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Some people dream of becoming an Olympian, or an astronaut, or a pop-country star, and some of us dream of interviewing the mysterious, Gen X punk icon who took the late 2000s literary scene by storm—Laura Albert, aka JT LeRoy. Well, I’m here to tell you that dreams do come true because last year Pioneer Works reached out to ask me and my dear friend Steven Phillips-Horst—co-host of our podcast, 

—if we would be interested in interviewing Albert? Um, that’s a heck yes!

Years ago, before I really knew who Laura Albert was, I did know one thing: in the 2000s it was really cool to have a JT LeRoy book on your bookshelf. But then his three extremely popular autobiographical novels—which recounted a life of poverty, drugs, sex, and abuse in West Virginia and California—were revealed to have in fact been written by Albert, who was exposed by a family member. It was a top cultural controversy of the 2000s, featuring lawsuits and a major motion picture as well as Jeff Feuerzeig's feature-length documentary 

. Albert came out a cult hero and literary star. Cut to present-day Red Hook and my semi-literate ass is somehow at the fabulous Press Play literary festival interviewing Albert, author of 

Let me set the scene for this iconic interview: I walk into the green room and see a woman in a gothic outfit—she’s not giving mall goth, more like Stevie Nicks meets The Cure with a touch of macabre Victorian child. Laura is wispy yet intense, and instantly pulls me in for a slow dance before showing me and Steven photos of her flashing the festival goers downstairs as she posed in some sort of art exhibit about January 6. This is how you create intimacy and chemistry before an interview. What followed was a riveting conversation teen Lily could only have dreamed of. Picture it: Steven and me, curled up on a small vintage couch with one of the most controversial contemporary American authors. An audience of funky New York intellectuals and two small yet shockingly loud dogs. We talked about the meaning of authorship, the unwritten rules of memoir writing, sizeism in the punk scene, gender as performance, Laura’s unexpected relationship with the mafia, and got a sneak peek into her new book.

Steven Phillips-Horst

Thank you so much, Laura Albert, for being here. I thought maybe we could just start talking about fashion and your outfit because you look amazing today.

Laura Albert

The girls were out. This is actually an American Apparel skirt, from the rapist guy. It was probably made for a 13-year-old girl.

Lily Marotta

Indie sleaze revival. And you're wearing your iconic raccoon penis.

The designer Levi Palmer dipped an actual penis bone—featured in [my book] 

, where the best prostitute gets a raccoon penis bone—in silver for me. So, I'm also werewolf-proof.

Do you type hard? Are you a Carrie Bradshaw?

I wish I had that internal [monologue]. It's more like, "Oh, fuck, this sucks so fucking bad. I'm going to have to edit this."

It's kind of like you’re in your pajamas. I don't know how people don't eat constantly through writing.

Anytime I have to write one email, it's a snack, sandwiches, sauces.

For me, it’s a lot of porn—that helps me punctuate the process. So, if we've got seven tabs open, six of them are porn and then there's the document. It's about procrastination, ultimately. 

For me, it builds up. There's a point where it's more painful not to write than it is to write. So, it gets to that point where I absolutely have to, because I've exhausted everything. There's nothing else.

And then it becomes the path of least resistance at that point?

Or most resistance, but it still happens. It's like when you're doing something and you’ve got to pee, but you just don't want to pee. But, finally, you know—

One of the first times I really had to pee terribly was during 

 as a 12-year-old, and I held it and held it and held it. And I've never peed like that. Every time I really have to go, it conjures that trauma.

Which brings me to phone sex. I was wondering if we could talk about it a little because it's a big theme in your life, in your work. You were doing phone sex before you were a writer.

When you were creating your characters, would you actually enact them in phone sex with a client? Would you be playing this character for them and developing it in the process?

You had to be a marketable kid to get empathy and sympathy. I was a chubby tall girl. It was okay to make fun of girls who were overweight. You were never allowed to be the protagonist. 


Well, it's complex. I was very good at creating connections if that was what was wanted. The name LeRoy came from a client. His name is Bruce, he’s from Wisconsin, and we became friends. I was really interested in people's lives, so I would take him off the clock. That's how I found out about lot lizards. I was really fascinated with hidden worlds, with subgenres.

This was the early ’90s. I had never heard the term “lot lizard,” which is used to describe prostitutes who work truck stops. I just started asking him questions. As writers, we collect these things. I have always been really fascinated with people's stories.

So, when you were creating JT LeRoy in the very first stages, it was all mediated by technology. You were having conversations. It could live in this imaginary space before you then had to bring the doll to life.

JT is one of many. There was a dissociation that happened a long time ago. I watched these stories of boys, and for me it was a safe way to allow myself to feel and legitimize what had happened to me. Growing up in the ’70s, when they were just starting to talk about abuse and inappropriate behavior of adults towards kids, it was always this blonde, blue-eyed boy on after school specials. I mean, think about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, or even the girls, you had Tatum O'Neal and Brooke Shields. You had to be a marketable kid to get empathy and sympathy. I was a chubby tall girl. I remember boys pulling out the chair from underneath me and people laughing. I was called Fat Albert. It was very clear that I needed to look a certain way in order for people to say, "Hey, that's not okay.” It was okay to make fun of girls who were overweight. You were never allowed to be the protagonist. You were the joke, the hang-along.

 you talk about getting into punk—and I love this line, you say, "I heard the Stiff Little Fingers record and it changed my personality." That happened to me, too. You're like, "Well, now I have a personality, so it's cool. I'm punk now." But even within that subculture, where you thought you could be whatever you wanted, people were glorifying heroin chic and being thin.

As I say in that documentary, there's nothing worse than a fat punk. That's not my position, but it was made very clear to me. Guys could be big. But girls were relegated to the girlfriend or maybe a bass player. I was an early pen pal with Chumbawamba and Alice Nutter. And I was highly, highly involved in the scene. But at the same time, I really felt like I needed to keep myself hidden. There were a lot of guys that were into boys, and they took out their hostility on girls. It was a very painful scene to be in because I thought, "Oh, finally this is my family." But then I was like, "No, not really."

One thing I think is interesting about JT LeRoy, the character, is that he is almost a fetishized object of gay male desire. Thin, young, blonde, prostitute. He has the vulnerability of a character in a Dennis Cooper novel. Did you create him in relation to gay male desire?

I think it was desire in general. I wanted what I saw on the street, which was, again, that Huck Finn [archetype]. But also it was important that he was mischievous, because a lot of books about abuse had protagonists who were very innocent. We like our abused kids dead. I was in foster care in a group home and they tried to evict us because we were too inconvenient. We weren't dead. But when you go through shit, you learn how to hustle, you learn to manipulate. I would not talk to my social worker about what was going on. I had no way of saying, "This is what happened to me." I felt so much shame and disgust and removal.

Did you distrust the authority figures around you?

Yes, but also, you have to remember the time period. As Werner Herzog said, "Context is everything." PTSD had just entered 

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

 as related to noncombatants. They didn't really apply PTSD to us in foster care. It was more like three hots and a cot. The social worker actually said that if we talked about how we felt, if we got into what had happened to us, it would be too destabilizing.

I had a severe eating disorder and I told them. But there was no help available. I was basically hiding everything, and I would call hotlines. My memoir gets into this. JT was not the first [character I created]. He was an iteration of many and someone who just really stuck around.

In the documentary, and also now, you refer to him as "he." Do you see him as different from you? And when you were writing this memoir, did his story feel separate from yours? Do you see your life happening side-by-side with his?

When I was writing the memoir, I was so surprised that there was a one-to-one correlation; I did not know that before. At the time—again, context is everything—there was no idea of gender fluidity. After I was outed as JT, they referred to JT as trans. We never used that word. [In his public appearances,] JT was clearly a girl, using a male pronoun and wearing makeup and sleeping with everyone, and that was okay. There was a need in the culture, and I needed that. They say an artist often creates what they do not see. And to this day when people say, "How do you identify?” I reserve the right to say, "Any way I want to."

Let’s talk more about your memoir. We read a lot of memoirs for our podcast. A lot of them are rather insipid. They're written by celebrities. But there is a real consistent trope to the narrative that surrounds each release of one and even the whole artistic direction. It's often a black-and-white photo of the celebrity on the cover. And it's supposed to signal that this is finally their authentic self. It's a revelation. We're setting the record straight, which kind of implies that there has been a misunderstanding, and that it's probably the media's fault. Have you felt that sense that this is finally your time to tell the truth? Or has that been put on you at all?

They say an artist often creates what they do not see. And to this day when people say, "How do you identify?” I reserve the right to say, "Any way I want to."

I am really grateful to have a wonderful agent, Bill Clegg, who was very gentle with me. When I was outed, another agent, who's a very big deal, said to me, "No one's going to care about you in seven months." And I said, "Nobody cared about me seven months ago, so what do I lose?" I am not doing a David Copperfield "I was born" thing. I mean, I come from a family that was lost in the Holocaust and that definitely informed what was passed on to me, my survival techniques, whatever you want to call them. But I did not want to write about the celebrity stuff. That will be book two.

Right now we are facing an incredible crisis. I think a third of available psychiatric beds for adolescents have been cut. Where do these kids go? A lot of my memoir is about this group home where I lived, which was not perfect, but which I was very fortunate to be part of. It saved my life for all its faults, and I'm still in touch with my social worker and other people.

If I had just written about the celebrity, all that, it wouldn't have been a lie. That just came later. I needed to unpack what formed me. To answer your question, when I was outed it felt like the media made me in its image and ascribed to me its motives. People assumed I wanted money, fame, to meet Madonna. They could not comprehend a completely different sense of desire. They didn't have a trauma-informed approach to truth-seeking at all.

There was an avalanche and someone said to me, "You cannot stand up in a tsunami, just shut the f— up." It was very difficult to do because I was being called everything, you have to remember the news cycle was very, very long. It really was like I had destroyed fiction. 

 called me a fake fiction writer. Really, they did. I can make up a lot of things, but not that.

There's always this idea that we're peeling back the layers until, eventually, we get to our true selves. That if you are as vulnerable as possible with yourself and your work, you'll finally become your authentic self, as if it's just waiting in there. But I think that's false. I don't think there is a secret person inside. I think everything you're making and everything that comes out is true because truth is in the process of creation. And that's all that truth is.

I think we're complex people. Fitzgerald said that true intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory things at the same time. When I was outed, the questions were:

Is she crazy? Yes or no? Is she evil? Yes or no? Male or female? Yes or no?

Right, people want the story, but then they are so mad at you. But then they love the scandal of it all, too. I feel like a lot of people critique memoirs when their authors aren’t trauma dumping. They're like, "I didn't get my money's worth because there's not enough trauma in this book."

It's not about pure plot and content. You can write from a place where you're caring more about how each sentence sounds and how it's going to pierce the reader and how it's going to viscerally feel to read.

I like that. I am trying to pierce the reader...

Yeah, you're trying to hurt them a little.

You know what? I did go to piercing school. I pierced a tongue. I pierced one of my best friend's belly buttons.

No. I had a book deal already, but I didn't feel the writing was ready. How many people walk away from a book deal? I did, because I really felt like I wasn't there yet. And so I thought, well, what's something scary I can do? Piercing school.

It was about a week, and we actually did a labia. That was graduation.

Oh, a week? I'm getting my degree next week.

Laura Albert is an author and creator of JT LeRoy. 

Steven Phillips-Horst and Lily Marotta are comedians and the hosts of the

gen-excaliber-nouveau

Truth or Dare with Laura Albert

Ben Ratliff Runs the Song

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

At some point, after he stocked the rivers with salmon and peopled the villages with descendants and in-laws, Coyote disappeared. Of course, he did not die—at least not permanently. Coyote, like the Coyote People, could not be put down forever. He would come back. Someday... probably? And we would too. At least that’s what the Coyote People believed back when we still called ourselves Coyote People.

The most common account held that Coyote would reappear in the End Times. When things came full circle, the trickster who molded the world into its Indigenous state would be there. Just to do whatever trickster shit needed to be done—make something, like a son; or break something, like the witches’ fishing weir; or steal something, like goose eggs or a wife; or invent essential ergonomic functions, like the elbow; or live a life full of damn good stories. Because how the world ends is just as important as how it begins.

Some said Coyote would reappear as a cooler version of Jesus. Cooler because if you listen to stories of his feats, Coyote resurrected way more than just once and did more to create our world than Jesus. Jesus died for our sins, and yet thereafter we were still sinners who could be damned to Hell. In the single act of liberating salmon—just one of many feats—Coyote provided over half of the Coyote People’s calories most years. While Christianity hands down eternal sentences for life mistakes, Coyote fills bellies, lives his own mistakes, and laughs about it all. According to a belief common among the Coyote People in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Coyote’s next coming would mark the renewal of the world and the return of an old and good Indian way of life.

Christians fingered Coyote as the Antichrist. Many believed the Indian way of life was the Devil’s work. That the Coyote People and our beliefs were wrongheaded, and that we would be punished for all time if we did not renounce Coyote and follow Jesus. And to make sure we did, they kidnapped our children and took them to schools where kids and even newborns were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused, assaulted, traumatized, neglected, diseased, starved, raped, and sometimes even killed.

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. He is the embodiment of forces greater than ourselves that drive and ride the metamorphoses of the world: of climate, geology, environment, technology, and culture. Coyote was change incarnate. And as his descendants, we carry that same power of transformation. Colonizers tried to remake us in their image or kill us—physically, legally, and culturally— countless times by countless means. But every time we came back, not as whitewashed primordial cultural goo, but as ourselves— as distinct peoples with prior and rightful claims to these lands carrying in our culture, memory, and blood the knowledge of how to live well upon them. To survive, we remade ourselves and the world around us in whatever way we could—often, and especially, by getting into trouble like Coyote, who broke that fishing weir, or my pé7e Zeke, who, amidst a genocidal apocalypse, almost single-handedly repopulated the Coyote People all up and down the Fraser River watershed; or my dad, who narrowly escaped the incinerator and many other brushes with death to bring the NoiseCat name and family back from the Land of the Dead.

In late May 1808, in this era of mass death, incipient invasion, and earth-shattering transformation, three birchbark canoes carrying a party of two dozen white men and two Indigenous translators came barreling down the Fraser River just after the spring floods, when the river was roaring in freshet. At their helm was a stubborn, barrel-chested, and heavy-browed 32-year-old Scotsman born in the colony of New York named Simon Fraser. He planned to follow the wild, unnavigable river that would eventually bear his name all the way to the Pacific. It was a preposterous mission. After he announced his intentions to the Coyote People, one of Fraser’s men fired off a swivel gun mounted on one of the canoes in an attempt to shock and awe the Natives. But the gun backfired, and the gunner was wounded. It was an appropriately slapstick entrance for this foolish voyage of discovery. Understandably, some of our ancestors went, “Coyote? Is that you?”

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. 

Though not all. Fraser’s identity was hotly debated. Some among the Nlaka’pamux said Fraser must be Coyote returning at the End Times. Others, like St’at’imc, said Fraser and his party were more likely cannibals. They were hungry, dangerous, and consumed many dogs. Still others, like the Coast Salish, said Fraser and his party were transformers, like the ones who shaped the world in the beginning. These ideas are reflected in the words the Coyote People use for white people. “Semé7,” the most common, comes from the root “sem,” meaning “to tell stories.” The word for Frenchman, “Stspetékwllúy,” comes from the word for narratives about tricksters, transformers, and supernatural events: tspetékwll.

Although not all Coyote People believed Fraser was Coyote, there was a common understanding, reflected in our words, that the incursions of colonists were world-changing events marking a new epoch for our people and planet. Some European explorers and historians have trumpeted these historical, linguistic, and ethnographic facts as evidence that Natives believed Europeans were gods. But that’s an arrogant Eurocentric way of looking at things. Because in our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

Simon Fraser’s father, a Roman Catholic Scottish Highlander, settled in Mapletown, New York, in 1774. A British loyalist, the elder Fraser fought for the Crown during the American Revolution and was taken prisoner in 1777. Held in an American jail for 13 months, he died a prisoner of war. His widow lost the family farm and fled to Canada, where Simon’s modest upbringing included just two years of formal education. As a teen, Fraser went to work at the North West Company in Montreal, a fur-trading outfit increasingly manned by Scots. Fraser, a capable frontiersman and trader, was named partner by 25.

But the North West Company’s business was far from thriving. The larger Hudson’s Bay Company controlled forts and shipping ports on Hudson’s Bay, pushing the North West Company out toward the Rockies. The North West Company set up operations in the Peace River Country in what is now northwestern Alberta, where the land was rich in furs. But the overland route between Athabasca and Montreal was long and costly. To better compete, the North West Company was actively looking for alternative trading corridors and especially a navigable river route to the Pacific.

Fraser was the second Nor’Wester and Scottish explorer to visit the relatively calm upper stretch of the river that would bear his name. The first was Sir Alexander Mackenzie. When Mackenzie came through searching for a pathway to the sea, the Natives told him he shouldn’t take the river. To the south, it was impassable. (Any child raised on “Coyote and His Son” knew how dangerous our rivers and waterways could be.) And if, somehow, the river didn’t kill him, the warlike downriver Natives would.

Mackenzie listened. He followed an overland grease trail used by the Dakelh or “Carrier” Indians west. A grease trail is an Indigenous trade route so named because it was used to trade valuable, nutrient-rich oil rendered from eulachon, a sardine-like fish that spawns in and returns to river systems on the Northwest Coast. The Dakelh are called “Carrier” in English because they were a trading nation that carried grease and other goods from the coast to the interior and vice versa. Following Indigenous guidance, Mackenzie made it to the coastal territories of the Nuxalk near present-day Bella Coola, British Columbia, becoming the first European to cross the continent north of Mexico. Though Mackenzie’s route was too difficult for the North West Company’s purposes, his journey came a full 12 years before Lewis and Clark’s easier southerly crossing. The Americans reached the Pacific near present-day Portland, Oregon—a metropolis. Bella Coola, by contrast, remains a remote community reachable only via a dangerous switchbacked dirt road, small plane, or infrequent ferry. On a rock overlooking Dean Channel in Nuxalk territory, Mackenzie used a mixture of red vermillion and grease to memorialize his victory in this colonial-era space race. “Alex Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.” (Take that, America.)

Unlike Mackenzie, Fraser did not listen. When he encountered the Secwépemc at Chimney Creek, the Coyote People told Fraser that if he wanted a river route to the ocean, he should leave the Fraser River and travel overland four or five days by horse to the river now known as the Thompson. From there, he could ride the gentler Thompson to an area near present-day Kamloops, British Columbia, then portage to Okanagan Lake, which feeds into the Columbia, the same river Lewis and Clark took to the Pacific. Against this advice, which he received at least twice according to his own journals, Fraser chose to travel the river that now bears his name. Though the Coyote People told him otherwise, Fraser believed the Fraser River was the Columbia. He survived the journey out of sheer luck and because, on many occasions, the Coyote People saved his ass.

The first and most helpful was the Secwépemc chief Cllecwúsem from Soda Creek, whose name means “to wear a mask” because the chief wore a face covering to protect himself from Fraser and his men. Whether this mask was a carved wooden face shield like the ones worn in ceremonial dances, a woven head covering like those donned by healers, or a precolonial KN95 has been lost to time. I suspect, however, the mask had something to do with Cllecwúsem’s spiritual power and political influence. The chief was well-loved. His brother gave Fraser a beautiful, well-dressed deer hide and beaver pelt, and asked the voyager to take care of his kin in return. While Fraser’s party canoed the Fraser Canyon rapids, losing a canoe on their first day south of Chimney Creek, Cllecwúsem rode ahead. The chief was known and respected up and down the river that fed and gave birth to the Coyote People. Through political and spiritual gravitas, Cllecwúsem negotiated safe passage for Fraser all the way through Secwépemc territory and into St’at’imc country.

The St’at’imc were far more suspicious of Fraser and his men than the Secwépemc. To this day, they still refer to Fraser’s party as “the Drifters.” One St’at’imc who met the Nor’Westers near present-day Lillooet said he had seen white men in “great canoes” on the coast before. He mimicked a naval officer, strutting with hands on hips. “This is the way they go,” Fraser quotes the St’at’imc in his journal. Others believed Fraser and his men weren’t white men at all. Since they seemed to prefer eating dogs over the plentiful Indigenous staple, salmon, they must be enemies or even cannibals in disguise. Fraser’s meeting with the St’at’imc turned heated, but the “Old Chief,” as Fraser called Cllecwúsem in his journal, held sway. This may have been because, according to oral history, Cllecwúsem’s pipe came from downriver. A pipe is a powerful spiritual and diplomatic tool. It connects the smoker’s breath to the Spirit World and was traditionally used to make agreements connecting people, villages, and nations to one another. I speculate that Cllecwúsem’s pipe signified his spiritual connection to and power within downriver St’at’imc country—commanding respect, granting him certain chiefly rights, and maybe even saving Fraser’s hide. Because despite palpable animosity, which nearly ended in violence according to Fraser’s journal, the Nor’Westers’ voyage continued.

Thus, the first treacherous leg of Fraser’s journey is actually a story of Cllecwúsem’s prowess—not Fraser’s. While it is unknown whether Cllecwúsem believed Fraser was Coyote or some other supernatural being, the chief had the forethought to talk to Fraser about building a fort at Alexandria in his territory, a long-term strategy to enrich and empower his people and himself. After Cllecwúsem departed upriver, Fraser and his men missed the “Old Chief.” “Here we are, in a strange country, surrounded with dangers, and difficulties, among numberless tribes of savages, who never saw the face of a white man,” Fraser wrote. “Our situation is critical and highly unpleasant; however we shall endeavor to make the best of it; what cannot be cured, must be endured.” Upon his return upriver, Fraser gave Cllecwúsem the finest gift he gave anyone on his voyage: a gun.

At ƛ’q’əmcín (Kumsheen), a town now known as Lytton at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, some 1,200 people gathered to greet Fraser, who some believed was Coyote, and his party, who they saw as his helpers: Sun, Moon, Morning Star, Diver, Arrow-Armed Person, and Kokwe’la (a supernatural transformer who takes the guise of a root vegetable). Lytton is the place where the Nlaka’pamux say Coyote’s son crashed to earth after returning from the Sky World. It’s just downriver from the place where the Secwépemc say the witches’ weir stood and where geologists say there was once a great ice dam at the end of the last ice age. Because of Lytton’s centrality at the junction of two great rivers, the Nlaka’pamux consider it to be the center of the world. (I also have a great-great-great-grandmother from there.)

At the center of the world, Fraser shook hands with all 1,200 of the Coyote People gathered around. The chief from Lytton gave a long speech. He pointed to the sun, the four directions, and back at Fraser, according to the Nor’Wester’s journal. Then he brought forward his father, a blind elder, so Fraser could touch the man. The Nlaka’pamux offered the travelers a feast of salmon, berries, and roots. Fraser requested dogs for his men. After dinner, the Coyote People danced through the night, as their neighbors along the Columbia River had when they met the North West Company explorer David Thompson in 1807.

In our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

Fraser and his party departed the next day and ran into trouble a few miles downriver when a canoe capsized and broke apart. A North West Company employee named D’Alaire, who the Nlaka’pamux remember as Moon, was carried three miles by the current before dragging himself onto the banks and up a cliff. There, after searching for hours, Fraser, or Coyote as the Nlaka’pamux say, finally found him.

After Fraser passed through the remaining territories of the Coyote People in the Fraser River Canyon and entered the delta lands of the Coast Salish, his luck turned. By then, he’d wrecked about a half-dozen canoes and probably as many pairs of shoes. Running low on supplies and trade goods, he turned to piracy.

At a village not far from where Pé7e Zeke was sent to St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in present-day Mission, British Columbia, Fraser robbed a chief of his best canoe. And for good measure, he seems also to have taken the chief captive as a human shield and prisoner diplomat for the remainder of his dash to the sea. Though the Coast Salish were wealthy and lived in enormous Big Houses— some even 1,500 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 18 feet high, hewn from cedar trees as much as 30 feet in circumference, they lived under near-constant threat from northern raiding nations like the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, and Haida. Northern raiders routinely sent fearsome war parties down the coast in huge canoes to pillage and take slaves. Some Coast Salish believed Fraser and his men were transformers. Others saw the Scotsman and his party as yet more maritime invaders. Paddling a pilfered canoe, Fraser barely made it past the village of Musqueam in present-day Vancouver before the Coast Salish turned the Nor’Westers around and pursued them back upriver until they returned the stolen vessel to its rightful owner.

By then, Fraser had other problems. Speaking on behalf of the crew, two of his men petitioned to abandon the river in favor of an overland route back home, like the one the Coyote People originally advised. According to Fraser’s own account, some even suggested they stay with the Coyote People rather than go home. “This journey did not meet the needs of the Company and will never be of any advantage to them,” wrote Jules Quesnel, Fraser’s clerk, in a letter to a friend in Montreal.

Fraser reached the coast, though he never paddled into the Strait of Georgia or the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He glimpsed the tops of the mountains on Vancouver Island but could not see the open ocean. And he never made it past the spot where the silty Fraser River water meets the blue sea. In the eyes of the North West Company, the journey was an utter failure. The Fraser River was unnavigable, just as the Coyote People had said. A latitudinal measurement taken near Musqueam confirmed another fact the Coyote People told Fraser: this river was not the Columbia.

Fraser was no triumphal explorer. He was a foolish river pirate whose obstinance almost killed him and many others. The name “Fraser River” thus commemorates the epic misadventure of a lost wanderer not so different from Coyote. Because the trickster was not just a mythological being. He was also a worldview, philosophy, storytelling style, and tradition.

For the Coyote People, the reappearance of Coyote in the guise of Fraser was ominous and profound. It meant the world was ending—because for us, it was. But it also meant that our departed ancestors and everything they carried—their names, their ways, their lands, and their worlds—were coming back. And they are. ♦

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. 

, from which the excerpt below is drawn, is out this month from Alfred A. Knopf.  

ser-martin

The Cooler Jesus

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I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life's ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don't have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down.

All the very best countries celebrate their national holidays in summer. Summer is the season best adapted to modern commerce. When you think "Hollywood" you think "summer." Arson perpetuates summer; it makes it an action and not just a moment. In summer we think of rain as a calamity, and so does the weatherman. Summer craves fresh bodies. Summer has no consequences. Summer has children in every orphanage. Summer just walks into your house and goes straight to the refrigerator without saying hello. Summer has not spoken to the other seasons in decades. Summer cannot get served because it abjures shirts and shoes. There are open warrants out on summer.

But summer, however phlegmatic, dominates. There is no arguing or reasoning with summer. If you try to, summer just belches and everybody laughs. Summer doesn't need money because it has yours. Summer lies over the land like syrup on an ant hill. Summer wears your body like a shroud. Summer suddenly lashes out when everything is quiet. It pretends to retreat and then lashes out again. Summer knows your weaknesses, your blind spots, your unacknowledged biases, your unspoken shame. Summer pretends to love you but then burns you and runs. Your mind goes tilt whenever you try to think about summer. You try to tell people the truth about summer but no one believes you.

Summer wasn't always like this. It had a decent upbringing and a reasonable education. It lived in harmony with the other seasons, sometimes trading off bits of one another's weather. Just where it went wrong is uncertain, except that it happened in our lifetime. It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage. Summer will not stop until it gets every inch of its way, and since that is impossible it will never stop. Summer will destroy everything we know and when called to account for itself summer will just belch. Summer is mindless. Summer is nothing but fun. Everybody loves summer. ♦

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose most recent book is 

. The following piece first appeared, in different form, in 

ser-kosugi-maru

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, a monument to human pride, and a warning.

The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

Among the Ruins

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

As I walk the city, I sometimes recite the second line of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The poem is an amulet. I use it to ward off the scourge of freeways surrounding our house in the Bronx. The Henry Hudson Parkway (NY 9A) that our boys must cross by an ugly pedestrian bridge to get to their public middle school. The Major Deegan Expressway (I-87) that turned back into a river when Hurricane Ida dumped a record seven plus inches of rain. The eight lanes of Broadway (US-9) that divide us from the greenspace of Van Cortlandt Park, where a brook now known as Tibbetts was dammed in the eighteenth century. I haven’t known this ancient little river, one of New York City’s many buried streams. By 1912 its final stretch was strangled into a culvert that led underground to the sewer.

I’ve known roads thick with traffic and loud as hell. Walking over the sewer line along Broadway under the clattering elevated 1 train—check cashing store, pawn shop, smoke shop, puddle, liquor store, dollar store, panhandler, fruit stand, puddle, laundromat, bodega, barbershop—you wouldn’t know that ours is a riparian habitat. Except, of course, for the puddles that remain after it rains. These days when it rains, it pours as if the very sky was torn. A puddle persists in a dip in the road directly in front of our house. The puddle has an attitude like, “Yo! I belong here. Do you?” A nineteenth-century map indicates that our house sits on the historic pathway of Tibbetts Brook. The brook’s absence seems sad and wrong. I live where something significant was intentionally vanished. Since discovering this, I’ve been following the ongoing restorative effort to “daylight” or unbury its water.

Daylighting Tibbetts Brook is one of the city’s most ambitious green infrastructure projects to date. It will cost $133 million to restore the waterway along a new route that won’t disturb the neighborhood’s structures, including our house. That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a bargain compared to the high price of sewer and stormwater overflows when cloudbursts drop their heavy payloads. On dry days, four to five million gallons of freshwater flow from the brook into the sewer, ushering our filth and concentrated street runoff down to the Wards Island wastewater treatment plant. But when we get rain bombs, the volume of water is way too much for that system to process and spills unfiltered into the Harlem River, further contaminating the ecosystem, sickening all it touches. Daylighting will abate combined sewage overflow, extend greenspace, absorb heat, and relieve chronic flooding in our area’s janky, archaic drainage system, in an act of climate mitigation and as a community effort to solve a mess caused by old crimes.

When the crimes that got us into this crisis feel too much to bear and this endangered place itself—redlined, polluted, haunted—feels nearly unlivable, I recall what Mr. Rogers once told his television neighbors. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

My first encounter with the daylighting project was in the spring of 2023, when I went on a site visit with the Tibbetts Advisory Group, which included folks from the city’s Departments of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Parks & Recreation, the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, the local community board, and Rebuild by Design, an organization that collaborates on climate resilience. The helpers. Some of them had been advocating for recovering Tibbetts Brook since the nineties when I was about as young as our children are now. We met at the terminus of a dead-end street, but there was a feeling of excitement and possibility in the air, like at the bottom of the ninth when the Yankees are about to win. I’d gone on walks of the city before, to reckon with climate change, sometimes with a companion and sometimes alone, but never in so organized a fashion, nor in a group dedicated to a solution. I felt cautiously optimistic. A representative from Bronx Climate Justice North reminded us that this was an environmental justice community with co-morbid social justice issues, that decades of disinvestment and poor urban planning had fractured and isolated the borough—which suffers the worst air and highest rates of asthma in the city—and that the Bronx was nearly destroyed by highways. Daylighting was a way for the city to do the right thing.

Before crossing a chain-link fence to survey the site, we went over the plans. About a mile of the brook would be brought back above ground from Van Cortlandt Park South to West 230th Street. It would flow alongside a newly built greenway with a ten-foot-wide bike and pedestrian path, beautified with native plants and public art under the overpasses. I was grateful to learn there would be several direct points of entry to the greenway from Broadway. My boys would no longer have to cross the busy interstate to bike to the park. But the brook would need to be piped back underground to accommodate a section of railroad tracks owned by the MTA, which are dedicated for garbage transfer and Metro-North’s Hudson line. Meaning, the residents of the NYCHA projects in that industrialized area of Marble Hill (which in 2018 had the city’s highest report of street flooding complaints to 311) wouldn’t get easy access to the greenway at all, raising the question: by whom and for whom was this venture?

Imperfect as it was, the daylighting plan was progressing. The final roadblock was the steep price of the land needed to reroute the brook above-ground. At this point in the story, the city was trying to cut a deal but the freight company that owned the real estate was acting like a crook.

We walked for several blocks along that contested property: the narrow corridor of a former railroad wedged between the Major Deegan Expressway and a string of strip malls and big box stores. Petco. Staples. Cubesmart. Target. Parking lot after parking lot over what was once marshland. Here and there the route remained marshy and thick with reeds. I noticed an abandoned shopping cart, the puddles stained red with iron oxide, the pawprints of a raccoon in the mud. It was hard to hear each other speak over the ceaseless roar of traffic. The acoustics were as god-awful as the air. All that separated us from the highway and its toxic fumes was a concrete guardrail, in some places only three feet high. I took pictures of graffiti and busted refrigerators strewn behind businesses whose basements regularly flood.

A landscape architect who lived elsewhere yelled something about how lucky we were to witness this place before it became an attraction, how when the Deegan was cut through here to continue I-87 and the train and sewer were built—and the chain stores came—each one had an easement. How easements overlap easements, so we wind up with waste space. How we were now walking somewhere between nature and not nature. How when this no-man’s-land gets remade as a public park, rail to trail—like Manhattan’s beloved Highline—new people would visit, revitalizing businesses in the vicinity. How wildlife and pollinators would share the habitat, too—the hope being to keep it wild, to enjoy the land along with other living things.

I had so many ethical questions without easy answers. It felt uncouth to ask them of a dream 30 years in the making. In any case, I doubted I could have been heard above the Deegan’s speeding cars and trucks. Unlike when walking the Highline, we weren’t lifted above the city’s bustle, but ambling directly beside the worst of its blight. Could it ever be pleasant here? Difficult to picture. Even with the brook resurrected, there would still be the sound of the road.

What does it mean to be a good steward? A good ancestor? What ought reparation, resilience, and restoration look like given the scale of the crisis at hand? The water never really went away. It still remembers where it used to be. Long ago, the Munsee Lenape called the brook Mosholu, meaning “small” or “smooth” stones. 

 I gathered several small, smooth stones in my pockets along the walk, from among the duckweed, trash, and muck. I later made a ring of them around the little shadblow tree I planted in our backyard in memory of my father. At first it was just a twig but has recently begun to grow. Eventually it will be underwater, along with our house.

As if pointing to my failure of imagination, someone from the DEP much younger than myself shouted that in due time the vehicles would all be electric, and consequently quieter. The working group went on pointing out the future features of the linear park. For example, where benches in the style of those at the 1964 World’s Fair and native trees would go: red maple, sweet gum, river birch. I wondered: how else might the park change the neighborhood? Will it invite gentrification? Will it grow too expensive to live here? Despite the ecological and economic benefits, will anyone suffer? Can daylighting outpace inundation, or will it be rendered moot by water tables that rise with the sea? If flooding catastrophes continue, what then? Would government funds be better spent moving the most disadvantaged among us out of the watershed to higher ground? Has anyone asked for the brook’s consent? Whose help is sanctioned when it comes to healing the land, and whose is rebuked?

Daylighting feels like a cause for ceremony, a chance to pay respect to the body of the ghost river that flows unseen under our feet. Better yet, to imagine the perspective of the brook. 

, an artist acquaintance and CUNY colleague who lives in the house she grew up in just a stone’s throw away in Kingsbridge Heights, on the east side of the Deegan. I’d asked her to join me on this daylighting walk and she’d politely declined, citing a dispute with park authorities that left her wary and somewhat bitter. During the pandemic, she and a band of other local, activist cis women and gender-nonbinary people of color in the North Bronx Collective devoted themselves to cleaning up Tibbett’s Tail, an overlooked park running between 234th and 238th Streets. It lays parallel to (yet invisible from) where I stood with the Tibbetts Advisory Group, imagining the daylit brook as the crown jewel of a park that does not yet exist. Tibbett’s Tail is an unwelcoming dumping ground on the wrong side of the road. It has no benches or trails and, being entirely inaccessible to the public, is overgrown with brush.

Sensitive to the disproportionate blow by COVID-19 to the Bronx, where an overflow of dead was buried in a potter’s field, Alicia and the collective rolled up their sleeves to make Tibbett's Tail a place for respite. Committed to mutual aid, land liberation, spiritual uplift, and the belief that parks are for the people, they worked hard to remediate its lead-degraded soil and nurture its medicinal flora. They partnered with a local church to use the park as a meal distribution site for the hungry. They also passed out face masks there, planned programs on healthy eating and composting, communicated their grassroots efforts to the proper advisors, including the Bronx Parks Commissioner’s office. Due to their good work, they even received funding funneled through the New York Restoration Project with which they installed raised garden beds to grow vegetables.

Helpers, I tell you. Within a few months the members of the collective succeeded in transforming the abandoned park into a vital community hub, only to find themselves shut out—the gate was literally padlocked by Parks, citing unspecific safety hazards. Getting locked out must have felt like a slap in the face. To the collective it reflected a larger pattern of intimidation, surveillance, and neglect in the city’s poor Black and brown neighborhoods, so often deficient of green. And now, having exiled those helpers, the city was powering up to bankroll this sexier thing.

Some workers in white coveralls were painting over graffiti on the back wall of BJ’s Wholesale Club, making a blank canvas for someone to tag again tomorrow—as true a metaphor for impermanence as ever there was. We are at an inflection point. A critical time for reimagining, reckoning, repair. There was a labor struggle here back when BJ’s was the Stella D’Oro Cookie factory; before that, a struggle between the Redcoats and the Patriots during the American Revolutionary War; a struggle when Dutch colonizers grabbed Indigenous people’s land. Mosholu is now the name of a parkway in the tangled road network constructed under arterial coordinator Robert Moses. Tibbetts is a bastard name for a bastardized brook, a misspelling of the last name of colonial settler George Tippett, whose loyalist descendants got kicked out of New York. It’s remarkable how many spots in the neighborhood are misnamed after this guy. The brook’s revival is the nation’s highest profile case of daylighting in a major city to date. As one neighbor said, “We got bragging rights in the Bronx.” Many of us look forward to some recovery of the watershed. At the same time, the brook is calling us to look back.

Such a poetic name for a feat of engineering: “daylighting.” It’s happening or has happened in cities all over the country and across the world. Berkeley, Boston, Detroit, St. Louis, Paris, Zurich, Sheffield, Manchester, Madrid. Adam Broadhead, senior scientist at the sustainable development firm Arup, has been researching daylighting projects worldwide. He wrote to me about the terms for daylighting in other languages. The Swiss refer to it as the sensible 

 or “stream concept.” In German, it’s the practical 

, or “deculverting,” also regularly used in Great Britain. In French, the more romantic 

, “returning to the open” of “disappeared waterways,” 

 Writer Anton Hur, who translates Korean literature into English, tells me that “restoration” is the best match of the Korean term, 복원, used for the daylighting of the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul.

Most daylighting involves restoring some or all of a previously covered river, stream, or stormwater drainage to a more natural state, but there are other ways of daylighting. Architectural restoration exposes the stream to open air while confining its channel within concrete walls. Cultural restoration celebrates a buried stream through markers or public art created to inform people of the stream’s original route, although the stream remains hidden. Now that NYC has finally cinched the land deal to unearth Tibbetts Brook, paying more than $11 million for the strip we walked, daylighting is expected to begin in late 2025. But it’s already been happening culturally for years, most prominently through

a constellation of artist and designer-led initiatives through 

 (CALL), a nonprofit that seeks to make sustainability more tangible.

, a conceptual artist worked with local school kids to craft collages about the future greenway. A pair of artists led 100 volunteers to embroider the 

, a quilt that re-envisioned our neighborhood’s poor planning with green roofs, bioswales of vegetated ditches, and rain gardens meant to heal the paved over habitat. In 

, another artist mapped the history of Tibbetts Brook and its wetlands on the bodies of locals, making people into works of art by painting the pre-urbanized waterway on their skin. I talked to Bronx-based artist 

, of Creek, Seminole, and African American background, whose great grandparents healed themselves by planting certain herbs at certain seasons. For his upcoming public art project on the daylighting of the brook, he imagines weaving mugwort that grows invasively in Van Cortlandt Park into a massive blanket and hanging it from the rusty remains of an old railway station to create a sound barrier, “for protection.”

I appreciate how initiatives like these offer an expansive response to catastrophe, a way to gather, and even a sense of hope. It’s not just the architecture of the daylighting project that interests me, the restitching at the scale of infrastructure, or the civic muscle behind the job, but the metaphysics of the exhumation. Daylighting feels like a cause for ceremony, a chance to pay respect to the body of the ghost river that flows unseen under our feet. Better yet, to imagine the perspective of the brook.

What is the memory of water? Is this captive chapter just a blip in the long life of the brook? Or might the brook be angry, like a poltergeist deranged by degradation, indignity, and concealment? I mean, does the brook hold a grudge? Has the brook been dreaming of freedom, attempting repeated escape? What are the brook’s rights? I don’t wish to anthropomorphize, but how do we match our repair work to the level of harm that’s been done, not to mention, to the soul of the brook?

Quoted in a recent article on daylighting for 

 in New York, Hadrien Coumans, who is an adopted member of the White Turkey-Fugate family of New York’s first peoples, said, “I don’t think that any living person today has a real understanding of what this original ecosystem was. For many Lenape, Coumans said, “each of these streams and rivers have a spirit, and the spirit must be recognized, acknowledged, given thanks to, and offered that kind of consideration, in its place, for life to thrive. Daylighting efforts are one element in a whole of what would be the restoration of an original ecosystem.”

What is the memory of water? Is this captive chapter just a blip in the long life of the brook? Or might the brook be angry, like a poltergeist deranged by degradation, indignity, and concealment? I mean, does the brook hold a grudge?

If anyone today has an inkling of that unknowable past, it’s Eric Sanderson, senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. His landmark project, Mannahatta, has attempted to convey what NYC was like 400 years ago. Sanderson understands the potential of the watershed from a place of curiosity about how it once functioned. According to an analysis of the West Bronx he spearheaded, this part of the city retains approximately 16% of its original rivers and streams. Of the former 307 hectares of wetlands in the study area, less than 1% remain. A staggering loss. “If you look at the city today, it’s hard to imagine it could be anything else,” Sanderson said in a 2017 video on CALL’s website about the daylighting of Tibbetts Brook. “In the city, we’re so used to how people made the city. How did the soil get here? People didn’t make the soil. Nature made the soil. It took thousands of years for the soil to get here…If we understand the historical ecology then that gives us some metrics of what sustainable ecology would be.” Sanderson’s work helps reconstruct the long life of this little river that I am coming to know. To paraphrase:

For millennia the brook babbled and tumbled down the valley carved by a glacier. The brook ran, swelling with rain, to the sea. In time, the climate warmed. The sea rose to meet the freshwater brook, filling the lower valley on the high tide and forming a brackish sward of salt marsh. The lower brook began breathing in two directions. In on the flood tide. Out on the ebb. The upper brook meandered in curves that changed color when the teeming algae was struck in the changing light and when the water mirrored the changing sky. Blue. Green. Gray. Brown. Black. Trout swam in that part of the brook’s body, and shad. The real people came to live along the bountiful banks of the brook and by the mouth at the edge of the marsh. They settled on a small sandy island, a flat place, under the flightpath of turkeys, within earshot of howling wolves. They made trails up the bluff to the west where they shaped the land with fire. They understood that some spirits, such as rivers, have bodies that long outlast our own.

Much later, new people came with weird ways. They built dams, planted crops, wrote treaties, owned slaves. In their grab for land, they swindled, murdered, massacred, and chased the real people west. (To write such erasure in one breathless sentence feels craven, I admit.) Along with their agriculture, the new people brought industry. They built homes and streets and trolley lines. They floated farm produce to market along the brook in summer and in winter ice-skated on its frozen skin. Then came the train. In its tracks the brook grew despoiled. Mosquitoes bred. The new people feared malaria. The brook’s dirtied water issued their trash and waste downstream. When it rained, they complained of streamwaters flooding what they thought were their properties. In their view, the brook was an impediment to progress, a health hazard, a thing to backfill for capital gain. (

Though why should I whine / Whine that the crime was other than mine?

 wrote Gwendolyn Brooks in “The Mother.”) The city increased its grid. More new people, more buildings. More buildings, more land. More land, more new people. These people. My God, did they bungle the hydrology. They preferred their land dry, and hardscaped the watershed to spread and build, driving the brook underground. For over a century, it has remained hidden, in the dark.

Now, it’s being brought back to light. Sanderson again:

If we could make our city work like it did when it was a forest and a wetland, and still have all the people, well that would be the big win. Right? We’re so ambitious for its economy and architecture and culture and science, but we think, there has to be a cost, and that cost has to be borne by the environment. We’re almost naturally pessimistic about our ability to make the environment better. I don’t get that. Why can’t we be as optimistic, positive, and affirmative about how great the environment can be? This is the work of artists to activate our imaginations … Science itself doesn’t get you there.

These people. My God, did they bungle the hydrology.

My second encounter with the daylighting of Tibbetts Brook was in January, 2024, at a storefront gallery uphill from our house. The occasion was the opening reception of an exhibition by local landscape painter 

. The small space was packed. Sushi was served. I recognized Noel from the walk the previous spring. When I told Noel it felt like the brook was working to bring people together, he nodded. A humble guy with a philosophical air, he’s attuned to the brook’s vibrations. He spoke softly but with purpose about the fifteen canvases hanging on the wall: “Artists help us learn how to listen to, understand, and live within our landscapes.” The paintings were charmingly naïve. Noel hadn’t used watercolor in 20 years before painting this series, 

 but the medium matched the content. Since we were inviting water back into our neighborhood, he felt it necessary to think in watercolor. The day he planned to begin his project, which was supported by a City Artistscorps grant, was the day Hurricane Ida struck, inundating the Deegan. Noel saw that the highway was also a river, but of oil. It struck him, as the water rose, that the brook was both returning and had never left.

For a season, Noel painted the water’s path. It was an astonishing feeling, looking into the prelapsarian landscape while walking through its current form. He came across a puddle on the asphalt where Tibbetts Avenue crossed 230th Street, which transformed for him into a remnant of the historic brook, “like the traces of graphite that remain when you try to erase a drawing.” People were curious about him. A landscape painter standing with an easel by the highway is an unusual sight. He had countless conversations with community members he never would have talked to otherwise. He’d prepared a bilingual handout—in English and Spanish—about the daylighting proposal to pass out to residents, assuming the idea of the river’s return might not be common knowledge. A lot of folks said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Some of them assessed his artwork or shared art of their own on their way to the bus, to work, to pick up the kids.

“Daylighting a buried stream begins in the public imagination,” Noel said, convinced that “the project must weave into the local fabric and not just cut through it in a sharp line.” Given that the floodwaters are coming, he wondered if our community would be proactive or ultimately reactive. Could painting have any impact on, or contribution to, this critical moment? Only after he finished the series did he realize that he was already part of the moment by deciding to paint it, “as if enlisted by the water itself.” In other words, painting was not a catalyst but proof of a change already afoot.

“A watershed is not just the path of the water, but it is the culture, the people, and the attendant ecosystems as well,” Noel observed. “The water is rising in the minds of those who understand we must invite it back.” He was still practicing how to listen to the water. But, I wanted to know, how does one hear it through all the noise?

My third encounter with daylighting had this very question in mind. 

, an augmented reality soundwalk along Tibbett Avenue,

, a composer of contemporary opera and experimental music who previously wrote a ten-hour opera for the trees of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. For this new artwork, sponsored by CALL, she’d designed a phone app that guides listeners to walk where the brook used to flow, listening to sounds of music and water along the way in concert with their phone’s geolocation data.

In May, 2024, the community was invited to hear Kamala talk about her project before undertaking the soundwalk. About 20 of us showed up, including Noel, Dennis, some birdwatchers, and several senior citizens. We gathered in Van Cortlandt Park, at the weir at the edge of the lake where the dammed brook drops dramatically down into the sewer. The chokepoint had a spectral feeling and stank of sulfur. The lake was recently renamed Hester and Piero’s Mill Pond after the enslaved miller and his wife who worked for the Van Cortlandts, a wealthy landowning family who ran a wheat plantation here before it became the park. A hundred steps away, in the direction of the tennis courts, a sign marks the site of an African burial ground. Dennis told me that before the highways sliced through the land, the gravesite used to be much bigger than it is now. “How much that’s now roads is actually ancestors?” he pondered.

To reveal. To illuminate. To bring to the surface. To expose. To bring to light. A compound, the word pairs a state of affairs and action, like landscape, timekeeper, nightlife, sunset. 

Kamala had a UFO on her t-shirt and a fig leaf tattooed on her arm. She explained how to use the app as a guide to the past. Along the soundwalk, we could use a slider on our phone screens to fade away the neighborhood as we know it via Google Maps, and bring into focus a historic map from 1892 showing the brook running freely. The soundwalk urged us to notice the old topography as well as to listen. A few of the senior citizens had trouble with the technology. But there was another element planned that they could participate in: a creative writing exercise. Each of us was handed a tiny recycled-paper notebook and a pencil. Kamala then introduced us to Raymond Pultinas, a retired high school English teacher who now works for the 

 operating a farmer’s market off Mosholu Parkway South. The helpers are everywhere, if you look for them.

What sounds do we normally tune out and ignore? What’s the quietest sound? The loudest?

 Ray asked. With our eyes closed and our ears open we meditated near the skatepark where the brook used to run. I was acutely aware of the noise pollution. I heard the highway, a motorcycle, the screeching 1 train, a pounding jackhammer, and the drone of an airplane. 

Breathe through your nose. Listen harder.

 Under that racket, some more pleasant sounds: the jingle from a Mr. Softee ice cream truck, the bright horns of salsa from somebody’s boombox, a basketball being dribbled on a nearby court. 

Listen for sounds that might have been here prior to all this development. 

I heard the calls of a cardinal, a red-winged blackbird, a virio, and a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

Ray had us open our eyes, write down our observations, and consider not only that our relationship with the land could be a conscious choice, but that the river was consciously determining its own path. Many places look the same owing to corporatization, Ray said. We could be anywhere. But there are particular things one can do in one’s local environment that one can do nowhere else. 

 Bottlecaps for Corona Xtra and bright circles of foil confetti pounded into the dirt. A squirrel brazenly eating a french fry. Ray asked us to sit in the grass and reflect on how we’re entering a new era. 

What words could we give to this unfolding?

People shared their definitions. To reveal. To illuminate. To bring to the surface. To expose. To bring to light. A compound, the word pairs a state of affairs and action, like landscape, timekeeper, nightlife, sunset. Ray wanted us to get out of the human way of thinking. What will daylighting mean to other creatures? A worm might experience it as “moisture-gift,” a fish, “path-making,” or a coyote, “territory-growing.” An old man wearing an “I LOVE NY” baseball cap and a camera around his neck objected that for some creatures adapted to the way it is now, daylighting would be an intrusion, like the Cross Bronx Expressway that displaced his parents. “Don’t be a putz,” said his wife. “On the whole, it has to be better to bring nature back.”

I parted from the group at the park’s 240th Street entrance to follow the brook’s original course. 

Please use caution and pay attention to your surroundings

, warned the Buried Brook app. Nevertheless, I blocked out the city’s violent overload, and listened to the water. I crossed Broadway and turned up the volume on Kamala’s soundwalk as high as it would go

Kamala had gathered many sounds: field recordings of birds in the park; using a hydrophone underwater, the lake; Hindustani ragas associated with rain; and a song sung in Munsee gifted by Nicole Pecore and Ja’Ni’Ya’Ku’Ha Webster, of Mohican, Munsee, Oneida, and Menominee Nation (with respect to the original Lenape inhabitants of this land and their deep connection to the brook, Mosholu). It gurgled in my ears. Rounding out the soundscape were an mbira, a xylophone, a saxophone, an accordion, and a sitar, which kicked in by the jeep dealership.

I walked west toward Tibbett Avenue in the direction of our house, consulting the map of the past. I followed the blue line. Its squiggle contradicted the grid. I stayed on the sidewalk. If I allowed my body to meander like the brook, I risked trespassing, or getting hit by a car. But my mind could wander with Kamala’s composition. I passed Gaelic Park, the playing field of Manhattan College. The music relaxed me. My shoulders softened. My pace slowed. So did my breath. At Tibbett, I turned left, tracing the brook south. I can’t say how I knew that the song in Munsee was an ode giving thanks to the water, nor that the spoken text that started by the physical plant at the corner of 239th Street was admonishing us to respect the water, but I did. 

Water is the life river of our Mother Earth. Water is Life. 

That is what the women sang. I straightened my posture, to dignify the brook.

I passed a six-story cooperative apartment building called The Brookside. The wind was blessing my face, like water. The same flier was stapled to every telephone pole I passed: 

Expressway Moving. $190. 2 hours, 2 helpers.

 My breath deepened. The water gushed. I nearly felt it lapping at my ankles. As I approached our corner at 236th Street, I was overcome by a feeling of loss. I could glimpse the brook now, as through a parted veil. Pulled by the current, I waded down Tibbett backward in time, past the trash-strewn catch basin and station of Citibikes by the rubbled lot of the burned down drug house at 234th Street, past the often flooded construction site for a new charter school at 232nd Street, past the Tibbett Medical office offering pain management, past the Bx7 bus stop at 231st Street and the Tibbett Diner, all the way to a DEAD END sign at the intersection of 230th Street where the brook used to empty out into the Spuytin Duyvil Creek in the old days, before the wetland was paved over. I stood in that spot for a long time, listening to the water with my eyes closed. I might have looked crazy. “I’ve known rivers,” I said. When I reopened my eyes, the U-Haul Storage facility, the TD Bank, the car wash, and the BP gas station were still there. The price of gas was $3.77 a gallon. I touched my face, and found it wet. ♦

This essay was sponsored, in part, by Social Practice CUNY.

Emily Raboteau is a Black Studies professor at the City College of New York and the author of 

gen-spade-wound

Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

October

Notice that daylight is now less than 12 hours—we've passed the equinox.

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union startled the world by announcing that it had launched 

, the first artificial Earth satellite. It was just a little metal sphere, but it carried a radio transmitter which allowed the world to verify its existence and track its orbit. Alongside the U.S. lunar landing in 1969, this moment is remembered as humanity's first venture into space.

 was quickly followed by the much larger 

, which carried a dog, Laika, who actually managed to survive for a few orbits. Laika became an international folk hero; her story (or stories—there are many versions) is well told in the National Air and Space Museum and in 

magazine. She belongs with Balto and Hachiko in the pantheon of dog heroes.

Truth or Dare with Laura Albert

Ben Ratliff Runs the Song

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

The Cooler Jesus

The Cooler Jesus

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx

Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx

Big Apple Sky Calendar: October, November, December 2025

Climate Hacks

The Art of Decolonization

The Art of Decolonization

A Bundle of Desire

A Bundle of Desire