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.