the land is a being who remembers everything

Issue #30

The storm is over, and the land has forgotten the storm: the trees are still.

Under this sun the rain dries quickly.

Cones from the sea-pines cover the ground again.

Where yesterday for my fire I gathered all in sight;

But the leaves are meek. The smell of alyssum that grows wild here

Is in the air. It is a childish morning.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

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Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and activist, wrote lines that continue to tap me on my shoulder decades after I first memorized them. “Thinking and its pain” from her poem “Small hands, Relinquish all”, comes to mind when I am overthinking my concern for the world. “Thinking and its pain” came to mind often in 2024, specifically this past fall. Close to home, the geological event that wore the names Hurricane Helene and Tropical Storm Helene topped my list of “thinking and its pain.”

Millay names nature by her appreciation for the shore, the texture of wet leaves, and the scent of alyssum, the fragrant, tiny, flowering plant native to Europe. Lyrically, in her poem Cap D’ Antibes, above, Millay also writes that “the land has forgotten the storm.”

But does the land truly forget storms? Was I misremembering Millay? Or was I asking too much of her poem?

I located The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay in the months since the Storm. (How quickly I lost my sense of organization without power and water for that long.) Weirdly, the spine cracked open to Cap D’ Antibes.

Yes, there it was, as it had been in my memory. Millay declared that the land had forgotten the storm. That was poetic, as well as the prevailing wisdom more than seventy-five years ago when Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote Cap D’ Antibes. She died in 1950 when the world was changing in ways few could anticipate.

Would I want one of my poems to undergo this level of scrutiny? Yes, absolutely, if we were, as we find ourselves, on the edge of all edges. We know more science. We can core the land and water as we do to trees — to reveal their history. A friend and historian believes that we should not hold writers from the past to today’s standards. Though I disagree, I see the benevolence offered. Still, the words we choose and the thoughts we express hold supreme power these days.

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Our Storm killed more than 100 people in North Carolina, damage has been estimated at $53 billion and as Eduardo Medina of the New York Times pointed out, “plunged thousands of residents into economic crisis.” Medina spoke with Philip Prince, a geologist who has researched landslide hazard assessment. Prince compared the Storm to the strongest category of a tornado. “It’s like the F5 tornado of the Appalachians — the most powerful focused event.”

I fear we will give Helene another label — a hundred-year storm, a label that engineers use to define building code parameters. The ten-year, twenty-five-year, and hundred-year models relate to storms that were somewhat predictable in bygone years. While the measures can be helpful, we need to acknowledge that if the very place that attracts climate refugees is no longer a climate haven — perhaps human activity requires a mid-course adjustment. Calling Helene a 100-year storm would be similar to ignoring Harriet Newton Foote’s 1856 backyard experiment that proved that carbon dioxide heats up and holds heat longer than regular air. Had we listened to Harriet’s warning and the many since then, we might have avoided the consequences of a warming planet. We might not have witnessed Hurricane Helene turn west into the sanctuary of the mountains around Asheville.

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I attribute my late-blooming environmental awakening to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a biologist and honored professor who is an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer is the author of three books: Gathering Moss, Braiding Sweetgrass, and The Serviceberry. Her work focuses on kinship, and she teaches the reciprocal relationships between water, land, and people. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer mentored Trish O’Kane who you met in Issues # 25 and 28. She encouraged Trish to write the story of Warner Park and birds as teachers. She taught her how to organize the story threads: surviving Hurricane Katrina, her trauma, returning to school for environmental studies, saving a city park and brandishing novel teaching programs pairing college students with middle school students through a shared love of birding.

After reading Birding to Change the World, I found Trish through a network of Substack connections. A month before the Swannanoa River rose 26.1 feet, five feet higher than the flood level of 1916, Lauren Graeber (my editor, my dear friend, my fellow book geek) and I listened to Trish talk about how Hurricane Katrina changed her life path. She was angry at herself. Her house had water up to the eves, 11.5 feet of water, which took three weeks to drain. Trish realized the pollution she had caused by leaving her truck and a house full of chemicals to pollute the rising water and then the land as the water receded. How many more creatures would die due to her lifestyle, she wondered. She wanted to learn how to live on this planet without destroying it.

“I’d worked for the United Nations. I’d published two books. I had two master’s degrees. But I didn’t understand what a wetland was or what sea level really meant even though I’d moved to a neighborhood built on a filled-in swamp…I realized that before Katrina I’d never thought about water as a living entity with power and its own agenda,” Trish said.

I asked Trish if it was eery that, unbeknownst to her, the house she could afford in New Orleans was built on a wetland and then she moved to Madison, Wisconsin to study the environment and the Park across the street was on a wetland.

“It is eery, Katharine. Yes and no. This country has willfully destroyed more than 50% of our wetlands. My husband and I talked about it. When we realized that the little wetland [200 acre Warner Park] was threatened, we decided we had to do something about it. And it was because of Louisiana. We couldn’t fix New Orleans. It was a big huge horrible science fiction thing. But we said, maybe this [Warner Park] is something we can take on. We don’t have a choice. We walk by it every day. And we love the place desperately, so we have to defend it.”

You can hear more in our interview, especially the enthusiasm Trish brings to her love of Warner Park. What you will find in her book Birding to Change the World is a story of how a community banded together to save the land, the trees, the birds and all the creatures in Warner Park. The book is O’Kane’s memoir but also the Park's story. It gives me pause when I think of my pursuit of Rights of Nature for the Swannanoa River — that maybe O’Kane accomplished more with her actions and her story than I ever would in the court system?

What if we give nature a seat at the table or a place in every conversation? Have we asked what our rivers and our wetlands think lately? That’s the story Trish was after. That rivers are alive. That wetlands are beings, too. That’s the story Robin encouraged her to write. HarperCollins got it. I think you will, too.

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On September 27th, 2024, I was forever changed by Helene, the vessel of wind and water that flooded the Swannanoa River banks and altered the Blue Ridge mountains with landslides.

Our terrain was soaked from torrential rainfalls the week before September 27th. Then, sometime between 7:30 and 9:45 on the morning of the 27th, the land crumbled and a quarter mile of tree trunks, gravel, and mud slid south, landing on the bottom of High Rock Acres, the community where I live. We were landlocked. North Carolina’s Forest Department would later inform us that two more landslides were behind the one visible. Our landslide was one of over 300 in Buncombe County and almost two thousand in the Southern Appalachian mountain range.

Helicopters ferried high-risk humans off of our mountain: a neighbor due to deliver a breeched baby, the gentleman with dementia, and the renters whose vacation time was interrupted by the weird left-hand turn that the Storm took into the mountains. The pilots were hobbyists who learned we were stranded from a neighbor who was agile on TikTok. Daily, at least two copters arrived with medicine, water, baby food, dog food, flashlights and batteries. They left with a carefully calculated weight load of humans.

Most residents stayed. About fifty gathered on the mountaintop every day for afternoon meetings. We used whiteboards to list skillsets: the engineer, the vet, the naturopath, the mechanical experts, the people who could wield chainsaws, and the people who could hike out if need be. Who had bulldozers? Who had generators? Who had gas? Who had solar? Whose well was running off their generator or solar power?

Internet was rarely available in the early days. Yet for those of us working at the bottom of the hill, where our road meets the state highway, the steady stream of emergency and military vehicles and semi trucks carrying gravel rolling by conveyed the scope of the Storm.

By the third day, the National Guard arrived. Convinced we were organized as a neighborhood and had already gone house to house, they told us we saved them two days work, tied yellow ribbons on our front entrances and left.

My notebook details the sixteen days that followed without water or power. It’s a hard story and one that I have yet to process. I can tell you that everyone on our mountain survived, and every house is still standing. I can tell you we are incredibly fortunate.

Lauren Graeber has been my source of strength. The roads were broken just a few miles south where Lauren lives and she evacuated with her family but she sent me this note on her way out of the area. “Make a list of what you need. John’s coming back to check on the chickens.”

This is the land and the people whom I love. This is Western North Carolina culture. To care. And when something as huge as Helene happens, we care more. We overlook our differences. I humbly acknowledge that every hurricane experience is different, yet the goodness keeps coming here.

Two days later, Lauren sent a note with John’s first load of supplies: dog food, paper plates, toilet paper, batteries, and almonds to make milk for the lactose-intolerant toddler.

“May any of this ease what is hard among you. Even a little, we hope. Soon, we will be talking words, their power, their reach. The land holds you.”

Lauren and I feel the responsibility of surviving the Storm. We have gratitude, beyond words, for Trish O’Kane. Her story made us strong even when we didn’t know we needed to be. I’ve reread Birding to Change the World since the Storm. Trish and I exchange emails. I have called her in tears. She is an extraordinary example of how a human can create greater meaning in work and in life after a tragedy.

My plans include more work with

Matters of Kinship

. Beyond that, I continue to see clients and pursue Rights of Nature for the Swannanoa River. There will be changes. I’m taking my time.

Lauren has published a stunning writing guide called After the Flood, dedicated to “the ones who want to find the words.”

In her Introduction, she writes:

Why write about the storm?

Because writing is a practice that helps people heal.

I know this from my own life and from the many folks I have worked with as a writing teacher. When we find the words that explain what happened to us we gain the footholds we need to find a way forward.

I have called this process miracle and magic, but there are also academic fields dedicated to understanding how storytelling works within, on, and among us so maybe it’s science. Maybe it’s all of that.

What I know for sure is that writing about what was hard, what hurt, what was insanely frustrating, what wrecked us, what we lost, what we never saw coming and yet survived, the kind of writing that I’d like to help you do…it will not fix everything, but it will heal some things.

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Yesterday, the winds were high here. That was troubling; the sound of the wind echoed the Storm to my ears. I stopped by the post office. Of the many kindnesses extended to our zip code, one was to pause the billing on postal boxes for three months, but now it was time to pay. It’s a small town post office. The smell of old paper greets you when you enter. Each time I see a notice on the door, I wonder if it is closing, but yesterday, the notice said the post office would close on January 9th for a national day of mourning for our only centenarian ex-president. James Earl Carter, Jr., who died on December 29, 2024. Carter was an environmentalist. He was responsible for installing solar panels on the White House that heated water for his family’s quarters and the cafeteria. In 1979 he said, “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters.”

Ronald Reagan did not have Carter’s visionary view; he took down the solar panels.

And here we are again.

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Kinship is a powerful remedy for what is unkind. Might we speak the language that honors nature? What if we remove the violence from the conversation and walk away from the sarcasm? What if we eliminate the omnipresent ‘grab’ from our verbiage?

Might we think about taking some pressure off the land? Might we honor our wetlands and floodplains? Our rivers?

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.”

The land has not forgotten the storm. I can not forget the Storm or the land. Despite my quibble with Millay, I applaud her nature writing. You see that beauty in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing, in Lauren Graeber’s writing, in Trish O’Kane’s writing and in President Carter’s vision.

The natural world is also woven throughout Joy Harjo’s work. I owe her thanks for this issue’s title, a line from “Conflict Resolutions for Holy Beings”: The land is a being who remembers everything.

I look forward to the stories that shape equality consciousness for all beings, our kin.

Thank you for being here.

In kinship,

Katharine

Resources::

After the Flood: Writing Prompts & Exercises by Lauren Graeber, December 2024. To order your copy, send Lauren a message via Substack here.

Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane: A Memoir, HarperCollins, 2024

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, milkweed editions, 2013

The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harper & Row

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems by Joy Harjo, Norton 2015

Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands by Ann Vileisis, Island Press, 1997

The Carter/Reagan moment and the Biden/Trump moment, The Crucial Years by Bill McKibben, Substack, January 6, 2025

A Large Family Built Its Own Little Town. A Hurricane Killed 11 of Them by Eduardo Medina, New York Times, December 29, 2024