The forces in our lives are constantly colliding—sometimes in ways that work out well and sometimes in ways that don’t. This interview series is an exploration of what it can look like to work with the collisions, rather than against them. By digging into how humans and nature interact– from our relationships with other humans, to those with our non-human neighbors, to our relationship with ourselves to our relationship with the landbase–we can uncover how to best step fully into our role in the story of the world.
The Ordinary Collisions Interview Series is back, after a several month hiatus! I’m delighted to introduced you to my fellow St. Croix River Valley dweller, Greg Seitz. We became aware of one another’s work years ago, and then finally met in person a few years back at my neighbor’s plant sale. I may have been holding a baby goat at the time we actually met face to face. He’s been a great supporter of my writing over the years, so I’m happy to have him on the other side of the interview this time.
Greg is a writer, researcher, and river bum based in the St. Croix Valley of Minnesota. For the past 15 years, he has operated a popular website called St. Croix 360, covering numerous topics related to the river. He regularly reports on issues, shares experiences, and writes about unique wildlife, history, and more. He lives with his wife and two young children in the woods.
Heidi: Greg, thanks for being here with us today. What a treat to have you on the this side of the interview! So, I always ask the same question to kick these interviews off: What are two forces that are colliding in your life right now (or that have in the not too distant past)?
Greg: It’s water and rock, life and its impediments. I spoke about water at my church one recent Sunday. Beforehand, I went and sat by a creek for a few hours to think about what I wanted to say. The creek flowed over glacial till, tumbling around rocks up to about the size of a cantaloupe. It reminded me of a line Wendell Berry once wrote: “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”1
I believe Berry meant a creek’s voice comes from the rocks in the stream bed, briefly blocking water on its insistent path forward. The sound the water makes as it breaks and collides is the song of the stream. And I believe he was making an analogy about life. It rarely slips by quietly and peacefully. And it’s the challenges and how we respond to them that give life its song.
“How do we find a way forward, going around the immovable objects?” I asked my fellow congregants. “Each life’s song meets different obstacles and has a different tune. Every rock adds another voice to the whole choir.”
Heidi: I do enjoy a good Wendell Berry quote. That’s an especially poignant one, especially these days. I’m also reminded of Mary Oliver when she wrote, “Inside the river there is an unfinishable story | and you are somewhere in it..” So around the rocks we go, each singing, stumbling, and figuring out how to move forward around what lays in our path.
How are you navigating the conditions this collision is creating? How does the dissonance created impact your choices?
Greg: I’m crashing into a lot of rocks, making music more noisy than melodic. All the awareness I described above doesn’t mean I’m any good at enjoying life’s music when the going gets tough. I often want life to be like the big St. Croix River near where I live, which just slides along easily and powerfully, and mostly silent. But the fact is, right now, it’s more like a steep creek rushing over rocks.
So I try to remember that a lot of great art comes from dissonance and difficulty. I think of a Neil Young guitar solo, or Picasso’s Cubism, or Melville’s digressions on whales. The water and the rocks and the noise are all part of the stream.
There’s another concept I’m considering in all this. When you’re canoeing or kayaking with current, and if you hit a rock or something and get trapped sideways to it with the current pushing you against the impediment, you have to ignore your instinct to lean away and try to free your boat. Instead you have to “hug the rock,” I’ve heard it said. If you lean away, the current will catch your upstream gunwale and instantly fill the boat with water. If you lean in, you increase your freeboard and reduce the force of the flow, and if you’re lucky, you can buy time to escape.
So as much as I can manage, I’m trying to create art out of struggle. And I’m trying to not only enjoy the song of the streams, but embrace the obstacles.
Heidi: As a former river canoe guide, I have seen my share of paddlers resist hugging the rock and swamp their boat. Here’s to hugging the rocks when necessary!
What has these collisions taught you about yourself? The world?
Greg: Gary Snyder wrote: “Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight.”2 He went on to explain that nature is also dark and cruel, and that side of it can’t be ignored.
Nature for me is so often a refuge, a place of peace and quiet in the hectic and noisy world. But the fact is it’s full of strife and struggle, too, and sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s chaotic. Suffering and death is always going to be part of it.
This all feels related to the impeded stream. The dark side of nature is part of the music, it’s the rocks that obstruct the water and create the sound.
Heidi: Shadow and light are both a part of the narrative, that’s for sure —from the song of the stream to the story of the world.
Now, I know you’ve got a number of projects going—what sorts of collisions do you explore there?
Greg: People and places. I’m curious how natural history—geology, ecology, hydrology, climatology, and other -ologies—affect human culture. There are parts of us that are shaped by the places we know, but of course there is also a lot of us that can be shaped by other forces, like family, books, and music. How does a place shape us? But also, how does being rooted in any place influence our lives and values?
I’m also looking at the collision between human boundaries, like counties and states, and natural borders, like watersheds or biomes. I’m curious about how things change if we ignore the human lines on maps, invisible on the actual landscape, and change our psychogeography to those dictated by weather and water and soil and things like that.
Heidi. Such an important topic and one that I like to explore as well. (After all, this newsletter’s tag line is “intersections of nature and culture”!) There are so many layers that influence why we are how we are.
What else would you like to share about what you’re working on right now?
Greg: I’ve just embarked on the public phase of a book project, a “deep map” of the St. Croix River watershed. This book is to be published by the University of Minnesota Press in a few years. It will try to describe this 7,700-square mile region in depth and detail, convey lots of stories about its human and natural history, try to develop a coherent sense of place, and consider how watersheds are a natural way to organize space.
I have been working on the research for this book quietly for a while and am now going full speed with lots more research, including “field” and “archival” research (going to significant places and spending time in libraries and such), and a lot of writing. It’s a daunting project but it feels like exactly what I should be doing right now.
Heidi: Greg, thanks so much for taking the time to sit with these questions. I’ve appreciated hearing your perspective and look forward to exploring the ‘deep map’ when it becomes available to read! May the song of the stream keep you inspired to carry on.
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("The Real Work," from Standing by Words, 1983)
(Practice of the Wild, 1990)