I went camping along the Russian River, outside Guerneville, a few weekends ago. My wife and I went with two friends, and their medium-size dog, and their very small baby. One night of camping, about an hour-and-a-half drive north from Oakland. We stayed at a small campground nestled in a canyon of second-growth redwoods and bay laurels, recommended by another friend who camped there at the end of last summer, to spend time calf-deep in the river, fishing for bass.
Just across the road from our campsite, past a modest orchard—I grabbed a small golden yellow apple from a low branch, crunchy, delicately sweet—there is a small, pebbled beach. Green tufts of coyote brush line the riparian path; alders and maples fill in the gaps between redwoods on the ridge above the river. A young cottonwood leans toward the water. The river is low, moving slowly enough that it seems not to, dotted with mayflies. I stand ankle-deep in the water, and listen to the sound of an electric saw whirring somewhere in the hills above me, another camper whistling for their dog to come, my friends layering and de-layering the baby—it’s his first camping trip—as the sun moves in and out of clouds.
The Human Animal
A column exploring the relationships between people and nature, written by Endria Richardson. Read more
This river—my feet are cold, I need to leave soon—winds westward to the Pacific. The water reaches Hawaii, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Somalia, the Gulf of Aden, Sudan. The California Current moves—slow and broad and reaching hundreds of miles offshore—from the northernmost point of Vancouver Island, southward toward Baja California in Mexico. The North and South Equatorial currents are pushed west by trade winds along the equator toward the western coast of continents, where countercurrents traveling east and north form. It is possible that the exact water I stand in, here in this brief, slow section of the Russian River in Guerneville, California, might make it across an ocean or oceans—perhaps over the course of a hundred years or so. But probably not.
Still, I am thinking about the shared world. When my friend came to this campground in summer, they were not just fishing for pleasure, but in order to continue to learn skills that might help them and their community survive, in a bad scenario. I am nearly always thinking about the bad scenario: politically, ecologically, climatologically. The bad scenario has, of course, already happened: Russian and American settlers exploited Indigenous labor in the fur trade along the river and nearly hunted the California sea otter to extinction. Large-scale weather disasters are increasing in scale and frequency around the world. War is here, just an other here than here.
I am in a particular here, now. Time and space are bounded things, after all—the river is not a conduit to the world, and the countries we live in shape the lives we live. I can drive a highway without checkpoints, turn onto a river road, lie on soft duff and yellowing bay leaves, roast sausages and assemble s’mores over a fire, and sleep beneath bending trees. I can, if I choose—as so many seem to be choosing now—disbelieve the reality of anything that is not within arm’s reach, verifiable by my own senses. Perhaps because I am the child of an immigrant and the descendant of enslaved people who were brought, afraid and unwilling, to this continent across the Atlantic Ocean, I am always thinking about worlds out of reach. But it is a human impulse to wonder at the limits of what we know through experience alone, to yearn for a way to share the suffering and the delights of people and places we will never touch or know, other than through our phone and computer and television screens—flat images, sharp, but without smell or texture or taste.
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Back at our site the next day, early morning sun streamed through the bay trees, lightening their slivered leaves. Campfires burned in the sites around us, and someone seemed to have charred their breakfast. I smell the smells of our neighbors, I hear the sounds of their children.
I am in this here and now, but there are other heres and other nows. I want to touch them, to deepen and layer the experiences that present themselves to my physical senses: woodsmoke, bay leaf, sunlight. I want to share this moment, this still-here-and-now possibility for an evening and morning of peace, so that, when we must, we can recall being part of a beautiful world.
