Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against

THE WATERS ^{KEVIN HEARNE}

SOMETHING ABOUT RUNNING water relaxes me. When I walk alongside a clear mountain stream in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, I can forget for a while that the world has a pillow over its face made of gases and that it’s smothering to death. It’s because the waters never speak of the problems that cause my lips to press into a thin line of worry and my stomach to churn with acid. Instead they ripple and flow over rocks, chuckling as they go, for they’re headed downhill and it’s easy, and everything they see is brimful of beauty and health, fulsome and fine. I need to forget my problems like that sometimes, lest I turn into an Edvard Munch painting, eternally screaming my horror in front of a burning sky. And while I forget, I also remember that long ago, the whole world used to be like the waters, pure and clean and sure of its purpose.

We are far gone from that time now. We can never go home again, as Thomas Wolfe observed. But we can still find thin slices of the primeval tucked away from roads and air traffic corridors and cell phone towers, and taste for a soft sweet while the peace we seek and never find in cities. And if you’re a Druid, you can walk among the animals of the world, bind their minds to yours, and feel what it’s like to live in blissful ignorance of politics, to drink up the sun or huddle underneath the moon and think of nothing but where to eat next. You can also, if you wish, bind your mind more deeply to a creature and teach them language over time. I have done that with my Irish wolfhound, Orlaith, and she loves roaming through forests with me, sharing what she smells, and asking me to name what it might be, since she’s still learning.

“You might be thinking of voles or shrews.”

I grin at her moral compass. “What’s worse, Orlaith? Squirrels or cats?”

We do have a grand time when I bind myself to the form of a black jaguar and we run through the forest together.

“But you can’t ever get along with a squirrel?”

A squirrel chatters at Orlaith and scurries up a tree as my hound takes off after it, barking like she has serious bad blood with this strange rodent. Even though my hound can stretch to more than six feet tall when she reaches up with her front paws, as she does here, the squirrel quickly outpaces her vertically and reaches safety in a branch above my hound’s head. It perches there, looking down, tail twitching, and scolds Orlaith furiously. I let them go at it until Orlaith feels satisfied.

“Okay, now that you’ve told that squirrel off and they know they’re wrong, do you think they’ll change their attitude?”

“Do squirrels ever change their minds?”

“Okay, I can understand that. There are people like that too. Squirrelly, you know, about other people. Internet trolls.”

“That’s true. I did make one hide though. You’d be proud. Maybe.”

“What did you do?”

“This one troll became so famous for being rude on Twitter to women and people of color that he made it into the news. An article I read included some of his tweets, and they were vile, even threatening. Since nothing was being done, I found out which city he lived in and traveled there to talk with the birds.”

“All of them. I very patiently showed them his picture and said that they should poop on him whenever they saw him. He doesn’t go outside much anymore. He can give people shit, but he can’t take it, I guess.”

THE STREAM WE’RE following is spring runoff high above Silverton, and it’s so winsome that we follow it downhill to enjoy it a while longer. It feeds into the Animas River, and soon enough the language of the waters graduates from chuckling and gurgling to a sibilant roar. But the swirls and skirls of it also become sullied by the legacy of mine tailings in the area and a horrible blunder in 2015 that spilled heavy metals into the river from the old Gold King mine. Arsenic, cadmium, and lead, plus copper and aluminum, turned the river orange. It’s somewhat better now, but the damage persists, the fish and wildlife poisoned, tourism way down. The miners who exploited the earth long ago for their short-term gain are now dust that could float dispersed among the incalculable damage they did, and that thought crumples the peaceful smile I’d been wearing quicker than failed origami. Because I am hyperaware that we who live today are doing irreparable harm to the world, wiping out species and ruining entire ecologies.

It makes me unbearably sad, and I sit down on the bank, staring at the polluted gunk floating by—much of it unseen, but I can feel it through my connection with the San Juan elemental—and weep for a timeline full of bad decisions.

Orlaith first sits beside me, then lies down and rests her head on my lap for easy petting. It comforts both of us.

she says.

“I’m sorry. I just lost it.”

“Maybe a little of all three.”

“It certainly would be for anyone who came along and wanted to start something with me right now.”

I flailed an arm at the river. “Witnessing this disaster and knowing it’s only one of too many to count. Feeling Gaia in distress. The bugs are dying off, have you noticed? The Great Barrier Reef is toast. There’s a huge floating island of plastic garbage in the ocean. Just so much to clean up and everyone thinking that the job is somebody else’s problem, never regretting their choices or changing their behavior. Like my stepfather and his oil company.”

“Yes. But it’s overwhelming when I think of it. There’s so much to do I wonder how I can do anything meaningful in the end.”