The Disappearing Shore by Roberta Park

Author:Roberta Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Climate change stories, Future of humanity, Positive hope for the Earth, Environmental change and challenge, Human courage now, Hope in the dark, Black humor fiction, Survival stories, Environmental ethics, Life in the Future, Eco action plan, Eco stories, Peak oil
Publisher: Roberta Park
Published: 2019-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Kristen

I was at the supermarket the other day checking out this tropical durian - a bizarre spiky fruit that’s supposed to be really intense and smelly inside. I was trying to decide whether I should buy it when this old lady started staring at me with this nasty look like I was literally causing her pain.

At first I thought she might be warning me not to buy it, but then she started to look me up and down like she was going to take me on.

So okay, I’m not the most conventional looking person but I wasn’t doing anything to her, talking to her, looking at her - nothing. I was just getting into this spiky durian space wondering if I should inflict it on my roommates.

And that’s when she called me a heathen. So I said, “What’s that?” and she screwed up her face even more then turned around and walked away.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t a compliment so I looked it up when I got home and found out it means “pagan”. And I thought, fuck yeah! Good call Mrs. Face-like-a-tight-shoe. If I’d known she was on to me, I would’ve flashed her my secret handshake. It’s something my friend Dave came up with. It’s not the handshake that proves your membership, it’s the dirt under your nails.

We do guerrilla gardening and other stuff like that and grow food wherever we can. We do it all on our bikes with trailers and wagons and whatever else we can get our hands on. We make money doing “edible landscape” for people who don’t want to do their own gardening, and who think it’s cool to grow food. It is cool to grow food, so we don’t mind doing it for them.

Some of the people in our house grow these amazing oyster mushrooms year round and others make wine and hard cider in big carboys we keep in the basement. And we make a lot of our own medicine from the plants we grow around town and out in the country. Some we use dried, others we put in tinctures and ointments. We treat our pets too, unless it’s really serious and then we’ll take them to a vet.

So I guess that makes me a pagan, for putting my faith in nature. One of the guys who lives in our house is an environmental lawyer and totally committed, even after working in the field for a long time. He’s kind of old, in his 40’s, but is just the coolest guy. Jared. We were smoking some pot after the incident in the supermarket and I told him about it and he laughed and said I should’ve bought the durian for my accuser as a “goodwill” gesture.

That’s why he’s so good at his job, he can jam any situation. But then he got kind of quiet and I could see the wheels turning in his head and he said, “You know, that’s what we are. We’re the new pagans. That’s why it’s such a tough sell, that’s what we’re up against.

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