In 2024, Jenny Chamarette asked questions by the water.
The Overflow
I question the wisdom of this walk. The thick air and burning glare overhead make everything an optical illusion. My eyes misjudge distance, pace, depth. Last week I went outside only as the sun rose above the farm’s glasshouses, or sank below the mountain line in the west. At those times the light saturates the land with blue shadows and rose gold mists. But in the mirage of daylight, I’ve made a promise to myself. And to the water.
The whole estate derives its name from this place: the spring by the little oak. The oak is long gone, but the stone outhouse protecting the watercourse remains. Here the water does not spring so much as surface. Internal steps lead down to a covered doorway where mind-your-own-business (soleirolia soleirolii) creeps across the soaked floor. Outside, steps stacked against whitewashed walls lead up to a crawl space beneath the pitched roof. Large scats lie at the entrance, fresh and full of seeds. Groundhogs are large enough to leave those behind: I’ve seen their shy, undulating gait like tawny waves in the grass. They have another name: woodchuck, from wuchak, a loan word from an unidentified Southern New England Algonquian language. Algonquian words are now being reclaimed by the descendants of Indigenous American tribes who once populated the arable land and hunting grounds of Fauquier County, where Oak Spring sits. Algonquian, Iroquois and Siouan-speaking communities were the earliest to be decimated or expelled by European settlers like Captain John Smith, who in 1608 named and claimed Fauquier as English.
Wuchak means ‘fisher mammal’. Woodchucks are beings of the water. One lives in the gutter near the Schoolhouse on the Rokeby farm side of the former Mellon estate, now the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in North Virginia, where my five week summer residency is located. The Mellons were part of the American banking elite – capitalism’s own aristocracy. Paul Mellon sponsored the Yale Centre for British Art; his wife Bunny established a foundation to honour the legacy of her garden and her library of priceless rare books on botany, horticulture, agriculture. Her foundation brought 12 of us here: artists, writers, scholars. By night we watch planes wink towards Washington DC’s orange sky-burn. Deer leap across the old airstrip; a coyote pack giggles its way across the estate, revealing twenty pairs of eyes reflected in the green catch of a car’s headlights. By day folds of land and stands of trees shift subtly. I know planes, deer, trees. But here I do not know them at all. None of it is my land. Nor does it belong to the people who once owned it.
The outhouse is the oldest remaining building on site, protected by semi-aquatic plants and large rodents. But I can’t smell the earth, plants or scat with any accuracy. The red loam is gently floral; not the gamey intensity of an English meadow. In the fuggy air I am distracted. My scent vocabulary, like my British English, is half-baked. It’s tick season, and my skin itches in vivid anticipation. Their nonchalance obsesses and repulses me, and on walks around the estate my co-residents have already picked up a couple.
I turn left, past the dead oak that homes European hornets, towards the spring-fed ponds, and the lake beyond. Pond number one’s pump rumbles as I pass; two aerated circles bubble constantly from the green floor.
Where in most of Europe I hold the names of passing plants like prayer beads, here I blunder by, unknowing and speechless. I see only resemblance, not identity. It takes hours of detailed reconstruction, scouring plant identifiers online and in the library to locate even one species. There is so much I do not see because of it: I only notice the colourful highlights. In place of yellow-headed dandelions there is blue chicory, a naturalized colonial import. In the British landscape blue is precious; here it is ubiquitous. Conversely the Virginia creeper that bleeds across the walls of large European houses came from this part of the world: a poisonous landgrabber tamed as a colonial pet. I’m not blind to the plants filling every crevice of my senses. I just don’t know how to parse their language. The prickle of it stings my eyes, even under cloud. I am a foreign body, surrounded by strange bodies whose language I do not speak.
As I turn toward the second larger pond, a bevy of trumpeter swans rests watchfully on the other side. I pay no attention until, having come round in a half circle, I realise that they are sat on the path itself. A grey juvenile in that distinctive phase of wan, uncertain adolescence, nestles between three adults. The group huddles close, breathing nasal alarm. I have heard of broken arms dealt swiftly by angry swan parents. I gaze back across the pond: it’s not far, but wet air clasps my lungs, and retracing my steps feels like going back the wrong way through time. The bird who has watched me the longest, neck erect and collared by a four-digit number, turns and hisses. I ask for permission to pass in my useless language, gesturing my direction of travel with my hands. How is it that words are what humans use to say what they mean, when they don’t? Words take decades to travel; nerves are lightning-fast. The swans expel black turds onto the grass, shifting from sitting to standing to sitting again. Eventually they inch down the bank, eyeing me sideways as I walk on. I turn and bow feebly.
The path veers sharp right, with a dip toward a small wooded grove I cannot name, and a rippling stream filled with yellow flag irises – another invasive import, apparently, from the Mellons. The temperature dips in the clammy shade, but this offers less relief than I hoped for. I sip water as a Northern Flicker, a large woodpecker with a scarlet streak on its nape, sends out distress calls from branch to branch overhead.
During my walk I’ve been messaging my friend S, who earlier in the day sent me a reassuringly grey video of turgid grey waters and puffy grey skies against fawn grey shingle from Hastings on Britain’s south coast. I ask S to pull a Tarot card, to help light my way. Because my unplaceable angst in being here, under a relentless sun in a region that unnervingly resembles England’s rolling hills, colonized on authority of England’s virgin queen, torn from millennia of stewardship by the Algonquian and Sioux and Iroquois people who called this home, cultivated as a billionaire’s paradise and now waiting in the shadow of full-blown fascism, this angst of the uncanny has been impossible to shift despite all the treasures of this residency. I feel the repugnance of self-criticism. Why am I inert during the day, shedding a hundred or so words as though they were hewn from rock? How can I live with the conundrum of this beautiful place underscored by centuries of violence?
S is kind. A writer, they understand the pressures of residencies. The golden prospect of uninhibited writing time meets the uncomfortable realities of self-reprobation for failing, always, to do or to be enough. They also understand how the land starts to speak.
I ask them to pull when I am by the lake. So that I can ask questions I don’t have words for.
As I approach the third and largest body of water, perhaps still a pond but certainly big enough to call a lake, water birds take flight across the green bloom. Stiff angular cattails and bullrushes clack together like the sides of wooden boats. Close to the waterline improbably huge pink swamp mallow flowers merge with swards of long maroon panicum grass. I don’t move closer: I’ve watched too many videos about tick transmission via lurid seedheads. From the waters a small dark arrowhead rises to observe me. Moments later it descends. The ripples behind it are too concentric to form the sidewinds of a water snake. A terrapin or a turtle then. The dark point repeats its pattern several times: sinuous ripple, dark rise, ripple, rise. Then a final tail, before the swells and the arrowhead disappear.
Holes in the water, where the life comes in.
As I round the lake’s curve, the algal bloom and duckweed part, leaving indigo waters beneath. On this side large electric blue dragonflies – common green darners, anax junius – dance between switchgrass and teasels, circling round and over the waters before returning to shore. Their figure-of-eight patterns carve up the lake into near and far. Beyond them, small round patches of mirror-like water are encircled by ribbons made by the breeze.
Holes in the water, like unshaped punctuation.
I check my phone for S’s reply, but my signal is poor and the photograph I send them of the lake and its holes has the familiar dotted circle of halted delivery. I place my hand on my belly – though it is the body part I most struggle with – and close my eyes, unstopping the voices of crickets and cicadas. As the tiny river of sweat down my spine makes itself known, I ask the question again.
There is no response: the dragonflies are gone and S is silent. So I head laboriously towards Goose Creek, which runs along the furthest point of the estate – the property as it is properly put in American English. Goose Creek winds north towards the Potomac river, then outward to the Chesapeake Bay, along which John Smith in 1612 mapped out hundreds of indigenous chiefdoms living in its watershed. In Algonquian Goose Creek was called “Cokongoloto,” meaning “creek or stream of geese or swans.” The trumpeters knew it. I did not. The water still speaks of those who are gone.
The land dips and rises ahead, and in the loop that runs beside the stream, huge clumps of yellow wingstem (verbesina alternifolia) tower above my head. Sunshine bursts of straggling petals lean at obscure angles across the path. Bees and flies flock to them, and though the creek’s gauzy ozone scent passes between the stalks, the sounds of the slow brown waters are obscured by pollinators. Along this corridor of yellow crowns, I wind over and under green frilled blades. One of the librarians at Oak Spring suggested I swim in the creek, but the wingstems guard sentry over it. I am learning the guest’s rules.
The path circles back to the longer route, and I retrace the slow rise that returns to the lake. Unable to kick my phone obsession, I pounce the moment a new message from S arrives. They’ve been out for food – am I ready? I text back quickly: yes, and walking back to the lake. I hadn’t hoped for a response so quickly. Questions asked by the water don’t always return the same day, or week, or month.
Back by the indigo-green waters, questions float to meet hollow circles among the wind-blown ribbons.
S sends me a photo. Below a symbolic sun dripping with tiny honey-coloured teardrops, a cup overflows clear cerulean, streaming into an outstretched palm with elegant nails and dark chestnut skin. The water falls through the palm’s fingers, sliding deeply into an infinite lake below, whose ripples edge away slowly. The Ace of Cups.
Don’t be afraid to begin in overflowing, writes S.
What I have been waiting for rises. Tears burn but they don’t break through. The river of my back holds me beside the lake’s green body.
Overflowing pours from sun to cup to hand to waters that drift in blue ribbons.
Between me, the land, the lake and S comes an answer 4000 miles long, 5 time zones deep. Holes where the life comes in.
It comes in the overflow between us.
(With thanks to S for the Tarot and the specificity, to Oak Spring Garden Foundation for the generous residency, and to the land, waters, and stewards of the Tidewater and the Piedmont.)
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Jenny Chamarette is a writer, researcher and arts critic, curator and mentor based in London, UK. Shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo and Nature Chronicles prizes, and longlisted for the Nan Shepherd and Space Crone prizes, Jenny’s non-fiction has been published in anthologies by Saraband and Elliott & Thompson, in Sight & Sound, Litro, Lucy Writers Platform, and Club des Femmes among others. Jenny’s upcoming book ‘Q is for Garden’ explores the radical relationships between sexuality, nature, culture and cultivation.