I consider locations like Graham Creek as basically nonbinary locations. Not fairly land or water, however someplace in between.
Expensive America,
Graham Creek is a mystical place, working by means of a tupelo-cypress swamp, lined on all sides by fat-butted, twisting and knobby bushes that remind one in all lengthy, warty witches’ noses. The black, tannic tupelo tea of the stream has nearly no perceptible present, so paddle strokes disturb what looks like centuries of silence. Must you go there, you’ll fairly actually be floating on life and dying.
Graham is a small tributary, working by means of Tate’s Hell State Forest and into the Apalachicola River, the most important river by quantity in Florida. I’ve spent a lot time there and all through Tate’s Hell, particularly whereas volunteering with the Apalachicola Riverkeeper, and have had the privilege of seeing Graham on quite a few totally different events, and all through the seasons. A river or stream in flood has a totally totally different character than the identical river throughout a drought. Go to Graham within the winter and the bushes stand like stripped bones sticking from the earth. In fall, after I first paddled there, they had been draped in auburn (cypress being one of many few bushes to reliably change shade for autumn right here in Florida). And since there are such a lot of totally different variations of a river or creek, let me inform you my perspective of that place, the best way the creek flows for me. I’m a nonbinary particular person; I am going by they/them pronouns, and I don’t consider myself as a person or a lady, purely masculine or female, however someplace in-between. Nonbinary individuals are a part of the trans spectrum, and trans folks, particularly these days, have had a horrible time in Florida. Nonetheless, I really like this state, and I consider locations like Graham Creek as basically nonbinary locations. Not fairly land or water, however someplace in between. A creek, but additionally a floodplain. Contemporary water, however tidally influenced. A query mark on maps made by individuals who want their rivers to run in orderly strains throughout the panorama. I see most of Florida (the locations left undeveloped) as basically queer areas, and that’s one cause I’m all the time excited to paddle Graham.
Tate’s Hell, the state forest that Graham Creek runs by means of, was named after Cebe Tate, a Florida cracker whose notorious panther chase by means of the swamp ended with him dropping his approach, and after a number of days, strolling into the city of Carrabelle and supposedly dropping lifeless instantly after uttering the phrases, “My identify is Tate, and I’ve been by means of hell.” Not less than, that’s one model of the telling, although there are lots of variations. Getting misplaced within the forest is a few folks’s worst nightmare. Personally, although I really like such tales as Tate’s, I’ve all the time hated the identify Tate’s Hell; the place is heaven to me. Although I have to admit, the occasions I’ve been misplaced, even in locations as humanly influenced and near my residence because the maze of logging roads working across the Florida Path, I’ve been frightened. I can bear in mind on a couple of event sprinting by means of the woods, retracing my steps, determined to seek out my misplaced approach. When the solar begins to set, and also you’re not sure of the trail that may lead on to your camp or again to your automotive, your chest will get tight as a path overgrown with bamboo (and generally, in Florida, that’s what you’re strolling by means of). On a current kayak journey on Graham Creek, I had one such pulse-intensifying expertise. I put in late, at 3 p.m., which in December gave me barely two hours to paddle earlier than sundown. I wasn’t going far, however I used to be going upstream—alone. And I used to be already grumpy after having been trapped at a mechanic’s store all morning, considering how I won’t make it to my campsite. I used to be paddling from Graham to the place the creek splits off from the East River and from there to the Huge River (the Apalachicola). I hadn’t paddled the route earlier than and every fork took longer to get to than I’d imagined. Although I had a map and had been given instructions by pals, I started to get uneasy because the sky darkened, because the bushes grew extra wraithlike and encroaching. I used to be by no means actually misplaced in any respect and made it to my sandbar camp with sufficient daylight to arrange my tent and even collect firewood with out the usage of a flashlight. However there’s one thing unsettling even concerning the mere thought of being misplaced within the woods, particularly at night time, and particularly if you’re alone. Like a Brothers Grimm story.
But Florida is a particular state as a result of it nonetheless comprises locations to get misplaced in, mysterious locations, spots which can be “off the map.” Whether or not these be the mangrove mazes of the Everglades or swamps like Tate’s Hell. These locations are consistently altering. Treefall blocks a path; seedlings mature and alter the course of water stream. The truth that locations like Graham are consistently in flux makes them extra than simply an thrilling journey—they’re additionally vital refuges, difficult-to-penetrate fortresses for the atmosphere and the more-than-human creatures they assist.
Rivers just like the Apalachicola and their related wetlands are at risk everywhere in the state, the nation, and the world. Nature studies that, since 1700, about 21 % of the world’s wetlands have been misplaced. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported in 2022 that the U.S. fared even worse—now we have misplaced over one-half of our wetlands nationwide. And by the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Florida alone had misplaced 9.3 million acres, extra acreage than some other state within the nation and a 44 % loss since attainting statehood.
Whereas efforts have been made towards preservation and restoration, the Nationwide Audubon Society studies that “for each one acre of wetland restored [in Florida] from 2004-2009, two acres had been destroyed.” A part of the explanation for this, I consider, is that so many individuals don’t see locations like Graham Creek as vital. Swamps, bogs, and marshlands—for therefore a few years, we colonial settlers have considered them as “ineffective” locations, wastes of area. We’ve got tried to empty them for farmland and dredge them for delivery vessels. We use the phrase “drain the swamp” as a euphemism for eliminating ineffective/crooked lobbyists and politicians in our governments.
Redefining peoples’ ideas about wetlands will not be so totally different from redefining their ideas about queer folks.
This hatred will not be a brand new line of considering. For lots of if not 1000’s of years Westerners attributed illness and dying to wetlands and their miasmic vapors. The character poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote (in his culturally appropriative poem “Tune of Hiawatha”) of an evil determine who “Sends the fever from the marshes, / Sends the pestilential vapors, / Sends the toxic exhalations, / Sends the white fog from the fen-lands, / Sends illness and dying amongst us!” But when we’d been listening to actual Indigenous knowledge on this continent as an alternative of creating up our personal variations like Longfellow, we’d have recognized higher.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of swamp-reliant peoples in her e-book Braiding Sweetgrass:
Individuals valued the grocery store of the swamp for the cattails, but additionally as a wealthy supply of fish and sport. Fish spawn within the shallows; frogs and salamanders abound. Waterfowl nest right here within the security of the dense sward, and migratory birds search out cattail marshes for sanctuary on their journeys. Not surprisingly, starvation for this productive land precipitated a 90 % lack of the wetlands—in addition to the Native individuals who depended upon them.
It wasn’t till across the latter half of the twentieth century that any important variety of settler-colonial People started to shift their attitudes about wetlands because of the work of activists, scientists, and writers like Florida’s personal Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the writer of the 1947 traditional The Everglades: River of Grass, which performed a serious position in convincing People to guard the Everglades as a nationwide park. And but we nonetheless have a protracted option to go. Lately, elected officers accepted exploratory oil and fuel drilling within the floodplain of the Apalachicola River, simply upstream of Graham Creek. The proposed drilling platform will sit beneath the high-water line throughout flood stage, which might simply ship toxins flowing downstream and all through the encompassing, interconnected swamplands. I’m afraid for my river. And I’m reminded of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s opening phrases in The Everglades: “There aren’t any different Everglades on this planet.” Certainly, there isn’t any different Graham Creek on this planet both. And no different Apalachicola watershed. No different Florida. No different Turtle Island (North America). No different Earth.
The way in which unfamiliar individuals are uncomfortable with wetlands jogs my memory of the best way so many cis individuals are uncomfortable with nonbinary/trans folks like me; I believe it has to do with the truth that we’re not simply outlined, not simply categorizable inside (cis and dryland) society’s acceptable parameters. The borders of a wild river and its floodplain aren’t particular; this makes improvement troublesome and housing extra vulnerable to floods. That’s why we dam rivers (I’ve all the time thought it greater than coincidental that dam and rattling are homonyms); that’s why we dredge them (an issue nonetheless significantly affecting the Apalachicola watershed). We wish to make them predictable, straight (once more, a homonym not misplaced on my queer thoughts). We wish our rivers and our folks to suit neatly into our predetermined, acceptable classes. However that’s not how nature works, which is why we have to maintain defending our rivers and our folks. I think about a world the place extra individuals are snug paddling in a tupelo-cypress swamp like Graham, or feeling the moist squish of bogland and sundews beneath their toes, a world the place folks acknowledge the worth of those “ineffective” wetlands and vote for presidency officers who refuse to empty or in any other case disturb them; equally, I think about a world the place nonbinary/trans folks like me are not “unimaginable” or seen as “confused.”
A river and its floodplain are a nonbinary area, one that may be traveled not solely in two instructions (upstream or down), however in all instructions, and so rivers beg for all tales. This is without doubt one of the causes I felt a big want to guard Graham Creek and to put in writing this story about it. I consider redefining peoples’ ideas about wetlands will not be so totally different from redefining their ideas about queer folks. I felt a accountability to Graham as a queer particular person. However I wouldn’t wish to make the error of so many colonial mapmakers and have a look at Graham as just one factor. Sure, as a queer storyteller, I really feel a accountability to inform the story of Graham as a queer place. I even have a extra apparent accountability to Graham Creek as a paddler. After I go there, I must maintain it clear, depart no hint, decide up any trash I discover. And with that accountability comes a accountability to the broader watershed. If I need Graham Creek clear and vigorous, I want the Apalachicola clear and vigorous. I want the river to be flooded with the fantastic, life-giving water so usually blocked up by the Jim Woodruff Dam. I’ve a accountability to work together with my native authorities, to vote, and to assist organizations just like the Apalachicola Riverkeeper. (This appears notably vital because the proposed oil and fuel drilling within the Apalachicola basin was accepted by regionally elected officers). And if I wish to maintain the Apalachicola system clear, I even have a accountability as a nationwide/world citizen. If I wish to defend this river, I want to guard the local weather. I must work together with my nationwide authorities; I must vote there, too, and to consider who will do good for my river in any respect ranges. Paddling on Graham, I noticed this interconnection firsthand. I noticed that black water and knew precisely the place it was working, regardless that it was nonetheless a query mark on the map. I understood the significance of this seemingly small backwater creek, even when I couldn’t absolutely perceive which approach the water would transfer, what it was doing, what story it was telling.
The final story I wish to inform is one about water: Someplace, out at sea, water is evaporating. It’s tumbling into cloud, wrapping itself round mud particles, getting heavy, and falling. It’s falling on a river it has by no means recognized, then falling down that river, by means of its floodplain. It’s a well-worn path of water. It’s each new and previous, the identical river and a distinct one than what was flowing a thousand years in the past. Now it’s wrapping across the legs and knees of cypress and tupelo, catching vitamins in its stream, pulling them together with it. And now it’s working by means of the principle channel, curving like a query mark into the large river. It’s searching for the salt of the ocean that it misplaced so way back. It’s bringing a present again with it, that leaf litter. And when it lastly meets the bay, this isn’t the top of the story, however one other starting.
For the rivers,
Chris Watkins
Chris Watkins is a genderqueer poet, author, and environmental activist residing in Tallahassee, Florida. They earned their Ph.D. in Poetry and Ecocriticism at Florida State College and at the moment function the lecturers and partnerships coordinator of FSU’s Sustainable Campus in addition to a member of the board of administrators for Apalachicola Riverkeeper. Chris’s current work has appeared in Poetry, Cincinnati Assessment, and The Harvard Assessment, amongst different journals. Their debut assortment, The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books.
Learn different Letters to America on-line or in Expensive America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, printed in partnership with Trinity College Press.
Header photograph by Dani Davis.
I consider locations like Graham Creek as basically nonbinary locations. Not fairly land or water, however someplace in between.
Expensive America,
Graham Creek is a mystical place, working by means of a tupelo-cypress swamp, lined on all sides by fat-butted, twisting and knobby bushes that remind one in all lengthy, warty witches’ noses. The black, tannic tupelo tea of the stream has nearly no perceptible present, so paddle strokes disturb what looks like centuries of silence. Must you go there, you’ll fairly actually be floating on life and dying.
Graham is a small tributary, working by means of Tate’s Hell State Forest and into the Apalachicola River, the most important river by quantity in Florida. I’ve spent a lot time there and all through Tate’s Hell, particularly whereas volunteering with the Apalachicola Riverkeeper, and have had the privilege of seeing Graham on quite a few totally different events, and all through the seasons. A river or stream in flood has a totally totally different character than the identical river throughout a drought. Go to Graham within the winter and the bushes stand like stripped bones sticking from the earth. In fall, after I first paddled there, they had been draped in auburn (cypress being one of many few bushes to reliably change shade for autumn right here in Florida). And since there are such a lot of totally different variations of a river or creek, let me inform you my perspective of that place, the best way the creek flows for me. I’m a nonbinary particular person; I am going by they/them pronouns, and I don’t consider myself as a person or a lady, purely masculine or female, however someplace in-between. Nonbinary individuals are a part of the trans spectrum, and trans folks, particularly these days, have had a horrible time in Florida. Nonetheless, I really like this state, and I consider locations like Graham Creek as basically nonbinary locations. Not fairly land or water, however someplace in between. A creek, but additionally a floodplain. Contemporary water, however tidally influenced. A query mark on maps made by individuals who want their rivers to run in orderly strains throughout the panorama. I see most of Florida (the locations left undeveloped) as basically queer areas, and that’s one cause I’m all the time excited to paddle Graham.
Tate’s Hell, the state forest that Graham Creek runs by means of, was named after Cebe Tate, a Florida cracker whose notorious panther chase by means of the swamp ended with him dropping his approach, and after a number of days, strolling into the city of Carrabelle and supposedly dropping lifeless instantly after uttering the phrases, “My identify is Tate, and I’ve been by means of hell.” Not less than, that’s one model of the telling, although there are lots of variations. Getting misplaced within the forest is a few folks’s worst nightmare. Personally, although I really like such tales as Tate’s, I’ve all the time hated the identify Tate’s Hell; the place is heaven to me. Although I have to admit, the occasions I’ve been misplaced, even in locations as humanly influenced and near my residence because the maze of logging roads working across the Florida Path, I’ve been frightened. I can bear in mind on a couple of event sprinting by means of the woods, retracing my steps, determined to seek out my misplaced approach. When the solar begins to set, and also you’re not sure of the trail that may lead on to your camp or again to your automotive, your chest will get tight as a path overgrown with bamboo (and generally, in Florida, that’s what you’re strolling by means of). On a current kayak journey on Graham Creek, I had one such pulse-intensifying expertise. I put in late, at 3 p.m., which in December gave me barely two hours to paddle earlier than sundown. I wasn’t going far, however I used to be going upstream—alone. And I used to be already grumpy after having been trapped at a mechanic’s store all morning, considering how I won’t make it to my campsite. I used to be paddling from Graham to the place the creek splits off from the East River and from there to the Huge River (the Apalachicola). I hadn’t paddled the route earlier than and every fork took longer to get to than I’d imagined. Although I had a map and had been given instructions by pals, I started to get uneasy because the sky darkened, because the bushes grew extra wraithlike and encroaching. I used to be by no means actually misplaced in any respect and made it to my sandbar camp with sufficient daylight to arrange my tent and even collect firewood with out the usage of a flashlight. However there’s one thing unsettling even concerning the mere thought of being misplaced within the woods, particularly at night time, and particularly if you’re alone. Like a Brothers Grimm story.
But Florida is a particular state as a result of it nonetheless comprises locations to get misplaced in, mysterious locations, spots which can be “off the map.” Whether or not these be the mangrove mazes of the Everglades or swamps like Tate’s Hell. These locations are consistently altering. Treefall blocks a path; seedlings mature and alter the course of water stream. The truth that locations like Graham are consistently in flux makes them extra than simply an thrilling journey—they’re additionally vital refuges, difficult-to-penetrate fortresses for the atmosphere and the more-than-human creatures they assist.
Rivers just like the Apalachicola and their related wetlands are at risk everywhere in the state, the nation, and the world. Nature studies that, since 1700, about 21 % of the world’s wetlands have been misplaced. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported in 2022 that the U.S. fared even worse—now we have misplaced over one-half of our wetlands nationwide. And by the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Florida alone had misplaced 9.3 million acres, extra acreage than some other state within the nation and a 44 % loss since attainting statehood.
Whereas efforts have been made towards preservation and restoration, the Nationwide Audubon Society studies that “for each one acre of wetland restored [in Florida] from 2004-2009, two acres had been destroyed.” A part of the explanation for this, I consider, is that so many individuals don’t see locations like Graham Creek as vital. Swamps, bogs, and marshlands—for therefore a few years, we colonial settlers have considered them as “ineffective” locations, wastes of area. We’ve got tried to empty them for farmland and dredge them for delivery vessels. We use the phrase “drain the swamp” as a euphemism for eliminating ineffective/crooked lobbyists and politicians in our governments.
Redefining peoples’ ideas about wetlands will not be so totally different from redefining their ideas about queer folks.
This hatred will not be a brand new line of considering. For lots of if not 1000’s of years Westerners attributed illness and dying to wetlands and their miasmic vapors. The character poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote (in his culturally appropriative poem “Tune of Hiawatha”) of an evil determine who “Sends the fever from the marshes, / Sends the pestilential vapors, / Sends the toxic exhalations, / Sends the white fog from the fen-lands, / Sends illness and dying amongst us!” But when we’d been listening to actual Indigenous knowledge on this continent as an alternative of creating up our personal variations like Longfellow, we’d have recognized higher.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of swamp-reliant peoples in her e-book Braiding Sweetgrass:
Individuals valued the grocery store of the swamp for the cattails, but additionally as a wealthy supply of fish and sport. Fish spawn within the shallows; frogs and salamanders abound. Waterfowl nest right here within the security of the dense sward, and migratory birds search out cattail marshes for sanctuary on their journeys. Not surprisingly, starvation for this productive land precipitated a 90 % lack of the wetlands—in addition to the Native individuals who depended upon them.
It wasn’t till across the latter half of the twentieth century that any important variety of settler-colonial People started to shift their attitudes about wetlands because of the work of activists, scientists, and writers like Florida’s personal Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the writer of the 1947 traditional The Everglades: River of Grass, which performed a serious position in convincing People to guard the Everglades as a nationwide park. And but we nonetheless have a protracted option to go. Lately, elected officers accepted exploratory oil and fuel drilling within the floodplain of the Apalachicola River, simply upstream of Graham Creek. The proposed drilling platform will sit beneath the high-water line throughout flood stage, which might simply ship toxins flowing downstream and all through the encompassing, interconnected swamplands. I’m afraid for my river. And I’m reminded of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s opening phrases in The Everglades: “There aren’t any different Everglades on this planet.” Certainly, there isn’t any different Graham Creek on this planet both. And no different Apalachicola watershed. No different Florida. No different Turtle Island (North America). No different Earth.
The way in which unfamiliar individuals are uncomfortable with wetlands jogs my memory of the best way so many cis individuals are uncomfortable with nonbinary/trans folks like me; I believe it has to do with the truth that we’re not simply outlined, not simply categorizable inside (cis and dryland) society’s acceptable parameters. The borders of a wild river and its floodplain aren’t particular; this makes improvement troublesome and housing extra vulnerable to floods. That’s why we dam rivers (I’ve all the time thought it greater than coincidental that dam and rattling are homonyms); that’s why we dredge them (an issue nonetheless significantly affecting the Apalachicola watershed). We wish to make them predictable, straight (once more, a homonym not misplaced on my queer thoughts). We wish our rivers and our folks to suit neatly into our predetermined, acceptable classes. However that’s not how nature works, which is why we have to maintain defending our rivers and our folks. I think about a world the place extra individuals are snug paddling in a tupelo-cypress swamp like Graham, or feeling the moist squish of bogland and sundews beneath their toes, a world the place folks acknowledge the worth of those “ineffective” wetlands and vote for presidency officers who refuse to empty or in any other case disturb them; equally, I think about a world the place nonbinary/trans folks like me are not “unimaginable” or seen as “confused.”
A river and its floodplain are a nonbinary area, one that may be traveled not solely in two instructions (upstream or down), however in all instructions, and so rivers beg for all tales. This is without doubt one of the causes I felt a big want to guard Graham Creek and to put in writing this story about it. I consider redefining peoples’ ideas about wetlands will not be so totally different from redefining their ideas about queer folks. I felt a accountability to Graham as a queer particular person. However I wouldn’t wish to make the error of so many colonial mapmakers and have a look at Graham as just one factor. Sure, as a queer storyteller, I really feel a accountability to inform the story of Graham as a queer place. I even have a extra apparent accountability to Graham Creek as a paddler. After I go there, I must maintain it clear, depart no hint, decide up any trash I discover. And with that accountability comes a accountability to the broader watershed. If I need Graham Creek clear and vigorous, I want the Apalachicola clear and vigorous. I want the river to be flooded with the fantastic, life-giving water so usually blocked up by the Jim Woodruff Dam. I’ve a accountability to work together with my native authorities, to vote, and to assist organizations just like the Apalachicola Riverkeeper. (This appears notably vital because the proposed oil and fuel drilling within the Apalachicola basin was accepted by regionally elected officers). And if I wish to maintain the Apalachicola system clear, I even have a accountability as a nationwide/world citizen. If I wish to defend this river, I want to guard the local weather. I must work together with my nationwide authorities; I must vote there, too, and to consider who will do good for my river in any respect ranges. Paddling on Graham, I noticed this interconnection firsthand. I noticed that black water and knew precisely the place it was working, regardless that it was nonetheless a query mark on the map. I understood the significance of this seemingly small backwater creek, even when I couldn’t absolutely perceive which approach the water would transfer, what it was doing, what story it was telling.
The final story I wish to inform is one about water: Someplace, out at sea, water is evaporating. It’s tumbling into cloud, wrapping itself round mud particles, getting heavy, and falling. It’s falling on a river it has by no means recognized, then falling down that river, by means of its floodplain. It’s a well-worn path of water. It’s each new and previous, the identical river and a distinct one than what was flowing a thousand years in the past. Now it’s wrapping across the legs and knees of cypress and tupelo, catching vitamins in its stream, pulling them together with it. And now it’s working by means of the principle channel, curving like a query mark into the large river. It’s searching for the salt of the ocean that it misplaced so way back. It’s bringing a present again with it, that leaf litter. And when it lastly meets the bay, this isn’t the top of the story, however one other starting.
For the rivers,
Chris Watkins
Chris Watkins is a genderqueer poet, author, and environmental activist residing in Tallahassee, Florida. They earned their Ph.D. in Poetry and Ecocriticism at Florida State College and at the moment function the lecturers and partnerships coordinator of FSU’s Sustainable Campus in addition to a member of the board of administrators for Apalachicola Riverkeeper. Chris’s current work has appeared in Poetry, Cincinnati Assessment, and The Harvard Assessment, amongst different journals. Their debut assortment, The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books.
Learn different Letters to America on-line or in Expensive America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, printed in partnership with Trinity College Press.
Header photograph by Dani Davis.
