part i : a magic trick
the house is not securely tied to the ground, though the boy tells himself there is a welded and bolted steel pin that pierces the rock and the wood as the earth shifts itself, so that the wobbling of the floors carries less threat than his home being knocked off its little perches. he can very easily imagine some giant plucking the columns up off their footings, but has a harder time imagining steel returning to rust, concrete cracking and decalcifying. of course, that story of security is a trick predicated on the ground being synonymous with stillness. the boy has not yet been invited to listen to the mountain making a hum.
they work and live 200 and some feet above the rock’s cradle. between its peaks, suspended on a thin line of asphalt, fossils contorted into violent forms; the bitumen and the gravel and the sands that concealed a vast volume of streams and soil indiscriminately compacted with razed houses and garbage and polychlorinated biphenyls. before the days of Hudson and Morris and Rutherfurd and the 20-year old Randel, before the gunpowder and the pickaxes and the winches and pulleys and horses and men persuaded or forced, before the imaginary straight lines intersecting at arbitrary angles, before the separating circle of the horizon was imagined, Muhheakantuk was called the river that flows both ways, waters that are never still. the flow of the river changes direction with tides; when the current of fresh water is pushed by the salty sea that was soon to be full of terrible beauty.
in the valley where the streams were, the floods came. they came from the west, where the base flood elevation of the river kept rising; they came from above, in the form of rain, and they came from below, where someone made a hole in the 3-foot thick monolithic mat slab foundation and released the upward pressure of the groundwater. after days and days of heavy rain, the water began to push up against the glass, the paint flakes whirled with shattered rearview mirrors and sunglass lenses, vapes, and bottles, and ipad cases and credit cards. somebody, maybe the property owners, came and removed panels of glass. there were rumours that they were being sold off, or hoarded; in any case, the encased, empty building shed its dry skin and its polished concrete floors were slick with flood.
they were so preoccupied with the water’s return that practically no one was expecting the earthquake, or at least not before the end of their working age. they too had been told the story of security by the solid lines of asphalt and concrete and steel, and so were afraid of the fissures in the pavements that cracked into the air just as the line of the fault widened itself, the fractured surface of bedrock crumbling further. the waters seeped through the gaps and over the years they noticed that there were grasses growing where the ground was torn. the sulphate abundant in the minerals of the soil and brackish water made the cement react by lowering its pH, and all kinds of microbes were freed to grow.
part iii : the landfill ontology
it occurred to some of them who were passing through that they could make more fissures, at least to collect some of the water they waded through on rainy days and high tide, some so they could take off the plastic boots that made their feet sweat, others so they could bring their friends and grandparents by foot, and listen to the sparrows sing or look for the red-winged blackbirds in the grasses. bit by bit they chipped away pieces of concrete, listening for the thin sounds of small removals, making the bottom surface slope gently down, down the stairs and ramps, down the slope of the earth that even the commissioners’ labour force could not flatten. they learned that wider pools slowed the flow of the water, and heavy particles would here settle on the bottom, and that the larger things that kept floating would collect at the small mouths of their system’s tributaries. slowly they began to clean the water of the garbage it had inherited them; and in so doing the skin of their hands remembered its cool embrace. they could plunge themselves in it, or rinse their feet and the backs of their necks, but they could not drink it. even when the work made them thirsty, it did not pay and they could not always afford to buy the bottled water.
part iv : what keeps our hands in the water
when the power of capital moved through the bodies of everyday people, our labour was channelled towards the maintenance of its tricks. the cracks in the ground were mapped and catalogued and filled with bitumen or silicone in the name of security. the earth was not allowed to move. we were only able to meet for transaction. in their eyes we got nothing out of cleaning the river of our own debris, we only started to remember how our bodies are made of water.
this project is indebted to the teachings of mario gooden and raven chacon (diné)