Elegy with Rampikes

Photo Credit: Dana Barton

I learned a new word recently: rampike. A rampike describes a tree—a dead or dying tree. Rising salt waters make rampikes. 

When I first encountered the word, in Elizabeth Rush’s book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, I assumed it was old, even archaic, but the Oxford English Dictionary records its first use to the middle of the eighteenth century. The word isn’t ancient, but it echoes with old words. With rampart, for example, and with pike, and so it suggests other ancient tools of war: lances, halberds, spikes. The word causes ripple effects. Rampikes and spikes. The dead and dying trees echo the dead and dying on the point’s sharpened end. They are both the result of human assault, which includes anthropogenic climate change.

I have spent about a quarter of my life on the coast of Maine, mostly in the summer months. This summer, I began to see rampikes everywhere. I half-wondered if it was a classic instance of frequency illusion, even though I am a climate change educator. Their sight left me queasy. Trees of bare grey wood pockmarked the shore. 

About five years ago, a group of writers decried a decision to omit words describing the natural world from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Their public letter cited clear links “between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing.” They wondered what other connections would be lost with the loss of the words. Acorn, buttercup, and conker were cut, as were others closer to my rampikes’ decaying roots: herring, lobster, and minnow. Soon thereafter, Robert MacFarlane teamed up with artist Jackie Morris to make a gorgeous book full of Lost Words, incantations to “help children find, love, and protect the natural world.” 

But how do we describe a natural world changing unnaturally fast? Do we even have the words we need to make the connections? We have solastalgia, the distress caused by climate change. What other distressing new words do we need to see what’s before our eyes? 

These questions were very much on my mind when I tried out my new word in a community meeting this summer. The meeting was called to discuss local climate impacts. (The Gulf of Maine is warming 99% faster than the average pace of the world ocean.) About a hundred of us showed up; we shared examples of the changes we were seeing around the island: fishing floats rising higher than the fixed docks they used to ride below, underwater kelp forests whose enormous leaves are fouling fishing gear. I mentioned rampikes and their increased frequency along the shore, ghostly obverses of hypertrophic kelp. 

I went to Maine this summer, as I have long been lucky to do, to work in more quiet—away from the humming collaborations on climate change education that occupy my school year. I had hoped for quiet to write, but instead rampikes resounded. I wandered the shores, surveying their specters. I produced very little. Maybe it was a form of mourning, although my obsession might be more melancholy than mourning. Mostly, I was just really sad.  

I wanted to write the trees an elegy. But that form’s traditional closure, its solace, is everywhere missing. Rising waters have hollowed elegy of its essence, dead and dying on the shores. Rampikes in the end index pure loss. Words fail me.

Editors’ note: This piece was invited as part of an ongoing dialogue with the Penn Program on Environmental Humanities (PPEH), a conversation that extends beyond the waters of New York City and began in May 2019 when UNY Founding Editor Nicki Pombier Berger spoke at the PPEH Teaching and Learning with Rising Waters Convening. Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of PPEH.    

Object

Rampike

Body of Water

Penobscot Bay

About the Artist

Bethany Wiggin researches, teaches, and writes about culture, ecology, and climate change with focuses on the world of the North Atlantic and its multilingual writers, including in the American mid-Atlantic. She is a co-editor of Timescales:Ecological Temporalities across Disciplines (forthcoming) and is at work on Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods. She has been on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania since 2003 and in 2014 founded the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, an incubator for engaged, experimental scholarship and teaching on university campuses and beyond, which she now directs. She grew up in rural Maine and makes an annual return migration to Penobscot Bay with her family and children, including their dog, Lucille Ball.