Printed Matters: Where the Leaves Fall

IMAGE COURTESY OF WHERE THE LEAVES FALL

By Sara Bellini

“Indigenous thinking breaks the extractive capitalist rationalism that looks at nature  the same way it looks at other people, aiming to dominate them. When looking at nature with a holistic sense, we understand that we are part of it and that we are connected to this planet.”

These words are taken from the editor’s note of Issue 12 of Where the Leaves Fall, entirely guest-edited by Indigenous activist Txai Suruí. The magazine regularly gives space to activists and Indigenous people from all over the world to share their experiences and their view of a sustainable future.

Where the Leaves Fall aims at exploring “humankind's connection with nature”, through articles, interviews, illustration and photography on the themes of art, agriculture, technology, science, philosophy, human rights and any field where our impact on the planet is visible. The commitment to rekindling our relationship with nature goes beyond articles on how climate change is linked with social justice. The entire production process of the physical journal is sustainable, from minimised paper waste to chemical free ink and a wormery to finish the staff food at the printing facility. 

The contributors to the journal are diverse, including marginalised voices from the global south, Indigenous people, women, people of colour and people from the LGBTQI+ community. Community, at a local as well as a global level, is fundamental to reach a more balanced relationship with the world we share. Where the Leaves Fall was born out of this shared value at OmVed Gardens, a space in north London - partnered with the UN World Food Program - promoting ecology and agricultural sustainability, where people can engage with and experience nature in creative ways. 

Below you’ll find our interview with editors Luciane Pisani and David Reeve.

Image courtesy of Where the leaves Fall

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

At the time we started there weren’t many magazines looking at climate breakdown through the lens of our connection with nature and print felt like a good way to take people away from digital spaces – including social media. We were very careful in how the magazine is printed – printing with one of the most environmentally friendly printers in the world - if you smell the magazine you won’t catch the whiff of any chemicals.

However with the pandemic and the various lockdowns and restrictions around that it became apparent we needed to go online as well. So we now encompass physical spaces for events, print, and online. One of our Australian collaborators recently told us our magazine is a message stick – you can look that up.

One of the focuses of WtLF is climate change. How do you turn feelings of anxiety, anger and hopelessness into a force for change?

It’s difficult to feel hope at a time of climate and societal breakdown. Systems that have held us up for so long are slowly collapsing and that’s creating a lot of discontent. Capitalism has failed us and the planet and we’re now in a system where politicians and industries are desperately trying to hold on to what they had and many people are being cast adrift. The growth of the far-right is a result of this. With the UK government’s indifference, the National Trust RSPB and WWF came together to create the People’s Plan for Nature to engage the public in caring and connecting with the natural world.

Similarly the UK government is largely ignoring the National Food Strategy that it commissioned so there’s a movement towards how people and business can take action and affect change. Rob Hopkins came up with the Transition Network (you can read an interview with Rob in the mag) which is all about communities coming together and reimagining the future. In Brazil you have movements such as the Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho and MST (Landless Workers’ Movement). Where governments and corporations fail us, people can come together and affect change - it’s about demonstrating that things can be done differently and work. 

What’s the importance of community and connection for you?

Our focus is on growing our local and global communities. Community is everything. It’s diversity. It’s understanding. It’s collaboration. It’s imagination. It’s strength. It’s power.

Could you share some details about your creative process, for example in regards to finding themes and selecting submissions?

The magazine is a project of OmVed Gardens – a space in north London that has undergone ecological transformation. We meet up there to discuss the things that people might want to focus on or talk about. From these meetings come the magazine’s themes. We then meet again to discuss initial ideas around those themes before casting the net out to our global audience. We have a period of submissions and then from the ideas developed at OmVed and the varying submissions, we select the features (text and photographic) and dialogues (shorter essays) for the mag.

For the 12th issue we wanted to do something different. Everyone was largely disappointed by the results of COP26. We watched the opening ceremony with some really impressive speeches – but were the ears in the auditorium listening? One of the speakers was Txai Suruí – an Indigenous activist from the Amazon’s Paiter Suruí people. In the lead up to COP27 we were interested in what the magazine would be if we asked Txai to edit the magazine, bringing her perspective to our readers at this crucial moment in the climate emergency.

We wanted to step back and allow her complete ownership of the editorial direction, and it has led to a series of fascinating features from the perspective of Indigenous peoples – mostly from the Amazon but also other parts of South America. As Txai said: “For a long time, the stories written about the Indigenous peoples of Brazil and the world were told through the eyes of the coloniser, almost always stereotyped and from a perspective of domination and superiority,” she writes. “We are now protagonists of our own history and the narrators of it - a history that didn’t start with the invasion. We continue our resistance that has lasted more than 500 years and that does not end now.”

It’s a powerful issue. As the shaman Davi Kopenawa states in the issue – we, the westerners, are the earth eaters. Our relationship with the land is one of extraction and destruction. It’s not about us saving Indigenous peoples but recognising that we need to open up and that they are the ones who can actually save us. They are amazing storytellers, artists and experts in conservation. They have a deep connection with the land and have survived and developed alongside it for 1000s of years. 

What did you learn about humankind’s connection with nature since issue 1?

We are nature and a part of the ecosystems in which we live. The rivers and seas run through our bodies. Our family includes the flora and fauna around us and the living soil under our feet.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with our readers?

If you’d like to know more about the magazine or become a part of the conversation then you can sign up to our newsletters, follow us on Instagram and check out the mag.

Hill Haven

The poet’s father on his tractor, by Bill Clark

By Carol Barrett:

After a poem by Craig van Rooyen

They aren’t moles. I’m told nights are too cold for moles in the high desert. Then what -- gophers? Ground hogs? Prairie dogs? In the damp soil west of the Cascades, moles were plentiful as robins. My father got his supply of traps at yard sales for two bits, some farmer having given up the harvest ghost. Whenever hills popped up, he’d dig down a few inches and lay them in, warn us to stay clear. He didn’t want an ankle enmeshed in the gears, a toddler’s curious hand clamped to the earth. When he got one, he’d announce it supper-time, bury the sleek body in the apple orchard, or along the edge of the woods, where alder leaves made for soft mulch.

I never looked one in the eye. But I spotted plenty of mounds, out digging potatoes or tearing corn from the stalk, peeling broad squash leaves back for a golden bonanza. One year a new ordinance forbid trapping them, on account of cruelty to animals. My father kept up his solution despite the risk. He figured, more humane than shooting them, and no law against that. He was especially perturbed when they dug up the lawn, clipped short for picnics of a summer evening, cedar table re-varnished every five or six years to restore what wind and rain had roughed up. The trap wasn’t an instant success. You had to wait for the critter to come up for air. It could take days, even weeks.

Here my hidden low-lifes stay quiet all winter, perhaps hibernating. But come spring, their handiwork pops up all over the yard. I scoop lush mounds into flowerpots for the pine seedlings that spring from ample cones. The soil is just right – combed and softened, free of roots, fine as biscuit dough. When I first started repurposing their primordial heaps, I feared I might slice one with the shovel, but it’s never happened. They dig their tunneled dugouts well below the planted surface. And they won’t cave in. When I tamp the excavated soil down, the lawn is flat as before the latest hill happened. In time the grass will spread across the brown moon, fill in with the help of whirling sprinkler.

We manage to co-exist. These creatures save their building frenzy for late at night when I’m already tuckered. When I open the door to a new day, I may find another hill to salvage for my tree farm, small but growing on the back deck. Sometimes I’m blessed with two or three, yards apart, a quick jaunt with the garden cart, sun on my neck. Life goes on as usual underground, my father’s ashes on a tunneled slope. He is getting acquainted with new friends, inviting them to watch reruns of Perry Mason, where it all turns out okay in the end, his pipe smoke mingling with the damp and porous earth.

***
Carol Barrett coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. She has published two volumes of poetry and one of creative nonfiction. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has lived in nine states and in England. She currently resides in the high desert of central Oregon. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, and in over fifty anthologies.

The Bleak and Wild Desolate Shore

By David Murphy:

Along the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula—
harbored by sea stacks,
washed by the ablutions of frequent rain,
and scrutinized by the salmon-keen eyes of fierce eagles
who sit perched with feathers made wet and salty by ocean spray—
lies a beach spliced by piney evergreens and the wintry Pacific Ocean.

It wears as its mantle a cloak of becoming fog:
wide filaments of thick mist wreathe the beach’s shoulders,
narrow wisps tuck into the crevices of teeming pine,
and, like a stole, that pale brume softly embraces
the necks of the majesterial, protruding stones.
The beach’s curvaceous, serene form lies upon its side
with its back to the land, knees tucked up against the tide,
with its stone lips ever kissing the briny, icy waves.
Water is its heart. In the rain, in the sea and spume,
throbs the lifeforce that begets the beach’s growth and decay,
shapes its projecting stone fingers, and creates its austere beauty.

In the night, the wan moon with its grey craters
beams down on sword ferns glowing nearly phosphorescent
and flashes on the bottle-gold eyes of great horned owls.
The moon turns milky the evergreen forest that adorns
the beach’s hips, and the moon tints the bleached driftwood
from day’s ivory to an iridescent alabaster of night.
That moon casts upon the beach’s cliffs a lustre
that speaks of shining rock, and, with its hushing silence,
it seems to make the surf’s voice boom.
With wind, the beach’s trees move sinuously and with susurrant song.
In the moonlight, upon the beach’s damp and footless shore,
lie whips of bull kelp, washed up and drying,
with algae blades like Medusa’s chaotic hair, their origins
in the marine forests of stone mantlepieces and rocky shelves.

The crows cackle madly in their rookery, the wind whishes,
surf roars, eagles scream, seals honk and bark and cry,
clouds morph then rework their hues, tides ebb and rise,
marshy mushrooms rise and rot with the sun’s circling,
the fragrance of evergreen sap freshens the air, salmon run,
gulls bed their island colonies with bones, osprey preen and fish,
glossy baneberries bear fruit like murderous scarlet pearls,
and purple mountain saxifrage color the cliffs.

In antiquity, the Makah resided here
using yarrow for childbirth, red cedar for dugout canoes,
yellow cedar for clothing, spermaceti for candles,
stones buffed by water to high polish and wound
by withy willows for anchor stones, having halibut for dinner,
sea otter teeth and whale fins for art, cherry bark for basketry—
which tightens as it dries—and bones for awls and adze handles.
They used tides and stones and fences to catch fish,
laid white clam shells on the tidal floor for better contrast
to see the fish in their traps. On a crisp, windy spring night
six hundred years ago, the tribe gathered on the damp beach
after partaking in a feast of salmon, octopus, and halibut
for a sacred ritual conducted to send its rowers and harpooners offshore
in a twelve-seated canoe to hunt whale. A chief chanted,
sang, worked the crowd into a frenzy before the night fire,
and when the throng felt most animated, the chief
poured whale oil onto the fire, so that it soared, crackling to
a crescendo, rose like the wave of a tsunami, and
in the dark night the bellowing and shrieking
of the Makah were swallowed up by the forest.

Over this desolate beach there is a kind of peacefulness:
gently lapping waves, the soft pattern of rain,
the rustle of a crow’s wings. It appears desolate, Shi Shi,
here in winter.

***

David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday in a small town in northern Oklahoma.  He attended public and private schools in Oklahoma and Louisiana.  He graduated from Oklahoma State University and Kansas State University, and he studied abroad on scholarship at Lunds Universitet in Sweden.  Later, he worked in Afghanistan during the war as the Administrative Director of a project funded by The World Bank.  He worked in Riyadh, then he won two English Language Fellowships from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  He was posted to Mexico.  He then worked for four years in Washington state government as a Program Supervisor for Title III funds.  Now he lives and writes full time in a small Mexican pueblo near the Pacific Ocean.  

Spring Grove

By Eugene Navakas: 

Winter:

Three mute swans live in this cemetery. We hear one before we see it. It flings itself forward against a stiff, stubborn sheet of surface ice, so fiercely, so indefatigably, that we wonder whether we should help. This is common winter behavior, our phones tell us, not to worry, but the force is so brutal and compulsive, the breast so soft and undefended, that we struggle to believe them. The swan’s face is unreadable. It makes no vocal sound. We’ve seen it in strange postures before⎯once, standing on the steps of a grand mausoleum, gazing into the tomb through a bronze veil of Arts-and-Crafts grape leaves, as if contemplating the past and future and all the world’s lost things⎯but it is, after all, an animal. There is a limit to our ability, however much we may refine it, to understand what it wants.

What we can do is walk. Every Saturday, for twelve months, with our boots we trace trails across 450 acres of hilly parkland devoted to the peculiar mix of feral nature and steady human memorialization. We aren’t the only ones. There are long, snaking funeral corteges for which we respectfully step aside and sometimes halt, arrested by a driving, rhythmic rumble leaking through the windows of a hatchback at the rear. There are joggers, whooshing past in suspended clouds of breath, cheeks flush with wind and cold and the heightened fluency of pounding, reliable hearts. There are even guided tours, groups of five or ten around a single, heavily bundled figure. Sharp mitten-dartings punctuate her recitation, before a familiarly grand mausoleum, about the Canteloupe King within. He grew rich, she says, by using refrigerated rail cars to ship Colorado melons nationwide.

Spring:

In March we turn and gasp at a great blue heron, portent of the coming profusion. It freezes at the lip of a pond, amid sunning turtles, and so do we. The turtles are red-eared sliders, the most popular pet turtles in the United States. They are also among the most damaging invasive species, outcompeting native turtles at great expense to ecosystem biodiversity and even human health, in the form of salmonella infection. The heron is a juvenile, more gently shaded than its maturer counterparts. Instead of blacks and whites, here suffuse more smoky blues and grays, fading as they extend from wing and impossibly sinuous neck to a long spearpoint of orange-bellied beak. The bird stares back at us, sidelong, from the black pit at the center of its banana-bright eye, then flaps up and out over green water⎯gliding, mouth open wide with seeming glee, until resettling, safer, on the far shore. The Eastern Redbuds show early signs of flower, but they’re barely intimations of the riotous, purple future.

Our asphalt path leads straight to May, beneath skies deep as ocean and the soaring, white-hulled wings of turkey vultures. Each branch, now, is fragrant color, sweet with bees. The Higan Cherries weep tears so cream they’re pink, so pink they’re cream, moody and intense as dreams. Around one bend, the stones themselves sprout flowers. Arcing, vibrant, lush cascades of custom, deeply felt bouquets⎯GRAMMY; a can of energy drink; a three-foot baseball; the wreathed photo-print of an ultrasound⎯dazzle gray- and red-granite monuments like stars. Thistles carved in sharp relief peek out behind the floral burst, below all-capped Scottish surnames. Each year, come Memorial Day, Scottish Travelers return to these stones, this parkland cemetery, to mourn and cherish their dead. If you search the digital record, you’ll find a contemptible archive of fear and bigotry, exoticized misunderstanding. An online business magazine tries to link the changing scope and luxury of the annual display to its own broad economic forecast. But if, for a moment, you breathe in the display yourself; if you pause, at respectful distance, on the trip back toward the sliders and the Weeping Cherries; you may feel a sharper, more familiar pang⎯something living, something lost.

Summer:

Summer is a season for the ears. What better place than a graveyard for hungry, roused life to fly shrieking from the ground? Here, specifically, over half a billion Brood X cicadas⎯roughly 1.5 million per acre⎯burrowed into the soil as fresh-hatched nymphs in 2004. For seventeen years, they fed on roots and tree sap less than a foot below the surface, until last week they tunneled up and out. The males broke through first, shedding skins and rapidly contracting tymbals, the clicking reverberators that, in chorus, sync into a jangly, hissing call loud as a motorcycle engine. The females heard that call, and now they’re everywhere. Pavement, grass, bushes, trees. Your car, your hair. Even the chocolate shop uptown, if you’re game for a crunch and can brave a mid-pandemic crowd. Their eyes are ladybugs, glossy red buttons with faint black spots for holes. Or at least that’s what we think their eyes are, until, much later, magnified, we spot the other three. Onscreen, inset like jewels on an igneous plain between submerged red moons, hides a tiny triangular trio. They’re called “ocelli,” simple eyes, and as far as we can see, they distinguish light from dark.

It’s funny how the greenest days, air thick with water, hot with sound, can also feel so full of death. In two short months, the cicadas will have come and gone, their seventeen-year regeneration restarted, today’s lively bodies in stacks like rotting blankets, warming future generations beneath the dirt. One of the most spectacular structures in these half-shorn, half-wild hills is a private Gothic Revival funerary monument built in 1870 in the style of Paris’s medieval Sainte-Chapelle. Its first interment was the English whiskey magnate whose fortune paid for its construction, as well as the transfer of his remains to marble catacombs eight years after initial burial in parts no longer known. On the second floor, above the crypts, sleeps a tall and narrow chapel twelve feet wide but thirty deep and thirty-four high⎯an austere, long-suffering space we’ll likely never see. While even on sweltering, swarming summer afternoons, the exterior remains a popular stage for professional photography, the heavy doors stay locked, the wrought-iron gates chained. Brides and grooms and Instagram influencers grin wide before the retreating flying buttresses of a family in disrepair. Just three Brood-X life-cycles after the building’s birth, the magnate’s granddaughter tried, and failed, to have it razed.

Fall:

It’s not hidden, but it takes a little looking to find the graves of Levi and Catherine Coffin, unmarked until 1902, when a memorial was erected in personal tribute by the city of Cincinnati’s Black population. During the forty-one years from their marriage to the end of the Civil War, the Coffins aided 3,000 enslaved people as they risked their lives in search of freedom. The Coffins’ home in Fountain City, Indiana became known as the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. Levi himself was often called its President. The landmark we use to return to this quiet, shattering spot⎯just seven miles north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon, the old, antebellum border⎯beckons only a few paces away. A fat, trunk-like branch radiates out like a sine wave from the base of a squat tree. It skims briefly above the trimmed, leaf-pocked grass, then dives, submerged, before again swooping back up. So much of Autumn feels between. Leaves turning, half-glorious, half-gone.

Our air comes quick, our tendons groan, as we lean ahead into the circuit’s final stretch. The trees buoy us⎯great oaks and beeches; sycamores; maples; a prodigious, solitary September elm, a national champion⎯as if a god would compete. Pixelated crests of red and orange, green and yellow, each shade just slightly tilted off of true, draw up our eyes to the spotlit, golden-hour sunbursts of hunting hawks. Closer to our feet, a labored scurry. A groundhog galumphs through underbrush and disappears. A frog’s twin bulbs peep up like periscopes above a dollhouse sea, then quickly dive and vanish. Around a corner, flustered scrabbling from a bewildered flock of spindle-legged turkeys, surprised from their leisure beneath the awning of a portable funeral tent. A mermaid rises from a harp atop a bed of kelp and conch and a guardian ring of dolphins. Louisa Lawson fished her out from marble in 1887. Now she decorates the tomb of the world’s once-largest manufacturer of architectural sheet metal. In the end, however, we return to the swans⎯which today, though on opposite sides, all share the same turbid, algal pool. There’s a kind of paradox to writing through the seasons. A temptation to squeeze shape from a cycle that never stops. We turn away and keep walking.

***

Eugene Navakas is a lit. Ph.D. turned TV writer who splits time between Oxford, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. His 2020 crime drama pilot script GALAPAGOS, TEXAS was recognized on Kyle's List here, and his dramedy pilot script EXPECTATIONS won the 2016 UCLA Extension TV Pilot Writing Competition. He also updated and co-performed a 19th-c. folk song about coral, which was featured on a podcast hosted by the Newberry Library in conjunction with his wife's academic environmental research here.

Traces of Wildlife

By Karen Parra:

As we set out on the well-worn trail, I linger behind allowing them space and time. The cadence of their deep voices rises and falls over the crunch of leaves under my feet. Seeing the similarity of silhouettes between my husband and son, I adjust the strap of my camera, feeling content. This holiday has taken on a more festive note with our son’s visit, and reflecting on our gathering promises to be an exciting entry for my gratitude journal. The recent warm spell, a welcome reprieve from the bitter Midwest winter, has given the three of us a chance to walk off the second helping of stuffing and slice of pumpkin pie, highlights of our Thanksgiving feast. I've brought the boys to one of my favorite trails, and from the empty parking lot, it looks like we have the place all to ourselves.   

At this point in the season, and in the quiet of the late afternoon, I expect minimal activity, mere traces of the wildlife which inhabit the woods. The melted snow has uncovered leaves, withered berries, acorn shells, fallen branches, and dark soil to release a rustic, woodsy aroma. Hearing commotion in the midst of a pile of fallen leaves, I turn to see a squirrel searching for part of her cache she buried earlier this fall. Scanning the canopy of trees and finding the tallest one, I wonder how many years ago some squirrel forgot to collect that buried acorn. Or maybe it was an intentional act of the squirrel to bury this one small gift, knowing over time it would become a grand oak offering nourishment and a safe, warm home for future generations. Puddles are scattered along the path, and in the soft mud I can make out paw prints, likely raccoon tracks. Searching the network of intertwined branches above, I count a variety of nests visible now only for the lack of foliage. Off the path I notice several piles of fresh deer scat and wonder where this herd has bed down for the afternoon. As I move on, I realize our trio has been spotted.  From deeper in the woods, I hear the bold screech of a blue jay. Following us, she swoops to a new tree continuing her alarm call.  

It is typical for me to search for signs of nature, noticing individual elements. But, on this particular walk, I consider the evidence of life as a collection of essential living things. With every step I reflect on the significant role of each species, and yet, in a new way I see these as a part of something much larger. Like a cast of characters, each species within an ecosystem contributes to an encore performance. 

I hear the rap-rap-rap of a woodpecker off in the distance and wonder if it is gorging on insects, marking territory, or stashing a seed. In the spring, holes left behind by one species of woodpeckers will be oozing sap which renders a much-needed sugar boost for hungry migratory hummingbirds. Arriving too early to the Great Lakes region, hummingbirds and other pollinators such as butterflies will be unable to forage on nectar from the array of native flowers. Tree sap can be a vital food and energy source to sustain them until the spring blooming. I notice the ceiling of the forest begin to open to the blue sky. I feel a shift in the breeze, a signal we must be getting close. It is as if I’m entering the grand foyer of a mansion, an entryway leading to something unknown, but breathtaking. There is a sense of excitement of what is to come.

Though today the water of the low-lying marsh is dried up, the spine of a narrow wooden bridge stands ready for the wet season ahead. On previous walks, this overpass has served as an observation deck for me while taking photos of passing turtles, soaking frogs, and if lucky, a wading great blue heron or egret. I would focus my Canon on sunbathing dragonflies perched high on the peaks of cattails as they bow and aim their wings toward the warmth of the summer sun. At the perimeter of the wetland, the multitude of pink petals on the swamp milkweed would offer a pop of color to my images. Much to my delight, this plant would also try hard to grace the marshy stench of decay with a lighter more appealing scent. But now, with the quiet of the winter season and in absence of these features, I appreciate the rhythm of the seasons and this time of preparing for spring. 

Stepping off the bridge, my feet sink gently into the lag gravel. I notice trees that dwarf in contrast to those in the woods behind me. Now with full sun, a variety of grasses and shrubs line the sloping trail of sand. As I wander and adjust to the changing terrain, it feels as if I have been transported to a new land. Gazing across this area, one might mistake it for a barren wasteland unfit for wildlife. Exposed to strong winds, extreme temperatures and other harsh elements, what life forms could persist?  However, like the forest and marsh, this too has an assemblage of unique living things which thrive together in the dune habitat of the Great Lakes. 

The native plant Pitcher’s thistle, similar to our resilient frontier pioneers, is one of the first to establish and colonize a novel ecosystem for the good of others to come. This native plant with its heavy seeds and deep taproots can withstand the extreme conditions of an open sandy coastline. The presence of this valuable plant, some might mistake for a weed, is essential for the next wave of immigrating species, both flora and fauna, by supplying shelter, shade, and food. Now, with a more stable habitat, other vegetation such as Houghton's goldenrod can flourish and produce nectar to sustain pollinators such as the rusty patched bumble bee. Monarch butterflies, an iconic pollinator, will pass through during their migration north and east, and the bounty of these native plants will serve as a needed layover in their long journey. In addition, hundreds of migratory birds use this Mississippi flyway as an area to forage and rest before the next leg of their flight. Other birds, like the charismatic piping plover shorebird, make this their final stop to mate and raise their brood. The magnificent snowy owl represents other species who are year-round residents of this robust dune habitat. Each species with distinctive ecosystem functions, fulfilling a niche, and in concert with other wildlife, also lends balance and persistence to the dunes.     

At the top of the sandy ridge, I widen my gaze and scan the horizon. Similar to the illusion of an infinity edge pool, the lake appears never-ending, and the vast, vibrant blue water makes the sky pale in comparison. This immense body of water shifts my perspective, and I suddenly feel small. I try to imagine the size and magnitude of the series of glaciers that, in succession, scoured the land for thousands of years.  As they advanced and receded, the glaciers formed the five Great Lakes, leaving them abundant with fresh water and setting the stage for thousands of miles of dune and coastal habitat supporting an array of species. What they have left behind is stunning and unique.

Lost in thought, the squawk of a seagull pulls me back to the here and now. I notice my husband and son walking ahead and realize the gap between us is closing. Without the protection of the trees, the wind is brisk. I turn up the collar on my jacket, as the three of us come together where the trail fades and the shoreline begins. Taking turns with the binoculars we skirt the water’s edge, and after a time, the sun dips lower in the sky casting our long shadows on the sand, our signal to turn back. 

Once again, I look toward my family ahead of me on the trail. I follow their lead thinking of the future, and in my mind’s eye I see a little one with pigtails, no taller than their knees, stretching out her chubby little arms to hold their hands. Walking together in this place for us, they gently swing her between them.  As I envision this scene, I also notice a walking stick my husband is using to steady his balance, an indication that life moves on.

I stay with this thought, of leaping forward in time, and wonder what changes this natural space will endure and whether the wildlife will be able to adapt. While I retrace my steps on the path, I note the ecosystem as well as the essential parts. To protect the dune ecosystem will ensure a place for endemic species in addition to the wildlife only passing through. Further, I consider how the loss of one species might affect the system’s ability to persist. Would the dune landscape persevere in the absence of Pitcher’s thistle? Could pollinators and migratory birds thrive without the resources provided by this and other native plants? More questions continue to surface as I pass through the marsh and forest ecosystems. However, as I take the last few steps of this walk and rejoin my family, I realize it is the health and preservation of natural spaces like these which are necessary to support the indispensable species of plants and animals.  

***

Karen Parra is a graduate student of Project Dragonfly, an Advanced Inquiry Program offered through Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  Her work is a blend of her curiosity of nature, academics in biology, passion for environmental conservation, as well as the joy of photography. She lives with her husband in Illinois, near Lake Michigan.

Broken

by Lori Mairs:

Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them. 

The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it. 

I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.

Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated. 

Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.  

Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.

My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.

Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume. 

I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection. 

There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.

There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth. 

As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts. 

***

Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia.  She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work.  She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna.  In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry.  In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world.  For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.”  She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death.  She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.

Beachy Head: trauma and transformation

By Julius Smit:

I'm standing on Beachy Head, a chalk headland rising to 531 feet/162 metres above sea level and despite intermittent spring sunshine, there's a sharp wind coursing over the wide open space. Beachy Head is known as the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. It's found west of Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the south-east coast of England. The name originates from the corrupted French beau chef meaning 'beautiful headland.' The writer and walker Richard Jefferies wrote about the place in 1883 in an article aptly named The Breeze on Beachy Head. 'The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is wind-swept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.' I agree. I too am wind-swept and washed with air. The headland is visited and walked on all year round, more in good weather than in bad, but even in November mists or strong February winds, the site can make you refocus on yourself and your sense of existence. It can turn you inside out.

Local inhabitants and visitors from all over the globe are attracted to the area for its space, height and the views: to gaze out across the light of the English Channel with a post-Brexit vision, to imagine the land mass of Europe beyond the horizon. It's a place of meeting and transience, evocation and conversation. It's also a darker place given the number of people who come here to end their lives. On average twenty people a year throw themselves over the edge. On one of my previous walks up here a man with tears in his years walked past me and muttered that someone had gone over. Division of land masses, division of existence.

The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, set up in 2004, is a volunteer led organisation whose members are trained in skilled crisis intervention support. Members take regular patrols along the length of this coastline ready to save lives and help anyone in need. I often see them on their walks dressed in their high-viz jackets. The headland is an 'edge place', physically and psychologically, signified by the number of wooden signs conspicuously announcing in stark white lettering 'Cliff Edge'. In the past, friends and relatives used to leave bunches of flowers with written card notes attached to the thin wire fence which runs at intervals alongside the cliff edge. Sometimes, small crosses have been placed in the ground near to the spot from where the deceased person jumped. In 2018, Eastbourne Borough Council decided in its wisdom to remove these memory tokens and shrines, no doubt in a move to counter a site favoured for suicide in favour of encouraging more positive tourism. 

On this Sunday afternoon I feel pivoted between air, land and sea, and I think of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for not only seeing what's around me but also what's within me. Admittedly there's no fog to be seen, but the vast sky with its scudding clouds makes me feel insignificant on the land's design.

A road not far away runs past the Beachy Head public house, the Countryside Centre with its shop and rotating exhibitions and a large car park. A public telephone box bears a prominent sign stating that the Samaritans are always there, night and day, to receive your call. They are there to listen. Listening. At the beginning of the Cold War, Beachy Head was chosen as a strategic site for a government radar installation. An underground bunker was built and by 1954 the 'looking and listening' site was fully operational. It was only around 1960 when decisions were made to wind down the activity that the complex was eventually demolished.

Although concrete slabs and grass have now covered over most of the surface evidence, traces of the operation are still around if you know what to look for. As I walk around I notice a ring of metal barriers with Keep Out notices has been erected around a grassy mound, part of which has been ripped apart exposing smashed concrete slabs. I go closer to investigate and can just make out a narrow flight of rusty metal rung steps leading down into an underground darkness, no doubt once an entrance to an operations room monitoring codes and signals. It's not only the height I must be aware of, but also what's under my feet.

There's more to the breeze on Beachy Head than is realized, as it's one of the prevailing natural forces which continue to batter and pummel at the chalk cliff, wearing away half a metre of land a year. Regular news reports in the local press announce alarming splits near to the cliff edge, followed later by reports of large rock falls onto the beach below. Emergency barriers are then erected and the Cliff Edge signs are moved once again. The visitors walk around and the land moves. All notions of stability are questioned on this 'edge place.'

During WWII, Beachy Head was the last land formation many aircrews saw on their missions to occupied Europe. To mark their operations a large memorial block of granite has been placed on the headland with images and inscriptions relating to the work of the squadrons. Now, in place of aircraft, there are regular meetings of a paragliding club whose members are often seen exploiting thermals, floating and soaring above a once defensive landscape, attached to their curled coloured fabric wings like surreal insects. I've often heard their 'music' as they swished above me.

I'm not tempted today by the ice-cream van parked strategically in one corner of the car park. It has a small queue of customers desirous of icy satisfaction. I turn away and start on my walk back home. On the way down I spot a discarded plastic printed arrow, black on yellow, a reminder of last year's annual autumn Beachy Head Marathon. Yes, add runners to the mix. All is movement, all is flux.

***

Julius Smit is a photographer, poet, zine maker and a member of the Walking Artists Network - Website