In my childhood, I remember whispering the names under my breath, determined to ward off my family’s amusement by pronouncing them precisely: Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur, Dindigul and Erode, Coimbatore and Chidambaram. These were the cities of my summer vacations, where I visited relatives, temples, and sights throughout the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Occasionally in view as we traveled by car and train was Cauvery, South India’s third-largest river, bisecting Tamil Nadu roughly west to east. My father would point out her drying riverbeds and then explain water cycles and drought and the timing of monsoons. After sweltering hours on the road, I wasn’t particularly receptive to his facts and figures. Nevertheless, I listened groggily as he reminisced about the Cauvery of his own childhood, her waters ample and clear, and as he worried for her future.
Now, decades later, Cauvery’s crisis conditions have accelerated from pressing to dire. With so many Indian cities losing groundwater at an alarming rate—and indeed, predicted to lose it entirely at any moment—their governments increasingly turn to Cauvery’s river water, extracting it with pumps, collecting it in tanks, and then transporting it to clamoring crowds.
As groundwater drains, the water table falls below river levels—which means Cauvery now feeds the groundwater, too, like a mother pouring her attention wherever she’s called. But as climate change alters monsoon patterns, Cauvery herself is barely fed and never replenished.
As I hear of the worsening droughts, of the increasing desperation and displacement, it’s particularly harrowing to learn which cities in the Cauvery basin are approaching Day Zero, when all the taps run dry. Some are those I visited throughout my childhood, the cities where family members live at the front lines.
A wide rectangular room anchored my grandparents’ home in the city of Karur and accommodated most household activities, even eating and sleeping. As a child, a major source of my amusement was cartwheeling from one end of this room to the other, where the narrow passage to the kitchen and bathroom commenced.
At that entryway stood a tiny sink with an equally miniscule faucet—everyone’s first stop for morning ablutions, specifically, toothbrushing. I still remember my mother’s scolding when I accidentally let the water run while brushing, as well my relatives’ look of shock at my wanton disregard. I learned that two or three quick fistfuls of water from the tap were considered sufficient for a rinse and eventually mastered those motions. But my irritation—and shame—lingered.
At the time, I didn’t consider the possible reasons for the tight management and careful husbanding of household water—I only felt the inconvenience. I struggled to get my long hair fully washed with the allotted two buckets of bath water. Sitting on a short stool, I used a small chombu to pour the water over my head; it took me a week or so to get the knack of maximizing its coverage.
During summers of drought, I sometimes had to draw my bathwater from a storage well at the side of the bathroom. During those droughts, the thick wall of this storage well was lined with larger chombus, used to catch extra water whenever the taps were running. That captured water would be used later for washing clothes or cleaning the household.
Even in a clean and well-maintained home like my grandparents’, the stored water containers attracted the dengue-spreading Aedes mosquito species, which hospitalized me at age seven. The stored water itself also presented challenges, often tasting a bit strange and even altering the flavor of the food cooked in it.
My grandparents’ home was comfortably outfitted by community standards, with an attached groundwater well, some pipes, and a few sinks. Unlike other families, we did not have to fetch water from elsewhere. With attentive management, there was enough with which to cook, wash, and to transport in stainless steel thermoses when we traveled—after, of course, it had been thoroughly boiled, filtered, and cooled.
At a certain point during my summer vacations, one vision sustained me: returning home to America, filling a tall glass with ice, then adding water straight from the tap. I dreamed of that brimming liquid and my first frosty gulp and the sweet taste.
Just a few more weeks, I’d tell myself.
As a child learning Bharath Natyam, a classical dance form native to South India, I was discouraged at times by the notoriously rigorous physical training. I knew, though, if I bided my time, I’d eventually cross the bridge from nritta (physical steps) to nrithya (facial expressions), and finally, to what I longed for: natya (drama). At its heart, Bharath Natyam is a storytelling tradition, and I longed to be the one dancing those stories.
The stories were those I’d learned from my parents and grandparents, from books and Sunday School lessons—compelling tales of sages, warriors, kings. Later, in high school and college, I enjoyed researching these stories further, digging into their philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and then watching as expert dancers communicated those more esoteric aspects.
For example, a physically skilled dancer might accurately execute Shiva’s signature tandava dance—but could she demonstrate how it symbolized the ever-pulsing circle of creation and destruction? An expressive dancer might easily portray a woman’s assiduous search for her beloved—but could she evoke the soul’s longing to merge with Oneness?
When I could see and understand what a dancer truly meant to convey, it felt exciting and revelatory, like a flash of light.
At a 2019 Isha Foundation fundraiser for Cauvery Calling, a massive river revitalization effort, I watched a set of dances relating well-known tales of the woman named Cauvery, the wife of a renowned sage, who accepted the task of irrigating South India. At one point during the evening, the featured dancer told the story of another river, the Ganga, whose connection to India’s history and mythology is as deeply rooted as Cauvery’s. Though I’d heard many versions of Ganga’s story, my skin prickled at this particular interpretation of the old tale:
Humanity needed Ganga’s sacred waters on the Earth, and she was ordered to descend there from heaven. Angered by the order, Ganga planned to sweep the Earth away in a furious torrent. Appealed to for assistance, Shiva, the divine ascetic and yogi, caught Ganga as she descended in the thickly matted locks of his hair, where she remains now, eternally entangled. She is released only gradually, reliably, and sustainably for humanity’s survival.
Locks. Entanglement. Sustainable release. In the context of the event and the information being shared there, I understood what the dancer wanted to tell me.
I saw that flash of light.
In the last few generations, forests flanking Indian rivers have been cleared for a variety of reasons, for example to follow non-traditional agricultural methods. For millennia, those forests produced thick, interlocking networks of roots and topsoil, which trapped water in the earth. That water was released gradually, feeding the river continuously and sustainably. The dense tree cover resulted in transpiration, drawing rainfall, and acting as another source of water for the river. The river never dried, and, due to the tightly-woven root networks, the monsoons couldn’t wash away all of the nutrient-rich topsoil.
Encoded in the dance was this age-old wisdom. Shiva’s locks represent the underground root-soil networks. Ganga’s capture represents the sustainable release of water and preservation of topsoil. This is a story of the structures and cycles holding the water in our rivers. It’s a story of the natural world in balance.
It is estimated that Indian land has supported agriculture for at least 10,000 years. However, over only the last few generations, the availability and nutritional value of its soil has plummeted due to climate change factors and the recent “Green Revolution” that encouraged farmers to abandon traditional crops, deploy chemical fertilizers, and plant high-yield seeds.
Lacking adequate water and nutrient-rich soil to produce crops, and now trapped in debt and despair, Indian farmers are committing suicide at a shocking rate—some sources estimate 60,000 suicides over the last three decades. This desperation has prompted responsive measures such as the Cauvery Calling campaign, an alliance of scientists, universities, associations, and government bodies.
Soil health is deeply connected to river health, and as such, soil depletion results in river depletion. Cauvery Calling is implementing a large-scale intervention, planting a kilometer-width of trees on both sides of the Cauvery, over her full length, in order to build up organic material in the soil, increase water percolation into the river, and promote water retention within the river. Farmers enrolled in the program are gradually diversifying to fruit tree-based agriculture and are receiving educational and moral support during the entire period of transition.
There is an old saying in the Tamil language: even if the rains fail, Cauvery will never fail. Sayings like these are now subject to question. Within a few generations, 10,000 years of traditional agriculture have come undone. Within a few generations, rivers that flowed for millennia have drained, and the forests that sustained nutrient-rich topsoil have been depleted.
It is now predicted that 25 percent of India will turn to desert. I find it unimaginable that this land I visited regularly, bursting with plants and insects, exploding with color and fragrance, overflowing with fruits and flowers, could lose its ability to support life—unimaginable that its teeming soil could turn to sand.
As this desertification advances, I wonder whether the erstwhile profession of water divination—the detection of drinkable water by examining local vegetation—might revive. The ancient sage Sarasvata composed a geo-botanical guide to prospect for groundwater based upon micro-environmental ecology, noting how, for example, the presence of a date palm near jujube and piu trees pointed to water, as did certain ficus varietals in proximity to one another. Later, in the 6th century C.E., Varahamihira built upon this work, listing 120 plants serving as groundwater indicators. Though such guides may possess less relevance due to irreparably damaged and altered landscapes, I suspect that the people drawn to this profession, being instinctively tuned to the natural world, will adapt.
I met such a figure recently, not in India, but in Santa Cruz, California. She was not a water diviner, but rather a forager who searched for edible foods among the grasses, weeds, and trees in the area.
When my husband and I began our hike with her, I found it difficult to concentrate, thinking of the wildfires that had raged in the area during the previous week, imagining another spark reigniting the landscape. But I slowly tuned in as the forager shared how to identify edible plants and explained which leaves and nuts and berries we could touch and eat. Each time, before placing an item in her mouth, she closed her eyes for a moment in gratitude to the land around her, the source of the food she consumed.
Though we hiked in a parched and dusty area, at one point we crossed into a clearing, its air fresh and cool. A pond rippled at our feet, inviting us to bend and touch the ground, to place our hands in the water.
I wished I could send myself backward in time to stop the car in India that held my child-self. I wished I could place her hands in the water, too. I’d ask her to feel Cauvery nourish the land, to look deeply into her waters.
I’d beg that child to ignore her various inconveniences. I’d ask her to stop worrying about pronunciations, to stop reciting city names, and instead to list all that the flowing water fed: Soil and Clouds, Leaves and Roots, Bodies and Cells.
Though I wouldn’t want to spoil her moment of communion, I’d feel obligated to warn her of the times to come, and to urge her to fight for the water, for her life, for the earth.
This is your reservation reminder from Palmetto Kayak Adventure Tours. Your four-hour self-guided tour is scheduled for today, 1–5pm. Reply 1 to confirm, 2 to cancel. Hope to see you soon!
The text is waiting when I wake up. White letters stark against the black text box. I don’t bother looking at the number. I’ve made no such reservation, nor the one for Lowcountry Marsh Tours that I was sent on last year, or Saltmarsh Wanderings the year before that. The origin of the texts remains untraceable, and I’ve had some smart people looking.
The first time, I thought I’d won a giveaway. I like to ramble down to Charleston and the Sea Islands a few times a year, spend half a day out on the water laughing with the gulls and crying in wonder at the rays and dolphins. A giveaway wasn’t too far-fetched. It wasn’t until I got where I was going that I knew why I was there. Now it’s an affirmation of faith, a call and response between me and the sea.
I text back to confirm and dress for the day. Water leggings, sports bra, and a long-sleeved sun shirt; baseball cap from a school in the northern part of the state. I’m what they call a local tourist, not quite a local, definitely not one of the out-of-state offenses the Sun Belt is forced to rely upon for revenue. Still, it’s an hour drive down to Folly Island and I have time to sit in the quiet truck and talk to myself, make sure this is what I want to do. What I still want to do. It’s not new to me. Ten years since that first text and I’ve taken over a dozen of these impromptu trips, trusting that I’m doing my small part to leave the marsh—maybe the world—better than I found it.
My friends marvel at my impulsiveness. My bravery. My joie de vivre. They can’t imagine going anywhere on their own, much less out onto the water, but I’m rarely more than a few hundred yards from shore and 80% of the water I’m on isn’t even over my head. It’s not like I’m out free climbing red rocks without a safety partner.
“Ms. McDonald?”
I’m never what they’re expecting and today less so. It’s a perfect November day and the weather is beautiful—bright blue sky, sun blade-sharp as it glints off the dark water—but there’s a storm off the coast and the breeze is fierce. I’ll be paddling into a 15mph wind and spend most of the paddle out against the tide. I don’t look like the athletic type.
Whatever that’s supposed to mean.
“Like the farmer,” I confirm with a very realistic moo-moo here. Sometimes the joke lands, sometimes it doesn’t, but the couple behind the counter is closer to my age, granola crunchy sapphics from the upstate who made their way south in the nineties and found Charleston more hospitable. Angela’s name tag boasts a rainbow flag pin not too different than the one she’s just noticed on my hat. She grins back and I add, “That’s me.”
“Gonna be a rough afternoon out there,” she warns, but she takes my credit card anyway. “But if you stick to the edges, you’ll be alright. Should be able to get a little paddling in before the wind gets worse.”
I’ve paid for four hours. I’m not coming in until it’s storming or dark, but I’m used to people underestimating me. When I was younger, when I had more to prove, it used to infuriate me. Somewhere around thirty, I realized it was a gift. By the time I turned forty, it was a miracle.
No one expects much of a round, middle-aged white woman. They suspect her even less.
Angela and I make small talk as I sign the necessary waivers and give them my emergency contacts. Her wife, Kathy, tells me to be careful. They seem a little reluctant to send me out until I show them my waterproof phone in its floaty bag. They ask if I have water and I show them my favorite insulated steel flask. It’s so big it has its own sling across my back and holds enough water for most of the day. If I have to I can use it as a bludgeoning weapon.
They don’t need to know that last part.
“There’s an old boat they beached on this little creek,” Angie says, handing me a laminated map of the King Flats Creek and its tiny tributaries. Some of the brackish waterways are so small they only really exist at high tide. “It’s full of crabs.”
“I’ll be sure to check it out.”
It’s all very up and up. They give me back my card and I head out to the landing. The salt in the air is holy, by day’s end I’ll be dusted and glittering like a sea pixie, anointed.
The Folly kid waiting with my bright red kayak is too young to be a burned-out hippy, but he’s burned out just the same. A full-time resident of the island, with long, salt-dried, sun-bleached hair that might have once been brown, skin burned and bronzed like the bottom of a biscuit. I couldn’t guess at his age; his face and hands are weathered from outdoor life. What brain cells he has left know more about the tides and marsh than I ever will.
But it doesn’t call to him.
“You’re a local right?” he asks, hope drawing a frown between his warm, brown eyes.
“Local tourist,” I admit with a smile that always disarms. “From swamp country, an hour or so north.”
We have our own tourist problem, though it’s migratory. Every spring, they come for the lakes and the golf-course weather. If there’s a polo-shirt, cleat-wearing version of me wildflower-bombing thousands of acres of pesticide-soaked bentgrass, I don’t need to know about it, but I wish her well.
“Ah.” Folly kid nods in almost approval, like he knows a little of what I’m thinking. Maybe he does. He takes a deep breath and I find myself inhaling with him, a slow toke of pungent pluff mud air. “Bit different down here.”
He likes me, feels safe around me just like most wild creatures. He smells a little sweet, like good pot and seawater. Nothing worse to him than the necessary evil of tourists.
“It is,” I agree. “But it’s nice to get out on someone else’s water every now and then.”
I’m not arrogant enough to think myself at home here. This isn’t my land. It’s not even the land of my people. Some of my people stole it from the Kussoe centuries ago. I’m an interloper. An occasional predator necessary to the ecosystem, but neither resident nor invasive.
He nods again, sagely, points with his chin at the rough, rippling water. “Too salty here for snakes or alligators.”
It’s mostly true. They’re what biologists call transient species. Animals who only spend part of their lives in the marsh. Alligators are as rare as I am; the daily commuters are dolphins, rays, and small sharks. Each drawn into the intertidal area by the promise of calm water and good hunting.
Local tourists, like me.
“It’ll be a little rough getting across,” he says. He’s worried about the currents too. The river is wide here, a dark reflection of autumn sky. Clouds may gather like omens a few miles southeast, but the way the weather wavers, it’s unlikely I’ll see rain.
I zip on my life vest just to make him feel better and assure him that I have been kayaking before. He gives me the same speech he gives everyone, marks a couple of points of interest on the map with a wet fingertip, including the crab boat.
“Just stick to the edge,” he says, finally. “Tide’ll be with you on the way back, make the return a whole lot easier.”
He pushes my boat half out into the water, and waits for me to get settled. I take my time, storing my water bottle out of the way, clipping my floaty-bag to a bungee by my seat. I have a multi-tool in my waist pouch and a mesh bag for litter. There’s always something out there that shouldn’t be.
“Ready?”
It’s been a rough two years, pandemic and all that, and this is my first trip beyond my own swamp in eighteen months. I brace myself, mentally and physically, for the send-off. I’m not a small woman, and part of me still expects to be too big, too heavy for something as simple and finite as the laws of buoyancy. I don’t know why—except cultural conditioning—it’s not like I’m close to the kayak’s weight limit, but it’s hard being a woman who takes up space.
Fat. I know we’re supposed to be reclaiming that word, giving it the neutral value it’s supposed to have, but it’s never been neutral to me. Maybe if I were a whale or a seal or a manatee. Maybe if fat was something you had instead of something you are.
I tug on my gloves and pick up my paddle. “Ready.”
On the water, I’m just another round marine creature. I’m heavy, but I’m strong. My body has never failed to do what I want or need it to. That’s all the water cares about. If it cares at all. Bigger and stronger than I get lost beneath its surface every day. Having come back from drowning twice as a child, I’m acutely aware of this. I still get a cold skitter down my spine whenever I cross deep, dark water. Doesn’t matter how many times I manage it safely. There’s only one wrong breath between us and oblivion.
The Folly kid was right; it’s rough crossing the widest part of the river. It’s deep water, permanent. I look both ways before I start to cross, a mostly useless habit out here. The big boats stick to the center, and most run a low wake, but not all. It’s not like a kayaker is fast enough to get out of the way. We rely on common courtesy, the laws—both written and not—of water etiquette.
Across the water, miles of Spartina grass wave, green and gilded and filled with the surf-sounding tumble of a brisk sea wind. The water along the edge is calm as promised, and I’m halfway across when an offshore fishing boat goes zipping by too fast. Post-911 country music blares, louder than the breeze, and the tattered nylon buzz of an American flag hangs past respectful retirement on the Master Baiter’s stern. I raise my paddle and let the waves push me roughly toward the bank. Assholes. Serve them right if it’s them that I’m here for, but there’s no use worrying about that yet.
The kayak bottoms out, a soft bump then a harsh grate as the tough plastic scrapes against oyster shells clustered in the shallows. I wait for the water to calm again, for the smell of diesel exhaust to sweep past me and vanish, before I push back off, paddle digging into the muddy bank. A handful of long-legged oystercatchers dash along beside me, footprints disappearing in the damp sand, bright red bills flashing amid grey-shelled oysters. They’re not bothered by the assholes; maybe I shouldn’t be either.
Not yet.
My paddling form is terrible, clunky. Doesn’t matter how often I come. My arms are short or I’m clumsy. Maybe both. I don’t know. I just know practice hasn’t cured me. But the wildlife never seems to mind. I know it’s partly because they’re accustomed to worse than me, but I like to think they know I’m no threat to them, that they welcome me among them. I paddle ahead of the birds and grab my phone, snap photos as the wind pushes me back. A scoop of pelicans swoop low in front of me and I get their pictures as well before I lose too much momentum. Then it’s back to balancing, staying close enough to the bank that I don’t have to fight the wind, but not so close that I’m bottoming out every dozen yards.
I might not be getting my steps in, but I’m getting my workout. At least I’m not sweaty. Soaked through from wind and sub-par paddling form, but not sweaty. I love being out here. Surrounded by water, sky, and marsh. The entire day is blue-white and golden, a perfect mid-seventies. Overhead a red-tailed hawk circles. Tiny birds dart through the cordgrass, marsh wrens and saltmarsh sparrows, nibbling on grass seeds and insects.
Every time I check my map or stop for water, I drift back. I’ve kayaked before but nothing like this. The marsh is usually peaceful as a warm bath, and I’ve never really bemoaned my poor paddling form, but I’m regretting it today, even as I’m grateful to have remembered my gloves. My first time out I went home with blisters and that was on water as smooth as glass.
The grass opens up on my left, the small tributary with the promised crab boat. It’s not quite the halfway point of my four hours, but I’m tired enough to take the respite. The wind doesn’t roar here, it sighs, and so do I, letting as much of the last year go as I can. I take a selfie with a great blue heron who seems utterly unconcerned with my presence, post it and a few other pictures to the ‘gram. Establishing a timeline. An alibi.
Perfect fall day on the water!
As promised, just around a bend, a derelict fishing boat has been overturned and run aground. Repurposed as a crab habitat, its sun-scoured, barnacle-covered surface swarms with orange-fisted fiddler crabs, claws raised in warning as my shadow falls too close. I salute the intrepid arthropods and paddle past, bank my kayak and take a few more photos, then a water break in the quiet. The sun is nap-warm and my arms are just starting to get tired. I toy with the idea of hiding here for what little is left of the afternoon, but there’s work waiting for me.
A chip wrapper flashes silver from the bank. Beside it lies a plastic milk jug and a tangled knot of fishing line the size of my fist. The fishing line is the worst, but that silver flashes like a lure to more than me out here. I use my paddle to drag the rubbish to the edge of my kayak, throw one leg off the other side to balance as I lean down to pick it up. The water’s cold this late in the season, and even knowing the bottom is only inches beneath my dangling foot, I feel the silty truth of my own vulnerability. I distract myself with a few curses for all litterbugs and head back out.
The tide turns as I reach the widest part of the creek. It’s deep water here, and the storm current is strong, pushing me back the way I’ve come even as the leaving tide pulls me forward. I fight along with the water, because it’s not in me not to, because there is a single crystalline moment when it’s just me and the water and the wind and I am both insignificantly small and cosmically stubborn. Immortal, ephemeral. My entire being surrendering to the frantic pursuit of perseverance, ultimately going nowhere.
I hate it, but I am still paddling.
I have a moment to doubt, a moment to wonder if the marsh really chose me or if my descent into madness was the inevitable product of growing up in a late-stage capitalist hellscape, consuming too many Disney Princess movies and 90s environmentalist cartoons. What makes me any different than the white kids deep-diving into far-right radicalism on Youtube?
An hour before sunset, the marsh grass shadows stretch long, dark reflections in the unquiet water. The Atlantic is just a song away; the salt in the air thickens. Last time I was here, my sister and I turned back about a quarter-mile before King Flats merges with Folly and Oak Island creeks, but I’ve never been this far out alone. A pair of osprey crisscross above me, hunting cries all but lost in the wind, and even though I’m expecting them, I startle when the first bonnethead shark bumps the bottom of my boat.
“You’re late,” I accuse, as if there is any timeline but that of the marsh.
The second little shark swipes the side of my kayak, movements reminiscent of herding dogs. Soon there are a dozen swimming close to the surface, avoiding my paddle with enviable agility. Bonnethead sharks aren’t big enough to threaten people, even if they wanted to, which they don’t. They’re the smallest of the hammerheads—in hammer and in length—tending around three to four feet long and traveling in schools of twelve to fifteen. Omnivores, if you can imagine. They’re the only sharks we know of whose diet consists equally of plants. They forage into the marsh because they like swimming along the bottom of shallow water, grazing on sea lettuce and crustaceans.
I take a deep breath, my doubts sinking to the bottom like so much detritus. It won’t be long now. Longest it’s ever taken from pick up to target is ten minutes. I lift my paddle from the water and let the bonnetheads bump and nudge and push the nose of my kayak in the direction they want me going. Nothing about my escort is natural. They’re not false-smiling bottle-nosed dolphins charming boaters with swim-bys and strand feedings.
Whatever time is left, I spend preparing: turning off my phone, making sure it’s safely secured in the kayak. I take a few gulps of water. No matter how often we do this my throat always gets dry. My shirt is salt-crusted, lips wind-chapped. I’d be sunburned if I didn’t insist on an unreasonable SPF. I check the fit of my gloves, flex salt from the creases. My arms feel like jelly and my feet have pressed to the pegs for so long, I can’t tell what my legs are doing. That’s pretty normal, especially after a long time sitting in the boat. When I finally get back to the landing, Folly kid will tell me to go slow getting up and he’ll hover, not wanting a customer to land on their ass.
A curved fin breaks the water beside me, and my heart leaps free of its fears as a pair of dolphins breach gently, grey sides slick with watercolor sunset. They cross in front of my kayak and then something heavier than a bonnethead bumps beneath my seat. What makes me different from those radicalized kids? They do. An unnatural alliance. Sharks, dolphins, and the raptors overhead. Disparate species gathering together, water and wildlife willing me on their way.
Whatever my reluctance, it’s lost in exaltation. We make the last deep bend of King Flats Creek. Ahead is Folly Creek, then a half-mile farther the Atlantic. The Master Baiter is anchored in the confluence of the three creeks, and yes, I’m glad it’s them. The water is dark, filled with the sky’s reflection, but there’s something floating like oil just below all that sky. As I draw closer to the boat, I can see that it’s blood.
It’s legal to chum in South Carolina; it’s a standard fishing practice. There are certain restrictions around certain beaches, but I’ve never bothered learning them. I don’t care about what’s legal, I only care about what’s right. Here, in this quiet sanctuary, it is defilement. Sacrilege. I pick up my paddle, stick one end forward on my right and cut hard to port.
They’re “shark fishing.” The kind of nonsense that leaves hooks in mouths and bullet wound scars on heads, backs, and sides. We’re supposed to leave nothing behind, but some people think that the only way to be remembered is to leave a scar upon the earth. They’re always the same. White men with too much or too little money. Ignorant of all but their own entitlement. I don’t need to have the first fin brought to my attention, but whatever brought me out here wants to be sure of my investment, I guess. One of the dolphins swims up alongside, eye lifted out of the water, a dark certainty in the meeting of our gaze. The fin in her mouth is small, cut clean, not torn or ripped like any non-human might manage.
The Master Baiter looms with laughter and loud music. Three figures move along the deck, but they haven’t noticed me. It’s impossible to hear the gunshots over the wind, but the creatures around my boat recoil with every shot, and the kayak seems to reverberate with fear and anger and my own trembling rage. When my bow brushes the side of the boat, the sharks and dolphins dive. I don’t see the darker shadow that follows, but I can feel it, a low quiet rising from the deep water like a promise.
They’re too busy taking turns shooting into the water to notice me. I grab a line and tether my kayak to the ladder on the side of the boat. By the time they realize they’re not alone, I’m onboard, leaning back against the rail, situation and targets assessed.
Early twenties. Gym muscles and soft hands. Beach blonde hair growing out from hundred-dollar haircuts. Perfect teeth, expensive sunglasses. They’re not kids; they’re grown-ass men languishing too long under the protective banner of boys. Their parents have summer homes in places like Beaufort and Isle of Palms and Frogmore Isle, but they like to come to the marshes and cosplay the local rednecks in cut-up Dirty Crab t-shirts of buxom cartoon girls covered in double entendres.
“I called ahoy,” I lie with a nod back to my kayak. The boat smells like beer and blood and fish guts and there’s a red, white, and jingoist anthem twanging from the stereo. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but cruelty has its own cadence. There’s no doubt about why I’m here. “Water was getting rough. Y’all mind if I tie up for a few minutes, get my second wind?”
They glance back and forth between each other. The one holding the gun—it’s a 9mm Glock; I can’t even—tucks it into the back waistband of jeans he bought already ripped to hell.
“Naw.” His accent is bad, either a part of the south I’m not from or something he picked up on those faux southern reality shows, the ones that wouldn’t know a real southern accent if it blessed their fucking hearts. “We’re just doing a little fishing.”
He pulls at the brim of his trucker hat. I can’t tell if he’s trying to tip it at me politely or if he’s just nervous. I can’t see his eyes, but I don’t need to. He realizes he’s caught. He just doesn’t know what net he’s in.
“Water’s rough for fishing,” I say as his buddies fall back to flank him. They’re just out of arm’s reach, but that’s okay. I’ve nearly got my legs back.
The other two aren’t nervous. They’ve done nothing wrong and they’re used to being the most important people in any given room. The guy with the gun, well, he’s a little squirmy, wondering how much I saw, how much trouble I can get him in. He’s been in trouble for stupid shit before. I don’t know this for certain, but I recognize the type. Daddy’s important or wants to be; Junior keeps costing him money and reputation with the cover-ups.
“S’posed to calm down this evening,” says one of Junior’s buddies. He’s got blood and offal on the hem of his t-shirt, and I avoid looking at the mess on deck. It’s clear they’ve never cleaned a fish before; they’re not fishing for food or even sport. They just want to kill something. “Hoping to get a good haul tonight.”
Junior can’t decide what to do with his hands. He crosses his arms in front of his chest. Uncrosses them. I don’t say anything about the gun; I already know it’s mine. Just as soon as he turns his back to me. Whether that’s before or after one of his buddies hits the water is all that remains to be seen.
I just want to kill something too.
“Not really the ideal spot for shark fishing,” I say lightly. They could shrug it off if they wanted to, but they’re not the type to take criticism from a woman who isn’t their momma or their unfortunate girlfriend.
“It is if you put enough bait out.” Junior laughs, and I decide I’m going to leave him for last.
I don’t answer. Instead, I make a show of stretching. When a fat woman does anything active, people tend to look away or stare in judgment. They turn back to the rail, and I’m instantly forgotten as the third one leans too far over, reaching down toward the water.
“Chad, on your right!” Bloody Hem says excitedly.
I get close enough to see that he has a bangstick partially submerged. I’ve never seen one in action—they’re used by divers and spear-fishers as shark deterrents—and I doubt this is anything like the right way, but I’ve seen the effects of them, photographs of three-inch deep holes in the broad beautiful heads of bull sharks somehow still swimming.
Chad leans farther out, stretching, stretching . . . stretching.
It doesn’t take much. The idiot isn’t even flat-footed. He’s on his toes, leaning out as far as he can and still keep his weapon in the water. His buddies are cheering him on. When he tips face-first into the water, it takes them entirely too long to realize I pushed him. Hell, if I hadn’t grabbed Junior’s gun—easily, far too easily—they might have kept laughing, assuming Chad was shit-faced enough to lose his balance.
But I have Junior’s gun.
“What the fuck, bitch?!”
The violence simmers up on an outraged shout that is always just beneath the surface with these kinds of men. Junior takes a step towards me and I shake my head once. He should be grateful I’m not stuck using my vacuum flask.
“Shh . . . .” I don’t know if they can hear me over the wind, over the country music twanging beneath cries of the gathering gulls, but they still, gazes darting to each other like frightened baitfish.
It’s been years since I held a handgun. I’ve always preferred revolvers, at least until the gun nuts ruined that for the rest of us. I have a rifle and a shotgun at home. One for hunting, the other for scaring off coyotes or any other uninviteds too close to my house. The 9mm feels like a toy, but Bloody Hem and Junior are taking me seriously now that I have it leveled at them. I wonder how many bullets are left in the clip.
“You can’t steal my boat.” Junior has misread the situation.
I can’t help but laugh. Confusion reddens their faces.
“I don’t want your boat.” I make eye contact with Bloody Hem through his polarized shades, point toward the water with the gun, then back at him. “Go on. You can take your chances in the water or don’t. But I’ma see how many bullets you have left in three . . . two . . . .”
They stare at me in disbelief, but they jump before I get to one. I’m actually a little surprised, though I shouldn’t be. Courage is in short supply among this particular demographic. They don’t know what to do when they aren’t the ones holding the gun.
Twin splashes quickly become desperate thrashing. Just off the bow, the water writhes and churns with blood and unidentifiable voids. When I see a terrified face too close to the surface, I lean out and down, close enough that skill hardly matters. Close enough that the Glock could have been a bangstick. I put a bullet between Chad’s wide blue eyes. Now he’s bait. If there’s an afterlife or a next life or purgatory, maybe someone can teach him about irony and just deserts.
Bloody Hem screams something watery and incoherent, but he’s no fool. He’s swimming hard for the ladder at the boat’s stern. He doesn’t see the unnaturally large bull shark gliding behind him, Junior’s arm hanging out one side of her beautiful mouth.
But I do.
She’s not a real shark. With very rare exceptions, even the biggest and hungriest sharks want little to do with us. She’s something else, both more and less than the reality of a bull shark. She’s vengeance and requiem, the physical manifestation of the marsh’s need.
Junior surfaces behind her with a scream, his remaining hand clutching the bloody stump of his arm. Bloody Hem looks back and sees . . . well, he’s not sure what he sees. He’s not the kind to recognize his own end, but I make sure Junior sees me raise the gun. His buddy falls back, eyes round and mouth gaping, blood spreading bright across Dirty Crab’s Bait Shack.
Junior doesn’t suffer nearly as long as I want him to, but I need to head home. I put the last bullet in his back and toss the gun overboard. When the scavengers come to feast, I slip down the ladder, feet just above the autumn sea, waiting. The bonnetheads and dolphins return, the little sharks feasting on the small bits of fresh bait. There’s a flash of metal at the corner of one gaping mouth, impossible to ignore. I slip out of my life jacket and into the bloody water. It’s chilly, not enough to be dangerous, but it’s not a pleasant swim. The earth is warming and so the waters are cooling from polar icecap melt. Another month and the bonnetheads may well be swimming south to warmer waters. It’s now or spring, if I even see the same ones again.
I’m never sure; I don’t always join them. Baiting is bad, even for the best reasons, like data collecting and scientific observation and what I’m doing now: pulling hooks out of lips and fishing lines off of tails with my multi-tool. The last thing wild creatures need is to get too accustomed to humans, but the reality is, they’re already tangling with us on the regular. Doing nothing feels like violence.
I tug loose one last hook from the mouth of a large female, fumble my multi-tool back into my pack with cold fingers and the jerky movements of prey that she’s polite enough to ignore. When I’m done, she glides around me, silking past me like a cat. Once, twice, three times. She presses her head up against my empty hand, shark-skin benediction scratching lightly at my glove. I would linger if I could, but this is her home, not mine. Maybe one day I’ll be another wild creature and not just their agent, but not today.
I climb back out and into my kayak, teeth chattering and shivering in the breeze. The dolphins bump me away, escort me through water painted mango-bright with Lowcountry sunset. Is that water-color reflection stained brighter red than the clouds? I can’t say, but it feels like it should be. Red skies and warnings and all of that.
When I turn my phone back on, there is a text waiting.
Thank you for adventuring with us today! We hope to see you again, but not soon.
“Does the defendant admit posting this message after the sinking of the ship Deep Power?” The prosecution lawyer looked up from his papers, directly at Kaveri. “I quote: ‘A hundred oilers nowhere near make up for even a single whale fall, but I guess it’s a start, el-oh-el’.”
My cousin, blank-faced in the dock, said, “Yes.”
The tight bun she’d made of her plaited hair was coming undone. I wanted to go to her and re-tie it. I gripped my thighs with aching fingers and waited.
It wasn’t truly an oil ship—I don’t know if any ultra-deepwater drilling ships still operate—but trawling for rare earth elements was hardly different, in her mind.
I was scared they’d ask if she believed what she wrote.
Instead, the lawyer said, “Can you elaborate on your meaning?” He must have been hired locally by the company. I can’t distinguish subtle regional variations, but knew his accent was a New Zealand one.
“Entire deep sea ecosystems were created and thrived on the nutrition from dead whales that sank to the seafloor, but in the absence of whales, I guess humans will do.”
The judge frowned.
No one I care about was particularly sad when the Deep Power sank. So much we loved was already lost beneath the sea—we had no sympathy to spare. But all of us, except Kaveri, had kept those thoughts to ourselves.
She looked thinner, as worn as her patched-up secondhand clothes, standing there alone. Her friends hadn’t come to support her. I didn’t blame them. We knew as soon as she was questioned that this would, at the very least, jeopardise her—our—climate residency. Then, the previous month, her charges were read out in this same courtroom—a rearranged hall in the International Seabed Authority’s local premises. The list started with something like ‘anti-green energy propaganda’ and ended with blowing a hole in a ship carrying ninety-seven crew members. No one wanted to risk being associated with that.
A little money did quietly appear in our bank account, enough to talk to a lawyer. They told me it was Kaveri’s bad luck that the ship hadn’t sunk in Aotearoa waters; the International Seabed Authority had its own way of handling trials, and national courts wouldn’t want to touch this case. I’d be permitted to attest to Kaveri’s good character if called as a witness, but unless they found new fragmented evidence six thousand metres underwater to prove she was involved, the outcome would largely depend on a judge’s assessment of her social media statements.
The company representative, when his turn came, spent a long minute staring at his papers. He addressed the entire courtroom, eyes darting often towards the lone reporter and their camera. “We have a chance to break free from petroleum—from a world dependent on burning the carcasses of millions-of-years-dead organisms to pollute the air—and to avert future wars centred on the resources of vulnerable nations already devastated by the effects of climate change.” He held his hands out, palms up, and lowered his voice. “The seafloor is common property; we could all be richer for sharing its wealth. Deep Power, and its crew, stood for that promise. We all believed the time of conflict minerals was past. And now, these . . . eco-terrorists have devastated that—”
He was cut off by the judge, who reminded him that no eco-terrorism had yet been proven.
I wondered if others in the courtroom saw through his evangelism, or if I was the only one on Kaveri’s side.
An old neighbour rows me back to the house, anchoring upriver at the rusted post that used to be a front gate. He says he’ll be back in a few hours and leaves me to pick through the remnants of our long-lost lives.
The blue-inked label on the cassette is an illegible smudge. Even if it hadn’t been water damaged, we must have re-recorded over it dozens of times. Nevertheless, it takes me back twenty years to that morning when I stood beneath screeching gulls, nose wrinkled as I pressed buttons at random on the video camera inherited from our great-grandmother.
That memory is so clear. It cools my heart to find something that cuts through the blur of the trial last month—the thin grey carpet, pens tapping against polished-wood tables, and stuffy summer air.
We’d collected the camera the day before, from the antique shop that repaired it and found us an old tape. My little cousin was determined to film her own documentary for school and apparently my new cellphone was an environmental travesty.
“Can we do this quickly? It stinks like rotting sewage!”
“It’s RICH NUTRIENTS that go into the OCEAN,” Kaveri replied. “Anyway, I’m ready. It’s you that should hurry up.”
“If only Chinnamma and Chiththappa had named you for a deity instead of this damned river, we might be singing at the temple right now!”
She danced barefoot, between lumpy tree-roots that bent upwards seeking air through mud. Waggled thin fingers overhead, as if to mimic their reach. “There’s a red light when you start recording.”
I finally found it.
She put on her best television voice. She’d been watching old clips of some famous British naturalist. “These ancient mangroves may not seem much at first glance, but—”
Her next words were about carbon fixing and nutrients flushed into the coastal ocean. The beauty of the mangroves. I noticed that her leggings were covered in mud, and somehow she’d managed to smear it on her hair. I contemplated how to prevent her dirtying the car: whether we should just leave it there and trek home through the muck, or find clean water to rinse off. I thought of how we could have gone to a zoo to film lions from a pristine concrete walkway, or visited beautiful plants in the botanical gardens full of fragrances that aimed to please the human nose. By the time we’d found crabs and oysters, or whatever she was looking for, and she’d told the camera how mangroves slowed climate change and protected us from storm surges, gloopy sediment clung to my legs too, and we had run out of tape.
“Ah well, the marks are just for the essay,” she said, trailing a toe through silt sodden with the rising tide. I wondered why she’d needed me at all, but only briefly. The smell had faded into the background as we searched for animal tracks and flicked through her plant book, and I overflowed with love for her, and the joys she always introduced me to.
“Ivvalavumthana?” says the neighbour, studying the plastic cassette in my hand. He scuffs bare feet through what used to be our garden. “Isn’t there anything else?”
We both look downhill at the boat. I always hoped we would return, once I’d saved enough for the voyage, thinking we’d benefit from closure after the way we fled during the worst of the storms. I should be grateful to find anything left here to say a proper farewell to. But seeing the house only reminds me I’ve lost two homes now.
I shake my head. “Found everything salvageable. Some knick-knacks upstairs.” I tap the suitcase beside me. “Old books.”
Not the photo albums, the letters, the remnants of my family. Not her.
I keep clutching the tape.
The smell from that day down in the mangroves seems to have suffused the air here too, although nowadays it could well be from rotting sewage. Still, when I inhale, it brings with it the recollection of something else Kaveri said: “Mangroves are the lungs of the ocean.” She breathes so much life into this world.
I think of those roots straining for oxygen above the incoming tide. When the waters recede, what’s left are memories, coated in sediment and bad smells. The richness is always washed into the sea.
At Kaveri’s questioning, she said whatever came to mind, as she always had.
She talked about her work. Yes, they had seen the Deep Power and yes, she had gone for a dive nearby because she’d never seen a deep-sea miner before and yes, she was an environmentalist or she wouldn’t be volunteering to reseed coral reefs while her cousin paid the bills, would she? The prosecution lawyer asked what she knew about deep-sea mining. She talked about creatures that grew on metallic nodules that grew in the depths of the ocean. About noises and echolocation and plumes of sediment that clouded the water for kilometres. About how everything that happened on this planet was connected.
“I didn’t know the ship that sank was the same one I saw until I was ordered to come in for questioning.”
The lawyer pursed his lips before asking what I’d dreaded. Did she believe what she had written?
She folded her arms. For the first time, her voice quivered. “If things had been different, we could have still had whales.”
When I was sworn in, the judge kept telling me to talk louder. The sound sank into the humidity. It reminded me of early days here, when people kept telling me to speak up or repeat myself, correcting the way I pronounced words I’d known my whole life.
I told the court how our family had raised my cousin to care about everyone around her.
“So you agree she has a single-minded focus on wildlife preservation?”
“No, not wildlife—humans too. We’re not separate. There’s no ‘them’ and ‘us’,” I said, hands clasped tight. This couldn’t be helping her case. “Kaveri said it already. We’re part of the same ecosystem. It’s better for everyone when it’s in balance.”
She looked up at me then, eyes bright.
I told them about the river she was named for and its delta in which we grew up; the city lost to the sea centuries ago; the family we lost in the storms. “Kaveri knows loss. She wouldn’t inflict it on anyone. Even when she was a little kid, she just wanted to show the world the beauty of what was left. She used to have me film her own documentaries . . . . I wish I could show you. I had them on my phone but everything’s gone. When we came here, we had nothing except my job offer.” My shoulders ached. I seemed to have swallowed a whole lot of air, making my stomach churn. “And Kaveri wouldn’t have knowingly put our residency application at risk either. She made a thoughtless comment, and maybe she doesn’t understand how it looks, but she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and she definitely had nothing to do with the ship sinking.”
She gazed fixedly past me at the white-painted walls.
Now everyone knew who I was, I sat at the back of the public gallery, as far as possible from relatives and friends of the crew. The reporter, adjusting their camera, was the only person with a smile for me; Kaveri didn’t turn back in my direction. And, in the end, my attempt to emphasise her naivete made little difference.
“I didn’t do it,” she said. “And I don’t celebrate death; I only celebrate that it happened where it did. The oceans we came from are our mother. We have taken life from her and left her starving, we’ve made it impossible for our siblings to live. I hope eventually we will crawl into the oceans, and re-evolve to replace what we stole. But since this cannot happen for millennia, and since this is all we can do now, why not celebrate any chance to give back? When I die, I want my body to feed the abyssal depths. Bury me in the sea, too.”
She was sent back to her cell and they wouldn’t let me talk to her. They said judgement was reserved. It could be months before a verdict. I had to take the train back up north to wait for news.
Our residency application was declined a week later.
That night, the wind blew strong and the bay glimmered in blue light. A crowd stretched along the sand flats, well after midnight, taking photos. I left off packing to join them. It seemed a good omen: microscopic life, thriving. A respite from my despair.
Several hundred long-finned pilot whales—Kaveri would remind me they’re dolphins, really—stranded in the morning, the deep red tide of the water that brought them mirroring the brightness of pōhutukawa blossom against dark leaves and blue sky.
We cooled them with towels soaked in toxic seawater, into which we’d refloat survivors when the tide returned.
Sea-salt and sweat-salt stuck to our t-shirts. Others took breaks to lather on sunscreen. The waves lapped higher.
As our dolphin gave a weak tail-flick, the person working beside me said, “I wish we could have helped. If nothing else, maybe they’ll fall to the seafloor?”
“I was thinking the same. My cousin said . . . .”
“We’ve got it from here,” said a rescue officer, approaching. “Thanks.”
The two of us turned to wade back.
“You’re Kaveri’s cousin, eh?”
“Were you at the trial?” I stopped, a low wave sloshing at my shins.
“My friend sent me the last video.” They splashed up next to me, pushing cracked sunglasses onto their forehead. “He’s been on her side from the start. I’m sorry, must be rough waiting. Though . . . she’s right, isn’t she? About giving back?”
Unwilling to dump the ruined tape, I take it back to where I’m staying, in the spare room of a stranger’s house near the Kaveri River delta. Here, I eke out what remains of our savings, seeking work that might offer me a visa back to Aotearoa. This is a new kind of loneliness—albeit an incomplete one, because every day, I receive more messages:
“I saw her testimony. I’m writing it in my will.”
“My sister runs a charter boat company and found a funeral director to team up with. They’re booked solid.”
“I’d like to interview you about Kaveri’s trial.”
“I’ve been sending that court video to everyone I know, it’s incredible.”
“Would you be able to put us in touch with your cousin?”
I can’t, because Kaveri is languishing in custody still waiting for the verdict. In the meantime, the company has launched a new forensic investigation.
But now, out here—all over the planet—we bury our dead at sea.
The trash patch did not break us up. The trash patch (or vortex, I should say; it isn’t stationary, it is not an island) did not poison the way I look at you or turn your words to stinging flies. We did not get physical; we did not even throw anything. There is a whole toxic ecosystem built around the microscopic plastic particles—a spread of microorganisms feed on the waste. You live on the other side of the gulf. One potential lie is that the bacteria clean it up. One potential lie is that they spread the poisons. One definite lie is that the trash patch is okay. When the medical examiner cuts me open, my stomach will be full of soda rings, plastic threads, and shopping bags, and I will have starved to death. I don’t want to spread the poison. Let the mess stop here with me and you. It is time to call it. One lie about the pacific garbage patch is that it is the only garbage patch in our oceans. It is not. At 5,000 square kilometers, it is simply the biggest.
Near the end of the last year of her projected life expectancy, Cora knows she shouldn’t be spending any moment on frivolities. Her store of oxygen tanks is depleting. Her body begins wheezing halfway up the stairs to her apartment. Every last breath in her body needs to be spent on work, on microscopes and slideshows and documentation and the full spectrum of mycelium she’s endeavored so hard to engineer.
But instead of thinking about any of this, she, like everyone else, is riveted to her newsfeed. She clings to every eddy of information.
The satellites spot them first at night: lights where there should be none, sparse enough to be mistaken for dead pixels in the ocean’s inky gut. Before long, the lights splatter into a constellation orbiting 32°N and 145°W, and those who know the significance of that migratory path are summoned to interviews that flood every social media feed.
WHAT IS IN THE NORTH PACIFIC GYRE?
There’s speculation, amazement, alarm. Journalists and researchers and influencers livestream their journeys by sea and sky toward the light, cameras panning across the ocean’s seemingly endless blue, and then its seemingly endless heaving crust of bags, bottles, rope. Even that far out from the coast, the currents gleam in rainbow neons from runoff. Telephoto lenses show a reusable straw jabbing skyward like an arm waving for rescue. Snap-lid plastic tubs bob like polygonal turtle shells, one of which is lifted and upturned by a reporter with a waterplane, revealing barnacles fisted underneath, alive, floating: foreshadowing.
“There are people living out here,” says the only influencer Cora follows, a girl who speaks in awe through a branded lavender nasal cannula. Self-consciously, Cora adjusts her own, and takes a steadying breath as she zooms her phone camera in on grainy, irregular silhouettes in the ocean’s distance.
Over the next weeks, the extent of the floater colony becomes clear. Boats of all models slung to rafts slung to bridges slung to shelters of all sizes, constructed of plastic bottles stuffed with salt-crusted litter and compressed into bricks. A panoply of desalination vats and solar panels bob alongside, dappled with flags, indicating the floaters’ various origins. They range from disillusioned tech heirs to typhooned refugees floated out to sea alongside the ruins of sub-sea-level cities. At night, the Gyre rekindles the ocean’s horizon, radiating gold and crimson from headlights and lanterns and bulbs on hefty rubber wire.
It’s—inspiring.
The monitor in the lab breakroom remains fixed on Gyre newstreams, for hatewatching.
Cora’s project manager: “Do they really think they can stay out there forever?”
One of the marketing people: “Living the material-free, zero-waste lifestyle on a luxury yacht—”
An intern, laughing, eager to fit in: “All that garbage they say they hate so much—where do they think all of it is coming from, now?”
Cora feels the words whirl in her belly, coalescing into a hard, sharp knot. It swells. It hurts.
I don’t know, she wants to say. When a storm washed me out to sea as a child, I think I would have been alright ending up there.
She shuts her eyes.
Focus. Her air is too precious to waste on arguments. She adjusts her cannula, tries to calm down, stares at the news. Overhead, an influencer grimaces and laughs as she rates the output of the Gyre’s pelagic forage: slurry stewed with amphipods netted and flash-sanitized from beneath the ocean’s crusty skin, snails chopped raw with microgreens raised in a greenhousing boat, fish dried on solar-heated racks.
“Cora,” someone calls. It’s her boss. “Let’s do our dry run.”
A withdrawal. In the hallway, Cora’s boss starts talking in Tagalog.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time on Gyre news,” he says, “Cora, you need to focus on here and now,” and this time, she can’t help her protest.
“But—solar panels—mariculture—housing—”
There’s even more she wants to say: Anyone that makes it out there gets space, and everyone there is sifting the ocean clean, and it’s not just the rich, there are people like me, or people who just didn’t want to pay rent, and scientists, everyone who left the field because they couldn’t find investors but finally have the dedicated community, and actual applications—
But she can’t continue. Those first words were her limit, the only sounds that her deepest breath can inflate. She gags and coughs, and her boss lays a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.
“They’ve—done more good—than we have—in years,” Cora forces herself to spit out, and he frowns.
“Our work comes to fruition today, Cora. You’re willing to throw it all away because of a handful of—sea hippies? Cora,” he says finally, “focus,” and it’s these final words that sink into her like lead, sealing her mouth tight behind them.
Focus.
So close to the end, she can’t risk being pulled off this project. The path has been so hard—convincing her boss to have a spot on his team—begging allowance to work from home during flareups—nodding her head in every meeting, holding her head up over office gossip about the tank she rolls with her on bad days. She has no illusions; even with her GPA and degrees and circlet of prestigious scholarships, she’s the kind of person a lab of this caliber and venture backing took only to improve their diversity numbers. It was challenging work—and, Luis scoffed, relentless—but her best chance at getting what she really wanted.
I want to do something with my life, she wrote on her cover letter. I want to be the last to suffer this way. I want to die in peace.
She got the job.
They review the presentation one last time; and then, later that afternoon, in front of the board of directors, Cora’s boss recites points from their slideshow flawlessly. Mycolution’s arsenal of fungi is ready for deployment. Exhaustive experiments and projections show their full set of offerings is capable of digesting over eighty percent of humanity’s most non-degradable waste products, reducing even the most ancient plastics to harmless, reasonably edible mushrooms. Observers can even see the mycelium working: engineered luminescence indicates where hyphae have detected, and are digesting, plastic-based nutrients. Cora displays the diorama on the conference table, three acrylic boxes filled with her best specimen, tweaked and optimized. Each box contains different debris collected from the beach, left with the mycelium for half a year. Someone turns off the lights, for better visibility. Threading through the waste in each box is a lacework of vivid, fervent violet.
This is by far the most impressive demonstration their lab has ever been able to yield—but no one is interested. Cora’s chest tightens as one of the board interrupts the presentation halfway through and spends the remainder of the time on interrogation. The developed fungi varieties are fine, but how would the mycelium be transported to landfills? How could companies select the proper species to digest each dump’s specific stew of pesticides and nurdles and retired polyester clothing? What appeal was there for a company to wait decades before they could advertise having made any meaningful dent on the planet’s health? The costs in time and money and effort were high—there weren’t any subsidies for technology this new—and what would be the psychological cost, of bringing back to public consciousness the existence of a bunch of evacuated wastelands that public relations companies had already successfully hidden from view?
Cora gapes. Are they . . . serious? Just because problems are hidden or take a long time to resolve don’t mean they aren’t affecting anyone. It’s exactly because of companies making decisions like this that she has had to spend her life like this, not just in pain, but just trying to—clean up—
Focus, she tells herself, focus, be calm, focus, but her head is heating, and her chest is tightening, and all at once she dissolves, into coughing so harsh that she loses her balance—pitches into a wall—gasps, her breathing awful, inoutinoutinoutinoutinout.
In the end, her boss looks relieved at her struggling. It’s the perfect excuse to end the meeting.
The next day, she can’t even get up from bed. Her head spins. She fumbles herself together just enough message her boss that she’s too sick to come in, and accepts his immediate return voice call.
“I know you’re discouraged,” he says. “But the mycelium aren’t completely shelved. Let’s do the marketing research, find the money, and try again.”
I’ve already done the research, Cora types back. Her eyes are sore with it, with not sleeping, not resting. Everything they mentioned, the zero-waste certifications, the focus group branding. It takes a lot of time. More than I have left.
“None of us will ever see the fruit of our labor,” her boss argues. “All of this work is always for a future we’ll never see.” But he knows what she really means, and adds: “I don’t want to hear you sound so hopeless. This place has good coverage. You’ll live as long as anyone else. Just rest, and come back when you’re feeling better, alright?”
The way he says it, he’s forgotten that this is the only day of paid-time-off she reserves for herself shamelessly every year. She was supposed to spend her birthday in celebration of the project taking off; and in relaxation, one final breather before she dedicated herself to assembling all her documentation for whoever would inherit her work. She isn’t supposed to be shuddering nauseous on her couch—dizzy with reviewing PDFs about market and government certifications—nearly collapsing after opening the door for Luis, who arrives with birthday cake. She tries to hold herself together when the candles light, but her tears spatter on the icing. Her body squeaks, struggling to refill after she fails to blow out every candle.
I think, Cora wants to say, that this is it—but she can’t say it, her body judders, inoutinoutinoutinout, and Luis hugs her, holds her face to their chest. They understand.
In the end, Luis’s mother also hadn’t been able to blow out her candles. It all happened fast, after that.
“All I—want—is one more—year,” Cora sobs between breaths. “Just to—to know—that I—”
Luis’s arms around her tighten.
“Cora,” they say. “You’ve done all that you could. Please—please—just let go of the work. If this is really . . . you know I’ll be with you, until the end. But if this is really it . . . I can’t bear to see you spend your last days like this. You’ve done enough.”
No. She hadn’t managed even close to enough. But any protest Cora might have then is interrupted by her buzzing phone. A news alert, for the Gyre: another interview, about water purification methods they’re experimenting with. And their new coordinates, near mainland. The alert displays above her boss’s last message, a reiteration: Come back tomorrow when you’re feeling better.
Luis sees the message. “Don’t,” they say. Their voice is low with contempt. “Let’s just enjoy the time we have left. They don’t deserve your labor, much less you.”
They don’t, Cora agrees with a shake of her head. Still, she keeps looking at her phone. Her hand, shaking on her oxygen tubing, fists.
“Luis,” she says. “You—mean it? With me—until—the end?”
Luis meets her gaze, trying to understand the turn of her voice. Slowly, they nod.
“Okay,” Cora says. “Then—I think—I’ll go back.”
Just one last time.
She met Luis in the university hospital as a teen, back when no one knew the name of what was killing her. She was an orphan, a refugee of Tropical Storm Bagwis, jobless, a student. For her, and for Luis’s mother, the stipend given in exchange for their cooperation was better than nothing, and adhering to experiment protocols was well worth the hope they might one day breathe freely, rather than only in spurts, at times sucking for air like fish out of water.
Doctors barraged them with tests, and chased the symptoms around and down to their roots: the blood vessels that branched and withered over and over again in their lungs, like the boughs of trees in manic seasons. That wild growth and anti-growth was thanks to a frantic pendulum of hormones; and that was thanks to the chemicals leeched into their bloodstreams by plastics, apparently ingested in fatal levels by both Cora and Luis’s mother. They were too numerous and minuscule to extract or neutralize. Luis, who always hated seafood even when it was fried anonymously into bacalaitos, remained unaffected, though it wasn’t obvious from how they cried and hugged their mother and Cora both upon official diagnosis.
The news coined their own name for it, vulgar and catchy: trash lung. An islander’s affliction, carried by superstorm exiles along with whatever baggies of memory cards and soggy photo prints they could keep hold of, adrift, before being scooped up by rescue boats. It felt unfair that the city was where things were safe to eat, with its meat trucked in from toxic mass production facilities. It felt criminal that Cora’s poison was bangús she chose from the market alongside her mother, fried and eaten with rice, plain and simple and miasmatic with microplastics and pollution finer than fish bones, and sticking deeper in the throat.
The injustice was obvious. Luis’s mother died; and Cora picked them up from their grief, cooked food, helped parse out all the bills, now in Luis’s name. It was like the sickness had simply happened, with no one to blame: no paper trails, no culprits, and no cures. When Cora asked, the doctors told her that the funding had dried up.
“And what about us?” Cora demanded. “All us research subjects? And what about everyone else in the world that has this?”
I know you’re discouraged, was all they said. Let’s just find the money, and try again.
They told her that she had a while yet—at least until age twenty-eight. She waited, and then she didn’t. She wasn’t going to die having done nothing. She’d heard of a lab, run by someone from her same hometown, who was trying to use the earth to purify the water.
Presently, Luis searches the chat forums while she makes her final preparations.
And I found someone, they message. On a Gyre forum. Their boat can take us out to the coordinates the Gyre announced they’d be at in a week. I got the time off. Do you think you have that amount of time?
Yes, Cora responds.
There’s a pause. Luis says, And you’re sure you want to do this?
Yes, Cora repeats.
And to her own body she begs: Seven more days. That’s it.
All I want is seven more days.
All her life, she’s had to balance so much: insurance, co-pays, tuition, grants, rent, oxygen. So it’s a blessing, really, that none of that matters at all, anymore. Her life has only one last to-do item.
She heads back to work—after hours, after packing her things, and after connecting herself to a fresh tank. Despite her conviction, her hands shake. The substrate drawers rattle as she opens them—in her anxiety, she accidentally opens one against her tank roller, causing it to clank against a cabinet—and when she finally rights it, and starts to palm a bit of spore-laden substrate into a spare vial, the vial slips, and when she tries to catch it her wild hand instead smashes it.
The sound pierces, echoes. Her breathing goes into overdrive, and then stops: Inout—in. In the silence, even the sound of her blood dripping from her palm sounds like a drum. But no one comes when she tamps the soil and spores into the vials with her bleeding hand. No one comes when she slips the vials into her pockets, sock-padded to quiet the clinking. No one comes when she heads out the door. Luis picks her up at the lab’s back door, and inside the car is Peregrin, a tanned white woman with a catamaran and a wealth of optimism, who on short notice agreed to delay her departure just another day. They make introductions. At the moorage, Peregrin points at the water, which is scaly with wrappers and plastic bottles and gleams magenta in the moonlight.
“So you’ve got mushrooms that can eat this stuff?”
“Wait,” Luis says. Cora is wheezing already, with the effort of walking across the pier. In the catamaran, Peregrin helps her into a seat, and by the time they’ve made it out of the sound, Cora’s pained but steady breathing is deafened by the groan of the boat, the hiss of seafoam on the windows.
Inside her single bag is two changes of clothing, her laptop, and binder-sized substrate trays, with humidifier layers and battery-powered warming elements. Each tray is speckled with various kinds of plastic waste, and labeled according to which mycelium can digest it. It’s equipment from home, things she used in the past to continue research over the weekend. She takes a deep breath.
The soil in the vials is studded with spores and fluffy hyphae that, once the lights are off, glow: purple, tangerine, cyan, neon jade. On some vials spores luminesce in whorl-shapes, stamped by Cora’s thumb. On others, there are smears of blood.
“Cora,” Luis gasps. “When did you cut yourself?”
“It’s nothing.” Her palm is still bleeding, even stinging, sharply—but a brief glance shows her no shards of vial glass, just a little dirt.
“It’s not nothing! Cora—”
Cora frowns at them. This is the least of my worries. But she accepts antibiotics and a bandage that Peregrin procures from a cabinet, and then returns to work, upending the vials and stirs the spores into the trays. Peregrin peers over Cora’s shoulders, impressed.
“That’s it? That dirt?”
Cora nods.
“That is so fucking cool, Cora,” Peregrin laughs. “This stuff definitely deserves to be out in the Gyre, rather than in corporate purgatory. You’re a goddamn hero. Honestly, I’m honored y’all chose me to help you. Count me in until the end.”
Thanks for helping, Cora writes. And then, not wanting to get distracted: As long these mycelium have nutrients, they’re fine anywhere. A toxic dump. An ocean.
That night, she focuses, and writes everything she can remember about mycelium, about hyphae, about enzymes, polymers, monomers. About detergents and fuel and polystyrene. About how the eventual luminescent caps can be eaten, with no adverse affect whatsoever. It’s useful—it deserves a life out there. She stays up the whole night, drawing diagrams, arranging files.
All I want, she thinks the next morning, is six more days.
“How about taking a break?” Luis asks, halfway through the next day, when she asks them to roll down another tank from her meager storage. “Just for an afternoon? Just for an hour? Just for the sunset?”
No, Cora writes. I have to focus.
So close to the end, she can’t risk this falling through the cracks, can’t risk the last moment of her life being filled with regret. Peregrin brings cut apples as Cora is writing about optimal temperature ranges. Luis brings another air tank as Cora is writing about instructions for how to mix new substrate. Cora writes and writes, and when she starts slowing down on facts, she starts adding dreams, describing training the mycelium’s fibrous body into brick-shaped molds, describing a glowing city fruiting on the ocean, stretching, chewing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch up and spitting it out as homes, or at least as floating mycelium reefs.
To actually construct something out of material like that would take years, if not decades, of course—and who knows how it would all fare long-term, in the harsh salt and sun of the Gyre—but she can see it all so clearly, which is a blessing, because if any of this ever became reality, it would be long after her death.
Which is fine, she thinks firmly, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, and she steels herself as she feels her body constrict again—inoutinoutinout.
At the end of Luis’s mother’s life, these attacks had come on so fast and close together that she’d deflated in the space of a week. Gasping, eyes watering, Cora pinches her cut thumb, comforted by the simple sharp pain of it.
All I want is five more days.
By the time the boat noses through water cloudy with polyethylene bags, Cora feels a stab of relief—We must be close! But this delight breaks as the day proceeds and the seamless blue of their journey turns murky, then blistered, with debris. A two-second dip of Peregrin’s landing net yields handfuls of waste: salt-blunted chips of white and gray and blue plastic, flakes of wave-softened styrofoam. She upends it all onto the deck, and three of them pick through it, with gloves, and morbid curiosity. For a moment Cora raises her hand and wills her fingers to drift and rest, prophetic, on something scattered by a lola or even older ancestor: maybe a family photograph storm-flung by some miracle, through decades and miles, to her possession, an omen, a sign that someone approves of how she’s chosen to live and die. But most of the stuff is slimy knots of trawling net, and tatters of fluorescent fishing rope: castoff sloughed off secretly, before it could be counted by an expense report.
Luis is somberly silent. Peregrin wipes her eyes.
“It’s different,” she murmurs. “When you see it in person.”
Cora nods, not wanting to waste air on a useless, depressed Yes. The sight of all this garbage, scabbed over the ocean and never healing, congeals in her like she sometimes imagines the plastic inside her does: not ruining her through some haywire of hormones but with something even more basic, as if the blame for her weakening body rests on crackling film and crumbling egg crates lodged between every capillary, too deep for fingers or fine instruments to wedge out. Thinking about it, she feels her chest tighten again, with a kind of claustrophobia—she scratches her skin, as if she could claw the poison inside her out—her cut palm catches on something, and bleeds anew, and the color is so wildly bright and spills so fast and for a moment she feels her chest going again, inoutinoutinoutin—
When she returns to consciousness, it’s in panic.
Luis, she tries to scream, and she feels her hand, gripped. Luis is in chair beside her hammock; Peregrin is standing over, as well. Both are teary.
“Hey, girl,” Peregrin says. “How are you?”
Fine, Cora mouths. She reaches her arm out, toward her laptop, but Luis takes her hand, and squeezes it.
“Cora,” they say, “I think you’ve done enough,” and for the first time, Cora can’t find the energy to argue. She slumps.
“There are nurses in the Gyre,” Peregrin whispers. “Doctors too, maybe. You think maybe one of them could help her? I don’t know, I mean—if they could even buy her just another month, or—”
“Maybe,” Luis says, and then turns back to Cora, making a smile. “Just four more days. Hang in there, Cora. This—this isn’t how you’re supposed to go. Don’t you . . . do you want to see the Gyre? Isn’t that worth staying here for, just a glimpse of it? You have to see it. You have to see where your work will go. Don’t you?”
Their eyes are red.
I’ll try, Cora mouths, because she knows they’d only protest if she said, I’m sorry you have to watch this happen all over again. You don’t deserve this.
Luis brushes her hair. “You’ve done enough,” they say, “just rest now, just sleep,” and for the first time, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.
Maybe Luis is right.
I’ve done everything I needed.
I’ve done everything I could.
I can die now, in peace—
But in the days and hours before her death, robbed of the lush distraction of work, all she can think about is how hard it is to breathe. How cold she feels, even with Peregrin’s hand-knit shawl. How her whole body aches, especially her cut hand, even her whole arm. How Luis’s mother, in her deathbed, had painkillers, and movies, and short books—but all Cora has is an ache deeper than the one in her chest, something hard and huge in her belly, something that says, This can’t happen.
I can’t die yet. I still want—all I want—
Is . . . to . . . to see the Gyre.
Yes.
Just three more days. To know the mycelium made it, and then, Cora swears, I’ll die, I know it, it’ll be fine, I’ll go without complaint, and so for the first time Cora listens exactly to what Luis says, stays wrapped in the hammock, drinks Peregrin’s bone broth, tries to ignore Peregrin and Luis whispering around her in anxiety, and Cora wishes, hopes, begs.
All I want is three more days.
Two.
One, please, one.
“Cora,” Luis calls, and Peregrin says, “Cora, sweetheart, wake up, we’re all docked and locked in, I’ve got your air, let’s go,” and together they heft her out of the hammock, out of the boat, and she thrashes, violently, but Luis says, “It’s alright, Cora, I packed the mycelium up, just like you wrote, they’re here, look,” and it’s true: the trays are stacked and labeled neatly, and now there’s someone here, and they’re taking the mycelium, legs wide and careful to keep balance because, yes, they’re all on a bridge, which is floating on the water, swaying gently. All around her are lights, and boats, rising and shining in the night.
She made it.
This is it.
I got it, everything I wanted.
I can—finally I can—
But peace, a comforting blanket of triumph and private fulfillment she always imagined, doesn’t come. Instead her lungs are burning, and her body is heaving. People are around her, lifting her up, and she hears Luis’s voice, “Please, Cora, please, hang in there,” and somehow her feet move beneath her, bringing her forward, forward, with some wild animal hope, as if there might really be someplace left still for her to go, and that place turns out to be a boat heady with the smell of sanitizer. Cora gasps hideously as she is released into a cot; Luis grips her hand as someone approaches, a nurse, maybe, with a stethoscope, and Cora inhales, and inhales, and inhales, ineffectually, and knows, suddenly, that this is really, actually it. Her final moments will be spent like this, in pain, in furious misery and marrow longing and nothing at all of being glad that she did something useful with her life. Somewhere in the burning of her body, her mind is even hotter, incendiary.
I want—all I want—is—
Not just one more day.
She wants days, months, years, more, everything: her whole life, all the years she should have had left, stolen from her because she was cheaper than the unspeakable complexities of a corporation cleaning up after itself. Their extravagance stole her hometown, her body, and her future, and left her not even this last minute on earth that she could spend in anything other than excruciation.
The nurse grips Cora’s shoulders.
“You’re having a panic attack,” they say. Their voice is firm: “Close your eyes. Listen. Breathe with me, using your diaphragm, right here,” and Cora almost tries to use her precious little wisp of air to shout, You don’t know what you’re talking about, but she sees it now, finally, in the blur of her tears, the nurse’s nasal cannula, and her tank, too, and Cora mashes her palms against her eyes, aligns her breathing to the nurse’s slow count: inoutinoutin . . . out . . . in . . . out.
“See?” the nurse says, smiling warmly, and Cora—inhales. Deeply—fully. She trembles, not from exhaustion now, or cold, but startled awe. As the world starts to re-align around her, she spots Luis, and gapes.
“Look,” she gasps, purely from disbelief, and Luis says, “No. You look.”
“At what?” Cora asks. She looks at the nurse, at the faces of the others in the room, coming into focus again, all staring, at her. Peregrin is covering her mouth. Cora looks down, and notices it, finally, under her collar. Trembling, she rips off her shawl, her sweater, her shirt.
Her skin is glowing. Threading through her palm, her forearm, and up across her entire chest is a lacework of vivid, fervent violet.
Water: what is it good for? Absolutely everything.
(I’m sorry. But also not. I hope that’s stuck in your head now.)
In privileged areas worldwide, access to clean water is never far away. Water is so ubiquitous—and, depending where you live, so seemingly renewable—that, if you are in this population, it’s easy to forget how easily disrupted these systems are, how quickly that convenient tap can go from potable to unsafe, how your recreational or work sites can be shut down or disrupted practically overnight.
I’m excited for all of you to read four perspectives that are as diverse as the challenges facing our water systems today. Each piece brings an environmental issue into stark personal focus. Whether it’s government or paramilitary action, the exploitation of resources far past what can be sustained, or the ever-lurking shadow of global warming, ecosystems are being transformed at unprecedented rates—and the people who inhabit these ecosystems alongside them.
But these are not stories of hopelessness. Part of focusing on the personal—my favorite part—is that it highlights points where individual action does make a difference. It’s easy to look at the challenges today and walk away thinking there is nothing to be done, but that elides the important work that people are doing every single day to protect and restore their communities.
Building resilience matters. If we want to restore natural continuity, we must start by ensuring our spaces—the full ecosystems, including the human elements—are healthy.
We are so used to statistics that many of us rarely bother about the numbers and what they really mean until alarms trigger us to act. We rarely drink the right amounts of water even when we dread heat injuries, cerebral edema, urinary and kidney problems, seizures, and hypovolemic shocks. The poems in this issue are like a sensor for diagnosing water levels and the impact not only on our personal body but also on our real body—the Earth.
Human activities are increasingly unsettling water bodies everywhere—the Colorado River recedes revealing remains of the Vegas mob families—the Danube empties unveiling carcasses of World War II German warships—the Tiber falls low, showing the stone supports for Nero’s Bridge—the Po dries up leaving behind World War II tanks—the Elbe ebbs exhibiting an ancient hunger stone with the inscription: “if you see me, then weep.” And we have seen it and we cannot hide the tears falling as broken pieces of the graveyards, dinosaur footprints, settlements, gardens, and the other artifacts vomited by the waters turning toward other places. Because the amount of water in, on, and above the Earth is constant, changes in climate also mean that other rivers are experiencing more rainfall and flood, like the Amazon, the Nile, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Murray.
These poems portray the precarious state of our waterways—from chemical to oil spills, from radioactive to nuclear waste, from invasive to endangered species—and it is not getting any better. Yet we cannot despair. Let us listen to these songs and reconsider our connectedness with the oceans, aquifers and springs, rivers and streams, wetlands, bays, and estuaries that are a part of us. Our body is fragile, our planet is fragile, and both of them are about two-thirds water. These poets, like physicians, have diagnosed our ailments and are calling us to reconsider our activities and care for our body, earth.
