Mixing Waters

Today I gathered dirt and water for my “Weaving Waters” collaboration with Jessica Green from the Summit Tunnel.  The Summit Tunnel is a railway tunnel in the Santa Cruz Mountains built by Chinese laborers in the late 1800s, where more than one horrific explosion happened.  The tunnel is no longer in use, having been dynamited in 1942 by the Army Corps of Engineers.

I perch on the roots of a splintered tree, dead but so alive with moss ferns and ivy, its root tentacles reclaiming earth from concrete, patiently working dirt and clay.  The continuous pour of water, splashing hard against rock and gravel and concrete walls softened by graffiti and wet green moss blending unexpectedly, harmoniously. I wonder what possessed the owners of the South Pacific Coast Railway to want to blast a tunnel through this mountain, a mountain belching methane and pockets of gas exploding collapsing on the bodies of the Chinese laborers who once worked here, who saved each other, who worked in mud and rock and dark, whose comrades became singed flesh, whose bones were never returned to China, who bravely did work stoppages and fought for better pay, all to open up a hole in this mountain, this mountain that fought back and reclaimed the land, this land now owned by the San Jose Water Company, this land that no one visits because NO TRESPASSING signs are everywhere, tacked to mossy trees and rocks and barbed wire fences. I wonder if my car has been towed. The water splashes loud, insistent, and my jars of dirt and water sit between two waterfalls, three sticks of incense burning a gentle plume of smoke, my small gesture of remembrance. I gathered the dirt from inside the tunnel, near where it was blocked from the dynamite blast in the 40s. The ground wet yet so packed and hard; I took a stick and scratched and scratched until I could gather a little earth with my fingers. I filled the jar bit by bit as I exited the tunnel, scratching and gathering, then placing some gravel from the tunnel mouth, some dirt and leaves from the outside, the living world. Now I sit and listen to the water, waiting for the incense to burn down, alone in remembering these nameless men who fought to chisel a hole out of a mountain.

For more historical info on the Summit Tunnel, please see:

https://www.santacruztrains.com/2017/12/tunnels-summit-tunnel-2.html

https://hilltromper.com/article/horrors-summit-tunnel

Lydon, Sandy. Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region, Capitola Book Company, second edition, 2008.

MacGregor, Bruce. The Birth of California Narrow Gauge, Stanford University Press, 2003.

Thanks to Scott Trafton for his dramaturgical research support.

Today I visited Paradise Park Masonic Lodge, formerly the site of the California Powderworks, where a sizable community of Chinese laborers lived and worked, segregated from their fellow white workers, from 1864-78 until they were fired due to pressure by local white supremacists.  I walked behind some second-growth redwood trees and clambered down a slippery steep slope underneath a covered wooden bridge to gather dirt and water for weaver Jessica Green to use in our collaboration.

January 26, 2019

I never feel comfortable here. The initial sense of suspicion, of what are you doing on our land, of being marked as outsider has infected all my experiences of this place. I perch half hidden underneath the wooden bridge built for the Powderworks in 1872, back against a concrete support. The river flows, fast and bustling over rock, below. I dipped a jar into the waters, running so clear, scrabbled with fingers and digging stick to gather rich black dirt, redwood leaves and cones, grasses, half river mulch, skeletal leaves, moss and dirt and tree root all together and becoming each other. The black dirt is inches away from river sand, light and soft and sifted like brown flour, so close yet so separate. Today, I gather only the black.

I’m delighted to be launching a new collaboration with Jessica Green at the instigation of Cara Hagan, who’s curating an interdisciplinary art exhibition called “My Place or Yours” based on a model of “artistic surrogacy” involving long-distance collaboration.

Jessica is an extraordinary weaver living in Appalachia on Cherokee land (see http://alittleweather.com/about/).  Inspired in part by this Mixing Waters project, we’ve decided that I would gather materials -- dirt, water, etc. -- from the sites in Santa Cruz where Chinese communities once lived and mail them to her.  The current plan is that she will integrate those materials, potentially as dyes or stains, into her hand-woven cloth before mailing the cloth to me to performatively animate in some way.  

Today I visited the San Lorenzo River at the site of Santa Cruz’s last Chinatown, gathered some dirt and water, and did a bit of writing. 

Friday, January 18, 2019.  

The grass is tender and lush, a specific green we only see during the rains.  January is springtime in California.  The riverbank is rain-soft, squishy muddy, heels of my boots sinking into the earth as I scoop earth into the mouth of my mason jar: layers of wet river sand, muddy dirt layered with leaves and twigs composting, river gravel.  I pick up bits of foliage, native redwood and “invasive” immigrant eucalyptus.  Today is soft, hovering between sunny and overcast, the river brown and fast, singing a quick brisk gurgle as it flows to the sea under this narrow concrete bridge that leads to what was once China Lane, the ramshackle memory of wooden houses, the lost sounds of laughter and life.    

Joy Brooke Fairfield

I have recently moved to Memphis, TN, a region (like most of the country) heavy with the legacies of US colonialist genocidal practices. When I arrived, confederate statues still populated our civic spaces, and I bike along an avenue that traces the Trail of Tears on my way to work. I’ve been trying to sit with these histories in a manner that acknowledges their ongoing effects, meditating regularly on what we can do in the now to mitigate, memorialize, and provide actual antidotes to the ongoing violences that took place then. When I received Cynthia’s vial, I added it to my altar, hoping to charge the contents with the energies of my questioning prayers.

I’d assumed I would mix Cynthia’s water from the San Lorenzo River with waters from the Mississippi River, the powerful liquid superhighway that serves as the westernmost boundary of both Memphis and Tennessee itself. I’m a Pacific Coast-raised girl, accustomed to tidal sunset vastness to the west, so I’m just now building relations with  the grey-brown snake that separates me from Arkansas and then the rest of the mythical West sprawling out into flatness beyond. But the Mississippi is sick. Conservationists have dubbed the Mississippi “the most polluted river in the country,” and a 2012 report found that almost 13 million pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped into it annually.  The farther south it travels, the more poisonous it becomes.  From Memphis, it crosses the border to Mississippi then Louisiana, where it’s been recorded as the most tainted coastal ecosystem in the world. I went down to the Mississippi during a high water time, meditated on a log, and snapped some sunset photos.  But I decided to gather water from elsewhere.

A few months before, I had visited the Wolf River, one of the tributaries to the Mississippi.  Until the turn of the 20th century, it was the primary drinking water source for Memphis and before that, its confluence with the Mississippi was the site of Chickasaw communities.  The Wolf is sick too.  Collecting chemical waste and farm runoff, it smelled so bad that in 1960 it was diverted north of the city, and in the 1970s parts of it were declared “dead.”  In 1985, local efforts to help restore the river began, and now a conservancy is dedicated to stewardship of the water and adjacent land.

I’d visited the Wolf River for an interfaith healing ceremony for an unjust extrajudicial murder that happened 100 years ago – the lynching of Ell Persons.  Persons had been accused of the murder of a young girl.  Her death was never solved, and the heinous social event of his lynching under a trestle next to the Wolf River only served to further poison the literal and spiritual waters feeding Memphis. At the 2017 ceremony, faith leaders from a variety of traditions joined with descendants of both the white girl and the Black man who had lost their lives 100 years ago, and diverse participants walked the path down to the river to spread rose petals at the site of Persons’ murder.  I revisited the site next to the highway where a memorial had been erected, then followed the path down to the water.

I meditated by a little inlet, which looked as dirty as the Mississippi. Slapping bugs away, I considered giving up again and looking for a cleaner river, but instead surrendered to the silt and slime and shameful human histories of extraction and pollution. I collected a jar and took it home.

The small vial and the larger jar sat on my altar for months before I mixed them. Maybe I thought I could purify them with time or energy, the prayers I whispered while lighting candles.  All that time I watered my lettuce seeds and tomato starts and mint plants and crawling pothos vines with tap-water, sourced from deep artesian wells below the city that we use now that we’ve poisoned both our adjacent above-ground rivers.  

I’ve never been taught very well how to grow things. I’m at least four generations removed from farmers, by my calculation, and each generation has taught the next to do something they felt was “more important” than caring for the soil and the creatures that grow within it and from out of it.  My grandmother grew roses and my mother has in her retirement finally found time for vegetables, but my hands are ignorant and I don’t know very well how to listen to these green things I’m urging up out of the dirt.  I overwater and underwater them. I abandon them for too long over weekends away, forget to prune and turn, I repot at the wrong moment, I break roots and propagate clumsily.  But my altar and my greenhouse are one and the same right now, and I pray and meditate at both of them hoping to learn better how to listen.

Finally I mixed the two waters, thinking of the San Lorenzo and the Wolf,  the human and non-human creatures nurtured by the rivers, the societies just and unjust who have traveled them, the terrible crimes that have taken place on their banks as well as the moments of human joy and pleasure and all the unrecorded moments of graceful animal being. I poured in some clean clear artesian tapwater too, stirred it all up and looked through it as the light passed through sediment and mineral shine.  I poured a little bit into every altar plant – these green creatures I’m trying to keep alive. The mixture fed them for several days. Eventually some of them moved outside to raised beds (my first!) in my girlfriend’s backyard.  The lettuce died and the kale got nibbled up, but months later a few small red juicy tomatoes escaped squirrel consumption and ended up in our salad.

As I was putting these photos together, I remembered that our mutual friend Annie Sprinkle took some photos of me next to the San Lorenzo River a few years ago as we’d done a walking rehearsal down by her banks.  Annie caught my love of the green and the fresh and the wet in her lens, so I add those pics to mine to connect our rivers.

Miyuki Baker

Although I initially chose this lake due to its proximity to my home, I later learned that the bulk of manual labor of removing soil and digging to bedrock to turn the original sag pond into a lake was provided by Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s, connecting this water to the San Lorenzo River flooding the last Chinatown in Santa Cruz.

Lalenja Harrington

Brianna Smith

I went down to the shore of Town Lake, a body of water that splits Austin in half, north and south. I gathered my water in a small jar, mixing the two together on a sunny afternoon with my shoes off and my feet submerged. When I returned home, I spoke a blessing over the water and used the combination as well as hair from my own head to nurture a new plant that sits on top of my bedroom altar created for stones, smudge sticks, plants, icons and potions.

Cynthia Ling Lee and Sandra Chatterjee

Scott Trafton

Where I live there are three rivers that come together as one. Or there is one river that splits into three. Or there are a bunch of creeks and streams and even swamps that start somewhere and flow somewhere else, that begin in another state or in began in another millennium and are still headed out of town and out of time. There are also drips and drops of watery words written on local plaques and geologic maps that convey not so much liquid flow as much as the collection and holding of rivers:  river basin, floodplain, watershed. It’s a weirdly wet town.

It’s not unfamiliar, though. I grew up on a bayou, with mixed waters running through my backyard and mixed blood running through my veins, muddy brown liquid and muddy brown skin carrying the sediment of other lands and other lives, home and harbor to alligators and alabaster relatives, snakes and slaves. Those waterways were notoriously resistant to boundaries and barriers, labels and levees, often deciding to disregard the desires of humans and rise up and wash away houses, neighborhoods, and entire towns, choosing to carry their waterlogged treasures to the next riverbank, the closest coast or nearest ocean, to join a kind of brown watery oneness that seemed to cover the world.  

Shyamala Moorty

Nana* crossed the Pacific Ocean

Only to find he’d lost his visa on the long journey…

But borders bent to his will.

What good was a philosopher to the US?

He wasn’t exactly desirable; but he wasn’t a threat.

He raised me near the Pacific

Countless hours making seaweed collages on the shore.

Other immigrants were present but hidden: Latino farm workers,

Vietnamese beauty workers, and the occasional South Asian professional

Mixing into the mostly black and white mosaic of the Monterey peninsula.

We visited Santa Cruz on occasion

A treasury of redwood lined paths

And an occasional rocky creek - Was that the San Lorenzo?

An exotic hippy location with white surfers and college students at every turn,

I didn’t know of the lost Chinatowns that shadowed its past.

I still live near the Pacific

My son plunging into the icy waters with abandon.

Our new community of professionals, descended from immigrants:

Latino educators, African American contractors, and the occasional South Asian in health care are now the foundation of our block in Long Beach

as the elderly white folk who lived here before us slowly pass on.  

But our young Latino neighbor also passed too soon.

The one who welcomed us with homemade treats and travelled abroad to Japan.

The one who had a Trump piñata for his 18th birthday and registered himself as Presidential Candidate in protest.

We plant marigolds in his memory,

We mix waters to bend borders,

We mix waters to create a new mosaic of natives and immigrants,

We mix waters for marigolds,

We mix waters for Emilio.  

Julianne Gale

My 婆婆 (maternal grandmother) was never allowed to learn to swim as a child in China because of her family’s fear that she would drown. Later, she almost didn’t graduate college in the U.S. due to the swimming requirement.

Her daughter, my mother, loves to swim and insisted I take swimming lessons young. But the intergenerational fear of children playing near water lingered, and I was never allowed to visit the river that flowed at the edge of my parents’ property that I grew up on. That land, originally stolen from the Wampanoag people by English colonizers in 1635, was called “Tiot” or “land surrounded by water” in Wôpanâak. In 1636, the colonizers began calling it Dedham instead. That was the only name I knew for over 30 years.

At age 31, with San Lorenzo River water in my hand, my love for Cynthia in my heart, and determination to finally see the bank of the river that I grew up near, I returned to the house that my mom still lives in. It took me over an hour to make it through the thick tree-and-undergrowth barrier that separates the manicured lawn from the river’s edge. Just a few steps in, the growth was so thick I could no longer see the house. This is a 360-degree video.

I only reached the river by discovering a neighbor’s old boardwalk, tilted sideways and collapsed at places, and following it to the water.

At the water, I gave thanks to the water, to the original people of the land, to my ancestors, to all life that is connected. I offered my commitment to land and water and life everywhere.

I gave the two waters together to a tree I used to watch from my childhood bedroom window. I used to call this tree “Grandfather Tree.” I gave thanks to this first tree that I remember connecting to.

I am grateful now to live among many trees and rivers here near part of the Salish Sea (as known as the Hood Canal in Washington state).  The land I live on is land that was stolen from the sqWuqWu'b3sH (Skokomish) people in the 1855 Point No Point Treaty. SqWuqWu'b3sH means “People of the River,” and refers to the largest river in the Hood Canal watershed.

My 婆婆’s father, my great-grandfather, was born in a small village called 永豐 alongside a river in Jiangxi province. His family had lived there for many generations. It is one of my ancestral villages.

Scott Trafton and Lena Trask-Trafton

Paper, marker, ink, river water and a heart-shaped rock sourced from the waters of the confluence of the Congaree, Broad, and Saluda Rivers, Columbia, SC, 2017

Cynthia Ling Lee

The Saalach River forms the border between Austria and Germany in Salzburg and has been the site of increased refugee-related border tensions from 2015.  

1. Gathering Water

I gathered water from the Saalach while visiting my friend and collaborator, Sandra Chatterjee, in June 2017.  In August 2017, I gathered water from my local river, the San Lorenzo, in Santa Cruz, at which time I did this mixing waters ritual.

2. Meditations on the Saalach and San Lorenzo Rivers

Saalach River:

I remember dipping an amber Nalgene bottle into your waters, the icicle-like sheaths of water falling fast from the dam, algae slipping between toes. Round smooth river rocks, sunlit skies, waters meandering green and blue, feet teasing, talking, fighting with each other. How close the other side of the border, how seemingly effortless the crossing, un-policed. Stones gathered in rings, charred stone. Blackened vestiges of campfires lit by refugees, small fires of hope, re-homing, unbelonging.

San Lorenzo River:

today you were sandy, summery, overgrown with yellow flowering fennel, pink spires, the bees crazy with heat and pollen.  a redfaced man asked me for a quarter, blessed me when I said no.  the river was higher today, the stones of the riverbed all underwater.  I remembered the swollen brown winter floods, tree trunks drifting fast and dangerous, onlookers gaping from the concrete bridge.  across the way, a group of latino men lounge on blankets.  I think of the working class chinese who lived and played on the riverbanks in the early 1900s, of who is seen as suspicious, now vs. then.

3. Mixing Waters

4. Nourishing Life

I invite you to join me in a participatory ritual, “Mixing Waters,” which asks you to make imaginative connections between bodies of water as a political act.

As part of my project, Lost Chinatowns, I have been ruminating upon the San Lorenzo River, which was part of the texture of daily life for residents of the last Chinatown: a source of sustenance and a site of joyful play.  I imagine the river as a possible place of respite from the relentless racial discrimination that Chinese people faced outside their home community.  In 1955, waters flooded the banks of the San Lorenzo River, destroying Chinatown, and the land was sold and redeveloped into a shopping center.

Here’s how the process works: (1) I mail you water from the San Lorenzo River. (2) Gather water from a local body of water, preferably one with personal, geopolitical, or historical resonance. (3) Hold your bottle of San Lorenzo River water in your hands.  Notice what images come up — of natural beauty, archival photographs, personal memories, news images, etc. (4) Hold your container of local water, again noticing what images arise. (5) Pour the two waters into one vessel.  As you do so, imagine the images and stories of the two bodies of water mixing and flowing into each other. (6) Use the mixed waters to nourish a plant, either indigenous to this soil or a migrant plant (transplant). (7) Watch the plant grow and continue to care for it. (8) Document your ritual in a form of your choice, such as through photography, drawing, video, or written reflection, and send it to me to post on the Mixing Waters blog.

If you’re interested in participating, please contact me at [email protected], and some water will soon be in the mail!