Much can change in two weeks. In a world of constancy, we are faced with what poets called mutability, the reminder that things always change. In small ways this spot in the backyard has been altered in two weeks; in large ways it is no different; in truth it is always the same.
A feeble winter has passed through southwestern Pennsylvania, as if Nature’s energy has been focused elsewhere. Like the parent of a run-away child whose focus wanes on three kids at home, the intensity cannot be evenly disciplined between two places at once. Somewhere winter storms rage, but here in Pittsburgh we waddle through puddles that would have been massive snowdrifts in Winter’s typical attention. It has been a rainy season.
The yard is muck – two weeks ago it was like standing on a moon-surface snow. The crackle beneath the feet would have deterred a criminal in action. Now the heels sink into a trap of sludge, each step a sqa-woosh-pluck-glosh of sound as the boot holds, pops out, lifts up.
The snow has melted yet the yard holds water across its surface in a green-brown soup waiting to be reheated. Pennsylvania clay, they say, is thick that way. Under two or three feet of tillable soil resides clumps of un-mouldable material, useless in all ways other than holding the Earth together. The clay is a barrier that slows filtration and fills my yard with tiny, melted pools. Eventually the water seeps through, down to a water table only geologists and construction workers worry about. Perhaps those who rely on well water are also concerned with levels and depths and natural streams as well. If that clay could be turned to statues and monuments, what yard would I have for my children to play upon? If crayons could be made or if pots and tableware were to be carved from Pennsylvania’s clump, then the snow-melt-January-rain would drip down to the center unimpeded and flow back to the rivers faster.
The air smells of comfortably pungent reserve, no mold, no festering, and yet not quite spring either. Rather, a hint of dry air evaporates the muddy trenches toward the jetstreams and reeks of scant, day-old moisture. The invisible transformation continues before my very eyes. The sun is engaged in the battle, and like a divorce lawyer watching over custody hearings, it too has a say over which water will go to the clouds and which will sink deep into the folds of the planet.
The runaway child drips into the aquifer as the remaining three ascend toward the clouds; their paths will be different.
Here I stand, the last to rise up and follow Sky Mother, so tempted years ago by Father Dirt, and I wonder aloud about choices, about decisions made when we were too young to even know what decision was. The sister who disappeared into the dirt later returned, clean (sober and clean as they say) and seemed worse for the ware. The others rolled into thunderstorms and violent squalls of their own, as I rode the misty forgiveness of soft spring rains. We were kids then, and this yard was our grandparents’ who have now gone on to be amongst that clay, as has the father who lost a custody battle he didn’t wish to fight. It is my yard now, and I can’t help but think that Pap-pap didn’t have to wait for it to drain, nor do I remember standing water at his house. As nature changes, life holds the scars.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #1 Entry
Where Have All the Sidewalks Gone?
Baldwin Borough is a suburb south of Pittsburgh that does not have sidewalks. I spent my formative years here and have wondered often why the town planners who developed the space decided to leave such common appendages from its streets. Perhaps the notion that everyone would one day be driving everywhere moved such a decision forward. Built in the mid-1950s, Baldwin would have been a quintessentially American idea – success lead to progress and progress lead to thinking about the future in different ways, in newer ways. It has never made sense to me.
Those formative years were between the ages of ten and eighteen. While having on-street parking became a pleasant convenience, my younger years seem to have been stagnated by the inability to go somewhere. I just never thought to walk anywhere because directional suggestion was lacking – as if kids should need suggestions for what to do on a summer day!
We rarely road bikes, too many of us had the new-fandangled Atari game systems in our gamerooms, and without sidewalks to lead us anywhere we did little to motivate ourselves. Sure, we had a few friends whose houses we visited often but hardly enough to amount to exercise. The lack of sidewalks likely resulted in many having no motivation at all, a sort of community-wide laziness. We kids of the 1980s settled for the neighbor’s pool and waited until mom or dad got home to take us anywhere.
Some of us got jobs at sixteen, a few even went off to college after buying our own cars. But for the most part we just kind of hung around our own houses, shot occasional hoops into an under-used basket and walked to the store only when the cool lure of Pepsi aspired us to reach above our coach potato personas.
The community swimming pool was so far removed from our homes that a school bus ran through the massive borough each summer morning to pick up kids who had a pool pass stitched into their name-brand swimsuits. No one wanted to be that nerd who actually bought a pass, so we hung out in the small wooded lots that divided the subdivisions, doing little. The library sits dead-center within the borough, equidistant from both sides of the map which show Baldwin to be shaped like two “C”s cuddling, one upside-down and backward hugging the other at its upper crest. The building of books was too far to reach on foot, but really, what kid thought to read in those summers?
The borough didn’t make me lazy, that is squarely upon my shoulders. I eventually learned to work hard motivated by necessity, not activity. I returned to the same neighborhood in 2001 to raise a family. Baldwin’s lack of sidewalks cannot be blamed for complacent youths who grew to carry massive debt, vote less than any generation before it, raise teen pregnancy statistics to all new levels, surge the popularity of binge drinking, pot consumption and tattoo sales, but you have to wonder what could have happened if someone had said no to the idea of an entire community without sidewalks.
Baldwin Borough is a suburb south of Pittsburgh that does not have sidewalks. I spent my formative years here and have wondered often why the town planners who developed the space decided to leave such common appendages from its streets. Perhaps the notion that everyone would one day be driving everywhere moved such a decision forward. Built in the mid-1950s, Baldwin would have been a quintessentially American idea – success lead to progress and progress lead to thinking about the future in different ways, in newer ways. It has never made sense to me.
Those formative years were between the ages of ten and eighteen. While having on-street parking became a pleasant convenience, my younger years seem to have been stagnated by the inability to go somewhere. I just never thought to walk anywhere because directional suggestion was lacking – as if kids should need suggestions for what to do on a summer day!
We rarely road bikes, too many of us had the new-fandangled Atari game systems in our gamerooms, and without sidewalks to lead us anywhere we did little to motivate ourselves. Sure, we had a few friends whose houses we visited often but hardly enough to amount to exercise. The lack of sidewalks likely resulted in many having no motivation at all, a sort of community-wide laziness. We kids of the 1980s settled for the neighbor’s pool and waited until mom or dad got home to take us anywhere.
Some of us got jobs at sixteen, a few even went off to college after buying our own cars. But for the most part we just kind of hung around our own houses, shot occasional hoops into an under-used basket and walked to the store only when the cool lure of Pepsi aspired us to reach above our coach potato personas.
The community swimming pool was so far removed from our homes that a school bus ran through the massive borough each summer morning to pick up kids who had a pool pass stitched into their name-brand swimsuits. No one wanted to be that nerd who actually bought a pass, so we hung out in the small wooded lots that divided the subdivisions, doing little. The library sits dead-center within the borough, equidistant from both sides of the map which show Baldwin to be shaped like two “C”s cuddling, one upside-down and backward hugging the other at its upper crest. The building of books was too far to reach on foot, but really, what kid thought to read in those summers?
The borough didn’t make me lazy, that is squarely upon my shoulders. I eventually learned to work hard motivated by necessity, not activity. I returned to the same neighborhood in 2001 to raise a family. Baldwin’s lack of sidewalks cannot be blamed for complacent youths who grew to carry massive debt, vote less than any generation before it, raise teen pregnancy statistics to all new levels, surge the popularity of binge drinking, pot consumption and tattoo sales, but you have to wonder what could have happened if someone had said no to the idea of an entire community without sidewalks.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #1 Entry
Nights With the Kids and Time with Nature (January 15, 2012)
Becca is a smart kid. My twelve-year-old daughter shares the experience that will be my first Nature Writing blog entry as we step outside on a cold January night. Our backyard is of average size but flat with a rough, uncultivated wooded hill behind and a fair view of the sky. We are natural talkers, so we quickly turn to discussing the stars that are visible on a winter evening. I show her Orion; she looks for the Big Dipper; we discuss how star gazers, our name for mappers of the sky, must have lived and worked at night four-hundred years ago.
The sky is skirted along its rim above the horizon, as if a blanket is beginning to grow off of the tangible Earth and toward the dome of atmosphere. It could be frost or ice sparkle, but something of a thin cloud-like band wraps the lower edge of the sky. And then, like an inverted ice cream bowl, the dense gray of the season opens softly across the span and highlights stars against a backdrop that looks more like a negative photo than anything my own eyes could witness.
Cold air has a way of breaking you down. At first, the chill is a thrill, an exhilarating spark of excitement that reminds me of deep, long winters of the 1978 blizzard or the record snowfalls of 1993. The transference of heat through thin cotton sweat pants is no match for the warm barrier provided by a thick, pleated leather jacket yet I feel myself getting cold quickly. I am warm enough to discern the decreasing warmth as we stand and talk.
She remembers a point she had learned in girl scouts – something about seeing from the bottom of a well, a scenario as if you had fallen in; something about stars being brighter even in the middle of the day. It troubles me to think of my kid falling into a well, and I wonder where we even have a such an ancient construct in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.
Becca adds the observation that what we perceive as Orion’s Belt are three stars that are actually millions of miles away from each other. I have three kids. They too will form one identity in my spirit, in my observation, in my life. They already have, yet as their lives go on and forward, they will drift apart and find their own ways, make their own marks, much like the stars. But in a tangible way they will all be part of my personal Orion.
I envy Becca. I didn’t know until I was nineteen what she repeats to me about the stars and about Orion. The clarity of the ages look down at us from illumines millions of miles away, and this observation/writing segment for dad and kid and nature has grown long. We are getting cold, our sentences shorter. The old coat of mine that hangs from her shoulders like a dripping blotch of river-bottom-brown paint is thinner than my jacket. She holds onto the warmth in order to avoid sleep; I hold onto the moment to avoid its passing. There are no wells to drown in, of that much I am certain. A ceiling of stars that have seen the greater magnitude of man’s history will still be here when she lowers me into the Earth some day. My only hope is, that from a grave one can see stars more brilliantly than on any winter night in Pennsylvania.
Becca is a smart kid. My twelve-year-old daughter shares the experience that will be my first Nature Writing blog entry as we step outside on a cold January night. Our backyard is of average size but flat with a rough, uncultivated wooded hill behind and a fair view of the sky. We are natural talkers, so we quickly turn to discussing the stars that are visible on a winter evening. I show her Orion; she looks for the Big Dipper; we discuss how star gazers, our name for mappers of the sky, must have lived and worked at night four-hundred years ago.
The sky is skirted along its rim above the horizon, as if a blanket is beginning to grow off of the tangible Earth and toward the dome of atmosphere. It could be frost or ice sparkle, but something of a thin cloud-like band wraps the lower edge of the sky. And then, like an inverted ice cream bowl, the dense gray of the season opens softly across the span and highlights stars against a backdrop that looks more like a negative photo than anything my own eyes could witness.
Cold air has a way of breaking you down. At first, the chill is a thrill, an exhilarating spark of excitement that reminds me of deep, long winters of the 1978 blizzard or the record snowfalls of 1993. The transference of heat through thin cotton sweat pants is no match for the warm barrier provided by a thick, pleated leather jacket yet I feel myself getting cold quickly. I am warm enough to discern the decreasing warmth as we stand and talk.
She remembers a point she had learned in girl scouts – something about seeing from the bottom of a well, a scenario as if you had fallen in; something about stars being brighter even in the middle of the day. It troubles me to think of my kid falling into a well, and I wonder where we even have a such an ancient construct in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.
Becca adds the observation that what we perceive as Orion’s Belt are three stars that are actually millions of miles away from each other. I have three kids. They too will form one identity in my spirit, in my observation, in my life. They already have, yet as their lives go on and forward, they will drift apart and find their own ways, make their own marks, much like the stars. But in a tangible way they will all be part of my personal Orion.
I envy Becca. I didn’t know until I was nineteen what she repeats to me about the stars and about Orion. The clarity of the ages look down at us from illumines millions of miles away, and this observation/writing segment for dad and kid and nature has grown long. We are getting cold, our sentences shorter. The old coat of mine that hangs from her shoulders like a dripping blotch of river-bottom-brown paint is thinner than my jacket. She holds onto the warmth in order to avoid sleep; I hold onto the moment to avoid its passing. There are no wells to drown in, of that much I am certain. A ceiling of stars that have seen the greater magnitude of man’s history will still be here when she lowers me into the Earth some day. My only hope is, that from a grave one can see stars more brilliantly than on any winter night in Pennsylvania.
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