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.