When I was 20 I was doing an internship at a bookstore in Minneapolis. It was the year of the “polar vortex” with temps regularly reaching 20 below with a wind chill nearly at 50 below. There were white-out conditions some nights and the whole city shut down in an emergency at least twice. I had to take breaks between attempts at shoveling my car out because my nose would bleed from the cold, and digging down from above to reach my car felt pointless.
I lived in an upstairs room in my boss’s house, with the singular window blind trapped shut under plastic to keep the drafts down. There were two sweet kids in the house, and we did a couple extreme cold weather experiments, throwing hot water outside to watch it evaporate instantly, trying to see if our spit would freeze and shatter before hitting the sidewalk. I ate a lot of rice and beans. When the temperature was back up just above zero Fahrenheit, I’d take the train a half hour south every couple days to the Minnesota river to visit a dying pelican who got sick in the sudden cold and couldn’t fish in the one patch of open water not frozen over– a sewage treatment plant outflow.
My friend Max was doing a different internship about half an hour away on the outskirts of town and we shared dinner a couple times to try to keep the cold from creeping in too far. Max was early on in his transition, and this was the last season I experienced before realizing I was too. Halfway through the internship I had a nervous breakdown and had to leave to return to Ohio. I felt trapped inside, trapped in the cold, trapped in the low light, trapped in the city. I drove 13 hours straight through the night and had a weekend to recover before starting an orchard and sugar bushing gig on a local farm.
On Fridays, myself and another person were tasked with pruning the apple trees. We carried around antique wooden ladders that came to a point at the top for three point stability against the trees and ground, and buckets of diluted bleach to dunk the snips in between fire blighted trees. We smoked weed behind the trunks when the boss wasn’t watching, even though he and his friends were doing the same thing in the sauna heat of the sap boiling down in the sugar shack.
Work the rest of the week was to drive around with a couple people to different maple heavy wood lots and collect two gallon aluminum buckets from the unlined taps and dump them in a 250 gallon trailer. Two of the men I worked with insisted on catcalling every woman they saw and got heated whenever I called them on it. One of the woodlots we tapped was at then Attorney General Mike DeWine’s house about 7 miles outside town.
Maple sap before it’s syrup is still sweet. Sometimes in winter it’s the only clean water around. Sometimes we had to dump the harvest of any given tree if mice or chipmunks got into it for the sugar and drowned.
I’m writing this 10 years after I worked that gig. I’ve been on HRT for 3 years now, and have had one surgery with another planned this year. I have small tits and my skin is softer but mostly I can just see myself when I look in the mirror.
Mike DeWine is now governor of Ohio. This week he signed an executive order and draft regulations which, both by stipulation and chaotic opacity, threatens to take away most trans related care from people of all ages in the state. I just got back from driving a county over to pick up extra estrogen from a caring cis person, and am dropping progesterone and a different kind of estrogen off to another trans woman an hour and a half away this weekend.
I’ve spent the last 72 hours convincing my closest friends to stay alive and helping them make plans for leaving. Several of my people are field botanists and ecologists and are so tied to this land, but we are also tied to our bodies and the selves we have nurtured and promised ourselves into being. I feel trapped in Ohio, trapped in my love of the land, of the people around me. My convictions are telling me to stay and fight, but I also feel trapped in my body for the first time in years, not because of who I am but because of what threatens me with lack and neglect, something I did to myself for too long.
This is the coldest I have felt since fleeing Minnesota, the coldest I’ve felt since numbing my fingers pulling aluminum buckets from their taps to dump the bodies of rodents on Mike DeWine’s lawn. I don’t know where I’m going from here except across, whether that’s state lines or convictions or legal boundaries or gender. I promised myself as much 10 years ago, and no matter the temperature of the dying world of men I’ll never look back on saccharinity cooked from the collateral of mice or of transexuals or of anyone.
Let this unreformable, unredeemable dying system eat itself from the inside out. We can make it on the edges in the brush piles, propping each other up and sheltering each other from wind under the sap running moon, shifting like fire blight creeping through the orchards til no sweet apple is left to reach the mouth of another pig.
Emma Loomis-Amrhein is a trans naturalist who is particularly enamored of birds and moths. Her debut collection of poetry, evening primroses, (April 2021) is available from Recenter Press. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and resides in over a dozen publications, most recently orangepeel mag and Open Minds Quarterly. She lives in rural, southern Ohio.
