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Creative Nonfiction / EssayPoetry

Body Counting by Taneum Bambrick

written by Guest Contributor February 14, 2018

Photo Credit: John Holmgren

 

Accustomed to our baked skin, it was hard to remember we smelled like

wet garbage until we sputtered past people who fakevomitted or threw solo

cups in our wake. Like everyone working for the dam we maintained an

image of functionality. A dam is justified by its abundance in each category:

power, irrigation, navigation, recreation. Every body on the water proves

that its unnatural swelling has utility. For us this meant drifting

uncomfortably close to recreators & counting with a loud clicker, our GPS

data demonstrating how and where the reservoir was used as a space. Flags

clumped on a grey grid like ticks on deer skin.

 

 

*

 

 

When a dam proves purposeless the government can, theoretically, take it away.

Every ten years the district files to renew their federal license, sending ours & other

collected numbers to the state. On counting days we were assured our

efforts meant something to commissioners personally. Sugar cookies &

black coffee. The sort of things you offer someone after they donate a sack

of their own blood, buy a house from you, count your bodies.

 

 

*

 

 

We liked to imagine what it would look like to revoke the dam. Crush it

out. Expose a scattered history. We were aware of what was sacrificed for

the affordability of electricity. That, when considering the common good,

flooding a truck stop town meant nothing in comparison to lit-up houses,

ours especially. We never understood the generation of power but that the

power was sent in boxes to other states, the dam safe due to the level at

which it generates. We’d heard of the abandoned buildings one hundred

feet below us accumulating algae. The imposed sacrifice of Native land so

much land. Knowing what we knew about the reservoir it was difficult to

count people half naked & vodka-drunk on a jet ski. They cut past. You

could hear the water burning. To gather floating wrappers. Check the list

of boxes saying these are important. These are the communities the dam is

serving.

 

 

*

 

 

The dam is a line after which the river is class divided. I.E. where is higher

up where has less cattle ditch run-off billowing into it. On the south end

fewer bodies, a sense of purpose. There we’d count families

swimming in holes where tributaries met the river. Children jumping off

the knobbed branches of cherry trees. The longest stretch without a town.

Buildings abandoned after the failure of the local railroad industry. People

sat between cinder block foundations, digging rods into river rock to reel

in ten-foot sturgeon. Not a popular fish but it made for months of meat.

These were people who worked for orchards, the nuclear reservation, or

with us at the dam in some capacity.

 

 

*

 

 

The resorts north of the dam were illegally lodged in protected wetlands.

Harsh, imported stones jutting around grey, repetitive condo buildings.

Vacation homes of the kids I knew from high school. While we counted

their party-barges I twisted my recognizably curly hair into a baseball hat.

Their glowing bodies the most beautiful I’d ever seen, so forced tan like

after peeling the first layer of bark off a pine tree. Walking an exposed sand

dune, I had trash bags tied through belt loops. I would think, finding bottles

of lube and whiskey in the brush, how I wanted to be someone with no

register of environmental impact. My sweating jeans. I hated the crew for

looking at these girls around me. I simultaneously wanted protection from

men noticing my dressed body.

 

 

*

 

 

Once, we counted four hundred recreators in one stretch. Spiraling

footballs. Different stations of the same country music. None of them

thinking their noise as a kind of violence. The steady motions of a deer’s

head as it swam, displaced, between those thin islands.

 


Taneum Bambrick is the author of Reservoir, which was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Contest. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona. She serves as an Associate Editor for Narrative Magazine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, Blackbird, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, The Nashville Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. She has received an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and scholarships from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference.

 

 

 

Body Counting by Taneum Bambrick was last modified: February 17th, 2018 by Guest Contributor
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