Do Et Dus

The sparkling blue waves roll onto the beach in perfect succession, like a ticking metronome. A horizon painted in a dazzling array of dancing blues, from deep shadowy troughs to turquoises that rise up into foaming blues whipped into frothing whitecaps that crash thunderously in front of where you sit in the sun-warmed sands just above the waterline. The immensity diminishes you, hushing your running thoughts, and your sense of bodily boundaries begin to dissolve. You can feel yourself expanding into the blue horizon, extending beyond the seen, as Nature gently tugs you back into the float of existence. 

Then, your blue oblivion is pierced with a flash of saturated red. Your thoughts return online, and your brain forms a single word: Doritos. A small, snack-sized package of chips, discarded from a passing tourist boat, is riding the white foam wave onto shore. You can feel your body imagining what it would feel like if the crinkly Doritos packing were to brush against the bottom of your bare feet, sliding against the soft sole of your left foot, which just moments ago had no sensation but the warmth of the sun. 

The bright red bag, with its Doritos logo, somersaults on the wave, pushing closer to you until it gets within seven feet of where you sit. You lumber to your feet and chase it down the receding wave, hoping to grab it before it's too late, and the ebbing water pulls it out of reach.  

I lay down my journal, where I’ve been writing, and wonder if that imagery, of the scratchy Doritos bag, will evoke the sensation of an unwanted presence, or, more, the sense of a malignant spirit.  

I lay that thought down, and look out at the ocean waves rolling towards land. I squint my eyes to see if I can discern where from in that watery horizon rises an individual wave, but my vision has grown fuzzy with age, and my glasses are just out of reach. 

I squint harder, pushing myself to discern where that wave first emerges to take shape from the undefined blue ocean. I press both index fingers along the corner of my eyes, pulling back the skin, creating something like a super squint, trying to fight against the nature of my middle age. 

I read in a magazine why this works. Squinting decreases the light rays that reach the retina. Essentially it shrinks the eye's pinhole through which light pours, allowing the rod-shaped cells on the retina to better disentangle the photons that get increasingly messy with age. 

The article said that these days, more people, not just the middle aged, but notably younger people, are squinting to see the world clearly. Ophthalmologists recently published a study showing that about eighty percent of young adults now show signs of myopia, meaning the horizon has grown blurry. They conjecture it’s because of time spent inside, on screens, instead of outdoors, in the sun’s glow. Key to an eye’s development, it turns out, is sunlight. Absorbed into the human body, sunlight triggers a release of dopamine in the still-growing eye of a child, and that hormone helps far-sighted vision take shape. Without it, the ability to see the horizon degrades, that far-off wave becomes fuzzy. In consequence, people, at ever-growing rates, now require artificial lenses between them and the outside world. 

For a myopic person, the point at which something like a wave moves from the fuzzy turquoise world into the clarity world is called “far point.” My far point, by which I mean that distance in which a smudge of color pulls together into a shape I discern, is about 50 feet, somewhere past the beach in front of me, but not very far into the breaking waves. I reach over towards my glasses, pulling them on my face. 

With artificial lenses, my far point is now 500 feet. The distant waves snap into delicious focus. I see a surfer bobbing among them and a cormorant scootering past. 

I take a long breath. In and out. Fifty years ago, maybe, a person sitting here might have imagined all the creatures, all the vibrant life, teaming under those waves. But not me, not these days. 

I see waves full of tiny plastic molecules, toxic microplastics. The reefs underneath the waves are smashed and broken, often in great white piles, like the mounds of bison skulls piled and sun-bleached on the Great Plains of 19^th-century America. We’ve never stopped piling those bones, from one species or another, for a quarter of a millennia now. It is getting harder to avoid the gaze of that Nature. 

What is the landscape today? 

I don’t just mean the cities, or the suburbs, or tourist beaches where I’m sitting, or the great prairie lands turned into a single-species monocrop for miles on end. My question reaches beyond that now, to what might appear to be untouched areas, like the vast stretches of forests, which in places like California, still cover twenty million acres. But these are not pristine havens where beleaguered nature finds respite. They bear the mark of a genocide—of people and an ecosystem. The ancestral forests are largely gone now; just a few tiny patches of old growth remain. In their graveyard, with stumps the size of houses, grow trees, yes, but ones carefully planted, row by row, with species bred for the slaughter. These are what they call “timber trees.” It’s not a forest anymore, even on U.S. Forest Service lands. It’s a farm. And like a farm, to the discerning, one can see record amounts of herbicides, like Roundup, Hexazone and Tricoplyr sprayed across the understory. The streams that run down the mountainsides, through the foothills and into the valleys, all carry that poison with them. When tested by state regulators kneeling next to streams dipping their tubes in burbling water, one hundred percent of the streams contain glyphosate, the Roundup poison, in the watery lifeblood of the ecosystem. 

So I no longer see a nature that is Emerson’s, his world of boundless, eternal energy carrying the God that is in it, that is in us. As I look out, I see a dying God, poisoned by the ones who stepped forth from it, from that eternal stream in, at first, a pose of worship, but who now, for more than a quarter of a millennium, have held forth a poisoned chalice. An offering of death. 

How much time will Nature allow us, how much grace will be given, until that offering is returned: do ut des, I give so that you may give? 

What does it look like to be poisoned by a God? What is the “far point” for humanity when that tainted wave, that returning gift, moves from an ethereal landscape into the sharpness, the defined edges, that reconstitute shadows?