The Wilderness Between

My place is soggy. The constant rain over the last few days has seeped into the decaying leaves, making them as pliable as wet napkins. The weight of the water drags the yellow leaves beneath that vicious green ivy, where the leaves will rot away completely, turning into rich brown earth. Oh, the ivy always wins. It remains hardy against the pelting rain. Water runs off of the leaves as if they were shiny plastic. If only I could remain as buoyant under the storms of life.

I am sad that this is my last entry here. I will miss this place. Though I pass through it most days to get to campus, it’s not the same. If I don’t take the time to stop and savor the wildness around me, it simply becomes another in-between place. Neither here nor there, and therefore, nowhere I want to linger.

But I do want to linger here now. Even if it’s nowhere. It’s special to me now. I’ve watched it die. I’ve watched the seasons happen here. So that even when I hurry up the stairs, huffing and puffing, I find myself glancing about, looking for changes, for signs of some new development. I see trash and litter like flashing lights. I see the ivy, creeping ever forward. I’ve seen the trees undress until they stood bare, tall and proud against the coming winter winds.

That is not something you forget.

I will worry about that savage green ivy when the snows fall. And when at last it melts away, in February or March, I will venture up the stairs as if checking in on an old friend.

I am grateful for the chance of having gotten to know a place so well. To see its moods, its different faces. I want that sort of intimacy with every place.

I feel that I have discovered something in this place that is not here, nor there. I have found a peace in the passing of time. I have watched death happen, and life. What would it be like if we all took the time to treat every place as a destination instead of simply a space to travel through? If every step took us somewhere.

In a world where so much of our lives are spent in these between places, like college, like grad school, where we spend significant amounts of time, but never settle. Places where we are not quite kids and not quite adults. Isn’t it important for us to look around at these places? To slow them down, to really experience them instead of passing through?

I’m not even sure we know how to live with such intensity any more. I don’t think we know how to slow down and treasure, notice, watch these in between places anymore. Do we remember how to identify with the trees, or ivy? I think as poets, we try. We try to rekindle those ancient connections between land and man, space and soul. But as writers, that’s our job. To look, to see, to tell others of that which they are blind to.

I think that Environmental and Nature Writing has been terribly important and constructive toward my writing. Already in my fiction and other work, I find a deeper sensitivity and connection between landscape and mood and character. I let myself linger a little longer in those moments of setting and description, allowing for a moment of reflection and detail before moving on to action and character.

This class also reminded me of the importance of specifics. Specific plants and animals and textures and colors. Knowing the name of a thing gives it power. It lends this power to the writing as well. I think this also has to do with metaphor. Metaphor is so incredibly effective and creates its own type of specificity. Nature Writing has really allowed me to work on the craft of metaphor.

Metaphor allows for the imprecision of language and communication to become more precise. It creates certain subconscious connections that convey so much more than just the subject itself. Some of the most memorable ones that I’ve written for me have been in my essay. Like the thunderheads over the prairie. I described them in my midterm as “convening like bullfrogs, swelling their chests to claim their territory.” And then in a draft of my final as “bullying thunderheads that flashed as they jostled one another like jocks before a big game.” The bullfrogs convey a much different image than the jocks, and the second description also gives a better sense of imminent threat. Or at least some ill will. I am really glad that I got this chance to hone my language.

I also feel that nonfiction writing has allowed reflection in my pieces that I don’t normally get to take. While I realize that I may not be quite reflective enough to succeed at nonfiction, I feel that this freedom to linger creates some very powerful moments. Moments that I would not have found if I had simply rushed on to the next scene.

Of course, I also learned a lot about the environment that I didn’t know about. Again, specifics. And a lot of the discussions we had (what is nature? Etc) really challenged what I thought about certain topics. I really enjoyed the class trips that we took as well. It was nice to get into nature. For similar reasons, even though it got to be a little much at times, I really enjoyed the nature blogs. I liked being forced to stop and really look at the nature around me. I liked watching autumn happen. I liked the few moments of quiet introspection that made me think, but didn’t feed into my neuroses like worry.

Overall, I thought this course was well put together. It had a nice balance of writing and reading, talking and doing. While I wasn’t crazy about all of the readings, I think that there was something for everyone in the wide spread of nature writing. I’m even recommending Ed Abbey to my father who is a geologist! Most importantly, though I wasn’t converted to nonfiction, I see the important lessons this style of writing can teach me in general. And I enjoy it.

This is my favorite point in fall. The trees are bare. There’s something so beautiful about a naked tree.

As I walk toward my wild place, they wave their thin branches in their air like an inefficient basketball forward, trying to block the city from my sight. But since their limbs are bare, I can see right through them. So vulnerable, you can see their weakest points. You can snap off the little fingers on the branches, the little twigs. In the cold, the wood would give a satisfying snap.

Suddenly, the birds’ homes are visible, high in the trees, a clutter of smaller twigs and needles cradled by branches; a black spot against the grey sky. The birds have already moved on, but I can’t help but wonder if some will return to their childhood homes to start their own families. Finding their old nests a little smaller, a little less soft then they remember.

There’s something holy about the bare trees and their scrawny arms in the dead of winter. I remember the trees at Knox after a long sleet. The lamps along the paths seemed positioned just behind the branches, always just behind, and after sleet had fallen, the branches would shine with ice. The little fingers glistened in the light, looking more like complicated spider webs than tree branches.

The way the light circled from the lamp into the glittering limbs, it made a soft sort of halo. It was magical.

There’s nothing to distract me now from the trunk of the tree except for its limbs. I get a sort of pleasure from looking at the small collection of empty trees so close together. It’s as if a tree forgets itself with the blob of green around its top, but when all of that falls away, it remembers what it is. It remembers that it is thin, narrow, and delicate. They make a different sound now (though even dead leaves are still a noisy bunch when the wind comes calling). They are silent.

Sitting below the naked trees, I can’t help catching their new vulnerability. The sky seems bigger, grayer. The sky can see me now, and I can see it. We watch each other warily, but the trees only shrug.

I think too, there is pride in a tree’s nakedness. They stand straighter without the leaves. They flaunt their twists and broken limbs as well as their long, delicate fingers. They are unashamed of their scars. If I could wear mine so well, I would flaunt them too. I wonder how humanity would change if we, too, were forced to drop our leaves every year.

If, for half the year, we lived physically and emotionally bare. Would we sway and bend with the wind? Would we break under the heavy ice and snow? Could we really free ourselves, or, like a few of the trees by my stairs, would we cling to they ivy that covers and devours our flesh? Accepting anything that covers. Are we as brave as the trees?

No. I think we are made of more penetrable stuff. More tender, more delicate, more ego-driven stuff.

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s experiences are truly moving in “A Place to Stand.” I found myself quite frustrated with the breaks in the sections that we read. While I am not a big non-fiction fan, I was completely captured by his narrative. I wanted to read all of it, know all of it, and be moved by all of it. His use of language is truly amazing. I kept trying to read his work like a writer, but ended up just reading. I had to stop myself multiple times to look at his craft a little closer.

While his world is completely different than my own, I could relate to everything he said. That is craft. It felt like I was there with him, watching his mother’s affair from under the floorboards of his house. I rode in the car with his drunk father, trying to sleep in the seat under a jacket. I was in prison, watching someone take over a space I had carefully created for myself (we’ve all had bad roommates). There is something so immediate about his language, so raw and vivid, that it completely passes through the analytical part of the mind and into the experiential.

I think part of this has to do with how seamlessly he enters and leaves scene. It never gets too clunky or awkward. Too, the language, while elaborate, is very natural. It isn’t overwrought or careless. It is precise and well-measured. The psychologist in me wonders how he processes and uses language since he learned to read at such a late age. It isn’t as if he just learned the language though; he’d spoken it all his life. So it’s odd because there is such a strangeness with something that had been so familiar.

His poetry itself is so vulnerable and rich. It was interesting to read it after having read “A Place to Stand” because it was like the guts of the experiences he had put in the book. I thought that the book had been so complete and well rounded, but the poetry is raw with emotions and images. The poem VI in “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley” which seemed to me to be about his mother was heart-breaking. The final lines “and your voices strained with the tragedy/ that you had lived a fairytale--/ Then he shot you and himself.” were devastating. I tried to see if this was, in fact, what had happened to his mother. If she had really been murdered because of the similarities in the stories, but I couldn’t find any confirmation.

I like how his poetry really struggles with these two worlds he had been trapped between as a child. We see glimpses of that in his story, I’m sure there is more of this in the pieces we didn’t see, but he never fully addresses it until he works on his poetry. And while he struggles with this white, “civilized” side, and this Mexican, wild side, I didn’t really see why he was considered a nature poet until I read, “Black Mesa Poems.” “Roots” was one of my favorite poems in that collection.

11/ 11/ 09 4:35pm

Everything here is a little more brown. A little more brittle. The moisture in the leaves has begun to evaporate, and with it goes the vibrant colors. Even the leaves that cling to the trees are so. Soon, I hope to hear that lovely fall sound: the skittering of dry leaves across pavement. It isn’t real fall until the cold has sucked the color from those already dead leaves, until the dry husks wander, aimlessly, under the direction of the wind. Like zombies.

It’s hard not to think of death and decay as you watch, week by week, the earth retreat into hibernation. I wonder how the class changes when it is taught in the spring.

In the spring, I suppose, there is that excitement as green suddenly springs forth. It’s exciting. The green affects you as you notice the first patches of green grass and clover. The first buds on the trees. Seeing the earth revitalize itself after the long cold sleep of winter give you hope as well. Music returns with the color. Birds. And fresh spring rains. Spring is a natural aphrodisiac.

But autumn is brown. The world shuts down, preparing for the dead of winter. It is an interesting experience to watch such a process so closely. It’s like reporting the decay of a loved one. Watching your parents grow old. Here is a crow’s foot at the corner of an eye. There is a grey hair, and there is another. Most of the time, we are so lost in our own lives, we don’t even notice this process until it has already run its course.

One day, it is a little chilly; the next, the leaves litter the ground. Watching it so closely, it is easy to see how slowly it really takes place. Like most occurrences in the natural world, these processes take place at a creeping pace. I wonder how the world must look to the snail or slug. I wonder if time or death make any more sense to them.

I wonder how black came to be associated with mourning, with death. Clearly, the color we should be wearing is brown. Death, his scythe, and his brown cowl. Death isn’t black, the absence of color. If fall has taught me anything, it’s that death is at least as colorful as life. Brown is the culprit.

I never liked the color brown as a child. Back then, it was a color that seemed to be lacking any beauty. It was the color of poop, of dirt. If you mixed all of the other colors together, whether using paint or crayons or markers, you ended up with a thick, disgusting brown color. Brown is what is left over after all of the other colors have been spent.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate brown and the subtleties of its hues. The differences between a mahogany and maple. The golden brown of skin and the crust of a bread. Hazel and nutmeg. Death must be the brown of dead leaves, of the leaves who still wander the streets on cold December nights, so brittle that they break upon touching.

I’ve heard so much about Pittsburgh being such a healthy and green city. Even when I tried to google for environmental issues or articles, most of them were praising Pittsburgh for all of the work they’d done reversing the harm done by the steel mills and lack of sewer plant for most of the twentieth century. However, once I started looking for more specific things, like air quality, little problems started to come out of the woodwork.

I was very surprised to hear that Pittsburgh was ranked number two for worst air pollution out of the country. In fact, the only city that performed worse than Pittsburgh on the American Lung Association’s list in 2007 was Los Angeles, which is down right smoggy. The air looked so clear here that I couldn’t believe the air was so unhealthy and downright dangerous.

This wasn’t the first time either for such a ranking. In 2003, the Surface Transportation Policy Project ranked Pittsbugh sixth on its list of the worst air quality, and then bumped it up to number two by 2005. The local news station even did an in-depth report on the subject, which won awards.

To be fair, a good portion of this pollution (40%) is caused by emissions from cars and other forms of transportation. However, apparently, many organizations in the area still burn coal for fuel, including three of the five largest sources of sulfur-dioxide in the country, all local power plants. When sulfur-dioxide mixes with ammonia already in the air, it turns in to a deadly, super fine compound named PM2.5. Though it’s not visible like the smog and smoke used to be over Pittsburgh in its steel mill days. Actually, it’s even more dangerous because of this fact.

The chemical, PM2.5, is so small that it bypasses the hairs in the nose that are supposed to stop such pollution from making its way into the body. It also slides pass the trachea, and nestles its way into the lower lung where it causes lung disease, asthma, and allergies. In fact, over ten percent of Pittsburghers suffer from asthma which is higher than the national average.

Too, these super fine particles can even work their way fro your lungs to your bloodstream where they then affect your heart. The damage that the PM2.5 particles can cause is devastating. It has been linked to much higher rates of lung disease, heart disease, and cancer because of how effective it is at entering the body.

I think this is a terribly disturbing problem for the people of Pittsburgh because there is this false sense of security. The city has already done so much to make itself more sustainable, but it’s still dangerously polluted, even though you can’t tell so without special equipment. To make matters worse, the owners of the power plants are refusing to put special scrubbers and cleaners in their equipment to clean the air before it is released. They say that the cost of installing such devices would cause their customers more harm than good because of the extra money they would have to pay for service. I guess saving money is worth more than our health.

My place is still yellow. Well, maybe a bit more brown. While last week, the yellow was as bright and vibrant as lemons, this week it has faded to the yellow of apples. Spots of brown rot have eaten small holes in some of the leaves, and brown has coursed through the veins and muscles of the leaves. Soon decay will set in completely and nothing but the brown will remain.

Still the ivy remains vibrant and hardy green.

I wonder how difficult it is to remain so beautiful when everything around you is dying. I suppose that’s what such parasitic plants do though. For all its beauty, it gets its strength from the trees around it. Those leaves that have fallen on top of it, trying to bury its shameless face are like the children trying to hide a parent’s affair.

I should not be surprised, though. Such beauty has a steep price in the wild. Vibrantly feathered male birds build those colors by sacrificing nutrients from their frail bodies. Those colors that attract females also attract predators. It’s a bragging right. If I can sacrifice all of these nutrients for beauty and still haven’t been caught by a predator, then I must be a good mate, right?

Young male syndrome. It’s a short life, but filled with excitement, beauty, and fucking.

A tree in this patch of wild has recently fallen over. It’s a steep hill, and I’m honestly still impressed by how the trees grip so tightly at the soil with their roots. How they balance so precariously. But this one has fallen. It looks so sad and thin. I wonder what made it fall. If the wind simply puffed too hard one day, and the tree teetered to the ground.

Or perhaps it was that ivy, that dreaded beautiful ivy. It wrapped its seductive tendrils around its base, winding its way up the shaft. The poor tree didn’t even notice the small sips she took of the sweet soil nutrients. Not at first. By the time he noticed, he was hollow and aching. She was already inching along to the next victim, too engrossed with the chase to notice his protests. That’s when the wind came. That bully. Talk about hitting a tree when he’s down.

Everything seems to be falling. The tree, the leaves, the temperature. I can emphasize with Chicken Little. Soon, bits of blue will tumble down like bits of fluff on the currents of air. Or rather, snow, I suppose. Considering clouds are made of water, the sky will fall soon. Little frozen water crystals. I see that it’s supposed to snow as soon as Thursday!

I am both excited and apprehensive about the Pittsburgh winter. Snow is both as beautiful and as dangerous as the ivy. Though the flakes are soft and light, they stick together, muffling even sound. Travel becomes dangerous. They trip tires and befuddle boots. They’ve even been known to float right into an open eye.