Watershed Journal: Fall & Winter 2006

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Brown and RISD’s Journal of Environment and Culture. Issue 3. Volume 2.

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Weed Eaters

A Local Actor: A Global Difference for Birds

ReGenesis in South Carolina

Starling Sestinas

Through the Impenetrable Wood

� watershed

Front and Back Cover Illustration by Celeste Rapone

Title Page Illustrationby Julian Gham

Editor’s NotE

NICK NEELY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing Editor

EMMA BELLAMY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Literary Director

ALICE COSTASALFREDO AGUIRREHELEN MOU. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Features Editors

CAMDEN AvERY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prose Editor

ALICE COSTASALLISON LApLATNEY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetry Editors

CAROLINE GODDARD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art Editor

NICK NEELY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Design

AMY pILLEREMILY UNDERWOOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Senior Editors

BEN CARMICHAEL EvAN FRAzIERIAN GRAYBEN GODDARD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors Emeriti

ELIzABETH TAYLORNORMAN BOUCHERTHALIA FIELDRICHARD FISHMANKARL JACOBYDAN JAMESSIMONE pULvERCAROLINE KARp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Advisory Board

Watershed is published with funding from Brown University’s CreativeArts Council and Undergraduate Finance Board, from the RISD Illustration Department, and from invidividual donations and subscribers.

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Printed by Kase PrintingISSN 1549-1374©2006 Watershed MagazineAll Rights Reserved.

With this issue, Watershed turns three-years-old. No longer quite fledgling, we are beginning to venture farther from the nest. Several wonderful pieces show us new horizons in this issue. John Lane takes us on a tour of a creek in South Carolina where pollution and environmental justice issues are being addressed in a community “ReGenesis.” Paul Huebener’s essay introduces us to a moose on the road and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Daniel Orenstein goes overseas to the Syrian-African Rift Valley, where millions of birds rest and refuel each year on an exodus from Europe to Africa and back. Bee-eater, roller, hoopoe — these birds are strange to us. Their perilous situation is not. Environmental degradation migrates all over the world. Elsewhere in the journal, Linnea Ogden shares a selection of her “Starling Sestinas.” Her inspiration is a bird we all know. It flocks outside our windows and quicksteps across our sidewalks. Colonies of starlings wake us early in the morning with shrieks and cackling as they ready to leave the roost. They affect indigenous birds, stealing nest space. Linnea’s work is observant, well researched, and imaginative. It lifts the starling off the page to reveal a different side to this overlooked, much maligned bird. Author Rick Van Noy essays upon another invasive in “Weed Eaters”— your lawn. Like the starling, lawn is the bane of native varieties. Our relationship to lawn is necessarily complex. Rick gives us a bird’s eye view of this controversy — up close and personal, a robin tilting its head to grass.

We like to tell stories among the staff about “Watershed moments” — personal experiences in which the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ seem poignantly engaged. A moment alights upon me now that seems appropriate to share. Up a forest service road in Washington State this summer, I was guided to a spotted owl — a threatened species iconic of the environmental movement. As I watched this rare creature, which sat sleepy and puffed on a branch, an airplane noised overhead, muffling the soft creek in the valley. The plane banked toward Seattle above the trees and broke the quiet of the forest with a quick rumbling turn. As it did, the owl looked to the sky and squinted, as if straining to see the sound somewhere up, up there, up above. For a second, space, scale, and species contracted. It felt like a moment of connection. The contributors in these pages relish in Watershed moments. We know our readers do, too. We hope you’ll share a Watershed moment with us soon. Send us a submission, but first, enjoy the birds. May they take flight for you.

Nick NeelyManaging Editor

�fall & winter 2006

CoNtENts

FEaturEs RICK VAN NOY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weed Eaters 12

DANIEL ORENSTEIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Local Actor: A Global Difference for Birds 20

JOHN LANE . . . . . . . . . . . . ReGenesis: Seeking Wildness in a Damaged Southern Landscape 28

LINNEA OGDEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Starling Sestinas 36

PAUL HUEBENER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Through the Impenetrable Wood 42

KATHERINE DYKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ladder 18

MATT NIGHSWANDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .By Way of Car 26

LISA GILES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Windfall, Deer / Heron 1 7

LEORA FRIDMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deciduous 34

MARYJO MARTIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bones of a Small Town 47

MICHELE BATTISTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Storm Season 47

art

Abacus 6 · Switchboard 7 · Contributors 48· Days 50

PoEtry

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abaCus

Abacus sources on page 49

submit to watershedFiction, essay, art, poetry. Send us your work for review.

Detailed submissions guidelines available online:Submissions and inquiries:

Spring Deadline: April 1st

[email protected]

MowEd dowN

Number of children under 18 who recieved emergency care related to lawn mower injuries from 1996-2004 . . 9,400

Number of pounds of domestically banned pesticide the US exported between 2001-2004 . . . . . . . . .28,000,000

Number of gallons of gas per year that Americans use to mow their lawns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8,000,000

Number of gallons of gas that Americans spill each year when refueling lawn mowing equiptment . . . 17,000,000

Percentage of yearly air pollution attributable to lawn mowing emissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Number of pounds of yearly carbon dioxide emissions that could be eliminated by replacing 500 gas lawn mowers with

manual mowers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80,539

Number of lawn mower related injuries in 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6,506,028

MoosE, ME

Number of muse in Maine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29,000

Average number of moose vehicle collisions that occur in New Brunswick every year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300

Number of moose vehicle collisions in Maine 2000-2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,400

Percentage of Maine animal vehicle collision injuries related to moose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50

Number of fatal injuries caused by moose vehicle collisions in Maine from 2000-2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

suPErFuNd

Number of dollars committed to toxic waste site cleanup projects through Superfund in 2006 . . . . . 530,900,000

Total number of sites on the national priority list for contamination cleanup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,557

Number of sites cleaned in 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 653

Total number of sites cleaned since Superfund’s implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,006


The apples are crisper as it gets colder, she tells me. I’m not sure, though, whether it is the apples or the bite my teeth get in the back at the touch of tart, cold flesh. The fruit’s skin doesn’t seem to help in the least to keep these teeth calm. My incisors are suddenly sunk in a foreign temperature of white. I’ve got the special toothpaste for “sensitive” teeth, but it never seems to help with that big, fresh bite of cold. The Barden Family Orchard has been represented at farmer’s markets on Providence’s College Hill for three years now, and I’ve been picking there for two. The orchard is in North Scituate, Rhode Island, she said. Impossible, I said, Scituate is in Massachusetts. The first time we drove there I was stubborn, waiting with each turn for the “Welcome to Massachusetts” sign in green. I should have remembered how little to trust my own geography. The Barden family has been a part of various farmer’s markets and local food initiatives throughout Rhode Island, from Pawtucket to Hope High school. The market on College Hill is the only one I’ve witnessed where a family will pre-bag everything for you. Apple season reminds me of my retainer, and less negatively than you might expect. It’s been three years since braces and I still pull out the retainer every few weeks. I check first, slide it over my teeth, preparing myself for a level of pain, the amount my cuspids have sidled from Doctor Ficalora’s 1998 ideal. Despite my will to keep my teeth straight, on rare occasions they deserve a risk. Take Exit 6 off I-295, bite into a Macoun or a Crispin twice the size of your fist, and you’ll see what I mean. The Barden family’s apples make your whole mouth and throat feel like they are getting a massage, like there are pores in there that are getting cleared out and nourished, rejuvenated. I realize that apples have sugar in them, but every time I bite into one I get the precise image that it is cleansing. The vitamin C hiding right under the skin, uncoiling into

my molars. Apple a day, keep the doctor away, I suppose I am thinking. Sometimes I wonder, what about two? Do the extra calories bring him sauntering back?

~ Leora Fridman

The sun dips low on the horizon, suspending the Ravalli County Fairgrounds in an amber glow. The crowd in the packed grandstands is silent. Men, women and children in cowboy hats clutch the green gates surrounding the arena, holding their breath. Others sit at the edge of their seats, straining to see the action. A bull shoots into the arena, rider astride his back. It bucks and whips and billows clouds of dust, and throws the cowboy to the ground. The crowd roars. Just as fast as it began, the ride is over, and the rider is floundering in the dirt. “The bull ripped the chap right off of him!” shouts the announcer, “Show him some love, Hamilton!” Ed Wills’ ride doesn’t last long, but the cheering does. One of the few local competitors in Hamilton, Montana’s National Senior Pro Rodeo, Wills is back on the circuit after a twenty-five-year hiatus. Dirt smudged across his cheek and still breathing heavy, the Hamilton cowboy says that one of his sons convinced him to return to riding. “I started up again last year,” he says, “and it feels good. But the older you are, the slower you are.” He wears the pain proudly, wincing with every step.

Two hundred or so contestants range in age from their forties to mid-seventies, and hail from the western states and Canada. Their weathered skin, stretched loose over gnarled bones and limbs, speaks of their deep connection to the earth. These cowboys know the land they ride. They’ve been on the circuit for years, traveling the West. They have ridden the grassy valleys of the Northern Rockies and the red mesas of Arizona. They wear the dirt in the soles of their boots and the wrinkles in their faces. Buried in the arena are memories, and as horses pound the dry ground, clouds

switChboard

RodeohaMiltoN, MoNtaNa

CrispinrhodE islaNd

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of dust swell. They remember. For Dee Ratliff of Hamilton, a petite redhead

with a contagious smile, the rodeo is a chance to remember her stepfather, a cowboy who recently passed away. Ratliff, who competes herself, is at the Fairgrounds Saturday night to visit her stepfather’s old friends with her three-year-old daughter in tow. “There are a lot of guys here that I knew when I was younger,” she says. “With her granddad being gone, it’s nice for her to see them. It’s a real family here.” Everywhere Ratliff steps, an old cowboy comments on how much she’s changed since he last saw her.

“I remember when you were this big,” says Jim Fresch, one of the many Canadian competitors in Friday and Saturday’s rodeos, first in the world in steer wrestling. Like many other visitors, he is awed by the crowd, who are cheering on a team of ribbon ropers. “This is why I come here,” he says. “You can be an hour and a half on the bull roping, and they still cheer.” Bert Roe, who grew up in New Mexico but now lives in Hamilton, explains that one of the biggest changes he’s seen to the rodeo is the prize money. “Back then, there was no money in it,” he says of days on the circuit, when he traveled the western United States. “If I won sixty dollars—now that was big money.” Today it is not unusual for a cowboy to win an eleven thousand dollar prize.

At seventy-five, Roe doesn’t have plans to retire the reins anytime soon.

“I’m going to keep roping until I die,” he says, but admits that rodeos get harder with age. “The older you get, the more it hurts.” He motions to the arena as a cowboy lands on his back in the dirt. “When you’re young it doesn’t hurt. If I got bucked off like that now, I never would get back up again.” Another Hamilton cowboy, Dwain Rennaker competed in three high school national rodeos, but says his fondest memory was winning a bronc riding competition in his hometown.

“It was 1961, and I rode a horse that had never been rode,” he says. “Nothing in my life will ever take the place of rodeo. It just gets in your blood. It’s the best sport in the whole world.”

Rennaker, who walks with a slouch and a swagger with his hands in his belt loops, is here to watch the competition but also to hear his granddaughter, Katelynn Rennaker of Darby, sing the national anthem. Katelynn is an up-and-coming cowgirl as well. Her grandfather taught her to ride before she could walk. A sophomore in high school, she enjoys watching the older riders compete. “I think its so fun to see them,” she says. “I hope I get to do it someday myself.” Katelynn has also come to watch the young cowboys, but she doesn’t let her grandfather hear her say it. The competitors don’t let age slow them down. Pat Turk kneels by the arena as a steer flies by, a pair of horses

Photography by Mike Cohea


at its heels.“I can’t do much of anything anymore but ribbon run,”

she says. “But I can really run.”Turk, who is seventy-one, runs a mile and a

quarter through her orchard every night with weights strapped to her legs. “And when I get out here,” she say, “it feels like nothing and I can fly.” She has attended every Senior Pro Rodeo in Hamilton since 1996. “Look at the crowd out there,” says Turk. “It’s so nice to perform in front of a crowd that appreciates you. Much better than an empty grandstand.”

Dan Stringari, of Gallatin Gateway, Montana, has double duty at the rodeo. He wears a black-and-white striped vest and also competes in steer-wrestling.

The short, stocky cowboy has judged every Senior Pro Rodeo since Hamilton’s first, held more than twenty years ago.

“I really like watching a good ride,” he says. “When everything goes right, you just get a high on it. You just feel so good for the cowboy.”

He also loves competing.“When you finish a good run, it’s just like hitting a

grand slam run in baseball - you have just conquered all.” As the night draws to a close, the dust settles in the

arena. Generations of cowboys and cowgirls pack up their gear and their horses and bid goodbye to old friends. Some are moving on to the next rodeo, others heading for home. The crowd, too, is quiet, this time for good. It filters from the stands into the packed parking lot across the street. The brake lights of cars and trucks, colored like the crimson clouds that streak the purple sky, turn onto U.S. 93. In time, this year’s rodeo will slip to the back of their minds. Tonight, it’s caked in horseshoes and worn leather boots, and buried in crevasses of skin.

~ Sarah Sutton

Earlier this year Warwick, Rhode Island hosted the first ambassador of a species new to the area. It was spotted drinking from a freshwater outfall pipe in Greenwich Bay in August, and later swam up to Cape Cod. The animal in question is Trichecus manatus, also known as the West Indian or Florida manatee, protected under the Endangered Species Act. Manatees generally grow to be ten to fifteen feet long and weigh between ten and fifteen hundred pounds. They live in the rivers, canals, estuaries, and saltwater bays of Florida, which provide the shallow and very warm waters they need to survive. In the summer they are commonly seen in the Carolinas and, rarely, as far north as New York.

Manatees are members of the phylogenetic order Sirenia, so named, the story goes, because early sailors mistook them for the mythological sirens, temptresses who lured ships

toward rocky waters with their songs. However, this story probably says less about manatees than about sailors who could confuse a beautiful woman with a half-ton sea cow.

The manatee encountered in Rhode Island this summer was at first thought to be Chessie, perhaps the most famous of all manatees. Chessie was named in 1994 while hanging around Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. The US Coast Guard airlifted Chessie back to Florida for fear that the water would become too cold for him to survive the long trip on his own. The next summer Chessie returned north to Point Judith, Rhode Island, until this year the farthest north a manatee had swum on record. While the recent Warwick sighting is not a sign of an impending manatee migration, it is suggestive of the effects that rising sea temperatures due to global warming could have on their behavior.

It is surprising that this environmental wake-up call was sounded by an animal that was essentially able to drop

out of evolutionary competition. One look at a manatee will tell you that it was not designed for survival in the usual sense. Armed only with large flippers and a mouth full of molars, a manatee’s best chance at fending off an attacker would involve getting in close and using his whiskery snout to tickle the potential predator to death.

Obviously, the manatee didn’t actually forgo the process of evolution, but its evolutionary adaptations are not centered on defense because it has no natural predators. Attacks by sharks, alligators and crocodiles are very rare, as manatees are too large for crocodiles and alligators and they inhabit waters too shallow for sharks to enter. Without these concerns, their evolutionary adaptations facilitate navigation through shallow waters and consumption of enormous quantities of food — up to 10 percent of their body weight daily. Extremely dense bones and hermetically sealing nostrils enable them to stay submerged for extended periods of time, and a remarkable upper lip with dexterous right and left sides that work independently allows them to corral the sea grasses, flowers, algae and seaweed that make up their diet. Another effect of the absence of predators

Siren in the SearhodE islaNd

Jennifer Kindell

10 watershed

is that manatees are inherently approachable. Boat trips in Florida allow tourists to swim with and even pet the gentle creatures with one hand (using two is illegal).

According to the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission’s latest survey, there are only an estimated 3,116 Florida manatees left. Worse, manatees do not repopulate quickly. Females are able to first conceive around nine years old and have a thirteen-month gestation period. Humans create most of the dangers manatees now face. These dangers include entanglement in fishing lines and crab traps, crushing in the locks of dams and canals, destruction of habitat and pollution. Collisions with speedboats account for about 20 percent of manatee deaths. Since 2002 boat collisions have killed an average of seventy-nine manatees a year, making them the leading cause of death among adult manatees. In addition to fatal accidents, non-lethal boat accidents are so common that manatees are usually identified by propeller scars on their backs. This is how it was determined the Warwick manatee was not Chessie. Additionally, scientists recently found that the manatee’s extra dense bones are more easily broken than those of other mammals, a fact which makes boating collisions even more serious. While some areas in Florida have implemented no-wake zones and speed limits in estuarial waters, these laws do not exist everywhere and are difficult to enforce.

The threat of global warming adds to the direct dangers humans pose to manatees. The most pressing of these concerns is red tide, a toxic algal bloom that killed 150 manatees in 1996 and ninety-six in 2003. Studies have also shown that fewer manatees survive years with heavy hurricane activity, and scientists are beginning to link higher sea temperatures to an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes. Hurricanes also increase rainfall in coastal areas, which, along with higher water temperature, is believed to be associated with the increased presence of red tide. Rising sea levels would require additional sea walls that would inhibit the growth of the sea grasses manatees eat. These changes would certainly affect more than just manatees. The sea along the Florida coast is rising faster than ever before, and Everglades National Park, home to many endangered species, is one of the ecosystems most vulnerable to this danger.

To some extent, manatees have adapted to and even taken advantage of the changes brought by humans. In winter they can often be found upriver in Florida waters warmed by nearby power plants. All the same, the negative effect of human influence is undeniable: since

1976 the manatee mortality rate has risen an average of 5.6 percent yearly. While the dangers facing manatees were for a time solvable locally, a global reaction to warming trends may now be necessary to assure their survival. Although this task continues to grow more daunting, it’s not too late to make sure manatees are safe, both at home and on the occasional trip to Rhode Island.

~ Davy Andrews

An eight-inch poagie is dropped into a pail of rosy water. It lands with a plop next to a much larger tail that extends from the paint bucket beyond its rim. The pail belongs to a Dominican man. He sits on a log

most days of the week angling for voracious gamefish that chase bait upriver along the Atlantic coast.

This fishing spot is down a trail accessed from a small, triangular park in Pawtucket. The park was once a landing, as marked by concrete foundations.

It is a minute-long float from the confluence of the Seekonk River and I-95. The sounds of car and water commingle; after a rain, the river rushes, pronouncing itself paramount, but today the traffic is strong, drowning out a laconic flow. The path runs downstream a short way to a derelict power plant, appropriately fenced off and overgrown. Behind the fence, I’m told, locals used to cache fawns, enclosing them to graze in solitude until large enough to shoot with bow and arrow.

There are two fish in the man’s bucket: a bluefish, face down, its tall tail twitching involuntarily, and the poagie, its prey, now temporarily revived and thrashing wildly, sending a bloody wash over the bucket’s edge. These fish are essential characters in this setting. Fishermen catch poagie; then they cast them back —

October BluesrhodE islaNd

Photography by Nick Neely

11fall & winter 2006

October BluesrhodE islaNd

preferably alive — as bait for blues. Some fishermen hook their poagies in the mouth for this return passage, others through the tail. The Dominican man, who seems like a sage on these banks, uses a three-hooked approach with his fish: one hook through the mouth, another imbedded in the body, a third through the tail.

When a bluefish rushes a poagie, it takes it from behind and cuts it in half. Its teeth are so precise that anglers use special pliers and/or gloves to remove a swallowed hook for fear of losing a finger. Blues are aggressive. They hunt anything that swims, smaller blues no exception. They stalk on smell, able to detect even small concentrations of compounds in the water on the order of one part per billion.

One can tell from the tail that it’s a blue bleeding there in the bucket; the caudal fin is broad and forked, built to thrust and cut in hefty current in pursuit of poagie and river herring. It is tinted grey and blue. A sharp posterior dorsal fin rises opposite an almost identical anal fin, both of which work to stabilize this efficient machine, this predator.

The Dominican grabs the poagie from the bucket in his left hand, lays it flat on a rock, and puts a hook through its lip with a crunch. He draws his knife across its gills, so that they bleed for the big ones. The fish is still alive, and it will continue to act like it for three, maybe four casts. Depends on its stamina.

He lowers the fish into the river, allowing it to recover a moment; then, when all is ready, he swings up, preparing to cast. The fish kisses the shore goodbye as he loads the rod over his shoulder. He snaps back the bail and draws a finger over the line to hold the fish.

All motion goes forward — he lets fly. The fish swims in air, finning full sail. It lands with a broadside-smack midway across and darts in a panic, towing line in an arc.

I know little Spanish, but I try, hoping for more information from this man on his art. I wonder how these fish taste.

“Va a comer este pescado?” I ask, pointing to the tail in the pail. The words are slow, but fishing affords time. I motion with my hand toward my mouth and squeeze my fingers.

He looks on cheerily. “Sí, me gusta mucho,” he says, in terse words, wiggling his tongue between his lips with a gustatory flash. He takes home his blues and stashes them in the freezer. Most eventually find their way into stews. A neighboring angler tells me (with a hint of jealousy) that two days ago the Dominican man caught eight blues and

one striped bass, a pretty sizable pot. The Dominican man stalks his blues, moving from his

seat, pulling the pole from the snag, gathering it his arms. He walks toward the water, puffing on a cigar, breathing smoke into the afternoon. He is inside himself, feeling the line as if it were an extension of his hands. His eyes shift from water to reel to line, and again, in quick succession. He has been here six hours today. “Desde la una” he says, raising fingers on his hand.

Soon the strength on the end of the line wavers. When it expires, he retrieves the wrung-out poagie and inserts two more hooks into its body. Wire leaders attach each hook to the primary hook in the fish’s mouth; suddenly, the poagie looks like a science project. He casts again. This trip, the fish sinks hard when it hits the water. It falls passively into the current.

The scene is calm, then BAM — “Picó!” It bit! The man gives a hoot, bounding off his log, pole in hand. His tip is low toward the water. The rod is trembling. He lifts — a fish is fighting. Just as suddenly, the line goes slack. His body relaxes. Dismayed, he retrieves, reeling in the fish. Or what was the fish. It is only the head — a triangle inset with a large piscine eye. It is streaming flesh.

I am twenty meters down stream talking to another fisherman who lives ten minutes from the park when he hooks another. He gives voice, and the boy next to me sprints to help, followed by the man I’m talking with and his wife. I follow. The boy grasps the man’s large green net — like an oversized aquarium scooper — and works to snare the large blue tearing up the shallows at the water’s edge. When he succeeds, the fish thrashes madly in the twine. He and the boy hold up the blue for the boy’s mother and her camera, striking a satirically triumphant pose.

~ Nick Neely

12 watershed

I ate my lawn this year. I also ate its roots. Probably a little dirt, too. It was the first of April but no foolin.’ We added

dandelion and Pennsylvania bittercress to the greens that overwintered in our glass-covered cold frame and ate them with a side of boiled yucca root. My daughter asked for more. Neither kid said yuck. Not even once. It was the ultimate economy: what would be discarded was on our dinner plate.

On one of the first warm days of spring, the grass finally green again, we dug out a row of yuccas to make room for a blackberry patch. We kicked spades into the soft spring dirt, cutting open the milky root — cool and moist, slippery like aloe, the color of coconut. Elliot peeled off her shoes to run the cool dirt between her toes. She jumped in and out of the yucca holes.

“I will have to dig to the center of the earth!” said her brother Sam, following the root well into the clay layer. Sam dug and Elliot pulled, falling back as the bayonet stalks gave way. She pulled out ganglia with hairy nodules. Metal blade to dirt, shoe to shovel, die yucca die.

While we dug, we heard the chew, chew, hurry, hurry, hurry of the cardinals, as the visiting cedar waxwings whistled us on. We carried away three wheelbarrows of yucca root, yucca chunks, yucca meat.

Some yucca species are native to the Southeast, but our row was probably planted. Later that day we found out that the roots have been used as shampoo, anti-inflammatory medicine, and food. I peeled the woody skin off two roots and boiled them. We passed around the bowl of yucca, which tastes just like potato, and had it with our salad of dandelions, whose roots are also good to eat.

Weed eating. In his 1962 book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Euell Gibbons tried to redirect our perceptions of “weeds,” especially the lowly dandelion, “herbal hero.” While he did not mention yucca, Gibbons wrote of how we could forage for our food. “Children, especially,” he wrote, “are intrigued with the idea of garnering their food from the fields and byways,” exciting their “unspoiled sense of wonder” as they imagine how their forbears ate. Those forbears once knew how to scour the forests and field for chow; they once lived without that modern invention, the lawn.

April may be the cruelest month, but it’s also one of the quietest. April is National Lawn Care Month, an

obsession on which Americans spend forty billion dollars a year. In April, the lawn care industry would have us tuning the mower, spreading the fertilizer, applying the weed control. “We don’t own our lawns,” Thoreau said, except he was talking about farms. They own us. “No yard!” he declared, but “unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills.”

By May, the season is in full swing. Every Thursday I can expect an orchestra: first the whine of the weed eater, prepping the grounds, twine slapping grass and sidewalk; then add the drone of the mowers, and finally, for the crescendo, the deafening buzz of the leaf blower. Every Thursday a white truck pulls up across the street with a white, covered trailer. Headphones on, someone clutches the left and right handlebars, joy sticks, and backs the moon rover out of the trailer. Others grab the long weapons from the racks. They could be creatures from a sci-fi film, ready to avenge the mutant scourge — “Grass Assassins” is the name of one local company — but they are just the neighborhood lawn guys.

The California Air Resources Board says that in 2006 lawnmowers emitted ninety-three times more smog-

forming pollutants per gallon than emitted by that same year’s cars. According to the EPA, herbicide use has doubled between 1981 and 2001, and much of it ends up in the storm drains and eventually the watershed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that homeowners use ten times more chemicals per acre than farmers. According to the EPA, 95 percent of the pesticides used on residential lawns are possible or probable carcinogens. Children living in homes where pesticides are used have shown increased odds of childhood leukemia, brain cancer, and soft tissue sarcoma. What a toxic patch of ground we tend.

Annually, the average American lawnowner spends forty hours — a full work week — spinning their blades. The reason we spend so much money and time on our lawns? Property values, for one. Drive though any high rent district and houses will have white flags in the lawn

Weed Eaters“Hope and future for me are not in lawns.” ~Thoreau

Rick Van Noy

13fall & winter 2006Brian Elig

1� watershedBrian Elig

1�fall & winter 2006

— status markers — or trailers parked at the curb and hired hands on the fescue.

An astute observer of both cultural and geographic landscapes, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave the lawn a prominent, symbolic place in his novel The Great Gatsby. Narrator Nick Carraway comes from “the country of wide lawns” — made ever wider by the novel’s chief symbol of a dream that kills, the car — so he takes up residence in a commuter suburb of New York. His shabby house has a view of his neighbor Gatsby’s “more than forty acres of lawn and garden.” His cousin, Daisy, in the more fashionable East Egg, has a lawn that “started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens.” And the very last thing Gatsby does before he meets with Daisy? The very last thing after he had secured the mansion and the marble swimming pool and the magnificent cream-colored car with hat boxes and the shirts, the beautiful shirts? “I want to get the grass cut,” he tells Nick, Old Sport, who sees a sharp line where his ragged lawn ends and the “well-kept expanse” of Gatsby’s begins. The novel’s final image is of Gatsby standing on his “blue lawn” that “he had come a long way to,” picking out the green light on Daisy’s dock. Americans are still drawn out of walkable cities to the grass is greener, sprawling suburbs in pursuit of a nice patch of lush lawn.

Another reason we spend so much time working on our lawns is because to fail to do so seems a shirking of our pubic duty or, worse, laziness. It is downright un-American not to fawn over our lawns. In a 2003 look at the economy of home turf, Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp of The Ohio State University showed that many Americans associate “moral character and social responsibility with the condition of the lawn.” People believe that the condition of a lawn reflects the work ethic of its owner.

Some of my earliest memories are running across the lawn pushing my toy jeep while my father mowed.

I watched the blades of grass bend underneath the small plastic frame and pretended that I, too, was cutting grass. Be careful what you wish for.

When I got older, I was handed over the pull cord to the green Lawn Boy, reputedly made from magnesium: the grass had to be cut on Friday afternoons to look nice for the weekend. Look nice for whom? I don’t know, but our yard was not to look like the Murphys’, whose father slept-in on Saturdays. My dad liked the lines the wheels made in the grass, and he liked them straight, in a pattern. He liked his clippings bagged and his yard trim. My sisters and I plucked dandelions with a forked tool and placed them in a peach basket while my dad added a new instrument to the lawn symphony, an edger. He did not want grass to overlap sidewalk, so we became familiar with the sound of metal shaving concrete while we clipped grass around the lamp

post with yellow shears. Some years later, we were the first home on the block to own a new contraption. It had a long pole with a rotating head that spun nylon chord. It strapped to my back, the engine behind my ear, the gas tank over my shoulder. Our brushy, weedy riverbank could now to be cut regularly, like a lawn.

One difference an American would see traveling down a road in Slovenia, other than the lack of commercial

signs that mar our landscape, is that Slovenians mostly let the roadside grass grow. They grow gardens, rather than lawns, and they actually use the grass for wheat or hay (one sees it drying in the wind on the hayracks or kozolec, a national symbol). After living in Central Europe for half a year, we came home in June to a neglected lawn.

Rather than cut it right away, we made pathways through it. Want the neighborhood kids to play in your yard? Put in a maze. Since then, although we keep our yard at a uniform but high cut, we have started to transform our lawn into a playful, edible, and riotous banquet of color.

Instead of a homogenous green, a “green desert” as some ecologists call it, in spring our lawn is a debauchery of pastels, a “fairyland” according to my daughter. We have the deep purple and brilliant white of the violets, the lavender of the myrtle and ground ivy with rounded teeth on its green leaves. Pull on these leaves and you get mint. Purple dead nettle forms a whorl of leaves until the tip of the stem, but the last lobes are the darkest shade of purple and its flowers a delicate pink. We also have yellow from wild strawberry and soon from the not-too-far-behind buttercup.

Each year the garden gets bigger, and we plant more trees. This year we added another row of strawberries and more blues. What we don’t eat other animals do. The squirrels love the dogwood fruit and the bees the clover. This spring, we will plant native paw paw — a tropical fruit like a banana or mango that is host to the zebra swallowtail — and some weeds, particularly milkweed. We will not spray to keep the bugs off. Instead, we hope they tear the plant to shreds. Milkweed leaves are host to monarch butterfly eggs, which the caterpillar uses to eat its way to fiery brilliance. If the monarchs don’t eat them, we can eat the shoots like asparagus, or even the young pod. “Eaten with pot roast and gravy,” Gibbons admits, it is “one of my favorite vegetables.”

U.S. yards have grown so cosmetic that they are inedible. Nobody wants “messy” nuts, apples, blackberry

brambles or poke, creating problems for the songbirds and squirrels, the toads and insects. None of that bruised rottenness that feeds life.

On the walk to school my kids and I sometimes pass the lawn and garden of Joann and Norm Lineburg. Retiring

16 watershed

after forty-seven years of high school football, coach Norm is an institution in our town and knows a thing or two about turf, so much that he’s had one hundred yards of it named after him. “Our yard was a dirt pile when our kids were their age,” the humble coach tells us. “I can still show you where the bases were,” adds Joann. “Kids from all over came here and played pick-up games.” “We were glad to have them,” Norm adds. “I hardly ever needed to mow.” Our yard is dirt pile too, the pitcher’s mound also an end zone. The hedge is a soccer goal, and the blueberry bushes catch their share of passes and home runs. Between punts the kids grab a snack. When the game breaks up they make mud pies.

On one walk home a few days later, we see an older man out with his green canister sprayer.

“Gettin’ the dandelions?” I ask. “I sure hope so.”“What are you using?”“Weed-B-Gone. I had something else but it killed

everything. She was after me as much about the brown spots as about the yella.”

A few houses up, another older man, WWIIVET written on the spare tire cover of his RV, is out with his white sprayer, browning the grass around his driveway and walk.

“What are you using?” I had to ask again.

“Tough Job. Does the job, and then some.”

To many of their generation, settling in the developments after the war, or growing up in them as my father did, a tidy green lawn is the dominant cultural aesthetic. It says, “I have arrived, I keep a neat house, I work hard.” The aesthetic was in part created by the folks at Scotts, whose founder, O.M. Scott, “waged a one-man war against weeds.” Before the war, the company rolled out two signature products, Turf Builder, a fertilizer, and Lawn Care, a magazine, the “Dr. Spock of yard care” according to Ted Steinberg.

I don’t use chemicals, though I might like to. One pull of the trigger and the garden rows would be clear, the aphids eradicated. But imagine Whitman leaning and loafing on a spear of summer grass treated with ChemLawn.

And though I seemed to have inherited some of my father’s lawn aesthetic, I’m hoping my children will learn to appreciate a different palate. In making ours as edible and livable as possible, I hope they acquire a different taste. Children in South Korea do just fine with pickled radishes and sweet potatoes. In Mexico they learn to like hot peppers, and they’ll eat seaweed in Japan. A bowl of borscht

would not be uncommon at a Russian school lunch. Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky says our

adventure window for new food remains open while we’re young. Sapolsky, who studies stress in baboons, told National Public Radio about his study of a troupe forced to move to new territory. “There’s different plants and stuff to eat, and then you get this question of who’s going to try the new foods.” The young baboons not only ate the new foods, they taught their siblings to eat them too, but the older generation refused the novel herbage. Geezers get fixed in a pattern. They often mow their lawn the same way each time.

I don’t know if we have as yet something that could be called an “edible landscape,” but now that I know we can

eat yucca, in addition to our berries, cherries, and apples, our rhubarb, garden and herbs, we are certainly close. We can also eat weeds: not only dandelion but lambsquarters (cook like spinach), chickweed (chopped in salads), and violet too (both the flowers and early leaves can be eaten, the latter apparently good in a marinara sauce).

We enjoy the freshness and flavor of our yard, but mostly it gets us outside, interacting with the natural world, having fun with yucca root. Our lawn and garden chores teach my children some of the same lessons my parents wanted to instill in me, being responsible citizens and members of the family, except the weeds go into the salad bowl and not the peach basket. By not using noxious sprays, they will learn that they have responsibilities and ethical commitments that extend beyond our lot, a care for more than just a perfect lawn.

A friend told me that his father used to keep a lawn of moss, which he did not eat. He lived in Fairfax,

Virginia. The lawn was shaded by a high tree canopy. Each spring he would “weed” out some of the grass. Birds would sometimes peel it up and he would replace the divots, but mostly it was maintenance free. Clumps begot other clumps until he had a carpet of green. They put in a badminton court and played barefoot on it. Neighbors would show up with their visitors: Can we show them the moss?

During the same conversation, my friend’s wife, Jenny, told me about a course she was taking on English Gardens. One day she asked her professor about how they cut the “drinks” grass, that place for high tea quartered off from where the sheep roamed.

“Because I’ve had sheep out here, and walking after

Serena Halsey

Windfall, Deer

How many crabapples will you eatin the darkwhen you come down,

seven ghosts and more,like tall white birchesto the marsh —I wake beyond the silveringto a crisp false November.

I have seen your hiding places,I know my motherwas also one of you,

when the seasons were more usual,when Newfoundlands could tow childrenin the water by strength of tail,

when there were always twoto measure — apples left, apples gone.


them is not so fun.” “’Scissors,’ he told me. ‘Long scissors.’” “And the other day I was cursing the weed eater, a

cheap import that has lasted only two years, and I thought about how we are fighting a war in part for control of cheap gasoline, and I went in the house for a pair of shears.”

She got down on her hands and knees and started cutting a small patch between her path and her garden and realized “there’s all kinds of things going on down here.” She nibbled some plantain, which tastes like mushroom. Her back wasn’t sore from the machine. Too, she says she felt young and curious about all that was in this Lilliputian landscape, when seen up close: beautiful flowers and different scents, grass spiders and tiny insects. “I realized this is why I garden in the first place,” she said.

My new neighbor may be too busy moving in to mow his grass. He mows only the front, and I bristle

whenever the tractor swings wide into our grass. Whenever the Miller’s gold Craftsmen would make that mistake, my father would knock on their door. As for my neighbor’s back yard, it is almost a foot high, scientifically more a meadow. The pokeweed is as tall as the kids.

There is probably a city code that I could call him on. A friend says I might say something in person, using the kids

as my excuse. “I don’t mind,” I could say, “but I’m worried the kids might step on a snake or something.” But I’m not worried. Besides, pokeweed shoots “so closely resemble asparagus some may be fooled,” according to Gibbons. The kids also make their own concoctions with the neighbor’s berries (not to be eaten) that stain their hands purple. Left alone, a lawn would eventually revert to a deciduous forest, a “climax community” in terms of ecological succession, and we’ve always wanted a house in the woods.

Along the alley my neighbor and I share day lilies. Their buds can be added to soups, like okra; their blossoms, tubers, and stalks can also be eaten. If the kids don’t kick them like soccer balls, puffballs grow on the hill behind our house, a tasty edible mushroom.

I have heard of The Edible Schoolyard, a project in Berkeley led by Alice Waters that provides urban public school students with a one-acre organic garden, but the growing season in Southwest Virginia does not coincide with the school calendar. Still, by eating both what we plant and what grows anyway, I hope my kids are getting an edible education. When they stand on our lawn, I hope they too are sensing something “commensurate” to their “capacity to wonder,” a green light symbolic of a vibrant, colorful future right in front of them.

Meanwhile, the yuccas have already sprouted in spots where we dug them out. That’s the nature of a weed: it comes back. Yucca flowers are said to taste like endive.

Heron

The one blue herondominates his banked pool;in the boundaries of the covewhite egretsskitter across his peripheral vision.I am tiredof letter after letter,approaching you quietlylike the little ripple at the heron’s feetand receiving nothingbut the slow, calculated blinkof a gray-lashed eye.

Windfall, Deer

How many crabapples will you eatin the darkwhen you come down,

seven ghosts and more,like tall white birchesto the marsh —I wake beyond the silveringto a crisp false November.

I have seen your hiding places,I know my motherwas also one of you,

when the seasons were more usual,when Newfoundlands could tow childrenin the water by strength of tail,

when there were always twoto measure — apples left, apples gone.

~ Lisa Giles

1� watershed

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20 watershed

Mid-morning, mid-autumn at HaMerkaz HaBein-Leumi L’Tzaparut, the International Birding and

Research Center in Israel’s southern Arava Desert. Though this is ‘nature,’ the sounds of the desert have a distinctly human resonance. Truck engines echo from the Arava road connecting Eilat to the rest of Israel. The engines reverberate across the Syrian-African Rift Valley from the mountains of Eilat to the towering Edom Mountains a couple miles into Jordan. A local bird — perhaps a wagtail — twitters as it hops among the human prints in the dusty path. The wind rattles a wooden memorial sign on top of a lecture hut dedicated to the memory of six Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza Strip in 2004. A middle-aged Russian-accented couple asks me where the flamingos are. Flamingos? Here? I shrug that I don’t know. My naturalist façade slips away.

The trucks, the footprints, the memorial sign, the tourists – and birds in the mix. On my walk here from the fork in the road, one path leads to the Arava border crossing to Jordan, another into a cultivated field. There isn’t a spot of ground unclaimed by crop, the deep recesses of tractor and off-road vehicle tracks, or some errant piece of construction debris. This place is nature of a new paradigm – the nature of a human-modified landscape.

Even though it’s not pristine by any standard, this area is profoundly important. Birds fly desperately for almost two thousand miles over natural barriers to get here, crossing the massive and waterless Sahara Desert. They must navigate around hunters and other predators across huge stretches of degraded and desertified land. Then, upon arrival, they must avoid the hotel windows that reflect the clear blue skies at the edge of the Red Sea. While these birds have it worse than those that preceded

them, they may have it infinitely better than those that will follow. This place is prime real estate – eyed longingly by hotel owners of the resort city of Eilat a mile to the south and farmers of the neighboring kibbutz across the road to the west.

The Arava Desert — and specifically this center — is a crucial stopover for millions of migratory raptors and over a billion migratory songbirds en route from northern Eurasia to Africa in the fall. Come spring, they leave in the opposite direction to nest and breed during the summer in Europe and northern Asia. As winter approaches, they take flight to their feeding grounds in central Africa.

Due to the geography of the region, the birds are funneled through several bottlenecks as they seek to avoid

desert and open water, minimizing their time over these desolate terrains. They fly primarily down Spain and the straights of Gibralter, down Italy and over Sicily, and—in the greatest numbers—down the Syrian-African Rift Valley through Eilat, where I am standing. Salt marshes used to cover twelve square kilometers of the southern tip of the Arava desert on the banks of the Red Sea, and they were a last chance for birds to eat and drink before laboring over the Sahara to Central Africa. This valley is also the first opportunity for birds to touch down on their way back to Eurasia after a physically draining flight over the desert. Today, the once great expanse of these salt marshes amounts to only 0.04 square kilometers of habitat — roughly ten

acres for billions of dependent birds.

The birds may have only Dr. Reuven Yosef standing between them and the total loss of this sanctuary. He

A Local Actor: A Global Difference

Daniel Orenstein

“Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.”

In a small corner of the Israeli desert, a man fights for migratory birds

Reuven, center, and colleagues process a European Roller at the banding station.

Photography by Robert DeCandido

~David Brower, environmentalist


is the director of the International Birding and Research Center and a model for how to conduct a successful environmental campaign. Reuven’s reserve is unimpressive by global standards, but its two small ponds, surrounded by shrubs, trees, islands, and walking paths, are a natural alternative to the “sun, sea, and sand” emphasized by the Eilat tourist industry. The astounding number of birds that touch down on these grounds are what give this place its grandeur.

I’m by far not the first to write about Reuven, as he graciously lets me know when I join him in his home after my station visit. He plops two large folders of articles in my lap — one for English and one for Hebrew — each article carefully clipped and placed in a plastic sheath. I glance around his small office in a modest single-story bungalow house off an alley in Eilat. The narrow room is packed with bookshelves stuffed with bird guides (encyclopedic volumes devoted to passerines, raptors, waders and others, in addition many more typical, Peterson-like guides), folders filled with migratory and physiological data, and a small section devoted to the classics of conservation biology. The house is hung with autographed sketches and paintings of birds. Later, at lunch, we drink out of mugs collected from ornithological conferences, while eating barbequed chicken.

I am visiting the station at Eilat because I want to understand the key to Reuven’s conservational prowess and

how my role as an educator, writer, and activist might best complement and support his efforts. I want to spread the word, write about him, talk to donors, and bring my students to his site to do research projects. Although I have been a committed environmentalist for the past twenty years, I have learned only enough about birds and plants and rocks to be able to tag along with some of the best naturalists in Israel. My interest is Reuven reflects my interest in people. I am out of my element when I’m close to birds and far from my computer.

Reuven is quite the opposite. His element is birds. He was born in India to a fighter pilot in the Indian air force. As a youth, he was influenced by his uncle, a zoologist-conservationist who established the Gir Nature Reserve for the Asiatic Lion in India. Reuven moved to Israel as a teen, lived on a kibbutz, and became a soldier in one of Israel’s most elite units. After attaining his first academic degrees in Israel, he studied on scholarship in the United States.Aspiring academics in Israel are encouraged to do some of their studies abroad.

He completed his Ph.D. at The Ohio State University, and then his postdoctoral research under the guidance of ornithologist Tom Eisner at Cornell University. Afterward, he worked at the Archbold Biological Station in Florida. While in Florida, he was asked by Eilat city deputy mayor and naturalist, Shmulik Taggar, and a former advisor, Barry Pinshow, to come to Eilat to establish a research center and

The Great Rift Valley, Eilat, Israel

22 watershed

reserve for birds. Taggar had a vision of a bird center that would bring tourists to the region, while Pinshow wanted to make sure a scientist was chosen for the job.

Reuven considered this invitation an opportunity to make a significant contribution to migratory bird conservation. He agreed, and with his wife and two children, moved to Eilat in 1993. None of those visionaries foresaw the challenges ahead. Reuven turned out to be a better selection for director than either Taggar or Pinshow could have known. “By the time he became director of the center in Eilat…,” wrote Mark Cherrington in a 2000 Discover Magazine profile on Reuven, “he was equally adept at research and warfare: the perfect man for the job.”

Once in Israel, Reuven began to develop a reserve at the northern border of Eilat on a garbage dump (or garbage “tip” as Reuven calls it) that had been inactive for more than a decade. He covered the dump with soil and began to reconstruct a saltwater marsh and plant native trees. He began banding birds and educating groups — students, schoolchildren, and tourists.

Reuven estimates that one hundred thousand tourists come to the site each year, particularly in the fall and spring when they set up their cameras and binoculars on the banks of the ponds or in small thatched blinds. Sixty thousand school children sit on wooden benches as Reuven and his colleagues trace migratory routes on a large cardboard map across Europe and down the Syrian-African Rift Valley. They wow the children with a parade of birds caught in the traps that morning. Dozens of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows have used this place for scholarly enterprise.

Reuven has published over two hundred manuscripts on physiology and behavior of migratory birds based on research he’s done at the center, focusing in particular on shrikes, a lizard-eating songbird with a sharply-hooked bill. He is interested in the decisions birds make regarding how much they eat before they take flight on their journeys, where they store their energy and when and how they use it. When Reuven is not researching, teaching school children, writing grants and otherwise advocating on behalf of his birds, he is traveling across the globe assisting other countries in setting up bird banding centers. This past summer he did this in Tibet, China, and Mongolia, where some of the birds that stop in Eilat migrate to breed.

I am fortunate to see Reuven’s research in action on the reserve. Among the traps are large mesh tents hung over shrubs. The birds come to eat in the shrubs, where they are cornered in the mesh, caught, banded, measured, and released. As I speak with Reuven at a wooden table next to a small research shed, a colleague brings us in quick succession a dunlin, a collared dove, and a redstart — all caught in their nets. Close up one gets a glimpse of the amazing diversity among these birds. Holding them, I think at once of their simultaneous fragility and durability. These

small packages of feather and hollow bone can be lighter than a handful of paperclips, yet they cover incredible distances on the small amount of fat and muscle they manage to build before their two thousand mile journey.

Amidst Reuven’s initial success in establishing the center, the financial world of Eilat awoke, realizing the

tremendous real estate value of the dump he was slowly nurturing into an ecological eden — a sanctuary for birds. Meanwhile, the local kibbutz, having lost cropland in an Israeli concession to Jordan following a peace treaty, began to take note of the site’s agricultural value. One morning in 1996, Reuven came to work and found that his reserve had been plowed under by a tractor during the night. “What was your first reaction?” I ask him. He replies: “I wished I had lived in the Wild West so that I could go and call the bastards out for a show down.”

There was no show down, and Reuven turned to rebuilding. Shortly after this devastation, some individuals requested that Reuven abandon the land to agriculture or construction. He refused. The requests quickly devolved into threats and intimidation. His car was vandalized and his office was burned. His dog was murdered. Still, Reuven didn’t yield.

Through it all, Reuven won grants and conservation awards in recognition of his effort and success. Among them, he was bestowed the Rolex Award, which supports “exceptional men and women who are breaking new ground in areas which advance human knowledge and well being.” Reuven has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Discover, Wildbird, and Earthwatch, and in all the local papers. According to journalists, he is: “contrary by nature,” “a scrapper,” “obstinate,” “a firebrand,” “a dedicated ornithologist and environmentalist.” “He radiates defiance,” yet is “a people-skilled protectionist.” And let us not forget that Reuven “would be at home on the prow of a pirate ship.”

Considering his conservation ethic, his military background, his love of hiking and rock climbing, Reuven can be described aptly as a local version of David Brower — mountain climber, soldier in the Tenth Mountain Division of the US Army, and legendary Sierra Club leader. Brower was at once rough, obstinate, and unyielding, but at the same time amazingly skilled at inspiring passion and love for nature among stodgy Washington policy makers and other potential allies. Reuven has that same unique skill set and, while he may not have kept dams out of the Grand Canyon or helped create Dinosaur National Park, he has created and preserved a critical bird habitat and a small

A sample of the diversity of birds caught in Reuven’s nets. Clockwise from top right: Hoopoe, Red-backed Shrike, European Scops Owl, Palestine

Sunbird, Trumpeter Finch, Golden Oriole, Wood Warbler, Bluethroat.

2� watershed

haven for birders. Back at his station, we continue to speak about conflict,

when, as if to remind me that this is supposed to be about the birds, Reuven points to three black dots in the sky and says, “They are three adult Steppe Eagles.” “How do you know?” I ask. His colleague, who is banding and measuring birds nearby, interjects with a smirk as he returns to his traps, “He always knows.” It’s that sentence that might hold the clue to Reuven’s success — he is self-assured, unyielding, and driven. He knows there is a problem for migratory birds in the southern Arava, and he refuses to obfuscate the story.

I sense that Reuven would rather avoid all conflict and simply concentrate on his birds. When I ask him later if he has ever thought of just leaving all of this and going somewhere quiet to continue his research — somewhere like the Archbold Field Station in Florida, which he speaks of as heaven on earth — he replies “on many occasions.” Yet fourteen years later, Reuven is still here.

He is clearly at home in this small site. The station is quaint — there is nothing physically powerful or impressive here. The salt marshes are small and surrounded by low scrub whose green color is muted by the dust of this region, which receives only twenty-five millimeters of rainfall in an average year. The shacks that serve as laboratories are drab on the outside. There are several sitting areas with wooden benches to host visitors in the shade. Over the marsh and

scrub to the south is the massive line of hotels in squares and semi-pyramids. Their shapes are dwarfed by the mountains to the west and east. Watching Reuven drive around his marshes and check traps, it’s hard to imagine that he would ever leave this place.

While Reuven has managed to preserve and promote this locus of biodiversity, the forces of development

are relentless, and his message isn’t resonating with everyone. He doesn’t think that the local government and people of Eilat “get it.” He has to fight a constant onslaught of development proposals for his site and its perimeter. The same farmers and developers are after his land. Even government officials are not particularly concerned with protecting birds. Rina Maor, director for southern Israel at the Ministry of Tourism, told Discover Magazine, “… now we are 6 million [people in Israel]. Yes, we pollute, we do. What can we do? We don’t live in tents. I know that we disturb not only the birds, but also the corals and fish, and we are not so nice, we human beings— we are sometimes very cruel. But what can we do?” Her outlook is exemplary of a perspective paralyzing conservation efforts in Eilat. In the meantime, Reuven holds the line.

Even if ecology isn’t a priority for the people running the “Banana Republic of Eilat,” as Reuven describes it, economics remain an argument for conservation. Reuven

European Bee-eaters in hand


insists that the one hundred thousand ecotourists that flock to see the birds at his station every year are a tremendous economic asset. Ecotourists stay in nice hotels, spend lots of money locally, and spend much more — five times more by Reuven’s estimate — than the average Israeli tourist that zips by the birding station on the Arava highway to and from “sun, sea and sand.”

He has received some help. When local farmers plowed his first site in a ploy to activate the old law “he who plows the land owns it,” Reuven mustered the support of European and American embassies against the kibbutz besieging his sanctuary. The embassies issued a harsh rebuke of the behavior of the kibbutz, and the settlement was temporarily cowed. Yet marshalling such support earned Reuven, once a combat soldier and still a passionate Zionist, the epithetic title of “Anti-Israel” from one government official.

Reuven is disappointed with this misguided perception, and also with the Jewish philanthropic world. The majority of the Center’s funding comes from European, non-Jewish conservationists. Of the Jewish community, Reuven laments, “They get the idea of a Jewish State. They even get the idea of environmental protection. But they still don’t get the importance of protecting the environment in the Jewish State.” None of their generous contributions to Israel are sent to aid Reuven’s efforts. He hopes the American Jewish community, in particular, will re-assess

their giving habits and combine their concern for Israel with an environmental common sense.

A sea change in mindset is needed soon. At the end of last spring, Reuven fired off an urgent announcement to various global conservation groups. In his message, he relayed that he had recorded the smallest number of migratory birds passing through his center since he began banding in Eilat. Later, Birdlife International, which works to protect birds and their habitat worldwide, issued a press release noting a similar decline in migratory birds arriving at their summer nesting sites in Europe. They offered the following possible culprits: climate change, land-use shifts in the Sahel (a semiarid region between the Sahara and central Africa), pesticide use, and desertification. The decline in the number of birds caught in Reuven’s nets is a manifestation and microcosm of these global trends.

It once seemed the birds could survive any number of landscape modifications and environmental challenges that humanity might create so long as it left a tiny plot of land on which to alight, rest, and refuel. Now we know otherwise. Reuven’s experience in Eilat and the cumulative impact of our most modern environmental challenges on dwindling bird populations teach us important lessons: Hold the line. Support those that do. Be a local actor. Make a global difference.

There was a time when I believed these little feather balls were made of paper maché. Birds were fragile creatures,

delicate like origami. They were symbols of elegance and peace. When I first held one, I marveled at how any vertebrate could feel so weightless. How could a Wood Warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) weighing less than an ounce make a three thousand mile journey from Europe to Africa in autumn, and then return south in spring? When I first banded birds, I was taught how to turn the tiny ones on their backs and blow a few breaths across their bellies. The air spreads the feathers to reveal opaque skin and breast muscle below. Those in good shape have golden globules of fat pressed against red muscle. Others are limp and beginning to digest their internal organs to fuel their long migratory flight. In this famished condition, a bird is unlikely to survive, but it will die trying to complete its journey. Feathers hide these secrets from people. I came to the International Bird Research Center in Eilat (IBRCE) to gain a hands-on understanding of birds as a bander. I wanted to understand birds the way a mechanic knows my car. At the IBRCE, I handled thousands of birds in one season, taking measurements such as weight, wing, and tail length. If we were able to re-trap a migrant, I saw how each of these variables changed after a few days of feeding at the IBRCE preserve. I remember the day at the banding station in late March when Reuven handed me a Woodchat Shrike (Lanius senator). Other little birds had been cooperative in my hands as I

A Bird in Hand

measured them and crimped a metal band around one leg. The Woodchat Shrike was different. He was uncooperative and audacious. He squawked and shrieked, and shrieked again. (The etymology of the word “shrike” became all too clear.) When I tried to turn the Woodchat Shrike on his back, he bit me, and bit me again, unwilling to let go. Banders know — and their fingers show — that Woodchat Shrikes are experts at finding the groove between the nail and the sensitive flesh of the finger. Once they sink that hooked beak into a tender spot, they chomp down. Reuven calls this a “kiss.” I cursed the shrike then, but I cannot forget him. In the ensuing weeks of spring other shrikes arrived in Eilat during their northward migration to Europe: the black-and-white Masked Shrike (Lanius nubicus) and the handsome Red-backed Shrike (Lanius collurio). I learned that each shrike has a unique personality — usually feisty and pugnacious. Indeed, the shrikes I met in Israel are much like my friend and colleague Reuven Yosef. Each is a survivor accustomed to meeting its needs in the harsh desert thorn and scrub. The measurements we took from more than ten thousand birds are now part of a universal database built to understand how migrants fare in the long-run. As green space disappears, we might find that the condition of future migrants is significantly different than those we are measuring today. Similarly, as climate changes throughout the world, how will migrants be affected? The only way to know is to band, measure, and study these small sentinels.

~ Robert DeCandido

26 watershed

By Way of Car: Photography by Matt Nighswander

Above: Selling Lobster, outside Trinidad, Cuba; Opposite Top: Circuit City, Chicago; Opposite bottom: Car Tracks, Airport

Matt Nighswander’s photographs show an environment that leans through our windows, blankets our parking lots, and hedges our malls. Look no further than your headlights.

2� watershed

Mixing pleasure with curiosity, I set out on a Sunday morning in late October to paddle a three-mile

stretch of Fairforest Creek just outside the city limits of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Four of us will put in on South Liberty Street in Arkwright, an old mill village, and take out a few hours downstream on 295-Bypass. This will be urban boating at its best. Fairforest Creek is not a wilderness: it drains most of Spartanburg’s Southside industrial zones — small-time machine shops, distribution plants, even a large petroleum tank farm just downstream of where we’ll take out. The Fairforest is not blue ribbon water; it’s a working class creek. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) classifies it as “impaired,” a word which, as a friend once pointed out, tells us little about a stream and loads about our relationship with it. In spite of the less-than-pristine nature of the creek, I’ve convinced my companions, GR Davis, his teenage son Phillip, and Gerald Thurmond, that a morning on the water — any water — is worth it. Paddling pleasure is not hard to come by once the boat’s in the current, even on the Fairforest, where the water is low as a result of a record dry fall that many are quick to blame on global warming. Pleasure aside, my curiosity about this area is easier to explain and appreciate. As we load the boats, I tell my friends that what I’m really interested in is claiming what may be “a first descent” through the territory of “ReGenesis,” Spartanburg’s national poster child for environmental justice and cleanup. The ReGenesis Environmental Justice Project’s focus includes an EPA-cited brownfield and two Superfund sites — what founder and local environmental activist Harold Mitchell called “the Devil’s Triangle” when he brought attention to this industrial neighborhood in the late 1990s. Arkwright, primarily a low-income black community, has fought for almost a decade now to clean up an abandoned fertilizer factory, an old textile mill leaking chemicals, and a thirty-acre city dump full of industrial and

medical wastes. The ReGenesis project was this struggle’s result. Its story, and the story of its founder, Harold Mitchell, is so compelling that in 2002 the EPA gave Mitchell its National Citizens Involvement Award, known informally as the “Erin Brokowitz Award.” Since then ReGenesis has become a national model for cleaning up low-income communities. Several weeks before this float, Harold Mitchell had visited my humanities class, part of a humanities-biology learning community I co-teach with a toxicologist at Wofford College. Mitchell, fresh off a victory in a Democratic primary for the South Carolina House of Representatives, ate lunch with us, visited class, and then drove us around the ReGenesis Project site, giving me perspective on the story. Gerald, GR, and Phillip don’t know the story of ReGenesis, though they live just up the hill in a middle class neighborhood called Duncan Park. I lived in Arkwright for a year in the early 1960s, when the village was still mostly white mill workers. I was seven years old when my mother moved us there, and I have a few clear memories: eating figs off a tree in our backyard, which sloped down to Fairforest Creek, and going with my uncles to the nearby phantom dump to shoot rats spotlighted amidst the rubble. When we turn down a street near where I lived, the creek is at the bottom of the hill. “It’s so quiet here,” Gerald says.

At 9:45 a.m. we unload the boats from GR’s old green pickup next to the mill site. I’ve e-mailed Mitchell

to warn him that if he gets reports of a fleet of old canoes headed southeast into terra incognito, it’s us. When Mitchell and I visited the site earlier, he explained that by the middle 1990s the old mill site had become overrun with drugs and prostitution and the only alternative seemed to be to clear it out and start anew. A few houses and families stayed, but mostly the ReGenesis vision was one of “renewal,” a word used to level the black community further north on Liberty

ReGenesis

John Lane

Looking for Wildness in a Damaged Southern Landscape


Caitrin Fee

30 watershed

Street in the 1970s. One can only hope we have learned a great deal more about renewal since then. Something clearly needs to be done to clean up this corner of Spartanburg. We drag the boats through busted bottles, old wire, and loose trash to put in at small, bold tributary running out from under the old mill outflow pipe, rusted and unused for decades. Behind us, on the hilltop, several huge piles of old wood loom from the teardown of the mill. ReGenesis now owns the property, and timber is stored at the back of the site in hopes it can be reused to build a project headquarters or an ecology center someday. DHEC has approved a huge bonfire, a controlled burn, for later in the year to get rid of the ruined timber. Lumber with paint has been painstakingly sorted from the raw wood to make sure ReGenesis doesn’t add more toxic waste to the air and water of Arkwright. Soon there are three canoes and a small kayak mirrored on the dark surface, a flotilla that almost overwhelms the narrow waters of the silted-in Arkwright millpond. Gerald and young Phillip head downstream, while I paddle alongside GR a little ways upstream against current and under a bridge. I want to commune for a moment with the epicenter of Arkwright, one of the most complex strands of my place-based DNA. There are layers of toxic industrial chemicals trapped below me in the millpond sediment, but I prefer to focus on what’s around me. I fix on some of Spartanburg’s old granite curbstones, now pressed into service to keep the shore from washing out under the bridge. I point them out to GR, noting that they are an adaptive re-use of a local resource having changed from quarry stone to curbstone, to riprap, to historic curiosity in one hundred years. GR, a nature photographer when not teaching physiology at Wofford college, is more interested in the way the early morning light bounces off the greasy surface of the water and settles on the bottom of the concrete bridge in swirling patterns. As GR gets his camera out, I’m reminded there is beauty all around us in the world, in spite of what we do to extinguish it.

We head downstream to catch up with Gerald and Phillip. There’s a large kudzu field river left and the

eroded, littered slope of the mill site on our right. Gerald is already birding. Sociology professor by day, writer and naturalist by evening, his binoculars are out, his passion for the natural world in full display. We’ve only been on the water five minutes, but by sight and call Gerald’s already identified a number of species. He’s left the ugliness of Arkwright behind. He repeats the names, and I write them down: Eastern phoebe, song sparrow, white-throated sparrow, great blue heron, American crow, blue jay, kinglet, rufous-sided towhee, belted kingfisher, and mallard. “The mallard is the only duck that quacks,” Gerald says. I tell

him he sounds a little too much like a science teacher, but I write that fact down anyway. For a moment Gerald’s ornithological prowess helps me focus on the wildness in this otherwise ugly dike, this endless tunnel of kudzu. As we round another bend, the strong odor of sewage envelops us. I decide it’s coming from a tributary entering the millpond on our left. This small creek, unnamed on our topographic map, starts only a few hundred yards off of Spartanburg’s Main Street, parallels Liberty Street, and empties here amidst the tires and kudzu. In its short two-mile run it drains some of the poorest areas of the Southside — government housing, shotgun shacks that have somehow survived into the twenty-first century, streets and vacant lots of abandoned needles and malt liquor cans. This morning there’s no denying the elements often associated with what academics and government pundits have come to call “environmental justice” issues all drain into Fairforest Creek.

Around another bend the creek looks dead, a fur coat of green algae hiding everything just below the surface

— railroad ties, an old shopping cart, a City of Spartanburg plastic garbage can, a quarter of aluminum siding. “Gerald can have the birds,” GR jokes as we head on. “I’ll keep the fish list today.” Old tires are everywhere. Downstream the half-circles of four rubber radials sunk upright in sediment look like a headless river monster in the glare. As a horizon comes into sight where the creek drops eight feet over a concrete dam, four wood ducks shoot overhead like cruise missiles. “Oh, look,” I say. “We’ve already had our ‘wood duck moment.’” Nobody understands my nature joke, so as we beach our boats to figure out a way around the dam I explain that a few years ago in an environmental literature class I’d asked my students to come up with a master list of the elements every nature essay has to contain. “At least one profound wood duck moment,” one smart-ass student suggested after reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Franklin Burroughs’ The River Home. Smart-ass or not, my student was right on. There’s something about the flight of wood ducks overhead that seems to fit our idea of nature so much better than the slow, ghostly dance of blue-green algae on a twisted shopping cart thrown off a south Spartanburg bridge years before. A heavily impacted urban creek like the Fairforest has about as much in common with Tinker Creek as a wolf does with a pit bull chained to a trailer. This struggle of wild and tame, raw and baked, green and paved is prevalent in nature writing, and not until recently did urban nature become a protagonist. As I drag my boat through the kudzu and broken bottles to portage the dam, I notice native river birch and box elder reaching


for sun out over what remains of a silted pond. “See, there’s even wildness here,” I say to Gerald. “Isn’t it strange that just upstream from a government-certified toxic wasteland I’m pulled toward dreams of wild restoration?” Gerald brings up historian William Cronon, who would dismiss my hopes of wilderness as the myth of some untransformed landscape that exists somewhere else, but I’m unwilling to give up on birch and elder. Surely what’s wild can creep upward through the poor Southside to the inner reaches of the city.

As we portage our canoes around the dam, Gerald’s bothered by what I’ve told him of Harold Mitchell’s

dream for this area. Mitchell wants to “renew” the community partially by turning the flood plain below the mill site into a golf course or tidy green space with paved trails and landscaping provided by the University of Virginia’s renowned landscape architecture department. “A damn golf course? Why is it that rich white men always see golf courses as the answer to everything?” he asks. It’s obvious Gerald doesn’t know that Harold Mitchell is neither white nor rich. When I tell him Mitchell is black, the golf course seems even more absurd to Gerald. My friend’s mistaken assumptions about Harold Mitchell make me realize that there are people in Washington, D.C. who know more about Arkwright and ReGenesis than those that live just up hill from this creek. The headwaters of the ReGenesis story is Mitchell, who grew up across the creek from where we are now paddling, just south of the old Arkwright mill village. Back home after college in 1991, Mitchell says he contracted a mysterious illness. He lost a great deal of weight, and the doctors considered kidney, colon, and prostate cancer. After a series of tests, the doctors couldn’t determine what was wrong. Mitchell wanted answers. “Just tell me I’m dying of something,” he told doctors. While Mitchell was sick, his father died from a mysterious ailment. Looking out the window of the family home, Mitchell began to wonder if the illnesses in his household could be connected to the abandoned IMC fertilizer plant that had operated across the street from 1910 to 1986. IMC Global is the largest producer and supplier of concentrated phosphate and potash fertilizer in the world. They’d sold the old plant site to a businessman in Gaffney, South Carolina after the company shut it down in 1986. In the mid-1990s it was still being used for storing textile supplies. Mitchell knew his street still drank well water because city water was too expensive to bring in from across the tracks. Could that be a problem? He began to ask neighbors about their medical histories and discovered quickly there was a very high incidence of cancer in his neighborhood — sixteen cases of cancer on his street alone. There were

only five or six families on his street, which made the survey quite easy. Mitchell didn’t know anything about “cancer clusters,” but so much illness in one community seemed strange. In the late 1990s, Mitchell recovered his heath and moved to nearby Greer, where he worked as a teacher, but he was still looking into the neighborhood fertilizer plant back home. South Carolina DHEC had certified the plant clean when it closed in 1986, but what Mitchell was hearing from the plant’s neighbors did not jive with what appeared in DHEC’s files. Mitchell says on one of his visits to the DHEC office a foolhardy clerk handed him the wrong file to take home. It confirmed his worst fears: potential hazards could have accumulated at the IMC plant for almost one hundred years. He began to read, ask questions of government officials, and explore all possible ways the plant could be contaminating his home. A DHEC survey of the neighborhood in 1997 did not put Mitchell’s fears to rest, though once again the agency found no contaminates. Mitchell was relentless. What we now call “environmental justice” meant little to him then, but he pushed forward. In 1998 Mitchell tired of going it alone. It was then he discovered a remarkable ability to build partnerships and consensus. He formed a small grassroots group in Arkwright to organize the information neighbors were gathering. Then he began to get threatening phone calls. “You crazy nigger,” an unknown caller would say when he answered his phone. “You don’t need to be asking all these questions.” In South Carolina’s pro-business environment, low or lax government regulation had often been the honey that drew out-of-state development, aided by a strong anti-union past that guaranteed low wages for workers and higher profit margins for stockholders. Mitchell began to realize that industrial pollution, dumping practices, and the siting of the dirtiest industries in black and poor neighborhoods were some of South Carolina’s dark secrets. Many felt they were better left undisturbed. One morning Mitchell had an unexpected visit from a suspicious man who claimed to be a representative of the South Carolina militia. The man stood on Mitchell’s porch and calmly told him that the questions the budding investigator was asking were very dangerous, that he should consider driving various routes to and from Greer when going to Arkwright to do his research. The man seemed to know everything about him. He said the Arkwright inquiry could challenge the very business establishment of the state. “Don’t trust anything from the state level,” he said. “Go straight to the feds.” The man gave Mitchell an 800 number to call the EPA. Then, before he left, he pulled a handgun out of a holster behind his back. “He’s told me all this, and now he’s going to shoot me,” Mitchell thought. “Do you have a permit to carry one of these?” the man

32 watershed

asked. “If you don’t, you need to get one.”

Mitchell took the visitor’s advice and called the EPA. The day before the agency was supposed to inspect the

fertilizer plant, the property owner bulldozed the building, making it impossible to do an easy inspection. Mitchell filmed the demolition with his video camera, part of a long record of the project he has assembled on tape. In 1999 Mitchell presented all the information he’d gathered at a community meeting. DHEC stopped the owner from destroying any more of the evidence as a result. The EPA then sent an inspector from its Atlanta office. He walked the site, dismissing everything, downplaying it all, as Mitchell followed him with the video camera. Undaunted by this regional roadblock, Mitchell used a high school connection to convince U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings to get involved in the Arkwright case. Hollings’ chief of staff was Joey Lesesne, Mitchell’s former center on the Spartanburg High School football team in the mid-1980s. Mitchell called Lesesne, and Hollings became interested in the Arkwright case. He requested an EPA investigation of the IMC site. The third EPA inspection revealed that sulfur had been dumped over the back fence of the fertilizer company’s land. There was a small yellow pile of it on the slope down to the creek. Once the area was explored extensively, inspectors discovered twenty tons of sulfur in the area. “With a seepage velocity of forty-six feet per year, there was no doubt all this was affecting the creek,” Mitchell explains. An abandoned acid factory was found underneath the plant as well. How had the state agency missed all this? The inspection also revealed an abandoned waste pond on the site where the EPA estimated 1.3 million gallons of toxic liquid had been drained into the creek by way of a ditch dug with a backhoe. When the EPA inspected the abandoned factory, the agency found forty-eight tons of residual super phosphate fertilizer. The walls were saturated

with it. “Timothy McVee blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City with two tons,” says Mitchell about the volatility of the situation. A homeless man was living in the plant and burning scrap wood. Arkwright was ready to blow. Once the EPA got involved, initiating an inspection that would lead eventually to the Arkwright site’s Superfund

designation, it kicked state agency DHEC off-site. It was the first time that had ever happened in South Carolina. The EPA then discovered the second point on Mitchell’s “Devil’s Triangle” — the Arkwright dump. The dump had operated from 1958, when the city incinerator closed, until 1972, when a new city dump opened. It was a thirty-acre landfill that DHEC didn’t have records for though it was on city land. “They dug a two hundred foot hole and filled it up — everything — trash, bulk oil, medical waste,” Mitchell explains. The site was not fenced. Excavations and depositions given by members of the neighborhood to the EPA show that the local hospital was dumping there, along with much of the industry in the area. Depositions tell of boxes of human fetuses

and amputated arms and legs dumped there, some of which dogs dragged into neighboring yards. In 1998, the Arkwright community addressed the landfill with the Spartanburg City Council. At the first meeting, one hundred twenty people showed up in council chambers from three communities in Arkwright — lower-income black families, lower-income white families, and middle-income black families. The third point of Arkwright’s “Devil’s Triangle” was the old mill site where we had launched our boats. There, contaminants existed as well — old leaking petroleum tanks. In 1999, the EPA designated the fertilizer plant, dump, and mill site triad part of the Superfund program, created by Congress in 1980 to fund the remediation of hazardous waste sites. Spartanburg officially had its own little Love Canal, the impetus for the initial Superfund legislation. IMC bought the site back that year and put a tent over

Jacob Sproul


the property. They installed monitoring wells and began a costly and complex cleanup. When the extent of the problems in Arkwright was clear, its neighbors decided to organize the lower Southside and create a “regenesis.” The name has a religious ring for a reason, and soon events took on revival proportions. Six hundred people were at the first organizational meeting to discuss the rebuilding and revitalization of the neighborhood — black, white, lower and middle class. The EPA held workshops to address cleanup and educate the community concerning its plight. Soon the number of community members signed on to the ReGenesis vision grew to fourteen hundred. In the past five years, ReGenesis has grown into a community revitalization organization with 124 partners — public, private, government, non-profit. About $134 million have come into the venture to date. Out of ReGenesis a model for action at similar brownfield and Superfund sites has grown that addresses environmental questions, pollution and blight, crime, housing and healthcare issues. Why has Mitchell followed through for almost ten years? “The voices of the dead tend to ring loud in my mind as I press forward,” he said in his acceptance speech after winning the Leadership for a Changing World award in 2005.

When we clear the dam, we leave Arkwright behind. From our topographic map we can see what lies ahead

is wooded country with no houses, maybe one thousand acres or more of raw land, much of it a one hundred-year flood zone. Renew or restore? With Arkwright’s history behind us, and the vision of a golf course clouding our ideas of wilderness restoration for this flood plain, we get back into our boats and head downstream, bumping over a few exposed rocks and the rubble of construction debris. It’s afternoon now, and we’re strung out along a quarter-mile of shallow water, paddling in four separate boats, setting our own pace. Phillip leads the way, his youthful spirit of adventure pushing him downstream in front of the old farts. As I float down Fairforest Creek, I watch the western shore, looking for signs of the mysterious city dump the EPA discovered in Arkwright’s back reaches. I know it’s somewhere in the woods, but all I see is trees. I don’t want to paddle past a Superfund site and not see it. “Look, the whole creek’s a landfill,” GR says, pointing in his canoe when I tell him I’m looking for the dump. All the way downstream he’s been picking up the brightly colored bottoms of a hundred broken bottles. He found them washed up on sandbars and collected them as we passed, a prospector for beauty along the creek’s sandy bottom. When I ask him what he plans to do with the bounty of glass, he doesn’t know.

“It looks like somebody threw every plastic bag in Spartanburg County in this creek,” Gerald says, catching up, pointing to the high waterline in the river birches fifteen feet above us. “They look like prayer flags when the wind blows a little,” GR says, paddling his black canoe forward toward more broken bottles. I look downstream. There’s beauty to be seen in garbage, even here, a mile or so below the old mill site and crumbling dam. The creek valley is not a wilderness, but it’s not rural either. There’s no patchwork of farm fields and sleepy homesteads with wood smoke drifting from chimneys. It’s nothing but a flat expanse of creek bottom, just like a hundred others, grown up for forty years in invasive privit and kudzu, and spindly South Carolina hardwood. “What would this landscape mean to a developer?” I ask Gerald as we rest on a sandbar. “Do the developers ever worry over the idea of development the way we worry over wilderness?” “I don’t think developers sit around and think about what anything means,” Gerald says. “They don’t do self-critiques or soul-searching when it comes to buying property. They run the numbers.” Back in my boat, I hear 295-Bypass a few hundred yards downstream. Gerald quickly falls a little behind, birding along an opening in the power line that follows the creek all the way, hoping to prolong his day on the creek as long as possible. As we float, I think about ReGenesis, an environmental coalition that doesn’t have much to do with traditional environmental issues — species diversity, wilderness, habitat destruction. ReGenesis is a powerful organization with high hopes for cleaning up and revitalizing the community. I can only hope its partners see the community as both the human and non-human world. Mitchell’s ReGenesis has proposed a plan (with national and state money committed) to cut a road all the way from South Liberty Street to 295-Bypass. It will cross the creek somewhere downstream from the dam, “opening up” the entire area for that golf course and a mixed-use village along 295. It is remarkable to think that the densely wooded and often dirty reaches we’ve paddled through for hours could someday look like any new subdivision, complete with a freshly paved avenue.

GR has stopped at the outlet for a small clear stream feeding Fairforest from the east. I stop too and ask

about Phillip. GR says not to worry, Phillip is already ahead of us at the take-out. He’s won the race; now he has to wait a few more minutes while the old guys catch up. I get out of my canoe to stretch my legs. We haven’t seen one human track on our paddle, though Gerald points out an interstate highway of deer prints when he lands on the sandbar. “I hope Mr. Mitchell knows this

3� watershed

qualifies as a major urban deer sanctuary,” he says. “They probably hide in here and go out and eat people’s yards in Duncan Park at night.” I’m still concerned about where the environment is in environmental justice. In the “EJ” movement, is environmental concern always relegated to funding paved trails and ‘green space’ when the money rolls in after cleanup? Once, when I brought up more passive green space for Spartanburg at a town meeting, a former mayor asked, “But how will we afford to mow it?” I tell Gerald we should file our own vision for this place we’ve paddled with the city. “I’d like to see at least a hundred acres of this big Fairforest flood plain cleaned up and left wooded,” I say. “I sure hope they plan to leave at least a hundred-foot riparian buffer along the creek.” Will ReGenesis recognize untended land as sensible stewardship? It’s possible. Harold Mitchell is a man who has made a career on listening to all comers with good ideas, even ideas from old conservationists like us. It’s hard to get in on the ground floor of development plans, but with a community consensus builder like Harold Mitchell in charge, it could be different. The motive for ReGenesis was not profit. It was justice. At my feet, the season’s last yellow jackets work the sandbar. In a clear, shallow pool I watch a school of tiny fish feeding. These are the hopeful signs I’ve been watching for all along the way. There is plenty of life here, a few miles downstream from Arkwright, where one bold creek feeds another. It’s mostly small or fragile life, overlooked or

undervalued by those who occasionally take notice. I lose focus for a moment, thinking how I can’t wait to get home to take a shower. Then I focus again, first at the new life earning a living at my feet, and then at the distance we’ve traveled. In just a few miles we’ve floated through the footprint of the industrial revolution. Some of it is foul — mill waste, factory pollution, trash — the remnants of human exploitation. Other stretches are more hopeful, marked by dreams of renewal, development, and an improved, protected paddle. What will become of abused places like Arkwright and Fairforest Creek? Like Mitchell’s ancestors only a few generations ago, wild nature lacks a voice, and it often lacks the justice that comes along with counting. While we walk away at the take-out, leaving Arkwright and the creek behind, somehow these fish and yellow jackets and turtles and deer survive in spite of what we’ve done to make life harder for those most vulnerable. Nature creates resilient systems, even the systems we humans call community. I look at the bottom of GR’s canoe and wish I could see every hand that once held the bottles he’s collected there. Nothing’s left now but fragments, some buffed smooth, others still sharp and jagged. GR empties his canoe, gathers his treasure to take home. His challenge is to make something from all those pieces. Mine is to see Arkwright, my old territory, in a new light. People live here. So do native plants and wild, resilient animals. We’re all just passing through.

Deciduous: A Legend in Two Parts

1.

Deciduous plants flower during the leafless periodincreases the effectiveness of pollination they’ll tellupon the Wikipedian definition falling apart at the leavesof stemmed acorn crossing season, genre

From Shel Silverstein to Horror, god forbid, to Romance, the back of the video store, a familiar reminder of how our parents metor can meet (because we’ve thought, hard, if they made it up)over Judie’s popovers and half-red leaves, a car slipping up Mount Washington

Whether that tire was last time we celebrated their anniversaryor the actual November of 1981 I’d guessthe figure of years before I was on the horizon speaksthe power of western Massachusetts, college towns of half-leaves


(the power of leftover green beans, just as appealing, moreas frosted chocolate cake if you’ve been jumping in piles an afternoon)

The absence of leaves improves wind transmission of pollenso one could say they exposed their yellow uppers to me,to an audience on purpose of crunching under bare feetof frozen toes for the sake of desiring winter, gasoline.

2.

I practiced in the mirror how to remove, take a jean jacket off sexyhow to pull a t-shirt, rustling, over my head instead of through each arm

Keep my head still, without leaves the deciduous are more visible to insectspollination, you know, is not for everyone, a dangerous game, forget buttonsA risky strategy; flowers, fluttering edges, can be damaged by frostYou’ve seen where the brown takes over from the borders and spreads in

(Justification; by losing leaves during cold days, the deciduousreduce their water loss through ice, less branch and trunk breakage They survive when a pine might split and block the trail behind Amherst(Lemon 1961) improperly cited, missed magazine, published without cause)

Apples-to-apples upon last week’s motorcar, mocked nauseaI’d pretend we played driving games, counted elk, but really, we listened to tapes, we buckled our seatbelts and reminded,we rewound James Taylor’s greatest hits twice

(Anatomy; Other body parts, shed, can be deciduous;antlers, old skins, family legendsI Spy for the sake of Seventeen, Peter Paul and Mary for the sake of cool jazz)

Deciduous teeth, also called milk teeththe ones that fall out normal, the course of developmentonly ones that hurt when we bite on ice, go sour when our mother uses the term “my high-school huney”

teeth or leaves,kept in a small clear box to recall kisses goodnight, deciduous remain whitened by un-use, cavity-less

uncelebrated,and on birthdays, broken candles, fed on spinach.

~ Leora Fridman

36 watershed

Star

ling

Sest

inas

Li

nnea

Ogd

en


For

a w

hile

the

sta

rlin

g is

a fo

urth

-day

bir

d, a

str

ange

and

squ

iggl

y lu

mp,

a b

lack

and

whi

te c

opy,

reco

pied

on

the

page

.

T

he b

ird’

s w

eigh

t ha

s qu

adru

pled

sin

ce b

irth

a

nd it

bal

ance

s on

a r

ound

bel

ly, i

ts w

ings

a

re ju

st s

tum

ps w

ith t

he b

egin

ning

of f

eath

ers

show

ing;

wha

t’s g

row

n ar

e co

ntou

r fe

athe

rs

and

the

bab

y is

a m

ap o

f dar

k pa

tche

s, ea

ch d

ay

a

new

tra

ct, l

ine,

cro

wn

regi

on.

Win

gs,

cr

ucia

l but

un

usab

le, p

rop

the

blac

k

bir

d up

so

it ca

n se

e ou

t of

the

nes

t. T

he b

irth

o

f fea

ture

s co

ntin

ues;

the

page

tells

us

noth

ing

happ

ens

on th

e fif

th d

ay, p

age

a

fter

page

of fi

rst,

seco

nd-d

ay b

abie

s, th

eir

feat

hers

b

arel

y in

like

frog

s an

d bi

rth

h

as n

ot b

een

kind

to

the

m s

ince

on

the

day

e

ach

one

repr

esen

ts t

hey

died

, bla

ck

sha

dow

s of

the

ir fo

rmer

sel

ves.

The

ir w

ings

will

nev

er w

ork,

han

g at

ang

les,

thei

r w

ings

o

utst

retc

hed

so th

ey c

an b

e m

easu

red.

To

page

t

hrou

gh is

to w

atch

them

leav

e th

e ne

st in

bla

ck

floc

ks,

tow

ards

the

pla

ce w

here

feat

hers

l

ose

thei

r de

finiti

on w

hen

pres

sed.

Ten

th-d

ay’s

n

eck

is be

nt in

; at

birt

h

the

eyes

are

clo

sed;

sev

enth

day

see

s vi

sion

born

, q

uick

dev

elop

men

t, by

the

tw

enty

-firs

t w

ings

w

ork,

bab

ies

leav

e th

e ne

st.

Eac

h da

y

som

ethi

ng

new

hap

pens

, but

if y

ou’re

dea

d th

e pa

ge

is

a pe

rman

ent

hori

zon,

feat

hers

f

roze

n fo

r po

ster

ity.

An

adol

esce

nce

in b

lack

segm

ents

sho

ws

clea

r sil

houe

ttes

, eac

h bl

ack

s

hape

cap

able

of a

diff

eren

t act

. B

irth

i

s no

bou

ndar

y if

it m

eans

feat

hers

w

ill b

e sim

ilar

each

day

. If

th

e w

ings

o

f a d

ead

star

ling

show

no

deve

lopm

ent,

each

pag

e

the

sam

e an

d no

way

to

tell

on w

hich

day

it di

ed,

then

feat

hers

are

just

bla

ck

mar

ks o

n th

e da

y of

eac

h st

arlin

g’s

birt

h

and

its

win

gs w

ill n

ever

pul

l fre

e of

the

pag

e.

3� watershed

A s

tarl

ing’

s th

roat

mov

es in

and

out

like

a f

rog

whe

n it

sings

; the

nec

k

tu

rns

dow

n, t

he b

eak

poin

ts u

p, t

he f

eath

ers

ruffl

e. T

he b

ird’

s so

ng is

a

seri

ous

c

all f

or s

omet

hing

and

I’m

a li

ttle

gra

tefu

l;

the

y te

nd t

o co

me

in fl

ocks

, and

one

alon

e se

ems

rare

, if s

neak

y. T

his

one

took

up

resid

ence

in t

he g

utte

r, ou

t

of

ran

ge o

f pre

dato

rs, t

enan

ts, g

rate

ful

p

erha

ps fo

r sh

elte

r. I

t w

alks

up

the

neck

o

f the

dra

inpi

pe t

owar

ds m

ore

seri

ous

c

once

rns

like

whe

re d

o fe

athe

rs

get t

heir

mot

ivat

ion,

whe

re d

o fe

athe

rs

go

whe

n th

ey d

ie.

I ca

n co

unt o

n on

e

thin

g, a

nd it

’s th

e lik

elih

ood

of se

riou

s

extr

apol

atio

n ba

sed

on n

ot

muc

h. O

ut

of m

emor

ies

I’ll

min

e st

arlin

g, b

ottle

neck

f

or c

erta

in, s

tuck

and

less

tha

n gr

atef

ul

for

fam

iliar

pat

tern

s. B

ut I

kno

w g

rate

ful

is

to b

e gr

atef

ul fo

r. I

may

not

hav

e fe

athe

rs

but

if ,

whe

n no

one

’s w

atch

ing,

my

neck

s

crun

ches

dow

n to

tur

n m

y m

outh

up,

and

one

s

hrie

k es

cape

s, th

en w

hat

crea

ture

has

com

e ou

t

of m

y m

outh

? C

hang

e is

a se

riou

s

cons

ider

atio

n. I

f I ta

ke s

erio

usly

m

y in

tere

st in

it, I

mus

t be

grat

eful

f

or s

mal

l mys

teri

es; i

f on

the

othe

r ha

nd, o

ut

of n

owhe

re, t

he s

tarl

ing

ruffl

es

its fe

athe

rs

nex

t do

or a

nd p

uts

me

in a

pos

ition

of o

ne

wom

an, o

ne b

ird,

I’v

e st

aked

my

neck

on t

he a

bilit

y to

get

out

of i

t. M

y ne

ck

aga

inst

mos

t ev

eryt

hing

else

, a s

erio

us

wag

er, o

ne I

’m n

ot u

sed

to m

akin

g. O

ne

sta

rlin

g le

ads

to o

ther

s, an

d so

on t

he g

rate

ful

bi

rd h

as b

een

abso

rbed

; now

my

feat

hers

a

re r

uffle

d be

caus

e w

hat

can

I ge

t ou

t

of t

his

situa

tion?

The

mov

emen

t of

one

bir

d’s

neck

,

dow

n an

d ou

t, co

ntai

ns a

ser

ious

a

rgum

ent

for

bein

g gr

atef

ul, a

nd fe

athe

rs.

�0 watershed

�1fall & winter 2006

In D

enm

ark

in t

he s

prin

g th

ey m

ake

wha

t’s c

alle

d th

e B

lack

Sun

Phe

nom

enon

.

P

eopl

e co

me

on t

rain

s fr

om m

iles

arou

nd

t

o se

e th

e m

yste

ry

of t

hose

bla

ck fo

rms

t

hat

appe

ar b

etw

een

the

wat

cher

s an

d th

e su

nset

.

A g

roup

of s

tarl

ings

in a

mat

ing

danc

e

requ

ires

tic

kets

to

atte

nd t

he d

ance

,

to s

ay, “

we

don’

t kn

ow w

hy t

hey

mak

e

suc

h co

mpl

icat

ed s

hape

s w

hile

the

sun

set

n

ever

mov

es.”

Thi

s is

one

phen

omen

on

on

whi

ch w

e ca

n ha

ve n

o co

mm

ent,

the

form

t

oo c

lose

to

frac

tals.

The

re is

no

locu

s ar

ound

whi

ch t

hey

mov

e; a

ser

ies

of p

hoto

s sh

ow t

he r

ound

and

impr

obab

le d

oork

nob,

ligh

tbul

b, d

ance

of

mor

phin

g ob

ject

s in

the

tw

iligh

t, th

eir

form

s sp

eaki

ng t

o us

of h

ouse

hold

. W

e m

ake

a

list

of c

hore

s, su

ppor

t ph

enom

ena

o

f hav

ing

som

ethi

ng e

lse in

min

d. E

ven

suns

ets

will

not

hol

d us

; why

shou

ld b

irds

? T

he su

nset

,

an

occu

rren

ce o

f the

sun

mov

ing

arou

nd

the

ear

th o

r so

met

hing

, a p

heno

men

on

of a

xes,

clou

ds,

wea

ther

bal

loon

s; m

eanw

hile

the

dan

ce

con

tinue

s, un

til it

’s cl

ear

our

reve

rie

has

mad

e

no

impr

essio

n on

the

sta

rlin

gs, w

ho fo

rm

just

for

an in

stan

t, an

act

ual q

uest

ion

mar

k, a

form

of a

skin

g w

hat

we’

ve m

issed

. T

he s

unse

t

is

fadi

ng; e

ach

phot

ogra

ph, g

ettin

g da

rker

, mak

es

a

m

ovem

ent

of t

he b

irds

whe

elin

g ar

ound

s

o qu

ickl

y to

be

inte

grat

ed in

to s

ky.

The

dan

ce

is

alm

ost

over

, thi

s ph

enom

enon

won

’t ar

rive

unt

il ne

xt y

ear.

Whi

ch p

heno

men

a

ca

n br

ing

us o

ut a

t m

idni

ght

or t

wili

ght

to fo

rm

a

new

gro

up lo

okin

g at

the

sky

? C

erta

inly

the

da

nce

o

f com

ets,

shoo

ting

star

s, fo

rms

t

hat

flash

and

disa

ppea

r. B

ut c

an it

rev

olve

aro

und

a

gro

up o

f sta

rlin

gs o

nce

a ye

ar w

ho m

ake

a da

nce

that

feel

s m

ore

like

a ph

enom

enon

t

han

mad

e ob

ject

s, m

ore

than

any

form

m

entio

ns o

ur r

elat

ions

hip

to s

unse

t? W

e cl

uste

r ar

ound

.

�2 watershed

It can be a horrifying thing on a dark highway to encounter a thousand-pound bulk of surging sinew

and sweat: to face the flashing eyes of a six-foot beast staring down into your vehicle. But the hot breath of a moose fogging your windshield can also be a euphoric, spellbinding experience. These are the sensations Elizabeth Bishop creates in her poem “The Moose,” which describes the progress of a bus traveling through Atlantic Canada on the way to Boston. As the bus makes its way by moonlight through the forests of New Brunswick, the passengers begin to doze off, or engage in idle conversation, until:

— Suddenly the bus driverstops with a jolt,turns off his lights.

A moose has come out ofthe impenetrable woodand stands there, looms, rather,in the middle of the road. (172)

The encounter here, in the middle of the road, between the moose and the people aboard the bus is the climax of the poem. The moose “approaches; it sniffs at / the bus’s hot hood,” and “looks the bus over, / grand, otherworldly” (172-73), until the driver shifts gears and continues along the road.

Bishop’s poem, loosely based on an actual event, was first published in 1972, yet the issues with which it is concerned — the intersection of technology and the natural world, the perceived separation between humanity and nature, and the ways in which we see and experience creatures different from ourselves — have increased in importance with each passing decade. As we continue to struggle with the ways in which our actions affect the nonhuman, and vice versa, it is inevitable that some of our assumptions about moose and forests will be challenged. By way of a moose, Bishop speaks to the existence, consequences, and contradictions

of our western conceptualizations of nature.Long before the moose appears, the bus “enter[s] / the

New Brunswick woods” (171). While the woods may be impenetrable in the sense that they cannot be understood, clearly they are penetrable in a physical sense, for the bus passes through. Yet the moose emerges “out of / the impenetrable wood” (emphasis added) to meet the bus, distinguishing road from forest, calling our assumptions into question.

Roads, of course, are of human design, and fulfill a purpose outside their own existence: a road is a thoroughfare, a passage to facilitate travel towards a particular destination. This is quite the opposite of a forest. Compare a road with environmentalist David Suzuki’s description of a forest, in this case a tropical forest, thousands of miles south of New England:

The variety of life in a tropical forest makes it difficult even to know where to look or what to look for. It’s best just to stand or sit in one place and focus on one sense at a time. With luck, a spectacular quetzal bird will land nearby or a chattering band of white-faced monkeys will lope across the canopy. Gradually, one becomes aware of flowers of all sizes, shapes, and colors, and around them, insects... [A person] could spend a lifetime studying one square meter of the forest floor. (40-41)

New England forests, though home to different kinds and numbers of species, are similarly fascinating and intricate. They are “hairy, scratchy, splintery,” in Bishop’s words (171) — disorderly and filled with life, often unrecognizable from one step to the next. Certainly they do not exist to facilitate travel. While a road may pass through a forest, it does not actually enter it; pavement is a carefully defined strip of non-forest. It is as if someone swallowed a penny: the coin slips inside, passing through the digestive tract and out of the body — fully intact and unchanged — no contribution to the bloodstream.

Through the Impenetrable Wood

Paul Huebener

Where the Forest Meets the Road in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”


What, then, is the purpose of a forest? We rely on forest to produce the raw material of house and

paper, harbor the endangered owls we cherish and the deer we hunt, cleanse the air we breathe, produce oxygen, and sequester greenhouse gas. But are any of these benefits the purpose of the forest? One would not say that the purpose of a shoe is to hammer in a nail, though one might use it that way.

Ecological theorist Neil Evernden describes the problems inherent in construing nature as something with a particular purpose. When, during the rise of ecological science in the 1960s and 1970s, we began to attach “objective” scientific measurements, explanations, and justifications to conservationist ideals, it proved revolutionary to environmentalism, which previously had relied on “soft” arguments for conservation. “Where once only an anguished cry could be expected in defence of a threatened mountain or an endangered species,” Evernden writes, “now a detailed inventory and a benefit-cost analysis are sure to be forthcoming. The system will say all that needs to be said about the mountain — and say it with numbers” (9). Ecology tallies the potential costs of logging or mining so that “environmentalist[s] can show even the disinterested that it is prudent, economic, to retain a particular mountain in its present state” (9). But the world is much more than economy. Evernden identifies fault in this type of reasoning:

The basic attitude towards the non-human has not even been challenged in the rush to embrace utilitarian conservation. By basing all arguments on enlightened self-interest the environmentalists have ensured their own failure whenever self-interest can be perceived as lying elsewhere.

Therein lies the fatal weakness of the so-called ecology movement. In seizing arguments that would sound persuasive even to indifferent observers environmentalists have come to adopt the strategy and assumptions of their opponents. (10)

One source of the environmental crisis is the conceptualization of a nature with a human-serving purpose. When nature is considered solely for its potential to store resources or purify air and water, any part of nature that does not convincingly serve humanity becomes dispensable. “Over the long term,” Evernden writes, “the only defence that can conceivably succeed in the face of this prejudice is one based on the intrinsic worth of life, of human beings, of living beings, ultimately of Being itself ” (13).

The purpose of a forest, then, if we are willing to relinquish our anthropocentric assumptions, is to be a forest. While we must use and modify our surroundings, nature is not something that exists exclusively for human need. The question “What is the forest good for?” is inherently destructive, but this realization is difficult because what we ordinarily encounter — roads, supermarkets, sheets of

Katherine Moon

�� watershed

paper, even language — have purpose inextricably linked to humanity. The difference between a road and a forest is that one has purpose and the other intrinsic worth. It is a point perhaps best made by a six-foot forest dweller standing in the way of one’s vehicle, as though daring the passengers to ask, “What, moose, are you good for?”

Before Bishop’s bus enters the woods, the narrator mentions that it travels “past clapboard farmhouses

/ and neat, clapboard churches, / bleached, ridged as clamshells, / past twin silver birches” (169). These trees and human-made objects visible from the bus exist, it seems, only to pass by outside the window, and no explicit differentiation is made between them. Once the bus enters the New Brunswick woods, “the passengers lie back. / Snores. Some long sighs” (171). Others engage in idle conversation about pensions and family histories. The woods are of no concern; interaction with the forest is unnecessary, seemingly impossible, and for their purposes, irrelevant.

Just as there are consequences of conceptualizing forest as something that serves human beings, there are also consequences of seeing forest as separate from humanity.

In his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon describes the problems inherent in the notion of wilderness as “the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth” or “a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet” (69). Cronon argues that the idea that wilderness is defined by a lack of human influence is contradictory:

Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation — indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. (69)

Cronon traces the evolution of the concept of wilderness in western culture, and finds that it has been conceptualized very differently over the course of history. In the eighteenth century, wilderness was a “‘deserted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren’” space of bewilderment and terror (70), but by

Serena Halsey

��fall & winter 2006

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the wastelands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price” (71). Wilderness became a sublime, even s acred place of romantic isolation — a refuge from society’s troubles. This impression of wilderness, Cronon argues, was the foreseeable result of an increasingly urban culture disconnected from land:

Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land. (80)

A paved road through a forest is a final manifestation of a deeper conceptualization of forest as existing solely for our benefit. With this initial conceptualization, forest becomes non-forest, and it follows that its physical shape will eventually change to match our understanding of it. The problem, though, which Cronon identifies, is that “if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves” (83). If the forest really is impenetrable, then either it or we must eventually cease to exist.

Should we run this bus right off the road? Let’s not take our hands of the wheel just yet. Cronon suggests we address our dualistic perception of the world. Rather than seeing things as either natural or unnatural, fallen or unfallen, “we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place…we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home’” (89). By synthesizing Evernden’s call to defend the “intrinsic worth of Being” and Cronon’s call to regard — and thus respect — the complete world as “home,” we may better understand the forest. We may enter it after all.

There is a moment when the boundary between the travelers and the forest wavers — when the travelers,

startled out of their slumber, hesitate in their purpose and participate in an encounter with the “other.” When Bishop’s moose comes out of the woods and stands in the middle of the road, the bus driver is forced to stop. As the bus idles, stationary on the road, the moose approaches, “sniffs at / the bus’s hot hood...” and “taking her time, / she looks the bus over, / grand, otherworldly” (172-73). The syntax here is ambiguous: it is not only the moose that is “grand, otherworldly,” but also the bus. In any encounter, when one participant is otherworldly, so, too, is the other. Here, two worlds size each other up. While the bus stands still, time seems to pause with bated breath, awaiting the outcome of this unexpected contact between a forest and human presence. As the moose looms in front of the bus,

towering in the moonlight, passengers whisper to each other: “‘Sure are big creatures.’ / ‘It’s awful plain.’ / ‘Look! It’s a she!’” (173).

Suddenly the travelers are interacting with the forest, not passing through it. They look into the eye of the moose and find a creature who is not a static feature of the landscape, but a being of intrinsic interest and subjectivity, no longer an “it,” but a “she.” Bishop’s narrator asks, “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” (173). Their sleepy thoughts are interrupted with a jolt by a creature both familiar and unfathomable — and unexpectedly delightful.

The spell cast over the passengers, though, is incomplete, for they remain divided from the moose and the forest by the barrier of their vehicle. Indeed, while the people inside the bus feel that they experience an encounter, from the moose’s point of view the encounter is not with humans, but with the bus itself; the technological apparatus is both a partition between the people and the forest, and an extension of their bodies. Eventually, the driver “shifts gears” — in every sense — and begins to pull away (173). The comment he makes as he resumes the journey — “‘Curious creatures,’ / says our quiet driver, rolling his r’s. / ‘Look at that, would you.’” (173) — revokes the gender and subjectivity given to the moose only moments ago. They are the last spoken words in the poem, and they render the moose an it once again: a half-ton curiosity rolling past the window. Yet Bishop’s word choice reminds us that the moose is not only curious to look at, but also feels curious itself about the flashing windshield and dented flank of the bus purring into the night.

Travelers once more, the people on the bus never completely collapse their dualistic understanding of natural and unnatural, human and other. The poem concludes:

by craning backward,the moose can be seenon the moonlit macadam;then there’s a dimsmell of moose, an acridsmell of gasoline. (173)

As the moon — an iconic symbol of nature — reflects on the human-made macadam, the moose’s odor commingles with the smell of gasoline. On the one hand, the combination of scents suggests that in the end the people on the bus do experience a merging of natural and unnatural, human and other, taking a step toward an expanded understanding of “home.” On the other hand, the moose fades into the night, slipping from existence as the bus pulls away and her “dim / smell” is interrupted by the “acrid / smell of gasoline.” As readers, we must respect the ambiguity of these closing lines. Just as the passengers on the bus shift their language to acknowledge the moose’s subjectivity, so, too, do we gain access to a multiplicity of understanding that suggests

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interaction in nature is an ongoing thread of consequence and interpretation.

Language is much like a road: while revealing certain connections and experiences, and moving the reader

from point A to point B, it conceals and silences others. As ecological theorist David Abram says, “our obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held in place by ways of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other species and to nature in general” (28). Just as the road lets the people on Bishop’s bus encounter the wild only through the frame of bus window, our daily language circumscribes our experience of the natural world. The language we commonly use renders nature silent and oblivious, limiting subjectivity and consciousness to the human mind. Abram explains this phenomenon by suggesting that:

….every human language secretes a kind of perceptual boundary that hovers, like a translucent veil, between those who speak that language and the sensuous terrain that they inhabit. As we grow into a particular culture or language, we implicitly begin to structure our sensory contact with the earth around us in a particular manner, paying attention to certain phenomena while ignoring others. (255-56)

A road, then, is a type of language, a way of articulating and understanding space. By having two ends, one at point A and another at point B, a road renders everything in between non-destination. Most of the written language we use follows this construction as well. A line of text leads to a destination, a conclusion reached by passing through the impenetrable wood of a blank paper. Each word on the page creates meaning and perspective, always for some purpose outside of itself, and always at the expense of other

possibilities. Even the word “moose,” while convenient for conjuring a concept, closes off other ways of knowing the towering, sinuous creature.

The strange encounter we witness when Bishop’s bus comes upon a moose suggests another way of articulating the space between destinations. If the travelers on the bus were to envision the space running past their windows as destination in its own right, the journey would be refashioned: linearity, mental or otherwise, would be replaced by a desire to wander, to participate in and reciprocate with the world as it presents itself. The very form of Bishop’s poem plays with this idea. Readers who want to indulge in conventional action — an exciting, stampeding moose — will be disappointed when they find the creature does not appear until the twenty-third of twenty-eight stanzas, and even then does little more than stand in the road and sniff. Similarly, though the first sentence of the poem shows us that the bus is traveling, this isn’t said explicitly in the first stanza, or even the second. Bishop writes the “bus journeys west” (169) five stanzas inside. By confounding our normal approach to reading and emphasizing spatial relationships over unidirectional argument and conclusion, poetry changes the purpose and the shape of the paper on which it is written, just as a moose transforms a road when it steps out of a dark night.

If a line of text on a page is a road, then a poem is a forest path: every step contains choice and possibility, and purpose lies not in destination, but in relationships created along the way. The “sweet / sensation of joy” that Bishop’s travelers feel when their vehicle stops with a jolt before a moose is a quick step into the impenetrable woods. Just as we delight and take lesson from our short stay in Bishop’s words, the travelers find home for an instant in what need not be an otherworldly place.

Works Cited

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).

Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Moose.” Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 169-73.

Cronon, William, ed. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 69-90.

Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Second Edition (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993).

Suzuki, David. The David Suzuki Reader (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2003).


Bones of a Small Town

Corn grows on the fringean outdated fashion trendthat cropped up in the centerand swelled like a wavenow long peakedand petering out.

The mountain passesguarded now bya dilapidated dinerand a last chance deli.No shower of arrows,but perhaps a slower death(clogging of arteries.)

We live in a time of voluntary risks.

Our vision is not failing from squinting to read thesmall print warningswritten on the mutating double helixof the food that passes our lips.

We are blind instead from being led.

The eyeslong dried and blown awaylike flattened frogsbaking on our autobahn roadways.

The last night for humankind will be a quiet one.

~ MaryJo Martin

Late June, the afternoon mute, clouds blistered,membranes near bursting. A field off Highway 54, we played safe, counting seconds after the lightening, mutteringcome on, thunder, come.

We gauged miles, minutes before anythingbreaking, the bent grass scratching our calves as we eyed the horizon, tensing for disaster in the other town.

Then the strike above our heads, rippingskin off clouds, sky cracked like thin crystal, and I ran without looking back, gagging on instinct, gunning the car’s engine before I thought to look for you.

Don’t leave the car, don’t touch the ignition if struck.You coached me on survival as we spedthrough Wichita, lightening thick as prisonbars touching down on all sides, urging us through red lights, a smaller risk.

The radio announcers breaking in, giddy with twisters splintering homesin an instant, and we were not safe.

Then safe, home, watching the wall of rain cascadefrom the roof. You held me, still drenched, as we spiedon the neighbor man running laps, risingwater swallowing his ankles in the street, naked exceptfor his briefs, chest heaving with shouts.

It was magnificent, your arms tightening to calmme, but I was dazed, struck – how I ran for my life, forgetting you.

~ Michele Battiste

Storm Season

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LEORA FRIDmAn BROWN ’07 is a Literary Arts concentrator from the nebulous world of “Outside Boston.” She has a nagging fear of the ghost in the compost pile and a consistent fascination with U-pick apples, rotting pumpkins, and mint grown in the shadow of garages. Though her boots have walked her elsewhere, she will always be loyal to Phil’s-U-Pick-Apples of Harvard, Massachusetts.

LEné GARy lives in Montpelier, Vermont and is currently working towards her MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She was recently awarded Best Overall in the KNOCK Ecolit Contest and first place in the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s National Poetry Contest. When she’s not writing or working on pesticide-related issues for the State, she can be found paddling her well-worn Mad River canoe.

LISA GILES began writing at the Giant Stairs on Bailey Island. She’s currently finishing her dissertation on American poetry at Brandeis University and teaching part-time at the University of Southern Maine. Her field work includes walking in the woods and restoring the lost gardens of an old family home in Freeport, Maine.

SEREnA HALSEy RISD ’07 is a native Oregonian concentrating in illustration. She’s just a little red squirrel trying to get a nut in this crazy mixed up world.

In the name of conservation PAuL HuEBEnER has hacked through slash and burn plantations in Venezuela, and helped New Zealand fur traders kill possums. He has his MA in English from McMaster University and lives in Vancouver.

JEnnIFER KInDELL RISD ’08 is expecting to graduate with a BFA in Illustration. She spent the summer in Italy where she studied archaeological illustration. Her hometown is Venice, Florida.

JOHn LAnE teaches at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He is the winner of the Phillip Reed Award for Southern Environmental Writing from Southern Environmental Law Center and his latest book is CHATTOOGA: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River (University of Georgia Press, 2004). His new website is www.kudzutelegraph.com.

DAVEy AnDREWS is a recent graduate of Kenyon College and a stand-up comedian. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia and plans to move to New York to pursue a career in comedy.

mICHELE BATTISTE is the author of two chapbooks, Mapping the Spaces Between (Snark Publishing) and Raising Petra (forthcoming from Pudding House). Nomadic by default, she currently lives and works in New York City, but not for long. www.michelebattiste.com

mIKE COHEA is a graduate of the University of Montana ’05 and currently finds himself on the wrong side of the Rocky Mountains living life in the Ocean State. Cohea spends most of his time exploring the East Coast with his fiancé Sarah and documenting the daily life of Warwick through his job as a photojournalist at the Warwick Beacon. More of his work can be seen at www.mikecohea.com.

DR. ROBERT DECAnDIDO PhD has researched bird migration in Asia and in his home town, New York City. In 2003, he helped discover a raptor migration watch site of global significance in southern Thailand. In New York City from 2004 to 2005, he studied the night migration of birds from the top of the Empire State Building, counting over thirty thousand migrants, and discovering that raptors such as Ospreys regularly migrate at night. www.BirdingBob.com

Chicago/Portland artist KATHERInE DyKE uses a mixture of techniques and materials to create fictional scenes. She interweaves photography, sculpture, & painting to create fantastical narratives. She works as adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago teaching experimental techniques in photography. She received her MFA in the Spring of 2006 from Columbia College and her BA from Lewis & Clark College. She shows her work in gallery settings as well as public spaces. www.katherinedyke.com

BRIAn ELIG RISD ’07 is an Ohio native who moved to Rhode Island. He has a background in a variety of media, specializing in illustrations that reflect the organic, the animated, and the narrative. His post-graduation plans include the pursuit of freelance illustration, comics, editorial illustration, animation, and game design. Visit his blog to see more of his work at countdowntomyreality.blogspot.com.

CAITRIn FEE RISD ’07 grew up in Connecticut and is currently studying illustration.

CoNtributErs


CELESTE RAPOnE RISD ’07 is studying Illustration, working predominately with oils. Her concentration is currently on both portraiture and more satirical themes dealing with religion, medication, the human body, and growing up as a non-Jersey Girl in New Jersey. For further info, she can be contacted at [email protected]. Her website will be up later in the year once she has found someone computer literate and patient enough to help her.

JACOB SPROuL RISD ’08 has grown up and currently resides in Rhode Island. He transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design from Montserrat College of Art, where he had previously been enrolled for two years. After graduation, Jacob plans to establish himself in the field of illustration.

SARAH SuTTOn BROWN ’06.5 is a recent graduate, Rhode Island native, and history and literary arts concentrator. After spending a summer in western Montana, she can’t decide what she likes best, the mountains or the ocean.

RICK VAn nOy is Associate Professor of English at Radford University in Virginia. He is the author of Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place (Nevada, 2003) and is working on Nature Knows Best: Essays on Getting Kids Outside, from which his essay is excerpted. He lives in the New River Valley with his wife and two children.

mARyJO mARTIn is a graduate student at SUNY New Paltz currently on a leave of absence to care for her newborn daughter, Marcie. Marcie encourages her mom to write while she is napping. MaryJo’s work was most recently published in the anthology In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief.

KATHERInE mOOn RISD ’07 grew up in the quaint town of Redding in Northern California. What the town lacked in culture it made up for in beautiful, untouched nature. It has been a source of inspiration for her work and will forever be a part of who she is.

nICK nEELy BROWN ’07 is the managing editor of Watershed. He also runs, writes, and photographs. He is from Portola Valley, California. That’s in the West.

mATT nIGHSWAnDER recently completed an MFA program at Columbia College Chicago. He has taught at the college and high school level and worked for several years as an international photo editor at The Associated Press. More of his work can be viewed in a Getty Images showcase of emerging photographers (gettyimages.com/np) and at his website: mattnighswander.com

LInnEA OGDEn is a Midwesterner living on the East Coast. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast Magazine and The Butcher Shop. Before entering Brown’s MFA program, she was a photographer’s assistant and general girl Friday.

DAnIEL OREnSTEIn PhD is science and policy fellow at the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and visiting fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. His research includes the ecological implications of land use change in Israel. He writes, speaks and teaches about local and global environmental challenges to anyone willing to listen, and hasn’t given up on those who won’t. He thinks the Hoopoe has afunny name in English, Latin and Hebrew.

abaCus sourCEs

Mowed Down- http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3492- http://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm#environment- http://www.landscapemanagement.net/landscape/article/ articleDetail.jsp?id=325225- Volman et al., “Lawn mower-related injuries to children,” Journal of Trauma 59 (September 2005): 3, 724-8.

Moose, ME- http://outdoors.mainetoday.com/hunting/060923moosehunt.html- http://www.wildlifecollisions.ca/news.htm- http://www.gnb.ca/0113/moose/alert-e.asp- http://www.boston.com/news/local/maine/articles/2006/11/30/study_analyzes_motor_vehicle_moose_collisions_in_maine/

SuperFUNd- http://www.epa.gov/superfund/news/1000cc.htm

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Sitting at the kitchen table, still wrapped in my terrycloth bathrobe, sipping Kenya out of a holiday-red mug, I could see Mika squeaking open the storm door just enough to keep the cold air from rushing in. He was standing outside having his morning cigarette when he pressed his lips through the small crack between metal and wood and whispered, “Babe, if you can, you should come out here for a minute.”

He was standing at the edge of my withering wood porch, looking up the rock cliff behind my house. He didn’t say a word; he just stared. My eyes followed what I believed to be his line of sight, passing through branches of Japanese barberry, beyond the scraggly limbs of honeysuckle and lilac, up to the cliff ’s edge where paper birch and maple trees dwarf my house and the neighbors’ on the hill.

A wood on wood tapping sounded through the small corridor of trees between city streets. Only on New Year’s Day, when most humans were barely stirring in their house clothes, sipping coffee, or taking their first drags of a morning cigarette, would one be able to hear a pileated woodpecker making mulch of a tree. For the next 364 days, it would be traffic waking me to the world. Not today, though. This one was for the birds.

DaysLené Gary

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Watershed Journal: Fall & Winter 2006

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Transcript of Watershed Journal: Fall & Winter 2006