Rock Pile

Rock Pile

These are things we have thrown away and forgotten. Here, barbed wire is coiled neatly and left to rust into nothing. It was thrown away with care at a time when we didn’t know better.

You have to be careful in a rock pile. When you turn over a rock, you can never be sure what is under it. We have embarked on a mission to renew, to make watersheds healthy again, and to change our paradigm to acknowledge that everything we do has an impact. But as we turn over stones, we are going to find things that we didn’t know about, things that happened in the past that might shock us. We could tear our hair at the thought of the thoughtlessness that has gone before us. But was it intentional? I look at these careful coils. They weren’t left loose to entangle a deer in its tentacles. Pointing a finger is a waste of a hand that could be better employed working for change.

I once spoke to a father who joined their child on the family day activities of a summer camp. Groups of families fanned out in a riparian area along a river and he commented that if you had asked him before, he would have thought the mown area leading down to the river, secured by rip rap and populated by picnic tables was a nice place to spend a summer afternoon. But we had taken them all a little further up the trail where willows grew in, surrounded by wild roses and rough fescue grasses. We said look again. Look differently. He continued, saying that he wouldn’t see these areas the same way ever again. But it’s an important distinction that this is new information. For the generation of kids, this is knowledge they have at their fingertips at a young age and it is not new. It just is. There are some to whom this perception of the value of riparian areas is not new knowledge, but to some it is only just developing. For some there is a paradigm that is shifting and a new awareness awakening.

I don’t see any shiny, newly coiled wire in this rock pile.

-Erin Murphy-Thompson