A Week of Water
in 16 movements
“In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that a thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss (preface, vii)
1. The blue is bright and deep, a color I cannot apprehend, but can only trust to take me into the wreck. Where is my crash? Where is my swell? Where is the feeling I had when I first found god? Full of light. Noticing each strand of grass. Finding dark and shine in equal measures. “There is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin”¹ and when I begin.
Life and death can feel so closely wound up together: the water and the undertow.
The tide beckons and I am in deep time. I am 27, in Kamaole Beach Park III, trying to map the currents on my skin. I am 19, atop St. Paul’s and the crowds pulse through London, each speck with its own way of seeing blue. I am 23, watching the Sea of Galilee. I now understand turquoise and walking on water. I would rather be within it, to let the water take my breath and sight. To feel the wave collapse upon itself and to dive under and, in a moment, escape the surf.
Would that my sinking be a sign of faith.
2. We moved to Puget Sound to be close to the topography of my childhood. To find the light just before dawn and ask why it rises before the sun itself. To ask questions of the bird learning flight, the tide on its own time, the face of god on the water.
3. There are many moving to Puget Sound.
4. Since 1960, the number of people living in the 12 counties bordering Puget Sound has more than doubled.² From 2010 to 2020, Puget Sound region grew by 600,000 people, adding 165 new people per day.³ 67% of Washington state’s population borders the Sound. We bring with us urbanization, loss of habitat, pressures on water supplies, water pollution, air pollution, and more. ⁴
5. Every year the state of Washington’s Department of Ecology collects data on waterbodies across the state. When waterbodies do not meet quality standards, they are placed on Washington’s 303(d) list and prioritized based on pollution levels. The prioritized waters are then studied in more depth to understand the total maximum daily load (TMDL) and sources of pollution, or they are moved straight to implementation when the pollutant source is clear. The project is monitored and once the waterbody reaches state quality standards, it is moved to category 1.⁵
6. My waterbody moves in and out of time, the edge of the wind, the pull before a wave, the laugh of the tide as it carries in and out with a force I do not know. This is you, this is me. And I am here with “the thing itself and not the myth.” ⁶
7. We learn to move through the world as if the acts of our bodies were separate from the waterbodies we love and feast upon. Our waste leaks into the home of the whale, seal, and salmon, which was also, from “time immemorial,” the home of the Duwamish.⁷ A century of broken treaties and stolen land, and our poison continues to ebb into the many sacred bodies of our sacred home.
8. The waterbodies that require a water quality improvement project in my county are: Bear-Evans Creek Basin, Cottage Lake, Duwamish and Lower Green River, Fauntleroy Creek, Fenwick Lake, Green River and Newaukum Creek, Issaquah Creek Basin, Lake Sawyer, Little Bear Creek, Newaukum Creek, North Creek, Pipers Creek, Sammamish River, Snoqualmie River, and Soos Creek.⁸
9. The Snohomish tribe teaches that the Creator and Changer first made the world in the east. Then he set out west, creating and dispersing language to each people group as he went. But the Creator and Changer had many languages left when he came to Puget Sound. He liked Puget Sound so much that he stopped creating and gave out all remaining languages.
We, too, see Puget Sound as the pinnacle of all creation.
The story goes on. The people of Puget Sound were not content with how the Creator made the world, for the sky was too low. People would bump their heads against it, and some would venture into the sky world. They agreed to work together, despite the language barriers, to lift the sky. They determined an agreed-upon signal (“Yah-hoh”) for the moment of lift and all but three hunters, four elks, two canoes with three men in each, a little dog, and little fish pushed the sky away.⁹
These others became caught up in the sky.
10. Paul also knows those who have been caught up into the sky. In his second letter to the Corinthians, he says, “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.”¹⁰
I, for one, hardly know whether I am in the body or out of the body. But to Paul, it seemed of utmost importance—is the body a myth, or the thing itself?
Have you ever been caught up in the sky? What do you know of a paradise that you cannot repeat?
11. The paradise I cannot repeat:
The shadow of bird song is Carolina blue. Light waves and winds into a particular color bounding about, finding its way to our eye then to our brain and then to the great absence in the center of us. Everything that could be blue, I see as blue. On a walk, you said that blueberries are purple and that blue food does not exist in nature. So it might be for you. But the first person to find the blueberry and bite into its small, fleshy, round body saw the same thing I see: oceans and riddles—the blue of the night—the nucleus of love.
12. What do we offer to the great blue? Waste: oil, grease, PCBs, phthalates, toxic heavy metals such as copper, lead, and zinc.¹¹ The steady release of toxins comes from brakes on our cars, the leakiness of our boats, flame retardants in our furniture, softeners in plastic, and building materials. ¹²
Our offerings are causing the water to warm. There must be an appropriate amount of dissolved oxygen in the water to sustain aquatic life and to help decompose organic matter. When the water temperature rises, the water holds less dissolved oxygen; when water temperatures remain cool, the water holds more dissolved oxygen.¹³
As the climate warms, the floodplains of Puget Sound and of snow dominant river basins will experience increased flooding, impacting the infrastructure and agricultural lands that fuel our lives.¹⁴ Our bodies entangled with the waterbodies, the boundaries ever-shifting. The threat of us has been at the door of the sacred land, people, and creatures for centuries, and we are caught squinting—not seeing how we are intertwined with the water. When our own way of life hangs in the balance, vision comes all at once.
13. Southern Resident Orcas, those that live off of the US Pacific coast line, reveal the health of Puget Sound. As one of the sound’s top predators, they are dependent on a healthy ecosystem to support their survival. With low birth and survival rates, new Southern Resident Orcas are rare.
PCBs are human-made pollutants that do not degrade in the environment. Not only do they persist in our waters, they are lipophilic, meaning they bind to fat. Orca mothers’ milk is 40% fat and scientists believe that 60% of their contaminant load is transferred to their newborns during feeding.¹⁵ “The transient and permanent populations of orca whales in southern Puget Sound are considered to be among the most PCB-contaminated mammals on earth. Puget Sound harbor seals are seven times more contaminated with these persistent toxic chemicals than those living in Canada’s Strait of Georgia, which adjoins the Sound.” ¹⁶
14. Ask Puget Sound where she has been. She followed me to Tel Aviv in 2015, but she would not come to Boston where I drove to the coast in search of her. Blessed be the waters that take us in and those that refuse to be what we need. Blessed be the next bit of dissolved oxygen that keeps a fish alive. Blessed be the journey home.
15. I want to know Puget Sound—for in the morning on my run to the shore, it is the outpost of mystery, the great yawn of god, open wide for this stretch of time. The tide obscures it, then lays it bare, rewarding those who can crouch over a small collection of water and look until life becomes used to a tormenting presence and inches out.
I want to know Puget Sound—to tell of the great border land that the inlet makes, and of the ways that this same encounter with the edge of the lung-ed world happens again and again far and near the stretch of the sound, anywhere with water. For, it is the border land where we come up against our boundaries, and thus, encounter the divine.
This meeting replicates itself in many ways, but especially at the water, an ancient symbol of becoming pure before approaching God. In order to pronounce the name of God in prayer, the Essenes (an ancient, mystic Jewish sect) underwent a form of baptism every morning.¹⁷ We too have our ways of washing off the distractions of capital and of ego before we can commune with the divine.
I want to know Puget Sound—but how can I without contending with what the presence of my people is doing to it? I want to know the waters not just for what they reveal of the divine, but for what we demand they bear for our way of life.
.
16. I cup in my hands a gathering of water; it is crisp and translucent but part of the big blue I keep trying to write around and around in a great, collapsing sphere so that I may continue to spin down into what makes it holy. Here, today, how will I keep from desecration? And, in the many tomorrows of my stretched and fast life, how will I share in the swell of voices declaring that the sacred is not unchangeable, that the divine risks annihilation again and again through the simple fact that it is open to us?
We must be gentle with the holy; it will not be sustained in a world that thinks the color blue and the touch of water will persist without care.
¹ Rich, Adrienne, Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972 (New York, N.Y.: Norton, 1973).
² “Why Does Puget Sound Need Our Help?,” Snohomish County Washington, https://snohomishcountywa.gov/3856/Why-Does-Puget-Sound-Need-Our-Help (accessed August 7, 2022).
³ “Census: Region grew by 600,000 in 10 years,” Puget Sound Regional Council, https://psrc.org/whats-happening/blog/census-region-grew-600000-10-years (accessed August 7, 2022).
⁴ “Why Does Puget Sound Need Our Help?,” Snohomish County Washington.
⁵ “Water Quality Improvement,” Department of Ecology State of Washington, https://ecology.wa.gov/Water-Shorelines/Water-quality/Water-improvement (accessed August 7, 2022).
⁶ Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems.
⁷“History of the Duwamish People,” Duwamish Tribe, https://www.duwamishtribe.org/history (accessed August 14, 2022).
⁸ “Directory of Projects,” Department of Ecology State of Washington, https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/ezshare/wq/WaterQualityImprovement/TMDL/projectdirectory.htm#K (accessed August 7, 2022).
⁹ Erdoes and Ortiz, eds., American Indian Myths and Legends, 95-97.
¹⁰ 2 Cor.12:2-4 (NRSV)
¹¹“Why Does Puget Sound Need Our Help?,” Snohomish County Washington.
¹² “Issues and Problems in Puget Sound,” Department of Ecology State of Washington, https://ecology.wa.gov/Water-Shorelines/Puget-Sound/Issues-problems (accessed August 7, 2022)
¹³ “Sammamish River Temperature & Dissolved Oxygen TMDL,” Washington State Department of Ecology, https://ecology.wa.gov/Water-Shorelines/Water-quality/Water-improvement/Total-Maximum-Daily-Load-process/Directory-of-improvement-projects/Sammamish-River-TMDL (accessed August 7, 2022).
¹⁴ Climate Change Impacts on Puget Sound Floodplains,” Climate Impacts Group, https://cig.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/11/TNC_Floodplains_3_25_16_bothlogos.pdf (accessed August 14, 2022).
¹⁵ Mathew, Naomi and Anais Remili, “Third newborn for Southern Residents: Killer whale baby boom.” Whale Scientists, https://whalescientists.com/killer-whale-baby-boom/ (accessed August 7, 2022).
¹⁶ “Why Does Puget Sound Need Our Help?,” Snohomish County Washington.
¹⁷ Kohler, Kaufmann and Samuel Krauss,“Baptism,” Jewish Encyclopedia, https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2456-baptism (accessed August 7, 2022).
