North of the Confluence, Late Cretaceous by Jay Needham, 2022
The Myth of the Yard Weather is a story that evokes present-myth making in the telling of a tale of two territories, one near the forests of Southern Illinois and the other on the Antarctic Peninsula. As told in the myth, ancient ferns are transplanted for a new garden, while past and present climates share a brief romance. Set across two epochs, in the Late Cretaceous and in the Holocene, just a few months ago, the story’s mythemes have been influenced by the author’s own experiences alone on extended vigils in the wild and in the backyard. The work is intended as a recounting of deep-time dreams and hopes, those moments of spacious learning when we are reminded of what lies under our feet. Performed at the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research Conference on August 10, 2022.
The Myth of the Yard Weather
2022: North of the confluence, Illinois, May
Dividing
It was assumed that the yard was never graded, kneel and squint, and the pitch is revealed. This is how the land goes and the water follows. The land and water hold hands and make an immortal impression. This is the signature, one of the long names for nature for which there is no pronunciation. Father has cut a fern in two, dividing it and has now planted it beneath the tree known to the family as the Hawthorn, but it is clearly a pine of some variety. It is here that Father converses with Shade, trying to relate to a spirit that, without ears, experiences his vowels as waves of heat.
Late Cretaceous: Maastrichtian age, Antarctic Peninsula 4pm
The Winds
In the early Spring, there is an everlasting wind that streams high in the sky, there are no obstacles for this wind as it flows, occasionally swirling fronds and bending tree limbs well past sunset. The wind has seen the sunset and is running, all the while inhaling and giddy with the idea that this may go on for some time, that this gathering of pressures might prevail.
2022: North of the confluence, Illinois, May
That kind of Rain
Rivulets, Father is sidestepping across them over the smoothed plain of the concrete floor in the basement. Father is a giant, lumbering over the tributaries leading towards the ruddy, iron-stained line of the storm drain. The water will find the Big Muddy River in 1 night. Combed West by water that rides as a glaze across the blades, the grass twists in the flow, inviting a naming ceremony. Folk who have given thought to any names have hidden them away, or have abolished their words from their imaginations. When neighbors recall their memories of the viewing, it’s shared between them that it is all hard to relate to, as if the encounters were simply too modest of a breath of life to memorialize.
Late Cretaceous: Maastrichtian age, Antarctic Peninsula, Summer Solstice
Eating Parts of the Song
There was a moment when the winds saw themselves. They could take in their own boundless elliptical shape across lands and waters, circling while they exhaled and lifting trees with only a nod. And while they practiced their song, the winds ate the parts of the song as well, taking in fractions or sometimes whole measures. As the winds sang and ate more, their song also became a sound different than any instrument or voice would be. This went on for a very long time, much longer than all of the lives of your kind when they come to be. Satisfied that their song agreed with their unperceivable self-appearance, the Winds who are from here laughed themselves into knowing, eternal life.
2022: North of the confluence, Illinois, Summer Solstice
Robins and Crows
In the early hours of the longest day, crows raid the nest filled with fledgling robins that sits atop the light next to the front door of Father, Mother and Daughter’s home. The crows have been rehearsing their procedure for some days now, sweeping in, then flying back to grip and sway in the neighbor’s dogwood. Evidence of the regalement came in the form of a unique collection of tiny quill pens that lay on the ground, each one having been rendered from a single fledgling feather. If you are the person who discovers the pens, words written with these instruments carry with them an attraction to magnetic north, and the lingering perception that the words you scribed with the quills will come back to you later in life. During the bedlam, the crows only saw feathers. In the coming days, the crows dispense news from their chambers, a reverberant federalist bunker that is lined with tiles on the walls that display aphorisms about righteousness written in Old Crow.
Late Cretaceous: Maastrichtian age, Antarctic Peninsula
Lucidity
The winds settled at the edge of the jungle, among ferns that were flattened by an animal whose time would not continue and whose remains would never be discovered. The winds were uneasy about sleep, uncomfortable with how the decline of their energy mattered so much to them. As they were worrying about not waking, sleep came to them. Their dream came as an emotion and as an image of something so solid that it would break them. The solid something was an immense sound whose presence was without end. The emotion was close to fear but also contained wonder. The winds wanted to know what this sound was, how to get nearer to it and so they invented something of a daring game within their dream to accomplish this.
2022: North of the confluence, Illinois, June
Penumbra
Shade is listening in their way to Father as he and another roll sections of a tree onto a skid trailer that is parked in the backyard. The thick rounds have been down for a long time, host to colonies of beetles, spores and sleeping ideas. Shade has been learning their language, and has built a memory and feeling for the shape of air flows, of their energetic and rapid conversations. All of this Shade does because they sense the inverse of what is seen, they sieve the differences in energies at the penumbra in an attempt to plainly observe our plans.
Late Cretaceous: Maastrichtian age, Antarctic Peninsula, morning
Backward Through Telescopes
There will be no end to the variations of green on the planet, that is one of the gifts that lies at the end of story but is something that you should have a feeling for at this time. Near the beach, there is a meeting occurring between several large animals that you would recognize as penguins, all of whom are taller than most humans. They are motionless as they face each other having an inaudible but important conversation between them. They’ve all been flying in their dreams together, slowly, just above the sand and out over the water. They have all dreamed of the solid something as well, the immense sound, seamless and without end.
2022: North of the confluence, Illinois, July
The Weather Tree
Father has planted grass seed in the empty space in the yard where the fallen tree was resting. The shape of the new planting takes the form of a continent you have never known but have a familiarity with. Its green contours announce where water will travel, where misfit streams empty into bays that have recently been explored by voles. A cold front broke the weekly droughts and now the winds are high in the trees as Father says. Father consults the weather tree, whose pulsing canopy billows in a hundred shapes, communicating through braided involutions where and what the weather will be. This he trusts more than the radar, the weather tree communicates a presence to him, he can see the winds.
Finding the Moonlight
Father is looking back in time, but it is difficult to understand this lensing, because of how easy it has become to see billion-year-old light. Mother and Daughter have also been viewing backwards through telescopes, looking at smaller things over deep time. As the Webb Space Telescope pushes back a data stream and then reveals images of the oldest light our kind has seen, Father has caught and released 11 Chipmunks in a two-week period. That evening, the family stood in the aquamarine light of the Buck moon as Shade drew outstretched shadows of them in the street.
Late Cretaceous: Maastrichtian age, Antarctic Peninsula, 3:16 am
Morning Sound and Light
The morning was particularly clear as clouds flew at all heights, parading and reforming as the Winds breathed and stretched. This era of green would be like no other, with broadened verdigris frawns and forests of emerald cycad trees cascading down glens to the sea in all manners and forms of green your kind will never know. The Winds saw it, how the light in the sky shifted, felt the scale of the horizon climb from blue to white and stay there. Now the day was brighter than any noon hour. In the new and sudden silence, the Winds knew they were between times, the last grand sound of an epoch, a rippling and energetic force resonating through lithe, jungle and sea, and into all bodies did this wave pass. The sky opened to black, an empyrean aperture that drew all senses skyward, carrying away all of the imagination of life in those times. The Winds were sped by the force, pushed into space and drawn back to ground in a motion that ate their song. The Winds left no trace of their time that morning as the planet took a new form.
2022: North of the confluence, Illinois, July
Morning Sound and Light: The Network Underfoot
The day has been filled with much digging and the laying of cable. In the yard, the mole’s subterranean path is charted by a series of clay soil volcanoes that begin as powdery loam and decay to mud flats. Near the street, subcontractors dig holes by hand in this heat for the fiber optic cable and later pull the glass tubes through soil with an oiled, iron chain. Soon, moles will feel the astral light with their teeth. Sometime that morning, the Winds fell on the Weather Tree, a straight wind onto their canopy as the Winds imagined a new song. There was a light Breeze in the yard as Shade observed Father and Mother as they discussed the fate of a newly planted willow. As the Winds ate more of their new song, they romanced with Breeze, whose songful breaths merged as a duet of binding energy that this world or the lives of your kind will never see. This is how the yard weather came to be.