The Bridges We Build, The Stories We Walk Home
It is raining outside, the color is gray, monochromatic, cool. I am watching rain drops suspended on rose bushes not yet leafed. Each drop is a glass sphere reflecting a horizon of red from last year’s rose hips. I am looking through the rain drop as if it is both a microscope and telescope when I hear a ping on my phone. It is my friend Victoria who has just sent me a photograph of Kyiv where she lives and works as a writer. The sky above Kyiv is lifting with a curtain of gray being pushed up by the strength of a pink horizon. What is most curious are the zig-zag flashes of white across the dark clouds. I immediately see them as missiles or bombs captured in motion. Victoria writes, “Sorry, it’s an accidental picture of Kyiv.”
I look again at the photograph and now see the same flashes of light I thought to be artillery fire now as a reflection from a window of neon lights. In war, nothing is as it appears – and here on this rainy day in Cambridge, nothing is as it appears either. I am watching water globes hanging from bare bushes. The spheres of our focused attention are varied and seen from many angles.
Our messages crossed. “Oh, my” I wrote.
“But maybe, it was meant for you.” Victoria wrote.
I write back, “And I was just taking this picture.” I sent her an image of two water droplets about to fall from the throny stems.
“Oh…these are powerful images.”
“How are you? We heard about the blackouts. Is it getting any better?”
“It’s much better now. The electricity is mostly stable in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Of course, if tomorrow Russians hit some power station again, there might be a black out.”
“That is good news.” Our messages cross again.
“Yes, the daily uncertainty – is it’s own violence.”
“Are you able to write?” I ask. “Your words reach me as water.”
I continue looking into the clear drops hanging – rain drops fall, bombs obliterate homes, tears stream down faces, as the dead leave us their bodies to bury. I leave the garden and walk back to my apartment in the rain, homesick.
Victoria and I met in Poland in November 2022, part of a diplomatic mission through the U.S. State Department and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. It was a convening of more than a dozen writers from around the world at Krasnogruda, the family home of the poet Czesław Miłosz located on the border of Poland and Lithuania. We were gathered to talk about Home/Land(s).
Victoria and I have continued our friendship through words across the miles. I gave her a necklace of seeds known as ghost beads among the Diné to keep her safe. She gave me a poem titled, “Homecoming,” that now sits on my desk as a reminder we are sisters in stories, that we give our words, especially in war.
I think back to my own home ground on October 2, 2022. When I close my eyes, I return to this site of disturbance: I smelled it before I heard it. I heard it before I saw it and when the roar of water reached us – there was a forceful break in the berm that was protecting our home. Suddenly, my husband and I standing outside, watched a raging red dirt river cutting into darkness. It could only be seen in fragments – the torrential runoff from the microburst up valley reached us several hours later. We had to shout to hear one another, the water in times of drought seemed endless as we watched more and more land erode and wash away – from dusk the water widened its course until the velocity of force and sound lulled us to sleep as we dreamed of our bodies rolled into mud bodies baked by noonday demons, blinded by the sun, until we can no longer see but feel ourselves breaking into pieces on the dry cracked playas bleached white in the heat of the desert.
That night, that roar, those dreams live inside of me.
The sound of water blasting through our place. Our quiet place disrupted by water cascading over the berm we had made to protect ourselves from exactly this. Within minutes, that protection was gone. My internal compass shattered. I didn’t know where I was. The turbulence didn’t register, only the strangeness of the relentless sound of water threatening our home, a river running red in moonlight, fifty feet to the side us, caving in with the torrents racing north. A terrifying beauty was eroding our known world. There was nothing my husband, Brooke and I could do but watch – with shovels in hand – we watched, helpless in awe of the destruction surrounding us.
First light created silhouettes of Adobe Mesa before dawn. A haunting quiet loomed large. I opened the doors. No birdsong. Just silence in the aftermath of the flash flood. Still in my nightgown, I put on some tall rubber boots. I didn’t expect to walk far – I only wanted to survey the terrain to see what remained. I walked to the place of my midnight dreaming and knelt down to touch the red earth. It felt like damp clay, something to shape in the hand: a ball, a pancake, a snake. I kept walking with my hands holding the evidence stunned by the ground that had been moved, scoured, displaced. I ended up at my neighbor’s home – knocked on the door to see if they wanted to witness what the night had brought. They, too, put on their boots and together, disheveled by lack of sleep, we walked for several miles among the strained wreckage laid down by water – all grasses were pointing down valley caught in the flow, now looking like carefully combed hair set in the flood debris. Swirls of thick mud acting like quick sand pulled off our boots leaving us barefoot. It felt good to walk. Destruction creates distortion and disorientation. Ground truthing becomes its own reorientation to a changed world.
By the end of the day, the same volatile storm creating relentless waves of red water breaking through the night -- heard not seen – now, was almost dry. How could that be? Sand was sifting through my fingers like a broken hourglass. The desert so parched before the storm, sent water two directions: down valley as a flood; and when the water settled into small pools, water seemed to seep deep down to the molten core of the Earth instantly until steam appeared rising to the heavens through the cracks in sand before me.
I walked back to the house and picked up a rake. I returned to the site of disturbance and began raking sand. Out of turbulence and loss, I found a practice of peace.
On the night, we arrived in Warsaw, two missiles aimed for or fired from Ukraine hit farmland just inside Poland. It was hard to know the origin there was so much confusion on the air waves. One person was killed. The streets in Warsaw were suddenly empty. It was quiet with a light rain – neon lights, red-yellow, green, stop-wait-go, pooled in the puddles on black shiny streets. Is this what the beginning of war feels like – what is truth, what is propaganda, who benefits from both – I turned on the news, there were conflicting reports in terms of what had happened. President Biden grabbed a microphone from his location in Europe and said quickly, “It was an accident.” I wondered how such a definitive response was possible.
Our writer friends from Ukraine en route to Poland were held at the border for two days much of it in darkness due to electrical blackouts.
What do I know of war?
Czesław Miłosz’s silhouette in the snow was my awakening in Krasnogruda. The poet’s outline was made of words beginning with 1944 in Warsaw, the city violently disappearing into rubble by Nazi forces even as the Uprising ‘unbinds their tomatoes, blood red.’ The poet recites “A Song On The End of the World,” Do not believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above. No one believes anything now, except the sun and the moon became stand-ins for dawn and dusk mirrored in lake waters before it freezes. When we think about this war, we freeze. Brecht’s birds fly. I walk into the naturalist’s corner and see a vase full of feathers. Who picks up the fallen angels of war?
The village of Sejny is suspended from the ceiling in the manor at Krasnogruda. Victoria comes up behind me and whispers, “Tell me what to do with my grief?” I don’t turn around but whisper in the cold, “There is no going back. Grief and love are siblings.” In that private moment, Victoria and I became sisters – both of us documenting the stories of the Dead. War crimes n Ukraine. War crimes committed in the American West on public lands from oil and gas development to endangered species. This is a war I do understand.
We can eat with another and sing for the last day of the world. People stay stoic and offer few responses. Life goes on. A bee circles a clover, /A fisherman mends a glimmering net. /Happy porpoises jump in the sea…Denial is useful in the apocalypse. What we don’t want to see and what we choose to see keep us attentive to the difference between being numb and feeling alive.
How does one document the evolving apocalypse? David Woo and I met for the first time in the Warsaw airport – both of us residents in the American West – David in Arizona, me in Utah. Our introductions were short, our shared tears over all we are losing by way of drought and water and climate collapse was immediate. What are the stories we choose to tell and those that render us silent?
We write. We write poems and stories and essays. We write to make sense of a world delivered to us in black and white. We write out of our discomfort. We write out of our hunger into our thirst. We write out of chaos. We write with the language we were given. We write with the language we adopt. With a pencil in hand, we create a narrative we can live inside.
“All stories are also the stories of hands,” John Berger writes in his novel From A to X, “picking up, balancing, pointing, joining, kneading, threading, caressing, abandoned in sleep, cutting, eating, wiping, playing music, scratching, grasping, peeling, clenching, pulling a trigger, folding….” With our hands wide open and our hands clasped in prayer, we learn to adapt. Hands on Earth, we recommit ourselves to life and death as change becomes our only instruction.
The flash flood that occurred on October 2, 2022, was actually two floods that raged for 24 hours. In the two and a half decades we have lived in Castle Valley, Utah, we have never seen this kind of violence rendered by a storm. Climate collapse is upon us. Or is it Climate Renewal? Hurricane Ian ravaged Florida a few weeks prior. Friends of ours are now homeless living in the homes of friends until rebuilding begins. Sanibel Island is in rubble, the ocean covering the island with sea surges. And in 2021, 9 million acres burned in the American West. Again, friends lost their homes, now displaced. Another lost his life. Extremes of fire, floods, drought, and hurricanes is becoming the norm. We are being asked to start over, begin anew. Climate change is not our future, Climate Renewal is happening right now, right here. What stories are we telling.
Home has become a violence. Home has become a reinhabitation. We can choose another way forward if we can reimagine it together.
In truth, I am only telling half of the story of what home feels like to me as an American living in the red rock desert of Castle Valley, Utah. When daylight struck the desert where we live, the site of disturbance was not just about water, but of mud sliding and boulders rolling, crashing, crushing, alongside uprooted trees -- resettlement occurs after the flooding stops. Once we stop and get our bearings, what is revealed upon closer examination?
Much of our land is gone, eroded and redistributed, with huge gullies now gouges into the land. What became visible to us now was that our neighbors to the west of us had built fortresses around their homes for just such a flood. The flood had flowed around them with no harm done to their property. They had hired backhoes and front loaders to dig holding ponds in anticipation of when Placer Creek would rise and flood again as it had done this summer. In so doing, they had indeed protected themselves, but where and how they diverted the floodwaters had not concerned them. Their own welfare was their only concern. The flood indeed flowed elsewhere saving their land and flooding ours floodwaters diverted toward us -- hitting us directly with the full force of the flooding torrents a quarter of a mile away.
When the mayor visited our ravaged home and it became clear what had happened up stream, she said simply, “I’m sorry, your neighbors had every right to do what they did – protect themselves -- it’s private property rights. Unfortunately, it didn’t work so well for you.” Individual rights carry the day over the common good. Our neighbors fly the banner “Don’t tread on me.”
America is in an uncivil war where the rights of one becomes the abuse of another. How do we forge a civil society where we can see beyond our own self-interests? How does a community come together in times of climate collapse – in drought and in flood --to rethink, reimagine, and restore a sense of neighborliness to one another and all species who call this red rock desert home.
I dream of embracing our collective home through change.
In our small valley, we are asking for a long view that is community conceived not individually reckoned at another’s expense. We are bringing in water engineers and soil scientists to help us see where the waters flow and how to prepare for more floods that will surely come within the Placer Creek watershed that empties into the Colorado River. It may be that Brooke and I will offer part of our land as a holding reservoir for flood waters, part of a community plan we are drawing up together. It may be that our neighbors redraw their boundaries for water storage into an overall water recovery system that protects and benefits everyone. We are in the beginning stages of having these hard but essential conversations in the name of a communal vision for the future, not an individual stance taken without thinking of how it might affect the whole.
With these parameters, I believe climate collapse can be seen as climate renewal if we are brave enough to do the work required of us together. We can draw a new map for ourselves as we navigate through a shared future, recognized as something more instead of something less, as we let go of our former selves who have been subservient to a a capitalist model. We are seeing how a competitive stance that counts on scarcity can evolve to a collective embrace of abundance.
This is a story of hands – all hands on deck – and how we extend our hands to each other – and move from conflict toward care – regarding watershed management, food cooperatives, and safety protocols for fire and floods.
There is the war in Ukraine that has now entered its second year. It is an ongoing brutality leaving death and war crimes in its wake. Blackouts are occurring. Russian occupation is a threat but not an option for the Ukrainian people who wave the banner of victory high with the support of most of the world. We hold the colors of sky blue, sun yellow wherever we live.
There is another war in America that is simmering around binaries of beliefs, one that trades in conspiratorial ideologies and fear, with guns as a god-given right not a responsibility; the other side invites inclusion, diversity, and belonging as we heal past wounds. Racial injustices and class inequities are deepening. Political rhetoric has become lethal. Red and blue states of mind threaten to divide us from our humanity.
Each war carries its own violence as different languages are spoken. Metaphors do not belong in wars, some argued around our table in Krasnogruda. Can we take back our Mother Tongue and expand it, rather than abandon it and constrict it? And what are the rules of being an exile -- what every writer is if we tell the truth? The poet ko ko thett said, “Your nation-state you’ve clung to may go up in smoke overnight. The nation within you, no one can destroy.” Our fellow writer, Shenaz Patel ends our round table discussion with this words from Mauritius, Archipelago thinking is possible.
I write to Chris Merrill and Nataša Ďurovičová:
What wild times these are — the losses – and yet the ways we are being forced to evolve on a new path of existence — if we are to survive — What lingers in my mind and heart are the honest and challenging conversations we are having and not having — what gets said and what is unsaid, and then, doubly said when we don’t even believe it. The performance of language among us, by us, to us, is killing us and worse — creating a loneliness of thought that is crazy making. This is not the unconscious toll of passive aggression, it is the conscious collective oppression of fear that keeps us unknown and isolated, especially to ourselves. Loneliness is now a landscape we travel. The elephants in the room are asked to leave because metaphors have been declared dead. The policing of language undermines the excitement of speaking freely, the play of words, the collision of paragraphs spoken side by side and on top of each other that build a new and unexpected narrative that opens the door to stories -- to listen – to be present in a heartfelt way — where doors and windows open, walls break down, ceilings disappear – we stand outside beyond fear, beyond ourselves, to the communal meadow, Miłosz’ s meadow where conversation is dancing, loving, shocking, at times even violent until we stop and realize we have been broken open by feeling alive again through our passionate, evolving, serendipitous discourse — our curiosity saves us -- courageous inquiry inspires our questions, welcoming owls to stand on our heads. We are dying to have real conversations that can carry us to authentic landscapes of thought and action where change takes root. I want to change. I am so tired of the lies — the ongoing flash floods of ignorance and selfishness that come like waves — when we care only about ourselves, and the safety of our own compounds we compound the destruction of our own communities, we now find ourselves in an emerging borderlands.
There is a bridge behind the manor at Krasnogruda that connects the wild world of beavers and muskrats, blackbirds and woodpeckers with the domesticated life of breaking bread around a table and making art in the spirit of collaborations. It is not a straight bridge that is emerging from the snow – It is a crooked bridge that registers like lightning from my vantage point on the hill behind the manor.
Krzysztof Czyżewski writes in “Before the Mystery of the Bridge Begins,”
“A footbridge which was built across the ford on the river runs zigzagging, it loses its straight line, because a straight line – as people of old say – is walked by evil spirits, and perhaps the devil himself. Whoever, in the borderlands, takes a straight path towards his goal, will quickly lose his way.”
Perhaps we all are standing on the borderlands, physically, politically, and spiritually. We are all migrants left in the debris of our consumptive past walking toward a future we cannot see but feel as a global fever reaching all of us.
Czesław Miłosz’s words in “Late Ripeness” return to me:
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.
The way forward in this moment of planetary uncertainty is to work “the vineyard” with others. With climate collapse casting a shadow over this beautiful, broken world can we see it as a brutal renewal brought about through transformative change; where seas are rising and island people and Native communities in the Arctic are being forced to relocate; alongside migrants on the move world-wide looking for new Home/Land(s); as warming temperatures, fires, and extreme weather exacerbate conflicts and political instability worldwide; we are alive, we are confused, we are scared and we can step forward and create uncommon bridges to span the differences and distances between us. There has never been a straight path to transformation, only crooked paths, messy and wondrous detours, unpredictable and creative movements like flash floods in the desert. The jackrabbits where we live are all ears and legs. They run like lightning following the zig-zag path through fences and over arroyos that favors multiple perspectives heightened by illumination and skillfulness. They make it difficult for hawks and coyotes to follow them. They are shape-shifters who can see through obstacles.
“Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge/Going into white fog…” writes Miłosz. We cannot see what is ahead, but we can walk with our hands extended to those we meet in search of a shared faith, a belief in collaborative thinking. We can begin the work of bridge building through offerings of hospitality through the gifts that are ours: be it a poem, a story, a song, a loaf of bread, a pomegranate or a simple bow of recognition.
Victoria, my Ukrainian sister in times of grief and beauty, tells me that she is learning how to write in times of war, “I kind of got used to the war to the extent that I can write.” My response to her is similar, “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.” I am writing through my grief which is love which is why a story is another zig-zag bridge for us to walk with the people we live among in the places we call home. We see ourselves anew in an altered landscape with fresh maps in hand.
A homecoming story is available to us. Victoria reminds me in her poem by this name how we turn toward this story:
Your home turns into
a gray rock
a bead
a last-year apricot pit
a lego figure
a seashell from Crimea
a sunflower seed
a button from Dad’s uniform
And then the home fits into your pocket
and there it
sleeps
You should pull home out
when you are ready
in a safe place
Little by little, your home will grow
and you will never,
remember, never ever
be homeless.
So what did you take with you?
I only took this story
The story about homecoming
Here,
I pulled it out into the light –
it is growing.
Terry TEMPEST WILLIAMS, an American writer, educator, and activist in areas of environment and social justice, is the author of over twenty books, including the environmental literature classic Refuge - An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Other books include Finding Beauty in A Broken World, When Women Were Birds, The Hour of Land - A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, and, most recently, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Her work, which has gained her a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, is widely translated and anthologized. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School.