The Witnesses and the Debt

The story begins with a cold, absolute erasure, but the ledger begins with a debt. In the Haudenosaunee creation story, our world took shape when Sky Woman fell toward a planet of water, finding footing on the back of a Giant Turtle.

Beneath my feet, the Adirondacks provide the physical proof of that weight: a billion-year-old basement of Grenville gneiss that was crushed and scraped clean by a mile-thick sheet of Laurentide ice. But the modern scars are human, and they require a different kind of accounting.

I spent my career as a benthic taxonomist, my eyes trained to find life in that muck. That work taught me that the smallest details—the way a freshwater sponge anchors itself to a rotting log or a trout huddles in a cold seep—are the only honest things we have.

They don’t offer metaphors; it is all about the quiet pursuit to exist. For thousands of years, the Haudenosaunee and Algonquin peoples moved with the slow, heavy pulse of this land, shaping the forest without breaking the skin.

Then came the ledger. I see it in my own history. My great-grandfather stood on these shores when the forest was treated as a bank vault. In a single human lifetime, the "floatable" timber was stripped, and the debris—the "dead-heads" and bark—sank to the bottom, pinning the shoreline under the weight of extraction. The steam engine didn't just speed up the clock; it flayed the soil.

The False Floor

Nowhere is this debt more visible than where the water meets the shore. In these headwaters, the water doesn't meet a clean stone edge; it meets a graveyard of bark and silt.

In the foreground, there is a "false floor." It is a thick, anaerobic carpet of legacy hemlock bark and shattered branches preserved by the cold. To my AI tools, it is just a topographical variance, but to my hands, it is a suffocating layer of the past.

Today, I live in the aftermath of that fever, holding several acres of shoreline with a proprietary greed I recognize but do not relinquish. My presence here—the radiant heat, the barn—is a continuation of the claiming. I use tools like Field Scrawl to document the world, but the screen is just a window that can't hide the reality.

The truth is in the witnesses, but here, the witnesses are missing. I move my eyes from the thriving sponge colonies in my basin to this neighboring basin's shoreline, and I find only silence. The muck is too thick. The "dead-heads" aren't being reclaimed; they are just drowning in their own debris. The debt is still too high to be filtered.

I walk the turtle’s back and realize that recording the "resilience" of a place is easy when the land is winning. The harder task—the true work of watching the debt—is documenting the places where the wound is still open, where the bark of the past is still thick enough to keep the future from taking hold. I am watching to see if the land can finally outpace the man.