Page 15 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

I really must get to sleep, and soon, because by 3 a.m. the logging trucks will resume

their ceaseless clatter. Tie-down chains bounce against the long, empty metal platforms

of the trailers – long as a tree, as the trucks judder and clang along the narrow haul road

across the river from my usually night-silent land. Well, almost silent, except for the all-

night barking of my neighbors’ dogs as they patrol their small flock of sheep, an

irresistible buffet loitering just out of reach of the mountain lions that have been hemmed

out by fences, and bears driven mad with hunger because the logging companies have

cleared the acorned oaks that are normally interspersed among the redwoods. In

desperation, the bears scrape and eat redwood bark. The trees ooze a sweet sap to

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repair themselves. Bees that feed on this sap are immune to colony collapse disorder.

Species in distress seem to have built-in mechanisms for protecting each other. Let us

bear this in mind. At least the distant barking is an animal sound that blends with the

calls of the owls and the booming rush of the ocean that echoes up the canyon from the

dunes. But it is not possible to become inured to the logging trucks, not possible to sleep

to the jarring lullaby of metal against metal. I turn out the light. I turn it back on again.

Shit. In Mexico, they have a saying, se me espantó el sueño: sleep got frightened away

from me. I find myself flipping through Facebook, looking for hope. (I don’t own a

television. This is my version of numbing distraction.) With luck, the blue-light-blocker

pasted to my laptop screen will allow sleep to find me if it decides to return.

Here are baby elephants piling into the laps of delighted humans who are visiting an

elephant orphanage. The little elephants gently knock the humans down and curl up in

their laps. It’s so cute that I almost forget to wonder: What has happened to their

mothers and fathers? Were they machine-gunned for ivory? Culled because the herd

outgrew its impossibly small range, reduced by human encroachment? Or were the

elephant parents enslaved by loggers, or perhaps stolen for a circus or a zoo? The

Facebook clip makes it all seem like a day at the petting zoo.

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Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, OAEC (Occidental Arts and Ecology Center), www.oaec.org

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