High Tide in Tucson

Kingsolver and her daughter Camille visit Horse Lick Creek, a picturesque region of rural Kentucky near where Kingsolver grew up. The landscape is innately planted in Kingsolver’s being, as most of her best childhood memories involve wandering through those woods look for bird nests and other natural wonders. When they visit, the area has been bought and protected by the Nature Conservancy. Outside of the protected area, they pass through various scenes of rural Kentucky life: a small general store where hunters come to tag their turkeys, houses with backyard shacks called “pouting houses” where people can escape from their families for a bit, and clandestine marijuana fields that are rarely spoken about but happen to be the most profitable crop in the harsh soil.

Most locals love Horse Lick Creek, although not all of them would classify it as special. They enjoy the good hunting and off-road vehicle trails but are not interested in the fact that the area houses wonders like rare bats, mussels, and limestone cliffs. While hiking and driving around the area, Kingsolver notices the juxtaposition between the wildness of the landscape and the constant reminders of human life: creeks made muddy by cows and walkers, piles of trash in the forest, signs of illegal mining operations, and abandoned cars that have been wrecked on the treacherous roads through the years.

Kingsolver and Camille visit the Tom Milt and Polly Lakes homestead, which belonged to some of the first white residents of the area. Milt and Lakes raised a large family and had to carefully preserve the land for the future. If they harmed a creek or over-hunted wild turkeys, their family would die. Today, though, the land is not viewed as necessary for life, and people have damaged it almost beyond repair through irresponsible recreation and exploitation. Despite some protection by the Nature Conservancy, the landscape and the animals that live there—especially the rare mussels in the creeks—are greatly threatened.

The essay ends with a call for environmentalists to protect imperfect, marginal landscapes rather than just untouched wilderness. Horse Lick Creek has been altered significantly through years of human use, which makes the animals there even more desperate for relief from human harm than those in virgin wilderness areas.

After living in Africa as a child, Kingsolver feels drawn toward the continent like a magnet. Using some Peace Corps friends as an excuse, she travels to Benin, one of the least touristed countries in West Africa. The lack of traveler-focused infrastructure is part of the country’s appeal, as she wants to immerse herself in a place where people are simply living their life without constant outside observation. She is often the only white person. On her first night there, after being led into an unfinished concrete hotel with no door knobs, she watches the street scene: Young girls herd pigs, two men carry a large pane of glass between two motorcycles, and the cacophony continues throughout the night. The people of Benin are particularly resourceful. Kingsolver reflects on everything she has ever thrown away as she watches craftspeople make useful objects out of what Americans consider garbage.

Leaving the capital city, she travels to the northern part of the country, a rural landscape of savannah and family compounds made of red clay. She writes about the colonial history of Benin: The country was designated as a single, distinct place by colonists, but its inhabitants span a wide range of tribal traditions that have little in common with each other. Benin is also deeply connected to the history of slavery, and is the home of vodoun, animistic traditions that were brought to the Americas by enslaved West Africans. Kingsolver visits a vodoun market and asks a man to sell her something to improve her love life. After an elaborate chant he hands her a small packet of dried blood and bones that he ensures her will repel bad men and attract the right one. She visits the Sacred Grove, where people have placed vodoun fetishes for many years.

Kingsolver also visits the Royal Palace Museum at Abomey, which housed the kings of the pre-colonial Dahomey Empire. Although the bloody history of West Africa is often attributed entirely to colonialism, the atrocities of the Dahomey Empire are apparent throughout the museum. Surrounding the former king’s throne are four skulls, said to be those of prominent enemies. As she leaves the museum, a person emerges from a doorway dressed in what looks like a haystack. Followed by children, he dances to a group of other haystacks, and they begin an elaborate dance ritual. Kingsolver concludes that Benin is a complex place where everyone has a different history, and life is very intertwined with nature. She ends with the words, “It’s best to be prepared” (193).

Watching the sun rise on the rim of Haleakala, a dormant Hawaiian volcano, is an ancient religious tradition that today is a huge tourist attraction. Hundreds of people, tour buses, and bikes swarm the mountain summit, all departing as soon as the sun is up and they have gotten enough photos. Kingsolver and her friend Steven wait until the crowd departs, and then set out to hike into the volcano.

As they walk through lava fields, arid grassland, and the last remnants of native Hawaiian rainforest, Kingsolver reflects on the risks that human intervention poses to unique places like Haleakala. Due to its remoteness and inability to be farmed, the mountain remains home to many endangered species like the impressive silversword plant and the nēnē goose. Now protected, both species were almost wiped out soon after Europeans arrived in Hawaii, bringing invasive nonnative species with them: The nēnē geese, which have no natural predators, were eaten by introduced mongooses, while the silversword was eaten by pigs and harvested for parade float decor. These and many other at-risk flora and fauna continue to exist in Haleakala’s crater, but they live increasingly precarious lives alongside dozens of invasive species.

When she arrives back home, Kingsolver anticipates that her friends will question her choice to spend her Hawaiian vacation trudging through a desolate crater, boiling in the sun, and soaking in freezing rain. She is drawn to places like Haleakala because of what they say about humans’ relationship to nature. Humans have managed to make nearly the entire world their own; even in hostile environments like this one, they have made an irreversible mark. Kingsolver wonders why, as a species obsessed with ancestor worship, humans are not more inclined to preserve the world for their descendants and for all the other forms of life.

Kingsolver visits a museum in a former missile silo. From 1962-1984, the silo housed a Titan atomic bomb, named after the giant creatures of Greek legend and able to destroy entire societies at the push of a button. She describes the desolate scene both outside and within the silo: gravel flatlands and fences enclosing a bunker transformed into a tourist attraction, with strange souvenirs like missile models for kids and missile themed golf shirts.

Inside the silo, signs warn about rattlesnakes and poisonous gas leaks. The tour guide explains that a crew of men used to guard the missile 24 hours a day, constantly waiting for a red alert from the president—an order to blow up a city. Kingsolver assumes that red alerts are rare, but the guide explains that they happened regularly, and could be anything from an unknown radar signal to a test of the crew’s alertness. Although the Titan missiles have been relieved of their nuclear warheads due to their age, undisclosed sites around the country still house live missiles. As the tour nears its end, Kingsolver becomes more and more disturbed by the nonchalant way that the guide and other visitors discuss this place of potential death and destruction. At first she cannot imagine why people would be so enamored with the idea of destroying unknown Soviet cities, but she soon realizes that they see it as a technological marvel, not as a major human mistake. They are obsessed with the machines themselves and view them as a necessary safeguard to deter “threats” to the United States.

In contrast, Kingsolver writes about a visit to the museum in Hiroshima that memorializes one of the few times an atomic bomb was actually used. Although there is a model of the bomb there, the museum does not celebrate its technological sophistication. Instead, it displays burned clothes and other remnants of the lives that were ended, both immediately and slowly, because of that bomb. There is a dress from a young girl who waited for a train, and an apron from a nursing mother. In Hiroshima, Kingsolver realizes what was missing from the Titan museum: a sense of the horror that should surround atomic weaponry.