On July 23rd, 2018, I witnessed a 10’ flash flood tear past my Santa Fe home. A tsunami in a quiet valley, washing downstream animals, debris, and tumbling boulders, leaving behind a raw and reordered landscape.
I’m not a very good nature tour guide. For one thing, I don’t know much about nature. For another, I walk very quickly; I have to keep reminding myself to slow down. Despite my shortcomings; however, two days before Halloween 2019, I take my English Composition class on a walk to a nearby greenspace, a short walk from our community college campus in Queens. Greenspace. It’s such a recent compound that Word autocorrects it into two.
Memories are translations. We gather much and miss more. I originally compiled this archive in spring of 2022 for a final project in a course on environmental histories and values. I did it mostly for myself. I wanted to attend to what I had picked up throughout the pandemic — people, places, poems, photographs. These fragments are re-memories of ecosystems and relational nests.
Today’s itinerary: visit Earth Room, where a layer of soil, two feet thick, has occupied a gallery in SoHo since 1977.