Those who did it from a distance erased the people’s language. Once they could claim their fiction of terra nullius they flooded in close and put up fences. They erased the history of their conquest and they erased the lake’s history too.

By Peter Gelderloos 

to the Erie and their survivors, to Raechel, to home and a future that allows it

In a place where the bank is steep the recent torrent flushed out the leathery remains of opened turtle eggs and caved in the holes the mother had burrowed to lay them in. Burrowing there, she knew her babies would see the lake when first they opened their blinking eyes, knew their journey to water and life would be short and all downhill. Raechel and I walked past and spotted them a couple days after the downpour carried the heat steaming off the roof of our house and gave new life to the undesired tangle we desire to thrive despite suffering monthly under the landlord’s weed whacker.

We walk every day past reminders that our house is not our house and we go as often as we can to the lake that is our home because our baby is buried there and we’ve seen so many friends like the turtles and geese and wood ducks grow up there. There’s one little turtle born this year who likes to be brave on a sodden log plants grow from. Across the lake sometimes we see twenty in the sunlight on a larger log and when one dives to the water in fright the others fall like dominoes, but our brave little turtle sees the plants don’t dive and the log stays still so she follows their lead and it all works out as we walk on and the peace returns.

An absent part of our lake’s family might have called it something like Yändia’wich Yentara’te.

But when the guns came those people fled west and were adopted or they were taken east and were adopted or they got placed in the ground and were adopted. Probably some of them were left strewn like the turtle eggs but without the symbol of continuity and hope a hatched shell implies. The beavers also died in the millions but some must have fled and been adopted because they’re still alive though none returned to this brook which bears an invader’s name like a cross may he rot in his invented hell.

Those who did it from a distance erased the people’s language. Once they could claim their fiction of terra nullius they flooded in close and put up fences. They erased the history of their conquest and they erased the lake’s history too. On the internet and at the Nature Center and on maps the lake is attributed to the Shakers who made it with a dam when they came to settle a graveyard a hundred years after the erasure. Then the Shakers did the only decent thing that settlers can do, which was to commit collective suicide with a minimum of bloodshed: they took their evil beliefs in a gentle direction and simply refused to reproduce. They are absent but not erased. I will claim the right to tell their story: they created nothing. This lake is not an artifact or a landmark to their inventiveness. It is a home, it’s a person. And the Erie were experts in aquaculture and the beaver were experts in aquaculture and anyone paying the least attention to the brook could imagine the lake and the wetlands that would flourish upstream with a dam placed just so.

A hundred years after genocide the dam would have fallen and the lake drained but to assume the Shakers were the first to imagine a lake there is to participate in erasure.

Whose lake is it now?

The English language doesn’t distinguish between possessives. Optimistically it’s because a long time ago there was no property. A connection was a connection (my land my home my family) and if you had to stake yours out at sword point everyone would see it so why bother naming what should be unspeakable? By the time grammarians came along it seems the only solid connection we could hope for in this world was through possession, but there is no possession that does not also imply a ghost.

I want to say our lake, my lake, but when I say it’s mine it’s a pledge of allegiance and the only kind I’ll make. I will do my best to carry your ghosts.

Yesterday the snapping turtles were mating, breaching and thrashing like mad whales, gripping with clawed hands to stay close, panting and swimming to the shade of overhanging trees when it was done. How wild and recognizable love is.

When Raechel found she was carrying it was a surprise. I’d always wanted to be a parent. So much desire it manifested as a long list of conditions I’d have to meet to guarantee I wouldn’t make a mess of it. And then I was forty and that imagined home wasn’t much closer.

My father was a good storyteller. I would have liked a father who didn’t need a redeeming quality. My family fled north or east and I’m not sure any of us found adoption.

Is it alright to make that comparison? I know there is an unknowable distance between erasure and getting to be here telling stories. I also know the settler who comes at sword point destroys home and memory and leaves ghosts to possess those he loved.

But when Raechel and I made Poppy we started thinking about a nest even though there wasn’t the money and I was still having flashbacks and she was still wounded and I hadn’t healed myself, much less made things right by her.

It took me too long to see we can also do harm in the ways we learn to survive the harm that was done to us. I swore I’d never reproduce this machine in the hearts of another generation, when I was the gear that was chewing people up.

There was a documentary I remember, baby turtles that hatch and crawl the wrong way because city lights resemble the gleam of a lake if home like love is a memory you wake up with and not something you’ve ever seen with your own new eyes.

We didn’t choose it, we weren’t ready to choose it, but the most important choices are how you hold what life brings you. So when Poppy came we burrowed and we smoothed and did our best to imagine the modest dimensions of a home and did our best to reconstruct love with daggers half drawn and wounds we would still slash open. We prepared, and also I drove Raechel to a clinic where evil people paraded outside. Because of all the sadistic demands of the law, we had to get the bureaucratic gears turning fast in case that was the decision Raechel chose, because this is Ohio and evil people have been in charge a very long time here, orchestrating wars from afar, making expeditions up brooks that should not bear their evil names, then streaming northwest through the Gap, laying fence and laying law and all their religion and their ethics flowing from the barrel of a gun.

But Poppy made her own choice. The cats knew, and then Raechel knew, and then she told me, and then the technicians and the clinic told her. It was only partial so she had to get the same exact procedure she had been contemplating, to get our dead Poppy out.

And the same evil people with the same stupid placards were outside that clinic, where the same procedure is performed to give abortions or to help pass miscarriages. And I think many of the people who could not be mothers feel the same grief. But no matter which procedure they go there for, the harassers outside shout with the same hate. I think all they really love is slavery. They preach a lot about sin but unlike the Shakers they insist on reproducing it.

The technicians had promised to let Raechel spend time with the embryo so she could tell Poppy goodbye. In the end they forgot and threw her in the trash. They were not evil people, but they are cruel, because they provide their vocation in a cruel world where people grieving are just procedures.

We buried Poppy anyway, because what’s a body when we’re all compostable and everything we’ve ever known is made of dead stars we never saw. We used a bandage, a note, moonflower seeds, the printed ultrasound, a new body to adopt the spark of her. We buried her in the closest thing to home, a little spit of land where a tree leans over our lake, where a blackbird would sing her songs.

That was last year. We always say hi when we visit, and thank the tree for watching over her, and ask her about her bird friends. This year we’ve been paying a lot of attention to the wood duck chicks growing up on the lake. I learned that shortly after they hatch, at the mother’s encouragement they jump from the nest, which can be fifty feet up a dead tree. The little fluffballs bounce harmlessly to the ground. Downhill the whole way. With their mom they scuttle to the lake, which they have never seen before, but they remember it.

What does it mean that I want to burn everything I could claim as an inheritance. And that I refuse to forget any of it. Not after the memories clawed their way out of me, so many mornings’ vomit in the toilet. Not after so many midnight visits to the graveyard, shovel in hand, to adopt the ghosts of this machine that raised me and claims me and will always let me back in to serve it.

What does it mean that I’ve always wanted to be a mother, that I’d jump fifty feet and settle for father if it was what my babies needed. What does it mean that joy and sadness sound the same to me and I’ve always felt how the world is full of them both. What does it mean that I’ve been at war since I was a child and I think it’s what I was called to. I’ve fought battles in classrooms and churches. I surrendered to a godly man with a ring on his finger I never valued my own life saving my mother’s was worse. I’ve fought police on streets humming and deadly but fighting my own family was harder I woke up in chains on a prison bus and it felt like a memory, prison is alright because there’s love there and we need to burn we need to burn we need to burn so much.

Even though my choice is war I’ve always felt the steps I’d take to hold my babies close when they came. I’ve spit in a judge’s face and gone to prison laughing, but when my babies come I’ll take any insult silently so I can be there for my babies. I’ve broken locks to win my housing but when my babies come I’ll learn the scam of a stable job so my babies don’t grow up with the morning bell of evictions.

And if the food runs out in our lifetimes if the evil people killing the world come to the Lakes for the water because they’ve used it all up on golf courses in Arizona or been flooded out by it in Florida, instead of killing as many of them as they deserve I will press my babies close and run with them or if they need it I will show them where to run and guard the way. Raechel will distrust that readiness for death just as she distrusts my readiness for violence, and she’s right. I will bear what I have to bear to be there for her too, in love, carrying our home if we have to. But I also know we won’t always get the choice, and with joy and with sadness I know there’s one last thing I can give.

I’d tell my babies about the war. How I chose it and now I choose them. How the war is waged against us whether we want it or not and one day they’ll have to make choices of their own.

I think people who hide hard truths often tell themselves it’s to protect another. Really it’s to protect ourselves. I want to protect my babies, but I won’t lie about the war. Liar that I am I don’t want to tell more lies.

I’d tell them we don’t have a people but there are some who came before us we learn from and they, they are our enemies and this, this is our home if we love it though it’s stolen and these, these are our neighbors while we remain here and we do not know our future and nothing is owed to us but the breaths we’ve already taken.

I won’t induct them into erasure. I’ll tell them the stories I know to be true but from there they’d make their own choices and no matter what I’d love them.

I imagine standing in the water. I won’t throw them in, but I’d tell them stories about swimming, and stories of all the lake creatures who might befriend them, how there are more stories out there and they just have to listen. I’d let them know the lake would welcome them.

I’d tell about me and Mike, with no one to guide us, how we went and met the water on our own. In winter we fell through the ice and always pulled each other out. And I’d tell of when I stood on the bridge in the flood, where there used to be railroad tracks, where a beaver built a dam when I was six, where the Confederates caught a white preacher and a Black man who rescued himself from slavery, both of them abolitionists, and the soldiers shot them both, and the Black man survived but the history books don’t remember his name. I stood in that spot and looked down to the flood and was seduced, like I knew what was coming, and only Mike kept me from jumping in.

I’d tell my babies all of this. I wouldn’t hide any of it.

Because children see, children see and they jump anyways.

Today I walk along the lake path holding Raechel’s hand. Our wounds are closing up, and scars tell a story you can learn from. I think I’m doing right by her. Most days I don’t have flashbacks, and I talk with ghosts and memories to find out what I still need to learn.

We get to Poppy and say hi. A kingbird chases a kingfisher and two lady blackbirds scuttle in the brush. A cloud of mud rises in the water, suggesting a turtle detaching itself from the bottom to get a move on the day. We turn to leave and I crouch to plant a kiss in the spot where Poppy is buried. Below green leaves I spy a tiny crater, almost like a cave in. Walking away I imagine something born there, pulling itself out of dirt and shell to crawl with hope, tracing a faint line of memory to find water, and love, and life.

Peter Gelderloos is a long-time writer, and works as an instructor with LitCleveland. He has published numerous nonfiction books, including The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from BelowWorshiping Power, and Anarchy Works; a speculative fiction novella, Hermetica; and essays or interviews with Truthout, Utne Reader, CrimethInc, Z Magazine, Fifth Estate, In These TimesBlack Agenda ReportUndisciplined Environments, and others.