Me and Hooper set our kayaks in the Wolf River at Walnut Grove. Our plan was to float all the way to the Mississippi and check out the floodwaters. The day was overcast and unseasonably chilly. I noticed all the trees than had been knocked down. A few weeks earlier the Wolf had been higher than I'd ever seen it. We saw huge dams of trees and limbs piled up against the bridge pylons and a fair amount of trash, but not too bad.
We explored some of the creeks that flowed in to the Wolf. We found a trot line that someone had run across one of these creeks with several large catfish attached to it, one weighing up to 12 lbs, old and scarred. I wondered if the guy that had run the trot line could also skin a buck and plow a field all day long....
As we floated down we thought about what an under utilized resource this was. Why don't more people boat this river? I mean, yes, it's dirty but there was enough nature to give me that serene feeling I get when I get out to the woods. I started to think about what it must have been like for the natives that lived here and paddled up and down the river. The river would have given them everything they needed. There was fish, there was game...we saw beavers and a deer swim across the river in front of us. I thought about how man was intrinsically entwined to rivers. The first civilizations sprung up because of rivers, and now it was a great toilet bowl. The natives had the right idea. To me, what they had was true freedom. I am not an American. America as we no it is not my idea of freedom. Freedom to me is not owning anything...it is living in a world where everything is provided all around us. This is the way the world used to be before it was conquered. Capitalism does not equal freedom. We're all slaves. Everyday I have to work to pay the tax man, the insurance man, the oil man. At one point, one could just exist....
We stopped and ate our lunches at Kennedy park in Raleigh that backs right up to the river. There was a picnic area that looked like it had not been maintained in years. A burnt down pavilion, a dilapidated playground that made me think of lost innocence. I wondered if roving gangs of kids still roamed these woods like my friends and I did when we were kids or if they were all transfixed by tvs and computers now. Just another way that the last of the beauty of the world will be stolen right out from under us while we're all checking our facebook statuses.
The river became more swollen the farther down we got and became more stagnant. This is because the Mississippi was pushing back up into it. This is where the trash got unbelievable. We weaved through the forests in our boats and the trash stretched on for miles. Every manner of plastic and Styrofoam drink container, sports balls, 50 gallon drums....and hundeds of thousands of plastic bags. My pictures do the amount of trash we saw no justice. The water began to stink and we saw dead fish...I wondered about all the trash I've created in my life. I've been recycling as long as it's been easily available...but how many tons of trash have I created? and how much resources does it take to recycle? Is it really worth it in the end?
I had a friend the other day arguing with me about how rad capitalism was. I posted something funny about BP and he said some dumb right wing shit like "If you don't like it move to China or Cuba". Here was the result of capitalism stretched before me. Fast food and Soda sells like almost nothing else and there is no true value in it. It's bad for our bodies and bad for the environment. It is only worth a moment of indulgence. In the end, we're paying to kill ourselves.We paddled up on an asphalt business that was totally flooded. The water really stank and the rainbows from petroleum covered the surface of the water.
I've heard a lot about the tragedy of the flood. about how people are losing their homes and jobs. It's not a tragedy to me. This is the river's territory. The river has always been here and will be here long after we are gone. We encroached on it. It showed us who's boss.
I started thinking of life as a river. You can try to control it and build up your treasures in spite of it, but it can swallow up all you think you've gained in an instant. It's best to steer yourself around on it, but ultimately navigate it's twists and turns and learn to take what it provides you. Everything we need is on that river and always has been. And trying to go backwards always ends in futility.
After 10 hours we finally ht the Mississippi and I got to see it from a perspective that I never had before. It made me feel small and insignificant.
I know that I never want to buy another drink in a plastic bottle again. I think everyone should have to float the river and really see what we hath wrought. The Wolf is a small river, just one of the thousands of small waterways that drain into the Mississippi and in to the ocean. There's an island of trash in the Pacific twice the size of Texas. We have to stop. Now. You surely can't eat fish out of the Wolf river or Mississippi and soon you won't be able to eat it out of the ocean. That's capitalism at work. That's why it's doomed to fail eventually, but not before destroying everything.
People preach to me all the time. People that probably spent their Sunday morning's in church. I spent my Sunday trying to enjoy the earth that god gave to us, but it was hard. You can't scare me with visions of a fiery afterlife. I believe we are creating a poisonous, fiery hell right here on earth with our sins. We will create hell out of paradise, and several generations down the line there will be no enjoyment of life at all...
So what can I do? I myself, can only change my own behavior and try to help other people see what we are creating. I know that one trip down the river opened my eyes to a lot of things and forever changed me....
