I’m walking my dog.
Nothing is harmless, everything is. We weigh and measure our choices each day. Have a dog. Hang the laundry. Own a car. Own a bicycle. Coffee to go? Get it from the café that serves in biodegradable cups because we can no longer use reusable ones.
My husband rereads Moby Dick every year. This year, he listens to it on a podcast. The whale is a whale, but the men could be read as the Anthropocene chasing the whale to find their own death. Ocean acidification. Streams lined with plastic waste. Fish’s bellies full of glitter and plastic pellets.
I walk my dog. Rather, he tows me. Out the front door, up the street to Playfair Park. Play fair humans. I toss and toss and toss his ball, then we walk to the next park, a soccer field, and toss it some more.
Sweet water. Salt water. I have stayed safely in my neighbourhood for months now. Though, over the last few years, from here, I have collected poems and made water books: Refugium and Sweet Water. Poets’ words branching from mighty Pacific to stream to watershed to creek and river and back to ocean. Voices. The poems worry over sturgeon and hidden rivers, over whales and endangered spaces.
Headline:
“Mink have Coronavirus”. I picture
little white, ferret-nosed mink, but alas no – the accompanying photo is of a
coat hanger filled layer on layer with the bodies of mink.
“There
was a shock last week when Denmark decided to cull all its mink – up to 17
million animals – because of the spread of coronavirus. That national cull has
turned into a political outcry, now that the prime minister had admitted the
plan was rushed and had no legal basis.” BBC News World, November 11, 2020.
Are you kidding me?
I toss the dog’s ball. What passers by might hear is “Look out for people, Frodo.” or “This way, Frodo!” as he heads the wrong way, or “Let’s walk.” At which he grabs the ball and jauntily runs on ahead. He is muddy now, from the damp fields. The last throw flew over the fence into the Gary Oak meadow. Damn humans, damn self. I am ashamed for letting him cavalierly jump trampling overwintering native plants, camas and lilies.
We are cavalier. Careless. Trampling is our way. Water wasters. Ocean dumpers. Lives lost and lives stolen.
I walk my dog.
We walk the carefully laid paths. A neighbour has spent years digging up invasive weeds, rejuvenating this Gary Oak meadow so camas grows in abundance each spring. I deeply and profoundly believe in this work.
It’s just past 7am. My husband has been listening to the last chapter of Moby Dick while making his toast. He stands, his large hands before him. He shakes them like a preacher, says: “The great sky-hawk pecks at the flag on Ahab’s ship and is caught in the folds of the flag and brought down with the ship.” I say: “It is a metaphor, the bird is the whole planet, and the ship is us goddamned humans taking the last creature down with us.” He says: “The ship is Satan bringing heaven down into the depths of the sea.”
Headline:
“Liberal government will miss drinking water target by years, CBC News survey
shows,” CBC News, November 2, 2020.
“Chippewas of Nawash is one of 41 communities
contacted by CBC News that are currently on Indigenous Services Canada's
long-term boil water advisory list. The community, located 57 kilometres
north of Owen Sound, Ont., hugs the southeastern tip of Georgian Bay and east
side of Lake Huron — some of the largest sources of freshwater in the country.
Its traditional name "Neyaashiinigmiing" means a point of land
surrounded on three sides by water — yet its members can't drink water from
their taps.”
The poets speak of water – amniotic, oceanic, water they swim in, water they drink. A glass of water, “the unremarked and neglected/ sentry at the top of place settings,” Rhona McAdam, “By the Glass.”
It is a long straight road from Playfair to the soccer field. It cuts through my neighbourhood. Life is a long road and on it you cut through your belief systems to travel it. Don’t you? My son has low iron and he is vegetarian not by choice but because of me. To not eat animals is a significant choice on the path of helping the planet. But, we have a dog, and he is not vegetarian. Something is cancelled out there. Oh humans, we are rich conundrums. How to choose to not eat animals even still when my son’s iron levels are low? How to not sacrifice. The doctor gives new iron supplement suggestions. I hang up the phone (we can’t see our specialists in person right now). I drive him to school late. The car. The iron. The animals. Water streaming down the street as the city clears the hoses in the school field before freezing weather sets in.
I walk the dog.
Have you read about the bird whose feet got entangled in a disposable face mask? How do you feel about that, as a human? Probably fairly shitty? Myself, I throw my arms up in the air, I fall back into a pile of leaves. In amongst the leaves are cigarette butts, bits of plastic wrapper, a granola bar wrapper, empty pop can, egg shells, an unopened kinder surprise, cellophane. Straws. Face masks. Dog poop bags left on the curb. In Refugium, Brian Campbell writes, “Little slithery ink ball,/ wings stuck. Bleats from a bird throat./ Low slow moan,” (“Slick”).
Herman Melville believed the world was man’s oyster, believed humans would never hunt out whales, there’d always be more of them. I said to my husband, “The world was white, middle class man’s oyster. Where the women? Where the poor? Where the animals in this equation?” So many of our ideas about mountains, streams, trees, bears, fish, seagulls, birds come from Victorian ideals of things here for our entertainment. We need a catastrophic change. One may have imagined Covid 19 could be it, but 17 million mink killed suggests that we’ve not even attempted to shift our world view. Yes, we are dying, this too is terrible.
The poets wonder at their own survival. In Joe Zucchiatti’s poem the family has stored their cabin’s water in “two repurposed, galvanized steel pails/ still bearing the stickers from their previous life:/ SOLVIT: Professional Rat and Mouse Killer.” It is funny, and yet I pull the dog from roadside puddles glistening with rainbow runoff. Chernobyl, Logging, Industry.
At the next field, I release the dog, release his ball. It arcs across the sky. The sky is blue, the day cold but bright. Rare here. The dog knows the trajectory of the ball, that knowledge is in his DNA. And he does not ignore what he knows, he follows, leaps, catches it mid-fall. There are things we know we know, and yet, change is slow.
My neighbourhood urban streets look rural from google earth. Treed. Green. Each tree a canopy and each canopy bald from winter wind. The splayed lines of branches echoed underground in root systems that draw their desire lines to water. Water. Water.
The dog is thirsty. Drinks from puddles at the base of the trees.
I walk my dog. The streets interweave trails, trees, houses, Christmas decorations are up, ditches run wild from rainstorms, branches litter from wind. Big blue sky where we usually have grey rain. Frost. My thoughts are little flying creatures. My rubber boots muddied; I am one endangered blue footed human.
