Reflection

Dear Readers,

This is the last post of my Watson year. It comes as the first drop in a river that will grow and meander from here forward. Before we dive in, I want to thank you for reading – writing is solitary only in action, but in larger scope, it is shared and made possible by all who inspire and all who read and pass it forward.

Israeli writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, questions how a species of big headed, relatively weak apes could take over as the dominant species on the planet in a fairly short period of time. Harari credits our immense success to our ability to organize ourselves in masses around particular intersubjective fictions – money, myth, and law to name a few. Homo sapiens means “wise humans” in latin, and I am humored to think that maybe we should call ourselves Homo fictas, “humans of fiction.”

As a writer, storyteller, and student of language, I am concerned with words – their purpose and manipulation to form interpretations of the world, to compel action and incite emotion, to unify, to uplift, and to protest, to tear down. Language and writing are the fertile ground on which the great narratives of humanity are built and stratified, fortified with time and power.

Part of the work for survival is to compete, to make it in a harsh world, and there is only so much room for one species before others begin to disappear; we are seeing extinction at a rate unprecedented by any other blossoming of a single species ever. The planetary impact of humanity is staggering, and we must honestly weigh the components of life.

Because of our ability to tell stories, we are not only prone to biological evolution, but to the evolution of consciousness. In just 20 years, the internet shifted the paradigm, becoming a global phenomena and bursting culture at the seams. Can we cocreate a story about sustainability as compelling as that of technology? As common vocabulary loses terms from nature and expands into digital reality, is it possible to entwine strands of our ancient reliance on land, water, flora, and fauna into the sphere of binary code and complex computation?

One metaphor of the river has to do with the movement of time: a child growing up along a certain stretch of river cannot perceive the full scale of the river or the time it takes to reach the sea, but a pilgrim who has walked the river’s length many times will have a longview and will see the interconnection of said river with the ocean. We must work for the longview.

With science & technology making great contributions to civilization, there is potential to overlook the catastrophic consequences of over-consuming and polluting the earth, and we cannot do this. We must use the tools of science and technology as well as our body of knowledge about nature and its dynamic systems to strive for a sustainable future. This includes building institutions around these tenets and working to transform certain norms.

I think in the shadow of Buckminster Fuller, a human of extraordinary courage who worked during World War II as a naval engineer. Post-war, depressed and losing capacity to live well, Fuller decided to take his own life. Standing on the shore of Lake Michigan pointing a gun at his own head, he had a revelation. He thought, why take my own life and cause suffering to those around me, when I could similarly sacrifice myself but for the good of others? From that moment on, Fuller dedicated himself to a 50 year experiment – how much good could he do for the rest of humanity and the earth in his life?

Fuller’s experiment lasted 56 years until he passed away and left the foundation of nanotech, the language of synergetics, a plea to prevent buildup of greenhouse gases in the 1970s – an inspiring legacy as ripe fruit for the world to pick and carry forward. Cultivating a positive future, like growing a garden, requires time, discipline, revitalization, and effort.

Presently I am working as a farm hand, with soil, water, and plants. The act of growing food is one I wish everyone could experience, for the dynamic process and the work required to farm will make every bite of life more flavorful. Perhaps next year I will be a student of law, exploring one of the great stories that shape our actions in the world. Angela Davis, wrote that “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’” Whether in a story or in the soil, roots connect to the substance that makes life possible, to grasp for that is a wonderful life’s work.

Jumbled as all of this may sound, it is a document of my life view from the age of 22 as I land on homeground with a rich year abroad steady on the mind. The urgency and difficulty of many situations we face on earth give powerful motivation to carry on downstream seeking solutions.

Thank you,
Galen

September 4, 2017 1

River

Where the river knows no end

Is in kindling flames of family

It is the poetry of the river

To unite mountain to plain to sea

And in that synchronous flow

Where beginning is never nor end

Is the promise of passing

A promise of time

Which holds us all

Together

July 15, 2017 0

The Blue

A distant mountain

Pretending paradise
Blood in

The rivers of my hands
And looking up

We are everything

July 10, 2017 0

Meat

I walk to the corral

Outside Antonio

Clears gravel and sand

From an area the size

Of a sheep

And digs a small hole

On one side

I follow him through

The pallet gate

And stand by

While he finds

The one
Roughly he grabs it

Holding its forelegs

Walks it to the gate

Through and onto the ground
Tells me to tie the legs

And I fumble

He gets tense, tenser

I continue to fumble,

Bastante, says he,

Enough
I hold the legs together

Tight
Antonio draws the knife

Clean over the neck

Again and again
Fire ignites in the legs

I can’t hold on

And the movement is wild

Spastic
We step back

And the small hole

Becomes a red puddle

And the bloods seeps in sand

Like water to the aquifer
I feel so grateful

For the life of this sheep

For the meals it gives us

For the cycles that brought

Us to this moment of siege

The taking of life
Then it is still

And we put the fluffy

Thing in the wheel barrow

To bring it over to

The butcher table

And the sweet birds

Sing the funeral song

As the day begins

June 27, 2017 2

Paradise

Paradise is moonlight

Lighting fire to the canyon

In the darkness

Coming from so far away

That light

Just to remind us

Every 28 days

Where we are

June 11, 2017 1

Wonder

I awake in the morning

Sleep shuddering in my legs

The weight of hand spun wool warm

Against the rise and fall of my navel

I wonder what we will do today

What new textures my hands will encounter

Which animals will need attention

If the sandy soil will be warm or cold

I wonder when I leave the turquoise door

If I will smell the blossom of damp desert

Or the ripe manure of the sheep

Or the lanolin

I can hear the soft tune of the wind

Walloping the cracks of the house

The silent hiss of the kettle boiling

The shuffle of Doña Maria and Antonio

I hear the birdsong outside

The pattering of water in the canal

The tremors of warming metal

Absorbing sunshine stretching

June 10, 2017 0

Snow

Here on the farm it is snowing

In the desert this is no dime-a-dozen day

Where the speckled earth shows its curves to the sky

Seducing the high blue until it lets go

June 7, 2017 0

Preface and Potatos

Excavando Papas
In the sand

I am searching

In hand, a bone

I think it’s pelvic

Perfect for sand

Fits like a

Familiar spoon
I am looking for Papas

Pulling rosy cheeked

Eye bearing

Hearts of starch

And sunshine

Excavating

Sunshine from sand
The potato

Sweet dumpling

Of the soil

Plopping its weight

Into my waiting hand

…

I am here, and here comes a poem. Excavating potatoes, and excavating poems. These are not so different in fact. Both, for me, are currently the fruit of living. Finding poetry in sentience, finding papas in sand.
Last year, about this time, my dear friend Haleigh Paquette and I went on a walk in the woods. We wandered about in the lowlands, looking at beech and oak and spruce forests, ferns for minutes. Then we climbed up a gorge between familiar mountains, seeking views from the heights. At the notch, in the quiet spruce stand, the path no longer led on as one, but formed an intersection. Left up – right up – straight ahead the belly of the beast. We wandered straight, and encountering nobody but ourselves as we shared a world of a conversation.
Haleigh and I, when we get to talking, there is no evading the substance of mind, and so, this particular day, with no distraction but the sunshine and the forest, the wonderful spring of coastal mountain, we talked. As we wandered and wondered, and time passed as only time can when nobody is there to talk about it, Haleigh asked me questions, and I asked Haleigh questions. I started to feel something quite powerful during this talk. I was finishing school at the time, nearly graduated, and heading into the unknown. But I knew something. I knew something in the way that truth leaps up like a fire stoked.
It was poetry.
Not a poem. But rather a call. Like a spring wind beckoning to the fisherman, lapping the shore and stirring the fish to begin their festivities of summer. It was in the most wonderful way a natural sensation, a reciprocity.
…
Now, after a year of time, in the confusion of austral winter, and the staggering yet wonderful realization that we indeed live on a flying globe, I am harvesting potatoes, cutting alfalfa, walking with sheep and goats, feeding rabbits, and laughing at llamas. I am becoming friends with Doña Maria, an 82 year old woman who has lived here all her life, a cultivator of the soil and a pastora of animals, a hiladora who spins wool and weaves and knits. Also with Don Antonio, son of Doña Maria, a man of steady humor and grin who relinquished the life of the city to work the earth with his mother.
We three are living in a valley ringed by volcanoes to the north and east, a fractured canyonland of springs that arise from a series of geysers to the southeast, the canyon of the Rio Salado to the south, and the open desert to the west where in the night one can see the lights of the Chuquicamata Mine envying the scale of the stars above–Southern Cross, Orion, Scorpio, Taurus.
Turi, where we are, is a hermitage of sorts, home to a few that cultivate the land and run animals. There is a geothermal bath in the town, that leads to a canal which brings water to the house here, and to the east, just across the road is an enormous series of small hills covered by a lost city, a stone lattice of massive extent called la Pucará de Turi, the largest of the settlements left by the Atacameño culture.
…
While I am here, I am going to experiment in poetry. These poems will come spontaneously, and may not come with narrative such as this. But please, dear readers, let this be a turn of chapter as I enter the final months of this riparian journey.

Where there is water

The underbelly of earth

Is laughing so hard

It’s wet itself

May 27, 2017 2

Atacama — El Río Loa

La tierra del sol y cobre–
Once a storm of sandstone

Had a seabed churning

Waving at the heavens
Now it is

Lost of its sea
As though

San Pedro, San Pablo

Miño, Láscar

The volcanoes

Burst at once

Melted the ocean

And left

La tierra del sol y cobre
Left the marbled earth

To bake in the southern sun

A crucible of copper

And quebradas

Canyons

Carved of wind

And water

The little that remains
One morning, still sleepy eyed, gravity decides to abandon you. Thinking that you are just drifting back into a dream, you leave your chair at the breakfast table, rise above the toast and jam, boiled eggs and coffee, reach out to get one last sip of java as a bit sloshes out and stains your nice shirt. Now you know you’re awake. You feel anxious to be late for work, to be wearing slippers rather than shoes as you float out the window into public airspace, there is a bit of toothpaste on your face, as you rise, and rise, and rise straight up, above the neighborhood, watching all the other people down there doing people things, bringing their kids to school, walking the dog. What will I tell my boss? Did I leave the damn stove on?
But as you witness the slow unfolding of earth below, the patches of green, the blue of the sea, the curve of the horizon against the forbidding black of space, you forget those worries, and you see this planet in all its humble and thrilling form with the clouds rolling over you like a swimming pool of egyptian cotton, and speaking of Egypt, there it is, the brown and brown and brown of earth, the little pyramids and the stretch of green, that long thread of life we call the Nile. And then around you go, past India where you smell the sweet spice of Madras and the indian ocean and the climbers on Mt Everest up north look like little lego people, and the Earth is spinning and you feel dizzy, and over the Pacific Ocean, what if I fall in there?? And then South America, and over the red flowing sediment of the desert an earsplitting roar comes out of nowhere, and a jet airplane rushes by. In the intense adrenaline of that moment, time slows to a crawl, and as the turbulence around the Boeing 737 shakes your very bones, you see me and my curly hair and wide eyes, ogling out the window at the desert below, and you think, what on earth has this kid on such a sugar rush about this barren land that looks like the coffee stain on my shirt?
Well, here I am, alive in the desert. And I want to tell you why I am so excited about it.

Stretching west from the Andes, from southern Peru and southwestern Bolivia, through northern Chile and Argentina, along 600 miles of Southern Pacific coast is the Atacama. Marked by high peaks and volcanoes, enormous salt flats, canyons wandering through the sandstone, and hundreds of mines active and abandoned, the Atacama is often recognized as the driest place on earth. But for Antarctica, this is true, yet the Atacama has supported humans living here for 13,000 years or more. Atacameño peoples have made the oases of this desert home, cultivating the arid soil with water from the slightest of rivers, or vertientes and ojos de agua, desert springs falling from the cliffs or welling up out of nowhere. Civilizations like Tiahuanaco and the Incas traded and at times had sovereignty over communities in the desert, using the great wealth of mineral resources and access to the sea to their advantage.
I was drawn here on my geopoetic quest by the lore of Río Loa, Chile’s longest river, which tumbles and winds its way from the fractured rise of Miño Volcano through 440km of desert until it meets the Pacific. The Río Loa and its tributaries are truly remarkable. Fed at once by snowmelt from the peaks, and by springs and geothermal upwellings, even geysers, the river, apart from its staggering canyons, is not what many people would recognize as a river. In the abundance of water of New England for example, Río Loa would be no more than a brook, but here, it is everything.

When I flew into Calama, I was relieved to breathe the crisp desert air, air that reminded me so much of home in New Mexico. Outside, the sun was hot, and with this sensation, I felt the twisting of seasons having just entered austral autumn, coming from the northern winter. Not only that, it was my first time across the equator.
Doña Virginia Panire, a friend of my professor from College of the Atlantic, Patricia Ayala Rocabado generously offered to pick me up at the airport. Doña Virginia came and met me, explaining that she had arranged for me to stay at her sister’s home in town. On the way, we stopped at El Parque Loa, Loa Park, and I got my first real glimpse of the river. The city has put up some small dams to create a swimming hole in the river, and there are places to walk and sit on either side. The flow is not very dramatic, but Doña Virginia told me that in February there was a lot of rain in the mountains and the river rose enormously. I learned that this is a feature of the “Bolivian Winter” when during El Niño years, the Andes receive lots of precipitation from the pacific.
Doña Virginia started telling me about the region as we walked around, pointing out a replica of a church in Chiu Chiu, the oldest church in Chile, and some of the mountains and volcanoes around the area, San Pedro and San Pablo, and Paniri, a mountain with which Doña Virginia shares her family name. She explained to me that their family is rooted in Turi and Ayquina, villages to the east near Paniri, and that they only live in Calama so that their kids can attend school.

From Parque Loa we drove to the house where Doña Irma, Virginia’s sister was waiting. She showed me my room, which is actually a studio for spinning and weaving wool. I felt so welcome and their warmth was remarkable, treating my as a friend before we all remembered each other’s names.
Over the following days I learned that Doña Irma and her husband Don Rene have three boys, Matias, Juan, and Tomas, and Doña Virginia has one, David. All of the kids play music, Andean music with various groups here in Calama. I learned that Doña Irma is working with wool for a living, and Don Rene worked in the hospital for many years as a paramedic, and now he and Doña Irma run a hotel/restaurant in Ayquina on the weekends, and he does construction work and all kinds of things during the week.
On Thursday we went to the Calama shopping mall to see the opening of a product that Doña Irma worked on called Volvimos a Tejer, “Back to Knitting.” It is a bag that comes with three balls of yarn made from a sheep and alpaca wool blend, and knitting needles. It also has instructions about how to knit. Doña Irma and her friends spin the wool for the bags, and it is sold in big department stores called Paris all over Chile. The idea is that here working with wool is an extremely important part of life, and has been a livelihood for people in the region for centuries. Doña Irma wants to encourage young people to continue the practice and tradition and Paris wants to sell products made locally.

Though it was commercial, it was good to see that this big business was supporting Doña Irma and the other women of the group. Doña Irma told me excitedly that she dreams of making a wool cooperative in Turi, the village where she grew up and where her mom still lives and keeps sheep, goats, and llamas.
On Friday, Don Rene and Matias and I drove out of Calama to Ayquina. There was a major dust storm with wind blowing east, bringing dust from the copper mines at Chuquicamata all across the desert. On the way to Ayquina we stopped at Laguna Inka Coya, a salty lake in the middle of the desert that confounds visitors and scientists alike. The formation is very deep, so deep that people are not sure of the source. It is coming from groundwater, and some people believe a legend that is is actually an “ojo del mar” an eye of the sea, and that the water is actually seawater. It is an anomaly in the desert where all other lakes only fill if there is rain, and otherwise remain as enormous salt flats in the desert.

Arriving in Ayquina I was surprised by the number of houses. There were hundreds of houses, but I was told that only seven houses are actually occupied. Why so many others? I asked. Don Rene and Matias went on to explain that Ayquina hosts an enormous festival every September for the Virgin of Guadaloupe, and 70,000 people come to Ayquina to celebrate. The rest of the year the town is like a ghost town, and because of a conflict with the government about money stemming from the celebration, the town remains a private entity, without services of the state like electricity. There is a generator for the village that runs for just two hours at night, so for the rest of the time, it is either solar power, personal generators, or no electricity. Because Don Rene and Doña Irma run a restaurant and hotel, they have a generator.

Ayquina sits in an opening to a canyon of the Rio Salado (Salty River), and the resturant, El Valle, is the center of town, next to the church. The view out the front window is staggering–it looks right out over the canyon and the small parcels of corn and alfalfa growing with water from a vertiente that comes right out of the canyon cliffs. In the evening after we arrived and gathered firewood (pallets that Don Rene brings from Calama), we started up the woodfire oven as friends of Don Rene’s began to arrive. They were friends from his time at the hospital, and we all sat together sharing drinks and stories through the evening.

The next morning as Don Rene was preparing to roast mutton over an open fire, I went off on an adventure up the canyon, walking through the river and thinking about the weeks and months to come.

The canyon is about 200 feet deep, and after the arable land around the vertiente at Ayquina, the canyon starts to narrow, and the walls get steeper. There were animal tracks all over that I could follow, and along the sides of the river, a type of wide sedge was growing that reminded me of the type of plants in the intertidal wetlands in Maine, something that likes salt. Further up the canyon, the sheep tracks went up and there was a choke where some enormous boulders had fallen from the walls onto the river. I climbed around in these rocks the size of houses for a while, feeling the intense vulnerability of a human in such a place, so many stories of people heading into canyons and never coming back.

Leaving the rocks, I went to the north side of the canyon where I could see some small constructions under an overhang. Climbing up, I followed a path that was fairly easy to make out over volcanic pumice stone. On the way I was stopped dead in my tracks by some petroglyphs carved into the canyon. I just stood there staring for awhile, wondering who carved this face and the llamas and the little people on the wall. Struck by the wonderful reality that someone hundreds or thousands of years past was communicating with me, telling me something, a small fragment of the past.

Then I looked into the little constructions under the overhang. There wasn’t much there, but I couldn’t help but feel the thrill of this place, that humans could be here, live here, for so long. I continued out of the canyon where I had to jump a sheep fence where a sheep had been less successful than I. At the top I was struck by how different the world in the canyon was from up top. Up top it was windy, the plants were all diminutive, and the horizon felt so, so far away.

Back in Ayquina after climbing out of the canyon, I got a ride to watch Matias play soccer with the Ayquina team against the neighboring village Chiu Chiu. They played on a pure dirt field, no grass. It was quite something to watch them play with the 20000 foot volcanoes in the background. I forgot my camera, so you’ll just have to imagine. After the game we returned for lunch, and we munched the amazing roasted mutton.
In the evening, we went out to Turi, a village much smaller than Ayquina to celebrate mother’s day with Doña Virginia and Doña Irma’s mom Doña Maria. Turi isn’t directly on the river, rather it is watered by a vertiente, a spring that just bubbles up from the ground. It is quite near Volcan Paniri, where Doña Irma told me she has an apple orchard. Turi is also home to Pokara, an Incan ruin, one of the largest in Chile. I didn’t get the chance to explore it yet, but I will. Matias and I went outside at some point and the stars were booming across the sky. For the first time in my life I saw the Southern Cross and the deep blue of the Milky Way around it.
I will post night sky photos soon, but not yet.
On Sunday we prepared lunch and served it to people who had come to church in Ayquina. Doña Irma and Don Rene made chicken, pork ribs, and llama meat, soup, and salad. After cleaning up, we headed back to Calama.
In the evening I sat looking at maps for hours. I found the headwaters of the Río Loa, on Volcan Miño pass through a canyon called Quebrada de Mal Paso, the canyon of bad passage. For the first 150 kilometers of the river’s journey, there are no towns and at over 12,000 feet of elevation the place is cold and scattered with canyons on all sides, making it difficult to cross. Further on, as the river starts passing through towns, the water diminishes dramatically because the mine at Chuquicamata has bought up water rights from many of the villages for use processing ore, and sometimes this leaves the river dry.
Below Calama the river goes through a series of intense canyons in absolute desert as it makes a u-turn through the desert and then arrives and Quillagua, before heading straight west through the biggest of all the canyons, at least half a mile deep, before it wanders into the Pacific.
I started reading studies on the water quality of Loa and its tributaries, and especially noted the high levels of arsenic as well as other heavy metals like mercury and even detergents. One paper I read blamed most of the serious pollution on the mine, but an article from the Journal of Applied Geochemistry notes that the waters in the area are heavy in arsenic and other metals as a result of the groundwater coming from young volcanic rock, for example the Río Salado is born from geothermal geysers at El Tatio. The article blames the mine some, but moreso it blames evaporation and water impoundment for the concentration of harmful materials.
In 1997, the town of Quillagua was devastated when floods, not unlike those that Doña Virginia told me happened this February, caused sediment in three reservoirs above the town to get stirred up. This sediment was holding unnaturally high concentrations of heavy metals that had built up over time behind the dams. Suddenly the water went from having 300 µg/L (micrograms per liter) of arsenic to having 30000 µg/L, while the recommended maximum for drinking water is just 50 µg/L. This flood apparently devastated the crops, animals, and the people in Quillagua, a town that at the time had not received rain in 40 years. It has still to recover and most residents have left. Quillague is considered the driest town on the planet, and the Loa, the oasis, was what kept it alive. The floods also seriously damaged the fishery off the coast.
With all this in mind, I am redressing my plans to trek the length of the river – the Quebrada de Mal Paso, the heavy metals, the danger of canyoning alone, and the potential for drinking seriously polluted water along the Río, even with a good filtration system, it probably isn’t safe. Tomorrow and Thursday I am going on a reconnaissance to explore the river in a vehicle, to see what these places really look like. Reporting back soon.
Look out the window

The dark of space, the light earth

A desert laughing

May 17, 2017 0

A Geopoetic Pilgrim — Quarterly Letter 3

In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.-Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Dear Readers,
I am in between river journeys now, a perfect time to write about what these last months in the wintery north have held.
The Torne River flows in a landscape of taiga forest marked by the Baltic Sea to the south and the pitched mountains along the Norwegian coast to the north, a region dramatically affected by glaciation from Earth’s most recent ice age and is today frozen half the year. When I met Kjell Kangas who grew up in the region, he told me that he thinks of Tornedalen, Torne Valley, more as archipelago than river valley. Over the heaths and bogs of land still upwelling, lightened from the weight of billions of tons of ice, flow five large rivers — Torne, Kalix, Lainio, Tarendo, and Muonio. Each river is connected to the four others as if the water is weaving a web around the taiga forest, and most impressively, none of these rivers has a dam.
In winter, Torne is a 550 km blanket of snow covering a foundation of blue, crystal ice that in many places will support the weight of a tractor. Elsewhere, long tumbling rapids prohibit the ice from forming, and the black river bursts through its icy ceiling, raging white over stones and reminding the traveler of caution, that this is indeed a lively river.
For 200 km, Torne marks the boundary between Sweden and Finland, and many of the Tornedaleners who generously invited me into their homes and shared stories of the place, told of the compelling history that entwines itself through the borderland. Linguistically, Tornedalen is home to Swedish, Sámish, Finnish, Miënkieli, and most recently English. Miënkieli literally means “our language,” and it is a form of antiquated Finnish that has absorbed some Swedish over the years. It is the living, breathing reminder that just over 200 years ago, there was no boundary in Tornedalen, and the residents were northern Finns, Sámi, and Kvener, not Swedish speakers, living within the Swedish Kingdom that maintained sovereignty over the region since the middle ages.

Then suddenly in 1809 Russia annexed Finland from the Swedish Crown, maintaining influence until the Russian Revolution when Finland took the opportunity to become a sovereign nation in 1917. Through the Great Wars and the rest of the last century, Tornedalen evolved under the auspices of neighboring nation states, at once being torn apart and maintaining a quiet unity across the water, probably aided by the fact that the river becomes lined with ice roads from bank to bank for six months of the year when ice dominates its surface.
My experience in this region cannot be summarized easily, and the reflections will last a lifetime. I was confronted with fragments of nature, myself, and human society around every corner. The fundamental state of this river — a clean, damfree, fishfull, peaceful boundary water — is an uncommon circumstance, and it hosts the largest salmon run in western Europe. It is truly a sanctuary for life.
After I finished skiing, I taught in the Pajala school, midway along the river’s course, grades 4-9, thanks to Kjell who works there. When speaking with the students, telling them about the dire situation along the Ganges River and its tributaries in Nepal, I asked them to consider what it would be like if the Swedish city upstream, Kiruna, was home to 10,000,000 people instead of 20,000 and had no proper sewage treatment. This gained some exasperated reactions, especially when I showed them an aerial view of Varanasi and one of the sewage drains into the Ganges. But in that moment it occurred to me that it doesn’t take 10,000,000 to pollute a river. Kiruna’s 20,000 people could make Torne’s waters ripe with harmful bacteria and protozoa, at least enough to make the water not potable, while now it is.
A thorough and regulated mode of processing sewage and strict regulations for pollution and on damming can maintain the abundance of life in a river and keep it pure enough to drink right out of the flow. For many of the Swedish born students in Pajala, the reality of Torne River’s purity was an unimpressive fact. But in the school are many refugees, and the students from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan could not believe the bounty of fresh water when they arrived.
A river is not unlike a person; if confined by artificial boundaries, literal like prison bars or figurative like debt, one is stifled even to a tragic degree; if overwhelmed with toxins — sugar, alcohol, drugs, chemicals — the body will unravel dispelling potential for life, especially without modern medical convenience. If one attains the nebulous yet rich heart of freedom, there is opportunity to flourish and to carry others in the wake. I am not trying to say that a dirty river cannot be free, or for that matter a person who takes drugs or is in prison cannot be free, but that perhaps we can form an ideology that places the very land, water, and resources that sustain us in a position of power, with rights, as a gift to ourselves.

Is not freedom the heart of worldly attainment, the foundational goal of so many of our collective ideologies? Is freedom just for us, or can a river be free, a forest, a mountain? Freedom is not achieved alone, but as part of a web of life. Can we work our way in a global world to at once engage our hunger for technology and imbue ourselves with morals embedded in nature, imbue the landscape with its own rights and economy? In a world fissuring at the folds of religion and polarized by nationalism, there is one place that human spirit lies which is common to all of us, in nature.
These journeys are showing me how to rewild myself, my vocabulary, my interactions; how to unlearn the manicured social contracts, lawns of the imagination, that I have with the earth in order to see with fresh eyes that there are bountiful opportunities for us humans to reconnect with one another and our shared landscapes. It’s a matter of revaluing “sense not cents” and thinking like a river, like a bed of soil, to think of gardeners as the aristocracy of connectedness, those who understand the relationships that enable life.
I’ve recognized something about my project that is fitting to close this letter. In many ways I am a pilgrim, searching for everything and nothing, partial only to the path of the river and nature, and the people who happen into my life as a result. I am not trying to unearth anything in particular, to inform a literal map of any area, but rather I will my conscious effort into a rivercentric perambulation that is trying to get at the poetry of land that Barry Lopez writes about, at the heart of nature, that strives so intently to pursue a natural flow, a force among forces.
As I move about, letting the ineffability of the landscape and other people fill this time, I cannot express the gratitude I feel for the opportunity. Thank you.
From the flow,