenous Guale to Catholicism. Eventually, 432 people would be buried in the floor of the mission. This is what brought archeologists like Morris to the island to work. Since 2012, Morris has learned to look her monster directly in the face. Along with her colleagues, she has learned to count down the tides that threaten to take the remains of the bodies and the mission that her team is attempting to excavate and document into the sea. In less than two years, these tides removed a small beach where Morris once slept, along with the two palm trees that marked the spot. She is looking directly at that one day in her future she grew up being cautioned to fear. The monster, as she says, is in the water with her. It is telling her exactly what the consequences of climate change will be.
Catherine Benincasa was born in the 1400s during a time of class feuds, religious wars, and the Black Plague. The monsters of her days. Catherine would become a Dominican nun and later a diplomat devoted to relieving the mental and emotional suffering of others. She would become Saint Catherine, the namesake of the barrier island Morris has come to love. The first line in one of Saint Catherine's poems is "Truth never frightens." This is what I learn from Morris in her story about this island, her love for it and the monster she has dreaded. Morris learned that she could survive this fear and still love the world. It is her reason for pursuing a graduate degree, to better understand this monster we have created.
In an interview I recently read about indigenous ways of knowing the world, Robin Wall Kimmerer, an ethnobotanist and Native American and the subject of the interview, says that indigenous ways are about relationship and reciprocity. According to Kimmerer, the property of our species is to live by the rules of gratitude and reciprocity. This guards against taking more than we need and taking care of what we have because, says Kimmerer, all flourishing is mutual. What a shame that government and industry do not know the world in this way.
I may never have the opportunity to visit Saint Catherine's Island, but thanks to Morris I know it is filled in late summer with the scent of dog fennel, that Spanish moss and resurrection fern cover the trunks of the island's massive old oak trees. That other scientists work on the island studying sea turtles, salt marshes, and various species of birds. I have learned the names of the tides Morris and her colleagues are forced to count--neap tide, ebb tide, espero tide. I have lived with her story on my calendar for more than a year. It is more than a reminder to me to live in accordance with the property of our species. In Spanish, espero translates as "I hope."Appropriately, espero tide is Morris's favorite tide. It is, as Dickinson observed, the thing with feathers, and it is everywhere, the thing that invites us in.
Counting Down the Tides by Hannah Morris
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