Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth
Edited by Laura Paskus
Torrey House Press | 2024 | 150 pages
As a college student in Eastern Washington, in wine country, I worked at an excellent French restaurant as a waitress. I adored the work, my coworkers, and many of the people I waited on. In fine dining, as in any service work, demanding and entitled individuals are inevitable. One afternoon I waited on a loud doctor from out of town, from the evergreen western side of the state. The day was slow, and the man’s wife, correctly assuming I was a student, asked me about my studies. I already had a sense of their table, the way the man ordered the most expensive wine, the fact he snapped his fingers at our busboy. So I lied to them. I said, “I’m studying water law.”
It was an easy thing to say, something I could continue to lie a little more about if they asked questions. They did not. They looked impressed enough, and I knew it was the answer that would get me a better tip. I proved I was not a frivolous young woman, studying something nebulous like environmental humanities. The doctor laughed and slapped the table. He said, “You’ll be making more money than any of us!”
In the slim chance he reads this review: Sir, I assure you that I am not. I did get a degree in environmental humanities, I would have made a terrible lawyer, and your tip helped me buy a pre-owned Subaru in which I can still fit all of my possessions.
On that day we both, the doctor and I, agreed on something. We admitted to the sheer political and financial power that water represents when it is viewed as a resource. We simply had opposing views on whether or not that is a reality that should be profited from. I, needing money, kept my face blank. He did not need, or likely want, to know what I thought.
I thought of this man while I read the multi-genre collection called Water Bodies, edited by Laura Paskus. The collection’s subtitle is Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth. These love letters come from 18 contributors. They take the form of personal essays, poems, and an exquisite illustrated poem. All these voices, snug in a thin volume, dedicated to illustrating ways a person might love water. The collection’s project is noble. Paskus closes her introduction with her hope that through these stories, “We’ll all love the waters that sustain us, challenge us, teaching us what it means to be present—and offer guidance for the future.”
The hinge of this, a most critical and ambiguous verb and noun, is love. Not just anyone’s love, but the reader’s love, guided by this collection of bright and varied voices. Given this introductory hope, I could not help but think of the audience this book reaches for. I thought of that doctor I waited on five years ago. I don’t mean to turn him into more of a caricature than I already have—he was a whole person I met on a brief afternoon, and yet he rose in my mind over and over while reading this work. Would a book like this end up on his shelf? I would make a small bet that it wouldn’t. I’ve seen copies of Water Bodies on a few of my friend’s bookshelves. We, the environmental writers and poets and dirtbags, are a much more likely audience. We are the readers whose love might be guided by these poems and essays and stories.
There is good guidance in these pages, much of it offered with beautiful language. There is no shortage of love, profound care, in these pieces.
Sarah Gilman, a multi-hyphenate creator from the Northwest, concisely and intoxicatingly captures the flow of water through porous earth and porous people in her illustrated poem “Terra Affirma.” She begins, “It is impossible to name all the ways / that water finds to go underground. / On the Kaibab Plateau, on the North Rim / of the Grand Canyon, it’s a miracle / that it does at all.” Gilman traces, with a geologist’s eye, the ways in which snowmelt and scant rain seeps into the sandstone of the desert. Down we follow the water, through illustrations of fractures and faults, to watch water that “has an appetite, and here it gorges, hollowing out / corridors and caves / and pits / and tubes.”
Gilman sees the humanness, the aliveness, in water. It has a hunger. It gorges. However, she doesn’t turn water into something it’s not. She does not force the metaphor to serve a human story. She is curious about how water moves and changes our world. She brings us into the unadulterated magic of witnessing water, at the mouth of a rushing waterfall, in springs at the dark bottom of caverns, underground rivers, and ephemeral flows.
People arrive at the end of her four-page drawing standing beneath a rushing waterfall; their veins are visible and mirror the flowing fractures and seeps from the previous pages. Gilman ends her poem with a waterfall pouring out of rock and into the Grand Canyon, a time when she and a friend stood in its power. “The falls hit / my shoulders / like a slap: / the sound of / water colliding / with water through / a tight drum / of living skin.”
How am I to understand this love letter? I see my own porosity, the porosity of the earth. Water pulses and seeps through everything, and yet it’s not mine. In Gilman’s form of love, I am awed by the functions of hydrological systems I don’t often consider. While I am also reminded that I share a kinship with these systems, I find Gilman’s love is most potent in her pursuit of understanding the specificities of how water moves through the earth—a system so much larger and more important than this small body of mine.
CMarie Fuhrman, in an epistolary essay, weaves together an exceptional and humane study on weather, grief, hope, and refuge. In “Letter Born of Snow Morning,” Fuhrman writes about the snow falling on the Salmon Mountains of Idaho. The piece is alive in every way, the weather with snowflakes “the size of a squirrel’s fist,” myriad birds and crotchety neighbors. The snow falls around her in March, and Fuhrman considers July and August, when the snow will become the frigid runoff on which salmon rely—the cold water refugia.
With etymological and scientific prowess, Furhman lays out the ways in which refugia and refuge critically differ. Refugia is a region that has remained unaltered by climate change, providing haven for flora and fauna. Refuge is a place that provides shelter from distress or danger.
Fuhrman recalls a summer week spent hiking with a biologist friend along a creek in the mountains. There, they witness a fish dead in a stream that is entirely too warm. She and her friend are wracked with grief and an understanding that they played a part in this death. She lifts the fish and lets it sink into a deeper part of the river. Through this scene Fuhrman considers how prayer without action is merely refuge for a person, a temporary balm. Refugia will only continue to exist through our actions. Although her worry for the natural world is heavy, she writes, “Let it be the birds themselves who I will miss should they never again return and not that which I have projected on them, not a burden that is not theirs to carry… Help me remember that the promise of a better future lies in my actions, not theirs.”
Water, and the life it sustains, speak to Fuhrman, “as if the river itself had sent a plea, a prayer to the feeble gods who have some power to save.” She understands that the way in which we can best love water is by paying attention to it in the midst of the climate crisis. Love is listening and acting on what we hear, feeble as we may be.
In “Rillito,” Ruxandra Guidi thoughtfully and humorously considers how, in a globalized world, people might engage with animism, understanding the life and rights of the environment without co-opting indigenous traditions that are not their own. Kate Schimel exposes just how rigid and feckless some of our lawmakers are in their decision-making. She wants the reader to see how complex it is to try and define what constitutes a body of water: “I’m not saying you can’t define these things, just that you might have to put up with a little more shiftiness than Justice Scalia seemed comfortable with.”
All these contributors taught me things I did not know, and their words will be integrated into how I witness and relate to water. As I read this bright, diverse, and expansive collection, I felt hungry for a particular love story. The West is full of people working doggedly to attend to the environmental health of riparian systems, to change the injustices and inequities created by how we dam and divide water, to create and protect laws that demand water be treated as more than a resource. This kind of work will forever be complex and imperfect, but the specifics of organizing to protect and care for water are guidelines we can’t live without.
In that restaurant, five years ago, I held my tongue and negated my beliefs in order to make money. This is something we all have done. Water Bodies is a pool for the weary to dip into. It will remind you that your love is supposed to be inconvenient, consuming, not financially viable.
Maybe it will make more of us hungry for stories of people, communities, lovingly serving their water. It will certainly make you consider what you might do with your own two hands and your inconvenient love.
Grace Butler is a writer from Waterbury Center, Vermont. She resides in Missoula, Montana, where she earned an MFA in Fiction. Funded by a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, she is at work on her first novel.
Header photo by Simmons Buntin.
