One year ago, here in Portland, we experienced days of rain that reportedly broke all records for rainfall since 1939. One evening at the end of April, my wife and I came home to find an inch of water covering our entire basement floor. It was a finished basement space- bamboo floors, rugs, furniture- all ruined. We had to bring in one of those emergency restoration companies to remove and store all our belongings, take out flooring, dry it out, do mold mitigation, and figure out what happened, why, and how to remake the space.
At first we thought it was water coming through the walls, runoff from the hill above us. We were told that it was, in fact, from a rise in the water table under our house, coming up through the foundation. Thus began our education on the vast hydrological system of underground springs that flow silently beneath us.
Many Portland streams that once flowed freely are now buried under development. Seventeen percent of the streams are now in pipes or culverts. Development has complicated the stream flow. Flooding and drought, pollution and aquatic health-all affected. Climate chaos, of course is woven in with the story of the water, and it informs planning for a city often cited as a top destination for climate refugees.
Of course, most of us living in the city aren’t even conscious of the fact that we are living on a whole landscape of soil and rock, rivers and streams. So much has been hidden, covered over, plotted. Diverted, subverted, literally and psychically. Water flowing through the impediments of human progress. Water becoming a point of conflict, of privilege, of wealth. Still, water finds its way to the sea.
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As for many people, the first two years of pandemic were difficult for me. I got sick in early March of 2020, actively ill for two months, and, while I didn’t need hospitalization, I was down for the count for months. Summer arrived, and just as I was starting to feel slightly more like myself, my mother died unexpectedly of a heart attack. After that there were fires, smoke emergencies, isolation from family and friends. I lost muscle strength, had trouble walking, wondered if I might have MS. No one was talking about the muscle and nerve symptoms of long Covid, no one knew. I chalked it up to grief, to deconditioning. I felt blunted mentally and emotionally.
Whatever urge I had for writing, mostly poetry recently, had fallen away. I decided to pursue some kind of structure, a class or something, to help me reclaim my capacity to dream into language. I applied for, and was accepted to an online poetry course with a local writing institute.
The students were lovely, supportive and encouraging. Most were experienced, some had published. The instructor was knowledgeable if annoying at times. He put me off with some of his comments, but he encouraged me to explore new ways of playing with words, with meaning. Lost in a fog, I tried to stay, to play.
Several times the teacher would lament the tendency of poets who start a poem with “the weather report”- an easy and uninteresting opening to a poem that creates an inert and unnecessary block to the story that wants to be told, to the revelations, small or large, that are inherent to good poetry. I was guilty of course, trying to lay a foundation of a sense of place. Instead, I was blocking the deep river of mystery, meant to flow through my words. I worried that all I had in me was a weather report.
I took it all so fucking seriously. And then I stopped. Writing, and worrying. I stopped it all.
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When I was in my late teens I took up with an older man who courted me, challenged me, impregnated me, abused me, terrorized me, and, after I left, stalked me until I moved to where he wouldn’t follow.
Decades later, the river of memory in the body, the pools of trauma, born of that time, still flow in me. It reveals itself at unexpected times- a deep stretch in a yoga class; a conversation with a new friend coping with loss; a ruddy, angry face spotted from a distance. The fluids in my body rise in response- vapor exhaled or released from skin, tear ducts moisten without knowing why. I finally graduated from shame to humility, from humility to compassion. But I still remember, my body still remembers. Grief and love, twinned forces, can break our compasses, shift our understanding of the landscape we inhabit. Both hold us, sometimes buoyant and freeing, sometimes in the undertow, that thing that sweeps us out to sea to places vast, deep, and uncharted.
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Lastly, a poem I managed to write in late 2020.
Salmon River Estuary, September 2020 photo: Barbara Ford
Season of Ash
the blood orange sky
that first day of the season of ash
made a terrible beauty
even though to the east
humans, elk, porcupine, wren,
fled the wind driven blaze
or stood, as the great trees,
sitka spruce, cedar, alder,
roots holding to the soil tightly in the flames
claimed their belonging even as
the undergrowth blackened below
that first day of the fire
I gazed, rapt in the ruddy monochrome of
sky and river and grasses of the estuary
my body stilled by the silence
of the disappearing sun
there was a different encounter
with ashes planned for that week
my artist mother, who would have joyfully painted
that amber sky, had recently died
her remains to be dispersed in the tidal flow
in a slow return to the sea
I’d gone to the river to wash my daughter-grief
the flow of that sadness rose
and fell with the water
sometimes still as the heron fishing on the bank
sometimes jittery and harsh as the kingfisher’s call
as it traces the surface of the quiet water
the small fish hiding from its shadow
there was no scattering of ashes, though.
we had to flee for our lungs, if not our lives.
the following days, locked inside
waiting for a clearing of
both the noxious skies
and my own rising tide of anxiety
I grew a new respect for the animal body
its insistence on belonging, like the trees,
to the larger body we inhabit
even if it’s burning
returning after the rains bathed the sky
I pondered the alchemy of ash and water
the way they may mix and flow forever
or instead settle and become
a soft bed of sediment
one, a surrender to fluidity and change
the other, a holding of memory
and a kind of soft landing
for whatever falls after
This is such a gorgeous braided memoir, Barbara. You’ve captured so much emotion and beauty and fear and and and.... This needs to be published! Do you know the online magazine, Persimmon Tree? I was just introduced to it - it’s for women artists over 60 - prose, poetry, visual. Just sayin’. 💗
Stunning writing and profound imagery, Barbara, which will linger with me. Thank you.