Theme: SIPHON

In the West, water runs uphill toward money.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

Innocent, courageous, curious, the characters of Canadian literature have a longstanding reputation as victims: servants of colonialism, and explorers of an unruly nature. In her anthology, Survival, Margaret Atwood presents this underlying theme and poses Nature as a great Monster. She demonstrates time and again the monster’s fury, her weapons being rock, ice, and trees. But where in the story, does this leave the role of grass? It’s as if explorers reached the edge of the prairie and found the ample belly of the beast, naked and defenseless. Here, they thought, we can create order.

So they started carving straight lines running to the east and west, establishing order, and feeding the coasts. In some ways, they were playing the landscape’s own game, a game of motion, draining steadily to the east.

The uplift of the mountains created a gentle tilt of the old sea bed, a consistent slope of ten feet to the mile from the mountains all the way to the Mississippi. This tilt meant the plains would drain, but slowly.

Richard Manning suggests that our infrastructure was a continuation of motion, only now it was substantially sped up. Finally, the landscape was the victim. In Survival, Atwood presents some literary works that mark a critical shift in the perception of Nature from that of a monster, to one of a victim. Earle Birney’s poem, Transcontinental, tells the story of the Railroad through new eyes.

…behold this great green girl grown sick

with man                        sick with the likes of us?

Toes mottled long ago by soak of seaports

ankles rashed with stubble

belly papulous with stumps?…

…For certainly she is ill                her skin

is creased with our coming and going

and we trail in her face the dark breath of her dooming

On the Prairie, we are left to deal with her two sides, juggling her quiet malleability with her unpredictable rage. The “creases of our coming and going” were like canals, moving not only resources, but power. And with it, there is a steady drainage of people. Farmers, no longer able to compete with conglomerates, move on. The landscape continues to be siphoned.

This is a story not only of resource loss, but also the loss of a quality vital to place making, the unknown. As we build more sameness, and deplete or contain all rarities, we’re establishing a new emptiness. It becomes increasingly more difficult to lose oneself in the wildness of a place, as there is little left to be found.

More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost