Groundglass, p.10
Groundglass, page 10
Walking the gallery, I wonder if my body will ever round with life again, like Liz’s. If I will birth my complicity in all of this, against my will. And I wonder if seeing clearly the interconnection between polluted places, human and nonhuman life, and future generations can be an alternative to the separation and extraction on which ecological abuses have long been premised. Maybe this is wonder, or grief by a different name.
I stand before a weaving of watersheds. Water flows within a diffuse net of permeable vessels like the movement of fluid inside bodies. The movements of blood and milk.
I think about how legacy ecological violence and other legacies of white supremacist thought and action thrive on imagining a world of separations and hierarchies that are not actual but invented to uphold such wrongs. I am as polluted as the sites. Could there be something humbling and revolutionary in understanding myself as a site of contamination? Inheritor of my ancestors’ trash and misdeeds? Could restorative action and real redress grow out of this painful recognition?
I live both up-and downstream. A didactic accompanying Tali’s work poses a series of questions: “If one understands home as a watershed, rather than a city or state, can that interrupt the patriarchal, colonial thinking that divides our understanding of here and away, self and other, earth and body, nature and culture? As the detritus of our human life on land runs downstream and then circulates back through bodies, what can watersheds reveal about relationships between ecological and human health? Can the ways of water help move us past the destructive extractivism that ultimately makes us sick?”
In the gallery, I am surrounded by weavings, porous as bodies.
How?
Before hospice, questions are posed to him. What are your main wishes? What are your main fears? Where do you want to die? How do you want to die?
I do not ask him these questions. A social worker in the hospital room does. I sit near them while a blood-red sunset flashes out the wide window that opens onto a courtyard facing other hospital rooms, and he does not want to answer these questions, and he keeps saying back, “Whatever,” and spitting into a small plastic cup, and from somewhere else I hear the words whatever / inside us that we think needs / protection, the whatever that is / small & hasn’t yet found its / way. I’ve been teaching these lines to students. I’ve come to the hospital from class. His main wish is not to die; his main fear is to die. We do not need to speak this to know it.
How do you want to die? Whatever. It thinks it could live / on air, on words, forever almost. His eyes are clear and blue. Ankles hairless from chemo and smooth down to his feet. One time, he got drunk on an airplane. When the plane landed in Phoenix, he was wearing bedroom slippers and he rode the baggage claim carousel like a maniac, my aunt told me at the bar after his funeral.
A former road in the unincorporated town of Picher, Oklahoma, overgrown with trees.
Shotgun Fungi
“There is only one question:
how to love this world?”
—Mary Oliver
It is early fall in Minneapolis, and in the community garden plot I turn over decaying leaves and damp wood mulch. In the newly exposed corners there’s a patch of shotgun fungi, clear as cooked glass noodles.
The stalks grow upright under the mulch, angling toward sunlight, each topped with a swollen bulb filled with sugar and a shiny black peridiole that looks like a poppyseed or nipple.
“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing asks at the beginning of her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, a work about the matsutake mushroom, capitalist destruction, and continuing life on earth. She goes for a walk to find mushrooms.
I’ve been neglectful this drought summer, failing to water. Encouraging only the weeds, fungi, and soil bacteria to return. What thrives without me. Across the fence today, freight cranes shudder shipping containers down onto the steel flatbeds of trucks. I take in this patch of shotgun fungi. Near as I understand it, the fungal body seeps onto other species. This is how tree roots and mycorrhiza fungal networks share nutrients underground. Fungi excrete digestive enzymes outside their bodies, and the enzymes can digest rocks, dead trees, and soil, breaking down nutrients and recycling them into new life. It’s like they’ve got everted stomachs. But sometimes harmony breaks down—as when the fungus parasitizes the root, or if the plant is already full of nutrients and rejects the fungus.
I take solace in the wonder of such strange patterns and repetitions across life forms and species. The seeping stomachs of fungi and people. Fungal bodies echo what’s buried, Tsing observes. Going for a walk to find mushrooms when one’s world is falling apart is to go looking for “binding roots.” When she finds mushrooms she knows “that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.”
Here in the garden plot, the air smells like kerosene and crushed yarrow. I breathe it in and out and am stitched to this place, however imperfectly and briefly, so I bend down low and dig.
A thick heat after a rare rainfall. The VOC-monitoring well pipes glisten. Under the boulevard tree, slippery, skin-soft leaves. Pollen-drunk bees dive back into the necks of late-season flowers for last call. A car drives by fast. Inside, someone is laughing. I have come to love this soft and violent place, where summer is ending. Where death reverberates and life returns.
NOTES
annotation as excess, leaking, gratitude
Epigraphs
Éireann Lorsung, The Century (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020), 111.
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 93, 62.
Humboldt Industrial Area
City of Minneapolis, “Humboldt Industrial Park Redevelopment Plan,” December 16, 2005, https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/media/content-assets/www2-documents/government/View-Humboldt-Industrial-Park-Redevelopment-Plan.pdf.
Information about the Howe fire and other historical and contextual information is from this city report. I have relied heavily on city reports over the space of this project. They are strange. Sometimes poetic. Worthy of mistrust. In this report, for example, I learned that a creek that ran through this corporate acreage was moved sometime between 1965 and 1971, but by whom and why remains a mystery. What I don’t trust in the reports is the near-universal linguistic gloss of neutrality; land reuse plans in a city with a long history of redlining and white-supremacist violence that don’t discuss this history. The structural racism of legacy pollution, and the ways place is interconnected with community health, is largely absent from the reports. Instead, there’s talk of redevelopment and jobs; borders are drawn; new maps made. The projected future of land use in the area is swaddled in environmental urgency, and premised on the implicit innocence of cleanup. There is hardly ever talk of who redevelopment benefits and who it harms.
Before he illegally installed the solar panels that heat our home, they’d been used to warm a catfish farm.… I remember the solar panels tipped against the tall wood fence in the backyard. Our cat would lengthen his neck on them. Did they really warm our home? Maybe this detail is closer to family myth than truth. All mistakes of memory are my own.
Curtain
Plato, The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), 147–48.
When I went to the crematorium I didn’t expect to be given the choice to look. It was early morning. The sky raw with light. I drove alone. His death and my grieving were new; his funeral plans intensifying; there was much to do. Watching his body transform from flesh to ash would only happen once, here and now, and so to look at this or to look away from it was equally mired in the fraught blurriness of witness. Was watching this happen love or rubbernecking? Later, would describing this watching be spectacle or truth-telling? On that day, I felt the tension of looking completely. My decision to include this moment is a gesture of tenderness for both of us and owes much to Natalie Diaz’s essay “The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon.” In it, Diaz writes: “The quantum theory of suffering is also the quantum theory of tenderness: Yes, writing about my brother is acknowledgement of his suffering, of his humanity. I am measuring his suffering on the page. I am proving my love for him. To acknowledge his existence is one type of tenderness. It is tenderness even for myself.” To acknowledge the existence of us on this day is one form of tenderness, so I offer it.
Natalie Diaz, “The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon,” January 13, 2015, https://pen.org/the-quantum-theory-of-suffering-or-why-i-look-at-the-moon.
Jacques Roubaud, Some Thing Black (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), 73–74.
Naja Marie Aidt’s writing on Roubaud’s work and on “death’s heavy unbearable stillness” in her memoir is stunning and was instrumental in early drafts. Roubaud and Aidt write on death and the living in lyric, moving fragments.
Naja Marie Aidt, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019), 25.
The Soo Line Dump
Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.
I walk the dump with Rebecca Altman’s scholarship on body burden in mind. The earth is not static or fixed, Altman observes, but it “is flux and system and process … which means nothing stays embodied or buried forever.” While not a direct quote, my inclusion of thought connected to imperfect sites of burial and the shifting activity of the earth owes much to Altman’s writing and thinking throughout her essay “On What We Bury.”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, “Health Consultation: Soo Line Shoreham Yard East Side,” September 25, 2007, 6, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/pha/soolineshorehamyard/soolineshorehamhc92507.pdf.
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (New York: Vintage, 1992), 219; 288–89.
I paraphrase Terry Tempest Williams. Here’s the full quote from Refuge: “Death is no longer what I imagined it to be. Death is earthy like birth, like sex, full of smells and sounds and bodily fluids. It is a confluence of evanescence and flesh” (219). Also from Refuge: “The women couldn’t bear it any longer” and the reference to “the contaminated country” and the quote “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim the desert for our children” (288–89).
Shoreham Yards, Minneapolis, Minnesota, © U-Spatial.
Live Map
This piece relied on the EPA’s “National Priorities List and Superfund Alternative Approach Sites” and “Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) Where You Live Map,” accessed August 10, 2021, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live.
On Openings
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2020).
Ghríofa inspired me to imagine the maternal thefts a body performs in pregnancy. While not a direct quote, I reference A Ghost in the Throat when I write, “I will learn that if a woman cannot consume sufficient calcium, her body will take from her bones to give to her infant.”
Here are her words that inspired mine:
“If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself” (35).
Rebecca Altman, “On What We Bury,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu039.
My writing about body burden owes much to Altman’s “On What We Bury.” Here and elsewhere, I think of Altman’s important contributions to this discourse. We are both mothers, and this ecological history is tied to our children’s lives too. Altman: “I have passed it along against my will. Such is the legacy of our time: heavy metals, pesticides, and some classes of long-lived pollutants that did not exist when our grandmothers swam in the interior oceans of our great-grandmothers’ wombs.”
Anders C. Erickson and Laura Arbour, “The Shared Pathoetiological Effects of Particulate Air Pollution and the Social Environment on Fetal-Placental Development,” Journal of Environmental and Public Health, November 26, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4276595.
I reference this article when I write about the intermediary environment between mother and fetus.
Returning
Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (New York: Picador, 2020), 30, 131.
Boyer’s brilliant feminist critique of biomedicine and capitalism is deeply instructive. I return to her work often.
I wish to include more of her words here to honor them: “Cancer is not a sameness eternalized in an ahistorical body, moving through a trajectory of advancing technological progress. No patient is sovereign, and every sufferer, both those marked by cancer treatment and those marked by the exhausting routine of caring for those with cancer, is also marked by our historical particulars, constellated in a set of social and economic relations” (30). Boyer, again: “The history of illness is not the history of medicine—it is the history of the world—and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interest of the few” (30).
Anna Bierbrauer, “Lost to Progress: Upper Mississippi River and Minneapolis Parks Development,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 7 (Summer 2017), https://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/lost-to-progress.
In 1872 Horace W. S. Cleveland advocated for a Minneapolis city park system that preserved open space for public use but left this stretch of river out.… Historical information about the industrial stretch of the river and information on the rate of asthma-related hospitalizations relies on Bierbrauer.
On asthma, here are Bierbrauer’s words that inspired mine: “Given that North Minneapolis suffers from the highest rate of asthma-related hospitalizations and the highest concentration of lead poisoning cases, these air quality issues could not be ignored. One company—a metal recycling plant was found in violation of their permit and, after a lengthy legal battle, will be moving off of the river in 2019 and has paid the City of Minneapolis $600,000 for community health programs. The soon-to-be shuttered plant is one of many contributors to poor air quality in the area, but the number of MPCA-monitored sites along the river in North Minneapolis places a large burden on nearby residences.”
Bierbrauer importantly observes that it is the Upper River communities of today who are driving restoration conversations. Community members who “have historically been underserved, underrepresented, and denied riverfront access making conversations about equity, environmental justice, and transparency crucial and critical planning topics.”
EPA, “OLEM Programs Address Contamination at Superfund, Brownfields and RCRA Sites Near 61 Percent of the U.S. Population,” October 2021, https://www.epa.gov/cleanups/olem-programs-address-contamination-superfund-brownfields-and-rcra-sites-near-61-percent.
G. P. Jacob, “The Orientation,” Money Power Land Solidarity, August 22, 2019, https://moneypowerlandsolidarity.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=the+orientation.
I reference “The Orientation,” episode 1 of the podcast Money Power Land Solidarity. Jacob’s podcast covers “issues of land, economic development, politics, race, class and more, all from a working-class left perspective,” and has been hugely influential and meaningful to me. I quote and paraphrase some of Jacob’s reflections. “North Minneapolis is one of the hearts of the Black community in Minnesota” is quoted. Later, when I write, “It was a place where people experienced poverty and oppression in Minneapolis” I quote Jacob, whose words are, “You could see that people experienced poverty and oppression in Minneapolis.”
Terri Hansen, “Kill the Land, Kill the People: There Are 532 Super-fund Sites in Indian Country!” Indian Country Today, September 13, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/kill-the-land-kill-the-people-there-are-532-superfund-sites-in-indian-country.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 8.
When I write, “I held this place, this maroon-trimmed house, this block of complexity and inequity, in my body in the form of memory, and in the form of industrial particulates that inhabited me epidemiologically, and in the form of grief,” I echo Rob Nixon’s observation that “if the past of slow violence is never past, so too the post is never fully post: industrial particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements we inhabit and in our very bodies, which epidemiologically and ecologically are never our simple contemporaries” (8).
Teaching Hospital
Rebecca Altman, “Upriver: A Researcher Traces the Legacy of Plastics,” Orion Magazine, June 2, 2021, https://orionmagazine.org/article/upriver.
Keisha Brown
Katherine Webb-Hehn, “Dangerous Conditions May Exist in This Area,” SCALAWAG, June 24, 2019, https://scalawagmagazine.org/2019/06/birmingham-epa-superfund.
Katherine Webb-Hehn, “For Black North Birmingham Residents Fighting Toxic Pollution, Staying Home Isn’t Safe,” SCALAWAG, April 20, 2020, https://scalawagmagazine.org/2020/04/qa-alabama-epa-superfund-covid-19.
Quoted material, as well as some of the paraphrased descriptions of Brown’s neighborhood and childhood experiences of asthma, is excerpted from the first article. The second provided more context. With thanks and gratitude to Katherine Webb-Hehn’s reporting.
