Impermanence

1

Dust breathes and flows. It spreads like people, like birds, like locusts, like power—each particle a sentinel, amassing and dispersing. The rains no longer come here. Not for decades. And Tyler knows people believe deserts can’t be healed, but he doesn’t care. He scans the pale horizon wanting something more to arise. Their small team of three huddles in the low belly of a pale dune with two blue tents and an orange one.

After two years of massaging the sand with feces and compost, planting bull grass and mesquites, they managed to form a layer that holds water.

In the sandy soil, Jen digs holes for creosote saplings. On the other side of the firepit, Finch sits with legs hanging out of the tent entrance. Shirtless, he distractedly studies the maps and pencils notes on a yellow legal pad: carving terraces into the new dune, constructing retaining walls to increase moisture capture, planting wood for hugelkultur.

While watering the roots of a sapling, Jen remembers her mother’s face, blank with dementia, shouting at her from the hospital bed to never come back. She tells herself this is why she left.

“Water?” Tyler asks.

She pulls back her Panama hat and wipes her forehead with a blue paisley kerchief before sipping from the ladle.

Finch keeps glancing up from the topological map, scratching his scruffy chin, but also just staring. He’s a starer and it makes Tyler and Jen uncomfortable. The mantra flows out, but no one can hear him mumble, rhizosphere, groundcover, herbaceous layer, shrub layer, understory, canopy, verticals. He sleeps with all the seeds he can’t wait to germinate in the fifth year as if girlfriends.

At lunch, Finch organizes sandwiches on a makeshift cutting board with handfuls of foraged salal to zest the salami and rye. Tyler chews loudly and mentions how he hates shipping in food on the solar truck they sometimes run a few miles into town.

No one says anything for another hour until Jen murmurs it’s time to take soil readings, and someone needs to go check up on the previous dunes where they’ve established pioneer landscapes.

By nightfall, everyone wants to watch the fire burn. The few pieces of imported pine from Canada, brought in during the last visit to the nearest town, crackle with laughter.

Tyler slurps at his hot chocolate with bourbon. Signing up for this program had been one of his rebellions against his Trump-supporting libertarian father. Instead of taking over the investment firm, he would live in the desert for twenty years bringing something back to life.

Jen glances at Tyler in the watery glow of firelight and wonders if he’s still having nightmares about his parents—he talks less these days. The landscape strips away the need for their voices.

Another Tuesday comes—but all days feel like sand falling through an unremarkable aperture: they bury the lengths of pinon pine on the new terraces, creating pockets for moisture and runoff.

*

Wednesday, they drive in water and lumber from the nearest town. Friday, they dance to Duran Duran from Tyler’s solar boombox under a full moon serenading the new rows of young ironwood.

Monday, everyone starts again somewhere in their cycle. Each trusts the other. The other is the other. The plants breathe. The flakes of calcium carbonate and clay form new aggregates with the new dirt and detritus. Lines are drawn which connect and delineate simultaneously.

One morning, Tyler hums a song Jen can’t name—a high school dance; driving to the airport with Mom before Thailand; her first kiss.

“What is that?”

“I Love You Always Forever.”

Friday. A desert storm destroys several patches across all four dunes where they’ve established pioneer landscapes. They replant what they can, chop up the rest, bury or huddle the mulch around tree trunks. Finch watches them comb the last sections torn up by harsh winds and sandblasts. He knows most greening colonies like theirs have little success.

2

A year later, a high school class shows up under the grey and yellow morning sky. The math teacher, Mr. Gelstein, heard about them through social media channels, hired a bus, planned the most direct route using old maps which show the roads now obscured by the Aeolian processes.

He tries to explain while huffing at the edge of camp,

“Students should understand how science manifests in soil and see the importance of greening a desert.”

Jen waves at some of the kids to follow.

A group of boys surrounds Tyler who shares handfuls of desert chia and wolfberry. He explains how these deserts used to be lush and full of saguaro and prickly pear.

Jen watches Tyler from the top of a dune, his hands on his hips, clearly annoyed. She’s wondering if his nightmares of his father still keep him from sleeping.

“Miss Lewis.” A girl with pigtails faces Jen. “Do you think we can turn back Climate Change?”

Despite the fact that Jen will sacrifice almost twenty prime years of life, she doesn’t believe they can stop the runaway systems. She tries to hide her real answer behind a practiced explanation: the scalability of carbon capture technology; the reinforcement of carbon-dense soil systems; and new market technologies helping global industry adopt low carbon neutrality.

That night, they drink more bourbon than hot chocolate. Tyler goes to say something and stops. Back in the dark of the tents, Finch muffles his mouth and cries himself to sleep, hoping no one can hear. The sobbing wakes Jen. She puts an entry in her journal where she tracks all they do: back in Seattle when I was an office admin for Greenpeace, I used to tell myself, “The planet won’t die, it’s seen many mass extinctions, life will go on.” But I now know greenhouse gases could wipe out all possibilities of life. We could turn Earth into Venus.

3

Year five; year of the monkey. In cheap paper party hats, wheezing on kazoos made from bamboo, they sing “Auld Lang Syne.” Finch can’t believe they’ve made it this far. Jen asks him to stop repeating himself. The repetitions trigger a memory of her mother asking who she is, why she’s there, who she is, who she is.

At the crest of a dune recently planted with ironwood, they stumble drunkenly. Jen looks back at the trail they’ve left behind. They’ve finally managed to create small ponds that persist for a few hours before the sun rises.

Tomorrow, they’re going to start the chop and drop for the succession of many of the pioneer landscapes to make the leap in soil development. Tyler thinks of his dad—a conversation they’d had once about disaster capitalism, how he’d made a huge move of assets into Florida after the great hurricane of’ 32, making hand-over-fist profits from government-backed support, using cheap undocumented labour to build shoddy buildings that just made it past code. This was the last straw before Tyler disappeared without a word.

The following Wednesday, Finch shaves. The massive clumps of black and grey form a mound on his blue sleeping bag. The smooth skin feels as if he’s removed sorrow and memory, data hanging from his chin. The recurring dreams of angels, where they speak to him about the Garden of Eden, convince him their work builds a reality into the unseen.

Under the stratus clouds, they hack limbs, kicking the wiry curls apart so their decomposition spreads equally. They work for eight hours straight, only stopping to drink from the galvanized tub with ladles, relishing the water they’ve partially co-created.

4

On a hot Tuesday in the year seven of their lord, they all work on a high ridge planting ironwood. Something glimmers on the crest over a few dunes. Tyler waves, thinking someone is walking toward them, but it’s just a bent ironwood warped by the heat haze.

That night at the fireside, Tyler tells a scary story that’s actually kind of scary, about a ghost sitting at the base of people’s beds every night, never changing position, there from midnight to dawn, only disappearing after the person goes insane.

Another uncommon windstorm sweeps the area while they sleep.

In the morning, they crawl out of their tents early, anxious to see the destruction. They feel an uncanny sense of ease because most of the plants remain rooted.

The next weekend, while they forage mesquite and ironwood pods from the first dune landscape, Jen notices the heavy whir of a diesel motor on the wind.

“Do you hear that?”

They go back to camp.

A large truck, with a gleaming smile of a grille, rattles over a ridge into the sunlight, its bright blue body bristling. Sand spurts all around the large black tires grasping for traction. The truck slows. Clanking doors whinge open. Two blue-jean-wearing men hop down with their unkempt beards and baseball caps, their white t-shirts.

“Who’s the one who talked to my son about all that carbon capture bullshit?”

“Oh?” Tyler smiles. “The students from years ago?”

One man looks like a capital I and the other like a lowercase i.

Finch tries to ask for their names, and the one who’s been speaking keeps speaking but doesn’t share his name until Finch repeats the question uncomfortably a third time.

“We’re former cattle ranchers,” Sid says after introducing himself.

“Ranchers, huh,” Jen considers, “Did the global turn toward crickets effect your business?”

Wind blows through them, pillars of flesh, dry and hot, standing a few feet from each other, holding up nothing. Benny, the tall one, cracks his knuckles:

“What you’re doing don’t make any sense, it’s confusing, offensive. My wife divorced me and became one of you eco-freaks.” He leaps from point to point as if a rehearsed argument he's been playing out over and over again in his head. “That’s your fault.”

The two men turn away, confer for a minute, their voices hiding between the branches of a mesquite tree. When they’ve rallied, they point their fingers to the top of a dune outlined by the shade in the hard light of afternoon.

"We wanna see what you’ve done, show us what you’ve accomplished,” Sid prods.

Six people trudge up between the swirls of creosote bush and young ironwood and Tyler shouts, “Stop! Wait! Why’re you really here?” He approaches them with his hands raised high and his voice billowing out like the fat belly of a sailboat spinnaker, the kind from boating trips on the Connecticut coast in summer—the only time he remembers laughing with his dad after his mom died. “You’re going to come up here with your Malthusian fucking ignorance, don’t you understand everyone in the world could live in Texas with 800 square feet, about how two-thirds of all produced food goes to waste before reaching a mouth, about the lies used to construct abundance and scarcity rollercoasters?”

This is the argument he’s been waiting for all his life. These two men speak like his dad, and that’s fine, because he knows it's weird and all the competing voices in his head hate them, but he still wants them to understand. And when he says,

“You don’t deserve to just come out here and make me feel bad for choosing this. I didn’t cause your divorce. I didn’t ruin your lives.”

Sid starts to cry.

His weak shuddering disarms Tyler who lowers his hands and says, “I’m sorry.”

“Sid’s parents killed themselves after the ranch went under.”

“We grew up together, farming and ranching,” Sid blubbers, “Then watched the agro-firms buy up all our land, and all the foreign workers living in shipping containers, being paid in pesos made it impossible to compete.”

“It’s people like you who fought to eat fucking crickets.”

“Looks like we’re going to have a storm tonight. Stay with us for a bit longer,” Tyler offers.

“Why not give them time to talk more.” Sid pats his friend on the shoulder, wipes his nose. “Hear all their reasons?”

The crackling of the storm and the loud winds stir up the land like a white sheet on a clothesline. Benny tries to focus on all the information they share about permaculture. Their tents don’t have much in them, their truck isn’t well-equipped. The water they collect daily, how much food they forage, how it’s processed and stored—it’s all a struggle. Sid and Benny grin enthusiastically. This rugged living they can understand.

“So,” Benny says, “What else do you do here?”

5

Year 10. Sid repeats the mantra under his breath, rhizosphere, groundcover, herbaceous layer, shrub layer, understory, canopy, verticals. The rhythm reassures him. It enmeshes him with the land. The others.

The night of his conversion, around the fire, Finch embedded the names of the seven layers of a permaculture forest in him. But first, it’s his speech about the Amazonian rainforest being an artifact—how ancient Indigenous peoples planted and replanted certain species, creating its endless array of medicine, food, and resources. It’s the Garry Oak Savannahs of the Pacific Northwest, that settlers believed to be the Elysian Fields of Greek Mythology—which they foraged until all the chocolate lily, camus, and Garry oak went extinct. It’s the giant sequoias and red cedars of California—how shells were brought in from the coast to feed them more nutrients; their trunks intentionally scorched to produce a protective response, allowing the trees to broaden their base to support massive heights. Humans built the nature that 400 years of industrialism had destroyed—a kind of lost grandeur, greater than any fossil or artifact they would ever dig out of the ground.

Sid grinds mesquite pods into flour with the mortar and pestle. Blurry bipetal dots along the dunes distribute captured water to drier areas. They take readings of soil moisture, groundwater, micro-bacterial and fungal biodiversity.

Something about the cold evening winds, the clouds hanging at the periphery of the Precambrian mountains makes Sid nostalgic for childhood on his parents' old farmland in northern Arizona. He’s become so close to the land that he knows the flavours of different soil mixtures, the humidities of seasonal winds. He wishes he could tell everyone back home how this ancient ecology of mimicking nature could transform lifeless sand into a jungle.

“You okay?”

Jen kneels in the brush putting down her watering jug. He smiles pointedly at her and says yes. He came from farmers, from ranchers. He came from people who built the food of the old world. Now, on his diet of mesquite or ironwood tortillas with prickly pear salsas and sow thistle greens, pine-nut butter and juniper yam soups and fried yucca, his bony wrists are sharp enough to cut glass.

They’ve started weaving new clothing out of beargrass. Sid’s joints itch from the unprocessed twine. But he’s never been this happy, or so he says to Jen. She nods and eats a handful of pine nuts, offering him some.

They all worry about Sid but appreciate his presence. His extreme pivot in life reads like Tyler’s reactionary decision to join. And it took Tyler at least two years to smooth out those rough edges of opinionated judgment and self-righteousness.

Later that week Sid wakes up shaking. He’s drawn into the darkness under stars and a new moon. Is he dreaming? After only about ten minutes Sid bypasses the green region into the loose sand where nothing grows.

Within an hour, Sid’s lost, but the mountains aren’t that far away. Maybe he’s moving in circles? Maybe he’ll never find his way back? But the sun’s not up.

Morning light spills sideways over the molars of mountain rock that skirt the edges of the desert in all directions. At the bottom of a small dune, two sticks tied into a cross stand vertically out of the ground. Treasure? A body?

He digs but the sand keeps finding its way back into the hole. Sid’s sweating and exposed. At hip depth, he’s found nothing. An empty marker meant for a passing stranger, that whispers there is a grave waiting for everyone. And he remembers a vacation on the East Coast, when his aunt brought him to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It’s the two dueling dinosaurs on display, frozen forever in an architecture of death, that breaks him. Because the dust doesn’t forget. Because trying to reverse climate change, rebuild a “nature” that was indifferent to him, was horrifying.

Blistered and dehydrated, Sid somehow makes it back to camp. Even without a body buried at the location, they all agree someone should drive to the nearest towns to ask if anyone’s missing.

A week later, Sid isn’t in Jen’s spare tent he’d been using. They don’t find him when they search the area calling his name. Maybe he just walked out? Jen murmurs she’ll miss him, and that’s the last thing anyone says for a month.

6

Every week during the 14^th year, they gather the foraged foods of dozens of plant and tree varieties and drive to the nearest Sunday farmer’s market. The folks who wander over always ask questions about the gnarled glasswort, the ruby prickly pear, the paper bags full of grey mesquite flour or the pine nuts; but people recognize the brined olives and ask, do those grow here? Finch always chuckles to himself before going into a speech, “What can’t we grow here!”

Although their nameless farmstand sells a few products here and there, it’s hard for others to see them as anything but a cult. Their undyed beargrass shifts and shirts and skirts replaced the old tattered polyethylene/nylon fabrics of their outdoor clothing. They look like some sect of Mennonites.

Tyler flirts with a nature-goth girl wearing patchwork jeans and a black fringed jacket. Jen goes to look at the other stands. As she picks over some potatoes to bring back to camp She remembers the day they went to visit the Tohono Oʼodham Nation to talk about the site they wanted to live on and green.

A few council members had taken them seriously enough to meet. They stared at them in the office of their council building, baffled after the proposal, and one said, “You want to pay us rent to live in our desert for twenty years, in order to try and repair the damages caused by your people, and return it to a healthy biodiverse region, and then leave?” An uncomfortable quiet lasted two whole minutes before one of the elders said, “We’d just need to kill off ninety percent of your families and I think we’d be square.” Finch audibly choked on the dry air before one of the other members started laughing, followed by more. Jen, Tyler, and Finch joined with timid smiles before conversations about drawing up a contract began.

Finch is alone at the market table. He glances up occasionally to see Tyler with the girl, Jen filling up a burlap sack. He smiles at a customer from another table who looks interested but turns away at his grin. A young blond man wears a fashionable leather jacket. The strong hawkish nose and big pink lips, those sandy eyebrows and pale blue eyes.

“Is that you, Sid?”

Sid acts casually, an “Oh hey, how’s it going,” moseying over with his taupe tote bag on one shoulder, a few frowzy bits of celery hanging out the top. Finch tries to get questions through his teeth but can’t manage. Sid apologizes, once, twice, he even blushes as he asks how everyone’s doing. Finally, the full sentence makes its way to completion, “Why did you leave?”

Sid sighs because he knows how hard it’s going to be for Finch to hear his answer. Because he knows how sensitive Finch feels about the entire program of greening deserts. And he doesn’t ever want to think again about that grave.

“I realized what we were doing was irrelevant and it got boring,” Sid lies with a shrug that can’t confront himself. “I kept having this Bible verse repeating in my head the days before I disappeared, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,’ and I realized I was already dead out there.”

Finch hears this phrase which becomes an earworm, mixing this new revelation with his rhizosphere, groundcover, herbaceous layer, shrub layer, understory, canopy, verticals. Boring.

Tyler returns from the washroom to find Finch nearly catatonic. It takes ten minutes for him to get an explanation. Jen brings a handful of golden plums she bought with some of their leftover earnings and drops them at the sight of Finch. They pack everything onto the transport truck and start the drive home.

Tyler chews a hangnail. Mumbles of inflected agreement rumble like the clouds on the horizon. Another June storm rolling through—a once common thing, gone rare due to climate change, now returning. They don’t think anything of it, going to bed a bit more defeated than they’d ever been in the last fourteen years.

Intense rainfall wakes Tyler, something feels wrong. He opens his tent, sees Jen unzip her nylon door covered in duct tape patches. A flashbulb of lightning captures their slack faces, wide eyes. The rush of water is so loud it can only be a flash flood heralding the return of the long-lost spring rains of the Sonoran. This is what they had worked to accomplish.

Jen’s body is paralyzed—a flood of memory from the whole of the Earth, and she thinks back to the song she sang with her mother on the way to the airport.

Finch wakes up to shouting. He recognizes the fateful word of death hanging on the wind, and wonders if they’ll be remembered, martyrs somewhere carved into stones and left like pillars for the future.

Tyler’s bare feet throb from the stab of twigs and hard stems as he flees, wishing he could talk to his dad again, to his mom.

By the time they’re all running, their neon tents are brushed away like birthday balloons on a draft of wind. Bodies tangled together, lost in the sandy melange.

When the sun rises, the light cannot find the three bodies buried beyond its reach. But the still-rooted plants dry off, their limber joints stiffen and stretch. The grass and scrub-bushes bristle in the light, somehow greener.

A gilded flicker swoops over and claws into a young saguaro. She watches grasshoppers springboard around the dark soil, while a grey cactus mouse leaps and slips into a little divot preparing to strike. He grabs a desert clicker, gnawing the chitin tube from one end to the other. The mouse stiffens to alert as if being watched. A cold and eternal breeze full of unfamiliar mixtures of mud and debris streams across the newborn hills under clear, blue sky.