If the lake could talk

Mist hovers above the lake’s surface in the moments before night lifts its cloak. The still dark water beneath is sullen and shrunken, exposing self-conscious banks. The forest is muted. No bird song, no insect hum, no wind in the trees. Aida crouches at the lake’s edge, damp hair stuck to her face, breath short and sharp. Tension mounts in her chest as the dawn begins to steal her hiding place. She grips a screen in one hand and, in the other, a small watertight disk.

She has planned this for months, though it has always lived within her. It started 28 years ago, mouth sucking on her mother’s milk, eyes searching the world around her. They sat under an elm tree in the garden, her mother’s strong back meeting the silvery ridges of the trunk. In that moment, Aida’s mother saw the dancing leaves and swaying branches reflected in her daughter’s wide, fearless eyes and felt the child’s plump body fill with the tree’s ancient verse. She knew then that Aida had the gift passed down through all the women in her family. The gift of hearing the voices of the trees, the sigh of grasses, the hum of the flowing river and the call of the wind. This innate ability to tune into the natural world meant they had always lived in balance, tending the land, knowing how much they could take and what belonged to other beings. Plant, soil, spider, fox, human – a tapestry of coexistence.

By the time Aida pulled herself up for the first time – small hands grasping the elm’s supportive trunk – she already felt the shift. A growing sorrow vibrating from deep within the tree. She would bury her face into the bark, wrapping her arms around its great girth. But nothing could stop the change from coming, not her will and not the women’s gift. As Aida grew, the plants and elements no longer gently whispered when they needed to replenish nor hummed to signal they were ready for harvest. By the time Aida was 15, she heard the wheat scream for nutrients in dead soil and the ocean weep as it began to acidify. And the chokes of her elm tree, now ravaged by hungry beetles, their numbers swollen in the rising heat. 

Over the years, many of the women lost their gift, the grief of hearing the lamenting planet too much to bear. Aida tried to unhear it too, moving far from the lush green of her childhood and into the dense, grey of the city. She locked herself away in a concrete box, muffling out the natural world. Coding was a way to distract herself at first, she relished the thrill of a string of characters prompting a learned response. From her self-imposed cell, she typed, creating advanced systems to read, interpret and understand. But even through the grey and distractions, the call of the wild still reached her, and in time she began to listen again. And in time, she began to teach her machine to listen too. With every cry from the Earth, she worked, writing line upon line of code so her machine could hear what she heard. Then waiting for it to learn enough to regurgitate the language of nature into written word. For what if the ones who pumped the oil and slashed the forests, who burnt the coal and polluted the waters could know the voices of their victims? Would that stop their plundering?

She started testing it on house plants. A wired disk slipped into the soil, the blinking cursor on the screen waiting to interpret messages from the plant’s intricate roots. The initial translations were basic, single utterances — “Sun.” “Grow.” “Enough.” As her code advanced, so did the machine’s understanding, and so did the plants’ voices. “This room is too dark.” “I need more space!” She let a philodendron wilt to near death and recorded its screams before reviving it, tears streaming down her face. The machine understood so much now, and she wanted to test its limits in a wilder and vaster ecosystem. She collected samples from the thick, sickly river that weaved through the city. But her machine only identified disjointed messages – half words, the ends of sentences. A sample wasn’t enough; she needed to listen to the voice of a whole body. She chose a lake on the edges of the urban sprawl. Once a dumping ground for waste and surrounded by monocrops that stripped the earth of nutrients and leached substances into the water, ageing it in fast motion.

As she dangles the disk above the water, she hears the lake’s anguish — a terrible rasping from the near-lifeless depths. She remembers her grandmother’s stories about lakes that sang to the million organisms thriving within their flanks. Aida isn’t sure if her machine will function in this expanse, with all its complexities and suffering. This is no house plant or river sample. Part of her is also afraid that it will work, for then she will have the means to grant the gift of hearing the elements to others. But what if they don’t want to hear? What then?

Rain pockmarks the lake as Aida lowers the disk into the water. At first, the machine splutters a few words onto the screen, deletes and blinks. Aida waits. Then suddenly, a flourish of characters. A story that begins thousands of years ago, when melting ice filled deep cavities in the earth, and the lakes of the land were formed. A story that tells of bounteous life, of wild and unimaginable swimming creatures now long gone, of flourishing ecosystems where every fish, plant and microorganism had a vital role. And of human life. Of people who once worshipped the lake, who survived off it, so nurtured it and who took only their share of the bounty. Of people that began to change and disconnect from the Earth. Taking too much and ignoring the calls of the elements to stop. And a story that describes a deep hurt and suffering.

A lake’s voice, a machine that learnt to render it and a woman with a tool for change. But would they listen?