[The Ohio River Speaks] The Veil Of Unreality

[The Ohio River Speaks] The Veil Of Unreality

by | Nov 9, 2020 | Listening to the Land

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Find the rest of Will’s journey with the Ohio River here.

By Will Falk / The Ohio River Speaks

One of the defining questions of my life has been: How have humans been capable of pushing the planet to the brink of total ecological collapse? The answer is undoubtedly complex and one that I will likely pursue for the rest of my life. But, I’ve long thought that a major part of that answer can be found in the spiritual failings of those most responsible for the destruction.

I found support for this idea in the writings of the great Lakota scholar, lawyer, and author Vine Deloria, Jr. In his book God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Deloria argued:

“Ecologists project a world crisis of severe intensity within our lifetime, whereas religious mythologies project the end of our present existence and the eventual salvation of the chosen people and the creation of another world. It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naïve conception of this world as a testing ground of abstract morality to a more mature view of this universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political.”

As I read this quote on the banks of the Wabash (a major tributary of the Ohio River) in southern Indiana’s Harmonie State Park, I wanted my journey with the Ohio River, and the writing that comes from it, to contribute to this radical shift in outlook, this spiritual change that Deloria described. Not long after I came to this realization, however, I read a warning Deloria gave about how difficult achieving this radical shift truly will be. He wrote:

“The problem of contemporary people, whatever their ethnic or cultural background, lies in finding the means by which they can once again pierce the veil of unreality to grasp the essential meaning of their existence. For people from a Western European background or deeply imbued with Christian beliefs, the task is virtually impossible. The interpretation of religion has always been regarded as the exclusive property of Westerners, and the explanatory categories used in studying religious phenomena have been derived from the doctrines of the Christian religion. The minds and eyes of Western people have thus been permanently closed to understanding or observing religious experiences.”

As a person from a Western European background who had previously been deeply imbued with Christian beliefs, my heart sank when I read Deloria’s words that the task of piercing “the veil of unreality to grasp the essential meaning” of my existence is “virtually impossible.” However, and with a hope that this would make the late Deloria smile in whatever world he presently occupies, I used my lawyerly pedanticism to conclude that “virtually impossible” is not equivalent to “completely impossible.” Additionally, I thought I could call on the Ohio River as an ally in this endeavor.

I did not know where to start the task until I came to Deloria’s discussion of the different views of death held by Christians and what Deloria calls “American Indian tribal religions.” During this discussion, Deloria described the importance of ancestors to tribal religions:

“Most tribes were very reluctant to surrender their homelands to the whites because they knew that their ancestors were still spiritually alive on the land, and they were fearful that the whites would not honor the ancestors and the lands in the proper manner. If life was to mean anything at all, it had to demonstrate a certain continuity over the generations and this unity transcended death.”

Reading Deloria’s words reminded me of a now-famous speech made by Chief Seattle upon signing the Treaty of Medicine Creek in Washington state in 1854 (and in fact several paragraphs later Deloria quotes the speech himself.) Two of Chief Seattle’s lines echoed in my head: “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret…”

Chief Seattle prophesied my existence. Throughout my life, I had wandered very far from the graves of my immediate ancestors in Kentucky and Indiana. After moving away from southern Indiana when I was eleven, over the next 23 years, I had lived in Utah, Ohio, Wisconsin, California, Hawaii, British Columbia, Utah (again), and Colorado. Non-coincidentally, perhaps, I had struggled so much to pierce the veil of unreality Deloria said was necessary in order to find the essential meaning of my existence that I had previously tried to kill myself. Twice.

I sat with that idea for awhile until the sound of the Wabash River bubbling over some downed trees reminded me where I was. Southern Indiana. Not far from my ancestors’ graves. A quick look at Google Maps on my phone clarified that I was only 54.4 miles from my father’s maternal grandparents’ graves in Log Creek cemetery near Stendal, Indiana.

I had never visited any grave of any of my ancestors. It was time to go.

Log Creek Chapel, near Stendal, IN

Log Creek Chapel, near Stendal, IN

***

The Log Creek cemetery was only accessible by a series of graveled and pot-holed county roads. These roads navigated the sharp, geometric lines of Hoosier cornfields and the groves of hardwood trees that farmers had mercifully left standing as testaments to the former glory of the forests that once stretched across the region. The driver of a diesel truck carrying some sort of agricultural equipment noticed my Colorado license plate, decided I must have been lost, and sped around me, tossing gravel at the flanks of my jeep. Maples, sycamores, and oaks did their best to shower dun cornstalks in reds and golds, but in early November, the trees had already given up most of their colors.

I squeezed through a gate in the wire fence built to keep the deer out and surrounding the cemetery, and set out to find my great-grandparents’ graves. Taking photos to show my father, I took my time searching amongst the hundred or so gravestones arranged in parallel lines marching up the side of a tall hill. A few lone sycamores, a birch, and a row of red cedars stood watch over the cemetery. I found them, sat down in front of the gravestone they shared, and tried to recall everything I knew about them.

Curtis Bone and Leah Bone née Renner – buried side-by-side, and next to my grandmother’s two sisters who had died as infants – were members of the sizable German Lutheran community that settled in southern Indiana (my grandmother converted to Catholicism when she married my grandfather). Both Curtis and Leah died long before I was born. Curtis died of a stroke in 1957 before my father was one year old, even.

I wondered if they understood why I believe the Ohio River speaks, why I love the beings we share our homes with so much, why I forsook the Christianity they, and the rest of my family, had embraced.

I imagined the notion that a river can speak is something that would have sounded ridiculous, at best, and downright sacrilegious, at worst, to these plain, stolid Lutheran farmers. I guessed that – for people who were forced to rip up forests, to dam and divert creeks and streams, to combat the natural succession of plant life to grow their grains and corn ¬– my love for the Ohio River would have seemed sentimental. I feared that my rejection of Christianity would have been something they simply could not accept.

I don’t know where the notion came from, but I left an acorn on each of my little great-aunts graves. I ran back to my car and grabbed a copy of the book I wrote,How Dams Fall. On the way back, I grabbed a curled oak leaf and a big, broad sycamore leaf. Then, I picked a dandelion that managed to get a bloom in before winter. I arranged the leaves, the dandelion, and my book on the foot of their gravestone.

As I sat there, a desire to connect with my great-grandparents in the only way I still could grew within me. I wanted to touch the leaves falling from the same ancient trees who once dropped their leaves on them. I wanted to smell the same fragrances of soil and old, wet wood the earth created for them. I wanted to feel the same chill on the air the winds once brought to them.

The old Log Creek church – a simple, white box of a building that alternated between Lutheran and Baptist uses over the decades – stood at the top of another hill just to the west of the graveyard hill. In between the hills was a shallow ravine where a grove of mature oaks showered the ground with their tawny leaves. I sat at the base of the roundest oak and knew the tree must have towered over my great-grandparents as they walked by on Sundays. The oak also must have witnessed first my two little great-aunts’ burials, then Curtis’, and finally Leah’s.

I took my hat and jacket off and let the wind play with my hair. I walked up to the church. And, in the shade it created, I let the chill bite into my bones until I was too cold to stand it. I moved out under the open sky and let the sun warm me back up.

As I lingered in that autumn sunlight, it shined in an amber slant that I could almost hear ripping open the veil of unreality. I felt a continuity with previous generations of my relatives. And, in this continuity, despite my Western European background, I got a glimpse of the essential meaning of my existence.

The Ohio River Speaks: White Jesus and the Gray Seagull

The Ohio River Speaks: White Jesus and the Gray Seagull

by | Oct 17, 2020 | Culture of Resistance, Listening to the Land

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Find the rest of Will’s journey with the Ohio River here. Featured image: White Jesus photographed in the home of the author’s grandparents.

by Will Falk

In my grandparents’ house in Owensboro, KY, the Ohio River spoke to me through Jesus.

After the incident with my grandfather in the hospital parking lot, I returned to my grandparents’ home with my mother and grandmother. One step through the front door and I counted no less than six Jesuses staring at me from the wall. Three different crucifixes hung over three different doorways. Dozens of prayer cards and placards my grandmother couldn’t bring herself to get rid of littered table tops and shelves. And, a statue of a blonde, blue-eyed infant Jesus, dressed as a Renaissance princeling, stood guard over the centerpiece of my grandmother’s cluttered little living room: a massive Bible.

These images of Catholic Christianity filled me with a mixture of painful emotions. The depictions of Jesus as white annoyed me with their historical inaccuracy. The prayer cards invoked my wish that more people would spend more time acting to change the real world than praying. The crucifixes, with their classically Catholic goriness, displayed the broken and bloodied body of a man I had been taught was tortured and killed for my personal sins. Shame rushed in until I remembered that the Roman soldiers who murdered Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago could not have cared less if I missed Sunday Mass, cussed, or even used a condom while having premarital sex. But, by then, an old, but familiar anger burned within me.

I was angry about how, as a child, adults sought to control my behavior by threatening me with the eternal suffering of hell. I was angry about the guilt Catholic teachings encouraged me to feel when my behavior conflicted with arbitrary Church doctrine. I was angry about the long history of atrocities Christians have inflicted. I was angry about the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the witch hunts. I was angry about the sexual abuse so many priests have perpetrated on so many children.

I felt sorrow, too. I felt sorrow for my great uncle, a priest in his 80s, who told my mother and me about some resentment he felt over the way that his parents took him to the seminary at 13. In other words, my great-grandparents determined their son would take the vow of celibacy required of Catholic priests before their son had even finished puberty.

I felt sorrow for both of my grandmothers who, encouraged by the Catholic Church, stayed nearly permanently pregnant during the prime of their lives. My paternal grandmother gave birth to eight children. And, my maternal grandmother – the one whose house I was currently in – gave birth to seven children. To illustrate this more vividly, my maternal grandmother (93 years old and with slight dementia) recently asked me: “You know how women get periods, Will?” I, wondering where this was going, cautiously answered, “Yes, Granny, I do.” My grandmother then said, “Well, can you believe it? From the time I was pregnant with Clare until after Cecilia was born, I only had one period!” My grandmother burst out laughing, but I almost started crying.

It is funny, of course, but the more I thought about it, the sadder I got. My aunt Clare is my mom’s oldest sibling and my aunt Cecilia is her youngest, so my grandmother became pregnant and gave birth to 7 children – and only experienced one period during that entire time. As a man, I can only imagine what being pregnant and nursing for that long must have felt like. To make matters worse, each time either one of my grandmothers became pregnant, she had one more child to take care of than the time before.

Just a few hours after I had committed to learning how to treat my grandparents more compassionately, confronting the icons and imagery of Catholicism in my grandparents’ home already caused me to question this commitment. I wanted to blame my grandparents for forcing Catholicism on their children. I wanted to blame my parents for attempting to do the same to my sister and me. I wanted to direct my anger for the pain Catholicism has caused me at my grandparents and parents – people within reach. In order to honor my commitment, however, I knew I had to move past blaming my family and had learn to understand. The question was: How?

A prayer card from my grandmother’s collection.

***

Before I could begin to answer this question, I had to justify spending precious time and invaluable energy trying to understand my family’s spirituality while I was supposed to be writing about the needs of the Ohio River. Achieving this understanding would primarily be an internal process, a journey through my memories and emotions, through history books and conversations with my relatives. At a time when more industrial poisons and more agricultural pollution were pumped into the Ohio River with every passing day, could the Ohio River forgive me for taking this personal journey?

Intellectually, the answer seemed obviously no. Instinctually, however, I felt something urging me to begin this journey. I did not yet understand why, but my intuition insisted that this journey would yield answers to this project’s two central questions: Who is the Ohio River? And, what does she need?

There was something deeper contributing to my hesitation: I was afraid of my family’s reaction if I criticized the Catholic Church and their participation in it. If I was not careful, my criticisms might come off as nothing more than immature contrarianism. I could not sugar coat the pain the Catholic Church has caused me or gloss over the history of Church-sponsored genocides, but it would be disingenuous to lay most of that pain at the feet of my family. Their Catholic beliefs were rooted in generations of indoctrination, passed down by well-meaning mothers and fathers. My family’s participation in Catholicism followed a long history involving the destruction, erasure, and cooptation of the traditional cultures of Europe. A true understanding of why my family has practiced, and still practices, Catholicism would have to attend to 2000 years of history.

I faltered under the weight of it all – the battle between my intellect and my instinct, the fear of my family’s reaction, and the enormity of the history of the Catholic Church. For days, I flip-flopped between ignoring my family’s Catholic beliefs and embracing my intuition that there were useful lessons for both the Ohio River and me if I was just brave enough to delve into that history.

***

I retreated to the little cabin the Troutmans had been letting me use in Potter County, PA. With very little writing to show for my confrontation with my Catholic upbringing, I had just about convinced myself to ignore my family history and head down to Pittsburgh to write about how that city has affected the Ohio River when Melissa Troutman invited me to come with her to run a few errands in Olean, NY. (She probably noticed the squirrelly look that had grown over me while I debated my family’s spirituality during my self-imposed isolation and figured I could use some time outside of my own head.)

Olean sits on the river the indigenous Seneca call Ohi:yo’. To the Seneca, the Allegheny and the Ohio Rivers are one and the same. And, as I’ve explained in earlier installments of this project, I follow the Seneca’s lead. Melissa needed to get her oil changed. So, we dropped her car off and took her terrier Runo for a walk in Olean’s Franchot Park, on the banks of Ohi:yo’.

The river is not visible from most of the park because of a massive earthen flood control mound. Runo, proving the wisdom of his species, took off over the mound, forcing Melissa and I to follow. I crested the mound to find the Ohio River flowing from east to west below me, curling through the curves formed by the hills’ shoulders. Despite knowing I would find the Ohio River, I was stunned once again by the realization that no matter how much time I spend thinking about her, there is no substitute for being in her presence. And, I found the clarity that had eluded me while I had contained my search to the round confines of my own skull miles from the main stem of the Ohio River.

The Ohio River turned the gray, October sky into silver. She glittered under the russet leaves of autumnal oaks, the golden bursts of aspens, and the brash crimsons of changing maples. Emerald feathers flashed where mallards, reminded by the chill breeze of the need for winter fat, tipped their tail feathers up and fed on underwater plants and insects. Honking Canada geese carried, once again, the voices of my ancestors.

Ask the river what to do.

So, I did. Out loud. A few moments later a single seagull caught my attention, descending from the clouds. She took her time, making slow, wide circles above the water. On that overcast day, all the colors of the sky –  the spectrum of whites and grays – settled in her feathers. When she reached my eye-level, she made three or four circles without making progress towards the river’s surface. I got the impression she wanted me to notice her. The gentle repetitions in her circular flight-paths hypnotized me. Memories flooded through me. This was not the first time a seagull had carried me a message.

***

It’s the fourth day after I tried to kill myself the first time. The St. Francis psyche ward is on the seventh floor of an eight-floor building. For exercise and because there’s nothing else to do, I brave the fluorescent lights outside my room and pace the long hallway that connects most of the seventh floor.

At each end of the hallway are wide windows. One looks west into the rows of old company housing for the Milwaukee Iron Company. The other looks east over the waters of Lake Michigan.  Patients are not allowed off the seventh floor and there are rusty bars outside the glass in case we were tempted to take that route to fresh air. I try to open a window facing Lake Michigan anyway. It will not open. A heavy snow begins to fall surrounding the hospital in more white. I press my forehead against the cold glass pane. The cold feels good.

It is not long before I see an old spotted seagull awkwardly wheeling and diving through the falling snow. I am mesmerized by the odd gracefulness in his seemingly drunken turns through the snow. His circles bring him closer and closer to my window. I wonder why he is flying through such treacherous conditions. He is the only bird in the sky. As he flies closer, I am stricken with the beauty of his grayness against the white.

I begin to believe the drunk old gull is braving the snowstorm to speak to me. When he lands on the sill of the window I’m watching from, I know he is. He pauses on the window sill, makes eye contact with me, dips a wing, leaps, and wobbles back toward Lake Michigan. The waves on the lake ripple gray, too. The wet snow falls slowly, gingerly over the waters. They hesitate, hanging a moment in the air, before they are swallowed by the lake. White becomes gray. I drink up the colors following one gray wave after another from their birthplace on the horizon until they wash not far below me onto the shore.

While still in the hospital, I begin trying to write about how the seagull showed me color again. I do not know why. I just feel I should. It is instinctual. There is no articulable rationality that I can come up with. Writing about the seagull is like choosing a path when you are utterly lost. I see a path and go.

While trying to dress the memory in words, the experience cements in my mind. A place – neither completely concrete nor completely abstract, neither completely within me nor completely without me – begins to form. My heart and my memory meet my paper and my pen and the gull’s spotted gray wings flap on. He navigates spiritual planes, physical spaces, the long distances of memory, and fat snowflakes to lead me out over Lake Michigan.

My contemplation intensifies.

While I seek the right words, find them inadequate, scratch them out, and write new ones, the meaning of the gull’s visit grows. Color bleeds from the tip of my pen and begins to trickle to the edges of my memory. Though I cannot make out their tunes, faint songs reach my ears from far away. Voices in strange languages enchant me. I feel hair stir on my head, a twitch in my leg, water collecting on my tongue. I feel small sensations after a long numbness. My memory begins to stretch. The blood returns. It feels good.

The beginnings of a new understanding are planted within me.  I sense mystery. I sense possibility. My world was pain, anguish, and the certainty of more pain and anguish. Now, whispers kiss my brow speaking rumors of something new.

***

Runo dropped a stick, his favorite kind of toy, on my feet. The seagull splashed down next to the mallards and geese. And, I came back to the present.

Seven years after the old grey gull led me to writing in the mental hospital, I knew the Ohio River seagull was urging me to write, too. But, was I supposed to write about my family history and Catholicism? I stood watching the river for a few more minutes and no answer seemed apparent. I turned to catch up with Melissa and Runo. And the first thing I saw was two towering church steeples: The Roman Catholic Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels.

[The Ohio River Speaks] In My Grandfather’s Words

by | Sep 30, 2020 | Culture of Resistance, Listening to the Land

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Find the rest of Will’s journey with the Ohio River here.

The Ohio River first spoke to me through my grandfather.

I was at my parents’ house in Castle Rock, Colorado. It was August, 2017 and my mother’s aging parents were visiting as part of their last major trip away from their Owensboro, Kentucky home. I was scrambling to finish a draft of the first document we filed in a federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem, the Colorado River, and my grandfather asked me what I was working on.

I wasn’t sure if I should tell him the truth. My grandparents are devoutly Catholic. They pray the entire rosary at least once a day. They never miss Sunday Mass – though, they would prefer to go every day. My grandmother spent a year and a half in a Poor Clare convent before it was determined that being a nun was not her vocation. And, ever since they learned I no longer believe in Catholicism or their version of God, they’ve never missed an opportunity to remind me that all I need to do to avoid hell and return to a state of grace is to go to confession and then receive the Eucharist. So, I didn’t know how a conversation with my granddad about respecting the rights of the Colorado River as a living, sacred being would go.

There was something else behind my hesitation to engage my grandfather in a conversation about my radical environmental perspective: a fear of my grandfather’s disapproval.

My years in psychotherapy have taught me that I am particularly vulnerable, addicted even, to a need for my family’s approval. This fear often leads me to avoid sharing too much about my work with them. If there’s a chance my family will reject my work, I prefer not to broach the subject.

Meanwhile – excepting a few times when I want to talk about Notre Dame football or my favorite band, Phish – all I ever really want to talk about is how to protect the natural world. This combination of my fear of disapproval and passion for protecting the natural world has, too many times, caused me to simply refrain from interacting with my grandparents for long stretches of time. And, this makes me feel tremendously guilty.  But, something – or someone – urged me to tell the truth. And, to my surprise, my grandfather listened intently as I explained why I was fighting for the rights of the Colorado River.

When I finished, my grandfather sighed and told me the following story:

In 1952, my grandfather was 17 years old and the United States was embroiled in the Korean War. To avoid the hand-to-hand horrors he likely would have faced if he had been drafted into the US Army as an infantryman, my grandfather convinced his father to sign waivers allowing my grandfather to enlist in the US Navy before he turned 18. After serving for a year and a half, and fortunately with no experience of combat, my grandfather returned home to Owensboro.

Not long after he got home, and with fond memories of fishing for catfish on the Ohio River as a boy, my grandfather asked his father if he wanted to go fish with him on the river. My great-grandfather, however, told my grandfather not to go fishing on the Ohio River because the river was now “so nasty, you couldn’t hardly enjoy being down there.” But, my grandfather wanted to see for himself. So, he took a rod down to his favorite spot along the Ohio River. One cast was all it took for him to learn that his dad was correct. My grandfather recalled that when he reeled his line in, “it was so covered in tar and gunk from that one cast that I had to go home and boil my line if I was ever going to use it again.” That was in 1953. In my grandfather’s words, “The Ohio River has been filthy for ages.”

A few moments passed as he reflected on his memories.

Then, my grandfather told me, “I sure wish you’d do some work for the Ohio River, Will.”

This statement stirred something deep within me. For the first time in my life, I saw a chance to connect with my grandfather through the work I was most passionate about. I still had a lot of work to do for the Colorado River, but I knew I had to do something for the Ohio River.

While I was traveling with the Ohio River in Pennsylvania, my grandfather had a stroke at his home in Owensboro, KY. My mother made the trip from Castle Rock, CO to help her siblings take care of my grandparents. Following her example, I made the trip from northern Pennsylvania to western Kentucky to offer my help.

The day I arrived, my mother, my grandmother and I, went to the hospital my grandfather was in to transport him to a stroke rehabilitation facility. With COVID-19 restrictions in place, the short ride from the hospital to the rehab facility was likely the only face-to-face time I’d have to see my grandfather for weeks.

As I was helping him into the car, halfway between the seat of his wheel chair and the car seat, my grandfather’s legs gave out. With my arms in his under pits, I quickly realized I was not strong enough to lift him into the car and he started to slip from my grasp towards the parking lot concrete. My father’s father had died two-and-a-half years earlier after slipping on ice in a parking lot and hitting his head, and scenes from my other grandfather’s death flooded my imagination.

I overreacted. I jerked my grandfather close to my body while my mom ran for help. My 93-year-old grandmother, who suffers from dementia, forgot her age and lunged in to try to help.

My grandfather panicked as he felt himself slipping towards the concrete. His breathing stopped. He slumped against my chest. And, his eyes rolled back in his head. I thought my grandfather was dead. Oh my God, I thought, the last words my grandfather heard in this world were the ones I frantically said to my mother: “He’s just too heavy…”

This moment will always be frozen in my memory.

My realization that my grandfather was utterly dependent on me as his body slumped against mine was deeply unsettling. The natural order of things had been disturbed. Generational roles were reversed as I cradled a man who had cradled my mother who, in turn, had cradled me.

Fortunately, hospital staff quickly arrived and helped me lower my grandfather to the ground. He wasn’t dead; he had just passed out. And, he quickly came to a few moments later with the hospital staff surrounding him. When a nurse asked him his name, he coherently answered “George Taylor.”

My mother was busy asking the staff if they really thought my grandfather was ready to leave the hospital. A nurse had her arm around my grandmother, speaking softly, calming her down. I stood in a daze. What if the last few moments had been the last few moments I ever got to spend with my grandfather?

Just a few days before, I struggled with a part of me that did not want to make the 11-hour drive to Owensboro. I was tempted to rationalize my reluctance by telling myself the needs of the Ohio River were more important than the needs of my family. If the needs of a single human family are great, how much greater are the needs of the Ohio River, the mother of all life within her basin? Then, I tried to justify my reluctance with a lukewarm insistence that there really was nothing I could do in Owensboro, that my mother and my aunts and uncles had everything under control, and that the best thing I could do for my grandfather was to continue the work he had urged me to do.

This felt wrong. It felt worse than wrong. It felt downright shameful. What kind of a grandson doesn’t want to help his grandparents at a time when they’re incapable of helping themselves?

As I drove through the Ohio River basin from Pennsylvania to Owensboro, I continued to ask myself why a part of me didn’t want to make the trip. Hot, frustrated, and impatient from 7 hours of driving, as I was stuck in traffic on the Brent Spence Bridge, which crosses the Ohio River between Cincinnati, OH and Covington, KY, I rolled down my window and asked the river:

“Are you trying to teach me something through my family?”

A few moments later, I saw what appeared to be, from about half-a-mile away, a grandfather fishing with his grandson in a small aluminum boat. I remembered the way the Ohio River first spoke to me through my grandfather. I recalled the stirring deep within me that accompanied my discovery of the means to make my grandfather proud while also helping the natural world. I also remembered that arriving at this discovery required that I overcome the fear of my grandfather’s disapproval.

Two days later, squinting in the sun reflected off the hospital parking lot’s white concrete, dazed by what I thought was my grandfather’s death, and profoundly grateful to be given more time to heal my relationship with him, I realized what the Ohio River was trying to teach me.

For years, I had insisted that we fail to protect the natural world because we fail to treat the natural world like family. But, I said this while interacting with my own human family in problematic ways. How could I continue to say “we must learn to treat the natural world like our family” with a straight face if I was treating my family with fear, anger, and guilt?

I came out of my daze to hear my grandfather trying to get my attention. He said, “Thank you for being here, Will. If you hadn’t been here, I might have really hurt myself.” As feelings of pride welled up within me, I committed to learning how to treat my grandparents with compassion – not fear, anger, or guilt. And, if I was understanding the Ohio River correctly, I hoped that I just might find a glimpse into how, as a culture, we can learn to treat the natural world like family.

Featured image: Ohio River via Pixabay

You can access the original publication and the whole series here:

https://www.theohioriverspeaks.org/ohioriverjourney/2gvdav3lpkom5q9cjdm7uwxyhgn28f

[The Ohio River Speaks] When History Becomes Hallucination

[The Ohio River Speaks] When History Becomes Hallucination

by | Aug 22, 2020 | Listening to the Land

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth part of Will’s journey.

On the Tidioute Bridge, where forests accompany the Ohio River through the round Pennsylvania hills, I fretted over my responsibilities as a writer to tell the truth as I experience it. So far, on my journey with the Ohio River, I had experienced beauty, but this beauty was always tempered by the horrific reality of the Ohio River’s abuse. I had experienced moments of peace, but this peace was eventually always drowned out by my anxiety over the river’s future.

Whenever I felt myself on the verge of accepting these contradictions in my experience, the words of a mildly famous environmental writer I had asked to review my book How Dams Fall about the Colorado River flashed in front of my eyes. This writer told me: “I feel your pain acutely and vividly – but it’s so overwhelming that I can’t find the countervailing balm and hope I need to write a decent endorsement.”

I didn’t want my writing about the Ohio River to overwhelm my readers to the point that they couldn’t muster the courage to act in her defense. At the same time, however, the reality of the Ohio River’s pain is overwhelming. Unable to resolve these contradictions, I asked the Ohio River for help.

Rain fell on white pine, hemlock, silver maple, and black willow trees. It dripped from leaf to leaf and branch to branch. It brushed over evergreen needles, washed over bark, seeped into soil, splashed into puddles, and blended with mud. Streams, strengthened by the rain, trickled melodically over stones, down the hills, and poured into the river. Below me, rising river currents turned over themselves and created a thousand little waves singing a thousand little tunes. The Ohio River hummed cheerfully and quickened her pace downstream.

In these sounds, I heard love songs. The forests and the Ohio River were celebrating their ancient friendship by singing ballads to each other.

As I listened, the Ohio River taught me about the role trees play in this cycle. My attention drifted across the river to where exposed tree roots clung to, and held up, the river’s banks. Like the water those trees drank from the Ohio River, my gaze was pulled up trunks, through branches and leaves, to the tree tops. As the trees sang with the rain, their breaths rose from the hills as fog to join heavy, low-hanging clouds. I followed the falling rain back to the river. And, one rotation in a cycle that’s been turning for time immemorial was complete.

Then, a truck carrying a pile of pine logs rattled over the bridge I stood on. The fragrance of freshly cut white pine competed with diesel fumes in an olfactory juxtaposition of beauty and horror. Fumes filled my lungs and scenes from the history of logging in the upper Ohio River basin filled my mind.

In the 1790s, men with muskets destroyed Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee villages throughout the upper Ohio River basin. They slaughtered and scalped men, women, and children and burned crops and other food sources. With native warriors murdered and native governments crippled, men with saws flooded the region. Sawmills were established in the upper Ohio River basin as early as 1800. Contemporary accounts describe whole hillsides along the Ohio River stripped clean of trees. They started with the hills along the Ohio River and her tributaries’ banks because the loggers could easily drag timber into the waterways where they could be transported to distant city markets.

Words like ‘logs’ and ‘timber’ are dishonest words that fail to describe the full cruelty the Ohio River was forced to endure. These logs were the dead bodies of trees the Ohio River had helped to grow from saplings. This timber was the corpses of trees whose families the Ohio River had lived with for generations. So, not only did the Ohio River witness the murder of her friends, she was forced to carry her friends’ dead bodies away.

At first, the loggers came for the long, straight, and strong eastern white pines. When the easily accessible white pine stands were exhausted, the loggers came for the hemlocks. Hemlock bark was used in tanning leather, but the logs were often discarded and left to rot in the woods. Around 1860, railroads allowed even the most isolated timberlands to be destroyed. I found a story in the Warren Times Mirror and Observer newspaper, dated May 26, 1973, that reported:

“In 1903, the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company installed a big steam and electrically powered band saw mill at Sheffield. It had a rated capacity of 130,000 board feet of lumber daily. But its all-time production record was on March 14, 1923, when 337,000 board feet of lumber were sawed in a ten-hour period. Between 1908 and 1941, when the C.P.L. closed down because of lack of timber, some one and a half billion board feet of lumber were sawed there.”

As I pondered this on the Tidioute Bridge, history became hallucination. Images of those I’d lived my whole life with joined me where I stood. I saw my mother’s eyes – a half shade of blue paler than mine – gleaming with the specific light that fills them when she tells me she loves me. I felt my father’s hand ­– a half shade of tan darker than mine – with the specific weight his hand carries when he tells me he’s proud of me. I heard my little sister’s laughter when we share an inside joke we’ve shared for longer than either of us remember.

I saw all the people who have helped me become the person I am today. I saw childhood playmates and grade school teachers. I saw football coaches and college professors. I saw my teammates on the University of Dayton football team. I saw old lovers and failed romances. I saw the friends who visited me in the hospital after I tried to kill myself. I saw my activist comrades struggling so hard for a better world.

Then, I saw them murdered.

Each of them.

All of them.

By men with axes, saws, knives, and machetes. Cut down, cut up, and piled in front of me by men who thought only of the price my dead friends’ bodies would fetch at market. The men who murdered my loved ones then slapped a rough harness on my back and snapped a whip over my head. But the load was too heavy to bear.

The sounds of the local water cycle brought me back to the present, but the music was angry. Lightning cracked across the sky with shrill staccato notes. Rumbling thunder added ominous bass notes in a minor key to the music’s low end. Where once they sang, the rain, the trees, and the Ohio River hissed.

Cold and trembling, I asked the Ohio River: “What do you need me to do?” All I heard was more hissing. So, I decided to trust the truth in my experience.

[The Ohio River Speaks] There Must Be Settler Colonialism in the Water

[The Ohio River Speaks] There Must Be Settler Colonialism in the Water

by | Jul 17, 2020 | Human Supremacy, The Problem: Civilization, Toxification

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth part of Will’s journey.

Red Oak Memories

On the banks of the Ohio River, in downtown Warren, PA, I stood under the long limbs of an ancient red oak wondering what this magnificent tree must have witnessed in her lifetime. Red oaks can live for 400 years or more and this one had a circumference of what looked like 25 or 30 feet. Even if she was only 300 years old, she would have witnessed the arrival of European settlers in the area.

I tried to imagine what the scene before me looked like when the red oak was young. The hulking asphalt bridge carrying traffic across the river vanished. When it did, the screeching brakes, honking car horns, and police sirens hushed. The multi-story buildings crowding the opposite shore, with their advertisements painted in loud colors, disappeared. The stone man dressed as a Union officer brashly observing the town’s movements from his perch on an obelisk dedicated to the area’s Civil War casualties disintegrated. From the brass crucifix on a steeple casting a shadow over the river, Jesus ascended to heaven. And, he took the church building with him.

Beyond my vision, the Kinzua Dam was inconceivable and the Allegheny Reservoir was unthinkable. The oil wells’ metal pumpjacks methodically sucking crude oil from the earth like mechanical vampires throughout the Allegheny National Forest were centuries away from invention. Warren’s United Refining Company was unnecessary because no one thought they needed the extravagant energy made possible by petroleum.

With all of the evidence of the town of Warren gone, I saw the red oak’s kin growing thick around me, showering the ground with acorns. I saw towering, straight white pines and thick-foliaged hemlocks. These trees had never heard the haunting sounds metal saws make as they slice their way through forests. I heard the songbird symphonies in their full glory. I watched the intense gaze of blue herons stalking crawdads. I delighted in the flamboyancy of the green herons displaying their plumage. Mergansers and mallards led their downy chicks in wobbly lines up and down the river. Black bear cubs wrestled and climbed trees while their mother eyed trout in the shallows.

I also saw humans. I saw the Senecas and their ancestors who had lived here for thousands of years. I saw adults working on a new canoe that would carry them and their trading goods as far as the MTississippi hundreds of miles away. I saw elders telling teenagers stories to live by. I saw parents let their children swim and splash in the river with no fear of untreated sewage spills, oil refinery pollution, toxic fertilizers, or radioactive fracking wastewater.

The red oak’s and my view of downtown Warren, PA.

The red oak’s and my view of downtown Warren, PA.

There Must Be Something in the Water

These visions slowly drifted away until a blaring train horn brought me fully back to the present. It hurt to be back. I wished I could permanently transport to a time before asphalt bridges, oil refineries, and church steeples occupied the Ohio River basin. I wished I lived here before the town of Warren was built. I yearned for the time when traditional cultures governed these lands. I wished Europeans never found this land.

I began to feel sick to my stomach. I tried to recall if I had eaten something, but all I had eaten all day was an apple and a handful of cashews and almonds. This meal had never given me trouble before.

An acorn fell from the branches and bounced near my feet. The red oak’s branches caught my attention. I saw her leaves turning in the late afternoon sunshine. She glowed with a verdant light – one of the forest’s original colors. She glimmered with memories of times past. Then, a statement echoed in my mind: “There must be something in the water.”

My nausea intensified. It was a hot day and I was guzzling water. I had filled my water bottle up at several public fountains in town. Was something in the water? What was making me sick?

Above me, four flags snapped in the wind. One flag was a blue field with three gold fleur de lis. This was the old, royal French flag carried by French explorers in the area. One flag was the British Union Jack carried by British explorers. The third flag was the one carried by American forces during the Revolution. It showed 13 white stars arranged in a circle on a blue square with alternating red and white stripes. The last flag was the Seneca Nation’s. It was red and displayed the Seneca’s respect for nonhuman life with eight animals in a circle. They were deer, heron, hawk, snipe, bear, wolf, beaver, and turtle.

Below the flags, a plaque explained that originally this monument flew only the three imperial flags of the Europeans who claimed this land. Later, the Seneca Nation flag was added. That irony provoked in me a desire to learn the history of how indigenous peoples were pushed off this land. I hoped this would reveal what was in the water.

Settler Occupation Heartbreak

The history of the settler occupation of the Ohio River basin is heartbreaking. White settlers, especially Americans, engaged in decades of ethnic cleansing and genocide to open the region to settlement. This process is called settler colonialism. Historian Patrick Wolfe sums up the goal of settler colonialism as elimination of indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers. And, in her essential book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz elaborates:

“Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”

Air Force officer and Associate Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy Lieutenant Colonel John Grenier goes so far as to call the extravagant violence perpetrated by Americans against indigenous peoples as the US military’s “first way of war.” He explains in his book The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814:

“For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.”

The Ohio River basin is home to many indigenous nations including the Senecas, Shawnees, Miamis, and Delawares. Americans fought wars of extirpation against all of these nations. Grenier describes why:

“The one constant road block to the settlers’ expansion into the interior of the continent was always the Indians. Thus, if they could eliminate the Indians, the settlers could make North America their own. Limited wars…did little to drive the Indians from their lands. Americans thus chose the most effective means of subjugating the Indians they faced. They sent groups of men, sometimes a dozen, sometimes hundreds, to attack Indian villages and homes, kill Indian women and children, and raze Indian fields.”

When I read this history, the movements happening across the country to remove statues and memorials dedicated to genocidal men came to mind. How can anyone who has read the words of men like George Washington, words ordering Americans to ethnically cleanse the land of indigenous peoples, oppose efforts to remove memorials to these men?

There is Malice Enough in our Hearts

During the American Revolution, for example, Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois confederacy which included the Ohio River basin’s Seneca) to “lay waste all the settlements around…that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed…[Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected…Our future security will be in their inability to injure us…and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”

In this spirit, in 1779, the Continental Congress mustered three armies against the Senecas. Dunbar-Ortiz describes how the three armies scorched “earth across New York and converged at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their separatist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees.” To encourage enlistment in these armies, Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps, without regard to sex or age and concludes, “This combination of Continental Army regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged most of Seneca territory.”

The end of the Revolutionary War did not ease the violence Americans employed against the indigenous peoples of the Ohio River basin. Grenier writes that, in March 1791, Secretary of War Henry Knox (the namesake of Knoxville, TN), directed Brigadier General Charles Scott to recruit 500 Kentucky mounted rangers to destroy Miami towns along the Wabash River, a major tributary of the Ohio. Scott sacked two of the Miami’s largest towns, captured 41 women and children, and then issued the following threat to the Miami:

“Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.”

The Shawnees received the same treatment. Dunbar-Ortiz recounts how George Washington charged alcoholic Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne (the name sake of Fort Wayne, IN) with destroying the Shawnees. Wayne marched into what is now northwestern Ohio and established Fort Defiance. He then made this ultimatum to the Shawnees: “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of blood.” When the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket refused submission, Wayne’s forces began destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men. At Fallen Timbers, on August 20, 1794, the main Shawnee fighting force was overpowered and Wayne’s men created a 50-mile swath of destruction while laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields. Wayne and his men carried on for three days after the battle.

Photo of a painting depicting the Battle of Fallen Timbers taken by the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office , I doubt the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office endorses my work. My use of this image should not imply that the Office does endorse my work.

Photo of a painting depicting the Battle of Fallen Timbers taken by the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office, I doubt the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office endorses my work. My use of this image should not imply that the Office does endorse my work.

The history of the American invasion of North America is filled with stories like the ones described here. It would take pages upon pages to represent this history in its entirety. Anyone attempting to understand the reality of American history needs to contemplate what Dunbar-Ortiz points out: “The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate [native nations’] existence as peoples – not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.”

Macutté Mong and the Wabash River

The following stories finally showed me what was in the water that made me feel so sick.

George Rogers Clark is considered a hero of the American Revolution. He was likely a psychopath. Outside of Vincennes, IN, in February 1779, Clark demanded the unconditional surrender of the British inside Fort Sackville. When Henry Hamilton, Fort Sackville’s commander, refused to accept Clark’s demands, Clark showed what Grenier characterizes as “the Americans’ darker side.”

Hamilton described the events in his journal. Clark had four Indian captives. He ordered these four men taken into the street in front of the fort’s main gate where the fort’s occupants could watch. Hamilton reported:

“One of [the Indians] was tomahawked either by Clark or one of his officers, the other three foreseeing their fate, began to sing their death songs, and were butchered in succession. A young chief of the Ottawa nation called Macutté Mong one of these last, having received the fatal stroke of a tomahawk in the head, took it out and gave it again into the hands of his executioner who repeated the stroke a second and a third time, after which the miserable being, not entirely deprived of life, was dragged to the river and thrown in with the rope about his neck where he ended his life and tortures.”

When Hamilton continued to argue for lenient terms, Clark began to wash his hands and face “still reeking” in Macutté Mong’s blood and threatened to put the entire British garrison to death if it did not surrender immediately. Hamilton opened the fort’s gates the next morning.

When I read that Macutté Mong was thrown into the Wabash River, I realized that what was left of his brutalized body was carried south towards the Ohio River. I did not know how long it takes rivers to break down human bodies. I did not know how far a body’s materials might be carried by a river, either. But, I did know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Macutté Mong’s body was no doubt recycled by the Wabash and Ohio rivers over the centuries. Some of his body was likely eaten by fish and insects who in turn were eaten by other fish, insects, birds, and animals. His bones likely sank into the riverbed, reunited with the bones of countless primordial marine organisms that form the white limestone southern Indiana is famous for. His blood stained the water until the river could wash enough of it away. And, in this way, Macutté Mong was spread throughout the watershed where he was murdered. I was born in southern Indiana, not far from where Macutté Mong was dumped into the Wabash River. Ever since I encountered Macutté Mong’s story, I have been haunted by the possibility that a part of his body – no matter how minuscule – became part of my body.

In March 1782, three years after Clark used four Indian men to intimidate the British in Indiana,  Delawares living along the Tuscarawas River at a Moravian mission in Gnadenhutten, Ohio were rounded up by a Pennsylvania settler militia under the command of David Williamson. These Delawares, who had converted to Christianity, were told they were being evacuated for their own safety. Then, the militiamen searched their belongings to confiscate anything that could have been used as a weapon. The militiamen accused these Delawares of giving refuge to Delawares who had killed white people and condemned them all to death.

The condemned Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, the militiamen marched over ninety people – forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children – in pairs into two houses and slaughtered them methodically. Daniel K. Richter, in his book Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, found that one killer boasted he had personally clubbed fourteen Delawares to death with a cooper’s mallet. After killing these fourteen people, he handed the mallet to an accomplice and announced, “My arm fails me. Go on with the work.”

The Tuscarawas River flows into the Muskingum which flows into the Ohio. I never learned how these Delawares were laid to rest. But, considering the wanton cruelty the Pennsylvania militiamen demonstrated while slaughtering the Delawares, it is easy to conclude the militiamen used the Tuscarawas River to dispose of their dirty work.

I couldn’t drive the images of Macutté Mong pulling the tomahawk from his head or the cooper’s mallet falling on Delaware heads from my mind. The death songs sung by the men George Rogers Clark murdered drifted across time and space to give me nightmares. I heard the Delawares singing hymns in the distance. I saw skulls shattering. Clark’s man hesitated when Macutté Mong handed him the tomahawk back. The man swinging the cooper’s mallet grunted as he tired. Mangled bodies piled up. Blood spilled across floors, washed from door frames, and swirled with river currents. Crimson pools slowly expanded in formerly clean river water.

Shattered souls spill like blood

These visions taught me what the ancient red oak I stood under in Warren, PA was trying to tell me when she suggested there must be something in the water.

Some violence is so heinous that it shatters souls when it destroys bodies. Shattered souls spill like blood. Some of the shattered souls seep into the soil and make their way into groundwater. Some of the shattered souls flow with surface water to mingle with streams and rivers. These shattered souls contaminate water with the metaphysical equivalent of chemical carcinogens. They poison water with grief and dread.

Shattered souls litter the North American continent. When you confront this history, it is difficult to envision any water untainted by the horrors of settler colonialism. And, when you drink water polluted with shattered souls, you may get sick. Symptoms include a nagging angst, inexplicable grief, spiritual discomfort, the urge to flee, and sometimes physical nausea. There is no cure for this sickness. But, you will find relief facing the violence that shattered these souls, searching for the truth, and working to ensure that settler colonialism never shatters souls again.

Buildings crowding the river in Warren, PA.

Buildings crowding the river in Warren, PA.

This painting depicts Henry Hamilton’s surrender to George Rogers Clark at Fort Sackville near Vincennes, IN. Hamilton’s surrender came after George Rogers Clark tomahawked four native men to death at the fort’s gate to intimidate the British.

This painting depicts Henry Hamilton’s surrender to George Rogers Clark at Fort Sackville near Vincennes, IN. Hamilton’s surrender came after George Rogers Clark tomahawked four native men to death at the fort’s gate to intimidate the British.

Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. For the rest of 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”