The Eye of Irene
by Joseph DiCenso
As I squush down the last stretch of the old logging trail that leads to Roaring Brook, the stream that drains our hillside, the sound is what signals that I’m about to have my expectations trumped. The brook is living up to its name, and then some: “roaring” doesn’t quite say it–it’s more like the static of a thousand TVs fed through a Central Park concert sound system–that’s the high end range–plus a deep rumble that trails off the low end of human hearing into something I feel in my flesh and bones.
Coming into view, the brook is higher than I’ve ever seen it. Grey-green, filled with silt, it’s blown up from the quiet trickle I’m accustomed to this time of year, like the Hulk from meek David Banner. Scanning the near banks, I see the water crested about two feet above its current level, scouring the banks, leaving only tightly-knotted bundles of debris–twigs, sticks, leaves and torn up tufts of vegetation caught on saplings and tree roots–placed here and there like party favors on a spotless tablecloth.
Following the brook upstream, I notice a surprising amount of silt deposited in the low areas and eddies where the high water has receded. Inches thick in places, like wet cornstarch, it gives only slightly under my weight. At a familiar crossing I stop and sit on the sloping bank, called into stillness by the sound and the muscular beauty of so much moving water. When I left the house the rain and the wind had already relented; now the sky clears a bit and patches of sunlight grace the banks and the brook. This is church for me. A high-water holy day. In quiet joy I sit by my roiling Bodhi brook. 1
Shock and Awe
When I reach the beaver swamp I get an answer to questions I’ve been holding: Why has the river already dropped two feet? and What explains this much silt?
Over the four years we’ve been on this land the beavers have been–well, busy. Building several new dams and doubling or tripling the size of the existing ones–the furthest downstream growing to at least my height (I’m 6’4″), they raised the water level in the wetland three to four feet in that time.
There is no sign left of their lower-most dam or the one just upstream of it. Both have been completely washed away. The next dam upstream, probably the most massive, has been shoved aside like a heavy gate. This dam had stood where the spreading wetland upstream funneled back into narrow stream again. A small section of it is still in place; two additional pieces now lie nearly parallel to the flow of water. The last section, furthest from the “hinge,” is gone altogether.
The far bank has been carved into a bowl about 15 feet across. Looking at it I imagine the churning eddy that formed before the dam broke, a huge hydraulic drill bit that carved into the clay of the bank and the end of the dam until it weakened the latter enough to drive through it. The wedge of water then must have slowly widened, gathering the mass to plow aside the rest of the dam.
The area looks as if a bomb had been dropped; or like a version of the fable about the brothers, one of whom could hold in his mouth an ocean’s worth of water. 2 Where there had been several feet of water there are now blackened stumps, bare mud, and the exposed rocks from the stonewall that crosses the brook just above the third dam.
The sleuth in me figures the water crested when these dams blew out, sending a surge downstream. And the tons of silt and sediment held in the dams got redistributed along the downstream banks.
I stand for some time on the remains of the uppermost dam, awash with a jumble of feelings: thrilled and awed to be witness to the raw power of nature; aghast and even angry at the “ugliness” of the devastation; relieved and grateful that our homestead saw none of this kind of damage; sad at the loss of beauty and the familiar look of the wetland; quietly reverent and humbled by the force of water, how relentless, slippery and unstoppable it can be.
Hidden Dragon
This leads to some philosophical musings–about rain and raindrops: how the small, insignificant raindrop, non-sentient and devoid of agency, by itself, has little or no impact. When it joins, however, with other raindrops–I wonder how many trillions of them fell, just on our 100 acre wood, never mind in our state or over the entire path of Irene–collectively they’ve obviously got some power.
This is true elsewhere in nature, too. Ants, honeybees, microbes and earthworms come to mind. As do kudzu, Asian longhorn beetles and zebra mussels. The phrase “the meek shall inherit the earth” comes to mind. Tahrir Square and the “Arab Spring” also come to mind.
A way of describing the crossroads we’re at, as I see it, is that, on the one hand, we are witnessing the accumulation of the heretofore-invisible impacts of our out-of-whack way of living. Like raindrops coming together in a storm, what had been easy to dismiss is now getting our attention–perhaps too late for us to stop the flood.
At the same time, we are poised to leverage technology (social media, for example) to multiply our individual impact with a speed and at a scale that has never before been possible.
I see each of us like a raindrop in this way, too: surrendering to the pull of our belonging to Nature–Earth as well as our own true nature–as individuals we may change little on the global scale. But if we were all to wake from our trance of separation and domination; if we collectively fell from that cloud of illusion, the resulting flood would alter the landscape.
I say let it rain.
1 The Bodhi Tree is where Siddhartha Gautama, the “Buddha,” is said to have sat until he attained enlightenment.
2
“The Five Chinese Brothers” by Claire Huchet Bishop, published in 1938
About Joseph-I am a counselor, workshop facilitator, leadership consultant and life coach in private practice in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts and I love my work! Learn more about me and my work at: http://joseph-dicenso.com
– is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
