Tag: Ecology
by Harmony Hazard
I picture my mother at the helm of a boat somewhere in the thick of ocean. Floating behind the boat is a glacier, a compression of quiet grace. My mother has tied a thousand ancient ropes to the glacier and is pulling it through the water with the same conviction that I imagine Moses had when he parted the sea.
For years, she has whispered her plan to us. Before they all melt, my mother wants to transport a glacier from Alaska to wherever my sister and I are living, so that we will have a secure source of water. To keep it from melting, she will coat the glacier in sawdust, as if sprinkling confectioner's sugar on a slice of bundt cake. Then, she will chain it to a tugboat and tow it across the ocean, where it will finally be left in a dry pond or a desert's scorched riverbed so that my sister and I will not die of thirst. We have always rolled our eyes to this idea. Impossible, we've said. But, recently, I've wondered.
On the night of her seventieth birthday, my mother told my sister and I that some scientists believe the moon was once part of the earth. This theory surmises that when the moon separated from the earth, the Pacific Ocean was formed in its void. We were eating pineapple-upside-down cake in the flicker of candlelight, she was wearing a white kimono and a halo made from fourteen carmine flowers, and my sister and I balked at the idea. But my mother insisted until my sister googled it. It's called the fission hypothesis, my sister says. I guess I have to get a PhD, my mother responded with a tilt of her halo, for people to listen to me.
Over a decade ago, my mother had a theory that the energy from the moving bodies at gyms or playgrounds could be used for electricity. When she and I walked past fitness centers with treadmills in the windows, she pointed to the sweating bodies and said, Imagine how many light bulbs they could be powering? My eyes went from the runners' wet, mangled hair to the ceiling, where fluorescent lights hummed incessantly above their heads, but I wasn't convinced. Years later, my sister saw an advertisement: a company was utilizing the velocity of playing children to power electrical outlets in a playground.
Maybe I'm wrong to not believe that you can part the sea, that a body can run enough to flash on a light bulb, that the moon can slice itself from the earth and spiral out into the knitted black of the sky. Maybe I am wrong to not picture the glacier, hulking and glossy, rising over the sea like a skyscraper; to not look closely at this image until I can see my mother's reflection in the ice, waving at the distant sight of land, her salty seaweed hair swept into the sea-wind, rough waves smacking against the sides of the boat. If I look even closer, I will discern on my mother's face not only the knowledge that her family's thirst will forever be quenched, but also that now, after all these years, they will maybe, finally, believe her.
Harmony Hazard hails from both Tucson and New York. She is completing her MFA in creative writing with Stony Brook University. She edits the "Participate" column in make/shift magazine, has been published in CALYX and Border Crossing and is part of a collective editing an anthology of creative writing about the Sonoran Desert borderlands.
Photograph by Timothy Neesam.
Posted on October 12, 2016 October 12, 2016 Author Wren AwryCategories EssaysTags Ecology, Science, Technology
Editor's Note: Golden
The Dodge Ram scrambles over rocks and rain-hewn ditches; water gallons and bean cans jostle in the truck bed. I gaze out the window, stretch my pointer fingers and thumbs then hold my hands catty-corner to pretend I'm making postcards. Snap!—everything gold, gilded.
The sinking-sun landscape looks like one of those photo essays from Arizona Highways I leaf through in the library. The Altar Valley is amber with cholla and prickly pear, acacia and mesquite trees. The dusk casts miniature, scattered mountain ranges in vermilions and mauves. Baboquivari's cuspate peak stands sentinel above it all, so backlit that it looks like its cut out of black construction paper.
Golden hour is seductive enough to lure me towards forgetting. I pull myself back, remind myself that the recent history of this desert is a catalogue of predacious desire for aurum, Au, the metal that shines like the sun:
1540: Coronado (arrogant, silver-plated) searches the Southwest for Cíbola, the legendary city of gold. He finds no such city but still plunders towns and villages, leaving death and destruction in his Spanish wake.
Pima County, 1774: Manuel Lopez, a Spanish holy man, forces a group of Tohono O'odham to extract gold from the Quijotoa Mountains. Thus begins gold mining in Arizona.
1877: White settlers open the Montana Mine in Ruby, Arizona. Until 1940, when it's abandoned, residents extract gold, silver, lead, zinc, and copper from the mine.
(Ruby is now one of the two best-preserved mining ghost towns in Arizona according to Wikipedia, twenty-five-odd buildings scattered on a hillside below the gaping mine mouth. The mine is home to thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats that swirl into the darkening summer sky, going north-south-east-west in search of bugs, disregarding the nearby cattle fence that splits two countries like a wound.)
Then there's my own white, middle-class childhood. 1994: I'm five, in a pink-painted bedroom just north of New York City, thousands of miles from this dusty border. My father reads to me from My First Book of Fairy Tales. The illustrations are full of golden objects–the giant's eggs in "Jack and the Beanstalk," Cinderella's pumpkin coach. After he finishes a story, my father asks, "What's the golden rule?" and I respond, well taught, "He who has the gold makes the rules." It's his favorite punchline. We laugh, oblivious to how it implicates us.
The princesses in the volume have locks so burnished they seem incendiary–like they might, at any moment, burst into flame.
This Editor's Note was written by Tiny Donkey Founding Editor Wren Awry. Photograph by Margaret KIlljoy.
Posted on August 3, 2016 October 1, 2016 Author Wren AwryCategories Editor's NotesTags Borderlands, Ecology, History, US Southwest
Editor's Note: To Stop the Sound of Gnawing
I've found myself fascinated, lately and distantly, by the accumulation of human action. I like to believe that as our universe expands it makes more space for beauty or good, which has dimensions and mass and density. We see a poet who puts affecting work into the world and we see small bits of beauty settle into once-empty spaces of her readers. It is matter; it matters. It takes up space, but unlike other matter, it can't be destroyed.
One story[1] of the beaver posits a different perspective on the universe:
I find myself fascinated with this story, not because of its brevity, and not just because of its apocalyptic vision—what strikes me is a universe built around anger as the constant, and not beauty, or not good, or not anything else that might not be contained by mathematics. I think about us all toppling. I think about the end of ends.
But this is just one story humans have told about beavers.
Another story about beavers is that they hate the sound of running water, hence their famous drive to build dams and lodges—in truth, a trickle triggers an instinctual response, to package a leak in the dam with young willow or the branches of birch. It's both more simple and more complex than we give them credit for. Hate, it seems, is a human specialty.
Another story about beavers is recorded early by Aesop, famous for his fables: "When pursued, the beaver runs for some distance, but when he sees he cannot escape, he will bite off his own testicles and throw them to the hunter, and thus escape death."[2] This belief percolates for roughly two millennia, until the 17th Century, when Sir Thomas Browne points out that a beaver's testicles do not pendulate outside the body, making self-castration difficult.
"In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish," writes essayist Amy Leach.[3] Surely anyone who had touched or skinned a beaver must have known the truth, but correcting the papacy hasn't always been easy.
We can see here the spectrum of stories about one thing, but also many: some are simply incorrect, some are mischaracterizations, some can be outwitted by science or simple observation, some exist beyond us, some we'll never be sure of. But my fascination with all of these stories is that each of us readers have space to make our own meaning of them. We get to decide correctness or incorrectness, and someone else can do the opposite. We can react, retell, recast. We can always make beautiful, if that is what we choose to do.
There is much in the world that I believe would make the Great White Grandfather Beaver angry. Lately, this feels hauntingly present, and it all, too, accumulates, in the shape of the thinning pole that keeps up our world. But I also like to believe in an addendum, in a story beyond the story of the "The Gnawing": It is known that if one goes alone or in a group, in the evening, to tear down the local beaver dam twig by twig, send them all down the newly-made stream, the beavers will stay up through the night to make the necessary repairs. And maybe the Great White Grandfather Beaver might spend a night gnawing through the anger to find a broken pole and a broken world that leaks water or something worse, and that he, like all good beavers, might decide instead to fashion a dam to hold up the world and make it quiet again.
That is a story I can believe. A little more time to tell old stories, and make new ones from the old, and to find ways to convince the Great White Grandfather Beaver that we are worth the work, even if we are terrible, and even if our beautiful isn't enough.
This Editor's Note was written by Fairy Tale Review Managing Editor and Tiny Donkey Editor Joel Hans.
[1] From American Indian Myths & Legends, eds. Alfonso Ortiz and Richard Erdoes
[2] http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast152.htm
[3] From "In Which the River Makes Off with Three Stationary Characters," published in her 2012 essay collection Things That Are.
Posted on July 20, 2016 October 1, 2016 Author Wren AwryCategories Editor's NotesTags Ecology
Interview: Saro Lynch-Thomason
Saro Lynch-Thomason singing ballads on the Blue Ridge Parkway
I lived in Appalachia for four years, and it's there that I encountered–and fell in love with–Appalachian ballad singing. Sparse and haunting, ballads are usually sung without instrumentation and tell melancholy tales of betrayal and lost love. Many draw on traditional literature–like folklore and fairy tales–and the medieval romance tradition. I wanted to know more, so I asked my friend Saro Lynch-Thomason, a folklorist and ballad singer, a few questions.
Lynch-Thomason–who is based in Asheville, North Carolina–is also an illustrator, author, and social activist. In 2012 she completed Blair Pathways: A Musical Exploration of America's Largest Labor Uprising–a researched compilation of over 20 historic songs from West Virginia's labor wars. Saro has led the Asheville Community Sing since 2010 and regularly teaches regional ballad workshops, Wassailing choruses, and May Day choruses on social justice themes. In 2013, Saro completed her solo CD Vessel–an acappella compilation of ballads and songs from Appalachia and the British Isles. Her distinct, powerful singing style transports audiences to Appalachian mountain hollers, 19th-century coal camps and old meeting houses.
(As a heads up, this interview mentions sexual assault.)
Ballad singing traveled from the British Isles to Appalachia, where you live. Can you tell me a little bit about ballad singing, how it originated and how it ended up in the U.S. Mountain South?
Ballads as they are often referred to today reference a particular story-song form that has been in Europe for nearly 1,000 years. Often a ballad involves first or third person narration, a simple rhyme scheme and a repeated melody. In the 1100s and 1200s, this form of storytelling was popular across what is modern-day France and Spain. A class of minstrels, supported by nobility, traveled and composed poetry and songs in this format. Over 2,000 poems have survived from this period, along with hundreds of melodies.
Since then there have been several periods of songwriting popularity, during which everyone from nobles to peasants took an interest in creating and singing their own ballads. Many ballads were written in the Middle Ages, about 300 of which survive today. But many ballads come from a revival period that began in the 1600s and had its heyday with the creation of the letterpress. People wrote and dispersed songs across Europe and America, drawing on old melodies and themes but with updated characters and political messaging.
During this period many ballads came to America, brought by immigrants from England, Ireland, and Scotland who arrived throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Immigrants families carried and adapted these songs for generations as they worked and settled across the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, the Piedmont in North Carolina, and the Appalachian Mountains. These song styles became dispersed into Afro-Appalachian communities as well, where people continued to change them.
Continue reading Interview: Saro Lynch-Thomason
Posted on April 27, 2016 May 17, 2016 Author Wren AwryCategories Interviews, UncategorizedTags Appalachia, Ecology, Feminism, History, Song
The Ghost Moose
by Ivy Jade
I should note that there were no moose in my fairy tales. Mice would weave dresses and songbirds wing in to harmonize, rats prey on babies, wolves leer at unaccompanied minors, and snakes give terrible advice, but for all her bedtime vespers Grandmother never had a word to offer on the moose. Moreover, I lacked an authoritative source to aid in personification of muskrats, ground squirrels, and particularly heather voles. The cats (duplicitous, self-serving) enjoyed sucking members of our abundant backyard vole community down to dollhouse rugs, and I struggled to decide what to make of it. Of course, a mouse in the house was inclined to die in the walls as opposed to sew me a back-to-school sweater, and the only rat I knew was Evans, who ate a lot of yogurt chips and liked to sleep in my sleeves.
Of the moose I had absolutely no guidance. Rocky and Bullwinkle couldn't be taken as communion; it lacked the mystic energy of tale layered over tale, the spiritual ambiguity of a frog emerging from the well with a golden ball or an ugly little man spinning straw by starlight.
Now that the moose are dying I wonder what it means for the stories, and I figure not much. There are ghost moose, which surely should mean something (hypothetical: the Little Match Girl is rescued from mortal hallucinations on the back of patchy, white-skinned moose), but moose as a fairy-species were passed over when they could have been messengers of kind fatality or knobby-kneed saviors, always owl-like with wisdom. Instead the ticks got them, a thousand sucking parasites to fell a thousand pounds of animal. Carbon dioxide got them, far from the realm of wicked witches or sadistic stepparents.
When I tired of the princesses, Grandma ought to have subbed in a moose for Little Red. I like to believe a moose would know a wolf in sheep's clothing. She would never be selfish or preening. She would know to fear the foe and not the forest, though I admit I'm spouting pure conjecture. I do know that a moose forswears a moral. She promises uncertainty and wildness. Moose are all the allegory I need for a good story, antlers added. They fade into Faerie meek as ghosts, and the birds build nests from their fur.
Ivy Jade studies biology at Smith College. She is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota and maintains a personal interest in the preservation of at-risk species.
Posted on October 14, 2015 April 25, 2016 Author Wren AwryCategories EssaysTags Ecology, Memoir