Prompt Entry #8

Thankfully, my understanding of the literature of nature is substantially different now than it was at the semester's start. I see it now as a mode of writing, not a genre in the strict sense, and that makes me more receptive to prose that I might otherwise pigeon-hole as memoir or reflective essay. Edward Abbey was an author that I had read previously, as was Rachel Carson, and they served as a template for my understanding of nature writing. I used to think of nature writing as being in service of some agenda or cause, at least in part. While I no longer think of that as a defining characteristic, I still tend to prefer the literature that is written to serve a purpose beyond itself and beyond the experiences of the writer and the audience.

There's a lot at stake with the literature of nature -- more so than with other genres or modes, I think. Either it seeks to inform and persuade, or it tries to engender an emotional connection to a specific place or to placedness in general. The import of this is ultimately to foster a sense of deep appreciation, which taken to its logical conclusion becomes an ingrained sense of stewardship. With the exponential growth rate of the industrialized world and the continued industrialization of the third world, what is at stake in the very biosphere that supports us all. The best way to get someone to work to preserve something is to get them to care about it first. We are a pathos-driven species first and foremost, as I see it. Individually, we have moments of great lucidity and logical reasoning, but as a species we tend to muck about and collectively ignore basic logic with regards to our industry and activities. And that's the burden of nature writing: doing it well enough to stir the passions of an audience to the point that both the logos and the pathos of an argument are too great to ignore. Think about Nash's "Why Wilderness" -- a great logical argument, but easy to forget, unlike Turner's "The Abstract Wild," where it's hard to forget the rage the author conveys so relentlessly throughout. Both are an attempt to foster a respect and appreciation for the biotic world in its many forms and values, and thus both are steering us towards a sense of stewardship.

With that said, the easiest way to foster a deep connection with the natural world is to foster a personal connection with a single place. It is difficult, if not impossible, to just start caring about the health of the planet as a whole without already knowing what it is like to care about a specific part of that world. We all had that experience this semester viz the places we observed for these weblogs. Theoretically, if we each spent a minimum of twenty minutes at our individual locations once a week for the eight weeks required by the syllabus, then we each would have spent a minimum of two hours and forty minutes of deliberate placedness there. Less than three hours total does not seem like a lot of time all at once, but a lot can be gained from making that time a deliberate exercise in inhabiting a single space over the course of months. I'm sure we all spent more than 2:40 at our locations, which only proves the point further.

By actively and deliberately experiencing a single place in this way, we practice a sort of projected introspection. Our chosen locales become a part of our identities in the context of this course, and our experiences of them are equal parts outward observation and inward reflection. We went, we observed, and we reflected on how those observations affected us personally. Imagine a Mobius Strip, if you will, as an illustration of what we experienced. Us, our places, and our experiences of each continue in one ever-overturning loop, where we always return with time to the point to where we started. Our experiences of the outer world lead us back into ourselves, which, if we developed those thoughts enough, lead us right back out again, and so on ad infinitum. Even our process of physically going out, experiencing, then returning and writing about it, then returning again is something of a Mobius strip, a cycle that covered more than the simple physical dimensions of the circuit; a three-dimensional approach to place, self, experience, and expression. Our experience of those places is in turn physical, perceptual, intellectual, and back again, all in one continuous motion.

Still, I don't know how I feel about Nine Mile Run. The lower half of it stinks like an open sewer, the upper half is disconcertingly discolored and laden with all manner of litter, and the more attractive joggers never make more than one circuit past my usual spots. Every time it rains, the banks are covered in garbage until the current pulls it down and out to the Monongahela, or Pittsburgh park services makes a sweep through with volunteers. I enjoy its open spaces and the occasional mallard sighting. I enjoy the chance to be out among grasses and trees so close to my house along a busy residential road in Squirrel Hill. I'm sure I'll enjoy it even more once the trees take to leaf and the flowers start blooming. Part of me wanted to love the stream, how it keeps struggling against the wastes the city introduces into it, how it keeps flowing and flirting with being a clean, natural flow again. At the moment, I don't exactly love NMR. I respect it, and greatly. I appreciate what it has gone through and I appreciate that people continue to work to restore it as best as they can. I am going to continue to help combat the build-up of litter, and I will most likely keep returning, particularly once the green returns.

I probably will not write about NMR anymore, though. This weblog has been a serious help in getting me to rethink how I write about the natural world, and about place in general, and NMR was a good tool to test my abilities to interact with a place on different levels. My experiences have gone from fondness to empathy to disgust and elsewhere, and writing about it has presented me with some excellently helpful challenges. I feel much better equipped to participate meaningfully in the literary tradition of nature writing, and I will likely continue to participate, though most likely not through writing about NMR. It has been a testing ground for me, but it does not hold much more appeal for me as a developing writer. More can definitely be said about that stream, though. Maybe it's my chronic wanderlust, but I think I want to leave NMR behind me as a subject of writing. It hasn't worked its way into the poems of my final portfolio, partially because I've seen it as an academic exercise and not a poetic wellspring. A few poems will likely be written, and probably soon, but I want to take some time to go back and just experience it all again without the structure of a deadline in the background. I want to take some time with it as something other than an object of investigation and see if have something more to say about it.

Prompt Entry #7

Mountains are part of the background of my life. From outside the window of a childhood bedroom in El Paso to the horizons around my former home in Montana, and now (in a diminutive way) the hills of Pennsylvania, mountains have defined the spaces of my life. I feel most at home when I am in them, and when I am out in flatter lands I feel lost, adrift, indefinitely disoriented. They stood over the city of my birth, and I am always returning to them in one form or another. And that is what they have been to me: always changing from one form to another. 

Their ubiquity is something that I struggle with in my writing and in the bigger decisions I have to make. I do not understand the extent of what they symbolize for me. As a young child, the Franklin mountains dominated the view from my bedroom window, a rough southern off-shoot of the Rockies. I was transfixed by their jagged outline and how they absorbed the red glow of the evening sun. At that age, they were the edge of my world. When my older brother and his scout troop went camping in the Franklins, I stood in our house's front door, staring at the summits, imagining what the city would look like from that height. Reaching the summit, or even coming close, was the pinnacle of achievement to me at that age. We moved out of the state and into Ohio before I was old enough to attempt it myself. And that began what I consider my “valley years.” It would be too long a time before we moved again to another stretch of the Rockies – this time in southwest Montana.

The Gallatin valley is surrounded on all sides by a confluence of three mountain ranges: the Bridgers, the Gallatins, and the Tobacco Roots. There, encompassed by mountains in all directions, I feel a great sense of security. It is inexplicable, but nonetheless real. Recently, I have been thinking about the cliché of “leaving your heart” in someplace you miss. It still sounds tacky and uncreative, but I think I understand it better than I use to. If my heart is left beating somewhere outside of Bozeman, I can feel secure knowing I have the mountains as my stony ribcage. They are the frame of my life. They protect and they define what I still consider to be my home, despite that I have lived in Pittsburgh for the past three years. When I return to Bozeman, I return to the mountains, and in a sense, I return to myself. Fishing the streams of the Gallatin mountains is a form of introspection, retreating into a larger self, probing the waters and searching out the tiniest nooks and crevices. The mountains in my life now are a way I can define myself. They are a body I can adopt and look out from inside. Mountains are where I hide my better secrets and where I go searching for them.

Place Entry #7

Hello again, everybody. When we last met, Nine Mile Run was suffering from some unidentified cloudiness. Returning after a two week absence, I found that it had cleared to some degree, but was still a disturbing shade of unnatural. While I originally thought it might have been minerals leeched from the rock under Edgewood and Swissvale from the rains that week, I have to reconsider what is actually in the water. The last scientific reports on the stream available on-line are dated from 2008 and show a strong increase in the chloride content of the waters between January and the end of March. Of course, this data is not current, and barring an actual chemical test (which I can neither afford nor preform myself), I can only speculate that the change in color and opacity is due to an increased level of some chloride compound - as to what compound, I haven't the foggiest idea.

Daltrey, Entwistle, Townshend, and Moon are all not beyond suspicion, though. Maybe Moon is, come to think of it. And Entwistle. Now I'm depressed. Time to pour a drink, don the headphones, and blast some Quadrophenia.

I have been holding off on this post since this past Thursday, when I was last in Frick Park. This weekend I was set to spend some time in Ohiopyle State Park on a writing retreat, and I wanted the chance to distance myself from Pittsburgh for a few days before I could write about it anymore. The semester is nearly done and soon I will have no reason to return to NMR regularly, or even at all, outside of my own whims. So I have to wonder now: what can I say now about Nine Mile Run that doesn't just re-hash old gripes or questions? Granted, the purpose of these blogs we maintain is to get us to examine a physical space in new and intimate ways. But what new ways are there?

Coming back from Ohiopyle, seeing clear-running streams free of litter and residential debris, I have to feel even worse for poor old NMR. It is enticingly easy to look at a stream like this one and say "Well, it's a little ol' stream dumping into a big ol' river, so it can't be all that bad in the big picture." True, the stream has improved greatly since the Homestead Steel Mill shut down and the Army Corps of Engineers removed what slag they could from the area, and true, it is a tiny stream emptying into the giant that is the Monongahela River, which helps form the Ohio river only nine miles away, which then empties into the even bigger Mississippi, and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico and then the great Global Ocean. Whew. One creek draining into thousands of miles of river and countless gallons of water - what's the harm, really? and why should I keep caring?

On the drive back from Ohiopyle today, a friend of mine mentioned that she had once floated a craft down most of the length of the Mississippi river. While she was planning this expedition, she had befriended a biologist who warned her to "not stick your head underwater below Wisconsin." Wisconsin. That still leaves everything from about Dubuque, Iowa, to New Orleans. Google Maps kindly informs me that would be a drive of about 1,014 miles, closely hugging the Mississippi river. That is only a little bit shorter than a drive from Pittsburgh to Miami, or about the same distance from LA to Denver. And the reason why? Submerging one's head in the river below that point exposes one to wicked infections from bacteria like fecal coliform bacteria that come in part from sewage discharges into the likes of tributary streams like NMR. Granted, more of the bacteria comes from agricultural runoff, but combined sewage overflow systems (like Pittsburgh's) are a contributing factor. Imagine a thousand miles of river contaminated by farm runoff and equally contaminated tributaries. It is difficult to picture that distance, especially considering that it is a thousand miles of the most voluminous river on this continent. The Mighty Mississippi - America's Toilet. All those little contributions all along the river, the tributaries, and all of their watersheds. All of that land - hundreds of thousands of square miles all channeled into one river. When you think of it in those terms, it is hard not to see the unavoidable connection we share with everyone along our watershed and the rivers that flow out of it. Thursday, while I was streamside, I say an empty bottle of Mountain Dew drift past me near the opposite bank. By now, it may be rounding Ohio, well on its way to pass by Missouri, where all the rest of Pittsburgh's trash ends up (*cough*Thom Dawkins*cough*).

But it was hard to focus on the negatives when I saw some of the grasses start to come up again, little bits of green unfolding along the banks. I could not help but feel a little bit more cheerful knowing that the leaves, the flowers, and all of the birds and insects they attract would soon be coming back to lend some vibrancy to the brown and grey backdrop of the barren trees. And Thom, if you are still reading, thanks for being a good sport. I have a great deal of respect for you, and just needed a cheap, edgy laugh.

From Deer Creek Trail, a tributary stream to NMR.

Prompt entry #6

There is no room in my life for faith. My world can be explained quite sufficiently through logical deduction and the advances of modern science. The complexity of life? The long-term result of gene mutation and the selective processes of evolution. The diversity of plants and animals? Adaptation and evolution rather than divine creation. The miracle of life? No miracle at all, but the result of complex biochemical reactions, each one reducible to constituent elements and which can be altered by their addition, subtraction, or alteration. There is no room in my life for faith, and no belief in the divine. And this is no apology for my positions, no platform to denounce the devout; this is the account of a moment of challenge, my one flirtation with the belief in a God.

I was only in-country for a month, and only four or five days in the crater. We had started in Tarangire (tare-an-GEAR-ee) National Park, northern Tanzania, a day or two drive from Lake Victoria. Tarangire is a lowland plain, a grassy expanse of prairie, baobabs, palisades, and the Grumeti River. The park itself is only a day's drive from the Serengeti, with the crater lying straight between them. From the park, we drove northwards, into the heavy treeline of the NCA - the Ngorongoro (n-GOR-on-goro) Conservation Area. The NCA covers an area encircling a caldera, the corpse of a volcano that collapsed some two to three million years ago, the belly of which lies 2,000 feet below the rim and covers more than 100 square miles. From the rim, the opening is about nine miles wide - a nine mile wide bowl scooped out of rock and tree and cloud line. But those are the numbers, and numbers are dry and interchangeable.

There's no easy way to scale the caldera's sides from the south or the east, save for a lone jeep trail that winds and switchbacks its way to the top. The drive was hairy, a one-lane dirt road cut into the sopping wet mountainside and dense vegetation, supply trucks and safari-equipped Land Cruisers passing each other in opposite directions, rumbling vehicles lumbering past each other at odd intervals on their way up and down the mountain. More than once, I gripped the support arms that lifted our Land Cruiser's roof, white-knuckling those moments when I could have sworn we were about to collide. Western driving sensibilities, I guess. It took nearly an hour to crawl the muddied road to the rim, and to the first easy breath of the drive. And suddenly, there it was.

Out of the Cruiser, onto the soft red earth. We were in the cloud line, and the clouds were lifting. After a few moments of grey waiting, the skies cleared and the clouds rolled back to uncover the caldera floor. From my vantage on the rim, the whole crater was visible, the whole width of the floor, the yellow acacia forest just below me, the Lerai Stream that feeds the forest draining into Lake Magadi, and the flat open grasslands, all 2000 feet below. Clouds were still breaking overhead, streaming light in iridescent shafts that splashed onto the crater floor. The air back in Tarangire was hot and arid; up here, there were cool misty breezes that culled off ribbons of cloud, pulled them down to sweep around us on the crater rim. The rim was a narrow band, barely 200 yards at its widest, only maybe 50 yards where I was standing, but it was the line between two harshly opposite worlds. Coming from the arid grasses of Tarangire, the dusty outer strips of Serengeti, Ngorongoro was a living cauldron of Eden, a lush enclosure of impossible paradise. The NCA encompasses the nearby Olduvai gorge - the site of some of our oldest known ancestral remains. From the lush garden of Ngorongoro to the arid, rocky lowlands around it - could this have been our Eden, our true first paradise amidst the harshness of the African grasslands? Maasai herders have been known to live here seasonally for at least the past 3000 years, so could it be more than a simple coincidence? Biologically speaking, mankind had its genesis somewhere within a few day's hike from here. Could our first mothers and fathers have passed down some tale, some information to their successive generations to call them back to this one perfect spot, to tell them that we came from a perfect beginning, an unspoiled heaven of rains and fruits and animals that move in abundance in and out of the crater's north slope?

It couldn't be. There's no way it could be, but still - there's no room in my life for faith, but there's never enough for that kind of wonder.

Place entry #6: There's something in the water

I had wanted to write this place entry yesterday (Friday), but something was troubling me about Nine Mile Run. There was something in the water, and I couldn't quite tell what it was. The creek had taken on a milky blue-green hue that I hadn't yet seen, and I couldn't figure out what was causing it. At first, I thought it might have been some kind of oil or petroleum product that had been washed from the watershed from the past day or two of light rains, but it didn't have an odor and there was no oily light refraction on the surface. The only other times I've seen waters naturally look like this have been after the glacier and winter snow melts in the Rockies. Mountain glacial ice often has the same blueish hue from trapped minerals, and when they melt at the start of Spring, those minerals are washed into the rivers, turning them cloudy and bluish-green. But this is Pittsburgh - a land not known for its vast fields of glacial ice. So when I was stream-side yesterday, I was at a loss as to just what was happening to the creek.

NMR on Firday near South Braddock Ave, close to where it leaves its underground tunnel.

We haven't seen more than a scattering of snow for the past several weeks, and there hasn't been enough rain to cause a heavy runoff for about a month. The waters are back down in the creek, but they're cloudier than they were even a week ago when the runoff was in full swing. I did notice that much of the surrounding hillside - at least the parts that were exposed enough to examine - had the same steely blue-green tint. Shale, I think. 

Right behind where the previous photo was taken.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, NMR only runs above ground for a little over two miles from South Braddock Avenue down to the Monongahela River. Prior to that, the stream is housed by a tunnel that runs under the borough of Edgewood. I'm not sure where the headwaters are, but I am fairly certain that most of NMR is housed in that tunnel. If most of the ground around here is that blueish shale, and most of NMR runs through a tunnel dug under Edgewood, then perhaps the saturated ground was leeching minerals into the creek. Then again, the ground has been saturated for weeks, and the runoff was never this cloudy. With all my clever postulations, I'm no closer to understanding what's happening in the waters. I decided I would go back there again this afternoon to see if anything has changed. In the past 24 hours, ain't a single thing changed with the waters.

NMR today, still looking the same.

But ah! the sun today! The past few days have been the first real taste of Spring, and the animal presence in the park is the loudest and most active yet this year. On my excursion yesterday, I heard a raucous chattering in the central span of marsh and reeds the lies a few yards in from the creek. It wasn't nesting birds - it was coming from the reeds, and the ground was too wet for ground-nesting birds. It nearly sounds like the chatter of birds Could they bee tree frogs? Some species of chorus frog or the northern cricket frog? Whatever they were, they must have just hatched in the past day or two. Going back today, I could still hear them in the same little marsh. I was tempted to sneak into the reeds and try to spot one, but I held myself back. As much as I was curious to see just what was out there, I had to remind myself that I didn't have a place in the marsh, and no matter how careful I was, I could still spook the frogs and disturb their ecosystem, the world into which they were just recently born. The best I could do was shoot a quick video to record their chatterings and give some idea of the marshland where they've suddenly come to life. Squatting at the edge of the established trail, I squinted into the reeds and grasses in a vain attempt to spot some kind of movement to pair up with the sounds, but all I saw were grasses bending in the wind and a single robin hopping in the mud, picking something or other out of the ground and hopping away. 

(A word of advice - you may want to turn up your volume in order to hear the frogs.)

Place entry #5

So yes, this and the last prompt entry are being submitted just after midnight on March 7th. The delay comes from two equally unsound and indefensible reasons: waiting for rain and solitary binge drinking. The latter is self-evidently inexcusable, so let's discuss the former.

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry that featured the outflow points where the city's storm drain and sewage system overflow combine to dump into the creek during "rain events." In case the dangers inherent in that statement with regards to water quality are not apparent, please reference the below sign (taken where Nine Mile Run exits its underground tunnel - a post for a later date):

And it doesn't photograph well, either.

So, about the rain. I had read that even 1/10th of an inch of rain can cause those overflow points to expel untreated human waste into the creek, so I have been keeping an eye on weather reports to anticipate when I could see one of the so-called "fecal fountains." (please see Place Entry #3 for an explanation). Well, this past Friday saw the rains start in the afternoon, and they continued on into Saturday evening. When I noticed that the rains would have reached a point that would have stressed the city's storm drains and caused a sewage overflow into NMR, I was excited, but I was also too drunk to do anything about it (please reference the above note on binge drinking). So Friday, the prime fecal fountain spotting window, was a bust. I had to wait until I sobered up enough on Saturday to drive down and take a walk to survey the damage to the stream. It was still raining, thankfully - or for that matter, unthankfully, because the stream was a frightful mess. Donning my much-ridiculed duster and Stetson, I decided to see just how bad a full night of rain actually looked.

Above: walking punchline/park flasher/anybody want to buy a watch?

Where can I begin? The sheer amount of litter that had accumulated in the week or so since I'd been there last (an inebriated 4am excursion that thankfully retains no incriminating photographic evidence) was nauseating. I tried to take some photos to give a sense of how much had washed up on the stream banks, but i just couldn't get a good angle to show a decent representation. It looked as though the city garbage trucks had just upturned somewhere upstream, pouring plastic bottles and microwave dinner boxes down the creek. One good night of rain, and the whole above-ground stretch starts to look like a municipal dump. Sickening. Swollen with waste water, clouded, turbulent, throwing off empty bottles and half-eaten food bits - maybe the creek and I had more in common this morning than I had realized.

People tend to forget that John C. Reilly was in "The River Wild." I'm just saying.

So now I know what I have to do on my Spring Break - I need to do some clean-up. Of myself, of my affairs, of the banks of NMR. There it is - the little creek that I'd come to care about, the natural stretch of water that just kept flowing despite the industrial waste, the garbage, the pollutants - there it is, and it looks like hell after what is just another natural event in the life of a river. Rain. Sure, rain should swell the banks, make everything muddy, maybe knock a tree or two loose on the banks, but not this. The waters surged enough to drown out the sounds of traffic from the highway nearby, and the birdsong I loved so much last time was still around, though a little less so this day. The banks were muddy - everything was muddy. Everything was wet and heavy it was wonderful to see. I say wonderful because I know that the Spring blooms are coming and the rains are presages of the coming flowers and leaves. Slopping in the mud is a natural part of being around a stream in the rain, but watching Colt .45 cans drift past you just simply is not. 

(near the entrance to the NMR underground tunnel - just another storm drain outflow, washing who-knows-what into NMR)

But it's nearly Spring. There's promise in the rains - promise of the coming blooms, the new leaves, the wash of greenery that is only weeks away. And there's promise in this creek, even if it keeps getting crowded with garbage. There's always promise in the creek. Slag heaps, toxic waste, struggling flora - they change, they can get better. There's always a promise to be made to the creek, too. It perseveres because it must, because that is its nature. It flows by the divine writ of gravity and the mystique of the water cycle. It promises the habitat to grow life, micro and macro, leafy and feathered, green and many-colored. It provides out of no will or conscious agency, out of only unthinking necessity, but we deny it by sloth, by ignorance, by incompetence and uncaring. It is not a solution to our excesses, and we owe it what we owe all waterways: the promise to understand that they carry more than simply water, that they carry more than their weight in our inland world. The least we can do is promise to respect that.