1. The Way of All the Living
The granite in New Hampshire is dying. Dying? No, not quite exactly. Metamorphosing? Perhaps, in a way. Transforming? Of course. Decomposing? Yes, decomposing. The granite in New Hampshire is decomposing. Breaking down. Becoming its parts. It stands on the precipice of rebirth, reincarnation. In millions or hundreds of millions of years, it will harden into sedimentary rock. Diagenesis: the middle of everything.
Granite weathers into pieces, much like all of us do. Its organs, the minerals it is made of, break down over time. Muscovite, biotite, and feldspar weather into clays. These clays expand when exposed to water, pushing apart the remaining quartz until the rock crumbles like granola. A once strong and solid rock: countertop material with an interlocking crystal structure, becomes friable.
The geologist asks: What happened to you? as it collapses between their fingertips.
And the rock says: Nothing… this is just what I am made of.
This is just the rock’s path to the grave, to the Earth, to its new form. All sedimentary rocks are made of loose minerals that become compacted under pressure. Most bedrock is sedimentary, or metamorphosed sedimentary rock. Fossils are held in sedimentary rocks: limestone, shale, fine grained sandstones. Sedimentary rocks are the beds in which we all someday lie.
Rock disintegrates the way all bodies do, piece by piece, over time. Permanence is a myth: not even the rocks remain unchanged if you look close enough for long enough. We all fall apart. Never let them tell you we can stop it. The march towards progress is nothing but a march towards sedimentation. A march towards decomposition. A march towards calculated oblivion: the end and therefore the beginning. So yes, I suppose it is true. The granite in new Hampshire is dying, just like the rest of us.
2. The Myth
I am seated in a screen surrounded by ten other severed heads. My eyes dart from box to box, caricature to caricature. My nose senses nothing, my ears pick up static, my hands lie limp in my lap. The air being lazily absorbed into my lungs is stale. My spirit wanders to distant worlds: ferns, mossy rocks, cold and clear water. My body sits on a couch surrounded by walls. My mind struggles to focus on the other ghosts, on the person speaking in the meeting. My skin feels weighted, sleepy, though I am not tired. I am restless. I want to run. I want to throw the seatbelt of my laptop across the room and dance freely. I want to escape this contrived trap.
It is not that I have an attention problem. I am not inattentive, hyperactive, or neurodivergent, even, though many psychiatrists may suggest otherwise. Rather, the world I live in has a reality problem. It is not that I cannot focus, it is that the things in which I am being told to focus on do not exist. The people on the screen – I cannot see their bodies, I cannot shake their hands, I cannot hear the true pitch of their voices, I cannot read their body language. Everything is flattened and glossy, nothing has texture and therefore nothing is real.
We spend much of our modern lives convincing our minds to exist in places our bodies are not, in places that do not exist in space, in places with no address or landscape. In zoom meetings, we train our brains, we beg them really, to focus, to be in the room with fifteen other floating heads, while our bodies remain frozen and empty on the couch. We practice thinking about where we will go next, where we will be in ten minutes, ten months, ten years, while our bodies remain fixed where they are. We transport ourselves to the Caribbean Islands, to France, to Mars, while shoveling down plasticized food in bed.
Since the Enlightenment, we have been taught to live in our heads instead of our bodies. It is either/or, and we must pick the mind, the pinnacle of our human form, the source of all our distinction. The body is just a vessel, a vestigial organ we have not yet optimized. What the body feels, where the body is, what the body craves, is of no significance to us anymore. We train our senses to serve the mind, and we ignore the ones that don’t. We ignore hunger, exhaustion, and restlessness to finish the project. We refuse to cry out with grief because we do not have the time. We dismiss our gut when it tells us this place is dangerous because we need a paycheck to eat.
When the body says run the mind says sit. When the body says sleep the mind says work. When the body says love the mind says fear. And eventually, the body’s will becomes a nonfactor. It ceases to exist except as a burden, a thing to be hacked, shaped, and exploited for the mind’s purposes. Eventually, we stop feeling these sensations altogether, we become incapable of sensing and fulfilling our most basic needs: loss of appetite, insomnia, depression, derealization, depersonalization, apathy, the great fog of the nonreal. The body withers away, dies a little, and recedes behind the shadow of the mind.
And then doctors say that people who cannot manage such things, whose bodies have stronger wills than the mind, are ill, or diseased, or psychologically disturbed. I am not ill, I am an animal. I am preoccupied by living creatures, by habitable places, by food and warmth and companionship and play. I will not apologize for drifting away in online meetings, in large lecture halls, and at the office desktop. Excuse my inattention, what I am required to pay attention to is simply not interesting enough, not sensory enough, not real enough. It is natural. I refuse to be severed, to live as a head on a stick. I refuse to deny myself my body in exchange for the comforts and conveniences of the modern world. I refuse to forget where I came from in exchange for where we are going. Call me anything you want, but to my own body I will be true.
3. The Heron and the Crane
I almost miss it. It looks like any other stump in the marsh, but my eyes linger, caught. I wait. There is a reason my feet stop, my heart beats louder in my chest, and my breathing slows. There is a presence here, something my animal body recognizes, something I am compelled to notice. I am patient. There is nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. After five days alone in the woods, my senses are attuned to my surroundings, unburdened of the pressure to be productive, to be moving in a particular direction, to be anything other than here, now.
The long neck of a sandhill crane unfurls before me. I smile. I knew it. Red feathers accentuate the light brown body. I can see its eyes; it is watching me as I am watching it. (It is not an it, but a being. A bird. A dweller. A wonder.) We stand together, in the same space, at the same time, our bodies made of the same parts, pulsing with the life from the same organs. For a moment, our lives brush against one another. Our shared existence hangs in the ether between us, suspended where our gazes meet.
After some time, we separate. I continue forward, through the marsh and into the woods. The crane remains, still watching me, hardly having fidgeted an inch. As we move apart, I feel it watching me still. Though our bodies disperse, we remain connected: by our shared habitat, by our sensory similarities, by our common ground.
◊ ◊ ◊
A blue heron flies overhead as I walk across a crowded pedestrian bridge. My heart soars with its wings as I follow its flight path and watch: its body aerodynamic, its movements effortless but intentional, its eyes sharp and focused on the path ahead. With a gray-blue body beneath the gray-blue clouds, and a yellow beak beneath the yellow sun, the heron is sky incarnate. It is magnificent, intelligent, gaze-catching. I point up, and say:
“Look!”
No one else on the bridge stops. A few people bump into me and glare, but no one else cranes their neck to see the majestic creature soaring above. Perhaps the heron does not exist at all, but is an apparition, a projection of nature where ostensibly there is none. The river under the bridge is largely decorative, isn’t it? A feature of the campus rather than an ecosystem unto itself. And who’s to say what is real, what flies overhead in the early afternoon, if there is only one witness? If the bird is gone in an instant, leaving no proof at all except the imprint behind my eyes?
I feel it again – the fear of impending madness coupled with the creeping sense that people are receding, being absorbed by something that is transforming us into creatures of another realm. It is hard to look around, at people walking on sidewalks with headphones in, sitting motionless in cubicles, transfixed by phones at every possible moment, and say we are of this world. We are still animals, but we are losing our instincts. Foregoing our focus. Letting go of all that tethers us to the physical world: our senses, our bodies, our attention. I finish crossing the bridge anxious and afraid.
Where have we gone to? I wonder to myself.
And where do I think I’m going?
4. Collision Course
Two migrating creatures move at breakneck speeds across the land, seeking food, shelter, comfort, warmth, and a new or temporary home. Both have been thoughtfully designed for traveling: aerodynamic, fast, able to use the Earth’s resources to move efficiently through space and time. One, however, is disadvantaged. Despite being evolutionarily pristine, optimized for flying through forests, meadows, and the like, the Butterfly is small and fragile. Its wings are paper thin, its proboscis was designed for flowers, and its body is full of sensitive organs. The Vehicle, on the other hand, is large, senseless, and heavily armored. It dominates the land, roams the ecosystem as the newest apex predator. It is not inherently violent, but so accidently deadly it may as well be an evil beast. The butterfly does not stand a chance. It will not even earn the designation of roadkill when it dies, just windshield splatter. It is a small miracle if the driver even notices. Yet another life cut short, destroyed by the morning commute.
5. Elegy
I am standing in the middle of the Granite Mountain Memorial in Butte, Montana, surrounded by twenty classmates and three instructors. This is an educational visit, a stop on our drive back from Glacier National Park. I am at field camp for my geology degree. We are supposed to be learning about acid distribution post open-pit copper mining. It is Saturday, sunny. Glaringly hot. Over ninety degrees. I am sweating. I am shaking. I am weeping.
There are bodies buried here. One hundred and sixty eight from the Speculator disaster, the worst mining disaster in American history. Over two thousand if you count the rest, the people who died on any given day from the accidents, from the toxins in their lungs, from the carcinogens lining their fingertips. Millions more if you count the birds, the plants, the mammals, the amphibians, the insects, and the reptiles displaced when the land was excavated for its entrails. Hundreds and thousands more if you count those still dying today from water and land contamination: the cancers, the birth defects, the family heirlooms. Here lie ravaged bodies atop ravaged bodies atop ravaged land.
The purpose of this mine was to supply copper for World War I. Which is to say, the whole operation was an exercise in extermination. Desiccated land. Human beings burned in the fire, killed in machinery accidents, murdered with the weaponry made of Earth’s minerals. The memorial was paid for in part by BP, the oil company. They kill you and then they erect a memorial in your honor. Devastation atop devastation atop someone’s incalculable wealth.
The miners wrote letters to their loved ones as they slowly suffocated from the fumes, trapped in the mine shafts while a raging fire consumed the tunnels around them. This is what floods my eyes with tears, what turns my heart until it unlatches, what pushes my humanity to the surface until it can no longer remain within me: [1]
◊ ◊ ◊
“Well, we are all waiting for the end. I guess it won’t be long. We take turns rapping on the pipe, so if the rescue crew is around they will hear us. Well, my dear little wife, try not to worry. I know you will, but trust in God, everything will come out all right. There is a young fellow here, Clarence Marthey. He has a wife and two kiddies. Tell her we done the best we could, but the cards were against us. Goodbye little loving wife. It is now 5:10.”
“Seven o’clock, all alive, but air getting bad. One small piece of candle left. Nine o’clock, in the dark, all is lost.”
“To My Dear Wife and Mother: It takes my heart to be taken from you so suddenly and unexpectedly, but think not of me, for if death comes, it will be in a sleep without suffering. I ask forgiveness for any suffering or pain I have ever caused. Madge, dear, the place is for you and the child. – Manus”
◊ ◊ ◊
And these men died for what? I ask myself. The war effort? Progress? Human development? No. In the end they died for this: one of the largest superfund sites in the nation. A scar across the land. A toxic dump waiting to contaminate the groundwater of the entire city below. The money made from the mining has been spent on remediation. They died bravely, for a despicable cause. All too human.
My classmates move away from me, away from the halo of discomfort created by my public breakdown. It is not polite to cry in public. It is not acceptable to let your body, your emotions, affect you in a visible way. But I cannot remain stoic. There are bodies buried here. Bodies buried under the weight of knowledge, murdered by the ideas of geologists like us, people who know where valuable minerals grow and how to harvest them. Knowledge facilitates destruction as much as it facilitates advancement. My knowledge of the Earth expands my love for it, but for many, it expands their ability to exploit it, to become rich off it. And we as geologists must answer for that. Scientists across disciplines must answer for that: the ways in which knowledge has advanced our deadly technologies, devastated wild lands, and destroyed incalculable lives as much as it has increased our comforts and lengthened our lives (so long as we do not also die in the fires, the wars, the accidents).
And let us never forget this is not compulsory. Mining is not a condition of human survival. We choose this, every day, we choose this. This life based upon human and environmental exploitation. And for what? I ask myself again. Why do we choose this death-life over a living-life? For television? For the freedom to waste my hours, days, and years mindlessly placated by entertainment? For factory-produced snacks? For the joy of the morning commute? For the ability to have anything I desire appear at my door, so long as I have the money and internet connection to request it? I have no satisfying answer.
“It is so jarring to go from the beauty of Glacier to here,” my classmate says to another student.
No…
“Why is it surprising?” I ask, still trying to catch my breath from the crying.
“Did we not drive on a road through the park surrounded by hundreds of other cars, use electricity-powered visitor stations, and stop in paved parking lots to admire the views?”
None of that would be possible without mining.
One cannot exist without the other. Glacier National Park, as we know it, cannot exist without the Granite Mountain Mine. The National Parks themselves were a response to the devastation of wild lands in the United States. The parks are a testament to the impacts of mining, logging, human industry and construction. It should not be a shock to travel from a National Park to a superfund site.
It all bleeds together: the mines and the parks, the birds and the humans, the mind and the body, the rocks and the soil, the migration and the deaths. Nothing ends where it is supposed to. The crane does not lie camouflaged its entire life. Our inattention does not end with missed observations. The bedrock breaks. The body resists the confines of the mind. The butterfly follows its internal compass even as the maps have changed. The contaminated water does not stay within its tank. The boundaries we have erected between nature and humans, life and death, body and mind, preservation and exploitation, are a farse. We all breathe the same air under the same sky within the same Earth. Continuity comes for us all in the end.
6. The River
I lie naked in a river surrounded by one hundred miles of wilderness. The water is warmer than the alpine runoff I am used to. I feel the weight of my body dissipate into the current. I am calm and free, just a floating body in this wide universe. Beyond all the ideas coursing through my head, beyond the conscious mind, beyond the calculations of modern living, this is what it means to be alive. When the mind dissolves into the surroundings, this is what is left: the skin, the eyes, the ears, the hands, the nose, the feet, the shoulders, the knees, the chest, the back, the neck – the body, with all its pulses and perceptions. When we remove the boundaries that separate us from the Earth: when we step out of our houses, our vehicles, our shoes, our clothes, and embrace the physical world completely, nakedly, we return to our animal selves. We simplify. Domestication is as much a dress as it is a lifestyle. We are not so buried under it as we imagine. We are closer than we ever know to returning to our humanity.
Julia Rudlaff is an environmental writer and seasonal worker from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Julia is a recent graduate of Michigan State University where they studied geoscience and creative writing, and their work explores the intersections of environmental science and environmental philosophy. Julia spends the summers maintaining hiking trails across the country and the winters caretaking at a remote educational facility in SW Montana. Their work can be found on Terrain.org and in Deep Wild Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Panorama.
Footnotes:
[1] The Granite Mountain Speculator Mine Memorial (website)
