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.

Prompt entry #1

 The great city of El Paso, Texas, has birthed a number of wonders and curiosities over its more than three-hundred year history: the first Thanksgiving Mass (April 30^th, 1598 – pre-dating those uppity pilgrims back east), the first of Conrad Hilton's highrise hotels (1930), the margarita (allegedly at Tommy's Place Bar on the fourth of July, 1945), the world's largest pecan orchard (Stahman Farms), and the very author of this weblog (relative unknown Dylan Jesse, 1986). If you enjoy hotels, pecans, and booze as much as I do, then perhaps you might want to . . . well, rent a room somewhere else, pick up a bag of Emerald nuts, and go to town on a bottle of Juarez instead. El Paso is a troubled city set in the unfriendly expanse of desert brushland between the Chihuahua desert to the north and the pollution soup of the Rio Grande river to the south, a city built on a history and landscape of hardship, conflict, and rugged determination. I had the pleasure of living in its outskirts on two separate occasions in my early childhood, and what memories I retain of it are of the harsh realities of its natural setting.

My father was stationed at Fort Bliss, seated at the south-eastern end of the city, a sterling cluster of lights visible in the distance from our home to the north. My bedroom window was filled with a view of the Franklin mountains, a southern tendril of the Rockies, a jagged mouth that swallowed the evening sun. We were surrounded by every imaginable shade of brown, interrupted sparsely by the silvery green of sage brush or the heavy jade of barrel cactus. El Paso used to be a hard-scrabble town where the land gave nothing for free and lawlessness was the rule rather than the exception, and in some ways that has not changed. While the city is considered among the safest in the southwest, the there is always violence from the drug cartels pushing north from Ciudad, Juarez. Since Texas was taken as territory for the U.S., the strategic location of El Paso, coupled with the relative scarcity of natural resources like arable land has created conflict and struggle for its inhabitants. Granted, technology and the conveniences of modern living (like central air) have made it easy to live in the desert environment, but that serves to highlight how little life in El Paso has to do with the natural environment these days, how modern it has become.

For me, though, the mountains, the open stretches of rolling hills of cactus and brush, the arroyos were all open spaces for my imagination. As a child, I didn't have much dealing with the city itself, so the surrounding desert was El Paso for me. Having lived farther north in the Rockies, up in the Gallatins and Bridgers in Montana, I remember the sight of the Franklins outside my window when I was a child, and I realize that my fascination with mountains would have started with them. Maybe it is just coincidence that I have such a fondness for rugged terrain, or maybe that fondness comes from my associating that terrain with my own beginnings, my own origins of meaning.