I
Their dark winter fur molting in these spring months, the tender pelage beneath the color of ale in sunlight. The massive heads slumped and swiveling like plows, horns cast down like divining rods. Following some set of invisible semaphores. I say “semaphores” because a train bridge runs here now, has since 1870. The Falls of the Ohio were actual falls back then: a clean break in the limestone shelf that roared and made mist to refract the slant rays of evening sun. Graceful on their cloven hooves. I imagine the red calves timid by the shore at first, then coaxed across the current in the momentum of elders. The beasts trundling where train cars now trundle. The promise of salt wired into the nervous system, a map somewhere in the bones, or perhaps the broad, un-bifurcated chest. I like to think of them where our glass buildings now stand, heading south as they shed their heavy coats. Did the bison feel this same vague longing? The tabulate corals of the Devonian behind them, a sea of hardwoods ahead. Every day I ask what we’ve made, and why. The answer is a path in the wilderness, a fossil record of endless spirals: inscrutable as the heart, reckless as the ocean all this was and again will be.
II
It’s Earth Day 2022, a kind-of holiday that we kind-of celebrate and that feels increasingly sarcastic.
The 1990 Earth Day celebrants in Central Park left behind more than 154 tons of litter in what was later hailed by the NY Times as “a fabulous event.” 32 years on and it’s just the optics that have evolved, not the spirit. We have a way in this country of making something fashionable until it becomes so removed from its origins that it ceases to have any meaning at all. Perhaps this isn’t exclusive to American culture, but the effects here feel particularly acute, so deep is our obsession with consumption and monetization and the smokescreen of righteousness over it all.
It's Earth Day and I’m thinking of buffalo, by which I mean American bison. It wasn’t so long ago that bison herds grazed where you now sit reading. That they do not now is taken for granted, greeted with a bored, eye-rolling “Of course they don’t.” It’s an assumption, basically, but an assumption no less tragic for being commonplace, an assumption among many others that more or less order the world we live in, the one that we’ve made and keep making.
III
The trachea of a bison is the same diameter as the very largest PVC pipes used in home construction, and they’re able to warm even the coldest air inside a little cavity lined with several inches of muscle, fat, and fur before it’s processed by their lungs. They can jump 6 feet vertically and are incredible swimmers even in strong currents. They have chaps. These tufts of hair, sometimes called pantaloons, are swung by bulls in displays of threat, an act that sounds both terrifying and sassy. These same bulls weigh upwards of 2,000 lbs and can hit 35 mph at full gallop, often colliding at speeds close to that. Their delicate brains, which seem to have remained unchanged over long periods of geologic time, are protected during these collisions by a system of bone struts dividing the inner and outer walls of their skulls, thus dispersing the impact. It’s not a coincidence that many American football teams, both professional and collegiate, have the bison as their mascot.
Bison were hunted to the brink of extinction for sport: gunned down by settlers drawn into the cult of Manifest Destiny, often shot from moving trains and left to rot by the thousands across the plains. From the most numerous mammalian species on the planet to just over 500 in a matter of decades. This is as good a working definition of savagery as any I can think of, one of many done in the name of civilization. But the genocide was two-fold. Bison served as a veritable supermarket for countless indigenous groups of The Great Plains, and with their rapid disappearance entire ways of life were lost just as rapidly.
IV
At 6:30 pm on April 22, 2022, (a.k.a. Earth Day) Wynn Bruce of Boulder, Colorado set himself on fire in the plaza of the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Bruce was a practicing Shambhala Buddhist, and his death was an act of protest to the US government’s apathy in the face of rapid, human-caused climate change and the related mass extinction currently underway. Mr. Bruce’s actions were not sarcastic. Self-immolation is not marketable and is thus beyond the reach of capitalism. Thich Nhat Hanh, speaking about the monks of Saigon that set themselves alight in protest of the war in Vietnam: “To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with utmost courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.” The words of the “Intro” section of Mr. Bruce’s Facebook page read, “The Truth waits for eyes that are unclouded – by longing.” The mascot of the university that’s just a short bike ride from Mr. Bruce’s home is — you guessed it — Ralphie the Buffalo.
V
There are plans to build a statue of an American Bison in Parkway Village. I hope it’s six feet tall and twelve feet long and gets the angle and placement of the hump over the front shoulders just right. Maybe someone in a sensible Corolla or insensible Tahoe will pause for a moment, noticing how the sheen on its brass torso is both brown and blonde depending on the angle, just as it was when they migrated along the same trace. Maybe the driver will feel a moment of vague longing before the light changes. Among our many false assumptions, perhaps the most dangerous is that of progress. It has become our single, unifying belief, our American faith, the vile taproot of this ever-striving, ever-harming, ever-justifying empire. Racing ahead and then trying to get back where we started. Always realizing a little too late what we’ve had and lost. Forging onward without ever quite fathoming where onward might actually be, or at what cost.
I seem to have mostly lost the language of prayer, but as I thought of how others once lived on this land and how we might live on it now the words “What we need is here” kept surfacing. These lines from the poet Wendell Berry give me something akin to hope: “Abandon, as in love or sleep,/holds them to their way, clear,/in the ancient faith: what we need/is here. And we pray, not/for new earth or heaven, but to be/quiet in heart, and in eye/clear. What we need is here.”
by Caleb Brooks