What Remains: Reflections on Line 3, Climate Activism, Home, and Hope

At a campground on the border of Illinois, the rush of passing trains shakes me awake. In the pauses in between, I listen to the waves lapping the banks of the Great Mississippi that curls around this peninsula of trees— along with the clamor of traffic crossing the bridge and beltway overhead. Nursing a cup of cold Nescafé, I walk to the edge and sink my feet into the stinky sand. 

All summer at the Line 3 pipeline resistance camps in Minnesota, I watched bass dance two feet below me as I hunted clam shells in the sparkling headwaters of this same river, right where it flowed from the womb of the earth. This downstream water sighs. Brown and green, it hides its treasures in silt, offering only a few shimmering rainbows of oil and the tickle of pinkweed on my ankles.

Seeking momentary solace in nature from the never-ending pavement of my road trip away from the frontlines, I follow their swaying stalks along the shore through bottle caps, cigarette butts, flip-flops, and washed-up tires into a patch of forest below the bridge, where I stumble upon the remnants of someone’s camp— abandoned to the rains of autumn. Or perhaps from fear of police looking to punish a person for sleeping nestled in the branches, for bathing in the river butt-naked as if they were born as free as the wind. 

I stand in the empty hearth of oak watching mold grow over tarp— remembering the sounds of the camps in the north and the singing of a hundred voices as the helicopters blew dust in our eyes and the police broke bones because we dared to love water as if it were alive. 

Then a train rumbles by and I catch myself forgetting not to think. I make my way back to the car and drive onward again, following the flow of river and traffic, trying not to get lost in the fact that we lost. That the pipeline that scientists call ‘Game Over’ is in the ground, and so few people seem to have noticed. That the horizon is not nearly as open as the days of my youth; the road will eventually run out and I’ll once again have to reorient myself to the cognitive dissonance of life away from the frontlines. That we failed— but tomorrow still comes. 

Alongside me, in a crack between the wild and the bridged, the Great Mississippi inches south— carrying memories no one would believe, even if it could speak in a way we could understand. 

************

Somewhere in southern Appalachia, a small town remains the same. 

After a twenty-year absence from the land that raised me, my route across the country takes me too close to just drive by and so I detour through instead— seeking, I suppose, some key to how I became someone who’d drive across the country to fight pipelines in other people’s backyards.  

It’s a trip back in time in more ways than one. The old barber shop is still a barber shop, the one bar is still a bar, the thrift store still holds bags of the local grandmas’ vintage polyester pants, and the low-income apartment building still sags into the edge of the river that winds through town. The fossil plant still pumps its steam into the clouds from the banks of the jade-green water, where fishermen still catch-and-release amidst the algae blooms. The people still smile and wave like they know you as they drive by on their way to clock-in at the nuclear plant in the next town over.

The only difference is that the country road to my childhood house seems narrower as I navigate its turns in my middle-aged body, and it appears that it hasn’t been paved since those teenage walks through every crevice of these woods at the edge of Wilderness and Company Town. Just beyond my old house, I follow memory down a deer path through the yellowing sugar maples and along the misty creekbed to where it empties into the cove. For the first time in half my life, I wade into the warm, muddy water and let Home wash over me as the river and I tell each other tales of the years gone by.

The heartbreaks and discarded dreams of youth; the unprecedented flood that recently covered this peninsula, depositing snail shells and animal bones amidst the juniper berries. The sound of multiple languages in my ears and the feeling of bliss when tossed by a Pacific wave into crystal-clear waters; the coal-ash that poured into the river some years back when the storage pond finally overflowed and cracked open. 

The parents’ eventual retreat back North to the sagging family farm after the work ran out; the decades in between, during which our lives were funded by nuclear waste. The crazy adventures of being born into poverty with a nomadic soul; the cancers that continue to spread throughout the land like the kudzu that wraps the trees along the banks.

The years of running and seeking and fighting before it all became as poisoned as home.

I dig my toes in the silt as if I could root myself at the edge of Then and Now and stay forever in one place— but the river and I both know that this cannot be. Instead, I gather a fistful of snail shells to place on my dashboard, take one last look with all of my being, and drive out of the forest, off memory lane, and onto the highway once again.

Back in Minnesota, Line 3 starts flowing with oil. Out west in Nevada, indigenous elders are evicted into the approaching winds of a pandemic winter and their homes plowed to the ground to make way for a lithium mine. In British Columbia, doors are broken open with axes so a fracked-gas pipeline can be shoved through. Behind me in the rearview mirror, Home fades away as I realize that no matter how much my odometer creeps along, I can never really leave the frontlines of the eco-war. There is no going and arriving, only reunions and moments of rest in between resisting and accepting. In those pauses, we remember again the feeling of rootedness, community, holism, and other ways of being with the Earth, and we carry those knowings like seeds— planting in the ashes from whence we came no matter where we go. 

The steamplant rises from the treeline as I descend again into the world we’ve made thus far and I breathe in, clutch the wheel, and wind my way again through What If’s and What Now’s like water moving around stone.   

In Chernobyl, I’ve heard, boars roam as wild as they did in the time before man. 

************

The switchgrass rises from the snow against a charcoal sky, where storm clouds dance between hilltops. The quiet symphony of falling snowflakes on a rural winter’s night crescendos as thunder rolls in and shocks of lightning illuminate the whitened fields just enough to remind us how small we are. 

Across the bonfire, my father tells me about a Diné man who once helped him with his dead car when we lived in New Mexico for a time in those decades when he still thought we’d escape this valley— how the man picked him up and took him home to meet his kids, treating him with a kindness he’d not experienced from strangers before. He asks me if a sweat lodge is like the saunas in the hotels in the days before and I explain that it’s more like going to church in a sauna. He can understand that, he says. He can also understand that Creator and The Holy Spirit are human names and we leave it at that. 

The truth is, he doesn’t know what to ask and I don’t know what to tell about my life in this new world. The media has done its best to divide us even further than the six feet and masks that deter his bad eyes from lip-reading and his deaf ears from hearing much more than muffled tones of voice. Somewhere in the years of driving semi-trucks back and forth across the country with nothing but talk-radio to keep him company, vocabulary itself became political. I know he simultaneously admires me and envies that I’ve traveled with a freedom he’s never experienced— seeing and learning things he never had the opportunity to, no matter how many miles he covered— but these days we mostly communicate by sending funny cat videos because it’s safest.

I try to explain how my journey to know this world and its cultures has taught me humility above all, due to the thousand mistakes I’ve made along the way, but then I sound ungrateful. And so we sit in the knowledge of our prospective ignorance by a fire lit with Amazon boxes, shouting stories of better times at each other, finding laughter in hindsight at moments in which we probably weren’t laughing. 

I say nothing of pipelines or the sound of singing inside a jail cell because that’d give him a heart attack. But I talk about the camps because I know he can admire a people hungry for their traditional ways of being with the earth. In truth, this old hunter was the first to teach me with respect of the ones who grew from these lands before my ancestors took root. He once sent me off to Standing Rock in his winter parka with pride. We could still talk without arguing then— in the days before. Before the red and blue lines in the sand, the cataclysm of bat blood, the entropy of once-benign weather.

In the flames between us now dance the contours of what we still share— fear and grief, strength and gratitude, the knowledge of forests and meadows, the blissful feeling of Spirit filling our hearts, the redemption of being welcomed at the table of another whose people have been harmed by our own, a desire to continue forever on this open road through mystery despite it all. 

These days he puts his faith in his Savior and fate, he says. I resent the idea of a male god determining my life, but can agree that we’re not as in control as we think. He sighs and then chuckles, takes a swig of whiskey and settles into its warmth, leaning forward on his cane— lost somewhere in nostalgia for a time when a man’s worth wasn’t measured by his life-insurance policy and advice was something one could still give the next generation. Still, the shadows of the fire hide his wrinkles enough that I can almost forget for a moment that we’re here already. 

We stare out at the darkened sky together while snowflakes dust our faces— the weary mountain man and his wary daughter— sharing the same peace of the wildness and mystery yet left to us. All around, nature swirls and douses us with a silence full of messages for which there are no words in our broken language. 

Still we listen. Still we try to hear. Still we fill in the blanks with human attempts at showing that we think we understand.

************

Tattered milkweed stalks dance in the winter winds, reminding me that once upon a time I bundled their cottony ‘hair’ in leaves to make elf babies, or used their empty seedpods as tiny boats that I floated down the creek winding through my grandparents’ farm. Back in those days when this valley was still hidden enough that I imagined there were many more just like it. 

Trying to be a child in a time of chaos, my niece finds distraction in slime— fascinated by the million ways in which it can be reshaped again and again before returning always to a pool in her hand. She asks me if other worlds existed on this Earth before and I assure her they did. 

There are so many things I want to say to her but won’t, because I want her to have the sanctuary of childhood magic as long as possible. Instead, we walk through the junipers looking for fairy houses, marvel at frozen water and baby shrimp hatching in the thawing creek, and shoot ourselves down slick hillsides into snowy-white oblivion— laughter and fear tangled together in our chests all at once. She asks if fairies really exist and I assure her they do. I tell her about the animal and plant spirits and how I believe in them too; I see the struggle in her eyes as she decides she believes me, at least for a while longer. 

It’s harder with the adults. We speak in brief of the tragedies— the pandemic deaths and displacements; the wildfires, heat waves and floods; the racism and culture wars tearing our country apart— before returning to the facade of resilience. But we know in secret we’re all drowning our sorrows in alcohol, smoke-clouds, junkfood, or too much thinking.

We’ve learned that collapse doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve come to understand that most of us will continue to live amidst the dying. We feel grateful and guilty and selfish all at once. We try to figure out how to be with other humans again, and fail miserably. We stumble along, breaking down and starting over, reshaping ourselves and our world as we go. And in some strange way, this constant chaos actually gives me— if not ‘hope’— some small trust in at least enough of my species’ capacity to care for each other. Humans are simply too vulnerable and neurotic to have ever survived this long alone. And yet, we’ve weathered so much disaster, again and again. 

I know we’re changing the planet beyond repair this time. I’ve seen the ocean vomit plastic, forests burn, rivers turn orange, beaches wash away— but the presence of this child whom I love beyond measure walking next to me demands that I remember that life is the most relentless force on the planet. It exists in the darkest parts of the ocean, the deepest caves, the highest mountaintops, and even the dust of the dead and dying. We can’t stop so much of the destruction we’ve put into play, but what is left to us is still far more than we can grasp now.

There is still space for feeling the ecstasy of existence— we have to hold onto that.

She giggles when I press my ear to the wind, listening for the sound of robins practicing their springtime songs in Mexico— but she’s young enough to humor me when I swear that I hear them, and she says she does too. Then she puts her tiny hand in mine and time stills. My mind stops spinning and for a moment nothing exists but love and breath and two entwined spirits making our way through chaos by way of deer paths. We walk among the survivors for now, shape-shifters in a melting world, with a capacity to find and imagine beauty that defies logic— but remains nonetheless.

************

An eagle soars overhead and my new friend and I point in unison, mouths gaping open in silence so as not to disturb the red-winged blackbirds and mink frogs watching us from the reeds, or the trout and bass swimming below our canoe. 

Grandma— as she insists everyone call her— can’t hear or see well and so when we bottom out in the shallows I walk next to her, pulling the canoe along ankle-deep in soft loam and pointing out the silver clam shells glinting in the sunlight while tiny minnows lap at my skin. 

Across from us, our Anishinaabe hosts show us how they use wooden sticks to knock rice into their canoe, as their ancestors have done since time immemorial. Behind us, the rest of our flotilla push against the current to catch up as they share stories of the environmental frontlines near and far that led us all here, to Line 3. 

Our motley group ranges in age from 25 to 85; we come from rural towns and inner cities and a medley of racial, cultural and religious backgrounds. But despite the improbability of any of us ever meeting anywhere back in the “real world,” we all float together now amidst the rice stalks— bonded by a fierce, desperate love for the world we’ve been watching wilt our entire lives, and contemplating what these wetlands could look like in the years to come if we lose this next battle.

When the current nearly pushes us into the cattails, Grandma and I giggle like children and I pluck a cottony bloom so she can touch it. 

“How do you keep fighting?” I ask her. 

Her grin lights up her entire face with eternal youth as she waves her arm to take in everything around us. 

“I just love her,” she says, clutching the cattail to her chest. “So much.”

“But how do we keep hope?” I persist.

She places her weathered hand over mine and looks intently into my eyes as she squeezes.

“We never know what that one small action will be that turns the tide,” she says. “We have to always remember that.”

We drift for a while without speaking— for what more is there to say? The older we get, the more love and sadness we learn to hold without breaking. Downstream, a great blue heron swoops from the top of a jackpine and sends schools of walleye and northern-pike scattering in the clear blue water. The wind picks up and carries us back to shore, rice seeds forming islands around us as we move.

A few days later I pick Grandma up from 48 hours in the cell for allegedly chaining herself to a rocking chair in the path of the pipeline. She’s still smiling when she comes out. 

“I just thought of the river the whole time,” she tells me, eyes sparkling. “Wasn’t it so beautiful?”

And for a moment we’re back in the canoe, floating together through space and time, humbling ourselves to entropy and uncertainty— small humans that we are, finding bliss in a clamshell or cattail bloom.