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:
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.
As the bow of my kayak slid into the Ohio River at the Buckaloons Recreation Area boat launch, on a cloudy morning in late July, all I wanted was a quiet mind. I was full of an anxious, noisy din produced by several sources.
After eight weeks of listening to and writing about the Ohio River, the stories the river was telling me – stories about mass extinction, the practice of scalping, and massacres – were emotionally exhausting. Meanwhile, national news was generally terrifying. COVID-19 surged while many humans believed the pandemic was a conspiracy designed to restrict their personal freedoms. Police brutalized citizens protesting police brutality. Reports from cities including Portland and New York described federal agents arbitrarily grabbing citizens off the streets and detaining them in unmarked vehicles. And, president Donald Trump, trailing Joe Biden in the polls, floated the idea of suspending the presidential election for the first time in American history.
I was also running out of the money I saved up to travel with the Ohio River. I spent a week and a half with my head buried in a computer screen while I created and shared an online fundraiser. Guilt accompanied my request for money. I felt guilty for not saving enough money. I felt guilty for not using my money more efficiently. Then, I felt guilty for feeling guilty because I wondered if the Ohio River thought my guilt in requesting money for her suggested I didn’t think she was worth requesting money for. To top this cup of self-loathing I brewed for myself off, I also felt guilty for spending time creating an online fundraiser when I could have been listening to the river.
My journey with the Ohio River was taking much longer than I originally planned for. I knew the Ohio River could speak. But, I was unprepared for how much she had to say. In eight weeks, I had only traveled the first third of the first third of the Ohio River, the part most commonly known as the upper Allegheny. Her answers to my two questions – “Who are you? And, what do you need?” – were rushing past me in a torrent profoundly more powerful than the proverbial firehose.
There were topics I sensed she still wanted me to write about before moving on. Truck engines hauling radioactive fracking wastewater throughout northern Pennsylvania and the ubiquity of their screeching brakes whined for me to investigate how dangerous that wastewater truly is. Pennsylvanians’ proper sense of pride in the dwindling, clean streams that still run through the state conflicted with Pennsylvanians’ misplaced pride in the role the state played in America’s first oil boom. The iron taste these conflicting prides left in my mouth wouldn’t wash out no matter how hard I tried to spit it out.
Black and white photographs in county historical society buildings haunted me. They showed hundreds of logs, the corpses of towering trees, floating down the Ohio River. They showed the eerie, bare hillsides those trees were stolen from. When I saw these photos, I felt the agony and anger the Ohio River still carries for being used to haul her forest friends, the old growth white pines and hemlocks that once grew along her banks, away. Once I felt this agony and anger, ghosts climbed from the shadowy photographs and cried out for attention.
Competing voices in my head struggled to be heard. One voice said, “Quick look away. Forget you saw it.” Another voice screamed angry obscenities. One voice asked, “Where’s my beer? Where’s my weed? What’s on Netflix?” My constant companion, the unwelcome guest in my head, the one who always tells me my writing sucks, acquired a bullhorn somewhere and was testing its volume against my ear drum. I despaired and thought maybe he was right that I had neither the time nor the talent to tell these stories adequately.
A few minutes before I pushed my kayak in the water, I saw a sign posted on the door to the Buckaloons men’s restroom. The sign warned visitors that “WE are STILL IN A PANDEMIC” before asking restroom users to keep the area clean and to adhere to social distancing. The sign concluded with: “We know that this place feels different, and it is! It can be a nice change of pace from the world; please help us keep it open.”
The realities underlying the sign’s rhetoric frustrated me. I knew the reason “that this place feels different” is because relatively undeveloped sections of rivers like the one at Buckaloons are becoming more and more rare. The reason a place like Buckaloons “can be a nice change of pace from the world” is because, for most people, “the world” is primarily human. “The world” is an office, a city block, a suburban house. “The world” exists online and onscreen, in headsets and TV sets. “The world” is no longer forests, rivers, mountains, and seas. The real world has become “a nice change of pace.”
***
Noise carries over water. And, just a few minutes after I pushed my kayak into the water, a family of nearby canoers began blaring Kenny Chesney from portable speakers. Someone asked the woman in charge of the music, “You like country music, huh?” And, the woman responded, “Yeah, there’s a time and a place for it.” I suppressed an urge to tell her this was neither the time nor the place.
Melissa Troutman accompanied me again. She graciously offered me one of her family’s kayaks and help with shuttling vehicles between the put-in at Buckaloons and the take-out fourteen miles away at the Bonnie Brae boat launch, just outside of Tidioute, PA. We originally planned to float about three miles down to Thompson’s Island where we would spend the day and camp for the night. We would float the remaining eleven miles the next day.
I was excited about Thompson’s Island because the island is home to some of Pennsylvania’s last remaining old growth forests. These forests were protected from the loggers by the relative inaccessibility posed by the Ohio River surrounding the island. But, when we stopped on the island, the skies darkened and the clouds released a downpour.
The noise in my mind must have been so loud while I was preparing for the trip that I neglected to listen to the voice that suggested I bring rain gear on a day the weather services virtually guaranteed would rain. In addition to ignoring the need for rain gear, I left my phone in my car. Melissa, fortunately, had hers and checked the weather. Thunder storms were approaching and would likely last well into the next day. Not wanting to chance lightning while on the water, we decided to hustle the eleven miles down to the takeout. As our plans turned from a leisurely day resting on a beautiful island into a long day of paddling in a rainstorm, the noise’s volume increased.
Back in our boats, I was disappointed to find that houses and even a few mansions were built along much, if not most, of our route, despite the fact that it ran through the Allegheny National Forest. I had heard that this section of the river was one of the most well-preserved sections of the Ohio River basin. That may be, but my definition of “well-preserved” was different from what I found between Buckaloons and Tidioute.
There was beauty. I saw my first green heron. And, then my second and third. The last two looked like brothers with the big brother constantly running away from the little brother who really wanted to play. The joy I felt in seeing these green herons was undermined by my fear that encroaching development for vacation homes and fishing lodges would destroy the herons’ nesting grounds.
I saw half a dozen or so bald eagles. I even saw one make a successful dive for a fish. But, I soon lost myself pitying bald eagles for being chosen as the mascot for the American Empire. I hoped no one in the future would blame bald eagles for the sins of a nation they never asked to represent.
A couple of hungry ducks followed Melissa and I around for half a mile, quacking at us for food. Melissa gave them some bread and I wondered out loud whether diets high in carbohydrates could give ducks diabetes like those diets do to humans. When I saw a great blue heron silhouetted against invasive knotweed, I worried about the plants the knotweed was crowding out instead of admiring the heron’s legendary grace.
As the mental noise intensified, I began to ask myself: What sort of neurosis prevents a person from enjoying the sight of playful green herons? What kind of person worries that tossing ducks a few bites of bread would give them diabetes? Why can’t I silence this angst and simply enjoy the trip?
I thought about asking the Ohio River for help. But, each time I considered asking, I shot the idea down, chiding myself that the journey was about the river’s needs, not mine. Regardless, with a mile left to go and my surgically repaired shoulders screaming with every paddle stroke, the Ohio River gave me what I longed for.
I don’t know how she knew what I needed. Maybe her intuition is so strong she hears thoughts and emotions like humans hear the spoken word. I was paddling hard and sweating. Maybe the water forming my sweat rolled off my skin, fell into the river, and shared my secrets with her.
I sat in a strong current, resting with my paddle across the kayak’s bulkhead. I let the river do the work of pulling me to the dry warmth of my Jeep parked at the take-out. My physical weariness tuckered out the petulant voices in my head. I heard the rain falling on the Ohio River’s face. The infinite sound of individual rain drops joining the river in a communion of life-giving water created a murmur. The river and the rain hummed softly. A whisper shimmered in the air. The Ohio River said, “Shhh, shhhhh, shhhhhhhh.”
Then, a dark, majestic shape lit from a white pine branch hanging no more than twenty yards above my head. A golden eagle! She flew a wide arc over the water. And, as she turned upstream, another golden eagle lifted into the sky from another branch to join her. Their wings pulled the noise away from me. As the golden eagles disappeared in the distance, the Ohio River whispered, once again, “Shhhhh.”
This podcast features two interviews. First, we speak with Joshua Wright about current logging of old-growth forest in the Mattole River Watershed, as well as on Vancouver Island and in Alaska. Second, we speak with Will Falk. Will is currently journeying the length of the Ohio River (the most polluted river in the United States) exploring the history and ongoing colonization and desecration of the watershed.
Forest defense activists in northern California can be reached on Instagram. @Redwoodforestdefense are the Green Diamond activists, and @Blockades.babes is the Lost Coast activists.
The Ohio River carried my ancestors to me. Arriving through traumatic memories recorded in history books and through a vivid nightmare, my ancestors’ presence was painful at first. Then, I asked my ancestors for help creating strength from the pain and they answered through wild geese.
When I was researching how settler colonialism affected the original peoples of the Ohio River basin, I also learned how settler colonialism affected my Irish ancestors. I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. She characterizes the Protestant colonization of Ireland (along with the Christian Crusades) as “dress rehearsals for the colonization of the Americas.” During the late 1500s and early 1600s, at the same time English colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts were being established, Dunbar-Ortiz describes how
“the English conquered Ireland and declared a half-million acres of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never before attempted to remove so large an Indigenous population and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A ‘wild Irish’ reservation was even attempted.”
I learned that the brutal practice of scalping originated in Ireland. Dunbar-Ortiz explains:
“The English government paid bounties for Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as ‘white’ as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.”
I found a connection with the ancestors of the original peoples of the Ohio River basin when I learned that many Englishmen who were involved in the colonization of Ireland were also involved in the colonization of North America. In the late 1500s, the English Governor of the newly conquered Irish province of Ulster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, invaded the Irish province of Munster (where my ancestors lived), and ordered that
“the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he [Gilbert] incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his own tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and friends.”
Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settlement in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583.”
Reading this breached a dam within me. I was flooded with ancestral memory.
I saw the gruesome lane Gilbert constructed. I tried to keep my eyes on the path ahead of me. Hurry through, I told myself. These heads are too rotten, too disfigured to recognize. But, some of my loved ones had yet to come home. The desire for closure was too strong.
Why does that nose look so familiar?Is it my brother’s?Is that red hair? My sweetheart’s hair is red. But, she was miles from the fighting. She’s safe. Isn’t she? Each step down the lane became more difficult. Each head I passed made the terror stronger. My grief became so overwhelming that I envied the lifeless eyes staring at me as I passed, oblivious to the horrors they manifested.
Despite my ancestors’ prodding, I was sick of confronting the violent history of settler colonialism. I was still reeling from my writing about Macutté Mong and the slaughtered Christian Delawares. I was self-conscious that much of my writing about the Ohio River, so far, had been dark and heavy. I wanted to write about something beautiful, something hopeful, something that didn’t involve massacres.
Then, my ancestors sent me a nightmare.
It was a sunny afternoon. I stood in waist-high, fragrant grass next to a wide, slow river. Despite my waking mind being fixated on the Ohio River, the shape of the land and the dark, almost mahogany color of the water suggested this was not the Ohio River. I was reminded of a river I spent some time with in Ireland in 2018 – the River Blackwater in Munster, not far from my McCarthy ancestors’ home.
The nightmare began with beauty. I ran my hands through the thick grass. My bare feet sunk pleasantly into damp, warm soil. The grass imitated the river’s face as the breeze rippled in similar patterns over both. As the tune to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” filled my ears, beauty slipped into melancholy.
Peace shattered when angry men came running over a distant hill. Sunlight glinted off weapons. I ducked down hoping the grass would hide me. The men spread out along the river bank. I saw their hands covered in mud and blood reach into the grassroots. I watched them wrap grass around their hands, intertwining their fingers with grass stalks. Then, they tore the grass up in patches, leaving flayed spaces of naked dirt. Each time they ripped, I felt pain like someone was ripping skin from my body.
I did not want the men to see me. At first, I managed to contain the pain in soft whimpers. Eventually, with each patch of grass ripped from the earth, the pain became unbearable. I screamed. The men noticed me, grabbed me, and rubbed my face in the bare dirt. When they wrapped the hair on my scalp around their hands, intertwining their grubby fingers with my hair, I knew the pain that was coming. They ripped the hair from my forehead to the top of my skull. I woke writhing and screaming.
At first, I thought this nightmare was simply a message to remind my readers of the cruel settler colonialism Ireland endured – especially my Irish American readers who have benefited so much from the colonization of North America. After I wrote the section about the colonization of Ireland being a dress rehearsal for the colonization of North America, however, my ancestors were not satisfied. I felt an itchy determination to bring some beauty out of this terrible history.
While I was researching and writing about this history, several times I found myself absent-mindedly humming the tune of the “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” When I remembered that the tune was in my nightmare, I knew I had to learn more about the song.
“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is a haunting Irish ballad that was written by Robert Dwyer Joyce in the mid-1800s about theIrish Rebellion of 1798. The song tells the tale of a young Irish rebel who says good-bye to his lover before he joins the rebellion. His lover is shot during the fighting and the young rebel returns home to bury her.
Barley is a symbol of Irish resistance to colonization.
Irish rebels, most of whom were woefully impoverished, often carried barley in their pockets to eat while on the march. Many of these men wore their hair closely cropped as a sign of opposition to the powdered wigs worn by British aristocrats. Because of this, these Irish rebels were called “croppies.” When the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was brutally suppressed, the British threw slaughtered rebels into mass unmarked graves known as “croppy-holes.”
The barley in the pockets of the slain rebels grew from the croppy-holes. And, just as the barley grows every spring from the croppy-holes, fed by the bodies of Irish rebels, Irish resistance to colonization sprouts anew in each generation, fed by the memories of our ancestors – those men and women brave enough to sacrifice everything to resist colonization.
I wept when I learned about the barley growing from the mass graves of massacred Irish rebels. I wept for their courage. I wept for the beauty of their story. I also wept because I yearned for a symbol with as much power as barley that could remind the Irish in America of our ancestors’ legacy of resistance.
When I finished weeping, my ancestors gave me the symbol I yearned for.
I heard the Canada geese before I saw them. My ancestors’ songs carried with the honking geese songs to announce their arrival. The geese swept low in a disciplined formation over the Ohio River. In flying columns, they evoked the rebels of old on the march. They got so close I could see their silver feathers quivering as they descended. I sensed my ancestors on the wind that shook the goose wings.
Originally used to describe the departure of an Irish Catholic army to France after being defeated by William of Orange’s Protestant army in 1691, the term “wild geese” has been used in Irish history to describe Irish soldiers who left to fight in foreign armies. Most of these soldiers fled poverty. Many of them joined foreign armies to fight against the British. Some of these soldiers joined foreign armies to gain valuable training that they could return with and use to defend their homes.
I am American because some of my ancestors fled Ireland in the early 1850s, just after the Potato Famine and British colonial policies killed millions of Catholic Irish. Like the Irish wild geese, my ancestors fled poverty and starvation. They survived. So, I live.
Now, whenever I hear echoes of honking geese, I hear my ancestors. They are with me. They say: Resist.
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. Throuout 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?”
![[The Ohio River Speaks] When History Becomes Hallucination](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/08/lumber_mill_on_five_mile_cr_allegany_ny_chamberlain_001.jpg)
