A recording made during Brian Kirkbride, Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann’s performance piece “How Does the World End (For Others?)” at Fort Defiance Park, October 2019. The author encourages hitting play before reading.

In January 2017, Brian Holmes and myself—both in various states of shell-shock from the then recent US election—drove south from Chicago to Carbondale, Illinois to investigate Anthropocene modes of production and the impact they were having on the Cache River Valley.  We found coal mining operations emitting heavy swirling dust, streams toxically glowing brown, and community colleges surrounded by coal waste. We found spectacular rock formations and breathtaking views. We found engaged activists, underfunded educational institutions, struggling  towns, flooded riverbanks, the birthplace of superman, big trucks and large dams.

During that journey we also walked through the remarkable cypress forests at Heron Pond, which provided a stark contrast to the dusty, toxic open pit mines, and systematized farmland we otherwise found surrounding us. What can be learned from this landscape? And what tools are needed for greater understanding? With this question in mind, returning to same region in 2019, I asked Brian about the importance of the Heron Pond area, as a living archive of a landscape before human intervention—is this site also an example of environmental mitigation and adaptation?

“Well, not just Heron Pond but the entire Cache River Valley is a kind of living archive,” he replied. “It’s one of only a few extant swamps in our part of the country—Illinois or, really, the whole Upper Midwest—where almost every other significant stretch of formerly wet land has been drained, dried up and closed off from the seasonal pulse of rising and falling river waters. So in this unique place you can wander through a beautiful cypress-tupelo environment, the northernmost of its kind, nestled in an ancient bed of the Ohio River. Here you might feel like you’re in Louisiana, looking out through the midday shadows over the intensely green skin of the water, with your imagination tickled by the sight of those knobby, bark-covered growths pushing up beyond the surface, the so-called cypress knees. You might even feel like you’re in a magical place, one that gives an immediate sensation to that odd phrase people sometimes use, ‘time out of mind.’ But it’s hardly an example of a landscape before human intervention.”

As he went on to explain, the drainage process of the Cache River Valley began during the 1910s. Much of the area was logged for the valuable hardwoods and then a simple ditch was dug, to stop the flooding of nearby fields. “That shallow ditch eroded a little more with each storm, to the point where it’s now sixty feet deep and two hundred feet wide when it finally pours into the Ohio. The little culvert has become a deep canyon that acts like a vacuum-powered suction tube relentlessly pulling the water, the soil, and the trees themselves down an artificial stream, which becomes a raging torrent during spring melt.” If it weren’t for deliberately engineered human intervention, the banks of Heron Pond and the bird and animal habitats it hosts would, in Brian’s words, “just swirl down into the Ohio River. And at long last, local landowners could plant more soybeans. You know, drain the swamp! It’s an American dream.”

Such thoughts bring to focus questions surrounding the perceived “natural” landscape, and the ongoing human intervention required to keep the terrain intact.  How do we interpret these layered archives of the “natural” world that are actually intricate systems of massive human intervention?

While experiencing the forest back in 2017, we contemplated bringing others to the region for an immersive experience, to experience such a dynamic landscape that exemplifies so much of what we had been discussing with our Deep Time Chicago collective back in Chicago. Two years later our idea was realized as part of a three-day engagement focusing on political ecology in the Anthropocene, Field Station 4: Confluence Ecologies.

As Brian surmised during our recent conversation, “places like Heron Pond or the Little Black Slough take us out of the infinite chatter of our minds and yet, at the same time, they make us mindful of the present. At our Field Station 4 we wanted people to experience a world apart, of which we are nonetheless a part. Is there a Louisiana cypress swamp in Illinois? How did it get there, how does it remain there? Is an ‘invasive’ Asian carp part of a Midwest river? Can you eat it? Can your animal mouth help heal the floodplain you’ve invaded with your levees and ditches and fields and farmed fish? Or we can put all that Anthropocene chatter in aesthetic and philosophical terms: What does a threat look like in a place that’s all beauty? What does beauty look like in a place that’s all threat?”

Or, to put it another way: “It comes down to one of the simplest things anyone can offer anyone else,” he added, “a friendly invitation: would you like to take a stroll beside a swamp on a Sunday afternoon?

Where should we be strolling on Sunday Afternoons? This simple question is a large part of the work Deep Time Chicago has been involved in since the 2016 Anthropocene Campus in Berlin. With the support of the Goethe Institute in Chicago, DTC created a series of public walks throughout the Chicagoland area to create a “public research trajectory.” Throughout the past three years, we’ve helped lead groups to a wide array of locations including oil refineries, arboretums, cemeteries, buried nuclear reactors, and restored prairies.

On this particular Sunday afternoon after engaging with the warm matte green ambiance of the cypress forest while learning about the history and ecosystem at  the site we headed towards Cairo, Illinois for the final events of Field Station 4. As dusk descended, and with exhaustion setting in for everyone after days of non-stop programming and socialization, a group of around 30 participants descended on Fort Defiance Park at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. This site of a once thriving but now struggling town has a layered and troubled history and the site of the park where the two major tributaries collide created an aura we hoped to communally explore.

Deep Time Chicago members Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann and Brian Kirkbridge had planned  a performance to take place on an observation tower in the park while myself and Jenny Kendler launched our floating sculpture, Lounging Through the Flood at the confluence. Shortly before the event the performer—a local Cairo resident—who was booked to sing fell ill and Kayla Anderson (also from DTC) stepped in to fill the role.

I asked Brian Kirkbride how the piece originated. He explained that “Beate & Oliver came to me with the idea to use Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil as a reflection on death— to invite death to the living. Within the context of Cairo, the flood there and the “devastating situation the world is in,” they felt we should hold a Totentanz: a danse macabre acknowledging where we find ourselves.”

Brian had originally imagined accompanying the reading with Franz Liszt’s piano and orchestra work Totentanz, transformed into waves of metal. “But the more I thought about the weight of classicism, the more I wanted to contrast Virgil with a different voice. I’ve always admired the near crystalline structure of the lyrics to The Knife’s We Share Our Mother’s Health. It’s such a deeply evocative but deceptively simple song—and what’s a more fitting contrast to classicism than a pop song penned by a feminist, environmentalist, socialist band? That they are Swedish felt relevant considering Greta Thunberg’s recent speech at the UN.”

Brian decided he would create a cover of the song, but not present it in a straightforward way: “Oliver and Beate restructured the Broch text such that it had a refrain or chorus. The music would creep in underneath the reading so slowly as to be hardly noticed. Oliver had the idea to mix in the sound of insects—which I loved because if nothing else survives our species’ onslaught on the planet, insects probably will.”

The music began as a group of us formed a procession carrying the large sculpture down to the water about fifty yards from the observation tower. Quickly after the sculpture launched Kayla began singing and the crowd moved back towards the platform. Ten or so minutes into the performance, the intangible factors of the site and technology seemed to condense the poignancy of the weekend into just a few minutes, as the power went out leaving only Kayla’s unamplified voice to carry on. The audience, somewhat clumsily dazed, began inching closer and closer until everyone converged into a tight constellation, creating the most intimate experience of the weekend and an endpoint which would require no encore.

Reflecting on the events of Field Station 4, and the region that we were investigating, it seems appropriate to end with one last exchange between myself and Brian Holmes. An ongoing conversation after these sorts of endeavors always goes something along the lines of “so how do we use this experience to create meaningful change?” I don’t have a definitive answer myself, but looking back at the history of Heron Pond certainly offers some clues.

When I asked Brian how activists were involved in the preservation of this area, he told me about the local people who, during the 1970s and early 1980s had realized the land was likely to soon become an instrument of “an abstract thing called ‘the economy’” reach out.  First to each other, locally, then naturalist, biologists and ecologists, and even (in his words) “those weird and scary two-footed critters known as environmentalists, who had connections to big pools of money like the Nature Conservancy, or to unpredictable and frightening entities like the IDNR (Illinois Department of Natural Resources).” As he explained, “people in the countryside don’t necessarily like to invite such folks into their living rooms, because it’s never exactly certain what they’re going to do.” The story has an interesting plot twist by the name of the Main Brothers, who owned the sawmill in a nearby town with the unlikely name of Karnak. When push came to shove, the Main Brothers chose to sell their land to the Nature Conservancy, who later transferred it to the IDNR with the contractual understanding that it would become part of a larger preserved area.

“Who would have thought? Time out of mind. It turned out that the loggers, too—they loved the land. They wanted to log it, but they didn’t want to drain it. They didn’t want to sell it to the richest local people, those who once grew cotton and now grow soybeans. The loggers had ruined the place, but now it was time to save it. Well, we went to Heron Pond together, right? And it was worth saving, right? And we Americans have just about ruined this planet, with a little help from our old relatives the Europeans, is that right? Can we still look up at the night sky? Do the frogs still croak in the swamps? Do the stars still twinkle? Do you think we can wake up from this dream?”