The Firewood 008: Reservoir
Humans have a tendency to both make the world go faster and make it slow down. We're not really very good at either.
Hello, friends.
You probably didn’t notice, but I did indeed miss sending out an email last week. I was dealing with a weekend retreat (more on that soon), the ongoing process of moving out of my apartment of seven years, a project deadline, and my lavender plants getting root-bound and needing to be repotted. Oh! But Substack was kind enough to feature me on their blog, which is why a lot of you are here. So, welcome! Please say hello. I hope you stick around.
Today I want to talk about some deep water. (Happy Scorpio new moon!) And we’re headed back to the Catskills, so buckle up for a few classic I-87 traffic jams.
Ashokan farewell
Between 1907 and 1915, the newly-formed New York City Board of Water Supply assembled five-and-a-half miles of dams and dikes around a valley in the Catskill Mountains to impound the Esopus Creek into what is now known as the Ashokan Reservoir. In the process, over 12 miles of railroad were rerouted, two thousand residents were relocated, and thousands of graves were disinterred as cemeteries were moved to higher ground. “A handful of bones, a glass full of dirt,” one graduate student at Case Western Reserve University summed it up in her 2013 master’s thesis about how the relocation of Catskills cemeteries embodied the idea of “the liminality of the body after burial.” With its deepest point at over 180 feet below the surface, it’s the deepest of the reservoirs that serves New York City, a shadow for the city that can’t seem to stop growing — as the state motto on our license plates put it, excelsior! — ever upward.
Legend has it that there are entire villages completely submerged underneath the reservoir’s waters, as though their residents just packed up and left after somebody nailed eminent domain notices to their front doors. Not quite. A 2002 article in The New York Times called the Ashokan “the Catskills’ own Atlantis” as it detailed the effects of a drought that peeled back the reservoir’s waterline and exposed lingering scars of the land’s history: a horseshoe here, the stone foundation of a long-gone tavern there. But there weren’t, for instance, church spires still standing defiantly and pointing toward the sky as the waters receded. Sometimes when we want to see our history laid bare, we want to see it still intact, frozen in time. Usually, there’s more to process and piece together.
I wound up at the shore of the Ashokan Reservoir last Sunday afternoon. I’d been in Woodstock for a lovely retreat with Radical Awakenings, the group I wrote about a bit last week. (A couple of you emailed me to ask if I’d write more about embodiment work. Ask and ye shall receive! In a week or two, that is.) A group of six of us had decided to do a COVID-safe gathering and tune into the virtual retreat, which was hosted from Los Angeles. But mid-morning on Sunday, our last day, I couldn’t handle sitting still or listening. I could blame this on a lot of things. The knowledge that this intensive yearlong program will soon be over. The emotional upheaval of knowing I have just a few weeks left in New York City before I move out in search of more space and more nature. The jolt of the election results coming in as my retreat-mates and I were running around in the backyard talking about squirrels and deer and pinecones and suddenly heard the neighbors start screaming and initially had no idea why. The Instagram and TikTok videos coming in from back home of wild celebrations in the streets, the first thing in months that’s made me miss the intoxicating energy of New York and forced me to question my decision to leave.
The feeling that change has decided to accelerate, that time is suddenly moving faster, that things are ending and things are beginning at a pace that would’ve been unthinkable just weeks ago. Even with planning. Even with Google Calendar. Even with 2020’s ongoing curveballs.
I couldn’t handle it.
If you’re a cat owner (like I am), you know those moments when the cat just goes bonkers and starts running around and crashing into walls and howling. I was about to start running around and crashing into walls and howling. But I’m a 36-year-old woman, not a cat, so that would be an uncouth move on my behalf. Instead I apologized to my wonderful retreat-mates, got into the Jeep, rolled down the windows, turned on the ‘90s alternative station on satellite radio, and drove the long way along twisting rural roads to Rte. 28 along the banks of the Esopus Creek, the waterway that was dammed to form the Ashokan Reservoir.
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and warped time
One of my favorite movies is the Coen Bros. 2001 O Brother, Where Art Thou, in which — spoiler alert — there’s a scene depicting a Tennessee Valley Authority-led flooding of a valley for a hydroelectric power project. First, the water trickles; then it sluices; and then, in a pivotal moment for the plot of the movie (like I said, spoiler alert) it begins to gush intensely down a hill and within a minute or two there’s a cow floating in the water (among other things). In reality, flooding a valley takes quite a bit longer. For the Ashokan, it took two years.
Thanks to some well-documented research, we knew pretty early into the COVID-19 pandemic that our perceptions of time were being distorted. “Unmoored from the usual rhythms of our daily lives, time feels elastic, stretching infinitely ahead and then, without warning, snapping back,” Arielle Pardes wrote in Wired. Or had our grasp of time really been so stable or natural in the first place? Rather than continuing to consider life to be a sort of ordinary progression of birthdays and anniversaries and 9-to-5s, we can now see that the whole time we’ve really been in the simultaneous presence of the imperceptibly fast and imperceptibly slow. With our schedules now upended — the dams on our little reservoirs of time — we no longer have the same pretenses of order.
In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium is the theory that the evolution of a species primarily consists of long periods of inertia peppered with comparatively rapid and fairly unpredictable intermittent changes. Previously, the prevailing theory (from the likes of Darwin) had argued for gradualism, the idea that evolution is moving at a relatively constant and ongoing rate. It sort of feels like 2020 is one of those punctuating moments for our whole planet, but then it’s like, OK, take a step back — hasn’t this rapid change really been going on since the 1960s? What about the 1850s? When did things start to move so fast?
Maybe they haven’t. After centuries of human civilization trying to make the world more predictable from Stonehenge to assembly lines, we now seem hellbent on making things more chaotic. I mean, it’s fun! Push alerts about Steve Bannon getting arrested on a yacht are like cultural crack, even if it’s a wildly irrelevant news story for the vast majority of us. What COVID laid bare is that we liked fake fast. It was addictive. And then you threw us into an actual crisis and we realized we’d gotten hooked on hysteria. How much did that change our behavior? Recently I was talking to a friend about the coronavirus resurgence this fall and whether we’d encounter supermarket shortages and toilet paper hoarding again. And our conclusion was no — but not because we’re more measured. It’s because we’re exhausted. We burned out on fake fast. Fake fast doesn’t actually speed up the pace of life; it just tricks us into thinking that it did.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, so many of the much-covered “pandemic habits” from baking to houseplant hoarding are weird little ways of trying to reintroduce some element of slowness and to try to put the scale of time back in balance. Sourdough can rise for a full 24 hours. A scarf doesn’t knit itself. The latest leaf on my monstera plant took three weeks to unfurl. But just like how there’s an element of human artifice to how damned fast everything seems to be moving thanks to push alerts and real-time media, that monstera can’t thrive at all in my apartment without a grow light and a regular watering schedule (that I stick to thanks to alerts on an app) and a cute humidifier I bought on Amazon. Fake slow can be wonderful. But it isn’t the antidote to fake fast.
Accepting the chaos
About half an hour of ‘90s music down winding roads later, I parked by the Ashokan Reservoir’s spillway road, which has been closed to car traffic since it was deemed a security risk after 9/11. The water levels were low enough to show bits of the concrete reservoir bed poking up along the shoreline, and visible in the woods lining the reservoir were dozens of overturned rowboats, their paint looking bleached in the unseasonably warm and unusually strong November sun. Sometimes an artificial body of water can be mistaken for a natural one pretty easily. Not this one. The concrete shores, paved causeways, and municipal buildings are a giveaway that these are tranquil waters thanks to human engineering. I’d found myself in a state where I couldn’t handle the chaos of fake fast, and unintentionally wound up driving to a temple of slow — our expensive, ingenious attempts to bring order and predictability to our communities.
If Stephen Jay Gould is to be believed, the natural world exists in a push-pull of fast and slow, and humans have a long history of trying to alter and control both. We like to slow down and control the unpredictable, and we like to speed up the stuff that tends to lag and stall. But what’s resulted isn’t a balance. It’s fake slow that’s too slow, and fake fast that’s too fast. The unpredictable happens anyway. So does the predictable.
But maybe that was inevitable. As my friend Julie tweeted earlier today, “I am long entropy and chaos.” (There’s really no other way things work.) Your meditation retreat is probably trying to slow things down too much. Your Twitter alerts are artificially speeding things up. Sometimes all you need to do is get the hell away from both and just start driving somewhere with no direction in mind, whether that’s literal or figurative.
Stay wild,
Caro
PS: Speaking of chaos, my favorite inhabitant of the White House ever — Rebecca Coolidge — finally got her proper enshrining in a New York Times trend piece.