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By Root 1189 0

a subject by turning it over in the mind and viewing it in its different aspects and relations). Killers is probably the best name for them, because that's what they do. Developers. My dictionary defines develop as to cause to become gradually fuller, larger, better. A child develops into an adult; a caterpillar develops into a butterfly; a baby nuthatch—tiny, featherless—develops into an adult who can survive the winter by eating insects and insect eggs that if left alone would develop into adult insects, and a baby hummingbird—even more tiny and just as featherless—develops into an adult that can fly south, past pesticide-laden fields of monocrops, clearcuts, and poisoned waterways, to a warmer home for the winter, and then find her way back next year to make her so-tiny nest in the same boughs of these same pine trees, saying, like the nuthatch, I think I'll choose this one. But a beautiful rocky meadow, ripe with flowers, full of the coyote tree's struggle to survive, full of the dailiness of tiny flies and anthills and coyotes and deer and baby pine trees and the decaying feathers of chickens and ducks and geese and the falling snags of pine tree elders who died in last decade's fire: all this fullness does not develop into green-lawned and sterilized houses, or white box apartments.

I sometimes wonder if the coyote tree gave up last winter, if she used the ice storm as an excuse to leave behind a life she knew would no longer be so rich. Did she know what was coming? Do the salmon, too, and the frogs, and the salamanders, do they all know, and are they giving up to become ghosts because they no longer enjoy, no longer can tolerate what we have become?

Two weeks ago I had a dream, the worst of my life. I heard the voice of the Dreamgiver, resonant and caring. It said, "You work so hard to make a better future. Would you like to know what lies ahead?" I nodded ever-so-slightly. Then—how do I say this?—I saw nothing but black, nothing at all, and I heard nothing but my own screams, of horror and despair. I know from this dream that it is possible, in fact quite likely, that the future will be far worse than I can imagine, worse even than I can dream.

Perhaps bull trout, blue whales, and manatees wish as little as I to see this future.

It will not long slow the machine, but if I am not going to blow up dams, which for today I am still too frightened, too bound, too small in my own person to yet do, the least I can do is remove these stakes. I removed them, each and every one, and removed the flags from bushes and dead trees and the limbs of tall standing pines. After removing all these, I returned home to where the baby chicks, out of the bathtub where they stay through the chill of the too-early-spring nights and into the sunshine of the yard, were doing their dances of joy, leaping into the air and dashing back and forth, glad to be alive, glad to peck at the soft dust beneath their feet.

Heroes

"If I were permitted to write all the ballads I need not care who makes the laws of the nation." Andrew Fletcher

STORIES TEACH US OUR social roles, and the people we look up to as heroes help validate who we are and what we feel. They help determine whom we become. When I was young, I watched the movie Lawrence of Arabia more times than I could count. Early in the film, Lawrence snuffs a match with his fingers. Another character tries this, and yelps that it hurts. At eight years old, I identified with and was profoundly encouraged by Lawrence's response: "Of course it hurts. The trick is not minding that it hurts." Among all the storybook characters I encountered, I unconsciously sought out one who supported my perception of reality, which was that in order to survive, one must not mind the pain. Other people, with different perceptions of reality, will choose different heroes. The heroes chosen, both personally and culturally, say much about who we are.

I went with Jeannette Armstrong to New Zealand. She is working on a book about what community feels like to indigenous people. She wants to understand how