Being Here
A watershed is a land area that channels precipitation into rivers, streams, and creeks. From there, the water makes it’s way to reservoirs, bays, the ocean. Watersheds are interconnected, as are all planetary ecologies, but a single watershed acts as something of a contained biome. This means knowing a decent amount about your watershed is deeply valuable for survival, resiliency, and planning.
Most of us, myself included, know very little about our watershed.
Half a century ago, Peter Warshall developed an exercise to promote knowledge of one’s watershed in the form of a quiz. There have been a ton of variations over the years. Kevin Kelly recently published a 30 question version “to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live,” and it’s my favorite:
Point north.
What time is sunset today?
Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
How many feet (meters) above sea level are you?
What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
From what direction do storms generally come?
Where does your garbage go?
How many people live in your watershed?
Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
Right here, where you are, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water?
Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)?
Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
What was the total rainfall here last year?
Where does the pollution in your air come from?
If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today?
What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable?
Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated?
After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?
Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it?
How many days till the moon is full?
If you’re like me, your confidence began to wane quickly. I did better than I expected, answering 10 more or less completely and another 8 partially. That which I didnt know I really didn’t know. I have a ton of room for improvement.
This is something I’m driven to learn more about, for reasons I mentioned above and because I think they contribute to feeling a penetrating sense of place, of rootedness in one’s community and environment. The best part, to me, is that what one can’t manage to learn from search engines or libraries is often freely available in the form of workshops and volunteer opportunities with community gardens, the local extension office, and city parks & rec resources.
I just recently attended a fruit tree pruning workshop, after which we cut back dozens of trees in a community orchard. It feels pretty rare for passions, practical knowledge, and community to come at the low, low price of contributing to a common good.
A Rising Urge, Devoid of Meaning
When I started this newsletter in 2020, I did so for a few reason. The primary one was need of a creative outlet.
For years, I wrote every day without fail. Graduate school accustomed me to it and taught me how to edit. I don’t always keep up with that bit, but I enjoy the writing even when it stays rough. After graduating, I didn’t exactly want to keep up with academic writing, but a vague, directionless motivation remained.
In about four years, I wrote three novels and attempted a fourth. I also wrote a bunch of short stories and flash fiction and maintained a writing buffer—basically a list of ideas, from the vague one-line to pages framing out a world or idea—as long as my leg. Then for at least four years, I hardly wrote at all, aside from work documents and emails.
I don’t always feel the pull the work on this newsletter, but I’m a believer in discipline over motivation. The former can always make up for the latter, and writing is important to me. Certainly more so than being lazy on a Saturday morning.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a bit of fiction for the newsletter. So far, I’ve been nervous to delve back in. Luckily, I also believe that fear of doing something is reason enough to do it.
I saw a prompt once that basically boiled down to: write 1000 words following the impact of an event of thought. Seemed a good way to roll some fiction in…
My uncle Jake turned ten the day the megaliths rose. A quartz-punctuated granite slab came up right outside his bedroom window, where the long promised extension on the house would have been if my grandfather had had any damn follow through.
Mom says that was the great family joke for years.
She was grown and living on her own a few years before the megaliths, and that was my grandfather’s go to excuse for not adding on another room until he didn’t need one any longer. That too I only learned from my mom. My grandfather died before I was born, and after that the family joke became too many ashes in the mouth.
Jake’s tenth fell on a Monday, so they’d thrown him a slumber party over the weekend. He was still riding the high, taking goofy selfies with his new tablet, when the monument rose behind him. It blotted out the light as he took a burst of pictures, each frame capturing a bit more of the rock until that was all there was to see.
I grew up in a world where the megaliths were old news. When I looked at the framed series of photos at Gramma’s house, I saw his growing confusion first. Mom and Gramma always saw the rock, their expressions tight and tentative. I always chuckled, and they always tried to snap out of it as quickly as possible. I couldn’t say why they chose to hang those pictures, or why they remained.
—
They came up everywhere all at once. On the US East Coast, it was about an hour after dawn. They were at once at home and utterly foreign, made up of the local geology but sprouting regardless of bedrock depth. In New England, it was pegmatite, In Mexico City, basalt. In Kabul, phyllite and greenschist.
Other than a rumble and some displaced earth, they didn’t do any harm on the way up. Not a one came up though anyone’s house, though more than a few came up just outside like at my grandparent’s place.
Social media takes seemed to sprout up faster than the rocks themselves, further fueling conspiracy theories that needed little help gaining purchase. They were clearly a psy-op, or else clear escalation of simmer tensions between state and non-state actors. Or maybe they were aliens or the incontrovertible proof of long-buried, unknown civilizations, human or otherwise.
They were absolutely, incontrovertibly this or that. It was true then, when Uncle Jake was 10 and mom was in her 20s, and it’s remained true long enough for me to grow up, plug in, and start seeing new hot takes flare and fizzle.
—
When I took an interest, Mom was nonplussed. She seemed to want to talk to me about it, relishing in my being suddenly so interested in something she knew, relatively speaking, so much about. The age of the megaliths, coinciding as it did entirely with her adult life, meant she was more than a little involved in all that online myth making.
She wanted to talk about it with me, but she refused to. I could see it every time. I would get deep into specious theories about the rocks and their supposed meaning and see a fire rage behind her eyes. Not rage, but raging. She needed to talk about it. But when I asked, she always retreated to the same place.
“Be careful with that stuff, baby. I know you’re smart, but if any of that’s true, it’s a big damn accident.”
And that was the end of it. Every time.
—
“I figured out why they call it Traitor Hill.” Paul said, too loud for first thing in the morning, when he slapped down a brittle piece of newsprint. A bit flaked off, and I immediately slid it into a plastic sleeve before reading.
Trainer Hill, a middle-class suburb on the edge of town, and better known to all who lived near by as Traitor Hill, was where my Gramma lived. Once or twice I overheard my mom and Gramma call it that, though never when they knew I might overhear. Just like when I’d ask about the megaliths, when I asked about the name, I never got a straight answer. Instead, they’d insist I never use that name anywhere in the neighborhood.
The article said that citizens of Trainer Hill were continuing their assault on public meetings of any kind, stoking fear and calling for independent incorporation.
“They wanted to be their own town?,” I asked.
“They took it to a vote! And nearly won. Shit, man, they did win but then after the fact it was tied up in the courts for five years or something and invalidated because of some procedural thing. By then,” he pointed at the paper, “these jokers couldn’t get it on the ballot again and it all went away.”
Paul was a lot less selective in his sleuthing. There wasn’t a rabbit hole he wouldn’t go down, and yet he was never taken in. Maybe I’d taken mom’s warning too close to heart.
“Geez. Guess it really did happen all over. Never would have thought it happened here. but…
“But why would we be special?,” Paul said.
“Yeah.”
—
Institutional responses to the megaliths were all over the place, which made them not much different from individual responses. It wasn’t hard to pull back the curtain and figure out why those in power said what they chose to.
As novel as the rocks were, as awful and terrifying as they time must have been, damn near everyone seemed to take on the sudden appearance of massive rock slabs all over the world as one more data point proving everything they’d been saying all along.
Those rare governments that chose to say little or nothing were no different. They’d ignored plenty before, so what was one more thing?
I think that’s why I got so interested in it when I did. I couldn’t then, and I still can’t now, figure out how something so unprecedented could come to be all people talked about while at the same time it became so utterly mundane, so normal, that the rest of the world kept chugging along as though nothing had happened.
The appearance of the megalith’s never up ended my life, despite the amount of time and energy I poured into learning whatever I could about them. But their disappearance, thirty years to the day after they first appeared? That defined everything that would come after.
Well dang, I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped. I never do, as I tend to write long, but reading this as I ready to hit send, I feel pretty happy with it.
Totally loved this installment! Watersheds are phenomenally important and have become acquainted with the one in Maine. Love the story you started! Right on the heels of me learning about metaphor in the writings of Camus! Awesome.