Talk to the Chair

Ann (U.S.A.)

[Reflection]

For the performance exercise (“Talk to the chair”), I talked to a large tree near the brook, currently wrapped in clear plastic to display a temporary warning sign ‘avoid contact with water as it may cause illness due to potential for sewage in surface waters’. I asked the tree who put the plastic and sign around it. Since this mess has been going on for over a hundred years, why now? Talking out loud helped me express sadness that this little brook’s issues seem intractable, and the recently added warning sign doesn’t represent the worst case in our human-polluted world by any means. I thanked the tree for doing the best job it could to process the questionable water, acknowledging that it has probably been living under these conditions for its entire life. So it seems ridiculous that it now had to have yards of plastic wrapped around its bark. Those renovating million-dollar condos and building billion-dollar biotech labs nearby don’t care about this little brook lost between towns and jurisdictions. We humans are greedy and want it all today without future consequences. The engineers at the last community meeting seemed to insinuate that the issues with the sewer system and flooding and the will to make a dent were beyond the scope of their action plans. Discussions centered on what is a typical year’s rainfall for the flow models. But these brook and flood plain infractions are nothing compared to the current inundation of flood waters in Mumbai or Sydney. Hyperlocal causes seem hard to focus on when there are many related global issues.

In the end, I wondered, since my sons grew up along the banks of the stinking Alewife Brook does this make them riparious? (def: growing along the banks of rivers) But I think they spent considerably more time on their electronic devices than I did–having grown up playing at the edges of one block of exposed ‘creek’. I feel sad that I let them go in a canoe on the grade ‘D’ polluted brook with a friend’s father. I think I am weaving parenting, worries of shifting conditions, and seeming lack of control in floods and future ‘living with water’ into one muddy mess.