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.