A Diary in the Age of Water, page 18
I can feel it. Hilde’s weaning off me and she’s careening into dangerous waters with that American girl by her side. I can’t control her thoughts. I can’t stop her movements or her heart. She’s entered a vortex, and I can’t follow her. I saw a lingam on her desk the other day. Is she turning Hindu? Mother of God, why? It reminds me of that bizarre and disturbing thing she said back in June about Shiva cleansing the Earth with some crazy frequency dance.
My greatest fear is that the American girl is a parasitoid, feeding off Hilde and controlling her as she feeds. Does Hanna know something about me? Is she using Hilde to go after me? If she truly works for Google, she might know everything about me. Google is married to the NSA, and they run America. I’m sure she’s a spy.
If Daniel were around, he’d warn me: there are no innocent Americans in Canada.
I can’t caution Hilde. She calls me paranoid and a conspiracy theorist. Yet she believes everything Hanna tells her, from her speculations that water has memory and intention to her wild theories about quantum entanglement and purpose. Hanna says this, Hanna says that…. I can’t stand it.
I’m in trouble. I can feel its dank breath on my neck, sliding and coiling with sibilant purpose. Strangling me to death with slow violence.
Since CanadaCorp forced me to retire, I’ve felt a great unease. I still cycle to the university every day, pretending I’m doing something important, rummaging through their sparse libraries, which have been cleansed of real science. Pretending I’m doing some project that will make the world better. Sometimes I feel like I’m being watched or followed. Hildegard thinks I’m getting paranoid. She told me to find some friends. That makes me cringe. I’ve managed to kill my only friends.
Daniel is still missing. It’s been twelve years since he disappeared. I know he’s dead. Food for the feral dogs of Parkdale. Bitten by a disease-carrying rat—they’ve taken over parts of the city, flourishing in the detritus of human failure and abuse.
It was my mission to protect Hilde. She was the reason I didn’t get involved, kept my head down, and didn’t make waves … not even ripples. I chose her over the environment. Was I so wrong?
Hilde has chosen a different outlook. She’s become an activist, marching for water rights. Marching for the rivers and lakes of Canada. I fear for her, but she is fearless in her commitment. Just like her dead grandmother. Does Hilde realize that she’s an oxymoron? To fight for water and the environment is to fight against humanity. Because at the root of Daniel’s question—would you save the planet at the expense of humanity?—lies the deeper question: can humanity exist without destroying the environment? And has Hilde made her prognosis? I know Una still believed in her heart that we could. I always thought her optimism was naïve.
If I could choose to save the planet, with its incredibly diverse life and beauty of form, at the expense of humanity, would I? I keep abstaining, refusing to commit. Did Hilde make her decision yet? Or does she believe in humanity against all odds? Does she believe that we can change and, in so doing, save our planet and ourselves? It’s like believing in the lottery.
Either way, Hilde doesn’t need me anymore. And with Hilde’s new trajectory, I am—like detritus—left behind, empty, in her wake, swirling in a whirlpool.
Like that dead caterpillar.
January 8, 2065
ENDORHEIC LAKE: Deriving from the Greek term for “to flow within,” this describes a lake within a closed drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but converges instead into lakes or swamps. Examples include Mono Lake in California, Chad Lake, and the Aral Sea.
—Robert Wetzel, Limnology
Watersheds of endorheic lakes are often confined by natural geologic land formations, such as a mountain range, which cut off any outflow to the ocean. They are insular closed basins. Because outflow is chiefly through evaporation and minimal seepage, what goes in pretty much stays. Little gets out except through the evaporation process, which in its own way helps to concentrate substances that are left behind as water vapour is released. Mono Lake in California is so salty that brine shrimp thrive in it. Because endorheic lakes don’t effectively have flow through, they are also more sensitive to waste inputs; pollution gets trapped and becomes concentrated. When inflows stop coming in—due to the massive diversions in Chad Lake and the Aral Sea, for example—the lakes simply dry up.
God created endorheic lakes and men destroyed them.
It’s Una’s birthday today. She would be a hundred years old. I still can’t forgive her for “abandoning” me. I’ve become a hermit. I don’t talk to anyone.
Hilde is never home; when she isn’t at the university, or volunteering at the animal shelter, she’s with her rebel friends planning some march or other subversive action. Or worse, she’s slumming it with that American. When she’s home, she’s always in her room. Her sanctuary. Praying to water, I suppose. Every time I peek into her room when she isn’t there, I notice more bottles and more crystals on her “water altar.” I spend my days rereading my old textbooks. Most of them are outdated; their information is considered wrong. The textbooks have been rewritten to more accurately portray the political truth of a CanadaCorp Canada.
I gave Hilde my ancient Limnology textbook for her tenth birthday. It paints a picture of a world that no longer exists. Where the Mackenzie and Churchill rivers flowed north to the Arctic. Where the Fraser, Liard, and Stikine rivers flowed into the Pacific Ocean—not into the Rocky Mountain Trench. Where the Saint Lawrence was a river not a ditch and Niagara Falls was still a natural wonder of the world.
That’s why Wetzel is forbidden.
I belong to Wetzel’s world.
That’s why I don’t belong either.
February 14, 2065
SAPROTROPH: An organism that feeds on dead or decaying organic material by secreting enzymes into it and absorbing its nutrients. This form of extracellular digestion processes decayed organic matter and is most often associated with fungi and soil bacteria.
Saprotrophs break down organic matter from the dead bodies of plants and animals. By doing this, they release vital nutrients in a form that plants can use. They help recycle—or resurrect—dead matter into living matter. It’s that creation-destruction cycle that ecologist C.S. Holling, and economist Joseph Schumpeter before him, conjured to explain natural cycles within a healthy functioning system.
When I was sixteen, Una drove us to Nova Scotia. It was the first time I saw the Atlantic Ocean. What I didn’t expect was the incredible thrill of peace that accompanied it. The ocean felt primordial, powerful, and restful at the same time. It was vast, scary, and comforting. And I couldn’t help being drawn to the rhythmic surge of ocean waves and their dancing play with the light of the sun. It was the unknown, known; the unfamiliar, familiar. I was born in an “ocean” of amniotic fluid, after all.
As we walked along the cobbles of Hirtle Beach, Una pointed out the mass of seaweed and other flotsam washed up on the beach. She called it “wrack.” It was made of mostly sea grasses, algae, and some land plants that may have washed down from the local river or marsh. It was mostly brown algae such as Ascophyllum and Fucus, mixed with other algae and eelgrass. This was what her dead uncle Ernie used as composted fertilizer for his field near New Germany, she told me as I poked some with a piece of driftwood. It smelled of fish and brine. “It’s full of saprotrophs,” she told me. “Fungi specializing in wrack.” She bent down to scoop some sand and stirred the pile in the palm of her hand with a finger. “The tiny fungus Corollospora attaches itself to the sand and waits for the wrack to wash up. When it does, the fungus releases spores with bristle-like appendages that attach to the wrack to decompose it while keeping the fungus suspended in the sea foam.”
Who would have thought that sand was more than sand?
I normally don’t go into Hilde’s room—in order to respect her privacy—but today I wanted to look something up in her copy of Wetzel’s Limnology before I went for my daily bike ride to the university. I’d given her my only copy. I never found Wetzel, but I did find Hilde’s notebook, lying on her bed next to the purring cat. The notebook looked like mine but a bit smaller, with a leather cover and girdled by a leather string. The cat stretched over it as though it were her captured prize. Curious, expecting to find notes on the anomalous properties of water, I gently pulled the notebook out from under Kleos, who flung out a paw toward the leather string. I flipped through the pages. What I found was obviously a diary.
I had no idea that Hilde was keeping a diary too!
In truth, it was less personal narrative and more observations and short cryptic notes about things she found interesting. Reminders, ideas, descriptions, questions. Mostly about water. Its structure, hydrogen bonding, and its tendency to cluster or aggregate. Its chemical and electromagnetic characteristics. The vortex. The water bridge. “Tesla and the number three,” “Tesla and the Vedic scriptures,” “the global electrical circuit,” and on and on. Her entries read like components of a recipe. But a recipe for what?
I wondered if I was mentioned in there.
Then I stumbled on something far more intimate and illuminating. In her clean cursive handwriting she’d written: Love flows like water, gliding into backwaters and lagoons with ease, filling every swale and mire. Connecting, looking for home. Easing from crystal to liquid to vapour then back, water recognizes its hydrophilic likeness, and its complement. Before the inevitable decoherence, remnants of the entanglement linger like a quantum vapour, infusing everything. I always know where and when to find her on Oracle, as though water inhabits the machine and tells me. Water even whispers to me when my wandering friend is about to return to Canada from the dark abyss. She’s coming tomorrow! I’m beside myself with happiness!
She was writing about Hanna, of course. Then I read something that made my heart jump: It’s as though I knew her from before, before me, even. As though she and I belong together as part of something larger. I resonate with her presence….
Mother of God! Those are almost the exact words I wrote in May ’42 about Orvil and me! Had she been reading my diary? And if she was reading that passage then…
I frantically flipped to an earlier part of her notebook—past scrawled notes on the hydrological cycle and models of water clusters—looking for my name, for Orvil’s name. I flipped back to before she met Hanna, and read: Water is a shape shifter. It changes yet stays the same, shifting its face with the climate. It wanders the earth like a gypsy, stealing from where it is needed and giving whimsically where it isn’t wanted. Water is magic. Most things on the planet shrink and became denser as they get colder. Water does the opposite. This is why ice floats and lakes don’t completely freeze from top to bottom. Water is paradox. Aggressive yet yielding. Life-giving yet dangerous. Floods. Droughts. mudslides. Tsunamis. Water cuts recursive patterns of creative destruction through the landscape, an Ouroboros remembering.
Water is an altruist. Ultimately, water will travel through the universe and transform worlds; it will transcend time and space to share and teach. Water will do its job to energize you and give you life, then it will quietly take its leave. It will move mountains particle by particle with a subtle hand. It will paint the world with beauty, then return to its fold and rejoice. I am water. I am joy.
I put the notebook down and tiptoed out of the room, even though Hilde wasn’t home. I felt like I’d intruded into a sanctuary. I decided that her phrasing was just a pleasant coincidence and she had not stumbled across my journal. If she were to find it, I would be damned.
As I write this, I realize that my little girl has grown up right in front of me into a woman. She’s twenty-four, after all. I’ve been treating her like she’s still sixteen! She harbours deep thoughts about love and death. And where water is concerned, she’s a poet.
When did she become an artist?
February 22, 2065
TRITROPHIC INTERACTION: A set of interactions involving a co-evolved partly mutualistic relationship of: a plant, a herbivore pest, and a carnivorous predator, pathogen, or parasitoid. The plant achieves its defence by enlisting natural enemies as “body guards” against excessive herbivory using physical attraction or chemical attraction such as induced plant volatile chemicals.
Everyone knows about the primary metabolic compounds a plant produces to survive: sugars and amino acids. But plants also make secondary metabolites called allelochemicals that they use for defence. The volatiles escape into the air to attract, repel, or poison an insect or animal. Basil, eucalyptus, and pine trees give off obvious volatiles.
When a leafminer takes a bite from the leaf of a pea plant, the pea releases hexenol into the air. The aerosol attracts the miner’s predator, a parasitic wasp, which eats the leafminer.
Parasitoids are the alpha-predator; they exploit the unique volatile profiles of specific plants and their infochemical signals to locate prey to feed on. The plant, in turn, exploits a parasitoid’s specific appetite for the pest it wants removed. We call it co-evolution. It’s really just a case of “your enemy is my enemy—or in this case, my food.”
Is that what I did to Daniel? Did I bring in the predator to remove the pest?
Now the pest is gone and I’m left with the predator. And the predator is always hungry.
After Hilde left for class this morning, I searched for her leather notebook. I found it open and lying face down on her bed. Kleos had claimed it with one paw—guarding it.
I pulled it out from under the cat’s paw and read Hilde’s latest entry: Beauty reflects Nature’s flowing embrace. Deep and quiet, beauty captures divine radiance—refracting, magnifying, rejoicing—and bursts into a sparkling sea of serenity. Light personified. Beauty is water.
I flipped back some pages to find several drawings and frequency notations for Chladni sound figures and oscillating water wave patterns:
28.9 Hz = water drop shows hexagonal pattern (two polar triangles) that resembles the blossom of a lily
24.24 Hz = 4-fold standing wave, blossom of Paris quadrifolia and, at
38.45 Hz = 5-fold standing wave, blossom of the wax flower
79.7 Hz = 7-fold standing wave, the plant Siebenstern (Seven Star)
102.5 Hz = ultimate standing form—the spiral or whorl; universal form in nature and in the universe from sunflowers to galaxies = Golden Mean Ratio
Below these, I found another disconcerting gem: The spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos = “synchronized chaos” = stable chaos. Order only manifests where chaos self-organizes into some kind of order or stability. The phenomenon results from energy input, a property of living things, which commonly occurs wherever there is water. Water enables stable chaos through cooperative interaction. It is a covenant.
Mother of God! I can’t remember if Hilde and I ever discussed this. If we didn’t then she must have been reading my diary! Or is this more coincidence? Ironic synchronicity?
In any case, I must hide my diary; I’ve been leaving it in my room, unsecured. Or is it too late already? What has she read? She writes of beauty. That is good. That’s my little girl—gentle, kind, and unremarkable.
She couldn’t have been reading my diary, then.
March 24, 2065
SCHUMANN RESONANCE: Named after German physicist Winfried Otto Schumann, who predicted it mathematically in 1952 (and first detected it in 1954), it is a global electromagnetic resonance of the Earth’s electromagnetic field spectrum. The normal standing wave created in the Schumann cavity occurs at a wavelength equal to the circumference of the Earth, and at a base frequency (and highest intensity) of between 6–8 Hz (7.83 Hz). It is called the “heartbeat” or the “tuning fork” of the planet and coincides with alpha rhythms produced by the human brain during meditation, relaxation, and creativity.
As soon as Hilde left this morning, I slipped into her room, past her crowded water altar, to her bed where her notebook was sitting.
Then I read the latest entry in her diary: Nancy gave me an article by a Lake Superior Ojibwa Elder from many years ago: The article said that women are the keepers of the water. Women know the ways and the ceremonies to bless and purify water in our environment as well as the waters that make up seventy percent of our physical bodies. The women are the keepers of the water because they resonate with the natural cycles. The ceremony best occurs at the thirteenth moon and at a new moon. The song is sung once for each of the seven directions: east, south, west, north, above, below, and within.
The article tells women from all over the world to go and Sing. Sing to the river, sing to the ocean, sing even to their cup of coffee…. These are the days of the great purification of the Earth. We can either sit by helplessly watching the events take place or to be active participants in easing her passage. It can be as simple as singing a song at a river bank, putting our hands over a cup of water for our children’s consumption, giving thanks and blessing the water that goes into our morning coffee, or picking up the garbage at the beach.
The portion she’d underlined made my heart jump. Was it for my benefit? It reminded me of our tense conversation last August about me hating the world. Does she know I’m reading her journal?
April 10, 2065
PALEOCENE-EOCENE THERMAL MAXIMUM (PETM): Associated with a sudden release of carbon which occurred fifty-six million years ago. It took more than 150,000 years for the excess carbon to be reabsorbed. PETM triggered drought, monsoon floods, insect plagues, and extinctions. The temperature of the Arctic Ocean was around twenty-three degrees centigrade.
