Sylacauga, treading lightly
This is where they walked, swam
hunted danced and sang,
Take a picture here;
Take a souvenir.
Cuyahoga, R.E.M.
Sometimes words swim around in our minds, sinking into the inner layers until they embed, planting new life in our neurological bedrock.
~~~S y l
a c a u g a~~~
A few days
ago, my swimming word was a name-place: a small, hilly town in
Alabama, where once tread the Shawnee, until they were forced to move west of
the Mississippi through the Indian Removal Act. Sylacauga looped around
like a river otter in my ear.
Chalakagay was a Shawnee settlement prior to
the expelling of native Americans both more and less itinerant (the Creek were
established in this area before the arrival of the Shawnee, who were refugees). The lay of the
land is gentle here; one can see why it made such a compelling place to rest,
with its hills, forests, and lakes coming together, forging ecosystems. See:
https://digitalalabama.com/alabama-cities/sylacauga-alabama/25433
White
Marble
We had come for a mushroom festival in a natural area used primarily for fishing, hiking, and mountain biking, all activities that take a toll on an ecosystem to varying degrees. The festival-comers were treading lightly here by comparison.
On a mid-morning forage, I noticed the trails were spackled
with chunks of white rock, revealing the origin of a white marble industry here. Marble removed from the lands in and around Sylacauga was
used in the building of the Washington and Lincoln memorials in D.C., a narrative
of an imperialism extracted from the earth, now jetting up, as I put the pieces
together from below the soil to skyscraping monument.
Culinary mushrooms
After the forage we got in line for savory dishes made from a variety of mushrooms called Pleurotus ostreatus, Craterellus cornucopioides, and Laetiporus, sending off nutty vapors.While waiting to reach the cooking area and vendor table, Sylacauga again ottered itself, as if it had re-entered my mind through the vapors, and I contemplated how the earth irrepressibly grows life. How we consume. How nourishment becomes part of us and keeps us alive. Our power plays and ploys in the cycle of life, building blocks of poor behavior that is often the product of imperialism, of industry, of taking what isn't ours. I thought about dominance and it’s antidote: not submission, but uplifting support: sustainability.
People were waiting in line for an hour or more to taste all the flavors in this
fruit of mycelia, the all-connecting cellular life. A woman in line said to me,
as part of our decision to talk to one another despite our pandemic shyness and
careful navigations: “this festival is all of ours, and we are all one.”
Lichen
During a
talk on Lichen under the presentation tent, I learned they are a living,
symbiotic organism, often used in the production of perfume as a base note (extraction). Its ambient qualities are: harmony, an entire spectrum of color, textures, varieties,
and smells. Passing around lichen samples to one another, I looked at our
composition as a group, possessing all of the same ingredients.
Interactions, cont.:
Rolling the film back to our first evening in Sylacauga, we choose a
restaurant near the hotel for dinner because they have a terrace and it feels safer. We order
inside, and hunker down outside to wait. When the food is ready, incredibly quickly, the proprietor steps onto
the terrace and bellows in an authoritarian voice: “X? I’d like to have a word
with you.” He is talking to us. He is imitating a master-and- commander (imperialist) style of
communication but--in utter jest. He is having fun. He is just letting us know
that our food is hot and ready for pick-up inside. I think about the cotton fields in the area, which are budding as we speak, and the ghosts of plantations past.
At a pizza parlor the next night, a nearby table is having a family feud. “Just because I’m not your dad,” jeers a large, bearded gentleman to a young boy “doesn’t mean you can disrespect me. The mother’s boyfriend has put the boy in his place. The boy's body language says he wants to disappear. He gingerly steps away from the table and inches over to the outside corner of the restaurant, slipping out of view.
In each of our interactions and exchanges, we choose whether or not to be respectful of our interlocutors--whether to play toward destruction, extracting life from a life, or sustainability, nourishing life symbiotically. Each glance, word and tone we choose in these instances determines whether we are growing or extinguishing the light and life-force coming from the other (in this case, human) being.
On the second and last day of the festival, I noticed the little boy from the pizza parlor running around with his siblings and step-siblings, offering snacks to everyone who walked by them. Then running wildly across the hill going to the lake, hair to the wind.
I looked around to see the medicinal mushroom tables, still vending, going strong, as the other ones began to fold, contemplating the healing promise of plants, and this nurturing environment, with the glistening lake below.
Sometimes words are our lifeguards, as we are swimming around, groping for answers.
Sylacauga.
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