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.