The Best American Poetry

Conversing on Kinship [by Cara Benson]

Benson converses with Kinship co-editors Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer

Fellow earthlings! If you're anything like me you need a boost of connection on a daily basis. I have just the conversation for you! I spoke with co-editors Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer about their new five books series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Humans and Nature Press). The Whiting Award winning journal Full Stop published it for your reading pleasure. 

What is our relationship to the more-than-human world? How does naming impact and reflect these relationships? Can playfulness build resiliency? These are some of the questions and topics we pondered together. I invite you join the conversation.

Full Stop published it in two parts:

Part 1
Part 2

Have a look, then check out the books! They're gorgeous and illuminating. 

Dispatch from a Distance -- Turning Toward the Sun [by Cara Benson]

It comes again. Every year. Every year I wonder, how does it happen, this miracle of growth, of green of flower of budding breeding migrating and the prolific swelling smells of earth coming alive into growing season. It’s iconic, awe at the miracle of cyclical rebirth. Ancient, even. Persephone, after all, had her own cult. I’ll admit that I’m not opposed to fancying myself a goddess traipsing through fields of hayseed ferns and the start of what will bloom into goldenrod in a few months. (Or to having a cult following, if I’m honest.) But the goddess of spring in long ago Greece was also the goddess of the underworld, that dark place humans have mythologized for millennia, and I do not think this is by coincidence.

TS Eliot famously said that April is the cruelest month. And then there’s the violent response to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, itself a symbolic disruption of tradition. Breeding season is a surprisingly dangerous time. Tender new shoots get trampled. Birds fail to fledge and get eaten. Only thirty percent of young songbirds survive. I saw a fawn, just born!, not a foot and a half high on bowed and shaky legs, wobbling its way behind the mother as she leapt out of sight into the woods. The babe not so much leapt, but bobbled. How easily this little one could get snatched. There are bear in these woods, and they wake up hungry. Other predators, too, including the most impactful of the lot – humans. Not just as hunters or destroyers of habitat, but also as drivers of two ton vehicles that smash, squash, and ravage flesh with barely a bump registering under the tires in some cases.

photo of yours truly by tc tolbert

Are you ready to riot yet? I am. And I am that trampler, that driver. As aware and watchful as I am, I’ve hit and killed probably more creatures than I know. Only yesterday a woodchuck ran out so close to my car there was no option for me to avoid it (though I’ve been accused of going up on two wheels to screech around a frog or chipmunk). There was a commotion under the car but in the rear view he/she kept on across the road behind me. Was it merely a matter of him getting banged up a bit? Did he make to the other side to die? Notions of locating and waiting for wildlife rehabilitators occurred to me, then I let this one go and drove on, crying. I think he made it. I do. Through the tears that I kept wiping so I wouldn’t create another potential casualty, I couldn’t help but notice the profusion of wild phlox and rhododendron along the road, both brightly hued flowers known for attracting hummingbirds and other pollinators. It didn’t seem enough, the magenta. But I continued on. What other option is there?

There is another choice, isn’t there, and that is to turn away. To avoid the rear view mirror. To remain in denial that everything that is born ends. What’s more, that at times I will be the one behind the wheel. And while I have intimate experience with the desire to stay shielded from at best unpleasantness, at worst tragedy, the fact remains: no one gets out of here unscathed. (I know we know this, and it bears repeating, and repeating, and...)

Everything changes – that’s the ultimate lesson of seasons, I suppose. And now even the seasons themselves are changing from what they’ve been for millennia, which is altering everything else on the planet. Life as we know it exists within such a razor thin margin in atmospheric conditions. The slightest of shifts could sooner than later take us out of the grift. Rendering earth unlivable is assuredly a primary rejection, perhaps the Freudian death drive in action en masse. (For the record, the ones cashing in on this are the über-drivers here, dragging the rest of us along in their quest for domination; but that ‘rest of us’ is varied, with varying degrees of individual and collective responsibility.)

What does it look like to face this? To, as Terry Tempest Williams writes, “find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts”? For me this means learning how to embrace my love for the world even as it’s under threat. One way I do this by paying attention on my walks. This might not sound like it requires the strength of which Williams writes, but I assure you this can be quite tricky ground. I’m quick to ascribe what might be merely a seasonal variation to a sign of a changing climate and suddenly my cavorting is shot through with worry. (My mental and emotional states can be as vulnerable as a baby bird some days.)

What is a normal seasonal fluctuation? Keen observation over time, the kind that puts a feeling for the rhythms of one’s surroundings into one’s bones, seems key to knowing what's typical. While this is only my second year on the hill, I did remember from last season a particular pool of water in a mud rut that became the site of blobs of gelatinous amphibian eggs. This year, the rain early on was such that there was no continuous water to provide a breeding ground. Some of this is to be expected, I told myself. But then the more reliable vernal pools that had exploded into a croaking frenzy in an early warm spell this season were not as flush with eggs as I thought they should be.

Reader, I despaired. The pond had been positively jumping with life during breeding, so much so that I could hear the orgy well before I came in view of the water. Had a subsequent cold snap killed off this season’s generation? And if so, is that part of the usual brutish and short ways of the wild or something less, eh, natural?

I was relieved to find later that the eggs must have been submerged in ways I didn’t detect because there they were, those squirmy tadpoles, propelling in multiple directions just under the surface, after all. The hatching had happened! That said, I’m not convinced that there were enough tadpoles for this generation of wood frogs to be on track, but then I am not systematically nor objectively observing in the field here. There are too many variables in my incipient data collection (geared toward anecdote) that I have no idea how to control for. More importantly, it’s only been two trips around the sun I've been observing. Is this a normal amount of offspring survival? Did I miss other batches of tadpoles and the numbers are where they need to be? Am I predisposed to panic, even if that could be considered an appropriate if not necessarily helpful response? (That’d be a yes for sure on that last one.)

I did turn to the internet for a deeper dive on seasonal cycles, a warming planet, and the mating habits of my newfound beloveds, Rana sylvatica. There’s much more to say about how climate variability impacts species survival as various triggers in response to the environment for where and when to breed are finely calibrated to avoid predation, to ensure sufficient food sources, and to react to other elements that support a healthy population, but I’d like to get up above tree line for another view on facing our changing biosphere.

I live about a two hour drive from the Adirondacks, a 10 million year old mountain range in northern NY State. There are 21 summits in the Daks that poke through the clouds into what is known as the Alpine Zone. Life is rare, fragile, and endangered above 4000’. Trampling here is a travesty. Many of the High Peaks summits have been perilously roughed up over the decades of hikers putting boots to ground in their quest for bagging the highest points in the range. For the record, I love summitting mountains. I also love the mountains themselves. These feelings and activities can absolutely co-exist. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, adventure pursuits overtook the peaks and acres of the most rare of ecosystems in the State were getting worn away in front of the eyes of those who were paying attention.

What to do? The answer they chose was to double down on observation. Various organizations working in tandem launched long-term monitoring programs. While most of these species are 10,000 years in the making, the data collectors have been able to determine quite a bit of useful information on the health of and the challenges to these plants over the past fifteen years. This information fueled an education outreach program, and now ADK Summit Stewards await eager hikers on top of the popular peaks during the busy months (which have become increasingly busier). They teach people to do the rock hop, to notice particulars in the awe-inspiring terrain, and to develop an appreciation for the rarity of the environment they’re standing in. The result, so far, has been an undeniable success. By all accounts the summits are rebounding in response to the greater awareness engendered by this effort. 

Diapensia blooming

On a recent hike I took up Haystack, the third highest peak in the range at 4960’, the weather turned as it does in the mountains and shifted from the predicted mostly cloudy to full on rain for the remaining hours of the trip. The trails to Haystack are rocky, choppy, and then fully exposed and scoured by wind and elements. It was tough going. My gear is well used, so it wasn’t long before I “wetted out” (got soaked to the bone). Breaking tree line was dramatic and felt quite desolate. Gray rock. Gray sky. Soggy soul.

The incline is such in spots that scrambling is required, fingers needing to find cracks in the rock to support the climb. As a result, I was closer to the mountain, literally, and focused intently on its surfaces. Pulling up above one particular ledge, I poked my head out over the ridge and saw the tiniest spots of bright white in the crevices and folds in the slope. As I got closer I was amazed to discover Diapensia in bloom. I might sound like a nerd, but this is a plant that grows at the rate of around 1/2 inch every 50 years and flowers for only a week. I wasn’t even aware of this "pincushion plant" until a summit steward on a previous hike taught me what it was. And then to come upon it unexpectedly in bloom? And so profusely, it turned out, up the sides of the hill? This did my heart a world of good. And oh how I needed it. These moments keep me in the game.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, Fence, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem "Banking" for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com

Read previous posts in this series: Hello from a Distance, Enter Geese; Whose Woods; Roads and Seeds, A Trace; Hunting Season; and Animal Tracking. 

Dispatch from a Distance - Animal Tracking [by Cara Benson]

Rare glimpse

It’s easy to feel like a Magoo in the woods, walking my developing foot paths to repeatedly visited spots among the veritable highways and busy intersections of animal tracks crisscrossing all around me. Of course I notice them, the tracks, but the creatures themselves have typically skidaddled. I imagine far off sets of eyes up in branches, peeking out from burrows, shining in dark dens, all trained on me as I whistle away, largely oblivious to their precise locations. I am learning, though, that their movements are legible and that I can become better versed in deciphering them. There’s a wildlife tracker I’ve been able to walk with a few times who talks about it that way, that it’s a matter of reading the story in the landscape. These stories are more prominent in winter as their trails show in the snow like pictographs on a blank page, so the season just past fell perfectly open for me to put in the “time on the ground.”

In my previous post, I’d written that I was going to explore snowshoeing next. My loose idea was to ruminate on how the snow reveals desire lines. That’s the term planners use to describe foot paths that form regardless of design (think of those bare brown walkways in the green of parks that show the cut-throughs and ways that people actually travel). In the woods hikers often call them herd paths. I was thinking about my own desire as revealed by the path I tread through the landscape out my door. More than a few writers have taken this topic on of late. Robert Moor in his On Trails and Torbjørn Ekelund’s In Praise of Paths both consider how desire lines are a result of how the individual and the collective meet on the road. This idea was appealing to me, but whose trails I was meeting and overlapping with were not of human origin. My snowshoes packed and connected with paths that, from what I could tell, were deer, coyote, and would that have been mink? Or were they fisher? Are pine martens in the area? And then porcupines! That’s a yes (I think) to all of them. So my writing, like my walking, has followed this line.

I quickly became obsessed with reading prints. First I was drawn in to looking at each individual mark. Counting toe pads. Seeing the imprints of nails. The gentle drag of a paw across the powder. All such intimate evidence of the actual creature left behind. I wanted to touch everything. To get as close as possible to the impressions that demonstrated an incredibly diverse taxonomy of fauna in this corner of the world. Deer, sure. Okay, voles, even turkeys. But bobcat? Out my back door? How cool is that! (Very.) (Until one attacks you.) (I’ve never been attacked.) (It could happen.) (Probably won’t.) (Right?)*

Trying to identify the animal by looking only at an individual print, though, is like naming that song in one note and that note might be muffled. Or played off-key and through a paper cup and you’ve got wax in your eyes. What I mean is that prints are not always clean impressions. Even when they are, some of them are similar enough to each other that more information is needed. That’s why trackers look at the gait of the animal as revealed in the series of prints. Are they body scissoring or leg scissoring? Bounders, leapers, waddlers, walkers, or trotters? Do they step back foot into front print? Land with hind feet first?

I try to picture the animal moving and get too mechanical about it. After a while, I can’t even remember how my cats walk. My mind loaded with data struggled to incorporate it into my sensing self. For a while, everything I saw was either deer or coyote (even if it wasn’t coyote). One of the pieces of information that stayed with me is that canine prints typically show the nails. As do weasels and mink and otter and fisher and probably others, but I didn’t know any of that yet. So I’d see prints with prominent front points and feel fairly satisfied with myself that I’d nailed it. But over the course of time and walking with those who’d been at it longer, I found that some of tracks I thought were coyote were actually fox. Of course then I went through a period of thinking everything I saw was fox, but I’m past that now (porcupine). For the record, I’m not always wrong. In fact, I’m getting less wrong.

If you can’t peg it from a small swath of the trail, the scope of the investigation must expand to follow the tracks for more information. That often means looking to see if there’s scat. Most animals in the wild, with the possible exception of porcupines who will sleep in their poop, don’t shit any old place. They do it to communicate. Fox, for example, will leave scat on little branches. Or up on logs. They want to elevate its presence. The message: “I’m here.” As I started looking, I saw them everywhere. It wasn't long before I began to wonder if they were also talking to me. Something else to consider: what was I saying to them with my repeated trips through their range? What is it I might have wanted to say? I’m here, too.

I did notice over the course of winter more and more scat was being left right in the middle of my snowshoe paths. There was a particular corridor that seemed to be an information hotspot. At the bottom of one of the first hills I descend from the back of my home I enter a rich swath of hemlock forest that holds multiple rocky beds collecting runoff and rain in spring and summer that are blissfully easier to cross in snow. Just past the first of these temporal streams, in one afternoon I came across two fresh calling cards. Coyote (hair filled, rope-like) and fox (somewhat similar, but smaller).

I know scatology is serious business, but it is a particular type of feeling one gets when leaning in to another creature’s excrement, then zooming in for close-ups. I can’t tell you how many angles of pellets, tubes, segments, and other shapes of feces I have on my phone now. Due to pandemic distancing, it’s not that often that I’m in face to face conversation with someone and scroll my pictures to show them something, but even going through them for my own self, it does give one pause. Not kidding, I have passed more than a few Saturday nights this season comparing my pictures with what’s on the internet (I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise, there’s a lot of shit online).

Though they were leaving evidence right under my feet, trailing animal tracks also leads the walking off my usual paths. To follow where the animal treads rather than what I might have intended put me into a more deeply attentive state. “As the crow flies” became as the woodchuck waddles. My walking evolved into stalking. Slow. Methodical. I want to run into the creatures, and, also, I very much don’t. Everyone wants to see a bear until they actually do. I have run into black bears a few times. It’s exciting! And scary. And I want to be their friends and feel badly yelling at them, as you’re supposed to do. But jeezum, they’re big.

Walking with the expert tracker we did follow right to the source – twice. Both times, benignly, porcupine. One down in a smelly den. The other up way up in a hemlock tree. Porcupines apparently are less skittish as they’re their bodies are supremely well defended. They get down in a den and curl up with their quilled backs to the opening. You can get your face in the hole for a peek and deep whiff (I did); they don’t actually shoot quills as one myth would have it. It might be safer doing that than standing under one up in the trees as they are known to fall out of the limbs, sometimes fatally.

Initially, though, I didn’t want to follow tracks too far as to not disturb whoever I might be on the tail of. Someone had said on one of my other walks that you can follow the trail in reverse to read some of the story. But it’s all moot, really, as it is ridiculous to think that a coyote is anywhere in the vicinity of me tromping along in my snowshoes. Over time I became more comfortable letting the trail take me wherever it went. Over downed trees, up rock ledges, frozen wetlands and bogs, some terrain I’d never tread without the protection of a hefty snow pack covering what’s frozen or asleep under it.

Now the snow is gone and mud season upon us. My tracker friend does walks year round, also in urban areas. The clues might be harder to discern, but I’m sure that they’re there to be read if I am looking. I was thinking about that while doing spring clean up last weekend, raking out the flower beds and cutting away last year’s dead growth. I saved the most unruly bushes for last, the catnip. I started snipping and pulling the stalks from the bottom, working my way up to the apex of the bush, when on top there was, elevated for sure detection, a small pile of dried fox shit, not far from my front walkway. Well played, red. Well played.

*I wrote this before that video went viral. I'm just being goofy here. Healthy bobcats don't typically attack humans, especially unprovoked. Don't believe the internet hype.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, Roads And Seeds, A Trace, and Hunting Season.

Dispatch From A Distance - Hunting Season [by Cara Benson]

Look closely

“Rifle’s done.” This from a neighbor I crossed paths with when I was out for a walk and he to shovel out his mailbox. We spoke from opposite sides of the road, occasionally pausing for the wind to die down in order to be heard. Our first big snow had fallen on the hill but “regular season” had only just ended. “Still got a few days of bow, though.” It’s the hot topic this time of year up here, whether one is gunning for meat or aiming to be missed, and I am definitively the latter.

Mostly I avoid my beloved woods walks during rifle season. Hunting stands and abandoned camo tents from previous years tucked into the landscape remind a girl that come a certain Saturday in November through a certain Sunday in December heading out is no casual act. It’s unnerving to see those ladders up into platforms at a height – like a tree house, only deadly. Even walking the roads I wear my safety-orange Carhartt hat. I am, after all, moving flesh.

During some of the shoulder periods that are less populated by hunters I’ve been known to slip further into the trees. Bow hunting is less a risk as an arrow’s reach is shorter than a bullet’s. Nevertheless, I whistle as I go, sharp piercing bursts with my fingers in my mouth like I’m cheering for my team. With the shorter days I’m often caught out and coming back through the woods in dusk, staving off the use of my headlamp to stretch how long I can go in natural, if fading, light. I like that time of day into night, the way the last hurrah of the sun slices the tops of the forests with gold. Apparently, that’s prime hunting time.

FWEET! FWEET! Nothing to see here! Just little ole me, human, walking innocentishly home! My travels often flush the deer. I’ve seen those beauties bound up from bedding in meadows or from under sagging pine boughs on my approach. It’s always a delight. Excruciating to think of a bullet or arrow through their heart, though I might as well say right now that I do eat some meat (I haven’t always). I’m fairly certain that I could never be the one to do the deed. It probably wouldn’t be smart to count on me as gatherer or farmer, either, but fortunately every tribe needs its scribblers.

A friend who walks with me in these woods (she lives down a hill, then up a patch – I can bushwhack to her house from mine) and I wear bells this time of year. Her orange vest has pockets for bullets as members of her family do hunt. She, like I am, is conflicted about it. We process this as we walk. “They have a good life up here.” Better than factory farmed animals, to be sure. We meet by our usual stump then down to a favorite pond to catch the end of the day outside after being online for waaaaay too much time. The two of us walking and talking, bells jangling, are a safer bet than when we part ways to solo it home. That’s when I begin my blasts. FWEET! FWEET! Every 20 feet or so. I know where the one hunting stand is planted between where we split off and the safety of reaching my door. I don’t know if anyone’s on foot, waiting. Watching for anything that moves through a site. It is because I am walking that I am at risk.

Which means I have the experience of feeling like a target. I’m reminded of the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon where one deer is talking to another deer who had a bullseye on his chest. The first deer says, “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.” More seriously, I think about being a concertgoer (back when we did such things). A churchgoer. To be a target based on who one loves, the color of one's skin, or what route one happens to take on a particular day. To walk through the world knowing there are those who carry lethal weaponry for the purpose of training them on other humans is stretching my capacity for empathy beyond its limit.

Hunting for food is a different story. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that hunting in the United States is typically done by rural poor or Indigenous people to feed themselves and that this is admirable or at least preferable to the UK where hunting is an elitist sport. In fact, access to the majority of land in England came to be denied to the underclasses as a result. Strict poaching and trespassing laws were enacted so these tracts would remain stocked for the few weeks per year that rich landowners took their sporting holidays. Where I live the woods are beginning to feel like something of a commons to me. This could be projection on my part, but the longer I’m here the more I have witnessed the overt and tacit agreements between inhabitants. Creatures pay no heed to posted signs, of course, so living with wildlife (and watersheds and air and airborne viruses and...) isn’t an individual endeavor, even as it is approached in varying manners. And by all accounts it is true that hunters on the hill will eat what that kill. Those lovely creatures sweetly nosing the forest floor for acorns.

FWEET! FWEET!

My neighbor's house

Despite my plan to steer well clear of the woods until after rifle season, I did wind up sidling in – on opening day of all things! I started off smartly enough, intending to walk only roads. I could hear the pap pap pows flaring up like fatal popcorn crackling in the landscape all morning. Plus, there were those ominous vehicles roadside with nary a home in sight. Bordering my small patch is a 200 acre wooded parcel with an abandoned, now dilapidated house. The former patriarch is deceased, and his offspring apparently never agreed on what to do with the property. Relatively young forest is growing up in what had been cleared for subsistence farming long ago. (Of course I love this – both the trees and the fallen-in bones of the structure.) I could see a jeep parked from early light into the afternoon in front of the old battered home. The Pastor from whom I bought the church I live in told me they’re never up on that land except occasionally to hunt. 

So I donned my Carhartt hat and headed out on the road. I was partway along a down and back when I ran into a few neighbors getting ready for their walk. Our party grew to four and somehow it was decided that we’d head into the woods behind their house. There’s a centuries old cemetery behind them and multiple acres of land with former lumbering roads to traverse. At some point, though, we crossed over to where their land joins with others. It’s all currently undeveloped in there, though signs of structures from years past can be read in the landscape. We came upon a guy in a camo tent, staked out to catch the deer movement at dusk. Through the course of conversation first names were thrown around, someone’s cousin, and our walking party moved on. Eventually we came out onto a road we could trudge back to our homes. They were about to point out another path that locals take when out of that very opening came a woman in a bright orange vest, rifle resting in the crook of her arm. It was nearly dark at this point, so she’d called it for the day. “But if you’re going to be flushing them this way I might go back in and give it another try.” (Way to go, Benson. Sending does to their demise.)

At one point, one of my neighbors had asked if she’d had any luck. Luck? I get it, and also ugh. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be obvious if she did? But of course she wouldn’t have hoisted the body up over her shoulders to bring it out on her own. There’s quite the procedure involved, in fact. I'll spare us both the recounting of the details of this process that I’ve become privy to. I will tell you that there is every indication of a healthy deer population on this side of the season. I see their tracks, the unmistakably ruffled forest floor, even heard tell of concerns that the herds would be too plentiful to survive the winter, but that seems not to be bearing out so far.

My first walk back behind my place after rifle ending was in glorious two foot snow. I’ll write more on snowshoeing in another post but will say here that it was a magical wonderland to me, the puffy white clumps clinging to evergreens and caressed by late day pink such a pure delight. I was plunking one foot then the other deep into perfect powder, when I heard a commotion just ahead. A buck! Not 20 yards from a snow-topped hunting stand. Looked like four points on his horns. He roused himself and dashed away through the trees in front of me. I’m so grateful to have been there to glimpse him. Both of us, lucky.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, and Roads And Seeds, A Trace. 

Dispatch From A Distance - Roads And Seeds, A Trace [by Cara Benson]

“There is a rhetoric to walking.” - Michel de Certeau

Most everyone I know right now is alternating between sheer terror over politics (I’ll leave it at that) and a desperate search for respite in order to manage the panic. Same here. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read any of my previous Dispatches that I take to walking when trouble is afoot (sorry). It gets me out of my interior, both my four walls and my mind, and into the body and the outer world. As I am physically capable, which I try not to take for granted, I can just go. I don’t need to have a thing sorted out but eventually how to get home.

Of course walking is ripe for metaphor, that time-honored mechanism for making sense of the world, especially if one is writing about it. As I am walking to interrupt myself, to disrupt the mind’s search, seize, categorize, repeat, I will leave it to the reader’s imagination to make of this string of sentences what she will. In fact, I’m in a mood to write a series of digressions and left turns, similar, at times, to how I walk (this grove, that path, over a hill, why not). Again, so long as I make it back.

I’ll start off with a confession: I trespass. Beyond being of European descent in the US, what I mean here is that I sheepishly tiptoe past POSTED signs all the time. In my defense, I’m not traipsing across someone’s back yard. There are thousands of wooded acres around me that host no dwellings. I do not hunt, rip it up on ATVs, nor leave detritus behind (these are often the concerns) – quite the opposite. I typically pick up any litter I come across (Mylar balloons know no borders) or pull dead branches from squashing new growth. I am very careful where I tread so as not to tear moss, for example, from a rock. Not to create mud, to cause erosion. I pay close attention when I am walking through what I will call raw woods, when I am not traveling a previous path that has shown over time that the forest will be just fine with this trail boring through it. Whether on private or public terrain, I am acutely pained to tramp down green, to step on an unsuspecting red eft, to leave a trace. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk a road.

One of the draws for moving up on the hill where I live was that even the paved routes stretching out in the vicinity of my home hold a boundary with much wildness. This area is one of NY State’s largest contiguous forests. Seasonal waterfalls, rampant wildflowers, long stretches of wooded land or meadows fill as much of the lengths along these roads as do homes, though those are here and I am curious about them, too. As I wander roadside, these walks can lend themselves to notions of rural flâneusery. I am out of step with utilitarian travel, as the urban flâneuse is by strolling city sidewalks as she does. What is it I am browsing if not shop windows?

Dogs. I know where all the dogs are on these walks. Or should I say that they make themselves known. Some are more aggressive in their pronouncements than others and I make guesses about their people based on this behavior, like we do with parents and their offspring. I could be wrong, of course, but sometimes the humans are outside or yell from an open window and one in particular seems hellbent on confirming my suspicions. (For the record, I adore puppies and love to nuzzle the noses of dogs, but not all canines have been raised as snugglers. Just saying.)

Other creatures that are plentiful out here: chickens. They seem to be fearless in foraging right at the edge of passing cars or trucks. Roadside gullies must have the best pickings. I am proud to say I have become a pretty good clucker.

Site of the heron sighting

And once, a Great Blue Heron! Less than 20 feet from me I spotted his stately, curved-neck repose atop leggy stalks, raptly focused on a swampish watering hole for a catch for dinner. So sleekly upright. I caught his blended colors (not as starkly blue as one might expect) and slim-limbed silhouette among the young trees and stopped on a dime, just behind a larger trunk. Slowly, I moved back into sightline. Holy, the biodiverse world is a glory. I stood with him forever (3 minutes) until he powered off.

Then there’s Duck Duck and Buzz, two white fowl with orange bills, best buds, that have their own homemade pond in front of a neighbor’s house down the road in the north direction. Buzz is much bigger than Duck Duck. Or is it the other way around? The bigger one (let’s agree on Buzz) had come to my neighbor with a sibling. They were deeply bonded, I’m told, and when Buzz’s sib died, he was inconsolable. My neighbor (I can’t remember her name even to get it switched. No! It’s Laurie! Or is that the woman who lives down the side road?). Whatever her name, she, too, became distraught, caring as she did about her despondent Buzz, until one day driving along a county route down off the hill with traffic speeding by was young, soon-to-be-named Duck Duck on the side of the road. She turned her car around and pulled up beside him. Legend has it that she opened the door and Duck Duck hopped in. Now the two of them, the ducks, are inseparable, and LaurieLisaLiz has a superb set up for them. Lilypads in the pond, room to roam, nighttime digs for sleeping in the slightly abandoned barn along a path in the trees beside her house. Duck Duck and Buzz are a high point on my walks when I head this direction. I don’t always see them right away as they might be squatting down in the grassy banks of the pond. I crest a hill and crane my head to see if the stark white bodies are hunkered in or floating. They rise up when I see them! I always call out in the happy goofy voice I use with my cats. Duck Duck! Buzz! There you are. Such cuties. They quack quack, lowly, little duck noises. I only ever saw Elizabeth once, to learn the lore and to get their names. I’m grateful that I can use the syllables they’re used to hearing and that I’m hoping signal me as friend. My clucking is better than my quacking, so far. 

Occasionally as I walk I wonder, does anyone notice my peculiar patterns? My mutterings, farmer’s blows (clearing the nostrils sans tissues), conversing with birds and self and god as I go? My boisterous swishing of a stick? Deer flies and mosquitoes don't give a shit about spray repellent, so in bug season I whip around a piece of downed maple with chunks of acorns still clinging to the mast to ward them off. It’s my version of a handheld accordion fan and I use it to the fullest. The faster I walk, the faster I wave and chatter. I might as well be doing Python's Silly Walks. Though sometimes I “pull it together” if I hear a car coming, I am often caught in the act of exhibiting my private self in public.

It is a particular vulnerability to be the walking body roadside as a motorized vehicle approaches, then passes. I ready myself to leap, if necessary, and every so often find myself staring down the drivers. Same as with my imagined dog owners, I make guesses or have visceral responses to the sounds of the oncoming cars or trucks or motorcycles. The louder the machine, the more obnoxious the person, especially if it's an intentionally aggravated volume. Then the upending of my tiny narratives – what if it’s a beater, the driver too broke to fix it, limping along as best he can in a hostile economy (systemic thinking is never far). Then my sympathy is evoked. I hear you, sister. I get it, guy. A moment of solidarity whizzes by.

Something there’s more of on roadsides: trash. I feel like such a nellie, but I hate it. Sometimes, my better self works very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt that the scandalous crap at my feet blew out of their hands or backseat unknowingly. Or I labor to see it as part of the mosaic, to puncture romantic notions about purity, about humanless nature. I’m reminded of something I read on eco-regional studies, that nature ain’t just out there. Humans, after all, are creatures of the planet. It’s how we live on it, with it, with creatures and dirt and each other, cars and machines – all technology – included, that is at issue. This same article reported that crows were struggling in the initial pandemic lockdown because less people were driving, and their main dietary staple of roadkill had severely decreased as a result. It’s an interactive scape – everything. Planet. Where and how we walk. What it means to be wild. I love this expansion of how to consider the world and my small part in it. 

And then I think the person who dumped his truck ashtray out the window is an asshole. (Keep walking, Cara.)

Speaking of technology, sometimes I bring my phone with me to track time or to take pictures. A recent shot of Cardinal flowers, the scarlet-robed beauties lining a wet run as if they are marching up water greens to their blue source, was such a catch. But that’s deep woods. What do I photograph roadside? This is the season of color in the leaves: flaming reds, tangerine dreams, delicious yellows. The understory is marvelous, too. Goldenrod, Snake Root, and Joe Pye Weed, so designated after the English name of Mohican sachem Shauquethqueat who used the flower as remedy, fill fields and edges at eyelevel. I have been watching them bud, flower, sustain pollinators, and turn to seed, which I am now collecting from the public right-of-way. I carry scissors and paper bags to clip and transport fluorescences for seeding the land behind the church where I live. Back home, I store the bags where their contents can properly dry until it’s close to the first frost. That’s when I’ll cast them, then lightly walk the area to ensure good seed to ground contact. Seems I do want to make something of my wanderings, after all.  

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, and Whose Woods.

Dispatch From A Distance - Whose Woods [by Cara Benson]

“Land is life – or, at least, land is necessary for life.” Patrick Wolfe

“Whose woods these are I think I know” begins the canonized Robert Frost poem about stopping on a horse one evening “to watch [the landowner’s] woods fill up with snow.” Though the first stanza is concerned with this probable owner and whether he would catch the speaker of the poem stopping on his land, Frost’s primary aim in the poem, it seems, is to render a stolen moment of contemplation on the darkest day of the year, before traveling the long road home and ultimately the long road of his life to death, the forever sleep.

As someone who walks in woods often, nearly daily since COVID and moving up on a hill, this opening comes to me not infrequently. It’s one of the many lines I chirp out as I go, a refrain as I make music with my feet as well. Others include: bah bah bah bah bah bah bah You say it’s your birthday! Or, from The Sound of Music of my youth: Oh Mother Superior I could never get lost in these hills! And, also, because I take me with me: Paranoia paranoia everybody’s coming to get me. Just say you never met me. I’m not sick, but I’m not…. Well, you get the picture. Songs, catch phrases, bits of conversation – usually unbidden – burble up from the well of my experience, which is some small part of a collective experience, a version, if skewed and biased, of communal mixed tapes.

The Frost line, I’ve noticed, usually comes out as Whose woods are these – an interrogative, the maybe more expected version than how it was constructed for the poem. Of course Frost is being a poet in arranging his line for rhythm and surprise. In conversation we might say, “I think I know whose woods these are.” Instead, he opens with what sets us up for an expectation of the question. “Whose woods” feels as if it will be asking, rather than asserting. Though he then undermines the assertion (he thinks he knows, not he’s certain he knows), there is a claim embedded in the line. He is sure that there is a singular owner, even if he’s not entirely sure he knows which.

The woods where I now live are the original homelands of the Mohican (Muhheconneok) people. Their villages and great council fire were down closer to the river, the land in the hills for seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering, and it is certain they were here for millennia prior to Henry Hudson sailing up “the river that flows both ways” in 1609. Their territory extended on both sides of the river and from as far north as Lake Champlain all the way south to close to the mouth of the river at Manhattan island. One account has it that their numbers had been 25,000, with 4,000 warriors, at their peak.

We know that this changed – dramatically and violently – with the coming of the Dutch, and then the English. This isn’t news. It also isn’t new to say that settler-colonial myths surrounding “giving thanks” between colonists and Indigenous people, as an obvious example, are distorted, propagandistic narratives. Still, the story of an amicably shared feast with scant acknowledgment of the atrocities that settlers enacted gets repeated every November. As do the tidal waters with their source high in the mountains of where the Mohicans lived still get called the Hudson rather than the Muhheacannituck.

Which names and narratives we reiterate have tremendous material, emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance. Erasure equals death. In a most literal sense, the story told in the 1493 Papal Bull that decreed “that barbarous nations be overthrown” wrote the justification for violently dispossessing non-Christians of their land solely by erasing the humanity of anyone who did not succumb to Rome. This is often called the Doctrine of Discovery, and in 1823 a United States Supreme Court decision incorporated this argument into federal law as the basis for further usurpation of Turtle Island. A more seemingly benign example, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, wherein he wrongly conflated the Mohicans and the Mohegans (neither of whom are extinct), gets retold to this day. 

What story, then, shall I tell of these woods? Rather, what story is it my place, nee duty, to tell? I am aware as I walk through the forested hills where I now live that I tread on history I don’t feel good about, to put it plainly.* I am also aware that this story is not solely in the past. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, the present-day descendants of those whose homeland I also call home, is a sovereign, self-supporting federally recognized tribe of about 1500 enrolled members. They live some one thousand miles west in Wisconsin on a reservation in Menominee tribal land due to various coerced removals, what they have called the “many trails” of their history. This distance has not diminished their connection to the area. The Muhheconneok, the people of the waters that are never still, after all, are a people named for place.

“The connection has never been broken,” says Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Bonney Hartley. “We’ve always returned, we’ve always had land claims, we’ve always had historical interest in our cultural sites. It’s always been home.” Her office, in fact, is located not in Wisconsin, but in New York in Muhheconneok ancestral homelands. Through the National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, their Tribal Historic Preservation program reviews hundreds of projects every year within its recognized areas of interest. In other words, in these woods.

What follows territorial acknowledgments? What comes once this story is brought to the fore? How to make this right? One specific avenue for reparation is, to use a complicated term, giving land back (is it giving if it was never rightfully owned?). The recent Supreme Court ruling in McGirt vs. Oklahoma, which decrees a large portion of that state as never having been disbanded as Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, is an historic win for Indigenous rights in the US. Could this signal the possibility of other favorable outcomes for Native American tribes and people? As for the Mohicans, they did petition the State of New York in 1986 for 23,000 acres, enough land that they would have been able to return home to live. The territory named wasn’t along the river valley but in western NY, the tribe’s last location before being forced out by developers in the 1800s. The suit was finally settled in 2010 with an award of less than 2 acres for potential establishment of a casino and an additional 330 acres added to their Wisconsin territory. The casino was never developed due to encroaching competition, ultimately from NY State itself. This certainly was not the win the Muscogee (Creek) Nation experienced, but that was 2010. Would the case have turned out differently today?

I am no legal scholar. I don’t know if there is a case to be brought for land along the Muhheacannituck. I imagine the tribe’s best legal claim was the one they sought in western NY rather than their original homelands. There are deeds that document agreements for most of the land along the river, though both sides of the signers on paper had vastly differing understandings of what those leases meant. But maybe this isn’t something that has to be negotiated through the law. Chelsea Vowel, writing as âpihtawikosisân, says that returned land could come from privately held territory. “I mean damn…maybe your huge ass union needs to fork over some of the land its executives have squirreled away on their massive salaries as a gesture of good guesting. That could be a real thing that could happen.” (She’s writing in response to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, hence mention of unions, but the point remains if we’re talking about corporate CEOs, for example.)

I don’t know if that is a thing that would happen. It’s easy to mention words like hell and frozen over when it comes to expecting “good guesting” from corporate America. Corporate anywhere, really. It’s also easy to deflect personal responsibility, hence the moves I just made in pointing out the government and then corporations as the culprits. Maybe the real thing that could happen includes the 1.33 acres that are deeded in my name. Maybe not, but reckoning with this history – this present – is as crucial as (and interrelated with) remediating the climate crisis, and it isn’t only about territory (though obviously that’s a big deal). The theft of land is a symptom, if you will. The disease is White hegemony, and I believe it can be healed with patience, dedication, and a willingness to be uncomfortable (here I am talking to my fellow Whites). Even for those of us who’ve been engaged in this kind of introspection and/or public action for a while, there is still deep individual and collective work to be done. I hope that the watershed moment we are in regarding race leads to truly liberatory transformations that take hold. I think repeating that story, the one that says righting wrongs and honoring the agency of others is liberating for all involved, could be of use. For anyone, and I include myself in this, who is grappling with his/her/their path in this process, I’ll offer the reminder that no one has to have all the answers. It’s good to be asking questions. Possibility can absolutely emerge from uncertainty. Of that I am sure.

Notes:

*I realize that centers a White woman’s feelings (mine). I do this to show that it isn’t healthy (“feel good”) to be an oppressor. 

The Tribal Seal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians is included with gracious permission by Tribal Council. It is the creation of Tribal Member Edwin Martin.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance and Enter Geese. 

Dispatch From A Distance - Enter Geese [by Cara Benson]

There is a pond at the heart of the woods down multiple hills, over more ridges than I care to count, from the church where I now live. When I think of it, the pond, from here at my home, I can feel its stillness, though of course it isn’t still, at all. Water, and certainly this backcountry collection of it, is in constant flux. What is it, then, that these pools become known as calming presences? I’ll drop the word womb here, also bodily percentages, where we come from and what we’re made of, but I’ve got other places to go in this post, so I’ll let them wash over us as I move on to how the pond ripples and drains through marsh grasses into runoff streams feeding the downslopes, all the while holding a relatively (isn’t everything) level surface.

Enter geese. There’s a pair of them I’ve come to find regularly at the pond. Surely they’d been there before, Canadian geese are what birdwatchers would call “common” in North America, but I remember the first time I became acutely aware of these particular two. The afternoon was glumly overcast, and though I’ve hiked in all manner of weather, winter being a favorite, this day my mood matched the gray and I might well have preferred working out at the gym if that had been an option. (My YMCA closed the same day New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had his last workout at the gym, some 65 days ago and counting.) My house could sport an exercise class, but getting out every day is imperative, especially because I can, both physically and also safely in regard to virus-required social distancing, so I do.

I layered up for the walk, stuffed my feet into boots, and sighed as I stepped out the door. It’s not immediately an easy path to get to the pond through the woods at the edge of the land surrounding the church; I have to walk through pricker bushes and pick my way carefully along and over a portion of the seemingly millions of miles of lichen-encrusted stone walls that crawl the landscape in the Northeast US. The stones wobble underfoot, and remnants of barbed wire fencing lie in wait in the crevices. It’s a tricky start when I head this direction, but it’s the most direct route to the good stuff, so it’s my most frequently used entry.

Up and over and then crossing back again, mindful with each step not to trip nor trod the season’s burgeoning wildflowers, I made my way down to the first of many old lumbering roads, or just plain long ago abandoned dirt roads for early automobile travel, having first been horse routes. Before that, this was Mohican territory, but that deserves its own post (which is to come). This day, as I’ve said, I wasn’t in the best of spirits, so my attention was pulled inward, the way a tree encloses itself around a wound, encompassing it with its bark. (I don’t know if that’s fully accurate, but I like it.) I tiptoed to the sides of mud ruts, leapt over puddles, and followed along animal herd paths, all the while my vision necessarily trained on where I put my feet, and I was not a little cranky about it. About everything.

Finally my descent leveled out and I could see through the open deciduous stands the glowing of the beloved pond. I made my way around the southern wetlands draining the pool, then back up the slopes flanking its western shore (this is my favorite spot). I climbed the hemlock and white pine studded rocky ledges to a small clearing nestled in the pines overlooking the pond. Through the green-needled branches extending into my sight line, I could see on a mound of ground rising out of the water – two geese! There they were, simply standing, doing what exactly? Were they a pair? There was a third! Was it their young? When do they hatch? There’s so much to know!

I pulled my phone from my pants, aimed the video in their direction, and moved forward as slowly and carefully as I was capable of without looking where I was stepping. I thought I might catch them take flight, as surely they would hear my approach. The first indication they were aware of me was when the one who looked smaller slipped into the water to swim in the opposite direction, dragging a V shaped wake across the surface. The two remaining on the mound began lifting each webbed foot, slightly rocking, clearly exhibiting agitation (getting one’s feathers ruffled is cliche for good reason). And then it began: not flight, but the fiercest round of honking as they, too, slid into the water to paddle in my direction. Then in circles. Then back my way, all the while barking at me. Clearly, at me.

How peaceful they’d looked. How annoyed they now were, and it wasn’t letting up. Just when I thought they were done, like hiccups, they’d start up again. A good five minutes passed like this, which is a long time to be yelled at. Finally I receded, sorry to have disturbed them, though I did think to myself as their protest followed me through the trees as I made my way up the hill and out of sight, if not earshot, Enough already, I’m leaving.

I’ve been back to see the geese nearly daily. Have they laid eggs? Who is the smaller one? Where do they sleep? I have found few definitive answers, though many slightly informed suppositions, but I’ve kept at it. Over time we have forged an uneasy truce. Rather, I figured out how to move in their vicinity slowly enough, and in small enough increments, to keep them relatively unflapped. Too many steps at one time and the honking winds up, sometimes for minutes without ceasing, until I sit long enough or retreat into the woods to try again another day. I have definitely formed an attachment.

The first time I went to the pond after my investment in our relationship and they weren’t there, I was distraught. The pond seemed so empty! Where did they go? Did my presence make the spot less suitable? Were their eggs picked off by predators (there’s been both a bald eagle and a blue heron circling)? The following day, still no geese, and I was downright sullen. I slumped on a rock at shoreline, hugging my midriff against the cold (where the hell is Spring anyway). I moped, uphill, all the way home, and let me just say that uphill moping requires commitment.

I took to reading about my missing friends. I didn’t acquire any sure knowledge, but I did come to believe that they hadn’t laid eggs, or the female would have been incubating (sitting on the nest) nearly continuously. The smaller of the three is likely a Cackling goose, whose mate had also appeared. Easy for me to have been wrong, though. The only way to get a better idea would be to spend more time with them, but they weren’t cooperating. They’re geese, after all.

To stave off disappointment, I’d mostly given up on seeing them again but continued to return because, well, what else would I do? To walk is to repeat a mantra with my body. An enactment of prayer, whether secular or otherwise. The poet’s “and the wave sings because it is moving”* is a neuroscientist’s “certain brain functions improve during even mild activity” is the Buddha’s “it is better to travel well than to arrive,” though having a destination to circumambulate or achieve is plenty fine, too, if that’s what gets me going. And for the love of [choose your signifier], I am desperate to get something, anything, going (aren’t we all?).

So I ventured back to the pond. There I was, sitting slopeside on a bed of pine needles, gazing at the wind spilling jewels across the water, when I heard that familiar honking, from afar, heading my direction. The sound grew and into view they came, expertly skidding in for a landing near their mound – the Canadian geese! And as if they’d been waiting off in the trees, the Cackling geese zoomed to the water to join them. All four of them settled in to their floating repose, and I leaned back against the hill, propped on my elbows for an afternoon visit, until it was time to move on.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

*Philip Larkin
Read the first post in this series: Hello From A Distance.