Today’s offering comes to us from Meagan Fischer, an emerging writer by trade and an edge-cultivator by life purpose. She is a current Community Ministry Certificate student with Cherry Hill Seminary and earned a Permaculture Design Certificate from Earth Activist Training with Starhawk in 2009. A lifelong student of the listening arts and group facilitation, she is a current co-host of the BUILD Community of Practice for conflict engagement practitioners working on pro-democracy efforts. Her writing has appeared in other faith-focused publications and her local newspaper, where she strives to make her right-sized contributions to collective trauma relief.
In California, we have this strange habit of referring to reservoirs – artificially created bodies of water held back with dams – as lakes. It’s a way of lying about the landscape. I was a young adult before I learned that most of the lakes I’d grown up visiting or hearing about were not the natural shape of the land. I have told my partner that this is why I have trust issues.
Whiskeytown Lake is no exception to this trend. I suppose I should have understood that it hadn’t always been there, because as a kid I heard that you could scuba dive down to the old town that had been flooded and find treasures. A park ranger dispelled this notion as mere rumor during my visit to Whiskeytown National Recreation Area last summer.
“Sunken Road” sign near Whiskeytown Lake [M. Fischer]
But it was not until I was a young adult that I learned that in creating Whiskeytown Lake, sacred and residential sites of the local Wintu tribe had been flooded. And there are still political leaders in my region who want to raise the Shasta Dam even more, which would flood the last remnants of sites where the Winnemem Wintu perform some of their rites today.
My entire watershed has been disrupted by dams that threaten salmon and prop up disharmonious methods of agriculture that depletes the top soil and drains aquifers, refusing them their natural replenishment by gathering water all in one artificial basin.
And yet, though this reservoir posing as a lake would not survive the removal of the Shasta Dam, there is an ecology here. I am not an ecologist and cannot detail the many imbalances I’m sure exist here. What I can report is that, like they said in Jurassic Park, life finds a way.
Last summer my partner and I visited this lake that I grew up visiting every summer, but had not been to in years. We rented a double kayak and paddled along the shoreline, venturing into little fingers of water lined with dense foliage, full of birds and giant spiders whose webs stretched between cat tails. I didn’t know spiders that big existed at these latitudes.
I saw a squirrel-sized bright red creature fling itself from a log into the water at our approach, and could not for the life of me figure out what animal would be that fast, that large, that vivid in color, and apparently amphibious. Squirrels don’t swim much that I am aware of, or hold their breath for as long as I observed, during which time nobody emerged. Crawdads tend to stay underwater.
The young men at the boat rental docks were unable to help us speculate about the identity of this creature. They had also never seen the giant spiders, and said they didn’t opt to kayak much. We suspected they prefer the thrilling rush of a motorboat across the open middle of the reservoir over the quietly diverse edges.
The author’s partner kayaking in Whiskeytown with a littered balloon retrieved from the resevoir. [M. Fischer]
My younger self wants to tell you about my most vivid and precious memory of Whiskeytown, at a different edge, a small car pull-out area at the side of the road, next to trees.
Deer. Eating out of my hands! My hands, cupped, filled with granola or trail mix, and deer, eating out of my hands. Little deer, probably, but then seemed so big because I was little, shorter than her, or him if antlers hadn’t grown in yet. Unbelievable.
Adult me says this is concerning. Was this deer starving? Why was she willing to eat from a human’s hands? But then, I was so small, probably not frightening like the big humans. We were both young, I think, though I didn’t know then that she was young.
She ate from my hands and I felt her magic, her saliva, her magical muzzle cooties, all over my hands – the metaphysical mycelial glitter of deer magic. My hands, they were tingling; she touched me!
Then my aunt, the one who had provided the granola, she poured water over my hands, made me wash off the deer magic. Devastation. I want to keep it; I want to keep it forever. Is it possible I still have it?
Deer [Pixabay]
I must admit I’d probably do the same with a young person in my care these days, because I don’t know what germs a deer might be carrying. But perhaps if I could be there for my younger self, I’d tell her:
The water is just washing off germs, not the magic. Feel that magic in your hands, feel that connection. Let us hold hands, I’ll get the germs and magic on me too. Feel it run up our arms into our hearts into our chests where it will stay forever. And the water we use to rinse our hands is also magic, carrying the germs back into the dirt where they won’t hurt us, and carrying deer magic into the dirt just like every poop from that doe’s behind and every tuft of fur caught on a branch entwines the deer magic into the land.
And that has been happening for centuries, millennia, since long before you were born and I was born, since before that deer was born and since before your beautiful grandma, who lives in our house and whose ashes are spread on this land, was born. Can you imagine how long that is?
There is deer magic all around us, in these trees, in the dirt, in the reservoir that we call a lake. It’s all around us. It’s everywhere, mixed with all the other magic: the tree magic, the water magic, the spider magic, the you-magic. The world is full of magic, life, love, beauty. You are full of this same magic-life-love-beauty.
Can you run like a deer? Walk cautiously like a deer? Rub your head, your invisible antlers, against this tree like a deer? Careful, don’t get sap in your hair.
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