My paddle at Menokin by Jay Grebe Yeatts
Jay Grebe Yeatts is Owner and Artist From the Fire Designs, and share with us her special experience paddling at Cat Point Creek from Menokin’s landing. A special story indeed.
6.8.2023
My paddle at Menokin
A few days ago, I had the opportunity… no, the privilege, of launching my little kayak up Cat Point Creek from Menokin’s launch site. A girlfriend suggested (i.e. aggressively pushed) me to climb out of my marginally hermitic, work-from-home cave and take a day trip with her. (She wasn’t wrong…) I often struggle to balance the work-life experience in general, and my introversion coupled with the emotional stigma attached to self-care for “elder millennials” (i.e. spending time that cannot be readily quantified as *productive*) has rendered me all but dysfunctional in terms of normal human relations. But I love her, so… (after far more hemming and hawing than I prefer to admit) I broke out my planner and scheduled a date with myself, my girlfriend and nature.
Spending any amount of time in nature seems to draw out the deep thinker in all of us, myself included. This shouldn’t be any sort of surprise really, the sheer number of songs, books, and poems inspired by the many splendors of mother earth is astounding. So, I suppose, the thing that struck me was not the fluidity of my thoughts, it was the details of what I started to ponder.
Did I revel in the glory of tiny purple Pickerelweeds bursting with color across the marsh? Was I enchanted by the stoic nature of the cattails silently standing vigil over the creek? Obviously, yes. I am not immune to these simple delicacies, so readily served up by an undisturbed landscape. (That is a really lovely thing about marsh lands, they are near impossible to develop in any sort of cost-effective manner, thus- for the moment- they continue to exist as nature’s wee safe haven… and by extension my own). But it was none of those glorious bastards… it was the Tuckahoe. Those quiet, unassuming little arrow shaped leaves, pointing up out of the water in droves.
A modest, nearly camouflage worthy shade of green, they are easily lost amongst the grasses and lily pads that define the creek’s navigable edges in early June. One might miss these modest little fellows entirely as they traverse the waterscape, otherwise distracted by a visual symphony of the most elegant Heron, a few intrepid Osprey, and what I can only describe as a family of some very weird black, duck looking creatures that Google has yet to properly identify (Open to answers on this one). But that day, the Tuckahoe… the Arrow Arum (just throwing that common name in there to prove that my inability to identify my weird sable toned flat beaked friends does not make me a completely lost cause)… Tuckahoe consumed me.
Let me forewarn you, this is not a post about the epiphanies wrought from the banal details of our day to day lives. Those posts are amazing, and inspiring. Maybe even downright magical! But this ain’t that. If you can ride it out with me, as a much as I relish the amazing horticultural and culinary wonders of our tuberous friend Peltandra Virginica, this is also not about any of those. Mine is a story of confusion, and science…and confusion… and a vaguely disorienting sense of personal peace realized. If you’re still here with me, then here it goes…
I have been on the creek before, but the real world kept feeling the need to repeatedly insert itself into the experience. I had been there, in the company of professionals, to learn and discuss all sorts of very important and practical adulty kinds of things. But this most recent trip, purely recreational in nature, accompanied by one of my besties, just “hit different” as the kids today say.
A touch of background, in the hopes that context will allow the rest of these meandering thoughts to make sense: I am a mixed blood Native, descending from the land now called Virginia. (Yes, I know EXACTLY how fraught the concept of mixed blood is, bear with me). I am a citizen of the sovereign Rappahannock First Nation. I am the daughter and granddaughter of a proud mother and grandmother, directly descended from the original inhabitants of Tsenacomoco. I am an Indigenous woman. And an Indigenous activist. And an Indigenous mother, desperately striving for the reconciliation and repatriation of a stolen culture. I take great pride in that. I grieve that.
That said, I am also, the daughter of a man who is mostly German with just a dash of Canadian heritage for good measure (read: stereotypical modern-day colonizer). The dysphoria created by this half and half existence is real. I will spare you the nuances of living this identity in a colonized world and focus instead on Tuckahoe… and Epigenetics.
In case you’re not familiar with this relatively new and extremely niche branch of scientific research, Epigenetics is (in an overly boiled down explanation) the study of how the experiences of our ancestors impact our own current day development. A quick search will inundate you with information about genetic methylation and modifications to the chromatin structures. (But that’s a whole other article, for a far more educated person than myself to write). For our purposes, let’s settle with Epigenetics posits that the lived experiences (victories and traumas alike) of our ancestors turned on and off little switches in the genetic codes, ensuring survival. Those activated (or deactivated) traits were then passed on to each subsequent generation. Basically: If your Irish great-great-grandma Maeve survived the potato famine, there’s a real possibility that you’re genetically predisposed to carrying a little extra weight. You know, just in case you may happen to need to survive another famine. In short, your genetic memory is constantly preparing your body to survive a trauma that it has already successfully negotiated in the past.
So, back to that Tuckahoe… back to the Creek… back to the Land and place.
My ancestors lived along Cat Point Creek. The Rappahannock people were not a loose band of savages, wandering lost amongst the virgin landscape as Virginia’s Public School curriculum would have you believe. When our existence was first “officially” recorded in 1607 by, the ever questionable, Captain John Smith, the Rappahannock Nation was already a fully-fledged civilization of interconnected villages and trade networks. At the time of the English colonists arrival in Tsenacomoco, there were already 30 distinct tribes and more than 15,000 people who called the supposedly untouched countryside home. In fact, the cultural exchanges used by scholars to define a society were well established among the earliest permanent residents of the land [that is now called North America] more than 19,000 years ago. Further, there is clear evidence of sophisticated intercontinental trade as early as 500 B.C. leaving another 2,000 years of highly resourced socio-cultural development to occur prior to the earliest European landings. But I digress. Parsing apart personal/ancestral history and the more widely accepted [politically driven, revisionist] narratives is always a sticking point for me.
Getting back to the mysticism of Tuckahoe and the generational ties that bind: For many thousands of years my ancestors regularly forged into the waters of Cat Point Creek on nearly daily basis. In the dead of winter, when other resources were scarce, they plunged into the icy creek and dug up the tuberous roots of the Tuckahoe plant. My great-great-great-grandmothers and aunties then spent hours processing the starchy little bulbs into stews and breads. Then my ancestral Tribe would gather appreciatively in the evenings to celebrate and indulge in the fruits of that labor. As I floated past patch after patch of unadulterated Tuckahoe leaves in my tiny plastic kayak, I was overwhelmed with the reality that this is not some abstract story of perseverance and determination meant to stir pride in Native children. My ancestors fought frost-bite in this water, possibly inches from where I am, breathing this same air. I imagine their faces, their smiles, and grimaces, even those little clouds of condensation that linger as their breath mingles with frosty morning air.
A feeling settled into the deepest parts of my brain, it is more than a superficial, self-aggrandizing pride in the resilience and strength of my ancestors. It is more than just a fleeting visage of romanticized survivalism. As I feel the balmy breeze of early June against my back, and the warmth of the Virginia sun on my cheeks, I find myself strangely, overwhelmingly at peace. This no longer feels like just a day trip, or an overdue stab at self-care.
In a few weeks, when the water is warmer, I’ll bring my own children back to the creek, and I’ll revel as their squeals pierce the quiet of the afternoon and their less than graceful attempts at paddling cause the weird black ducks to flee in terror. Hopefully, we’ll make memories they’ll carry away with them as they grow up and leave this geography behind. But it’s even beyond all of that somehow, I feel compelled by some surreal spiritual magnetism. As if something has finally been made right in the world. I am suddenly keenly aware that my children will be occupying the same landscape as the children who lived in the “before times”. They will scrape their knees and bruise their elbows in the same innocent ways that the little ones so many generations removed from them once did. In the most literal and metaphorical senses all at once, our blood, sweat and tears will intermingle on these muddy shores and in these waters.
Perhaps this doesn’t read with the same impact with which it is written. At the core of all this unintended emotionality is such an important detail: Barely a decade passed between the English settlement of Tsenacomoco and the forced removal of my foremothers and fathers from the banks of the Rappahannock river. It has been centuries since the Rappahannock people (who still exist, by the way) have had regular and free access to their ancestral homelands and the waters that were once their lifeways. My presence here today is not an accident of inheritance. My ability to leisurely daydream about years past and those yet to come, in this ethereal space, is a result of luck, privilege and the right social connections. Those realities are not lost on me, but I am, at least in part, a descendant of the river. My mere existence in this specific space, feels like the manifestation of the forgotten dreams of my ancestors.
There is a chance that all of this is in my head, but I will not discount that my mother’s-mother’s-mother’s blood flows through my veins. It would be a disservice to pretend that the stories of racism and disenfranchisement that cut deep wounds into their collective lives hasn’t left invisible scars on all of us. I will not claim to understand the visceral nature of that pain. But I do know that I can feel an unmitigated, unearned relief from this proverbial reunion of Rappahannock and River, in every inch of my soul.
I am at peace here. I feel whole here. The noisy parts of my psyche that somehow always manages to stir up some sort of anxiety or another… they are quiet. I have no personal history here, no happy nostalgia to fall back on. (And the theory that communion with nature makes all humans their most blissful, spiritual selves goes out the window when we consider that it takes 3 doses of Zyrtec and a handful of Tylenol to stave off even the mildest of my allergy induced migraines.) I am… we are…finally where we belong.
You may find info on Jay’s studio and follow her on social media via these links:
https://fromthefiredesigns.wixsite.com/jaygyeatts