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.

Prompt entry #5

In my research about Nine Mile Run, I discovered that most of Pittsburgh relies on a combined sewage system that links the pipelines that handle the city's sewage with the city's storm drains. Given that Pittsburgh is most known for its defining rivers and it wildly hilly landscape, I'm coming to realize how important that little feature is. Since I first encountered Pittsburgh in person, I've been taken with its dynamic hills and its prominent rivers, but there's a stark realization that goes along with those attractive geological features. The biggest issue is that the sharp hills around the city mean that when it rains, the watersheds have a lot of water to deal with very quickly compared to more level landscapes with comparable rainfall. The problem is this: when it rains around Pittsburgh, the rapid rise and fall of the surrounding land means that water is conducted quickly into storm drains and down into the rivers because the inclines give it less time to sit on the surface and be absorbed into the ground. As a personal anecdote, I recall two years ago being nearly swept away by the torrent that was raging down South Braddock Avenue in Edgewood the evening of a particularly heavy rain. The rainfall didn't have much of a chance to soak into the ground before it was drawn downhill by gravity, creating a surging current down a major street. The same thing has happened before and flooded the Steel Plaza and Wood Street stations of Pittsburgh's downtown trolley line.

The issue becomes that the physical features of the city cause even average rainfall to be rushed into the rivers and the city's storm drains which fill too quickly and combine with the city's untreated sewage. That overflow spills into the current of the storm drains and ends up in tributary creeks like Nine Mile Run and all spills into the rivers for which Pittsburgh is so well known. When it rains, this city practically empties its collective bowels into the rivers, and this has been going on since the pipes were lain. I've thought about how to write lyrically about this, but it's frankly just disgusting. How do we write lyrically about a combined sewage system that causes untreated human waste to spill into natural waterways with even 1/10th of an inch of rainfall? Only so many limericks can be written before it just gets sad, and that's what we have: a sad, sorry, disgusting mess of a sewage system. It gets hard to flush a toilet now, knowing that if it starts to rain, I might as well be pissing straight into the rivers themselves.

Our combined system runs pipes directly into the major rivers and any above-ground stream they can reach in order to have a place to finally send the storm drain run-off. If you take a walk around the neighborhood of Shadyside, you can spot a distinct white spray-painted profile of a fish on manhole covers along the road that says "No Dumping. Drains Directly to River," as though the fish image counteracts the run-off of motor oil, litter, and other unnatural detritus that gets washed into the drains and shuffled straight into the rivers. If we don't notice it affecting us directly, it sure as hell has an effect on the ecosystems downstream, down river, down into the Gulf of Mexico and the greater global Ocean. Disgusting. Exasperating. Self-evidently ruinous, and yet it doesn't get changed because it's too damn expensive to re-design the entire city's sewage and storm drain system. Where do we even begin to try to point out the absurdity of the system's design? If it isn't already apparent how silly it is to let a little rain in a hilly region result in tons of raw sewage being dumped into natural waterways, then what can I say to make it sound silly? maybe I should start writing limericks after all.

On Eating and Drinking

Our Moodle discussions this week drove me back into the pages of one of the most singly influential poetic works in my life thus far: Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The title of this post is the title of a canto that I will relay here in its entirety. (Don't worry - it's all in the public domain and can be found here with a few typos.)

Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, "Speak to us of Eating and Drinking."

And he said:

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.

But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,

And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.

When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,

"By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.

For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.

Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven."

And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,

"Your seeds shall live in my body,

And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,

And your fragrance shall be my breath,

And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons."

And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart,

"I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress,

And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels."

And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;

And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.

Prompt Entry #4

There are a lot of little things you have to look for when you first get on the stream. There's the temperature of the water and the air, the currents of the wind, the layers of substrate and the flow of the water. There are a hundred little factors that a good fisherman has to consider every time he goes to wet a line. Among those hundred little things, there's one that tells a better story of the stream than the others all combined. There, on the smooth exposed curves of the rocks at the high-water line, the stonefly leaves its hollow husks, their backs split length-wise, clinging to the stone. To most people, they look threatening and alien: dessicated shells with their elongated antennae, their mantis-like forearms barbed and hooked against the stones. The husks can be as big as two inches when the stonefly molts to become an adult. A two-inch bug like that can look a horror to anyone unfamiliar with their place in the world.

Gold stonefly nymph, last pupal stage

A good fisherman will know that stoneflies are the sign of the health of the stream. The more dessicated shells you can spot on the streams sides, the healthier the stream as whole. Trout especially live on the bounty of stoneflies, and trout is what draws most of us to the streams. As they grow, stonefly nymphs eat stream vegetation, grow fat for the trout and the birds. But pay attention: stoneflies so more than just fill a niche in the food web. Their bodies are soft underneath, and they absorb pollutants readily from the waters around them. They will let you know if a river is healthy, if the waters are still pure and still lively.

The bigger shells are the last to be molted, the last skin to be shed before becoming an adult. An elderly man as a fly shop once told me that they come from the order Plecoptera, the Greek name for "braided wings." When they go through a final molting, they unfurl a long set of wings that they carry overlapped across the length of their back. But the wings are a trade-off of sorts. When they molt, they lose the mandibles they had as a nymph. They gain their wings, but they give up their mouths. That last molt gives them one week to live, starts the countdown as they starve without means to eat. Those final husks have something tragic about them: one the one hand, they let us know that the stream is still well, still supporting its complex web of life; but on the other hand, they are a kind of swan song, a last act and exclamation of a creature with profound significance on its world.

Adult with wings folded

Place Entry #4

Something had been bothering me the past few times I visited Nine Mile Run - the only sounds were the sounds of traffic from Rt 376 nearby. My father, an outdoorsman himself, was the one who taught me that if you are in the woods or out in a field and it is silent, there is a problem, and that problem is almost always you. I had been bothered about the lack of birdsong at NMR in previous weeks, but had pushed it off as a marginal concern, focusing on other things.

But this morning - ah, this morning! I got onto the trail around 8:30, well before anyone else showed up to jog or take their dogs for a walk, and almost immediately I noticed it. Above the din of traffic and the soft bubbling of the creek, I could hear birdsong. As I made my way down the trail to where I usually begin my musings, I noticed the flitting presence of several vibrantly colored male cardinals, two of which were dog-fighting low in the air above the trail, darting in and out of the reeds along the bank. I managed to catch a shot of one as he lorded over his stretch of the creek, all challengers bested for now.

Ha ha! I am king in here!

It was refreshing to see and hear some degree of life returning to the fields. With so many trees and so much open field around the creek, it was unnerving to keep coming back to the uninterrupted sound of nearby traffic. To see the excitement of birds in territorial challenges, to see them light and alight again from tree branches and reeds, to hear their chatter was enlivening. As best I could, I tracked one of the males as he chirped and flitted his way upstream. Eventually, I was lucky enough to catch a shot of him on a branch with one of NMR's many little oddities in the background: a red, middle-of-nowhere fire hydrant. That hydrant is just out in the field on the far side of the creek, nowhere near any kind of man-made structure that would require such a thing as emergency fire services. But hey - red bird, red hydrant? Good enough for me.

He doesn't get it either.

The temperature is up into the mid-forties this morning, and the snows are nearly all gone here, only clinging to the more shaded corners of the fields and the paths where human traffic has trampled it into packed ice. Signs urge me to "stay on established paths," but when they look more like a bob-sled track than a walking path, my mind starts to justify walking just to the edge, just inside the grass line.

COOOOOOOOL RUNNINGS!

Thankfully, enough of the pathways had melted completely and were beginning to show other signs of wildlife that I have searched for since my first trip here. I had been noticing all kinds of dog tracks in the packed snow that covered the trail, but the freshly exposed dirt underneath, now saturated from the melting snow, was now showing deer tracks. This one below is pictured with a quarter next to it for comparison. From its small size and the wider angle of the toes, I think it belongs to a yearling white-tail. My father taught me most of what I know about scouting animal tracks in the wild, and I think of his lessons every time I spot a new track. Of course, that was a long time ago and I'm sure I've forgotten some of the finer lessons by now.

This deer obviously had a hole in his pocket.

 As I made my way along the stream, I noticed that the deer tracks continued to follow the path until the mud gave way to ice pack again and all traces of animal traffic disappeared. It reminded me of Quindlin's essay "Animal Rites," how she makes mention that many species will use the same trails and paths for their entire lives, and the successive generations will use them just as dutifully. Those tracks this morning were fresh, maybe only by hours. Somewhere nearby, somewhere just out of sight, deer were making their way through their daily routines, taking the same dirt path I was taking, hearing the same birds and enjoying the same warm morning sun as me.

A few quick thoughts on intimacy

This post is in response to Mel's question to me about my last prompt entry, about how I define intimacy, whether it is possible with a place. My answers would be a bit long for a reply comment, so I'm putting them up here in a post instead.

In its shortest form, my answer is "No - intimacy with a place is not possible." I've spent some time thinking about the concept of intimacy existing in a few different ways: as between two people, as between two conscious beings, as between two living things in general, and as between a person and a place. The question I wanted to answer for myself was "Is intimacy something that exists mutually between two things, or can it exist only in the recognition of the one?"

Now, I'm a cynical sort of person, but I do believe that intimacy can exist between two people if we conceive of it as a shared perception of mutually sympathetic understanding. Or something along those lines. However, I think that intimacy can only exist when we're talking about a relationship with another human being. I believe that intimacy, properly understood, requires a mutual exchange of feeling.

We all feel certain emotional attachments to particular places, and rightly so. That attachment, however, is one-sided. I have a great love for the Gallatin river, and I get angry when I spot garbage on its banks or when I hear about some attempt to divert its flow for private uses, and that can feel a lot like intimacy. I've spent a lot of time on that river, and I have a number of emotional entanglements with it, whether from memories, personal associations, or because it often feels like a surrogate home to me. However, the Gallatin is simply indifferent to me. If I only conceive of my relationship to the river in terms of how I feel towards it, then yes, it feels a lot like intimacy, like a human attachment. However, if I broaden my lens and consider how the river feels nothing for me in return, it feels more like a private longing, a guarded love that only runs one way. Now, this doesn't necessarily weaken the emotional attachment I feel to the river, but it does keep me from truly calling it intimacy. It's a lot like getting to know the details of someone well, developing a fondness for them, forming an emotional connection to them, and then realizing they have no idea you exist. Granted, if Anne Hathaway would just answer my letters, we could move this whole thing forward. But alas.

We can love, we can need, we can feel a responsibility towards a place, but it is a one-way expression. The places we feel for are not "ours;" they are not our sole dominion. Likewise are they not feeling things. They are something for which we reach, something for which we often yearn, but forever something that exists beyond the possibility of any kind of reciprocation. It seems silly to say it, though, but if we think of it in terms of being a one-way feeling of attachment, it stops feeling like intimacy at all. It starts feeling more tragic.


Oh, Anne...

Prompt Entry #3

Intimacy is a tricky concept. At heart, I guess I'm something of a Cartesian: I believe in the immateriality of mind, of soul, of whatever you wish to call what animates us. I can apprehend your body, we can say we know each other well, we can say we share an intimacy. But what we know of each other, what I can know of you is only the physical, the way one body interacts with another. We simply cannot reach past the limits of the physical when we reach out to experience an other. But still, we can feel a closeness to something ephemeral, something we never actually touch, whether it's another mind/soul/whatever, or if it's the beating heart of a special place. For me, that place is the Gallatin, it's east fork just outside of Bozeman, Montana.

It's a river, yes. It isn't private, no. And my experiences there are not all that unique - other people fish the same stretches, hike the same waterline, catch the same fish, and smell the same fragrance of neighboring harvested fields and the savory-sweet odors of sage. Other people know the river well, many better than I ever will; still, my heart carries a fondness for it. There is a stretch in particular I'm picturing: two miles upriver from the bridge at Four Corners. A sandy, rocky swath of grasses and cottonwood trees that divides the river into two different ribbons. During the spring runoff, when the snows in the mountains recede, the waters surge and this whole stretch submerges. One summer a few years back, I weaved my way from one ribbon to the other, heading for a fallen tree that makes a great hiding spot for trout. Cutting across the exposed worn river rocks, brushing aside tall stalks of brohm grasses, I nearly tripped on the remains of a deer. Or what I thought was probably a deer. It was large, maybe even a young elk, reduced to a bleached hip-bone and spine, and nothing else. Its sheer whiteness was surprising, as if some sculptor happened to have left it there in the sand. Surprising, but I had gone there to fish, and the waters were warming rapidly under the sun. I spent a few days camping along that stretch of the river, working the ribbons and small feeder streams before making my way back to the put-in point, a footpath that winds out of a quarry. On my final day, I was cutting back across that swath where the deer/elk/sculpture had been, only by now something new had taken its place. Unbeknown to me, a young couple had come by and lay naked, bodies entwined among the grasses, bright and vibrant under the mid-morning sun. It was a scene out of Anais Nin, but it wasn't mine. Quietly, I left, backing slowly into the brushline, unseen and unnoticed by them.

There's always something sexual about a river like the Gallatin. It has its fits and surges; it births, provides, consumes; it can embrace, can thrill, can ravage; it invites you to lose yourself in it. Dealing with the Gallatin is a game of give and take, and it requires the occasional bit of finesse. But in the end, the Gallatin is simply more-than-human. It behaves (if I can give it that agency) with a cold indifference and insurmountable will. But when I'm there, when I'm immersed in its waters, it is as alive and as human as I am.

Place Entry #3

Welcome back to Nine Mile Run.

It's Sunday morning, and it's a lovely time to be out stream-side. The temperature is up around 40 Fahrenheit, the snows are receding, and the run-off has swelled the creek enough to get it babbling over some of its rockier stretches. The ground still looks like a frozen hell, however, and color is essentially a forgotten concept. As pale and bleak as everything still looks devoid of leafy vegetation and covered in melting snow, it still looks better than its old hellish landscape.

The area we now know as Nine Mile Run was once the dumping ground for the Homewood Steel Company, which used the riverbank as a dumping site for slag. Now, "slag heap" takes on a lot of fun, sexy connotations if you're British, but we're talking about a different kind of slag today. If you're new to metallurgy, slag is the industrial by-product of the steel making process. When steel mills super-heat the ore that they mined from the Earth (a process called "smelting"), impurities in the ore (like metal oxides, metal sulfides, silicon dioxide, etc) separate from the heavier metals and rise to the top of the molten ore mixture. These impurities are then skimmed and dumped, as in the picture below.

Slag dump

The banks of Nine Mile Run, approximately 230 acres in all, were at one time under as much as 120 feet of slag and other wastes. This is a small stream, mind you. At its widest, I doubt whether it reaches more than 15 feet across, and there isn't a single point where you couldn't easily walk right across it and keep your knees dry. While I was walking the banks today, I struggled to picture how tall 120 feet of industrial waste would reach above me, how absolutely minuscule the stream would look right next to it.

The slag's been cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers, and restoration work still continues today, but the stream is far from healthy. I present to you the following two photos:

Item the first: located at the head of the Firelane trail

Personally, I like living in a city where the cash I spend on sales tax goes to something about which I care very strongly. Yes, I will take pride in these parks. Spend my tax dollars to clean this place up! Make it beautiful! Make it healthy again after everything it has had to endure! Keep it free of errant human feces!

About that . . . here's item the second, located a short distance upstream from the last sign:

In case you can't make out the words, here's what it says:

This outfall may discharge SEWAGE during rain events. These discharges may be hazardous to public health. Avoid contact with waters during these periods. For additional information, or if pipe is discharging during dry weather, please contact . . . 

Allow me to translate:

When it rains, this giant pipe will spew shit into the river, and this shit will kill you. Please don't go anywhere near this stream in the event of said shit storm. Even if it isn't raining, these waters may contain shit that will kill you anyway. Here's a phone number where you can learn whether or not you're totally screwed if you dare touch this open, flowing toilet of a creek.

Please do read this page about "fecal fountains" (their words, not mine) that occur here during as little as a tenth of an inch of rain. This is apparently because much of Pittsburgh uses what's called a "combined sewer system," which means that storm drains connect directly into the same pipes used to carry sewage to treatment centers. When it rains, the sewage pipes, which can't always handle the sudden increases in volume that result from rains running off of streets, roofs, sidewalks, and other impermeable surfaces, tend to overflow and dump raw human waste into nearby streams.

Like Nine Mile Run.

I'm starting to feel so very sorry for this little stream. It has its own charm, and I'm sure its beautiful when the plants and flowers are in full bloom; but it just keeps getting (good god, there'e a pun coming) dumped on over and over again. The waters keep coursing because that's what waters do, but not without having to pick up industrial and human wastes in the process.

Good sweet lord, why can't we (dare I say it?) get our shit together and build municipal systems that don't result in chronically poisoning something as vital to the surrounding ecosystem as a moving body of water? I need you all to hold me to this, but the next time it rains, I have to see what happens at that outflow pipe. I need to be able to see what it is that keeps sullying this otherwise quaint little stream. I don't want to, but I think I ought to check it out.

Place Entry #2

When we look to a certain place and reflect on what we see in it, how much of what we find is there because we brought it with us? I had been waiting to return to Nine Mile Run until I found my digital camera, so when I found it yesterday evening, I was excited to take it with me today. That excitement was short-lived. Last night, a series of events transpired that ended up being emotionally ruinous for me, which in turn lead to a fair bout of drinking, which in turn lead to a lovely single-malt hangover when I awoke this afternoon. This post, however, was on a deadline and could not wait while I "found a happy place," so out I went. Armed with my camera, a gut full of anger, and my ruggedly angular beard, I ventured forth to see what I could find at Nine Mile Run.

Exhibit A: ruggedly angular beard

The footpath from which I am reporting has seen a lot of traffic since my last post. The weather has been a little warmer and the snow here has been packed underfoot so well in parts that my hiking boots can't find traction. There are clean lines and sharp little embankments all along the path -- tell-tale signs of cross-country skiers. The air is still cold, the trees are still bare, and the the ground vegetation is just as dry and unadorned as last week. I keep thinking "metaphors, metaphors . . . I need metaphors" to have something to say about Nine Mile Run today, but I ran into a significant problem.

I also ran into reeds.

The problem is that I wanted to convey some sense of this place that goes beyond physical descriptions to recreate a feeling of what it's like to inhabit that space. Plus, I can only describe snow in so many ways before I bore us all to tears. The heart of the problem was that I was bringing anger and vitriol and bitterness into that scene and it was shading how I saw it. The snow was oppressive. The sound of traffic nearby was infuriating. The bare branches were symbols of ruin and breakdown. The houses I could see through the trees on the hills nearby were disgusting encroachments on the land. Somewhere in the distance The Cure was playing softly. I saw the whole place as a gross mockery of a natural landscape -- boardwalks over marshy patches, benches near the creek, established pathways all gross impositions on the land. I wanted to hate that damned place.

Pictured here: Robert Smith totally put him up to this.

That bitterness passed once the headache broke, and I began to wonder about how I could depict this scene differently. The snow-covered field next to the creek could just as easily be placid or tranquil and the bare branches could be elegant and fragile. When I wanted to write about the connections I felt to that space at that time, I ended up projecting my feelings onto the space itself. "Of course you feel depressed and angry. How could you not? Just look at the trees!" That isn't writing about a space; that's writing about myself while using nature as a narcissistic sounding board. Am I treating this natural place like some grassy, wooded Rorschach ink-blot?

Pictured above: either a pleasantly running stream or abandonment issues.

Even though my initial emotional turmoil was unduly characterizing how I reacted to my surroundings, I have to wonder what other baggage I might be carrying with me, what other associations and connotations I might have that are secretly shading how I perceive the natural world. I assume we all have our own hidden biases in that regard, and not all of them are likely hindrances. But I have to wonder if there are other times when I am reading into a landscape something that simply is not there; if when I write about the natural world, if I am not really only writing about myself. When I am present in that natural space, I must be present in the writing of it but not the center. I must make a conscious effort to keep my mind free of the distorting lens of preoccupations and let the space affect me on its terms, not mine. My facility with language and whatever poetic faculties I possess can be used to strengthen those impressions, but I have to approach Nine Mile Run as a listener first and an interpreter second.

A poem for your consideration

Here's a poem I'm working on that relates to my last post. I figured I might as well throw this up alongside it.

When you see the mayflies

So you see, this is how we find them.

An eye on quiet places, seams

and the breaking of the thermoline;

in spaces unseen, bodies hidden in the shimmer

of riffles, the uncertain meeting

of uneven coursing waters.

Feel the steady weight

of the stream against your leg

like a child's idle pressing,

at once support and opposition. Feel the gentle suck

of the eddy on your downstream side,

the pull of needful space, the refusal to be empty.

This is how we go after them,

uncertain propositions, the chance

of finding what lives to be hidden.

Rod tip down, straight at the bloodknot,

that spectre where leader and tippet disappear,

presage of the trailing hook, the hackle

and the hurl of a blue-winged olive

riding currents with the flotsam.

This is how we find them, our own

bodies submerged, all eyes on the line

dividing air and water, what rides

the current between them.

Prompt entry #2 - Sojourner

(Italicized portions are taken from Lisa Knopp's The Nature of Home: a Lexicon and Essays)

At the heart of the Old Frisian sojorner or sojourner is the word journey. The Low or Late Latin root of this word is diurnation, "a day's travel or work." 

Thirty minutes south of Bozeman on route 191, there's a turnoff across from an unnamed road. The road winds through the Flying D ranch (Ted Turner's quarter million acre plot) and up to the base of the Spanish Peaks, but that's not what we're after. From the turnoff, you have to find somewhere to fjord the Gallatin River – that is, after most of the snows have melted and the Spring runoff is done. The waters are quick and deep enough to pull you under once you near the far bank, so look sharp and stay steady. Keep your gear above your head. Keep it dry. Suit up again once you're on the bank and make your way upstream. The next tributary is the mouth of Squaw Creek, and that's where you really start. These waters are clear, cool, and hyaline in the estival heat of a high-country June. This is where you should start, string up a fly-line, and watch for the caddis and mayflies hatching on the slack water behind rocks and along the banks. If the action is good and the trout are rising, it will take all day to make it to the lake.

A sojourner is one who resides for a while in a place that is not her home among a people who see her as neither native nor alien.

No one else resides here. And no one ever fishes here – at least, none that you'll ever see. This stretch is tough to get to, and easy to never know was there. There's a forestry service rescue outpost here, half a mile or so north at Storm Castle, a megalithic bulge rimmed with palisades on three sides; a forbidding hunk of rock that looms behind me with a terrible sovereignty about it. No people here, but always the threat of grizzlies, the occasional moose, and mule deer passing like phantoms through the evergreens, more likely to be heard than seen. I keep fishing, laying line into the currents, an eye and ear kept open for bear, and I remember what my father told me. He had been fishing somewhere upstream from here when a grizzly came upon him fishing at a bend. My father lowered his rod onto the grasses beside him, careful to make no sudden moves. The bear was just across the stream, five yards or so, and more than capable enough to dash through the waters and strike him down in a moment. Standing slowly again, my father kept eye contact and began to step carefully backwards into the trees behind him. With no apparent anger, the bear reared onto its hind legs, arms folded up against its chest, and huffed a few deep breaths at him before lowering again, turning, and disappearing into the brush. He knew my father was no native to those woods, but neither did he pursue him as a threat.

A sojourner is someone trying to go home again or trying to find a place and people that could become home.

Past Storm Castle is Purdy Creek, then Line Creek at Spire Rock and Mica Creek all to your left. Take the tributary to the right after Mica, an unnamed stream that leads sharply up one side of Garnet Mountain. It takes all day to get here, if you're doing it right; all day to reach Rat Lake and the meadows that surround it. It is a lovely scene, a gentle sloping depression vaulted up above the canyons and streams, half way up Garnet Mountain amidst its stillness and quiet. The lake itself is relatively shallow, tinted a milky green for most of the year – the result of slow out-flow and the buildup of algeas and such. Pitch a tent on the eastern edge to catch the last of the setting sun and prepare to hike back downstream in the morning. 


No, I don't live here, but there's something akin to home in the still and the quiet of the Gallatins. Something that could be home.

I swear I'm listening

Thanks are due to Cory and Sarah M. for alerting me to the fact that they couldn't post comments on my damnedable blog. That should be fixed now, so please comment at will. I'm interested in what you all have to say, and I apologize for my technical inadequacies.

Place entry #1

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” - Norman Maclean

I can't help but be drawn to rivers. The epigraph to this entry was lifted from the novella A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, one story in a semi-autobiographical collection of the same name, all of which detail some part of the author's life in southwestern Montana. The film version of the story was shot in and around my hometown of Manhattan, Montana, and the final, iconic scene of the narrator flyfishing was shot on one of my all-time favorite stretches of the Gallatin river – though the pocket-water there can be mighty unforgiving. I am drawn to rivers; to the odd comfort I find in observing the bends and stretches of their determined courses; to their patient, glacially paced method of etching out landscapes; to how they stitch together ecosystems and thread together mountain peaks, hills, valleys, and the sea in one long motion. How could I help but find a place to spend some time in my adopted city of Pittsburgh to watch a stream course by?

For the remainder of this semester, I'll be reporting from from the banks of Nine Mile Run, a stream running through the southern end of Pittsburgh's Frick park, on the side of a footpath between the nearby Firelane and Braddock trails. Of course, this is the middle of January, and the whole park is under a layer of snow. The last footprints I saw were on the Firelane trail, a good fifty yards or so behind me. Nine Mile Run is still flowing, but the banks have been packed with ice and snow. All of the trees around here are deciduous, but I can't identify them without their leaves. Everything is quiet, barren. Back in Montana, I hiked streams like Nine Mile Run in the winter to catch sight of moose in the Gallatin mountains, and I instinctively scan the ground around me for any signs of deer passing through – footprints, ruts, droppings, anything. This latest snow has only been around for a week or so, and nothing seems to have disturbed it yet. Noticing that, I realize there is something profane in the heavy-footed trenches I have carved on my way to here. they look as though some rude beast had come through, rooting through the snow for roots or some covered vegetation, lobbing snoutfuls of the heavy powder left and right in the search.

The change from winter to summer around here is a process of covering and uncovering, a shifting of attention. When the leaves fall and snow covers the ground, only the many details of naked branches remain, everything else obscured by the white. Later, when the snows melt and the leaves return to cover the arms and tendrils of the branches, our eyes draw down to the grasses, the flowers, the newly unveiled palette of greens and browns around our feet. Covering and uncovering, everything revealed and hidden in turn.

It's well below freezing today. The cold is all I can think about after a while, so I trudge my way back through the trenches I left, still scouting for a deer print or two.