Dear Readers,
I have decided to move my writing over to Substack. My new writing and poetry will be posted here. You can sign up for free emails to receive poems from me every weekday straight to your inbox. Every weekend I will also send out longer thought pieces similar to my posts on here. I appreciate your support and hope you will check out my new site and subscribe!
Cheers,
Micah
When I was growing up there was a gully that ran through our backyard along the property line between us and the Jefferson National Forest. When the summer rains were heavy enough the yard would flood and the gully would fill with water. Sometimes this flash river would last for days after heavy rains. One section of it in particular, a bowl-like portion about fifteen feet deep, could hold water through the year if we had sufficient precipitation. The sides were made of clay and were slick and messy. When the flow from the rest of the gully ceased, the water in the bowl quickly became stagnant and dark slime took up residence on the surface of the pool. As the water evaporated the surface coating organisms would run aground on the steep walls and leave dark green streaks on the burnt orange. Tree debris from thunderstorms passed would slowly emerge from their underwater slumber — first as monsters, then as logs.
One winter I was playing in the snow with my brothers and we ventured back to the gully to discover the pool had held water into the colder months and frozen over. I was pleasantly surprised by the prospect of walking on the ice and apprehensively lowered my self down the slope of the gully, sliding on my butt across the snow leading with my right foot. Upon making contact with the ice I discovered quickly that it was not sufficiently thick. The ice broke and my leg sank into chilling water up to my knee. I scrambled out of the water, streaking the surrounding white snow with mud, and ran up the hill as my leg went numb.
There are seasonal rivers in Machakos and Makueni County in Kenya. They reminded me of the gully back home during the two summers I was there working with Utooni Development Organization (UDO). Their seasonal rivers are more than a playground, though, the area where UDO operates is close to the equator and experiences alternating wet and dry seasons. During the dry season there are often water shortages and draught. When the rains come the seasonal rivers fill and often cause flooding. Joshua Mukusya, UDO’s late founder, implemented an ingenious solution to the erratic availability of water in his area by building concrete dams in portions of the rivers with high bedrock. As they season, the dams naturally build a reservoir of sand that traps water and holds it through the dry season and provides fresh water to the surrounding community. These sand dams also raise the water table nearby increasing agricultural production and even alleviate flooding down stream. Utooni Development Organization builds these sand dams and does so much more incredible work in the area. You should read more about UDO here.
Some might say that it is easy to take the water cycle for granted, and perhaps this is true, but I think the greater plight is that it is incredibly difficult to comprehend just how special water is. For starters, it falls from the sky. The molecule that makes up sixty percent of the human body and contributes the majority of biomass to most other living things as well, falls from the sky! As I mention in The Thermodynamics of Coffee, sometimes the water falls as snow, especially on the colder and darker ends of the Earth and the snow reflects precious sunlight and brightens the days. In these same parts of the world and at high elevations, ice compacts overtime and forms glaciers which are geologically considered rocks and they pulse with the seasons cutting shapes in the Earth. Usually though, when water freezes under normal conditions it does something strange, it traps oxygen as the water becomes solid which makes solid water less dense than liquid water. This isn’t very common for materials (to be less dense as a solid than as a liquid) but it is incredibly important for the maintenance of living systems. When bodies of water free the ice forms on top and insulates the fish and other organisms living within from the cold. If the ice formed at the bottom first, aquatic life likely wouldn’t last the winter.
Two weeks ago we planted cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, and broccoli in the greenhouse and raspberries at the edge of the property. The rhubarb patch is shooting up before our eyes. A moose came and prematurely pruned the raspberry plant. The weather turned cool and wet this past week and each day I put on my coat and walk out to turn on the irrigation system as the dry leaves scrape against the window of the greenhouse and rain drops streak down the other side.
On a late spring day some weeks ago I was driving back north to my home after spending a week house- and dog-sitting for a friend in Anchorage. I was giddy. I didn’t quite realize how much I had missed the cabin until the stores and apartment complexes that line the highway gave way to trees and mountains. It was a surprising happiness and a simple one.
I decided to stop halfway home to refill my gas tank. It was early on a Saturday, around 7 or 8 o’clock, and both the gas station and the adjacent parking lot for the grocery store were almost completely empty. When I pulled up to one of the pumps and got out, I noticed a man in the distance walking across the parking lot. I thought nothing of it and began fueling. The man neared. As I finished fueling up my truck and was about to get in and go home I heard a voice calling to me: “Brother! How are you? Where are you headed?” The man I had seen from across the lot had made his way over to me. He was smoking a Black and Mild and wore an Army PT jacket and well-worn jeans.
“North.” I replied, suspecting where he was going with his questions, but keeping my own plans vague. He explained that he had received and email. That he needed to get to Fairbanks. That he had been offered a job but had no way to get there.
“I can drive you as far north as Palmer.” I offered. He accepted enthusiastically, took a few final drags from his cigar, extinguished it, and got into my truck as I cleared out the passenger seat. He was African. Perhaps 30 years old, he had short dreaded hair and weary eyes. I suspected he had come to the US from Africa relatively recently and (admittedly, always looking for a chance to practice my Kiswahili) I asked him where he was from.
“Ohio.”
“I’m from Virginia.” I offered, attempting to find a common ground for conversation.
“I think I’ve been there.”
The conversation was slow and awkward at first. We talked about how we had gotten to Alaska. I had driven. He flew. I work in a coffeeshop. He had bounced from job to job working his way up the Kenai Peninsula. He’d stayed in most of the jails along the way. He had gotten a ride at one point from a trucker who had grabbed his crotch. I promised not to grope him in a failed attempt at humor that I had hoped would put a deeply tired man at ease.
The conversation wound awkwardly around and eventually we returned to the topic of origins and my further questions about Ohio led him to tell me that he was from Somalia. That he had fled his country and spent a number of years in a refugee camp in Kenya.
“You hear my accent and you think this man must not be from America.” He said dejectedly. “You can’t buy anything for a dollar. A man gave me a dollar and all I could buy was that Black and Mild. I’m not even in a refugee camp but here I am hungry.” I had tiny bags of almonds in my glove compartment left over from a road trip and I offered them to him.
“How old are you?” He asked.
“Twenty-two.”
“Is this your truck?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been here less than a year and you have a truck? I’ve been here two years and I still don’t have a truck.”
I tried to explain that it had belonged to my parents and that I was still paying them for it, but he continued his line of questioning.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Do you have a wife?”
“No.”
“Do you have any kids?”
“No.”
“Man you gotta get your shit together.”
He talked about his plans to save up money and buy a sleeping bag and then a car and then land. He wanted to raise goats. He said Alaska was beautiful but cold. I dropped him off in Palmer with the few remaining bags of almonds and the $83 of tips that had survived in my wallet since Monday. And then I drove home.
To say that I was heavy-hearted on my way home would be both an understatement and an easy way out in the face of a deeply complex and heart-wrenching issue; a quick and easy way to fit such a vivid and unsettling experience into a familiar emotional framework. I have tried to resist the urge to find explanation in terms of “me.” Instead, in reflecting on that drive, I have succumb to another of my weaknesses: to think of things in broad theoretical terms. As if the problems of the man I drove to Palmer are a case study for all of humanities problems. As if these problems are to be solved by logic and not action.
Still —when confronted with the great and troubling irony that human action (and not theoretical engineering or sociology or economics) created both the concept and physical manifestations of ‘home’ and of ‘homelessness’— I seek the comfort of the writers I revere in order to formulate some hope of better understanding the problems of modernity and their possible solutions.
Jack Turner, in his book The Abstract Wild, writes:
The condors need to get home, too. So do the orcas. That they no longer have a home is not their problem. It is our problem; we have done it. The solution is to give them their home. Why is this so difficult to conceive or act upon? Part of the answer is this: we no longer have a home except in a brute commercial sense: home is where the bills come. To seriously help homeless humans and animals will require a sense of home that is not commercial. The Eskimo, the Aranda, the Sioux — all belonged to a place. Where is our habitat? Where do I belong?
‘All sites of enforced marginalization-ghettos, shantytowns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps-have something in common with zoos.’ If we add Indian reservations, aquariums, and botanical gardens to this list, a pattern emerges: removed from their home, living things become marginal, and what becomes marginal is diminished or destroyed. Of bedrock importance is the complexity of animals, plants, and place that creates a unique community. This is as true for Homo sapiens as for all other species.”
Wade Davis takes a more focused anthropological look at the issues when he writes in The Wayfinders:
“In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere. […] As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.”
When faced with these bleak accounts that try to explain the problems of the world, I find comfort and hope in the words of the Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear who said:
“…the old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence.”
“Muncho Lake, British Columbia, Canada — July 26th 2015
I have not been writing here as much, perhaps, as I should. The trip so far has been amazing— absolutely breathtaking and my only regrets are that I do not have more time to spend here and that I have not written more.
As we were driving through Banff and Jasper, the clouds hung low and hooked on the jagged edges of the mountains like wisps of carded wool. It was there by the lakes in the Northern Rockies of Banff that I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging and pure joy. I must return. Much of the journey has been hours of dull scenery, but there are shorter, more vivid stretches of sheer beauty —the kind that shrinks you down to only the parts of you that are good, which is quite small. Currently I am sitting at a picnic table in a campground on Muncho Lake and it is awe-inspiring. The lake is blue. A blue that you find rarely in nature as I experienced it so far. A blue that can only be found, if you’re lucky, in the eyes of someone you dearly love.”
I found this entry recently when I was flipping back through the pages of my journal and as I read it I began to reminisce (as I am want to do) about the countless, utterly breathtaking places I have visited. Sometimes, it is the historical or geographical significance of the place that gives me pause, like the giant rock that I stood at in Burundi almost 250 years after H. M. Stanley famously asked “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” Or later on that same trip when I drank from the source of the Nile.
Sometimes, it is the experience of the place. While in Kenya in 2013, the group I was with got the chance to climb a table top mountain named Mount Sabachi located in the arid Samburu County with a group of Masaai Warriors and Elders. The camp where we stayed at the base of the mountain was dry and dusty and hot. We started early in the morning, to avoid the sweltering heat, and followed a narrow trail that turned back and forth up the side of the mountain; slowly fine sand and dirt became gravel and rocks. A short ways into the hike someone asked if we packed any food for the top, the Masaai man who was leading us smiled and gestured up the trail to another man who was leading two reluctant goats ahead of us towards the top. The hike was long and difficult, at least more so than I had anticipated, but the pace was relatively slow and broken up by breaks and the distraction of stories and Swahili practice. When we reached the top, I knew it was worth it. We were in a lush oasis. There was a bubbling spring, tall trees, and thick green grass. We had a Swahili lesson in a shaded grove. We sat on the rocks in the warm sun with a cool breeze overlooking the camp and listened to lectures about the lands below. We roasted the goats on a bed of coals and ate as the sun set. We walked down with the meat on our backs, hoping there were no leopards nearby.
Sometimes, like at Muncho Lake, it is the all-consuming beauty of the scenery. The cool air refreshing two weary travelers as they sat on a long, pale-white driftwood log on the gravel lakeshore of the slender body of water, nestled between old stone mountains, dark blue in the evening light save one long silver brushstroke of moonlight. We met an older couple on the beach who were making the drive to Alaska again after more than twenty years since they first took the trip as college students. We retired to the warmth of the campfire. When we found it was not enough, we drank cheap scotch from blue tin cups, read poetry, and listened to the soft splashes of our neighbors fishing hooks playing in the water.
Every morning I step outside and view the rugged beauty of Pioneer Peak and —stretched out in either direction, hugging her sides— her many siblings. The brown porch creaks softly as I walk out to my yellow truck, mostly covered in grey snow scum, sitting contentedly on the icy gravel driveway. Pines and birch and the side of the mountain calm the strong valley winds to a soft breeze.
These places are special. Like all places, they are the confluence of uncountable factors; from geological sculpting to photon skipping, from wind currents in the atmosphere to electric currents in neurons, the ripples on the lake and the scratching of a pen. These places are special to me because I have been there; been a part of the confluence. The Inuit word sila means both weather and consciousness, the natural order and reason. For me there are few metaphors that are as deep or as moving. It is at times where I feel close to the world and other people, like Sabachi and Muncho, that the metaphor is most powerful.
All this and some days I still find myself in ruts. Apathy rusts passion. The mountains are just mountains. The rain and snow are inconveniences. The litter on the side of the road is inevitable. Cleaning up after customers in the cafe is a burden.
At the end of the journal entry I also wrote a quote from a poem in Sophocles’ Antigone that I have read many times— I read it again on the shores of Muncho Lake that cold evening. I found it in The Tree of Meaning by Robert Bringhurst and use the English translation he supplies:
“Or [man] paws at the eldest of goddesses, Earth, as though she were made out of gifts and forgiveness, driving the plough in its circle year after year with what used to be horses.”
It was a quiet, sunny day in Bujumbura and we were going to the zoo. The group walked from our meeting place in the courtyard of our five star hotel out to the back parking lot beside the golf course where our cars were waiting. As we passed the security guards, some of us greeted them in our broken French. C’est va. C’est va. As we loaded the SUVs, three people per vehicle, I looked for one of the drivers who spoke Kiswahili so that I could practice another tongue as we drove across town. I interrupted their conversations in Kirundi with the one word of it that I knew, mwaramutse, and then I continued the greeting in Kiswahili. Habari ya asubuhi? Unaendeleaje? It was a good morning, like all of the mornings I had in Burundi, and apparently the drivers were having a good morning as well.
We drove away from the hotel and the four vehicles moved aggressively through the chaotic Bujumbura traffic. At intersections and roundabouts, one of our drivers would block the intersection while the others sped through. The maneuvers were rehearsed and they moved fluidly with little communication between the cars. We soon arrived at the zoo. The scene was rather underwhelming. In retrospect, I’m not really sure what I expected. There was a dirt lot with a few trees and a building with ticket window. To the left of the building was an area full of kiosks and a small stadium. They were empty. To the right of the building was the gate to the zoo.
The zoo was at most an acre, if that, in size. As we entered, everyone slowly spread out, going here and there, unsure what route to take through the exhibits. I wandered through one of the buildings. It was dark save the sun creeping through the door, but the light was enough to see the walls lined with aquariums of various sizes and levels of completion. In the ones with water, fishlike bodies floated in silent green murk. Their eyes were dead. As for the fish? I heard voices calling for the group.
We all gathered in another one of the buildings. There was a long cage. The room was once again dimly lit and it took a moment for my eyes to readjust. When they did, I saw the contents of the cage: a dozen or so guinea pigs and a few rabbits. It seemed an odd exhibit for a zoo in a country that was surrounded by some of the most ecologically and taxonomically diverse countries in the world. Burundi itself still has some amazing rainforests, but much of their wildlife was run out years ago by long periods of civil war.
One of the people, who had been in Burundi longer than the rest of us and who had visited the zoo before with other groups, was speaking to the zookeeper. We all waited and wondered. After a few moments of negotiation, there was an exchange of money. The zookeeper picked up a tattered cardboard box, and then grabbed a number of guinea pigs and one fluffy white rabbit from the cage and put them into the box. He preceded to lead us through the zoo.
The first stop was the crocodiles. We walked over to a circular inclosure that was barely bigger than the crocodile it contained. It had a few puddles of stagnant water. The zookeeper pulled one of the guinea pigs out of the box and offered it to various members of the group. There were no takers, so he tossed the guinea pig to the crocodile who chomped it down. I glanced at the cardboard box that held the other furry critters. The bottom was now soaked with urine. We proceeded to the other cages, feeding some of the other crocodiles as we went. The plump white rabbit was dropped in one of the biggest, best kept pits, so there were logs and grass for it to hide behind. It survived much longer than the guinea pigs; running back and forth, hiding, running around some more until it was tired and the crocodile was bored and hungry.
Next, we went to the snake exhibit, a building without any doors that contained fifteen or twenty cases, most of them had snakes inside. The zookeeper was adamant that we would get our money’s worth from our rodent purchase, so he opened the case of one of the snakes, took one of the remaining guinea pigs, and dropped it directly in front of the (I don’t know the name, something very poisonous) snake. It was unimpressed. The zookeeper poked and prodded the snake to no avail. He wasn’t hungry. So the zookeeper retrieved the guinea pig and proceeded to the next case, leaving the previous one not quite closed. The next similarly poisonous snake was similarly unenthused. The zookeeper continued from snake to snake, leaving many of their doors wide open. There were no takers. I honestly don’t remember if I stayed in the snake exhibit long enough to find out if any snakes bit. Looking for a distraction from the zookeepers pleads with the snakes, I turned around and saw one of the other zoo patrons reaching into one of the cases and pulling out a slender green viper. This was my queue to leave.
I stepped outside and found myself beside the chimpanzee cage. It was roundish and maybe three meters in diameter. The cage was build around a gnarly tree, but only could contain the bottom half. Inside was a solitary chimp. There was a man there who had attempted to shake hands with the chimp, but now was caught in a cruel business transaction where he pleaded for his hand back and pried at the primates impressive, deal-sealing grip. Ultimately, there was an exchange made. The man was returned the use of his hand and the chimp received one liter of precious, clean, bottled drinking water —which he immediately dumped on the dusty dirt floor of his cage.
The zookeeper soon arrived. He had one guinea pig left in the pee-soaked box. After some hemming and hawing, he handed the final guinea pig to the chimpanzee. The chimp took the small critter, his new friend, and started to play with it like a small doll or action figure; pulling at its limbs, throwing it up into the air and catching with his dexterous feet, aggressively petting it. After a few minutes it died and the chimp carefully handed the limp guinea pig back to the zookeeper.
I heard other people at the zoo talking. They were appalled at the way that the chimpanzee treated the guinea pig; throwing it around here and there, playing with it like it was a toy. They pointed through the bars of the small cage. How could it be so cruel?
Enter Wilderness 