Happy Fall and Octavia Butler

By Arjay Ruotolo, Iowa Trails Field Crew Member/ AmeriCorps member

Photo Description: The Trails Crew returns from a day of backcountry trail maintenance in the Mark Twain National Forest.

Weave your sensory tentacles with mine.

The Iowa Trails crew and I are driving back from the Mark Twain Forest in Missouri. I sit cross-legged in the passenger seat of the truck, our Field Coordinator, and my former crew leader, Anna, is behind the wheel, and the rest of the crew is in the back seat. It’s been a year since Anna and I drove side by side in a corps truck, and it feels both like no time has passed and a millenia.

I’m running my fingers along the hairs on my legs—pinching slightly as they brush past. The hairs are soft but tacky with each pinch. It’s early autumn outside, barely crisp, and the leaves have begun their careful decay—a cacophony of lime greens yellowing at the ends, electric reds, and browns still clutching to their limbs. When I stare out the window, all the colors blend together just as my memories from this year and the one before.

Last year, I was a crew member on the Ozark crew, a resident crew based out of Eminence, Missouri. I spent many drives behind the wheel or as a passenger on curving country roads. Back then, I couldn’t wait for the year to end, ready to leave rural life behind, but now I relish the few times I can go to the place where these visceral memories live in the present and the past. To the times when I had a different crew with me.

This year, as a crew leader, there have been a few times I’ve found myself alone on an island surrounded by waves begging to pull me under. I’m not quite as present as I’d like to be. My world is a little smaller at times, existing only in my head. A constant tug o’ war between what I know and what I don’t. It helps, significantly, to have a wonderful crew by my side. It takes a lot for me to stick to my guns when I could easily let go of the rope and let the rip tide pull me in—but I have to remind myself I have them.

Octavia Butler, a late science fiction author, wrote a brilliant trilogy, Xenogenesis, on the complexities of human interiority and blocks in communication. It’s examined through the scope of aliens, a race called Oankali, that come to Earth after nuclear war destroys the planet. They rescue the last remaining humans to repopulate the planet with an alien-human hybrid. Among the many dilemmas is inter-terrestrial communication. Humans rely on their words, which have so many different meanings, culturally, personally, and literally. Oankali have this and more. They tangle their sensory tentacles with each other and share feelings and colors and sensations, an absolute form of communication. True blending. Their memories are total body experiences. I can only offer a piece of that experience, and I can only receive so much.

I relax my eyes. One of Anna’s songs is playing on the radio, which I swear I haven’t heard in a year, but I couldn’t really say for sure. There isn’t much time left in my service term, so it’s pleasant to be hit with nostalgia to remind me that even though this year has had its battles, there’s so much good that dramatically outweighs the bad. To remind me that these are the final days with a really special group of people. There’ll be times when I’m somewhere completely different, watching the leaves change and fall.