Sand on my Shoes

The environment was never an acting point, I saw it as something out there, outside the city, I was, am, disconnected. But going to spend time at a camp on Algonquin land, hearing the bulldozers or whatever they are, at 2 am, clearing, clearing, going to the logging site, it was the first time the community had gotten there, a week after the destruction started, because the cops had been guarding the company’s equipment and not letting them through, on their own land, the elders gasped, someone said, look at the tree. Someone said, where will the animals go? Someone mentioned all the little animals like rabbits that get crushed under the machines, one man said, they don’t even use the poplar, it’s just faster to cut it all down and leave them or burn them. Later he said quietly, ‘we’re not going to win.’ When I was driving home I saw another clear-cut spot on a mountain and it hurt. There’s still sand on my shoes.