Leave the beavers

on dams and devotion

Lately I’ve been so cynical and pissed off at people and the world. There’s an incredible beaver dam by our rental house that my child and I walk to almost everyday to look at and see what changes. The beavers, as they so graciously do, have created a beautiful wetland there where we’ve watched geese and their goslings, seen orioles and indigo buntings and redwing blackbirds go about their avian ways, where cattails grow alongside calamus, wild irises, chokecherries, and willow. A wondrous community of plants and animals getting lusher, more verdant everyday and all held together by the presence of a very fat oft-detested rodent. Since moving there in December the highway crew has come and ripped the dam down twice now, but within a few weeks each time these amazing animal engineers have rebuilt and the wetland returned and now every time I walk past I think to myself “yea, fuck the man.” Beavers are anti-capitalist af and I like it.

One of the neighbours on our road (at the farm where we normally live) has decided to build a new art studio for themselves up in the woods. We thought it would be a little cabin with a walking trail through the reforested apple orchard that folds over from our side of the hill to theirs, but we’ve recently come to discover it’s actually going to be a mansion with a pool and they’ve been clear cutting for days, tearing down the trees and running them one after the other through a chipper, not even bothering to set them aside for wood to build or fuel for heat. Walking through the woods this morning, along my beloved creek, I could feel the grinding and grinding inside me, in my heart. Paradise is right here and everyone’s too busy mowing it down to pave a parking lot (or mansion with a pool).

I didn’t grow up in the country, the woods, the garden. I’m a transplant to the natural world and I won’t lie and say I did it seamlessly. I’ve made my fair share of earthly mistakes and at the humble age of 31 I’ve already got a lifetime’s worth of eco-destruction to repent for. But every day I try. I bow down before the basswood, crawl on hands and knees to kiss the mayapple flowers, watch the buds swell slowly into curls of leaves, then return and return trying to learn their every move and every shade of green. If I could be a beaver, or better yet, if I could chain myself to every beaver dam and let the wetlands wash out people from the world, honestly, I would. That’s how I’ve been feeling lately.

It feels like there’s such a collective desire to get to the end point without the work, without the knowledge, without the journey. It feels like everyone, even the so-called radicals, suddenly all walk around with $$ in their eyes. We want the garden without gardening, we want the house, the farm, the herbal business without the years of devotion that it takes to get there. We want to seek just to find, not to love and to learn through discovery. And then we want the thing we find to be a product of our own skill and prowess, not a gift of happenstance from the generosity of the earth. That’s how we know that capitalism has leached into every pore of our being—when we look at the land and every critter that calls it home and see only how it could serve us. People think that’s the definition of humanity, but I want desperately to believe that it’s not.

I say all this also as a human who doesn’t know best, but a human struggling daily to fight off all these pressures myself—the pressures to produce, to perform, to perfect; to make more money, hustle faster, have more stuff to show for what I do. Everyday I find myself questioning my worth against a toxic onslaught of photos and advertisements and people (including me) telling me that because I don’t do or have this, look like this, make this much, I most certainly am not. Worthy, that is. But I want to measure the worth of myself and my day and my business by something different, by how many times I stopped to hear the wood thrush sing in the canopy above me, how many dips I took in creek—the lifeblood of this land where we are so privileged to live—how many people I teach to identify a tree, how many beaver dams I save by writing a newsletter (did you know the wetlands beavers create sequester carbon?), how many shades of green I get to witness before I die.

So, in brief summation, let’s just leave the fucking beavers alone. I, for one, am beyond willing to take the long way home.