Apocalyptic Roads in the Elwha and San Rafael Valleys
During a recent reading, a friend shared a quote by the late Lebanese poet Etel Adnan that went something like, “We are all contemplatives in an ongoing apocalypse.” During the Q&A, a student defined apocalypse as “the inability to return to a homeland or a way of life because the violence and destruction that severed you from all of that living is ongoing.” The following excerpts follow my returns to two places, the San Rafael Valley on the US/Mexico border, and the Elwha River in Washington State.
Back in 2021, I worked for the non-profit Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN). Based in the southern Arizona town of Patagonia, their mission is to grow “restorative economies” through rebuilding healthy ecosystems and border communities. In the years before my fall season of employment, the Forest Service had won a lawsuit against ASARCO for leaving toxic mining waste in the watershed outside of Patagonia. As a result, the mining operation’s new owners, South32, were ordered to encapsulate the mining waste, bury it in the earth, and then terraform around it. My job with BRN was to harvest grass seeds that would be planted to prevent the erosion of that terraformation, and consequently the leaching of mining waste back into the watershed. Despite my very unromantic role in this remediation process, it was a glorious job. I spent long hours walking through grassy plains, learning to identify the many species needed for the project, and getting to know the San Rafael Valley in Southern Arizona. Pastoral golden days of fall were punctuated regularly, however, by mining vehicles, game hunters, and border patrol traversing the valleys and mountains outside Patagonia. Large white trucks with flags and flashing lights, caravans, green stripes, off-road vehicles, so many guns…We were all sharing the same small, winding dirt roads.
I first comprehended how heavily trafficked these seemingly bucolic landscapes were on the way to a seed harvesting site one day. Sitting in the back of our van in the early morning quiet, I watched hills roll by out the window. I suddenly sat upright, blinking, astonished at the passing flora: all the trees and bushes were drained of their color, like the saturation had been turned down on a digital image. As it turns out, we were approaching the large Hermosa mining operation. Heavy vehicle traffic had kicked up enough material to blanket the roadside foliage with a fine beige dust.
Last summer, I visited the former site of the Glines Dam on the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula while researching for my MFA at Arizona State University. The decommissioned dam site is nestled 3.5 miles inside Olympic National Park’s boundary line and is accessible only on foot or for cyclists willing to navigate soft, rooty trails. The way to the dam was not always like this, however. When Glines was in operation, one could travel to the impressive reservoir overlook by car. But within a few years of the dam’s removal, the Elwha washed out the park service road, stranding National Park buildings, a campground, and exhibition didactics within the valley.
The first time I visited the site, a year prior to my research trip, I was shocked to see the crumbling washed out road and eroding park infrastructure along the trail. Words like post-apocalyptic and dystopian floated through my mind. Familiar but rusting brown signs with arrows and mile postings had been overgrown with moss. A small shack, encircled by the freely flowing river’s braiding channels, was now impossible to visit. Power lines, attached to tilting telephone poles, still hung suspended above. The buildings, inaccessible by car, stood like time capsules. I peeked into the windows of one and saw a nature exhibit inside, a service desk, and warm wood paneling. It reminded me of the documented domestic scenes of villages that had been evacuated for being in the blast radius of volcanoes…people there one day, then gone the next…
This fall, I returned to the San Rafael Valley for a very different reason. Land defenders were staging the first binational tree sit and preventing border wall construction from continuing through the valley and annihilating wildlife corridors, including a small grove of ancient cottonwood trees. My partner and I decided to go. It was the same time of year as my seed collection job, fall, and on the way I watched out the window for the waving shades and groupings of grasses in the land, their almost forgotten names emerging from my lips, coming back to me. We exited the paved highway onto the familiar dirt roads, but things were very different this time. Mining operations and border patrol presence had almost quadrupled. We even came upon a caravan of 8 border patrol vehicles, escorting a pile of border wall to the valley.
On the Elwha, animals had grown comfortable traversing the roads and parking lots, strolling through overgrown picnic areas. To see a well-branded state presence in this state of neglect was opening something in my imagination. That, for better or worse, *all this* could be another way. I walked along the Elwha again the next day, this time with a friend who had worked with rivers, restoration projects, and dam removals on behalf of the Chinook people and salmon. We walked and talked along the river. He shared about the Elwha, before and after the Gline’s Dam removal, and he speculated on why and how the river eventually took out the road. I wanted to know if the park service thought of the road washout as a failure. My friend instead talked about how rivers carry and release sediment, how they meander and change course, and create habitats in which the Chinook thrive.
Click below to hear our conversation.
Monuments and institutions, through ubiquity, scale, physical and systematic architecture, not only manage resources, peoples, and spaces, but narratives and imaginations. They freeze time, values, relations, histories, and even ecologies. I decided that apocalypse, an inability to return, had happened. But not when the river washed out the road, and park signs had become overgrown with moss. It had happened nearly a century before, when the river was withheld from its path. But here and now, the river was literally and figuratively writing and rewriting itself over the land.
Even though the contractors had felled and dragged off the last Grandmother Cottonwood, we decided to go anyway. Land defenders were holding a memorial, and we wanted to see where the tree had once stood. Aside from a small sign and some overturned earth, there was almost no indication on the US side of where it had been. Across the access road on the Mexico side, we could see a remaining land defender up high in a tree. Border Patrol skulked along the access road, glaring and pointing at us, while workers hastily raised the panels, setting them in their shallow footers. A helicopter buzzed and circled overhead. The contractors cracked jokes, and the agents shone bright lights into our faces. My partner turned to me and said, “we will see this wall come down in our lifetime”. We gathered around a small fire to eat together and listen to speeches, stories, and songs from the land defenders.