Headwaters Magazine - Spring 2023

Headwaters The University of Vermont’s Environmental Publication

Spring 2023

Table of Contents Overgrowth

By Anonymous | page 4

Greening the Sea: Growing Seaweed and Resilience in Coastal New England

By Emma Polhemus | page 7

Thoughts and Prayers

By Loden Croll | page 10

Dare to Grow Your Roots

By Deniz Dutton | page 11

Sheltering within Storytelling: A Home on the Hill of our Spines

By Kate Wojeck | page 14

The Delusion of Expectations: World of Forests and Fields

By Erin Camire | page 17

Skimming the Surface: An Introduction to Eutrophication in Lake Champlain

By Jaylyn Davidson | page 19

Fire in the Pines: New England’s Forgotten Fire Story

By Valentin Kostelnik | page 21

Returning to the Land: Buffalo Conservation in Montana

By Meagan Beckage | page 24

Exploring My Place-Based Connections to Northeastern Italy

By Fosca Bechthold | page 27

Shattering: On Ocean Acidification

By Ella Weatherington | page 30

What Once Was

By Jamie Cull-Host | page 33

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Masthead Managing Editor Deniz Dutton

Editors

Aiden Armstrong

Andie Vellenga Anna Eldridge Ben Mowery Cole Barry Fosca Bechthold Kate Wojeck Loden Croll Megan Sutor Sarah O’Leary

Co-Editors-in-Chief Jake Hogan Teresa Helms

Creative Director Ella Weatherington

Planning and Outreach Adelyne Hayward

Social Media

Emma Polhemus Jamie Cull-Host

Managing Designer Maya Kagan

Artisits and Designers Alex Zoner Avery Redfern Casey Benderoth Deniz Dutton Ellie Yatco Emma Polhemus Fosca Bechthold Frances Leadman Grace Weckesser Joshua Delahunt Mia Weyant Sadie Holmes

Find us @uvmheadwaters on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter and online at uvmheadwaters.org Copywright © 2022 Headwaters Magazine This magazine was printed on the traditional land of the Abenaki People

Art by Mia Weyant

A Foliage of Plants Throughout Evolutionary Time (Cover) Maya Kagan Digital collage This semester’s Headwaters cover incorporates herbarium specimens from the UVM Pringle Herbarium into a collage highlighting plant diversity over evolutionary time. The back cover includes some of the most ancient lineages of plants, such as Equisetum, Lycopodium, Selaginella, and Isoetes depicted at the bottom, and ferns from a diverse set of genera at the top. The front cover highlights plants from exclusively flowering plant families, which are the most recently evolved lineages of plants. The cover alludes to this semester’s theme of “past present future” by highlighting the diversity of plant life that has existed in the past and continues to flourish today.

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Dear Reader, Welcome to the 14th edition of Headwaters Magazine! As always, we must express our sincere gratitude for the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, the Student Government Association, and our advisor, Josh Brown.

This Spring, we have the pleasure of publishing an exceptionally strong set of pieces, from insightful personal reflections, to informative explorations of landscapes, to prospective social critiques. Early in our editorial process, a theme emerged from the nascent ideas that would become the content of this issue: Past, Present, Future.

In the very first edition of Headwaters, Inaugural President Dan Kopin wrote that, “Headwaters are the small sources from which rivers originate. With hopes that our ideas may flow into greater bodies of knowledge, we have chosen to put our pens to paper.” Hundreds of pages later, and in a year that feels quite different from 2016, we are still printing this small source of knowledge for you to learn from and enjoy. It is an honor to continue providing a space where UVM’s environmentalists may contribute their talents—into the river and out to the sea.

May these articles inspire you to reflect on the past; the historic significance and plight of buffalo, the forgotten legacies of fire on the New England landscape, or the hindsight that can only come with time.

As you read stories that are deeply personal and yet relevant to us all, you will see our authors decipher what it means to find a sense of place, in Burlington and in northern Italy. They explore the nuances of identity and the nature of community, daring us to be present in our environment, and with each other.

And, they point us toward the future. What might lie ahead? In twenty years, will we be lounging on pristine coastlines that have been restored in part by kelp, or are we each doomed for an ill-fated romance as nature takes its revenge on us?

We implore you to consider what legacies you may leave, and join us in looking to the future with open minds and bold ideas. As for the future of this publication, we are thrilled for new and continued opportunities to showcase student journalism and art, and we feel encouraged when we consider the talented editors and illustrators who will take on the torch of leadership in the coming years. From where we stand, the future of Headwaters looks bright.

Sincerely,

Jake Hogan University of Vermont ‘23 Co-Editor-in-Chief

Teresa Helms University of Vermont ‘24 Co-Editor-in-Chief

Headwaters Magazine is grateful to the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources for their financial support and dedication to lifting up student-led work. Their generous contribution has made it possible for us to continue providing a dedicated space where science, art, and environmentalism can intersect—in print.

The content in this publication reflects the decisions of the Headwaters editorial team alone. The views and ideas presented in this issue are representative of our contributing authors, but are not necessarily shared by or reflective of the institutions that Headwaters Magazine is affiliated with.

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Overgrowth

By Anonymous

How do you break up with your boyfriend during the end of the world? I would’ve Googled this if the internet was still up, but the last video I watched was a TikTok of my state senator getting strangled by a gigantic dandelion on his driveway. The federal government was unofficially dissolved two weeks after the giant plants started springing up in the US. After the internet cut out, I heard Otto, my soon to be ex-boyfriend, humming a blues song on the fire escape as he lit a Marlboro. He’s the only guy I know under fifty that smokes Marlboros.

“If I am to die tonight,” he said, “I want it to be right here, watching my city get devoured.”

“Shut up, Lana del Rey!” I said, joining him and crouching a foot away. He reached out his arm and I ignored it.

The street below us was every shade of green and no other color. There were the stems and stocks of unidentifiable plants wiggling and thrashing against what remained of the sidewalk; the trunk of a massive flowering pink tree lay on top of the remains of the brownstone across from us. A woman ran out of my favorite local bookstore down the street, tripped over a giant peony plant, and sank into the infinite green.

Before I could articulate my shock, Otto laughed. A maniacal, fake, dejected laugh, as if he had lived this all before.

“It was always gonna happen,” he said. “It’s revenge.” *** I was introduced to Otto through our mutual friend Victoria, arguably the worst way to meet a long term love interest. Our first date was a walk through the Common, where I blankly stared at the massive Christmas tree and he told me about how small-scale city parks like this set bad tones for conversations surrounding future urban planning. This set the tone for our relationship.

I learned he was a “sustainable entrepreneur,” and when I asked him to explain what that meant, he said something about how he sells plans to businesses that help them maintain their growth.

“So you’re a consultant?” I asked. “You can just say that.”

He quickly changed the topic to a meme he saw earlier about an overgrown papaya tree, which neither of us took seriously. I stayed silent for the rest of the night.

I have several theories about why I stayed with Otto beyond this point. The dominant one, posited by Victoria, was the Three Greens Theory: Otto had a lot of money, good weed, and the aura of a pseudo-environmentalist, which I found attractive because it was something I could not bring myself to embody. Nothing else about him was appealing. The sex was mediocre, the conversations consisted of his baseless interior monologuing. It was like dating a voice, an act. An act with a lot of money.

I was considering how to ethically ghost him when Tim and Carol, the straight couple I had been subletting from, announced that they were moving out. The rent was outrageous enough in the study I occupied; apartment hunting at that time was abysmal. The landlord said I could have first dibs on the apartment if I wanted it, but that I would have to act fast. I panicked. I asked Otto if he wanted to move in. He said yes, which was initially relieving, but made me cringe when I thought about it. We had only been seeing each other for two months.

Otto then invaded the apartment, putting up tacky posters with hand drawn herbs and brought in strange white minimalist furniture (“It wasn’t your living room to begin with!” he yelled at me when I questioned why he’d put up a life-size wire sculpture of a zebra in the corner without asking). He potted an aloe vera plant on the fire escape (“We have to start using natural remedies,” he said, even though it was the middle of February in Massachusetts).

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It was at the same time that Otto moved in that we started hearing about the plants. At first the coverage was minimal, confined to three minute bitesized chunks of the evening news. In a panicked response to predictions from ecologists that the forest ecosystems of the Americas would begin to die out without immediate action, the United Nations had deployed a state-of-the-art fertilizer onto various deforested parts of the Americas.

At first it was working: rubber trees thrived in parts of the Amazon where they were once thought to be permanently depleted. Live oaks in Texas began branching out wildly. My boss at the Beautification Bureau broke open the champagne when we found out the fertilizer had been approved to be used in areas in eastern Massachusetts. By March, it had been utilized in all the continental US states. Otto bragged to me about the future of the earth as if he had some part of it.

I sent him videos of me watering his sad potted aloe vera plant when he was away on business, even though I knew it would not grow. He asked me to be his boyfriend like we were fifth graders. This was the healthiest our relationship got.

But then things got out of hand. Vines from the Amazon, the first testing grounds for the fertilizer, began growing out of control. We watched farmers cut through the giant mass of green that entwined around each other like amorphous tree trunks. They got severed Indiana Jones-style, but grew back like hydras with multiple heads. Rubber trees grew to the heights of redwoods.

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“This is amazing,” said Otto. “It’s like, poetic justice.”

“Justice for who?” I asked.

Otto had the tendency to simply go silent and sulk on the fire escape when challenged. The aloe vera plant had risen only marginally since he first planted it, but neither of us acknowledged it.

By April, Rio de Janeiro went dark, and by May, my boss publicly resigned after using the fertilizer within city limits. Texans began evacuating to nearby states, some going south, seeking asylum in Mexico because the north was overrun with black cherry trees. Protestors filled the streets in some strange marriage of environmentalist rage and right-wing extremism. Fox News hosts worked overtime to link the plants to the gay agenda. The governor initiated a Code Yellow alert, and giant posters were put on the sides of bus shelters that advised citizens to be on the lookout for oversized poppies.

Then Florida was hit. On CNN, we watched a little girl roll a giant orange up a hill like Sisyphus. A mass panic ensued. Otto said Florida deserved it if anybody.

I reminded him it was going to strike us soon. I realize now that this was a hypocritical taunt. I still felt like I was going to get out by some miracle, that I would get up and leave and move to some desert compound and help stoke the flames of a new age civilization. That Otto would belong to the past.

But I didn’t leave. Instead, I stayed in Boston, micromanaged Otto’s increasingly toddler-like ramblings on the fate of our planet, and went to work on Zoom because the Beautification Bureau offices had their windows bashed in by protestors with gardening shovels.

Right after Florida, everywhere was affected. Eastern Redbuds rose an inch an hour; the Common began to look like a head of unkempt hair. Park rangers were called into the city to battle against the bushes. Then, for some reason, Otto went completely silent. No more proclamations of justice. He sat criss-cross on the fire escape looking down at the chaos on the street, cars honking on their ways to Western Mass. Everyone I knew had either evacuated or died absurdly. Victoria was killed after a nightshade berry the size of a boulder had dropped on top of her. There was no funeral.

I doom scrolled. I watched videos of convenience stores being turned into greenhouses, of a giant venus fly trap breaking a man’s arm. I was disgusted—it felt pornographic, but in an especially strange and shameful way. I filled the sinks at half full and began to ration out our food. We could last three weeks with what we had.

I assumed something would happen between that time, that someone would come save us. *** I had been trapped in the apartment with Otto for two weeks when he suggested we kill ourselves. It came after I suggested we try going to the other floors to see if anyone else had supplies. For the past two weeks he had been camping out on the fire escape, and I would leave him canned food on the windowsill like I was feeding a stray cat.

He immediately dismissed my suggestion and lamented that all of Boston was overrun, that we were the last ones left, that even if we did find supplies, it was only a matter of time before we were trapped, tripped, or otherwise comically murdered by a vengeful daffodil. Then he pulled a steak knife out of his pocket.

“Hell no,” I said, backing away towards the window. We were chest to chest. My only chance was to drag him back inside.

I pleaded; I asked for a moment back

inside, for a chance to get out in the world and die trying to survive if we had to.

“No,” he said, “it’s more intimate this way.”

That’s what sent me over the edge. I knew that I was probably going to die at some point for some ridiculous reason, like getting squashed by a giant eggplant or suffocating in a rosebud the size of an SUV. But I still had hope I would be saved, that God, in the midst of this practical joke, would spare enough grace to let me live long enough to find the only other gay man left in the Boston area so that Otto wouldn’t be my last fling.

So I pushed him. He nicked my collarbone with the tip of the knife, leaving a scar. I watched him fall and get swallowed in the middle of the street by a yellow carnation, followed by a thump. There was no screaming. I did not cry. I reached over and picked up the matchbox, lit one and dropped it where he had fallen, like a parting gift. The carnation was consumed by the flames, and come nightfall, the whole street was burning and the apartment was slowly filling with smoke. I loaded a backpack with face cloths and a map of the Seaport. Before I left, I watered the aloe vera one last time, which drooped, flaccid and deteriorating. H Art by Grace Weckesser Headwaters Magazine 6

Greening the Sea: Growing Seaweed and Resilience in Coastal New England

By Emma Polhemus

Thinking back to Pemaquid Beach in the little midcoast Maine town I spent my summer in, I can smell the salty air and the low tide scent of the seaweed crunching under my feet, equal parts fishy and nostalgic. Lobster buoys bob along with the waves, and the occasional washed-up trap breaks the stretches of sandy shoreline.

If you followed the river that feeds into the sea a few miles from here, you would find shellfish farms up and down the banks. In this town, like many coastal towns in the area, there are small reminders almost everywhere you look that these communities are built on harvesting from the sea. Fishing, lobstering, shellfishing—these are the economic and cultural backbone of this region, and have been for generations. Even before that, the Wabanaki people—the original inhabitants of this area—caught seals, flounder, and clams from the same waters, and continue to do so today. However, the fishing and aquaculture industries in the Northeast are being threatened by the far-reaching impacts of climate change. In response, the communities that depend on these resources are finding new ways to adapt to these changes without sacrificing their way of life. One of the most promising solutions might be found in the unassuming seaweed I’ve spent years stepping over without a second thought.

Atlantic Sea Farms is a seaweed aquaculture company based in Biddeford, Maine, leading the way amongst this shifting tide. The company was founded in 2009 as the first commercially viable seaweed farm in the United States, and over the past 14 years they’ve transitioned toward supporting the growth of the kelp aquaculture industry throughout the state of Maine. Working with a network of partner farmers, Atlantic Sea Farms grows and distributes kelp seedlings, assists new farmers with the complex permitting process, and processes and delivers the harvested product. In an interview with cultivation specialist Carlin Schildge, she shared with me that the organization’s mission is to address two central

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challenges. The first is to increase the proportion of U.S. grown seaweed, since the majority of seaweed products are currently imported from other countries. The second is a little more complex.

Because the state’s culture and economy is closely tied to its fisheries, especially the lobstering industry, ocean warming presents a major threat. Atlantic Sea Farms hopes that by growing Maine’s kelp farming industry, they can help fisheries diversify their income and address the multifaceted challenges of developing climate change resilience in coastal communities.

“Here in Maine, we hear all the time that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost anywhere else on the planet,” Schildge explained, sharing a study from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) showing that the Gulf is warming faster than 97% of the world’s oceans. “So we’re uniquely and intensely affected by climate change.”

A warming Gulf means changing geographical and seasonal patterns for many marine species. Lobster is particularly sensitive to temperature changes, and another GMRI study has found that populations along the southern New England coast have been shifting north for years, chasing cooler waters. As the Maine Department of Marine Resources reports, lobster accounts for more than 80% of the monetary value the state’s fishermen produce in a year, so population shifts and scarcity due to continued warming are a serious concern.

The related process of ocean acidification is adding more threats to shellfishing, another significant portion of Maine’s fisheries. As more carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is absorbed into the ocean, it undergoes a number of chemical reactions that makes the water more acidic and reduces the amount of available carbonate, a crucial resource for many marine organisms. Oysters, clams, and mussels use calcium carbonate to build their shells, and ocean acidification has been

shown to slow this shell growth and potentially even dissolve them faster than they can be built.

Despite adaptation advances in fishing and aquaculture methods, many fishermen and ocean farmers’ livelihoods are still under threat from these changes in the waters, pushing some to diversify into kelp. Diversification is the key in this—all of Atlantic Sea Farms’ partner farmers continue to engage in multiple types of fisheries, and Schildge was quick to point out that their goal is to integrate seaweed cultivation, not to replace other operations. For lobstermen, whose main harvest season is in the summer, the kelp planting and harvest seasons in late fall and spring are perfectly offset to provide additional work and income. Others who cultivate mussels or oysters are able to grow kelp directly alongside these products. Atlantic Sea Farms is part of a growing community of companies, researchers, and farmers who believe that applying the expertise of these fishermen and aquaculturists to seaweed cultivation could support the long-term survival of what Schildge calls “working waterfronts” in the face of complex climate challenges, and even improve coastal health in the process.

Jaclyn Robidoux of the Maine Sea Grant’s Extension Team shared a similar hope when we spoke about her work with the seaweed aquaculture industry.

As part of the team, she acts as a link between researchers, farmers, and processors, so she’s familiar with all sides of the seaweed industry. From her perspective, seaweed farming is a promising industry due to its potential to address multiple challenges and stakeholder priorities all at once, including climate change, local food production, and supporting coastal workers.

“It’s such an exciting time to work in seaweed right now because it’s at the intersection of all these big things…so it’s linking all of these social, economic, and environmental things together and really emulating that triple bottom line sustainability,” she explained.

Seaweed farms in New England most often focus on popular edible varieties including sugar kelp, dulse, and nori. The sugar kelp grown at Atlantic Sea Farms begins life as tiny leaves called sporophytes, which cultivation

specialists grow along strands of twine in a carefully monitored nursery. In the fall, these strands of twine are ready to be planted in the ocean. Once they’re attached to sturdier lines, the seedlings require no additional inputs from the farmers, harvesting all of the energy and nutrients they need from the sun and sea around them. Since the kelp grows vertically through the water column, it’s also highly space efficient, and many seaweed farmers take advantage of co-cropping opportunities as well, growing shellfish alongside the strands of kelp. When harvest season arrives in the spring, what started out as tiny leaves on twine has become blades of kelp up to ten feet long, ready to be gathered and processed into nutrient dense food products.

As the kelp grows, absorbing more and more carbon to build its leafy blades, it changes the chemical balance of the water around it. While seaweeds aren’t actually weeds—or plants for that matter—they do perform photosynthesis as plants do, taking in sources of inorganic carbon and producing oxygen as a byproduct. In waters with increasing acidification, this removal of carbon shifts the equilibrium back toward non-acidic components, temporarily reversing the process of acidification in the surrounding ocean. This is a welcome change for many marine species, especially those with carbonate-based shells. As excess, acidification-contributing carbon dioxide is turned instead into leafing seaweed, nearby oysters and mussels can once again find the materials they need to grow. For aquaculturists struggling to maintain shellfish farms under acidifying conditions, growing kelp alongside the shellfish not only provides a supplementary income source, it also improves surrounding water quality and supports their shellfish harvest. Schildge told me this is known as the “halo effect,” since shellfish grown in the surrounding waters of kelp are larger, healthier, and even taste better.

But the environmental benefits don’t stop there. Organisms can’t survive on carbon alone; they need other essential nutrients including nitrogen and phosphorus, chemicals infamous in many coastal communities—even Burlington—for their ability to cause eutrophication and toxic algal blooms. Kelp in areas that get an influx of Headwaters Magazine 8

these nutrients from agricultural runoff and other sources can take up this excess and use it for growth, making for cleaner, safer aquatic ecosystems.

At this point, kelp seems too good to be true. So, I asked if there has been any resistance to kelp farming from producers, given the long-standing traditions of these communities.

“Like with everything, change can be really hard sometimes…aquaculture can feel daunting just because maybe there isn’t the same existing infrastructure in place as there are for fisheries that have existed for centuries,” she replied. Despite these challenges, she told me that their partner farmers have been excited about the new opportunities of seaweed aquaculture, in part due to the support that Atlantic Sea Farms is able to offer throughout the process of starting a farm.

“By breaking down a lot of the barriers to entry of the world of aquaculture, I think it makes it much more appealing and accessible to communities in the Gulf of Maine…that’s kind of the key to diversifying the working waterfront here and ensuring long-term viability.”

Robidoux spoke of similar experiences. The majority of potential producers she works with are excited to learn more about this opportunity to expand their income and harvest seasons. The bigger challenge, she added, has been marketing the seaweed to consumers post-production.

“95% of the seaweed that we’re producing in Maine goes into products that people eat. So, we’ve got to make sure that people want to eat it,” she explained. Convincing new customers to try seaweed can be challenging, though. “People could be a little resistant, you know, like, ‘Is it going to taste like low tide? Is it going to be slimy?’ and the answer is usually no…but it still takes a bit of work to get them there.”

Once you get over the initial hesitation, eating seaweed has many human health benefits. The high nutrient uptake that improves the water quality around seaweed also makes it a highly nutritious food. More than once while exploring the world of seaweed cuisine, I’ve seen kelp described as the new kale. And, packed with vitamin B, iodine, and calcium, it does live up to the superfood aspect of this label.

“I think this is where it helps to be humble with seaweed, too,” Robidoux added. “The rest of the world has been farming seaweed for thousands of years, and we consume seaweed or products of farmed seaweed every day and don’t know it.”

Eating kelp is not a new concept, and seaweeds are a central part of many traditional cuisines, especially those from East Asia and the Pacific Islands. In integrating kelp cultivation into the Northeast, Schildge considers it a perfect addition to current food trends. Whether that’s providing a boost of umami flavor to plant-based diets or a healthy addition to green smoothies, she assured me that kelp is much more versatile than it seems. Atlantic Sea Farms already processes and sells a variety of items made with their partner farmers’ harvest, ranging from fermented kimchi-style salads to ginger-sesame kelp veggie burgers. The majority of their product gets purchased by other companies, restaurants, and college dining halls to be used in a variety of meals or processed as a component in non-food items such as toothpaste, medications, and shampoo. Schildge hopes that with more people eating and using kelp, more fishermen and waterfront workers will be able to diversify their income to include seaweed farming.

As we wrapped up our conversation, Schildge reflected on the progress Atlantic Sea Farms has made in supporting local farmers’ ability to face climate change impacts.

“Even just doing one thing to build our resilience is a good thing. Every small step—or big step—moves us in the right direction.”

I think back to my walks along Pemaquid Beach, stepping over the clumps of seaweed. This time, I take the time to really look. That one there is sugar kelp, brown and ribbon-like. The reddish-purple flecks floating in the surf are dulse. And tangled in the bars of one of those old lobster traps are stringy tendrils of rockweed. To many others, these unassuming ocean weeds appear just as miscellaneous trash strewn over the beach. But as you shift your perspective to notice their ecosystem-regenerating, carbon-consuming potential, they become main characters in the evolving story of working waterfronts, knotted together on the sand—tradition and history combined with what very well is becoming the future. H

Art by Emma Polhemus Headwaters Magazine 9

Thoughts and Prayers

By Loden Croll

If any thought was a prayer I would have taken the void— mock black, the deepest NASA red of “Unprecedented Times” corroding the poles —as an omen of waning luck, turning the nosebleed red into the gums of a giant with the posturing globe caught in its jaws, gnashed and jagged continents bobbing in seas of unswallowed pride beneath which living things and all their children’s dreams will eventually be sunk for whatever Undiscovered, digested, ancient terror lives in the belly of a god.

I grieve for everything these days.

The sun crushes a windowed skyscraper, gawking at its own destruction While the rivers burn and the music stops playing All before 10 am on a Wednesday.

There is an ancient me, the one that has outgrown my childhood fears, who knows if my miseries are justified—for they have witnessed the deaths of all my mothers— With their moon-old face recalcitrant before the jaws of the world, Mastodon molars seeking revenge for extinction Yawning to raze establishment and scatter my bones across the Wasted rot—at least there, it is quiet.

Like anyone too troubled to mutter their prayers, I let them collect dust in my notes.

Moth-eaten years of blue-burning resentment stare down the end of all-knowing, into the Deeper dark blues of outer space’s maw, With grotesque creations that have yet to materialize, Perched, vigilant, On the rabid tongue of a monster with suns for eyes

still, my bedraggled conscious, my mortified person carries on this Mortal coil marching to the beat of the giant’s war drum pulse Praying to my voided future that this world will afford me some parcel of Peace— Let the earth lie upon me softly And may grief be good to us all. H Art by Avery Redfern Headwaters Magazine 10

Dare To Grow Your Roots

By Deniz Dutton

I never understood people who live in the same place their entire lives. I always assumed, on some level, that there is something wrong with them; that fear is what prevented them from seeing the world, and now they are just creatures of comfort and habit, happy with domesticity and monotony. There is a species of bird down in Costa Rica, where I spent a semester abroad—the blackcheeked ant tanager, which lives only on a peninsula that hardly makes a dent in the Pacific Ocean. Its entire existence is confined to two protected areas of lowland tropical forest. Peering at this bird through a high-mag monocular, I didn’t find its black and brown plumage very striking, but upon learning of its extreme endemism, the bird made an impression on me. What was it like to be confined to one place? To only be able to seek a mate within a radius of a dozen miles, the most far-flung destination being just across the gulf? They have wings, too, which added to my perplexion. Why not wing off to another forest fragment, hop around Central America, see the sights? You could always come back if you wanted to.

Now people, like birds, have the ability to fly. In half a day you can be transported to the other side of the world.

As airplane ticket fares have lowered, the ability to visit new parts of the world has expanded to a greater share of the human population.

Some people, however, are like the black-cheeked ant tanager: disinterested in expanding their horizons, even when the sky is the limit.

What is the allure of a place?

Why does it have such a hold on us?

One of my favorite things about being in an airplane is looking down on the quilted surface of the earth, watching places pass by underneath. Mountain ranges will come and go; massive cargo ships will appear as

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tiny comets on the surface of the wine-dark ocean, with tails of white foam; you will see an endless patchwork of autumnal-hued farmland contrast with the lapis lazuli swimming pools and networks of gray streets in the developed areas. This was my meditation during annual pilgrimages to see my extended family in Turkey. A child of two cultures, I grew up with a sense of place split right down the middle. Only on an airplane did I feel like I didn’t have to choose.

Step 1: Feel Connected My grandfather has lived on the same patch of ground for decades. He has poured all of his energy into cultivating a farm on the most unlikely of lands—a rocky, eroding mountainside. Being a farmer is tough work, but my grandfather chose this. He could just live on his military pension, but the land calls him, and there he has found his purpose in life.

I understand him when I sit on the large boulder in the middle of his property and take in the panorama of green, blue and purple mountains cascading down to the Mediterranean Sea directly in front of me, just barely distinguishable against the equally brilliant blue sky. When the wind tickles my face, carrying the sweet scent of mulberries and peaches, it tells of paradise; in these moments I know why my grandfather spent the better part of his life building this house and painstakingly creating his own garden of eden. This place holds on to you.

In my grandfather’s garden, I feel connected to the earth that he cultivated, which he did for himself, but also for me and his other grandchildren, so that we may enjoy a rich heritage all our own.

If I can connect with the earth somewhere, I can feel like I belong to it. Walking through the Intervale—a strip of floodplain forest and community farms along the Winooski River—in mid-autumn, I stumble upon a treasure trove in an old, familiar field: misshapen beets left behind, and shaggy mane mushrooms. I gather some, but not all, of these goods and bring them to my car. Later that evening, I boil the beets and make a rich borscht with carrots, potatoes, and cashew cream. The mushrooms get cleaned and sauteed with a bit of butter—perfect. I have received the land’s gifts, land that I myself have tended to

with my own hands, planting rows and rows of lettuce in midsummer, creating irrigation channels; and now, the land has sustained me—as a home should.

Step 2: Be Vulnerable Sitting at my dining room table at night—the fairy lights that frame the window washing the space in a warm yellow glow and glinting off of the glass jars containing delicate plant cuttings, the clock ticking softly and melodiously—I think this place feels perpetually like the night before Christmas. Sitting here, waiting for my water to boil, I feel just as at home as I felt in my childhood house, a house I can never go back to, now that my parents have left it. I had tentatively hoped that Burlington would be up to the challenge of adopting me this year, and to my surprise, it has.

When the water boils, I take it up to my roommate M’s room, where she keeps her favorite tea. I know she’s been crying and this is the best way I can think of to cheer her up. She told me once, when she was drunk, that she really appreciates my presence. Appreciates my presence. I didn’t tell her but this has given me so much joy because all my life I have so rarely been able to discern whether my presence mattered to others or not. With her, there is no doubt; I know she appreciates having someone around to speak Turkish with, someone who relates to her own background. The hot water is my way of saying I see you. Her expression tells me all I need to know when she opens the door; this is what she needed. I remember that need being unmet for me so many times, festering as resentment, building the emotional walls I have put up between myself and this town and this college experience. But I also know that if just one person sees you, the walls start to crack and let some light through, and when that person is consistently in your life, they crumble completely.

Step 3: Reminisce on the Past After three and a half years living in Burlington, I know where to go for a good walk. As my friend Rachel and I stroll along the trails of Red Rocks Park, I admire the cathedral of oak and maple trees above me and the way the sunlight soaks through the red, orange, and yellow foliage and throws its pigment onto everything like stained glass. My breath catches in my throat at the beauty I am witnessing. The trees have been allowed to grow here for hundreds of years, and their mind-boggling girths and towering heights have the comforting effect of making me feel like I am among elders, playing as a child would

at their feet.

Trees have always helped me feel more centered and rooted to a place; after all, if they can happily stay in one place for so long, maybe I can, too.

Rachel and I’s conversation takes a similarly meandering path as our feet, and we talk about people and events from the past, our history running as deep as our time in college.

Despite the turbulence of the last three and a half years, some very important things have remained constant.

She is my mirror, and I am hers; we clarify and distill the changes that have taken place, and confirm our existence to one another. We find joy in the passing of time.

The many rocks and boulders that are scattered along the sides of the path are testaments to time continuing uninterrupted here for a long while; while the growing things, the old trees and the perennial ferns, suggest many life cycles, many sagas, playing out on this steady stage. We take a break from walking and turn our attention to a large boulder, which I immediately attempt to climb. As my fingers scratch at the rock face, they catch on to tiny beds of moss clinging onto impressions in the rock. I feel a little guilty as some of the moss slides off and falls to its end on the forest floor, knowing that the fuzzy green film has taken decades to grow there. I have always admired mosses; they are fiercely loyal to their localities.

They colonize what is known as the barrier layer of air that hugs all objects; there, the air is still, slightly warmer, more humid. The intimacy that moss has with its environment is almost unimaginable, but reminds me that this is one way to be. In fact, this is the most common way to be in nature. Aloofness and non-commitment have no place in these woods.

Step 4: Envision Futures There are special places in the world for me whose significance was created in an instant of spontaneous connection, in a single night of spectacular memory, but Headwaters Magazine 12

Burlington has been slow to arrive in my consciousness as a special place worthy of my nostalgia. I guess I have been busy weighing out the good and the bad, but recently the tide has changed to such an extent that gratitude is the overwhelming state I am in.

Things are different this last year in college. My roots have grown deeper. I am genuinely happy and optimistic about my future. In the long term, I don’t see Burlington being the setting of my future life, but for now, it is my home. It may be my home for a bit longer, too. As I contemplate whether pursuing another degree at the same place I did my undergrad is right for me, my sense of place in Burlington is being placed front and center. The time has come to test the strength of the bond I believe I have formed with this place. On the cusp of graduating, I already feel the familiar urge to flee. To run away and preempt the inevitable changes by creating my own. You can’t watch your friends move away from a place you’ve all occupied together for four years if you move away first. Forced by inevitable change to figure out what it is I value the most, I feel as though the time has come to define my early twenties; yet, all I really want to do is try out many lives while I still can, untethered by any real responsibility. It is a lot to come to terms with in a short time. But, the funny thing is, the only way to figure out whether staying in Burlington is right for me is to continue building deep connections to the people and the land.

To every first-year who has found themselves transplanted in Burlington: belonging here takes time. College is nothing like what the movies say it is and absolutely nobody has any idea what they’re doing, despite appearances. You will inevitably be disappointed by people. You will inevitably feel insecure and enter a period where you wonder whether you are making the right choices. If you’ve been hurt enough times, you may be tempted to detach yourself from your life in a place, especially if it has an end date, and just “ride it out.” But if you look around you, I mean really look, at what is growing and thriving here, you might find yourself inspired. It takes courage to call a place home; it gives that place the power to hurt you, to cast you out; it necessitates trust. But I ask you to dare to grow your roots.

Intimacy with place seems to be an inesArt by Deniz Dutton and Mia Weyant Headwaters Magazine 13

capable part of life. Nothing in nature survives without it. Even migratory birds are sustained by places on their routes that offer safety and nourishment—refugia—that they know by heart. I imagine their delight to touch down in an old haunt, mingle with old friends and recount adventures from the road. Not all birds are anchored to a place forever, although I find that I can respect this lifestyle more now. Like the birds that choose to migrate, we must return to places where we have been happy, by design. No matter how far I fly, I won’t forget where I came from—where we came from. When I return, will you meet me there? H

Sheltering Within Storytelling: A Home on the Hill of Our Spines

By Kate Wojeck

stay. Feeling too much and too little. I am not sure how to breathe against the sweltering of night. Well, I’m not sure how to breathe in the mornings, either. The truth is, I’ve always been breathless.

Dawn or dusk, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, 10 or 20 years lived: a puddle of drool seeps from my gaping jaw.

We’re all dancing in a blood ballet.

Broken stones and found bones. Gritted teeth, we keep on pushing.

Sleeping in on borrowed luck. How do we save something?

I’ve been hung up on Tales of Sweetgrass and Trees—a conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer and Richard Powers, facilitated by Terry Tempest Williams and hosted by Harvard University’s The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center—since the vibration of their voices hit my eardrums. Salivating as each thought exhales into air and fleeting syllables fall from their tongues. Again and again… and again. I keep listening. I cannot stop.

Breathless. Spiraling. My ears are ringing.

A puddle of drool pools beneath my open mouth.

How do we save something?

Powers—environmentally minded author of twelve novels and recent success, The Overstory—sputters out, “We’re afraid of feeling. We’re afraid of being vulnerable in the face of something so magnificent.” Seated at my desk, a semblance of bones and flesh hanging on every word he exhales, pain and shame and paralysis sit heavy on my chest. Crushing my lungs. Choking my breath.

Stiffening my neck. Taunting hesitance. I am afraid. My limbs pantomime and flail, aching to collapse and ooze in response to Powers’ vulnerability, yet withering dry the moment I ease my toe into those tender waters of seeing myself. Of accepting our condition. I shake. I cannot breathe. I get up. Body breaching chair. Too soft to

I try to wade. Bruised and blustering, reaching skyward, turning sunlight into flesh. Surviving. I am alive.

Perhaps my mother cradled a needle and sewed me together at birth, knotting muscle and mycelium to veins.

Either way, with toes in the dirt the trees sing “come dance.” I listen. I love dancing; a wind pulls at my shoulders, a timidness takes seat in my eyes, I bite my tongue.

Hard. For I am afraid if I start dancing—thinking, imagining, advocating—it will turn violent. Stammering and slobbery. Spinning, spinning—spiralic. Sweat beating down my brow; hands grabbing at my neck. What if I dance myself to death?

Kick ing.

Weep ing.

Jerk ing my body. I am afraid of my own mind in motion.

When I think too much about it I cannot breathe.

The pressure and the panic we push our bodies through clatters and bangs and pierces skin, collapsing.

Gingerly stumbling away from the open laptop, the same routine of cowering into my body unfolds. I leave the puddle on the desk. Curl up into a ball on the floor, longing to bury myself underground, a seed. Not a girl. I’d be more beautiful, I tell myself. But everytime my shaky breath catches on Power’s next word. The one he spits out from the lump in his own throat, only with the will of his added breath: “Nevertheless.” The lump in mine aches. “It all changes, it all dies,” he laments, but for a moment we

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are here. Be still. Commit to “unsuicide,” he urges against despair. Picking the pieces of myself up from the ground, kissing my shoulders and dusting my body off, I sit back down at my desk. Pulling my ears to listen again.

I’m just in time to hear Kimmerer—mother, scientist, storyteller and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation— assure me that being “...afraid comes from the same place that holds the joy. From the palace of humus…the earth.” “From me in the world of you I inhabit,” she orates. She extends a sturdy, yet still cracked, hand when she whispers next, “I hope I can take my anger and turn it into sacred rage. That’s why I write.”

I gasp for breath. Somehow, she’s found it in herself to not be bitter. Immobilized. How? Everything spins. Plates of these thoughts fall off the shelf in my mind, tumbling into motion, circling within my skull. I let Kimmerer pull my breathless body towards her. Swaying—then still. A hug.

And as their conversation unfolds—dipping and floating, mms and ahas tangled together—their dinner table of exchanged thoughts become inhabitants of my own being’s dinner table. In this musing, others have taken seats, stoking the fire, conversations carrying into night.

Erica Heilman—podcast host of RumbleStrip Vermont—pulls up a chair, warns that “if you don’t desperately need to, you don’t have to,” speaking to her creative process and work. She notes, about the act of interviewing, to “climb into them [the person with whom you are in dialogue].” Unfurl your closed fist, finger by each awkward finger, and “fall in love.” “Learn what [they] have that gets [them] through the day that [you] don’t have.”

In her words, “they’ll know when you get there. Get up that hill until you see someone you want to know about.”

Witness. With that, I knew I was desperate. Not for podcasting, but for the creative work I crawl into. Writing. It’s my own deeply selfish pursuit. But like Heilman, there’s an itch in my bones. Not everyone thinks in stories.

Gathers moments as sensory threads. I do. “I’m neurotic, but I care,” Heilman admits. Me too.

But is it not this pool of desperation that holds what’s most true?

Desire, anger, fear, hunger, pain, joy, sadness, hope: are these not the sensations goosebumps are born from?

I delay finding out. Sometime ago, I shut my mouth.

Left the door to my body ajar for strangers to stomp through and drag mud into my house, sewing the front door shut. I stood on the street in relief, thinking they were sewing my wounds for me. I was desperate to take myself out of the writing. The witnessing. Running from Headwaters Magazine 15

the stagnant fervor of energy festering in my body. My fragile body which always feels like it breaks everything over and over again every time I sit down to write. But amidst the murky blood from wounds with needles stuck in them, there’s been a knot in the yarn of my curiosity wondering if maybe it was time to let the creature within me breathe and bellow and scream. Even if violent.

Messy. I’m a fighter, have always been a fighter–might I trust, might I try. Might I let you see me care. My mind gets in the way of letting my lungs fill up with air, ribcage shutters pinned closed. I’ve never been sure how fear could move me like love does.

I let my saliva, instead of stories, pool beneath my mouth.

Suppose I bathe in my spit. Fling myself into the work so deeply that my porous pithy flesh becomes sewn to each syllable. Perhaps you must sit long enough to witness yourself and, even if you cannot find a thread worthy of saving, accept that you are wounded. Perhaps I must peel back my eyelids to see my body alive, slick with the sweat of my own mouth.

If I breathe into the work, might it too become alive?

For Kimmerer, this is true. Her words are living beings and she introduces me to them. In “The Council of Pecans,” she pulls her grandfather to his feet from his grave and we watch him run. She writes of his youth, “they’ve been shoeless all summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895 pricks their feet as they trot across the sunburned prairie, lifting their heels like grass dancers.” In my mind’s eye, I follow the boy and his friends as she threads their bodies with the needle of words. Before me are “young willow whips in faded dungarees and nothing else, their ribs showing beneath narrow brown chests as they run.” The soft thud of their footsteps aligning to the rhythm of my heart as I read. And suddenly I am running with them.

Daring to be honest, she is. My feet squish in the mud left by their footprints.

Sophie Strand—a writer at the nexus of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology—takes a seat, feet gently tap-

ping the floor beside my squishy soil covered toes, and admits in her essay “We Must Risk New Shapes,” “Survival is never safe. It is always a breach. A break in the skin. I do not want to heal; I want to survive.” She asks us to honor our wounds. We could let them fester and rot, or we could accept them “as invitations to risky collaborations we might otherwise not attempt.” Strand takes the bait. Vows to let her joints “sublux, cracking open for fungal incursions.” Exposing herself to the wrong path.

Hobbling into holiness. “[Stumbling her] way to the sacred.” Imperfectly empowered, she advocates, “I will honor my body as material refusal to participate in this ecocidal culture. I will let my mouth atrophy, as I photosynthesize with algal symbionts. I will fuse my roots to your roots.” Might we fuse our hands too? Steady, gasps mellowing. As terrifying as this is. As terrified as we are.

Might we tremble, jaws gaping, together?

But where? Where can we be this afraid and not drown?

Knees in the dirt and nose brushing moss, I know I am honest somewhere. I want to find that place and live there. I take a breath. I notice, when writing, as body, bone, breath embraces thought, I let fall from my tongue and slip from my mind all the things I dared not to say, even to myself. I can hold them now. Maybe one day I might say them to your face. Today, I must write them first or they will be buried. I will pull away. The process of writing prods and pokes. It often makes me cry. I sit at my desk, joints cracking in stiffness and pent up energy of emotion, just as they did listening to Powers, Kimmerer, and Williams in dialogue. But maybe my joints aren’t cracking out of misery or an inability to sit with what I think I cannot hold. Maybe they’re cracking open for fungal incursions, as Strand writes. Creating holes to thread mycorrhizal fungi through. Spaces for joy. Unfurled fists collecting the sensitivity and data to create, like rain. Growing edges releasing congested information; a pus covered, mucus lined truth fusing my roots to your roots.

Suppose storytelling offers an antidote to despair, always within us–perhaps just buried in a rusty hinged cupboard.

Suppose storytelling is the space to root to, endure from, and imagine—a home on the hill of our spines.

One which isn’t new construction, but has endured the oscillating storms of the planet, under the care of people, for generations. Underneath our tongues, caulked in the tiles of our teeth, tucked between the rungs of our backbones, many of us have forgotten to crane our necks to see.

In frustration or rage. Elatement or soul-crushing sorrow. There sits an invitation to show up to the dinner table as you are. Stripped of clothing and bearing nothing but the heart pounding out of your chest, you’re invited into a home to take shelter amidst the sweltering night of our collective terror. As one home collapses in the cycling of being rebuilt, storytelling is the kind neighbor whose door is always open. It only asks of us to listen. And care.

How do we save something? I’ve never been sure.

And I cannot promise easy days.

But, by a mad miracle we go intact among the common rot.

We’re dancing in this blood ballet.

We may be breathless. That’s fine. I collapse now into the body of a girl who understands where her fight is. Who can hold it. I trust her. Might you peel back your eyelids to see yourself alive too?

Climb up the rungs of your spine?

My roots are fused to other roots. Your roots. Ours.

This dinner table is growing–you’re invited.

May we shelter together, in the home of all our stories, asking once more, how we save something? H

Art by Ellie Yatco Headwaters Magazine 16

The Delusion of Expectations: World of Forests and Fields

By Erin Camire

What is a Forester?

What do I picture when I think of one? In my mind, he’s tall, tough, and quiet. He graduated from Paul Smith’s lookin’ and smellin’ like a true woodsman. If you were to point out a tree to him, he’d walk over, with his shoulders set back and his thumbs resting in his belt loops. He’ll sniffle once he finally reaches you and a calloused hand will rub the front of his beard as he tips his head back to look at the tree’s crown. Everything he says is short and sweet, and if he’s older, it’s with a bit of wisdom-infused sass. At the end of the day, he’ll sweep the fresh dirt off the thighs of his Carhartt pants and drive his truck down to the local joint.

He takes a seat at the bar and puts his mud-caked boots up on the metal rails like they were made for him, cause they were. He orders a beer, probably a Guinness, but as long as it’s a beer he’s not that picky, and when it’s placed in front of him he offers a quick “‘preciate it” with a small hand wave. It’s hard but honest work, and as long as he’s working, he doesn’t pay any mind to the bills.

This vision I have isn’t supposed to be representative of every forester. I know that to be true, and yet the man I’ve just described is the true forester. It doesn’t matter where he’s from, maybe he’s an old logger from Maine just trying to make ends meet. Or maybe he’s fresh off of thinning thousands of acres of Doug-fir in Oregon so that the timber world keeps going around. Perhaps he just put out the last longleaf pine fire he set earlier that day down in Florida. He’s not any individual guy, he’s the embodiment of what a forester is. He’s Paul Bunyan, who could down 100 redwoods in a matter of minutes.

He’s Gifford Pinchot, who revolutionized American forestry in a time when this country needed it most. He’s Bill Leak, the modern father of Eastern silviculture. He is what it means to be a forester. The expectation of what society expects a forester to be. Which means that all I’m left to do is compare myself to him. I’m a forester, aren’t I? Because the man I just described is what’s expected of me, the next generation of foresters. All these people are passing the torch to me, and they’ve set the illusion of how I’m supposed to look and how I ought to act. That feels like a lot to ask of me, especially when I’m not really Headwaters Magazine 17

like them. Sure, I’ve met foresters who aren’t like the man I’ve described. I’ve met plenty of them. But I still know the look on peoples’ faces when I say I’m a forester, and it’s a look of confusion. It’s never upfront, I can tell they aren’t just confused with me. I can tell that their struggle is with the term forester. Because the expectation of who I’m supposed to be isn’t lining up with who I am. I can’t seem to craft that illusion, and neither can the people I meet. So I’m left to wonder about the picture that will pop into people’s minds when they hear about the forester, Erin Camire.

Alright, so maybe I’m more of a botanist. That’s where all my experience is anyhow. That’s where I got my love for plants. It all started in the meadows of the Hudson Valley, where a fellow botanist showed me just how much there was to see. From cardinal flowers to scarlet pimpernels, I loved every single one. And it wasn’t just the plants I fell in love with, it was the idea of being a botanist. So, what is a botanist? What do I remember the fondest when I look back at my experiences? I think it was barely covering half an acre of woodland in a day because there was so much to look at. It was enjoying fresh apples from the tree out back while flipping through wildflower books to determine a sedge species. It was skinny dipping in the stream after a hard day of pulling Japanese knotweed. It was freedom like I’ve never felt before. Laughing, singing, and dancing through fields of rye and buttercups.

Spotting New Jersey tea or a rare orchid was always greeted with squeals of excitement and furious note-taking. But, when I really think about it, the thing I loved the most was talking. And my god, did we talk. All day long we talked and talked, and it never got old. Never did I realize how many word games I could play until I was stuck weeding hedgerows of black-eyed Susans for hours at a time. And never did I know just how much I’d be willing to share with friends sitting in the old farmhouse library, surrounded by botany books a half-century or more old.

Every botanist I’ve ever had the pleasure to talk to will chat me up

for hours, and I love every second. They contain knowledge and passion that feels infinite, probably because it is. And it all stems from such a rich and diverse history.

There were those who risked their lives to collect specimens from all over the globe, wandering in areas they didn’t always have the right to be in, all in the name of discovery. There were those who pondered over colors and placements, and were somehow able to create art and music from the land. Every fruit or vegetable I’ve ever eaten has been touched by a botanist who couldn’t help playing Cupid. But what do I picture when I think of a true botanist? What sort of person am I left to compare myself to? I think I found the answer when I applied for a landscaping job this past summer. At the end of my interview, I was told, “I hope you don’t mind working with little old ladies.” At the time, I thought to myself that it ain’t botany unless I’m working with little old ladies, and honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way.

With hand lenses tied around their necks and a worn copy of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide in hand, those “little old ladies” are some of the most powerful women I’ve ever met. And they’re all very good at making me look like the old one, whether it’s leaving me in the dust while surveying steep slopes or letting me know I should get a stronger eyeglass prescription when flipping through densely packed flora guides. I don’t doubt their skills and their strength for a second. So could I picture myself being like them? Being a botanist? Could I picture myself waking up at the crack of dawn, putting my gray hair up in a tight ponytail, and pulling greater celandine from the gardens on my hands and knees all day? My knees hurt just thinking about it. Their work is soul-crushing, back-breaking, and severely underappreciated. Yet, it hardly seems to phase them. They get up every single day and get to work without a single complaint, not necessarily because they’re hard workers (although that is abundantly true), but because they’re doing what they love. That’s a lot of passion, and a lot to live up to. Would I be happy as a botanist?

Could I find the same joy they do each and every day? Do I have the knowledge and the spirit to carry on the legacy of the people who came before me? Will I be able to match this illusion when people hear my name, the botanist, Erin Camire?

They’re very separate worlds, botany and forestry. I see them so distinctly in my mind. The two different versions of what society expects me to be. Two very different paths I can

take in my career. It seems like the second I start to favor one path, I yearn to explore the other. Why must I squash Pennsylvania sedge under my boots as I cruise timber, and why must I disregard the vibrant maple regeneration under an old big-tooth aspen as I hunt for blue cohosh?

How come I seem to be one of the only ones that wants to look up at the lush canopy above me and also down at the blanket of greenery beneath my feet? In that way, I guess I’m both a forester and a botanist, yet when I think about the way both professions are perceived, I guess I’m neither.

My passion doesn’t seem to have a place in the stark illusions that are placed before me. Society tells me I have to choose, am I a true woodsman, or am I a woman in her garden? Man or woman, which am I? I’ve been lucky in my life that no one has ever asked me, straight up, if I’m a man or a woman, cause I’m afraid they wouldn’t like my answer. Because at the end of the day, they’re asking me the wrong question. “Man” or “Woman,” these words hold no weight to me, and I don’t feel torn between them.

I’m not just somewhere in the middle, I’m outside the binary altogether, and thus outside of the question. If you want a thoughtful answer, then you’ll need a more applicable question, one that truly defines how I interact with the world around me. Funny enough that question would be: are you a forester or a botanist? I’m both and I’m neither. I can’t check either box. I can’t get either shoe to fit.

I can’t label who or what I am. In terms of how I’m going to be perceived, I seem to be off the spectrum altogether, and I think I have to take that in stride if I want to keep pushing forward. I will defy the expectations and standards that I’ve been given, and forge my own way, with botany in my heart and forestry on my sleeves. I need to push past the illusions that I have allowed to cloud my vision. I have to carry the knowledge of those who have forged the path thus far, and start carrying my own weight in this world. Not as a forester or a botanist. As me, Erin Camire. H

Art by Frances Leadman Headwaters Magazine 18

Skimming the Surface:

An Introduction to Eutrophication in Lake Champlain

By Jaylyn Davidson In late summer and early fall, the Vermont Department of Public Health warns against entering Lake Champlain’s waters due to dangerous blooms. Lake Champlain is particularly vulnerable to cyanobacteria and other harmful algal blooms, compromising the safety of the water and hindering the general public’s ability to enjoy the lake.

Cyanobacteria, colloquially referred to as blue-green algae, thrive in an abundance of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Although necessary for plant growth and development, excessive amounts of these nutrients from agricultural and stormwater runoff can induce eutrophication in freshwater habitats. Eutrophication occurs when excess cyanobacteria die due to depleted levels of nutrients and start a decomposition process, consuming all available dissolved oxygen. When dissolved oxygen is depleted, the water becomes anoxic, rendering it incapable of supporting aquatic life.

To gain further insight on eutrophication in Lake Champlain, I spoke to Dr. Ana Morales-Williams, a limnologist at the Rubenstein School who specializes in this topic. According to Dr. Morales-Williams, eutrophication impacts lakes in a variety of ways, including an increase in phytoplankton biomass, algal decomposition, and low oxygen levels in the water column, known as hypoxia. She referred to Missisquoi Bay and Saint Albans Bay, areas in the northeast arm of Lake Champlain, as being “very eutrophic systems

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relative to the main lake, [as they] function more like mesotrophic or oligotrophic lakes.” Mesotrophic lakes are intermediate, with medium levels of nutrient abundance, whereas oligotrophic lakes are nutrient deficient and have low biological activity. In these regions, “eutrophication has caused a large increase in blooms over the past several decades that are intensifying due to a number of factors.”

Dr. Morales-Williams shared her view on how climate change in Vermont has impacted eutrophication in Lake Champlain. She referred to lakes as “canaries of the landscape” because of their capacity to respond to changes in the watershed and in climate at a faster rate than terrestrial ecosystems. Lake Champlain is currently facing two important issues catalyzed by a warming climate: reduced ice cover and season mixing. Each year, the period of ice cover is decreasing and there is a delay in when ice begins and melts. She stated that, “Lake Champlain is a dimictic lake, which means that it mixes twice a year.” The first melt and spring mixing event are responsible for establishing the algal community and food web for the remainder of the year. When the ice melts, there is a large flush of nutrients and a bloom of diatoms—a type of algae containing vital lipids and nutrients to the food web—that sustains the zooplankton and other organisms in the lake. If the number of spring mixing events significantly decreases,

the timing changes, or the events cease to occur, the ecosystem will suffer.

Climate change is increasing the presence of algal blooms in other ways as well. Dr. Morales-Williams stated that “changes in timing of snow melt, pulses of nutrients, or big storm events… have the effect of supporting high biomass and diversity of cyanobacteria” that allow them to persist longer than they would under more stable conditions. Consequently, cyanobacteria are becoming a greater issue as climate change causes more frequent extreme weather events and seasonal variation.

When it comes to mitigation and prevention efforts, Dr. Morales-Williams argues that people must be responsible land stewards and utilize more sustainable land-use techniques. Due to the fact that “Lake Champlain has a very large watershed relative to its surface area—which is kind of unusual for a large lake—whatever we do with the watershed really matters a lot to what happens in the lake.” The Lake Champlain Watershed constitutes 8,000 square miles and includes mountains, woods, farmlands, and settlements that all flow into the 120-mile-long lake.

This lends to a 19:1 land-to-lake ratio, significant when compared to other large lakes, such as Lake Superior, which has a ratio of 1.5:1. Since the watershed has a disproportionately large influence on the lake due to its size, we must be attentive to the types of activities that are conducted throughout the watershed in order to minimize the transport of pollutants and excess nutrients into the lake.

Mitigation strategies and general education about eutrophication in Lake Champlain should be taught in all Vermont schools to give students a deeper understanding of the place in which they live. Shane Heath—a tenth and eleventh grade teacher at Essex High School—articulates how Lake Champlain is “a microcosm of what’s happening in parts of the ocean like [the] Chesapeake Bay,” making it a tangible local example with global implications. Eutrophication, he stated, is especially important in a small state like Vermont, which prides itself on being environmentally conscious.

Heath emphasizes eutrophication is a particular

topic that teachers must embrace in their curriculums. He adds, “it is certainly a missed opportunity if you’re teaching in Vermont and not talking about eutrophication, because it’s a way that we can see climate change effects, and also just human relationships to the land, firsthand and how those have to change.” Exposing students to water-related issues, particularly local topics, is vital because it demonstrates how our actions influence the environment. Heath feels that this could easily be implemented in many schools, explaining, “every school probably is in some sort of walking proximity to a stream or river where they can easily do some pretty meaningful science.” He cites benthic macroinvertebrate sampling as an example of hands-on, water-related science already integrated in many Vermont schools. The process of utilizing benthic macroinvertebrates to measure water quality starts by ruffling about rocks and catching them using a kick net.

The number collected, as well as the degree of environmental stress, are then calculated and compared to a pollution tolerance index to estimate the quality of the water.

Outside macroinvertebrate sampling, interdisciplinary approaches to eutrophication through the humanities and sciences are needed to increase awareness in school curriculums of the threats posed by eutrophication. Heath notes, “I’d be surprised in elementary or middle schools, and even in all high school curriculums, if they’re really talking about agriculture, wastewater treatment, and suburban runoff as ‘causes and effect.’” He goes on to add, “it’s our responsibility [as science teachers] to talk about some of the biggest issues facing our planet and facing this generation.” In addition to improving eutrophication education on Lake Champlain, Heath believes that planting riparian buffers to help prevent point and nonpoint source pollution and assisting local farms with adopting more sustainable techniques for the lake and land will help mitigate eutrophication.

Eutrophication in freshwater ecosystems is a major issue in Lake Champlain, and scientists are still working to find ways to mitigate and prevent both the process and its harmful effects. As Dr. Morales-Williams and Heath both advocate, we can all contribute to reducing the impacts of eutrophication by being educated land stewards. H Art by Casey Benderoth Headwaters Magazine 20

Fire in the Pines New England’s Forgotten Fire Story

By Valentin Kostelnik Drifting on a warm breeze, a light blue butterfly flutters down to a similarly-colored flower in a grassy field in New York. The butterfly delicately lands on a lupine, extends its proboscis into the nectar, and takes a draught of much-needed sustenance. Around them is a wide grassland dotted with scrub oak and pitch pine woodlands, and parts of the open landscape are charred with ash from a recent fire.

In Northern California where I grew up, fire is the object of much fascination, anxiety, and conversation.

The summer months now bring regular megafires that turn each day into one long, orange twilight. In the ever-shrinking intermissions between fire seasons, everyone eyes the rain forecast obsessively, wondering how bad the following year will be. Everyone in fire country has an opinion on prescribed burns too, a hopeful solution to our current crisis. As someone aiming for a career in fire, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing in New England, one of the only regions in the country that never burns. Being from California, I have been familiar only with cataclysmic megafires that should be feared, and prescribed burns that need to be expanded to a landscape scale. Both of these versions of fire exist only in the West and parts of the Southeast, and neither exist anymore in New England.

I staffed a student welcome day back in November with Cathy Shiga-Gattullo, who had a fire-scarred oak round on display to catch the eye of passing families. I asked her where the tree was from. “Colorado? California?”

“Poughkeepsie!”

Poughkeepsie? There are no fires in New York. What is a fire-adapted oak doing in Poughkeepsie? Cathy patiently explained that the round was from the Mohonk Preserve, where managers are trying to restore a fire regime to an oak woodland. She gave me the contact information of a few New York fire managers, and advised that I learn about the forgotten role of fire in New England’s ecology, both past and present.

Unlike Western states, New England would have few fires under natural conditions, if any. The region lacks a rhythmic wet-dry cycle, so the forest fuels never become combustible on a large scale, and lightning is always acHeadwaters Magazine 21

companied by rain, leaving no natural source of ignition. As Mark Twain famously observed, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait 15 minutes.” While out West, vegetation has months of hot, dry weather to become combustible, New England vegetation has a few weeks at most. You can imagine trying to light a fire in the damp litter layer under a northern hardwood forest; it won’t work.

In California things are less picky. In my hometown, it stops raining around April, and we might not see a drop of rain until November. Entire forests are turned into tinderboxes on an annual basis, and a single lightning strike can burn hundreds of thousands of acres. Even without human interference, landscape-scale fires are frequent.

Compared to the West, wildfire in New England is incredibly rare under natural conditions. This is why most people today believe it to be nonexistent in the region, and why I was so surprised to learn that fire was once a common occurrence here when Native Americans managed the land. But because fire is so naturally rare, the role it plays in New England has always been closely controlled by humans and reflected their land-use values.

Bill Patterson, one of New England’s foremost fire scientists, told me, “I devoted my career to finding out a fraction of what the indigenous people in New England knew about fire.” Prescribed burning in New England is difficult and requires intimate knowledge of habitat structure, weather patterns, and many other factors, but can be an incredibly valuable ecological tool. Natives needed the land for hunting and for agriculture, both of which can be made more productive by fire.

Fire is enormously advantageous to a hunter. All dead material is burned, and any surviving grasses or shrubs immediately send out new growth, which attracts game from nearby unburned areas. Furthermore, in a cleared forest, a hunter can locate and kill game far easier than in an overgrown one.

In Southern New England and along the coast, native groups were more sedentary compared to northern tribes and practiced extensive agriculture. Fire was particularly

frequent around their settlements, where they used it as an agricultural tool. They employed s l a s h - an d burn practices, in which large tracts of forest are cleared using fire before being cultivated. Early accounts of colonists visiting New York and Pennsylvania describe “open plains twenty or thirty leagues in extent, entirely free from trees.”

Native Americans managed the land using fire for thousands of years, long enough for species like the Karner blue butterfly and landscapes like oak woodlands or pine barrens to become fire-adapted. Though fire may be absent now, it is partly responsible for the New England we know today.

When colonists arrived, large portions of Pennsylvania, western New York, and the coastal plains were likely under prescribed fire management. Contrary to some modern views, colonists initially embraced fire, and records show a 16th century wave of prescribed fire on an even greater scale than what the natives maintained.

These early colonists, mostly farmers and hunters, used the land in similar ways as the natives, so fire stayed on the land. They put fire to use in “fire herding” to clear new land for agriculture, and to keep the forests clear. As the population of New England boomed in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did prescribed burns, and many contemporary observers wrote about widespread prescribed fires in New England even into the 19th century.

Then, as railroads and westward expansion depopulated much of the region, fire subsided. Forests regrew in its absence, and many of the old agricultural fields were replaced with hardwood “old-field” stands. Logging became a huge industry once these stands grew big enough to be harvested, and fire manifested very differently under logging than under agriculture and hunting.

The slash left over after logging is superb fuel that dries out quickly, especially given there is no canopy to shade it. Wildfire gorged on the slash and New England was wracked by some of the largest fires in its history, such as the 1903 Adirondack fire that burned 600,000 acres.

It’s this version of fire, not the version that existed under

natives and early colonists, that modern America first responded to.

These fires, along with even larger fires in the West like the “Big Blowup” of 1910, prompted environmentalists like George Perkins Marsh and Gifford Pinchot to conclude that fire was inherently destructive, and forced the Forest Service to institute its infamous total suppression policy.

The Forest Service’s suppression policy is often blamed for a lot of our problems with fire today, and the people who crafted it are painted as ignorant and dismissive of indigenous practices. This is certainly true, but they were also responding to a form of fire that was very different from the benign burns that came earlier. After living through multiple megafires, I know it can be hard to view fire as anything but a thing to be feared. In the early 20th century, that is all it was. This kind of fire had no place in humans’ use of the land, and so it was eradicated.

For most of the 20th century, it was absent, and it wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that researchers like Bill Patterson started to rediscover fire as an integral part of ecosystems.

These researchers, including Patterson, noticed that some species, like the Karner blue butterfly, rely on fire for survival and suffered precipitous declines in its absence. One of the first places in New England to reintroduce fire was created for the endangered Karner blue butterfly. It’s called the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, and it is one of the most successful of its kind. It lies surprisingly close to the New York capital, and conversations with burn boss Tyler Briggs gave me a clearer picture of modern prescribed fire practices here.

The Albany Pine Bush Preserve encompasses about three thousand acres of pine barrens, all maintained by fire. It is a mosaic of grasslands and pitch pine groves, with blue lupines dotting the grassy fields and little underbrush to obscure the pine groves. It was founded in 1988 to satisfy the Endangered Species Act, and today this rare ecosystem supports 20% of all endangered species in New York. Most pine barrens grow on deep deposits of rapidly draining sand, which can absorb huge amounts of rain but can’t hold onto it, meaning pine barren soil Headwaters Magazine 22

can dry out just a few days after a rain. Species like pitch pine excel in these conditions and happen to drop a lot of needles, which is superb tinder. In addition, as Patterson describes, “A lot of the species that grow with [pitch pine], like huckleberry and blueberry, produce one-hour fuels.” One-hour fuels are any organic material that can dry out within one hour, compared with ten-hour or thousand-hour fuels. So even in New York’s humid climate, where multi-week droughts are rare, Albany Pine Bush reliably becomes combustible after just a few days of warm, dry weather.

The Pine Bush initiative began in 1981 when the federal government, in response to increasing demand from locals, bought the land to become habitat for the endangered Karner blue butterfly. The barrens in the late 70s were overgrown and shaded out, with little lupinus perennis and few Karner blue butterflies, and the state government was desperate to transform it into healthier habitat. The only way to do that was fire. So fire was reintroduced.

Since then, managers of the barrens have adopted an annual burn plan. Under this regime, every acre is burned once every 3-5 years, a schedule that creates a patchwork of habitats in various stages of succession. Tyler Briggs, who currently heads the program, said that they try to burn 10% of the preserve every year, approximately 300 acres. The best time to burn is in the spring dormant season, after snowmelt but before leaf out, “when sunlight penetrates through the canopy and dries out the organic matter that’s on the ground.” In Albany, snowmelt generally occurs in midMarch.

Mr. Briggs says, “our prime time, when we get most of our burning done, is between St. Patrick’s Day and Memorial Day.” After April and May, they may get a few low-acreage burn days, but they don’t count on it.

Modern

New England doesn’t rely on the forest for food like the natives and early settlers. So why should we value fire?

The answer is not yet clear, but so far fire has been a tool for ecology and preservation. Bill Patterson thinks, “the future is going to be related to the preservation of endangered species that can be shown to be dependent on fire.” This can be seen in the Albany Pine Bush, and when they’re prepping burn plans, the Karner blue butterfly is always the first concern. The butterfly needs lupinus perennis, which needs sunny fields, which are maintained by fire. The Endangered Species Act demanded the Albany Pine Bush create habitat for the butterfly, so fire was returned.

Patterson, who has struggled with burning in New England for decades, likens the Endangered Species Act to a “political mandate from heaven” that allows the Albany managers to fully implement fire. Fire wasn’t returned to Albany for economic reasons, like what motivated early colonists, or out of the safety concerns prevalent in Western states, but rather because a single butterfly species was dying out, and fire was the best tool to preserve it.

New England fire is as different from Western fire as night is from day. Its merits and drawbacks, promises and challenges, are fundamentally different. Western wildfires are enormous and dramatic; New England fires are small and hidden. In the West, scientists are scrambling to understand the impacts of fire, while in the Northeast it is often overlooked altogether. Learning about fire in New England gave me a new perspective on it from both an ecological and human standpoint, and its story in Nor t he astern states deserves to join the national conversation about fire. H

Art by Sadie Holmes Headwaters Magazine 23

Returning to the Land: Buffalo Conservation in Montana

By Meagan Beckage Only 10 minutes from Yellowstone National Park, the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) camp embodies everything that is Montana: pristine forests of lodgepole pine, cascading mountain peaks covered in snow, an overwhelmingly vast sky. Nestled at the base of Custer Gallatin National Forest, the backyard of the camp consists of protected woods and granite cliffs. The cabins face the frozen abyss that is Hebgen Lake, with the Madison Mountain Range rising above the waters on the other side. It was, as the locals informed me, a true Montana winter. This meant snow up to my waist, frozen nights coated in ice, and skiing as a form of efficient transportation. As I spent the afternoon exploring the camp, I was greeted by the community lucky enough to call this place home. I met many different characters at BFC, each unique in their own regard. There was Pat, a Cheyenne Sundancer who could be found after dinner discussing

tribal law in the common room. Mike, the co-founder, who would often tell crazy stories of the early days of activism in BFC, such as members chaining themselves to slaughter facilities. There was also Rayna, who would love to share moments of her past activism in the American-Indian Movement and wildlife protection. No matter where people come from or who they are, everyone is united by one common thread: the American Buffalo.

Referred to interchangeably as buffalo or bison, they are our national mammal. BFC works to protect them, conserve the land they live on, and amplify Indigenous voices around the subject.

BFC fights for the bison in three ways: in the field, with science, and through legal means. In the field, BFC works to help bison safely cross the road and prevent hazing from cars/tourists. BFC truly is the first line of defense for these beings. They also fight for the bison Headwaters Magazine 24

through data collection, which is recorded in a wildlife database. BFC is building up a solid, scientifically-sound case to present to the National Park service in the State of Montana in order to demonstrate the mismanagement of the species. By legal means, BFC has lawyers with understanding of state and tribal law that are able to prosecute illegal actions against the bison and rally for wildlife statutes to protect them.

I fall in quickly with this community and soon am on my first patrol. Every day without fail, BFC runs a morning and evening patrol. The goal of this is to find out where the buffalo are and where they are heading, understand their migratory/behavioral patterns, witness any illegal activity done by hunters, and keep track of the amount killed.

I knew one version of the buffalo’s story from high school history classes, how in the age of Manifest Destiny and Western expansion, buffalo were massacred by the thousands. Hunters, like the famous ‘Buffalo Bill,’ were hired to wipe the prairies clean of these animals.

I remembered the motives behind this slaughter; it efficiently cut off a food source for plains tribes, such as the Lakota and Blackfeet, and left prairies free for homesteaders to move in and begin farming the land. What I didn’t know was that in Montana, the state allowed the cattle ranchers to graze their cattle on public lands. The cattle ranchers didn’t like having to share the public land with the bison and had an incentive to kill them off. An incentive that still exists today.

The patrols usually consist of backcountry skiing in Yellowstone and the surrounding areas in an attempt to track the buffalo herds. Today, however, I am getting in a car wearing multiple layers of clothing and no skis. The night before, a semi-truck was going too fast on the highway through West Yellowstone and killed 13 buffalo. An entire herd of pregnant cows and yearlings was struck dead. Mike drives us to the scene and blood stains the snow-packed roads. I stand outside the car on the edge of the highway, right next to the sight of the accident.

Across the street, a young bull slowly makes his way to the road. Really, he is beautiful.

His large head hangs low and swings from side to side as he walks. His thick brown coat glistens with melted snow. But I can tell right away that something is wrong— the left horn of the bull is broken and bloody. This is the orphaned yearling from last night; the lone survivor of the crash. Left behind with no mother and no herd, the bull wanders around, staying close to the place his family was killed. We watch as he trots across the blood stains, eyeing the cars nervously. Two days later, this young bull was killed by a hunter, and the entire herd was gone.

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The next day I am out on morning patrol. I finally have skis on my feet and my breath is taken by the landscape.

I feel like I’m skiing through a Bob Ross painting. Evergreen trees wear thick blankets of snow and porcupines climb up their trunks. We are skiing along the Madison River and the water is clear with melted ice. Up ahead, a coyote trots across the snow with a coat of silver and brown fur. As we ski, my patrol partner explains what is currently happening concerning buffalo in the state of Montana.

Cattle ranchers have been a powerful influence in Montana’s history due to their wealth. The same incentive from 200 years ago to remove buffalo remains present today: the use of public land for grazing. Cattle ranchers claim that buffalo are spreading brucellosis (an infectious disease caused by bacteria) to their cattle and thus are a risk that must be removed. Despite the lack of evidence to support this claim, bison are classified as “species in need of disease control” and managed under the Interagency Bison Management Plan, which places them under the jurisdictions of the Department of Livestock in Montana. This allows for capture facilities to exist in areas around Yellowstone National Park. Bison migrating out of the park in the winter will be trapped and tested for brucellosis. If they test positive, the buffalo will either be quarantined then relocated, or shipped to slaughter facilities.

As we round the corner of the east bluffs, an opening in the trees displays a flat field where the Madison splits into separate channels.

The angular peaks of the snow capped mountains seem to cut through the light blue sky. A pair of trumpeter swans duck down to the water, their white wings glowing in the morning sun. Way down on the other side of the field, a buffalo is bedded down in the snow. The silence of a cold winter morning is a sound like no other. As I pause on my skis, gazing out at the beautiful land before me, it’s hard to believe that anyone would want to change a single thing.

When I return to camp, I take time to reflect on what

I have learned. In the common room filled to the brim with buffalo memorabilia and a cute black puppy dying for me to play with him, it’s hard to discern the confusion I felt in the field. What is happening to the buffalo is unfair and unjust, but here I am in a cozy community with people dedicating their lives to these animals. Bison getting killed feels like a distant faraway event. If anything, I’ve gained a love for the sweet animals with their docile eyes and slow-moving strut. I can’t imagine an animal of such a gentle nature getting slaughtered.

Then it’s time for me to visit Gardiner.

In Gardiner, Montana, home of the northern entrance to Yellowstone and about a three hour drive from the BFC main camp, wildlife exists at every corner. Elk graze in church parking lots, bighorn sheep cross dirt roads in town, pronghorn antelopes run through yards, and hundreds of bison graze in the subalpine plains. The land has changed drastically. No longer the snow-covered forests of West Yellowstone, Gardiner is situated between two mountains that rise brown and yellow against the blue sky. Sage bushes spot the landscape alongside the dried animal scat that makes up the soil. Around 800 bison graze in the fields around the small tourist town. They are opting to leave the deep snow forests of Yellowstone for the easily accessible grasses of Gardiner’s plains. However, lots of bison means lots of hunts and capture facilities.

In recent years, the killings provoked backlash from the locals, as well as negative public attention directed at Yellowstone and the state of Montana.

In order to divert the negative publicity, the state granted tribal treaty hunting rights to the respective tribes. This allowed tribal hunters to conduct large hunting parties without limits on the amount of bison that can be killed. This accomplished two things for the state: shifted the bad publicity to the tribes and allowed for more buffalo to be killed.

It’s 7:00 am and still dark out. Headlights from hunters’ trucks line the road below us in the valley. My mentor Jackson and I are standing on a dirt road equipped

with binoculars and a camera. We’re here to watch the hunt. It is very windy and my fingers quickly grow stiff as I clutch the binoculars to my face; luckily dawn brings just enough light to see. I watch as around 20 hunters, a mix of tribal and state, start yelling at a group of bison.

Their goal here is to haze the animals into the hunting zone. The buffalo become frightened and nervous, soon the entire herd is sprinting through the hunt zone to try and escape the humans. Gunshots ring across the valley and I keep track of how many animals have fallen. One yearling is shot and lays motionless on the ground. Three cows stop running and huddle around it. Bison are social creatures who like to mourn their dead. Two of the cows see the hunters approaching and sprint away. The last cow, clearly the mother, refuses to leave her baby.

She nudges it and attempts to push it back up. One more gunshot and she is flailing around on the ground, until another hunter puts her out of her misery. Trucks drive on the highway with their beds sagging under the weight of buffalo carcasses. Legs stick out at strange angles and the fields are covered with rotting gut piles. The hunting guidelines outlined by the State of Montana are not only in disjunction with the cultural traditions tied to the tribal hunt, but also create an unsustainable environment where buffalo can be hunted in excess, year after year.

Something needs to change.

Rosalie Little Thunder, a Lakota tribe member and co-founder of BFC once said, “I felt a deep sadness for the deaths of the buffalo, but what really distresses me is the condition of human beings. We see everything as a disposable commodity already and that is not good”.

The issue to be faced at the heart of it all is the tendency in modern society to undervalue nonhuman life and view other life forms merely as objects to be exploited.

We have lost our connection to the land and with that, we no longer respect it. We forget that the earth is where we come from and one day, where we will return. Montana’s ecosystems are teeming with life. Large herds of buffalo move slowly through the prairie, rolling in the mud and munching on grass. Trees hundreds of years old grow into empty space, reaching towards the big sky. Foxes trot toward the forest line, red fur like fire against the snow. Every plant and animal on this planet deserves to be here just as much as we do. BFC fights for the right of the buffalo to roam freely through the land without fear of being massacred. After all, buffalo don’t understand human borders. When it comes to land and animal conservation, it’s important to remember where we are from.

In doing this, we can truly move forward in our conservation efforts. We must come back to the forests, we must come back to the trees, we must come back to the land. H Art by Alex Zoner Headwaters Magazine 26

Exploring My Place-Based Connections to Northeastern Italy

By Fosca Bechthold

Rolling hills with endless vineyards, the smell of fertilizer from the campi (fields), the sounds of church bells echoing through the hills, the cobblestoned streets and portici (porticoes), the views of the Prealps in the distance, the roaring thunderstorms, the deafening buzz of cicadas, and the barking chorus of dogs at night; these are some of the sensory memories I associate with one of the places I call home—the northern part of the border between the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia regions in Italy.

Like many in the US, I’m the daughter of immigrants; my mother immigrated to the US from Italy with her family when she was a young child and my father immigrated to the US from Germany as an adult. I grew up in Cambridge, MA in a transcultural family where I heard and spoke multiple languages; we mixed cultural traditions to create our own, and we celebrated holidays without extended family. I’m very grateful that my parents wanted us to maintain a connection with our roots and extended family in Europe, and that I was able to travel often to this part of Italy to connect with my heritage.

Going to the local café to have our morning cappuccino with a brioche and having long meals outside in the heat of summer at our friends’ vineyards (paying with the many mosquito bites we received) became strong memories of our daily life there that were reinforced over the years. Our culturally-informed routines, the many hours we spent with friends and family, and the familiar landscapes that we’d go back to time and time again, strongly influenced my sense of place, so much that it feels like another home for me. It is because of this and the many generations my family has lived there that I feel so deeply connected to this small pocket of northeastern Italy.

According to Donna Gabaccia’s book, Italy’s Many Diasporas, even before it was officially declared a nation in 1861, the Italian peninsula has long been characterized by migration, and its residents have arguably been “among the most migratory of peoples on the earth.” In the past, most of this migration took the form Headwaters Magazine 27

of out-migration, the reasons for which seem to have been primarily economic. More than “26 million people officially declared their intention to leave Italy” from 1870 onwards, as researched by Gabaccia. Furthermore, during the 800 years prior to becoming a unified nation in 1861, Italy was mainly just a “geographical expression” because there was “no common government, language, or culture” between people living on the physical peninsula. Instead, common governments, languages, and culture were shared on a much smaller scale.

I’ve noticed this myself, meeting Italians abroad or traveling within Italy, that there are significant linguistic differences, such as accents and dialects that are very region-specific, and can be different even at a smaller scale.

For instance, I have a hard time understanding some of my cousins who grew up in Sicily—it sounds like a completely different language! There are also distinct dialects, many of which can be categorized as their own languages. I remember hearing my nonno (grandfather) speaking in dialetto (dialect) with his sister. I grew up saying the word toccette when I wanted to dip bread to clean up the remaining food on my plate. I didn’t realize this word wasn’t actually Italian, but instead the local dialect that my grandfather spoke.

Not only are there linguistic differences throughout Italy, but cultural distinctions as well, with each region having its own foods and dishes. I didn’t grow up eating calzones or lasagna at home because those weren’t foods that my mom and grandparents had grown up eating— we ate dishes like pasta e fagioli (a pasta and bean soup), risotto, and polenta dishes, which were typical of the area and were based in ingredients grown nearby, such as corn and rice. These were foods and dishes from home that my grandparents brought with them into their new life in the US. According to Gabaccia, the largest out-migration (or intent to out-migrate) from Italy occurred between 1876 and 1914, when about 14 million people applied to the

Italian government to leave the country.

However, between 1945 and 1975, about 9 million people migrated within Italy between the geographically and culturally distinct north and south, rather than out of Italy. In the 1800s, Italians hailing from the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia regions made up some of the most numerous groups of migrants.

As Gabaccia found, despite the large numbers of migrants leaving Italy, evidence shows that “from the late Middle Ages down to the 1960s,” most left Italy with the intention of returning, and many did, in fact, return. This was largely due to the definition of home as “a place… not a people, nation, or descent group,” a definition that makes sense for Italy and its context.

In my own thesis research, when survey respondents were asked to explain why they stayed in their own words, one of the most common words used in their responses was ‘family,’ with one person saying, “I was born here and my family’s origins have been here for centuries.” Another person said they stayed because, “I built my house and family here in Friuli, my family and friends live here and I feel good in this territory/on this land.” Someone else stayed because they traveled to other places “for tourism and every time I was very nostalgic for home. Here I have my family and this is another reason for why I decided to remain where I was born and raised.” As these examples highlight, being close to family is very important for many Italians and influences their decisions to stay.

In the article, “The regional dynamics of internal migration intensities in Italy,” Corrado Bonifazi and other authors suggest that patterns in internal migration have generally been understood to be closely connected to economic opportunities, such as in the 1950s and ‘60s when many Italians from southern Italy migrated to northern Italy. According to this research, more recently, especially within the past 30 or so years, Italy has experienced an influx of immigration, a recent change from its long history of emigration, as well as less internal migration. This is mainly because people are choosing to stay, and, according to Bonifazi and others, choosing to stay is largely due to the “strong family ties” that discourage Italians

from moving.

According to authors Morse and Mudgett in the article, “Longing for landscape: Homesickness and place attachment among rural out-migrants in the 19th and 21st centuries,” as the study of place attachment in relation to migration has advanced, migration scholars have noted the importance of researching “the associated feelings and performative aspects of migration.” However, a “longing for landscape” as a form of place attachment has not been addressed. “The Vermont Roots Project” is a 2018 study conducted by Morse and Mudgett in collaboration with others about the reasons people who grew up in Vermont choose to stay, leave, or return. Through their quantitative and qualitative data analysis, they found that there was a “dominance of place-based factors and family ties in stayers’ residential decision making.” They posit that “entanglement of attachment to natural environments with family and community factors suggests that these elements of home might reinforce or build on one another.” This research indicates that place attachment for those who choose to stay in Vermont, encompasses both the physical environment as well as the social and emotional aspects of the place.

Through my own thesis research, I came to similar conclusions about attachment to place in northeastern Italy. Many people who stayed in the region they grew up in enjoy living in the region and named that as a reason for staying (57.7%). Interestingly, for many people who stayed in the region where they grew up, the familiar landscape/natural environments of the area (51.1%) was an important factor for choosing to stay, as well. Claudia, a 69 year old woman from a small town in the Dolomites, spoke about working seasonally in the gelaterie (ice cream parlors) in Germany where the Italian owners originally from the Dolomites would hang images of the mountains they associated with home on the walls—a nostalgic tie to their origins. Emma, a female physical therapist in her thirties said, “If I had to imagine where to live permanently, then I’d tell you that I could not live Headwaters Magazine 28

my entire life without the mountains” and that “here, [referring to the regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia], I see many, many people tied to the mountains…it’s something that unites us a lot.” Giorgia, a woman in her forties, grew up surrounded by the mountains of Belluno but left the Veneto region and now lives elsewhere in the Italian Alps. She said she was nostalgic for the mountains she grew up with: “those of Feltre are really beautiful.

Maybe because [that’s] where I was born, they’re more beautiful, it’s probably like that, it’s easily like that.” The landscapes that are familiar to us leave an imprint on our sense of place and identity, whether we realize it or not.

For many, attachments to place are also closely tied to ancestral roots and family. Living close to family was one of the reasons many said they chose to remain in the region they grew up in (42.8%). Childhood memories are also linked to family traditions and experiences in the familiar landscape, influencing attachment to place for many. One survey respondent described their reason for staying in the region as an emotional attachment related to memories and places: “For a sense of natural belonging to places that are witnesses of my growth and of my most significant life experiences, although not all of them; for the landscape that includes the sea, on one side, and the Dolomites, on the other, and to which returning, even from places you love, is always a return to your origins.” As my grandmother recounted to me, when she and my grandfather would travel back to Italy, as they got off their airplane in Venice and saw ‘their mountains,’ they’d feel a sense of relief, a sense that they were home, a feeling that I am also familiar with. I think for many who leave, these feelings are related to nostalgia.

For those who left their home region, an overwhelming majority of survey respondents said they’re nostalgic for the place they grew up in (73.5%), saying they miss family and friends or the mountains, air, and landscapes, to name a few reasons. I find that I often romanticize this nostalgia and the memories of the hot summers in this part of Italy, wishing I was there when I’m in the US and

often missing parts of the US when I’m there – conflicting feelings.

As I walk the cobblestoned streets, chat with friends and family in Italian over a cappuccino, or hike in the nearby mountains to the sound of a chorus of cow bells, I can’t help but feel a strong connection to this place, to the people, to the culture, to the language, to my roots.

The results of my research generally show that Italians in this part of Italy have a strong connection to the place they grew up in and factor that into decisions to stay, leave, or return. Understanding the place-based connections others have to this place has enabled me to better understand mine – especially relevant to those of us who are immigrants or children of immigrants, as many of us share complex understandings of home. I’m still trying to grapple with how my sense of place is informed by my connection to family, familiar landscapes, and local lifestyles and cultures, and how this identity fits into other people’s perceptions of who I am.

Walking down the street looking at all the different market stalls, I’m acutely aware that I may dress a bit differently from a local – although I know not to wear a sweatshirt – that I may hold myself slightly differently, that I may act somewhat differently. This is especially true if I find myself walking with my sisters, with whom I generally speak in English – this makes us really stand out as American, especially with our blonde hair. I’ll often put more care into the clothing I choose to wear and how I present myself when I’m in Italy, trying to blend in as much as I can, so as not to stand out, enabling me to feel like I belong in this place a little more if others perceive me as such. However, there are moments when I’m reminded that I’m American, like when someone will assume I don’t speak Italian and instead speak to me in English when I’m buying postcards in Venice, to which I feel frustrated. Yet other times I feel like a local, when I’m riding my bike to buy groceries or run an errand, when I run into family or friends on the street.

I, like many people with ties to other places, experience conflicting emotions that complicate my understanding of home, but ultimately these feelings define who I am, shaping my identity and unique sense of place.

And, for this, I feel grateful. H

Art by Fosca Bechthold Headwaters Magazine 29

S h On Ocean Acidification a t t e r i n g

By Ella Weatherington

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What Once Was

By Jamie Cull-Host

The garden in front of my childhood house has completely changed. Gone are the pyracantha bushes that I cut my foot on when I was little. The rosemary and mint that I would sneak nibbles of are dry and dead. The only thing left is the tall maple that used to hold my tire swing, which has outlasted the towering ponderosa pine.

I pull into the driveway and run over the overgrown weeds sprouting from the cracks. Walking through the front door, the familiar smell of home overwhelms me. Time hasn’t felt real since I heard the news. I thought I had prepared myself, but I guess you never really can.

I had decided to do all the packing myself. In hindsight, that wasn’t very smart, but grief does weird things. I need to start somewhere so I head to the garage, which feels safe based on my emotional state.

The garage at my house would probably be defined as a one-and-a-half car garage, but the only car we ever kept in there was an old MG Midget that we sold when I was in high school. The majority of the space is now taken up with boxes of miscellaneous stuff; old sports equipment, bikes, and skateboards. I start by wheeling the bikes out and shifting all the boxes to one side. Feeling a little warmed up now, I decide to start on the sports equipment lined up against one wall. As I begin moving the baseball gloves and deflated basketballs, I see their golf clubs. I can’t hold it in anymore. The next thing I know, I’m bawling my eyes out on the concrete floor. I’ll never be able to get anything done unless I start at the heart.

The study is in the basement of the house, a little room with no windows. It’s where I could usually find them… either there or the garden. At night, they would sit in the chair in front of the computer checking their emails, reading the news, or writing in their notebooks. I now find myself in that same chair. I’m not entirely sure how I got here. If I had to venture a guess, I would probably say I followed their ghost. On the side of the desk, under a mess of papers, I find one of their little notebooks. I never felt the need to sneak a peek before, but I can’t stop myself now. I open it to the first page; it’s a grocery list. The second page is the same, as is the third. Finally on the fourth page, I find a poem.

Two squirrels waltzed through the garden today, I saw them dance through the grass and up into the maple tree.

They spun blissfully past the encroachment of weeds…

Those weeds I now spend my days watching, Hoping that my ire poisons their roots.

I’m not sure what I had expected, but that was definitely not it. I had always wondered what they went through as they lost the ability to take care of their precious garden. They were never one to show how they were feeling, much less talk about it. I flip to the next page.

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Days pass and the grass grows taller.

I sit and watch as it taunts me, Goading me into spending the little energy I have left.

Though I don’t move, I feel it slipping away.

Page after page, there are poems giving me a glimpse into their life, into the grief they felt as they watched their beloved garden slip from their control. Unable to look away, they sat in the garden everyday. Though they barely had the energy to walk, they would somehow make it out and sit in the garden. Watching as the grass grew taller than they had ever let it before. Watching as the garden that they tenderly cared for withered. Just watching.

I keep flipping through the poems. My tears stain the pages. I read everything they never told me. There’s one page left. One last poem.

Once more I venture to my garden.

My body tells me it’s the last time.

I have no more fight left, No more vitriol to send to the weeds.

I sit in my garden and my folly is revealed to me.

Who am I to control this land?

Carefully crafting an alien landscape, An ecosystem separated from the surroundings.

My control was always meant to be temporary.

My foreign landscape was destined to fail.

I am content, The earth has taken my garden.

Nurturing it more carefully than I ever could.

The garden was never mine.

What it once was, it will always be.

I can only hope…

That the earth takes me…

Into its nurturing grasp…

Returning me…

To what I once was…

I’m going to sleep. H

Art by Joshua Delahunt Headwaters Magazine 34