The twentieth century has gone down in history for a number of ignominious as well as heroic events, but certainly one of its more troubling legacies is its treatment of rivers. As agriculture gave way to industry and massive development of cities, water was victim to an increasingly private and individualistic conceptualization of property. Consequently, rivers suffered greater transformation than in the previous ten thousand years. They were straightened, diked, and dammed, and where I live water was transported from less populous areas and fed into the Provo, all to provide more space for homes, more safety from floods to homeowners, and reservoirs to ensure the perpetuity of modernization. And as Donald Worster reminds us, the Mormons played no small role in this harnessing of water’s wild and unpredictable ways, seeing dams and dikes as the way of the Lord. Several small hydroelectric dams were built on the Provo early in the century, and then two major dams were built, one in the 1940s and the other in the 1990s.

Within a century of the arrival of the white man, 95 percent of the native species in the river and of Utah Lake went extinct, this despite the fact that it had been the meat of the native fish of the river and lake that provided for humans for thousands of years and saved the lives of the pioneers in those early, hunger-ridden years of settlement. But this is only the most overt and measurable of consequences. Aquatic species worldwide are going extinct at much faster rates than terrestrials. When the fish go, that means the invertebrates, zooplankton, plants, and whole swaths of life go, too.

Rivers are unruly by nature, of course, especially when they are subject to the ebb and flow of snowpack in mountain wilderness and when they drop quickly and sometimes with crushing violence. In the case of the Provo, what was once a meandering, braided series of cuts and turns that increased in variety, biodiversity, and breadth as the river fell from high elevations and grew and spread across each flatland with increasing strength and claim, is now in the lower regions what one local restoration ecologist, Mark Belk, calls a “moving bathtub,” a straight shot of water with decreasing biodiversity.

In the middle of the century, the Army Corps of Engineers did their level best to teach the river to behave with a series of dikes that riprapped it like some intransigent adolescent who, accustomed to slouching at the dinner table, is forced to wear a back brace. This was done perhaps not out of any overt malice but in profound ignorance of what a river is and what it does. We now know its health must be measured in terms of the entire watershed over the course of its dynamically changing shape through time, upstream and downstream, from the surface to the subsurface, and by its relation to the riparian communities it spawns alongside.

A river is water, yes, but it is also soil, plant, and animal life—a watershed. Seeing it requires something more than merely historical or aesthetic lenses. It requires the poet’s eye. Zooplankton, invertebrates, fish, mammals, vegetation, fowl, all respond to and even depend on a river’s unpredictable and uneven flow, its fluctuations in temperature, and its moods of violent overflow, as well as its vulnerability to drought. So, too, the invisible and larger supply of groundwater beneath our feet. Variety in contour is the rule of water left to run its own course as it spills over rocks, carries dead wood and plant life, turns back and braids itself around slight elevations. Its life, in other words, depends on chance, even chaos. This enhances the differences in temperatures, velocity, and volume of flow that provide habitats for a broad diversity of life.

But tolerating a river’s unpredictability is like tolerating the bald facts of mortality itself. Consider the two meanings of Isaiah’s recompenses: God’s gift of grace of a blossoming desert—the earth as home, as paradise—and God’s vengeance on a wicked world—the earth as exile, as wilderness. It would seem necessary to learn tolerance for the fact that we are never far from either one. We need an imagination of deep time, but try selling the merits of deep time to the homeowner on a floodplain or to the politician running for election on a platform of economic progress. It was only thirty years ago that some Utahns entertained the proposition that the Provo River could deliver its water more effectively if it were piped underground, which is sort of like deciding to forsake food in order to get your daily nutrition intravenously or with pills. It took the work of Robert Redford and Sam Rushforth, an ecologist at BYU at the time, and others to convince people of the shortsightedness of the proposal, not to mention its aesthetic impoverishment. But this new practice of environmental repentance, the deep art of ecological restoration, is more than preservation; it reshapes rivers to their complex serpentine forms and allows life to go about its business of promoting habitat diversity and mitigates against the effects of climate change. A way of saying, no, not yet, not here. Mark Belk, for one, believes it is not merely his scientific duty but his Mormon stewardship to be, as he wryly puts it, “out to save the world, one trash fish at a time.”

Human developments have also placed limits on the progress of such efforts, but ecological restoration at least signals a penitent response to Malachi’s threats. Repentance begins with recognition of sin but ends when self-loathing is overcome by love. If every species is a creative response to a particular environment, protecting species is protecting the integrity of a system as it moves through evolutionary time. Ecological restoration, unlike the work on the Sistine Chapel, is not a scraping away of time’s effects on the surface of a static work of beauty; it is instead a stepping into the flow of time and watching the diversity of life our restitutions spawn. It is a fundamental recognition of ongoing creation, something unimaginable within a theology of an ex nihilo creation.

Creationists, in their shallow temporal reckoning, cry foul since a seeming snap of the fingers is enough to explain the young and static world around us. Not for Joseph Smith whose understanding of the creation as organized matter accrues in potency with increasing understanding of the emergence of a world of complexity, extravagance, and beauty in deep time: “The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end.”

The audacity of the prophet Joseph is his claim to have restored an original form of Christianity, and that would have to include Christianity’s original ecological understanding. Was there an ecological apostasy? Are we perhaps just beginning to understand the ecological principles he restored? If the creation bears witness to a creator, it would seem that even the eternity of God and his works are inherently temporal. Spiritual work this is, this patient assent to what is. A working back along the path that first led us away from this ticking earth. Healing the earth, yes. But a restoration of ourselves, too.

_______________________________________________________________________________

George B. Handley is a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University.  He has been writing, teaching, and lecturing throughout Utah and internationally on the intersections between religion, literature, and the environment for the past decade.  As an activist, he has argued for the protection of wilderness, legislation to mitigate climate change, and smart growth in Utah.  He is the author of two books of literary criticism, Postslavery Literatures of the Americas and New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott.  His book, Home Waters, published in 2010 by the University of Utah Press, is a creative non-fiction narrative that argues for a sustainable sense of place in the West by exploring the environmental history of the Provo River watershed, Mormon theology, and his own pioneer and family history in Utah Valley.  He lives in Provo with his wife, Amy, and their four children.

He is also a member of the LDS Earth Stewardship group, a community of LDS writers, teachers, artists, scientists and others advocating deeper, more responsible human relationships with God’s creation, the Earth.

Citation. The above excerpt is taken from Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River by George B. Handley.  Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010, pp. 127-130.

its ripening body,
freshly emerged from a confining
pupal case. It seemed resigned

to die, as if it bowed to fate,
despite seeing clearly the trap
descending,

the butterfly net he wielded was a
destiny just too wide, too deep to
muster a pretense of escape.

Perhaps it remembered the ants.

This was an antlion adult, who,
(named coldly in Greek Myrmeleontidae)

as a young larvae built cone traps
in the ochre sand, teased from the
weathering canyon walls.

In those days, it lived as a wingless larva,
a monster with jaws almost as long as
its body, buried in the center
of an ideal earth-grain
vortex, where it waited for

a hapless feast to tumble
unaware into the cone of
sand, where its empty jaws
waited eagerly, patiently,
watchfully silent.

As the ants fought
blindly to escape,
spilling sand
across a vanishing
pheromone trail—the trap’s clever
construction forcing the
beast’s struggles
to collapse the diabolical
topology towards the
vertex, coaxing the sentinel’s prey
to the center. To the place
where ant becomes antlion.

He tries to explain his
easy triumph
with the net,
into which he swept up the creature
for cataloging,
collection,
for science at its most
unforgiving blindness.

He imagines
that its mind was yet foggy—its
wings not yet dry, it was freshly

awakened new into the world, like
a mythic God.

He stoops down and sees
its pupal case lying in
the red sand, being scavenged

by harvester ants. How odd it seems
that this fine sand was
once sandstone, which

in turn was once sand dropped
by an ancient and
forgotten river and is now used to
house ants—

And there lying on the sand
an antlion pupal case, formed
from ant, being converted

back to ant,
completing
necessary circles.

__________________________________________________________________

Steve Peck is an ecologist at Brigham Young University. Creative works include a novel: The Gift of the King’s Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications); a self-published novella A Short Stay in Hell (reviewed here and here), a short science fiction story: The Flaw in the Lord Harrington Scenario, published in HMS Beagle (online journal by Elsevier); poetry in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, BYU Studies, Irreantum, Red Rock Review, Glyphs III, Tales of the Talisman (in press), and a chapbook of poetry published by the American Tolkien Society called Flyfishing in Middle Earth.  A version of “The Ant Lion” appeared in Glyphs III (2007), 141-143. He blogs at bycommonconsent.com and has a faith/science blog called The Mormon Organon.

Victorian Violet Press, an online poetry magazine, is seeking submissions for the December issue. Please check out the magazine to get an idea of what type of poetry is published. You can find the magazine here.

Guidelines: Our taste in poetry is eclectic, but these subjects are preferred: inspirational, poetry for children, poetry about children, nature and life. Formal and free verse are both accepted, we particularly enjoy metrical poems that have lyricism, originality, accessibility and beauty.

Poems should not be obscure or overly abstract and should have a strong element of rhythm and a strong metrical element whether they are free verse or formalist.

Send 3-5 poems pasted in the body of an email with your name in the subject line. Simultaneous submissions and previously published poems are okay. Please wait three months after your last submission, before sending more poetry.

fold their hunger into gloves of sleep and cranes
whoop in the morning like freckled boys on stilts.

One body: some days, I swear, one is almost enough.
But today?  I want to climb free of this narcotic dark,

squeeze into that broken parable we call first light.
Sadness and wind, meadow and awe.  Who will teach

me to listen with leaves, make sky my skin?  I lean,
wondering which of my faces morning will erase first.

______________________________________________________________

Lance Larsen’s most recent poetry collection is Backyard Alchemy (Tampa 2009).  His work appears in such venues as New York Review of Books, Orion, Slate, Poetry Daily, Raritan, LIT, Southern Review, and Best American Poetry 2009.  He has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He teaches at Brigham Young University, where he serves as associate chair.  In spring 2010, he will direct a theater study abroad program in London.  “Rough Translation” was previously published in Field.

*Non-contest guest post*

As I started washing dishes I glanced out the same window in the other direction. I can see down the hill if I choose, but also uphill to the woods behind. Two yards over, I saw movement. Looking as closely as I could through the window, I could see a herd of whitetail deer bedded down next to the neighbor’s shed. Each deer was facing a different direction to watch for dogs and other trouble. One had already stood and stretched, and it started gingerly scratching with a hind leg all over, balancing itself like a ballerina as the hoof reached every spot. It reached over its shoulder and licked its fur into place, walked several yards away, and emptied bladder and bowels. As it moved on, it looked for nibbles in the grass. I noticed a couple other white rumps farther up the hill and counted a total six deer that were visible. Meanwhile, another deer stood, stretched, scratched, then groomed in the same way and order as the first one. Another one got up after that, going through the routine. They all had the same sleepy look as early morning commuters or students waiting at a bus stop. I had to go tend to some household duty or other but came back as soon as I could to watch the deer some more. By this time all the deer had performed their morning ritual and were ambling into the tree line. The light changed to a uniform shade that smoothed the sky flat. The day had begun. I felt as though something had awakened in me as well.

would carry remnant melodies across long, dusky
hours. At times I feel this eastern breeze has lifted
me, somehow, beyond the soft-lit sloping fields
and conifer lined hills. To lands where only goldenrod

has known me by my smile, and dampness soothes
the head of every yellow aster bloom. Tonight, before
the morning’s crest of ruby will extend through broken
clouds, I whisper prayers again to autumn:
take me there once more.

_____________________________________________________

“Hymn to Autumn” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  It was published in Joyful!, an online Christian magazine, in October.

For Karen’s bio, go here.  (Scroll down to end.)

The first three days on the way to Tarshish were beautiful. The sun played in a sky ornamented with the most delicate of cirrus clouds, and the water was a fortune in blues, purples, and greens, shot with gold where the light tumbled into it. Zabah lounged on the starboard deck, in a chair which he had specially constructed to recline and fold back up, sipped olive wine, and composed chiastic poetry to his favorite harlot back in Midian. The Amalekite who had come in third sat in his cabin sulking because he had lost to a crazy Israelite. Jonah paced the deck, distracted, usually in the way of the ship’s crew. Fortunately Zabah, with the very best of intentions, had inquired about a bit as to whether the Israelite camel champion might not be a bit insane, and so word was had around the ship that he was crazy.

When Jonah had said to get off, it appeared that the voice had taken him at his word, and stayed behind in Joppa. “I’m sorry,” he growled into the silence. “Look, as soon as I get to Tarshish, I swear, I won’t even race, I’ll turn right back around, I’ll swim to Nineveh if I have to.” His head stayed quiet.

“I don’t know,” Zabah told the sailors. “I’ve heard some strange things about the interior of Judaea. But still, he’s a phenomenal camel racer.”

“I know, I didn’t even win that race, you won that race, I’m sorry!”

“You’re no better than Abiezer,” a voice in his head told him, but it was only his own mind. He didn’t know how he knew the difference. His own thoughts were oranger, somehow. The other thoughts came in darker, and blue.          

“There may be something in the water there,” Zabah had said. “But he’s a good-looking kid.”

“Damn nutty Israelites,” the Amalekite said.

“I’ll go to Nineveh right now, just give me a way!” Jonah shouted to the ceiling of his cabin on the night of the third day, and promptly fell asleep.

The storm came up from nowhere. Zabah was nearly thrown off his chair by the wind and the Amalekite spilled ink on the angry epistle he was writing to the camel-racing commission. The ship rose high on a sudden swell of water. The rain came slamming down on deck like wheat dumped from a sack. Sailors swarmed and bounded from all corners to tie down the sails and bail water off the side. Zabah, in a hurried retreat below deck, chair in hand, heard them crying every man to his god, and went to find Jonah.

“Hey Jonah,” he said. “Sleepy boy. Jonah!”

Jonah woke with a start. “What? I won’t go to Tarshish!”

Zabah took his shoulder and shook him a little. “Is it your god you’re always talking to?”

“What?”

“You talk all the time, to no one. Are you talking to your god?”

Jonah shook his head. “God doesn’t talk back,” he said sadly. “I didn’t go to Nineveh.”

Zabah took a step back. “Your god is angry with you?”

“My God has left me,” Jonah said. “Or I left him.”

“Well, I think he’s back,” Zabah said.

Jonah took in the violent tossing of the room for the first time. “There’s a storm?”

“You might say that.”

A sailor burst into the room. “You!” He launched an accusing finger at Jonah. “Who are you?”

“Jonah son of Amittai,” Jonah said. “I am a camel racer.” He shook his head. “No, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Hebrew God, who made the earth and the sea.”

“You’re fleeing the god that made the earth and sea,” Zabah pointed out.

“You’re fleeing your God? You’re bringing us to destruction!” the sailor shouted. “We cast lots, and it fell on you! Come on deck, both of you.” He wrapped a burly hand around Jonah’s wrist, lest he try to resist.

“How could the lot fall on me if I wasn’t there to draw one?”

The sailor shrugged. “That Amalekite camel racer stood in for you.”

“Convenient,” Jonah muttered.

“My will may be done even through an unreliable man of Amalek,” the voice said.

________________________________________________________________
Arwen Taylor’s “The Faith of the Ocean” appears in its entirely as part of Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/peculiarpages/fobbible/pppfobbible.htm#faith) or as part of  the complete Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/).

It was Satan who spoke first, after his grimaces and rubbing had finished. “You are very beautiful,” he said.

The snake stirred, blinking. “How can you know what beauty is?” she asked. Her voice was low, and modulated. “Only the gods know that.”

Satan shrugged. “I don’t know how I know, snake. I only know that I know—and you are very beautiful.”

“Are you a god, then?” Her voice was cool and musical, like a brook, and she regarded Satan with cool eyes.

He laughed, leaning back into his wings and grabbing his knees. “Do I look like a god to you?”

“You look like half a bat,” said the snake as she eased down from the tree. “The other half might be monkey, might be man. You have more hair than the other two-legs in this part of the tree-place.”

“Not a god though. That’s a relief,” said Satan. He leaned forward slightly and studied her as she moved from under the shadows of the trees. “You are beautiful—look at you in the sunlight. You’re like a living bruise.”

“What part of creation is a bruise?” asked the snake.

“A very beautiful part.” Satan’s mouth twitched into a smile.

“Only the gods know beauty,” repeated the snake. “When this tree-place was created, the gods called it Beauty, but no creature may know what that means. Beauty is a mystery of the gods.”

“It’s a mystery, I will grant you that,” said Satan. “To be honest, I’m trying to figure it out myself. It’s one of the reasons I dropped down here—I thought it might give me some ideas.”

The snake regarded Satan with deep interest. “Do you know beauty? Can you see it?”

Satan’s smile was long and white. “Everywhere, no-legs. This is a beautiful garden.”

“I see you are playing a game with words, then, because this tree-place is Beauty—and therefore beautiful.” The snake twisted herself back upon her mighty loops to rise to Satan’s seated height. “And I am part of Beauty, and therefore beautiful—this is what you mean?”

Satan laughed. “I did not expect you to coil me in my own words. But here, I’ve given you a compliment and I expect it repaid—do you think I’m beautiful?”

The snake shook her head. “I don’t know beauty. It is a mystery of the gods. I do know you are made well—as the gods made you—and therefore you must be beautiful.”

“A true compliment. Yet I can’t imagine that anything—least of all myself could be more beautiful than you are,” said Satan.

The snake blinked. “This is a new thing you have said.” She thought for a moment. “How can something be more beautiful than something else? Both things are made by the gods.”

Satan shrugged. “Personal preference, I suppose. I’m sure the gods think everything is as beautiful as everything else. I just find you more beautiful than—say, that rock over there.” Satan pointed to a rock jutting from the muddy earth, crumbling and charred-looking as a burned stick. “It looks as if it tumbled from Heaven, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t feel more beautiful than the rock,” said the snake.

“That is because you are a woman,” said Satan, “and—innocent or not—some things breed true.”

The snake blinked at him.

“Don’t worry,” said Satan. “It’s just a joke. And not a very good one, either.”

_______________________________________________________________
“Blood-Red Fruit” can be read in its entirely as part of Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/peculiarpages/fobbible/pppfobbible.htm#blood) or through the complete Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/). The story was written by Danny Nelson and Eric W Jepson.

Late September
washes a season’s green
beyond field and village
and age seventeen;
only leaves
rinsed in afterglow
stir at Joseph’s homespun
passing.

He once knelt
in April grove,
drenched with that glory
of Father and Son.
Then summer wove roots
through his harrowed soul
as those parched by mockery
claimed the heavens
closed.

Autumn wind
shimmers into the trees,
quickening vision
of his pending task:
these hands will lift voices
silenced by stone,
fullness like morning
tide gathering
home.

_________________________________________________________

Nani Lii S. Furse is a SAHM*, proof that she’s learning textese in an effort to communicate with her teens and young adult children.  She earned a BA in English from SUU when it was Southern Utah State College and continues to enjoy life in that scenic area with her husband and three energetic sons who still remain at home.

“Finding Cumorah” was first published in the Sept. 2009 issue of the New Era (49).

*Stay-at-home-mom

Then Abel, Cain murdict.
And what is the verdict—

jealousy, heroism,
or the first eco-terrorism?

_________________________________________________________

Danny Nelson’s “Sustain-Abel” appears in The Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/) but is making its online debut here at the Wilderness Interface Zone. Nelson studies literature at the University of Washington where he is something of an expert on the more fantastical works of E.M. Forster.