When one is an animist, environmentalism isn’t merely about protecting the natural resources for the sake of conserving the resource to be consumable in the future. Instead, it is a way to honor the spirits. It is a way of venerating one’s ancestors.

For the most part, such stories gave parents a bogeyman they could use to scare their young away from the dangers of deep water, for like fire, there is something alluring about water. There’s also a part of me, perhaps a more cynical part, that sees these stories as something else; our loss of connection to these wild spaces.