A Diary in the Age of Water, page 20
I couldn’t answer. I think I just blinked in silence.
“We’ve done terrible things to water,” Hilde said. “And we’re mostly water!” she added passionately. But what she next said made my chest constrict. “What if water doesn’t like being owned or ransomed? What if it doesn’t like being channelled into a harsh pipe system or into a smart cloud to go where it normally doesn’t want to go? What if those hurricanes and tornadoes and floods are water’s way of saying that it’s had enough? But it feels trapped….”
My mouth gaped and I shook my head. I can’t remember what I responded. I’m sure I said nothing and we finished the dishes in silence. We’ve been doing a lot of that lately.
I thought to myself, this isn’t my Hilde speaking, this is all Hanna.
Beneath a sketch of the human chakras, I read the following passage in Hilde’s diary this morning: Memory streams in a braided and recursive path, meandering Ouroboros-like toward itself. Memory stirs up sediments that have lain for eons; re-suspending, re-examining, as if new. Then cascading toward the abyss of truth and paradox. The collective. The great ocean of thought. Memory is water.
Hanna is turning my logical scientific daughter into a babbling conspiracy theorist! Even Daniel would not have gone so far! Where has my Wetzel-quoting daughter gone?
August 2, 2065
HETEROCYST: A specialized nitrogen-fixing cell of some cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Nitrogen fixation is the conversion (chemical reduction) of gaseous nitrogen to ammonia. The heterocyst’s thickened cell wall maintains the internal anaerobic environment necessary for fixation to occur and allows certain cyanobacteria (notably Anabaena, Nostoc and Aphanizomenon) to bloom under conditions of dwindling nitrogen concentrations.
—Robert Wetzel, Limnology
For a primitive organism, blue-green algae are sophisticated revolutionaries that developed big cheats—highly specialized adaptations—at great cost to most other life. Their thick-walled heterocysts are an example.
Heterocysts apparently originated in the Precambrian some two and a half billion years ago, when some prehistoric multicellular blue-green alga became the first microbe to produce oxygen through photosynthesis.
Photosynthesis was the first big cheat. Because the cyanobacteria could exploit a new and almost limitless source of energy—sunlight—they exploded and transformed a Precambrian Earth of mostly hydrogen, methane, and sulphur into an atmosphere rich in oxygen. The Great Oxygen Event brought in a diversity of new oxygen-breathing life on Earth, but not before causing one of the greatest extinction events. Free oxygen is toxic to anaerobic organisms such as filamentous stomatolites, which were the dominant life forms then. Free oxygen also reduced the greenhouse gas methane, which then bonded with oxygen to create carbon dioxide and water. Through this process a thinner atmosphere emerged. The Earth began to lose its heat, triggering the longest glaciation period on Earth. It was a game-changer.
Heterocysts are the second big cheat. They’re highly specialized and sophisticated independent cells that form “on demand,” when nitrogen is scarce. The heterocyst wraps itself in a semi-permeable thick wall to keep out the oxygen to maintain its own anaerobic environment in an aerobic community of cells. The big cheat is maintaining an anaerobic inside in an outer aerobic environment. The heterocyst gets its organic carbon from its vegetative mates through a pore in its thick wall and its reduced nitrogen is, in turn, transferred to its mates.
The blue-green algae had found a way to play both games at the same time.
I’m all for those big cheats. But that American girl…. What’s her game? How is she cheating? How is she changing the game? I know that she will incorporate adaptations to suit her kind at the expense of the rest of the world, my world. I can feel its flow cast me aside and engulf my daughter. The American fabricates these ridiculous fantasies based on pseudoscience and crackpot water science that is sweeping my girl into a tide of insidious intrigue.
Those “twins”—they behave like twins—believe that water responds to our feelings and intentions. “We are mostly water, after all,” Hilde keeps reminding me. She calls water an altruist! “Water will save us,” she says, “but we must save it first.” She tells me that water has been telling us for a while to do something, to help it and set it free from its interminable suffering.
I remember something she’d written earlier in her journal:
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 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 remembered my own ridiculous notion years ago when I was an honours student—about water containing life-giving energizing properties, about water itself being alive. Hilde echoed these notions in her own diary last February. To assert that water is in fact alive is already ridiculous; to suggest that water has the intelligence to respond to intention, or even has its own intention at all, is beyond ridiculous.
Water is just water. Isn’t it?
September 25, 2065
KUMBH MELA: Named after the mythical water pot, the Kumbh Mela is a festival centred on the Ganges River that celebrates creation. According to Hindu mythology, the Ganges River originates in the heavens and is considered a sacred bridge to the divine. The Ganges is a place for crossing from one place to another. Hindus cast the ashes of their ancestors into the river to ensure their transition to the heavens. The Ganges is worshipped as a goddess and believed to cleanse and wash away spiritual and material impurities. The Ganges “is saturated with antiseptic minerals that kill bacteria. Modern bacteriological research has confirmed that cholera germs die in Ganges water.”
—Vandana Shiva, Water Wars
I hadn’t seen Hilde since the day before yesterday and I had started to think that Hanna was back in town. Hanna sometimes just appears—even Hilde won’t know the American is in town until she’s right at our doorstep. Then Hilde will disappear for days. But she explained at supper today: “I went with Nancy Skywatcher to an Anishinaabe water walk and blessing. We walked twenty kilometres along Lake Ontario.”
I remember the inaugural Lake Ontario water walk that Una took me to when I was five years old. Josephine Mandamin, the Anishinaabe Elder who started the movement, was there. Una and I started early in the morning, joining the others at our favourite river, the Credit. We walked for hours in what soon turned into the hottest day of the year. Una even took a turn at carrying the water, after being smudged. She winked at me as I walked proudly on her left and a man with a feathered staff walked on her right.
At the ceremony in Marilyn Bell Park, they threw in sacred tobacco. They prayed and sang for the water: Ngaa-izhichigemi onji Nibi. We do this because of water.
The Indigenous peoples in Canada have always considered water a sacred gift to be cherished and revered. They teach that water—Nibi—has spirit and that women, as the “keepers of the water,” hold the primary responsibility to protect it.
“Nancy says that water is the gift of life,” Hilde said. “Water is sacred and guided by spirits. It’s the transporter of other energies. She says we should give thanks and sing to the water to resonate vibrational healing. Water assists us in power. She says that the water spirit is feminine. Nancy even had a chance at the ceremony to read something from what Elder Josephine said at the inaugural walk in 2017.” Newly excited, she gestured for me to wait and then ran into her room. I heard her argue with Kleos, who meowed balefully. Then Hilde emerged with her notes and read to me: “‘Water has to live. It can hear, it can sense what we’re saying, and it can really, really, speak to us. Some songs come to us through the water. We have to understand that water is very precious.’ Isn’t that beautiful and moving?”
I think I nodded. As beautiful and moving as it is, it’s not practical or logical. Why has Hilde abandoned science?
Hilde’s entry in her journal was a quote from Josephine that had been passed down from grandmother to grandmother: “As women, we are carriers of the water. We carry life for the people. So when we carry that water, we are telling people that we will go any lengths for the water. We’ll probably even give our lives for the water if we have to. We may at some point have to die for the water, and we don’t want that.”
This makes me uncomfortable.
These are the dangerous words of an activist.
Mother of God, Hilde! You talk of saving water to save us, but first you must save yourself!
January 15, 2066
BUTTERFLY EFFECT: The sensitive dependence on initial conditions, whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere
I don’t know why I didn’t look Hanna up before. It turned out to be very easy, given Orvil’s celebrity status through his billionaire wife and his water empire. He had no private life.
Hanna’s last name is Lauterwasser!
She is Orvil’s daughter by Beulah. She and Hilde are even the exact same age. To the day! What are the odds of that? What irony that the girl orphaned through my actions should wind up on my virtual doorstep after befriending my daughter. I’m sure the girl knows nothing of my earlier tryst with her father. Nor of my part in sending him and her mother plummeting eighty-two metres to their watery graves.
Hilde loves her. Of course she does; Hanna is her half-sister. Though I will never tell her that. How can I tell her that Orvil is her father as well as Hanna’s? Because then I would have to admit that I was instrumental in his murder. Hilde has never asked me about her father, a fact that both relieves me and disturbs me. Does she know something after all? Does the American?
I think the two girls have become lovers. I don’t begrudge Hilde this joy; God knows she deserves some happiness in this horrible world. A world that her mother helped to create. I just wish it wasn’t with that American girl.
Hanna just appears, as if from nowhere, and then I don’t hear from Hilde for days. She only returns when Hanna is gone, having slid back into that dark swamp south of us. Hilde is better for the visit; I see that much. I can see it in her almost sublime comportment, in her hopeful nature. She flows with happiness. Then babbles nonsense about water.
I still haven’t met Hanna; nor do I want to. It would be too awkward. Too painful. I think Hilde wonders with some disappointment why I don’t invite the American girl over. She’s hinted often enough. My excuse about our illegal tech appears insufficient.
I just can’t bring myself to meet that parasitoid. No, it’s not that…. I know what I really fear: that she’ll see right into me. And recognize what I am.
Frack me! I wish I had never given Hilde my copy of Wetzel.
March 2, 2066
SEICHE: Refers to the up-and-down, seesaw-like oscillation of a water surface, or thermocline, of a lake about a line of no vertical motion (node). The node coincides with regions of maximum to-and-fro horizontal motion of the lake water masses. Surface seiches are the most conspicuous form of standing waves. Seiches are caused by strong winds and changes in atmospheric pressure or seismic disturbances. The standing wave, which can be created in just moments, sloshes between the shores of the lake basin and—in the Great Lakes for example, where surges as high as ten feet have been recorded—it is often referred to as tide-like.
—Robert Wetzel, Limnology
A seiche is basically the “sloshing” back and forth of water, like what happens when you carry a cup of coffee across the room. The bigger the cup, the bigger the slosh. In a large lake, like one of the Great Lakes, it can fall and rise a whole metre in fifteen minutes. Close to a hundred years ago, a sudden three-metre seiche hit the Chicago waterfront on Lake Michigan and swept eight fishermen to their deaths. Seiches … they’re not to be trifled with.
I’ve been checking Hilde’s journal every morning after she goes to class or work. This morning I read her latest entry. No sketches this time, just a short narrative: Rhythm undulates—at once turbulent and calm—signalling its fractal presence. Rhythm scours and builds its music with infinite patience and precision. Spiralling. Oscillating in successive rushes, glides, surges, and trickles. Self-organizing. Coherent. Viscous. Rhythm is water.
Since I found out that Hanna is Orvil’s daughter, I’ve been on high alert. If I were Daniel, I’d be having non-stop migraines. But I’m not Daniel; I’m Hilde’s mother.
One day she and Hanna will figure it out and come to me with a three-metre-high question. That’s when I’ll drown.
June 9, 2066
RESIDENCE TIME: The time that any given water molecule remains in a waterbody. Measurements of throughflow or total water renewal rate (the time it takes a waterbody to replace all its water) is also called its flushing rate.
—Robert Wetzel, Limnology
The time it takes an entire system to replace its water is highly variable and depends on the nature of the system. It takes around ten days for the atmosphere to replace its water. It takes thousands of years for the sea to do the same. Rivers are pretty fast, usually replacing their water within weeks. Groundwater, large lakes, and glaciers can take hundreds of years.
When I snuck into Hilde’s room I found her notebook on her bed, as usual. It was almost as though she’d left it there for me. Kleos lay curled up beside it. Upon seeing me, she stretched her sleek body into a bow, one paw still claiming the notebook. I had to smile at Hilde’s little sentry. Not terribly effective. Far too friendly.
This morning Hilde left me with this latest entry: Motion is the demon and angel of change. Motion flows endlessly on a tangent with time, destroying and creating. Motion carves sinuous patterns of stable chaos. In its turbulent wake or gliding caress, motion heralds transcendence. Motion is water.
My hope is that Hilde’s itinerant American friend has a naturally high flushing rate. She will tire of my Hilde, who is unexceptional, and then she will move on like her father before her.
July 30, 2066
SOLASTALGIA: The sadness caused by environmental change or loss. Solastalgia is the distress caused by the lived experience of the transformation of one’s home and sense of belonging. It manifests in a feeling of desolation.
—Glenn Albrecht, Earch Emotions
Over fifty years ago, Professor Glenn Albrecht of the University of Newcastle created the term solastalgia to describe Australians’ deep sense of loss as they watched their landscape around them change and deteriorate: familiar plants not taking, gardens not growing, and birds disappearing. He believed that this feeling of displacement was similar to what Indigenous populations originally felt when they were forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. The term derives from solacium (solace), nostos (return home), and algia (pain)—yet another paradox that aptly conjures the word nostalgia.
There is no depression more debilitating than knowing that you cannot go back home, even though you’re already there.
Long before Albrecht, the Welsh used the term hiraeth to describe a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return—a home which maybe never was—and the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.
There is only one planet Earth.
There is only one Eastern Townships, full of pastoral rolling hills and fields with their faint fragrance of ragweed, lilac, and manure. There is only one Yamasaki River, where I used to fish with my mother. Only one Credit River and Lake Ontario, jewels that once teamed with life and provided solace for a soul in search of home.
I catch myself glancing at Hilde with a mixture of longing, pity, and dismay. She is so young and energetic. And hopeful. At twenty-five, she is still full of questions about her world. Questions I can’t answer. There are times when I just can’t meet her eyes. They are too alive. Too hopeful. She still believes. She has a sense of wonder about this precious Earth. This once beautiful water planet. This once beautiful country, Canada.
Hilde still has faith. And friends. I don’t trust the American, though. I think she’s just like her father: an empty charmer. What are her motives with my Hilde? Hilde has nothing special to offer; she is, I fear, simple, pliable, and unexceptional. She is too easily led by superstition, from energy chakras to the magical properties of water. Hilde doesn’t know who and what Hanna is. And I won’t tell her.
When did I lose my faith and my friends? Was it when I turned Daniel in? No, it was way before that. Perhaps I missed them … or never had them in the first place.
Una never brought friends over either. My mother was a loner like me.
There are so many things I miss. But one stands out. My last summer in Quebec, when I met—then lost—what I thought was the love of my life.
I miss you, how you were when we first met. You were utterly beautiful. For a brief moment, I was so alive. The world was beautiful, and I was in love with it and everyone in it. You were my lens to the world. I thought you were my soulmate. You took the world with you when you left, Orvil. This world is no longer my world. Even the sun shines like a foreign star, mocking my existence here. I made you the enemy; but now I realize that I’m the enemy. Perhaps it’s not so much the world that I hate, it’s the people in it. People I can’t understand or identify with. People living meaningless lives, obsessed with material wealth and comforts.
I was once a seed, naïve and green and full of wonder and hope, when Hilde was herself a seed inside me. Now I’m an empty husk, cynical and grey, and Hilde is on a wild and uncertain trajectory with that American. Together, they are like a vortex, spiralling to new heights of imagination and fantasy. I see genius glitter in Hilde’s eyes, in her gliding movements and the flush of her face. She is so engaged in her world. She is a lake spilling its secrets. She is a woman in full bloom. I pray that the American does not devour her in their joyous hypnotic dance.
