About

I am drawing a map from the  sea  to the   sky.

Let’s start in the place where history runs liquid.

Its particular hue is made up of bull kelp, phosphorescence, and ghosts.

Watery bodies full of language, but they cannot speak.

A 19th ce. Romanticist-style painting depicting the Puget Sound coastline.
Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast
Albert Bierstadt, 1870
A school of fish swimming through a forest of bull kelp in the Salish Sea.
The Pacific Ocean from the shoreline at dusk. A few people stand by water's edge, watching the waves gently lap.
maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore
Sky Hopinka, 2020

The truth about water is it gestates all life and all death, all arrival  and departure.   It is the beginning,  and the end, and the beginning again.

Along the coastline, the jagged start of earth, there is a lostportal where the sea braids into a river.   This small stretch at the mouth was a complex intertidal wetland for many millenia.

Once winding and variegated, it was then dredged up and straightened out. 

Carbon stores were stocked with cement and steel, and parceled out to industry.  

The oxbow lake here became a B-17 factory, became a dumping ground, now a superfund site.  Land estranged into property and refuse, again and again.

But this river is elastic. Floodplains and groundwater continue to surge, and soil remains porous.

Blue heron and bull trout reappear upstream where life springs back into its bend— where water returns to its body.

A large indentation in the sand takes the shape of a human body. Tidal waters foam and flow into it.
Silueta Series
Ana Mendieta, 1976
A small blue heron sits at the edges of the Cedar River. The water is calm and relaxed, reflecting the vibrant autumnal hues of the surrounding forest.
Satellite imagery of a subalpine river winding through a lush green landscape.
White River flowing into the North Cascades, Google Earth

Meander is the special word for how the river straddles the landscape, heaving left and flushing right.

Sediment presses into the hollows, softening the flow of blue and making room for woodlands to root.

Over time, water sculpts earth’s matter into its likeness— sinuous and rhythmic, curling and cresting; the undulating shape of memory. 

Some rivers like this one have recently been anointed legal personhood. They have the enforceable right to meander, to remember, be as they were, are, full of vitality and cognition and contradiction, without rupture or contamination.

1
A bend of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, flanked by lush green landscape and blue sky.
2
The dark blue Biobío River, winding through the dry foothills of the Andean Valley.
3
Wispy clouds hanging low over the meander of the Atrato River in the Andes, couched in a dense, flat forest.

First it was the Whanganui River1 in Aotearoa, then the Biobío2 and the Atrato3 of the Andes.

Many rivers now, here and everywhere,   insist, imbibe, drift,  drop,dive.  

Onward, our river narrows, slips down the shoulders where soil is more black and embodied.

Salmon come back here each fall: Chinook, Coho, Sockeye, Chum.

Four medium-sized coho salmon finding a gentle spot to rest in the Cedar River.
A flock of geese feeding in the Duwamish River after a rush of salmon just passed through.

They migrate from the sea, to their ancestral streams, mapping the meridians of the earth through magnetite crystals in their tissue.

Here to this mossy riverbed, still, salmon return to birth new lifeand pass onto the next.

Three members of the nomadic Bakhtiari Tribe of Iran ride their horses through the valley at dusk.
People of the Wind
Anthony Howarth, 1975

On multiple occasions I’ve thought about dying here too.

I’d curl up like a slug, let the sun ripen one side of me while my skin and spirit pool down into earth.

Sunlight passes through the trees and illuminates the river bank with bright green.

Slowly my whole being would dissolve into an aqueous state, held conscious only by the thin, outer spread of cells filtering my nutrients back into the soil.

Public signage from a forest trail depicts a small black bear eating a salmon. The description reads: "This little bear is happily munching on salmon. When finished, she'll wander, dropping ocean nutrients in the forest."
A small olive grove in the rolling hills of Palestine, 1999. Men, women, and children pick the olives, some using ladders to help.
Olive harvesting in Deir Dibwan, Palestine, 1999

In the upper ravine, silver air cleaves open the mountain side.

This was once an old growth forest.

A small, crystal-green glacial stream winding through the forested mountains. Lots of big rocks and outcrops.

As we near the river’s vanishing point, there is a feeling of time dilating rapidly.

Eternity ripples through the gullies, desire whips the limestone, and the canopy soughs its whole history in verses.

Afternoon light streams through a towering tree canopy, diffracted by the cool, misty air.

The blue here looks almost iris to me, ultraviolet.

Its lucidity clarifies the edges, the edges, of each word on this page.

At last we reach a clearing. Watch the late firmament stretchopen over a glacial
outwash of twelve thousand years.

Glacier Peak in the North Cascades in the summer. A thin blanket of snow still covers the mountain, melting gradually into a bed of lupine flower.
A small, black-tailed deer looks curiously at the camera. Behind her is a thin stretch of snow, and a large fallen tree covered in moss.

Solar wind splinters into meltwater; flowering into aster, lupine, crocus; for sleepy marmots, mule deer, and char; thickets of fir and hemlock;

A small patch of crocus flower, with light purple crowns and saffron yellow centers.

then plumbed down to a thousand twinkling homes acrossthe basin.  

All of us drinkingfrom the same aquifer.

  This marks the end of our map and the source of the river.

“All water has perfect memory and is trying to get back to where it was.” —Toni Morrison

A full moon over a sleepy, tree-lined river, winding toward the horizon.