Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue

EDITOR’S NOTE

All things are inherently fragile, no matter how permanent and indestructible they may seem. Being mortal, we can only preserve our health, our very lives, for a circumscribed span of time. But what of our works—our languages, our communities, our arts and sciences, our institutions, our families? And what of our earth, its forests, rivers, mountains, skies, and oceans? How long can they, fragilities themselves if surely longer lived, be preserved?

The writers in Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue come at these and similar questions from a host of perspectives. In one story, a methodical archaeologist and a scavenger of architectural remnants approach the preservation of abandoned asylums using very different methodologies. In another, a starving geobotanist rides out the Siege of Leningrad in the Plant Institute cellar, where 370,000 types of seeds from around the world are stored, refusing to eat any of the rare potato exemplars he himself collected. An essay laments the rapid extinction of dialects—we lose a dozen or two languages a year—as a means of spurring us to find ways to salvage them. A memoir recounts the efforts of a caseworker to help the homeless find sanctuary off the streets. A collage of mostly unpublished letters, diaries, scrapbooks, FBI files, and other documents preserved in the archives of William Gaddis brings the author of The Recognitions to life in a vivid, unique way. Here are meditations on the preservation of friendship and family, of memory and bodies, of literature kept alive through the gift of translation. And here is my interview with novelist Richard Powers, in which we talk about trees and their majestic, magical contribution to preserving life on earth—an essential role that humankind continues to ignore at its own peril.

If the theme of preservation seemed significant last year when we began assembling this issue, it now seems of paramount importance—an imperative that must be embraced far beyond this specimen notebook you hold in your hands.

—Bradford Morrow

April 2018

New York City

What the River Saw

Diane Ackerman

They’re trouble, all of them. My babbling chestnut-green water rolling around this city carries their news and sailors, cheese and spices, peddlers and painters, refuse and toys, lost cockades, twisted virtue, and the lucky dead meeting their maker in a sky that I tie down to earth in my wrinkled mirrors. I carry the cock-a-hoop spirits of their carousers, boatswains, and braggarts, watch schoolboys practice contempt by placing thumb on the nose with fingers spread out, then consulting me to get their gesture right. Their sardine-narrow houses stand tall with long faces along my canals, where hordes of humans throng.

I’ve seen them all over the centuries, those scurrying creatures, been privy to the full alphabet of human longing. Served as their privy. Everything they are comes to me in the end, all their auras and effusions, even the vapor from their lungs, on chilly mornings, and sometimes the lunging enamel of their teeth, sometimes the newly born. I’ve watched their wooing and villainy, the modus operandi of their moods, their spinning, panting, pawing, felt their multitudes ride heavy on my body. I’ve drooled over their shoes, swallowed some people whole. They damn me, have dammed me. But I always have the last chuckle against their boat slips, always the last, long cackle along their quays. This generation believes it’s the first and the finest—they all do!—but I’ve seen so many of them come and go. They like to stroll beside me to play out their dramas. They come to shed secrets, or spill blood, or glisten with love, or moan in ecstasy. Heard them weep with loss too, and mumble endless rounds of self-immolating prayers. They baptize their young in my waters—sometimes on purpose. They’ve always been immersed in my continuum, and I in theirs, it seems. And I can tell you their forebears came from tougher stock. I used to enjoy their gliding over my long white eyelids in the time they call the Little Ice Age, when my usually mellifluous water for once froze thick. Then I felt them shaving the ice as they maneuvered across me on blades. I liked that, it scratched an ancient, elemental itch.

Wisps of past Amsterdammers drift along the canal walks too. The current locals mistake them for fog, as their predecessors did when they were alive. But I don’t fog like that. I doubt anyone else sees or hears them. In their missionary days full of high trade and visions, maybe then. Today I am the sole witness to their past.

Not that it matters, but my name is Amstel, given me by ancient farmers, who hadn’t much imagination, so they just called me Aemestelle, which means water area. It was the best they could come up with, big brains and all. What reckless souls, farming too near my soft banks, digging peat right out from under my arms—I became a furious water wolf, surging across the lowlands, devouring villages and farms, flooding their sheaves, roots, berries, pigs, and cows. Then it occurred to them to mound up thick walls and hold back my gush. Not move their fields, mind you, but rein me in, choke my natural flow. Humans are like that. They’d rather eat sours than mud, but don’t mind a little peat in their whiskey and cook fires. Now and then they pump me dry, reroute me and my brothers, rumbling down through a wide moat they’ve dug around the city to block invaders. I don’t suffer much from that, but their peasants pay when, in the process, I wolf down their flimsy houses and gardens.

Humans are such meddlers. They’re not happy unless they’re interfering with things. They just can’t leave anything alone. I use to be able to run out to the sea for a salt lick. But they’ve boarded me up, coaxed me into channels, curtailed my former freedom. I watch patiently, knowing I will outlive all their triumphs and follies. Now and then, I slide back and forth in time, remembering what I saw. But, mostly, I just watch. Some more than others. I remember when that painter—the one from Rijn who liked browns and blacks so much—painted my shores at nightfall in those sooty-toned scenes. Cleverly, I’ll give him that. This new lady who hunts bugs on my banks at odd hours, and lovingly paints my worst pests, I’ve seen her type lots of times. They usually end up dumping leftover pigments and oils into my depths, which I don’t really mind because the surface sheen that ensues is eye-bendingly beautiful. She’s just one more character on the human stage that surrounds me. I watch her as I do the other two-legged creatures. Truth to tell, she intrigues me. But, unlike her, I will endure.

In the beginning all was water: the galloping waves of a North Sea so deadly blue cold few but herring and whales braved it. Then these restless bipeds came along and, with colossal labor, drained hundreds of thousands of acres. Chased the fishes out. Squeezed the land dry and rolled the seabed over like an old mattress. Like it was their job to flip the landscape, totally redesign it! Magician’s trick, that one. Hocus-pocus! Turn salty world fresh. Build a thousand pinwheels with big corkscrews inside. Pump the mire into sluices and jog it miles to the sea. Gouge a network of canals all over the place. Flank them all with raised trails and roads. Abracadabra! Build brand-new golden cities and farms on the plains. Took colossal effort, plus hardships, injuries, illnesses, deaths. Instead of moving to where there’s already dry land, and not battling the sea day after day. For pious people, they sure act a lot like gods, changing water into land and chaotic wilds into well-behaved gardens. Doesn’t matter it’s naturally barbarous and banshee filled. To them, nature’s imperfect, untidy, disobliging, needs to be arranged, embellished, put into working order, fine-tuned, made pleasurable by their oh-so-lofty art. I mean, really. And they’re still at it—draining thousands of acres, some boggy, some fenny, some acidic, some alkaline, all heavier than their innumerable sins. Despite having legs, they sometimes flow together like one fluid, full of dark energy. Other times, they toil alone, like bug-eyed optimists, until they stagger and collapse. So contrary, pigheaded. Honestly, they make me tired.

Me, I’m lower key, only hum in the howl of the world, just stay my course, and try to remain unpredictable. Sure, from time to time I add to their troubles, and can’t help pouring a thick slurry of muddy goo over my banks. Often when the North Sea boils up a tempest and unleashes sheets of rain. Or sometimes just when these humans piss me off.

Meanwhile, they pump and pump and the polders bleed for months into years, while a heavy layer of decaying vegetation that’s halfway to being coal but still soggy—this peat—grows denser, compacting, sagging, slumping the polders lower, down below sea level, making it way more dangerous if a dike breaks. But they figure it’s all worth it, since peat yields fuel and salt—two gold mines, if they scoop the peat safely, from barge or boat in shallow water, using long sticks with baskets on the ends. Men pile it all onto barges, and spread it out on the grassy dikes, and women and children stomp it down, and keep turning and turning it till it dries, then cut the peat into squares and stack it all up neat. I like watching that, the natives dancing on sod, their rhythmic whumping and their chatter, with fragrant mountains of peat scenting the dikes for miles when the wind blows.

Tough work and dangerous on those bogs. And deadly to fall into, as people keep proving. Locals don’t find the old bodies much now, but will by and by, in a future age of steel diggers the size of dinosaurs driven by humans pounding with monsters’ jaws. It’s still freakish when a bog man is snared by accident, maybe thousands of years after his death, naturally mummified and perfectly preserved, with eyelashes, chin stubble, and wrinkles all visible; organs, nails, hair, even stomach contents exquisitely preserved; the bronzed hide of skin supple; all the calcium dissolved from the bones, leaving them rubbery and deflated. Bog people are ghoulish denizens of leather and mud, golems or she-devils, lying under a spongy carpet of moss with a few sad trees poking out. I’m surprised how many braved violent deaths, then were pickled in that realm not land or water, but a door to the sky world, so tribes swore, while all the rotting weeds produced tiny flickering lights people hailed as fairies and ghosts. Commoner and king, young and old, wayward wife and unlucky thief, deformed child and outcast, religious sacrifices—all murdered and tossed into deep sog. Some ill-fated fools today tumble in from boats or stumble off dikes after dark and find themselves quagmired. The harder they thrash, the quicker they sink down into loam darkness, where they’re cured of life. But by and large turf skippers are a careful lot, working together like a single organism, more like slime mold than bipeds, or whalers flensing blubber from leviathan flanks.

No water, no peat. No rivers, no way to ship the peat fast and cheap to consumers, including the big turf users like brewers, salters, dyers, printers, bakers, distillers, smelters. I am their everything, everywhere, the caution and current of their lives. Thanks to their vast pantry of peat for fuel and inland rivers and waterways, with branching veins and arteries, the Dutch live like their country is twice its size, with everyone leading a double life, their own and the peat cycle’s culling and shipping.

Meanwhile, I see them for what they are—sacs of chemicals and salt water on the move, who slosh imperceptibly with every step. Yes, also natural wonders. But exactly half of every man, woman, and child is plain water. Nothing fancy. So it’s no surprise they’re drawn to me. It’s a kind of osmosis, one they hear and find soothing: the lisping sound of water seeking water wherever water mutters, in surf, in gutters, in mills, in fountains, chanting low notes below stone bridges. As I am drawn to their convoluted inlets and outpourings.

They are water vivified and unbound, languid walking lagoons, leaky estuaries, bogs on the move—all under their skin, driven by a nonstop windmill from birth to death. We are kin, so it’s no surprise they worship water, their true master and life giver. Makes sense: they’re waterworks working water to serve them, connect them all across a planet that’s mainly water anyway, not earth. They should have named it Ocean.

Are you the river or the rock? I often hear one ask another, or advise: Calm down, take it easy, go with the flow.

Clearly, they don’t know me very well. I’m moody. I can swell into rapid chaos, seem totally wild, even in stampede—when in truth I’m just rushing to get to safety. My brooks crawl through the countryside like babies. My humble white water crashes from side to side like lions in a cage. Currents corkscrew just below my surface. During storms, my frothing waves run like whippets. I am poetic as water syncopating over pebbles. Shouting mad and charging after people like a bear. Or peaceful and placid, a silver band lying across the land. All of it, and more. That’s a lot for one human to grasp. But they needn’t understand the powerful beasts they ride.