If I Could Touch the Sun:
An Exploration of the Urban in Our Wild and the Wild in Our Urban
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,” my sister counted, touching each one of her pudgy four-year-old fingers for effect. My mom was being interviewed by the local news while my sister and I built a spa for frogs in the curves of 2.6 billion-year-old granite slabs, we noticed one of the frogs had six legs. It was 2005 and we were deep in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a natural reserve protecting over 1,800 lakes. We believed this was one of the few places where we could escape the grasp of human destruction, but even here hundreds of miles from any infrastructure or industry, chemicals were creating genetic mutations in a helpless population. My sister and I gently scooped up the frog whose two extra legs dragged, void of any muscle control. He spent the next few hours nestled in the lush moss of our frog spa until we got back into our canoe ready to portage to the next lake.
A week later when we returned to civilization, my mom mentioned the strange frog to a biologist at the Forest Service. She told us we should report it once we got back to the city. But when my mom finally got in touch with someone at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, they told her that due to budget cuts, they weren’t studying or even recording these incidents anymore. Months later, after attending a talk at the University of Minnesota from an expert on impacts of pollution on frogs, my mom stayed to ask the scientist what could have caused the mutation. He explained that it was almost certainly caused by atrazine in the water, an herbicide used by corn farmers, so toxic that it’s banned in Europe. The toxins have been known to rain down 600 miles from where the farmer applied it to their crops, urban soaking into the most remote corners of the wild. The scientist told us about studies where they diluted the urine of workers in an atrazine factory and raised tadpoles in it. Over time, in addition to some bizarre mutations, every male tadpole developed ovaries. Last night, I talked to my grandpa about this memory, and he said, “Well this was good news for one factory employee, who could finally start the barbershop quartet he had always dreamed of now that he had four heads.” As I laughed, I was struck by how little has changed since I was seven years old. Standing on the cold granite, looking over a silent lake, I had already realized there was no longer one square inch on our planet our species hadn’t impacted. In that moment, I felt a voice, billions of years old, calling out for humans to care. I still hear the wild’s whispers in the wind and her songs as they fill the mountain streams, reminding me of the pain but also the possibility. I wish we would listen to her words.
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if i could touch the sun
caress her face
and tell her of terrestrial violence
maybe she could touch the face of each human
and make them understand
but she only speaks in fire and darkness
so we keep trying to tidy the fireflies that fill the sticky sky
our roots interlacing with the poison soaking into our skin
tucking trilobites into an envelope to save something for our grandchildren
i didn't want to meet the man pulling up at the corners
but when i looked i saw only myself
watching as the chaos of capitalism corroded our world
so i stopped and shouted into the light
is there anybody out there or am i all alone?
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I’ve always felt the most at peace with the world while surrounded by nature. I basically grew up outside, sometimes sleeping outside for months at a time while exploring the United States and Canada with my family. My parents are both high school teachers so we had the luxuries of summertime to adventure. My parents, sister, dog, and I would pile into our old Subaru and just drive. We almost never knew when we’d return home or often even where we would end up sleeping at the end of the day. Every place we chanced upon was more beautiful or strange in some way than the last. I learned to find beauty and wild in places our society deems unattractive. My sister and I would giggle as we pet the fuzzy backs of bees as they bumbled between dandelions growing through cracks in the pavement. I feel as much amazement in forests of redwoods that seem to scrape the sky as I do in forests of actual skyscrapers, marveling at the way sun reflects off glass and dissipates through a canopy of green. I feel a connection to land, often quickly and fully. I fall in love with each new sight and smell and taste. Toes in the damp earth, fingers brushing through native prairie grasses, the smell of pine needles and trout lilies. I try to always allow myself this joy of falling in love even though I know it only makes human’s destruction more devastating.
The sticky summer of 2014, we decided we would drive Highway One all the way up the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to Canada. We pulled into a campground in Northern California just as the smallest sliver of a moon rose above the horizon. After we had set up our tent on a cliff along an abandoned section of Highway One, native grasses pushing through the concrete, I announced I was going to walk down the road to explore. My dad immediately disapproved, citing the fact that he’d like it if I didn’t fall into the ocean and die. Annoyed by the lack of independence, I insisted I’d be careful but after he reiterated his concern, I yielded and slid into my sleeping bag for the night.
As I peered out the tent as the first light danced across my family’s sleeping faces, I saw that just a hundred feet down the road I had planned to walk the night before, the concrete disappeared, having collapsed into the rough sea thousands of feet below. Grateful for my father’s wisdom that had likely saved my life, I marveled at this massive piece of urban, pulled back into the waves by the wild’s giant glowing hands, reminding us of how intertwined our worlds are. Imagine our world if we existed with the wild rather than in spite of her.
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the raindrops turned to stone as they hit my face
my harness clipped into the mast
a half inch of metal
the only thing preventing me from becoming part of the sea
I had only imagined waves this big on planets millions of light years away
the storm howled on for eight days
with me each night perched at the bow
flying fifty feet closer to the stars and then crashing down
feet barely touching the ground before the next wave tossed me into the air
the ocean had a mind of her own
and I felt how unimportant we were
just 32 scientists and crew who had left everyone we knew and loved
eventually the angered clouds dissolved turning to squalls and then the clear night sky
revealing stars I wasn't sure I would see again
I leaned into the wind now a warm whisper caressing my eyelashes
below me the hull of the ship came alive with bioluminescence
the stars had fallen from the sky to envelop our boat
we were suddenly on that alien planet I had dreamed of lifetimes away
and I felt how important we were.
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That steamy July morning, my neighbors awoke to the bleating of a goat and clucking of ducks and chickens. Although this is normal in many parts of the world, they were somewhat startled as they lived in the middle of a metropolitan area of four million people. But, they knew my family has always blurred the line between wild and urban, accentuating the wild in our urban and finding ways to make our urban lifestyle work in the wildest of places. We had already spent many summers building the dry dirt on our 1/10th acre lot in the middle of Saint Paul, Minnesota into soil full of life but had never hosted animals larger than the wild squirrels and rabbits. What started out as a joke with family friends that had moved out to the country turned into reality as they loaded two ducks, two chickens, and a goat into their trailer and made their way into the city. It was the morning of my sixth birthday and all I wanted was to transform our city life into a farm for one day. Soon, our yard was filled with the quacks and clucks mixed with the joyful shouts of children as they splashed in a kiddy pool with the ducks or got a little help during the pie-eating contest from the overly friendly goat. For a moment, we had reignited the interest in the wild in the eyes of twenty city kids and I could feel the warmth of a 4.5-billion-year-old smile.
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she didn't understand why light was ringing like silver bells
or why the wind was suddenly so chewable.
when she bit into the ninety degree peach
she drowned in a kaleidoscope of turquoise and gold.
a geometric growl made her turn
just in time to watch the trees unfurl.
she laughed as the smell of the humid summer night
wrapped around her in a tight hug.
and when she entered the river
the fish kissing the tips of her flowing hair
sang a slow sad song.
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My dad had translated one of my favorite books as a kid, Stellaluna, into Ojibwe, the language of the tribe that once harvested wild rice and tapped maple trees to boil sap into precious syrup and sugar on the land I grew up on before they were forcibly removed by the United States government. The Ojibwe moved West in 900 CE following seven prophecies, the first of which was to find their chosen land where food grew on water, causing them to settle in the land of ten thousand lakes full of wild rice. The final prophecy, the only of seven that hasn’t been fulfilled, told that non-Native people, a light-skinned race, would have a choice of two paths, one leading to peace, love, and brotherhood and the other to the destruction of the earth. Many Ojibwe people today believe these paths represent materialism and spirituality. This prophecy also described an eventual time of healing from the period of great suffering leading to a cultural and spiritual renaissance. I hope we haven’t gone too far down the road of destruction.
I would run my fingers over the glued-in translations in my favorite children’s book, fascinated by the double vowels and too many consonants for my head to wrap around. In that moment, I knew I wanted to learn as many languages as I could in my life so I could connect with more of the world. Stellaluna is a bat who gets separated from her mother and is raised by a bird, adapting to their ways. When she eventually finds her bat family again, she teaches her bird siblings how to be a bat which results in chaos, prompting them to wonder how they can be so different and feel so alike. I held this message in my mind for the next decades as I watched humans separate themselves from the rest of nature and each other, focusing on our differences rather than similarities. I gripped the hand of my wild a little tighter.
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we felt the first glimmer
just as the shadows of the
moon aligned
something deep inside
our glass bodies
sugar to wash away
the bitterness
we hadn’t realized
had consumed us.
slowly the needles that had
pierced our bones
began to fall away
dissolving
into the call of a bluebird
as a violet pushes through the earth.
i was preparing to take my first breath
a thousand damselflies
carving the wind
with their marble wings.
they filled my mouth
fizzing and crackling
and my throat bathed in silver
and the smell of grapefruit.
and i felt my toes leave the cold dirt.
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Have you ever watched fog roll over a hill, pulling a blanket over everything in its path? I always felt it must be magic that wrapped us in this heavy white cocoon, mother nature reminding all living things that she can pull the clouds from the skies. I didn’t know that for fog to form, the air has to be full of dust or other air pollution that water vapor molecules then condense around. Fog blurs the boundaries between wild and urban, mysterious, and uncontrollable but also influenced by our impacts on the climate and atmosphere. It’s one of the few climatic events that is almost impossible for humans to predict. Low visibility caused by fog creates dangerous conditions claiming many lives each year. But humans have also found ways to coexist with and benefit from this wild entity. Many indigenous groups all over the world developed methods of catching the water molecules in large pots. Today, engineers have constructed more elaborate, large-scale versions to collect water in arid areas. I always found fog so beautiful as she swallowed the reality I knew whole and dropped me into a foreign world of eerie light, reminding me of the entanglement that is humans and the rest of the wild. I don’t think it’s too late to turn paths.
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this is why you turn to the desert
in hopes of finding something to salvage
in hopes of understanding the importance
of every part of the plant.
you hope you'll discover the moment that the plaster
on your bedroom ceiling started to crack
and the reason your mother doesn't laugh anymore.
maybe you'll finally catch up to the fox
whose tracks you've been following for years
and witness the last sliver of ice
become nothing more than molecules.
the air is full
full of velvet and moss and seafoam.
the silence so heavy you get stuck in your inhale.
the rest of the world has disappeared.
your body enveloped in a cloud of nothing
and you find that something worth saving.
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I had learned to hear the bees before I saw them. I sat completely still watching the artificial flowers for six hours just like I had the day before, marking each time a bee would land on the sugar-soaked plastic flowers. I was in the rainforest bordering a sugarcane field in the Australian Outback researching the impact of sugarcane monoculture on native bee populations. Pollinator species extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal due to human impacts. At the same time, three-quarters of the world’s food is provided by just twelve plant species and five animal species. Destroying the unique sclerophyll rainforest to create agricultural land already had huge impacts on pollinator populations. The transition to extreme monoculture has only exacerbated the habitat destruction. I was attempting to understand the environmental impact colonizers had in just over 200 years after indigenous peoples had coexisted with the rest of the wild for at least 65,000 and possibly even 120,000 years.
One of the researchers from the wallaby rehabilitation nature reserve we were camping at had driven me the twenty minutes to the sugarcane field right after our early breakfast. It was only 90 degrees, bearable compared to the late afternoon scorch. I hadn’t seen a bee in at least ten minutes and was starting to focus on the songs of the rainforest, immediately identifying a sound I hadn’t heard in my many hours of sitting alone. Snorting. As I attempted to decipher the direction of the animal, I counted the raspy breaths of at least eight large animals completely surrounding me, snorting in a way only wild boars can. Suddenly the stories I had heard about wild boars killing dingoes in the area, and even tigers in India, filled my mind and in that moment, I didn’t feel nearly as tough as a dingo or tiger. As I started to run my options through my head, I realized there was only one. The edge of the sugarcane field lay 50 meters away through dense rainforest across a ten-foot-deep ditch. If I could make it there, I could avoid angering or scaring the hundreds of pounds of pure muscle around me. As I ran, vines whipping against my outstretched arms, at least twelve large bodies moving between the tall ferns, I remembered no one would even know anything was wrong until someone came to pick me up hours too late. I scrambled down into the ravine, a slight turn of my head revealing two large males a mere ten feet away looking right at me. I clambered up the other edge of the chasm pulling myself up with large lianas, quickly ducking through the fence a farmer had put up many years before. As I caught my breath, a wall of barbed wire protecting my fragile body, I heard ancient laughter and knew the wild had watched the situation unfold, the most dangerous species on earth running from a family of wild hogs snuffling for some dinner. As she wrapped me in a hug of warm breeze, I smiled as I thought to myself, “At least someone is trying to protect their wild.”
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we rattled down the road in the loud red pickup truck
the one that lost chunks of metal with each bump.
you with curls burned into your hair.
in my periphery the prickly pear cacti began to dance
violet in the moments after the sun falls asleep.
it took me half a lifetime to understand
i had neglected to teach you the ways of the wild,
the amber of a chickens eye
a drop of maple sap on the tongue
a dragonfly pausing on your paddle before you dip it back into the dark
the smell of the damp dirt and tomato leaves
a monarch stretching its wings in a yawn
the sweetness of silence as your ears fill with constellations.
what a world we would live in if we took time to write love letters.
it’s time to understand,
a flame with ache and fever to consume is your cousin,
the minerals in magma crystalizing as it turns to rock, your uncle,
and the waves that roll and rumble, your aunts.
the wolves that stalk silently through the ferns are your siblings,
each flash of lightning and growl of thunder, your father,
and the inky blackness of a moonless sky, your mother.
luckily it’s not too late for me to introduce you to them.
i take your hand in mine and we begin.