dam

Note. This image is not from the ice age, this is a 2005 image of a currently melting glacier on earth.

Can you imagine this planet clothed in ice? Embraced by ice. Shaped by the slow movements of glaciers across continents? There is something glamorous about that to me. Like Jennifer Lopez’s character in Hustlers.

I know. Ice queen realness. But the closeness of ice, the slow smoothing impact of centuries of solid flow. I fantasize about that feeling. And I’m not even a person who like the cold. Not even for its contrast. Ask my partner what we keep the thermostat on at home. Sangodare will tell you: Caribbean.

And yet. And still. And not still, but imperceptibly moving mountains, I love that the surface of earth got some of her curves from the slow roll of ice across miles and millenia. I too have grown beautiful exactly where you tried to freeze me out. I too wear ice over so many parts of my evolution. And now it’s melting.

Can you remember what it felt like when your frozen places became rivers nurturing all kinds of life you couldn’t have previously imagined? Do you remember when what was a weight became a rush and you greened all over? That’s what my journey to turning 40 felt like and now I know why Audre Lorde called herself “a high priestess of 40” in that video after the Broadside banquet. (Thank you Mary Lu Lewis, Michelle Citron and the Lesbian Home Movie Project.)

Audre said she let go of all the pressure she had internalized about who she should be and what she should make happen and what other people thought and BABY! Talk about prolific erotic inspiration, talk about dreams upon dreams we still dreaming. I’m so happy to know exactly what she means.

And maybe that’s why I have an issue with dams. Stay with me.

This hotel I’m staying in, in San Fransisco, has a note printed on the bottom of the mirror, proclaiming the good news that we can drink the tap water because it comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and is the cleanest drinking water in the whole United States.

And guess what? I love tap water. Our best way beyond the scourge of plastic bottled water. What usually fills my turquoise tumbler (after flowing through the filter Sangodare bought) is tap water. And I come from public water legacies. As part of the short-lived 1967 Anguillian Revolution, my grandparents prioritized free access to clean water as a collective necessity. Decades later my grandfather (who would have been 110 last week) still spoke of it as their greatest revolutionary achievement, that a poor child, like he had been growing up in Anguilla, could go to the pump and get the water they needed on an island surrounded by salt.

So why wasn’t I happy to read the note on the bottom of the mirror proclaiming I could drink the tap water in this hotel which they must have had to dig real deep to build up this high? And I have been drinking this tap water, even though strangely the hotel also gives out Aquafina.

I’m angry because I’m here in San Francisco, really only for a night on my way somewhere else, and I know how this city has displaced its Black communities. I watched The Last Black Man in San Francisco like everyone else did (or should). And it just doesn’t feel right to me that while the tap water in Jackson, Mississippi and Flint Michigan and too many more cities is poisonous sludge, this violent dream of a non-Black urban exception brags about having the cleanest drinking water. Of course you &^*(ing do.

While Oakland, which I can almost see from here, gets its water through old poorly maintained pipes from the Sierra Nevada and East Bay watersheds, San Francisco gets its water from 187 miles away in the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir over next to Yosemite.

And what is Hetch Hetchy Reservoir? A drowned valley, dammed up.

Millenia ago a glacier carved a most beautiful valley into earth, Cliffs and dramatic edges, a U-shaped curve in the land. And then when the glacier moved on and the ice melted, what a rich and fertile home for the people. The Sierra Minok, Yokuts, Washoe, Western Mono and Pauite loved ones and more tended the valley in loving relationship for thousands of years. And then. The manifest destiny dream fueled by the San Francisco gold rush unleashed state-sanctioned genocide against the Native people of the area in the mid 1800’s including the Mariposa War, inventing laws that called the beloved people trespassers in their own home.

Was that enough? Was it enough to steal the land these communities had made more beautiful with their living? This place that the white conservationist John Muir called “a grand landscape garden, one of natures rarest and most precious mountain temples,”? No. It is never enough in white supremacist capitalism. In 1913 adding more than insult to massive theft, the far away city of San Francisco built a dam that flooded the whole valley, drowning countless species so that 110 years later this hotel can tell Jeremiah Gumbs’s granddaughter to taste the cleanest drinking water in America? Clearly we do not have the same definition of clean.

This morning I woke up with a start. Some weird rerouting of sinus fluid to the back of my throat had me sit straight up to keep from drowning again. And dam. Maybe I should have never drank that water. Where is this happening in my life? What ancient treasures am I flooding for convenience, directing water to wherever the gold reside. Who do I push out of my life because their love demands too much of me, without even the good sense to love myself better in their absence?

I’m only here in SF because it’s a gay mecca. But my queer Black life (and all the lives in pinkwashed Israel by the way) deserve better than this stolen lie of clean. I deserve to be curved where I am. Curved and populated by the interspecies miracle of staying. Because the speculative housing market push-out in this and every other city I know can only produce more thirst. Of course we are unquenchable when we sever our deepest relationships and murder our teachers for teaching us what we most need to learn.

Once upon a time I wore ice and it made me who I am and it melted into every pore and the flow of it still overwhelms me. Once upon a time my curves, a fertile place of welcome growth that could forever surprise me. I call on the high-priestesses and the sages of all ages, I call on the displaced and the reaching. I call on my memory of Spring. A queer symbiosis, an ever changing love, a relationship that grows beautiful in the gaps of where we are. May it be so, again.

P.S. Are you ready to let it flow? Join me in one of these reflective writing courses.