If you haven’t yet read Part One, you should do that first.
In youth, sun-fever-burned, replete with doubt
and awkward angular, I walked unshod
and in the center of the viscid creek, heading
upstream, the algae tangled ropes
to bind my ankles. Shale under my feet
slicked dangerous in diatomic brown
lubriciousness, the creek blood-warm and fed
too rich with silt, with all the runoff dross
of chemical-fed farms, of septic tanks,
the creek near-eutrophied and yet I walked
its length a half a century ago,
through woods that should have been feted with mast
fallen from chestnuts, woods cut over once
and then a dozen times, stumps rooted out
and burned. Red oak grew up eventually
from worn-out farms; white oak, the hemlock with
its shy and graceful tips, recovery
of sorts, and to my youthful mind the creek
seemed wild, untrammeled, habitat for snakes
and tiny catfish. There, I delved the rock
that held the creek for fossil brachiopods,
horn corals, sponges, crinoids, the whole
assemblage of Devonian marine
and shallow-water fauna, sheltered there
four hundred million years. I imagined
a bright stark line between the long-dead past
and the present, seeking shells of shale
and slow-grown calcite jewelry, nacre
still impossibly intact, filled up
with cold, inert, dead stone so friable
four hundred million years of history
might crumble in a ten-year-old’s fingers.
A whole domain, extinct! I stood within
the watershed of pale Cayuga Creek,
which flowed into the Buffalo River
not far from that small river’s confluence
with the shallowest of the Great Lakes,
where water from between my toes conjoined
with the effluent of millions,
where the river was a chute through old
and oily docks, grain elevators, rock-
riprapped riparian shoulders sporting
the pinnacle of industry, and I
imagined myself being too late to see
the extirpation of communities
entire. I stood among naiads shrieking,
their springs gone dry. I stood near helices
circling the drain, clinging to life
as they clung to the diatom-slicked rock.
A thousand miles southward was the Gulf Coast,
and in every hollow between, the same
dire struggle: freshwater naiads,
snails that breathed — pulmonate gastropods —
which carried air beneath the meniscus
in bladders, mussels, clams, diversity
unparallelled in the hundred thousand
creeks that drained the Appalachian west,
gone blank, erased, while I stood lamenting
their forbears gone four hundred million years.
The hundred thousand creeks a holocaust.
The acorn ramshorn — breathing snail —and the
wicker ancylid — another — now
added to the litany, expunged
from the world’s gene-record, nevermore
to sip the sweet and wooded air beneath
the river cobbles from their bladder sacs.
The Tombigbee moccasinshell, found
first near Epes, Alabama, by the
young woman naturalist Winnie
McGlamery, upon a cobble bar
mid-stream in the low-water October
of 1935, known only from
two smallish specimens, is gone from the
industrialized Tombigbee, flowing now
well-tamed beneath the limestone cliffs where Jean-
Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville decreed
a town be built to trade with the Choctaw
in 1735, now slicked
with oil and fetorous houseboat bilgewater.
The agate, oblong, interrupted, striped,
rotund, lyrate, bigmouth, maiden, and
Coosa rocksnails, innocent of guile,
and the pebblesnails: the Oachita,
umbilicate, the channeled, the reverse,
and thick-lipped pebblesnails inundated
in a orgy of dam-building on
the southern states’ wild rivers, freshwater
molluscs that ate the river rocks’ green caul,
that fed the channel cats their frass, driven
from the earth’s very face, one species gone
unnoticed, then another, and anon.
The elimias high-spired, short-spired,
cobble, closed, rough-lined and fusiform,
constricted, hearty, ribbed, pupa, pygmy,
and puzzle elimias carry
their gentle Gothic spires no more beneath
the duff of forests cut for turpentine
shot through with sodden, silt-strangled streambanks.
Ten million crystal branches following
their languid Appalachian contours all
dotted with bright small populations of
freshwater mussels, and we sullied them:
cut down their forest mantle
plowed to the banks to grow cotton and corn,
filled shallows to the brim with silt, discharged
a thousand kinds of pesticide to leak
into each stream, built upstream factories
to tan our leather, smelt our ores, to cast
upon each watershed a pall of smog,
and one by one they died for us: the ribbed,
excised, striate, pagoda, pyramid,
and round slitshells, the Gyrotoma clan
entire, stout snails with furrows in their shells
known only from the Coosa, wet woodland
river choked to death by seven dams.
The once-free-flowing water of the wild
Coosawatee and its trout-filled twin
the Conasauga River joined to make
the Oostanaula, River of Shoals.
Oostanula joined the Etowah,
the High Town River: from their confluence
the Coosa ran down near three hundred miles
to the Tallapoosa confluence,
and in that stretch each individual
of the genus Gyrotoma lived
until the dams went in, flat water slicks
close-regulated with tame whitewater,
a simulacrum of the wild Coosa
for rafters, bleak depauperate below
the surface, and the same fate visited
on a thousand rivers, watersheds
torn, truncated, poisoned, dam-entombed.
The Epioblasmas, mere simple clams
that filtered branch water, that ate the silt
and frass, that made the streams clear, potable,
that delved beneath the cobble bars and drank
the water riffling over them mid-stream,
now mostly gone: The angled riffleshell.
The arc-form, arcuate, acorn, fine-rayed,
and nearby pearly mussels, the forkshell,
the narrow catspaw, Cumberland leafshell,
turgid riffle shell and the Sampson’s
naiad all erased, their lineage
wiped permanently clean. These are the sweet
and blameless dead, our careless casualties,
the bleak collateral with which we’ve bought
our lives. Intone their names: a flood of names.
A reservoir of names backed up behind
our inability to fathom our offense.
Of the Pleurobemas, nacreous-lined
and mild, that tasted river gravels with
their pearl-sheathed feet, these are forever gone:
the highnut, heavy, hazel, Scioto,
yellow, Alabama, Georgia, brown,
warrior, Coosa, true and longnut
pigtoes, that cozied in the river bars.
The Carolina elktoe, only known
from one small steeply flowing stretch of creek;
the Coosa elktoe, the lined pocketbook,
the Ochlockonee arcmussel, the late
and mourned Alabama clubshell, found
still by field biologists as wracked
and splintered shells, and the Recovery
pearly mussel: all forever gone,
and all of the one hundred thousand creeks
in pieces, paled, uncountable millions
already lost, unknown, unknowable.
1 comment on "The Litany: Part Two (Naiads)"
A few remain:
http://unionid.missouristate.edu/