Mud Prints
Photo by Author: Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge
Surrendering is a small death.
— Kabir Helminksi
Before I meet Polly in person, even before I set foot on Louisiana earth, she’s treating me like an old friend, calling me every day to check in about one thing or another. I’m in my kitchen when she tells me we’ll go to the refuge, we’ll take the boat. We talk again when I arrive in New Orleans; she wants to welcome me to her home state. The night before I’m supposed to meet her, she calls to say, “Be careful of the fog. Sometimes it’s so thick you can’t see the car in front of you.” Each time we talk, her words pour out quickly, one stacking after the other, making a trail so I don’t get lost. She tells me she likes to take care of her guests, and I keep fidgeting with whatever I can find around me: keys, utensils, paper, as if I can find something useful to do for her in return. I quickly realize this logic of transaction doesn’t hold together in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. People there have become used to giving pieces of themselves to the sea.
I leave New Orleans for the refuge early, hoping I don’t get caught in the fog Polly warns me about, the sort of fog that will turn everything to mist. Instead, I’m greeted by sunrise and my first gator sighting. The drive moves from thick swamp -- trees stretching above the water line like God dipped a finger in the mud and smeared upwards -- to sugar cane fields, to marsh. Houses get smaller and taller as I go, propped on progressively higher stilts that raise their foundation above the flood line. Then, finally, on a two lane road, way out at the edge where categories like land and water stop making sense, the refuge.
—
I started driving across the country, talking to people who’d lived through fire, flood, drought, and poison, because I wanted to understand how disaster shapes us. After the California sky I thought I knew turned red, smoke wrapping the air like skin, light bleeding through, I felt strange in my home, and strange in my body. For just one moment, I felt like I was dying. The Northern California hills, burnt and oozing and mortal, captured my attention. I yearned to get closer; I felt held at bay by my culpability. I blinked awake when I saw the blisters on California’s skin.
So I started driving to other places where I saw open wounds. I felt unclaimed by any one place, though I was the one who kept leaving. Trapped between rootedness and transience, I wanted to understand what was happening to me. I wanted to escape, to know whether California was worthy of my time after so many years of pushing her away, to erase the part of me that could write that sentence. I wanted to feel more and more and more of the heartbreak, to be absolved of charred guilt by the people living through worse than “my county burned, but not my house,” the people doing far more about it than I was. I wanted an excuse to scream.
But there, see, I can’t seem to write myself as anything other than a sinner, suspended between submission and choice. How relieving it is, to resign myself to a lifetime of repenting. To read everyone here as an unreachable model of salvation, their words as rebuke or redemption.
—
Polly calls again when I get to the refuge, directing my rented Dodge Charger over the small spit of land surrounded by water to the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge office building. She greets me with a gift bag of goodies, a to-go cup and socks I still wear weekly. She’s joined by two friends, Clair and Scooter, who shake my hand, and don’t waste any time before beginning the story of the refuge. 100 years ago, when the land was donated by the Rockefeller Foundation to the state for protection, it was 86,000 acres. “Now,” Scooter says, “we’re probably dealing with below 70,000.” Polly unfurls a map of the coast of Louisiana, part of my welcome bag, that marks in red the land considered lost, or soon to be lost, to sea level rise. There’s a red band about one inch thick running across the bottom edge of the entire state. Polly puts her hand over what she calls the “bird’s foot,” a portion of land marked by several rivers on the southeast coast of Louisiana. “We're no longer recognizing that we have a bird's foot Delta anymore,” she says.
As we walk from the refuge office building to the boat, Clair tells me about the 416 people who died in Hurricane Audrey in 1957. The hurricane hit Cameron Parish in southwestern Louisiana with incredible force, the death toll was unprecedented. 48 years later, Katrina killed 1836 more. Then, 16 years to the day, Ida hit, killing another 33. And still, they tell me, people came back, took the boards off their homes. “They had no choice.” Scooter says, “Because those people were connected to this land.” Some part of me twists. I don’t know what he means. Not really. I don’t know what it means to be tied to the place that might kill you.
There’s no space between these three and the refuge. Scooter and Clair grew up in Cameron Parish, and have been walking this land for as long as they can remember. Polly’s father cared for this place; now she does too. Choice, like land, like water, is muddied here.
We get into the boat and begin our slide through the canals. Clair and Scooter have known each other since high school. With Polly, they take turns explaining what we’re seeing like they’ve taken turns bringing one another dinner in difficult times. Eyes on the water, they point out landmarks: where the water was, where it is now, creeping higher, higher. Scooter has spent hours watching Google Earth, searching for the places where the land builds back along the edge of the water, sediment caught by rocks and eddies, accumulating over time to extend the width of the shore, to figure out how he can help his beloved coastline build back some of her own land. The strategy is a series of rock jetties in the places where the gulf meets the canals to try to mitigate some of the wave energy, and the impact of the salt water. He struggles to get funding from national organizations because the rocks he’s using aren’t “natural for this environment;” oil and gas are the primary funders for the work they do at the refuge. No one thinks these rock jetties will fully solve the problem, but, as Scooter says, “Twenty years ago, they said that we wouldn’t be here, and here we are. They say 20 years from now we won’t be here, but I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.” So Scooter adds more rock and Polly plants mangroves along the shoreline. I want to call this act of laying down stone, of planting trees, futile. But how could it be futile to touch the face of the land that you love? None of my language works here.
Clair is gruff at first, understandably. She says people always come and do exposés on how the refuge stewards are partnering with oil and gas, as if revealing these unlikely (the implication being immoral) bedfellows will absolve the reporters of their own culpability in an economy that runs on oil. But oil and gas, whether for optics or for integrity, are desperate to be involved in wetland restoration. They are a primary funding source, and Clair, Scooter, and Polly care more about protecting their land than they do about some illusion of purity. No one’s hands are clean. They don’t let that stop them from plunging their fingers deeper into the wetland mud.
Now, as the sea expands and saltwater seeps into the water table, farmers can’t grow rice. They can’t farm crawfish. Clair explains how the recent hurricanes unburied the dead from their soft, waterlogged graves. Shrimp and crawfish and family members washed up into yards, trees, roads. The presence of these dead is apparent in this place where water and earth blur. They do not just haunt. This wetland is sinking with their weight.
—
Mrs. Geraldine Watkins has lived in St. John the Baptist Parish, in the heart of Cancer Alley, for decades. A week after the refuge, I drive to her house just after midday, and I stay until it’s nearly evening. Mrs. Watkins treats time like something to be shared. I’m greeted by her nurse, who is wrapping her feet, and Mrs. Watkins gives me a big hug from her chair. I root around her kitchen to find a vessel for the flowers I brought her. She tells me of her arrival to LaPlace, of how different she felt as a girl from the North now in the deep south. She tells me of her husband, “daddy” she calls him, her face melting into his memory, she tells me about how they used to live, taking care of each other, walking on dusty roads, she tells me about the people who have become her family though she didn’t grow up here, she tells me when she started to notice the slow killings of those around her. To live in St John Parish, which is to say, to breathe in St. John Parish, is to risk your life.
Over the course of decades, the people who call this place home have breathed in more and more chemicals from the nearby Denka (formerly DuPont) plant, dark plumes of smoke blocking out the sky. Mrs. Watkins tells me of how her blackness and her poverty has made her, and her family, and her community, according to Denka, expendable in exchange for the chloroprene the factories produce. Chloroprene that is used in rubber, rubber in our gloves and tubes and weapons. We no longer know how to live without it. To make it, the price is Mrs. Watkins’ baby niece’s life. “Slavery is not gone,” she says, “racism is still here.” She continues, “we still manage to take what we have, and make the best of it, you know, we improve on it.” She looks at her own skin, she says, “We’re sun children.”
There is a term for this sort of place where the risk of cancer is so high given proximity to chemical off gassing that it surpasses “acceptable risk”: sacrifice zone. Mrs. Watkins calls this slow, unequivocal killing of black people genocide, a word that comes from indo-european roots meaning “birth” and “to strike.” St. John Parish has asthma rates more than double the national average. Being born in St. John makes you more likely to get cancer than if you were born anywhere else in the country. Everyone coughs all the time. Few can breathe freely, and those who can breathe contaminated air. Babies are born deformed. The ground is poisonous. Mrs. Watkins’ sister, she told me, died of a broken heart after birthing two stillborn infants. Birth strike.
And still, Mrs. Watkins lives, her heart broken, beating, loving, refusing to be relegated to sacrifice. She has surrendered to something else. She gets to work. She calls people constantly, organizing her community to advocate against Denka’s practices. She’s not even asking them to shut down, she just wants them to pause production until they can get their methods in order to stop leeching poison into the air. Mrs. Watkins says to her people, and to the soil, and to me, “I’m not going to leave here because this is my home.” She turns back to her children. She carries the dead in her heart. She thanks God every morning. She says, “I’m just happy to be alive, baby.” She plans on getting a red garter belt for herself for Christmas. Before I go, she tells me, “Stand your ground, and excuse my language, but don’t take no shit.”
The dead are dead because we are not immortal. Some dead are dead to protect the illusion that we could be. Ida ripped the dead from their graves. Ida drowned Mrs. Watkins' material reminders of those she’d lost. If only it were as simple as outsourcing responsibility to a hurricane named like a grandmother. In the force of water, the dead could not stay buried. In the face of toxic dust, the living could not stay living. They went on the move. To witness the unburied dead, explains Clair, is a gruesome, brutal sort of loving. To witness the slow dying, explains Mrs. Watkins, is a gruesome, brutal sort of loving.
When the waters come, the dead resurface, bloated and floating up in the branches. We reencounter stories we’d long since prayed to rest. This is how the dead exert their will on the living: they ask us to love them back into soil that will hold them. They ask us to edit their ending. Not done yet, they say. Let us help you. If we are to rebury our dead, the land must be able to receive them, but it cannot. The land is still poisoned. It is still sinking. We rebury them anyway.
I say our, but they are not my dead, are they? Aren’t they?
—
My life has been marked by adjacency. Which is to say, even now, I have clung to the possibility of choice, rather than submission. I pretend I have refused devotion, the kind that brings us to our knees in the mud, planting mangroves that we know may die. Something in me prevents me from saying I am yours -- to California, to her ashes, to myself. Scooter hands me a baby alligator that he is nurturing to maturity to increase the likelihood of its survival in the wild. I feel its small belly, soft in my hands. Even now, I can feel it. Submission always leaves a mark. I can’t bear to impose.
If you were to ask me who I belong to, I would only be able to tell you partial answers. A few people, a tiny piece of land I haven’t lived near for years, land I no longer know the shades of. Who, where, has told me, you are one of ours? And to whom have I said, take me, all of me? I leave the land to its own eroding. I soothe its descent. As it goes I whisper “are you sure?” And “I don’t want you to be alone.”
Six years ago, at my college commencement, Ellen Kullman, then CEO of DuPont spoke to our graduating class. During her speech some of us stood and faced the audience, holding signs that we’d snuck in under our gowns that said “This is not the future we want to march across the stage for,” and “Racist chemical spills endanger communities” and, in a feat of formatting magic, “DuPont has dumped carcinogenic chemicals into people’s water supplies repeatedly, and even though they’ve been sued for it multiple times, they continue to do so.” There was, we knew, a futility to this act. We would not change her mind. And still, I wanted her to know that we knew about the bodies. That we knew our relationship to the dead and to the still living in Cancer Alley, even if all we knew how to do was this standing wake. It was then, as recounting it is now, a kind of virtuous gesture, and an honest attempt. I want to show to myself that this path towards arriving in Mrs. Watkins' kitchen was long in motion before I was ever aware of it, before I had anything to do with it. That maybe, maybe, I too have submitted to something I only see in retrospect, when the flood waters recede.
—
Polly jumps off the boat onto a marsh that I want to call a mass grave -- gulls and pelicans and now, her mangroves. That’s not right. Her footsteps, gentle and tender, turn it into a cemetery. This is reverence. Oh, she whispers, look. None of them survived. Later, she’ll text me a picture of the eroding coastline saying “my heart hurts.”
To say that the coastline is eroding is not precise enough. Too passive. The earth is aching as she changes shape, the coastline is slowly submitting to the sea. And there are people, tears in their eyes, trying to hold her soil together. Polly and Clair and Scooter have submitted to the force of the marshes, to the desperate work to keep it alive and above water, to the part of them that will die if this land drowns.
To say that the people of LaPlace are being poisoned is not precise enough. Too disembodied. They are living on land, they are dying as they fight to change the ending we have relegated them to. Mrs. Watkins doesn’t speak as if she has a choice. She is bound to her home, to the ones she has lost, to the ones she tries to keep alive. She surrenders to leaving her mark on the parish, on her people. Meanwhile, we say there’s nothing we can do. Denka says Our hands are tied, as the body count rises. We forget that this rope tying our hands is an illusion of our own creation. We forget the feel of silt on skin. In the face of chronic poisoning, the people of LaPlace ask something of each other. They ask something of Denka. To be alive is to impose. To be alive is to ache with.
Polly clutches raw earth in her hands. Mrs. Watkins grabs my hand, tears, flood-like, in our eyes. I’ve deluded myself, thinking my refusal would leave you markless, thinking that love could be some pristine, clean thing. Our love leaves smears of mud. I cover you in the blessing of my sin. We are always tugging at one another's skin. There is no other way. Nothing will not die, and living is surrender. Each footstep, each touch, each mangrove tree planted, each foot wrapped are all part of this one, long, fall. Our return to the mud. As soon as we open our eyes we try to forget, we try to wash our hands of this muddy blessing that reminds us, we are alive, we are alive, we are alive. To think otherwise is to deny my own feet.
The gulf coast to my left flashes on the car window. I eat gummy bears as I drive. A thousand miles away two babies die. They appear on my phone screen, unburied dead. Try again, they say. Love us harder. Do not bury us until the land can hold us. Tomorrow, perhaps, another baby will be born with a birth defect in St. John the Baptist parish. Mrs. Watkins will take her insulin. She will have her feet wrapped. She will laugh with her grief. She will be taken, again, by God, by the day. She will say again, “I’m just happy to be alive, baby.”
I buy my plane ticket to California. I prepare to pack my things. I imagine what our house will look like, my partner and I. If you ask either one of us, we’ll say we’re moving because the other longed for home.
Maya Pace is from the redwoods of Northern California. She has a background in facilitation, chaplaincy, and conflict resolution. She orients her work around the question: how do we live well together?