Response 12: Reflections on the Semester

At the beginning of the semester, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this course. I had never tried to do any nature writing before, and I didn't know much about it. I was worried that I would have a hard time writing about nature, and that nature writing would be dull or overly idealized. As it turns out, I have been pleasantly surprised by the variety of writing that is termed "nature writing," and I'm glad that this class exposed me to so many different approaches and voices and styles. I found plenty of darkness and complexity in the works we read, and I definitely plan to continue to read nature writing in the future.

Before this class, I didn't see myself as a nature writer, but now I think I will incorporate descriptions of the natural world into my writing whenever possible. I've already noticed myself doing this in my writing for my nonfiction workshop. This class has shown me that descriptions of nature can be essential in placing a reader in the world of the narrative, and I've noticed myself thinking more about people (including myself) as outgrowths of their environments. As I think about some of the writing I'd like to do in the future, particularly about my travels in India and Korea, I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me in terms of what I can write about. For instance, when I lived in Korea, I first really understood how far from home I was when I noticed a black-and-white bird everywhere that I had never seen before. This bird was as common in Korea as a pigeon or a crow is here. At the time, I never thought of that bird as something I could write about, but now I can see developing it into a metaphor for my experience of the culture.

Surprisingly, I had never realized before that nature writing provides a logical way to connect my writing with my background in biology. I have wanted to find a way to write about the sciences for a long time, but I envisioned library-based research rather than observation of the natural world. Now I can see there is room for both of these possibilities.

I’ve also discovered that nature provides valuable material for meditative writing. Before this class, I would often take my journal outside and write as I sat somewhere in the natural world, but I would never write about the natural world; I would only write about my internal feelings or what was going on in my life. Through keeping my nature blog every week, I've learned that I can write about my internal world through writing about the natural world, and that this often happens unconsciously and unintentionally. As long as I observe what I see closely and stay with it and give it time, something emerges in my writing that is more than just superficial description. This has been a wonderful discovery for me; one of my issues with writing is trying to step outside of myself and engage my surroundings.

If I could take this class over again, I would want to spend more of the semester working on my final essay. That is what I initially aimed to do – I wanted to turn my blog about the cemetery into a longer piece. But when it came time to do that, I couldn’t figure out how to make it come together, I’m not quite sure why. I think I put a lot of time and energy into the blog week by week, but not enough time into thinking about how it could become an essay. I was disappointed not to be able to use my blog for my final project because I enjoyed it so much and felt very connected to it. I hope to do some type of project about the cemetery in the future, and I plan to continue my blog. I feel like I've only begun to explore the small clearing I chose as my site. I still haven't identified most of the species that live there, and I haven't seen winter or spring or summer there yet. Also, I've gathered some historical information about the cemetery and I've established some connections for conducting interviews.

I'm so glad I took this class and I've especially enjoyed keeping the blog. I hope to continue to write about the natural world as I move forward with my writing. Check back periodically for more cemetery posts!

Place 12: Dusk

Saturday November 28, 2009 4:43 pm

The first two things I notice when I come into the cemetery: the color of the light reflecting off bare tree branches, a glassy amber; and crows, there must be hundreds of them. As I start out on the road to the clearing, I see crows everywhere I look. Some perch atop tree limbs at the crowns of bare trees; silhouetted in the falling light they looked like large, fickle leaves. Others pose in the grass and among the tombstones and a few brazen souls sit right in the middle of the road. My eyes follow their black bodies from one to the next, as if trying to connect the dots or resolve their scattered forms into some larger, coherent shape: through the grass, across the road, up the hillside, into the trees, and as I approach they break ranks and rise into the sky. The air fills with caws and the beating of their black wings.

As I continue down the road, I pass two turkeys and numerous deer. The colors are so delicate at this time of day, right before dusk. Everything is cast in shades of rose and pale blue and gray. The sunlight catches the trees and illuminates them in its pink-orange glow.

The clearing looks so soft and gentle in this light. Crows are perched in the tops of all the trees, even the dead tree I've come to love so much. I notice that my dead tree is starting to look almost like the other trees, now that they've all lost their leaves. One difference is that the dead tree has only its thick, main limbs; it lacks the smaller capillary branches that the other trees have. And it’s a slightly different color, whitish-gray, while the other trees tend more towards brown. Despite these differences, it’s starting to blend in with the trees around it. Many more leaves have fallen since the last time I was here; almost every leaf is gone from the trees now. I was starting to doubt my memories of winter landscapes filled with nothing but barren gray branches. I try to enter the clearing slowly and quietly so the crows won't fly away, but I fail.

The floor of the clearing appears to have been torn up again. Maybe construction equipment has pushed the mounds of dirt back towards the side of the ravine. I'm not sure how it happened or why, but the puddles in front of the dirt piles are wider and deeper than I've ever seen them before. From a certain perspective, the sense of scale is lost and the mound of dirt in back of the puddle rises like a mountain beside a lake.

The muddy ground keeps a record of other creatures that have visited the clearing recently. I think these are deer tracks - this is something I hope to investigate more in the future.

I turn to face the other side of the clearing, to the elm tree and the piles of marble slabs, and to my surprise I see the moon glowing clear and soft in the blue sky behind a thicket of bare branches.

In each direction I look, the light and sky are so different. At the back of the clearing the moon shines in light blue twilight; out past the ravine, the pink dusk settles over hills and houses; and when I turn towards the gate to the clearing, I see that the sky is a gradient of blue to white to yellow to orange, like the reverse of a flame.

It's cold today. I'm bundled in coat and scarf and hat and gloves. It's muddy too, and my feet slip and sink into ground as I walk. But I have a hard time leaving. This is such a special moment, caught between night and day. As I walk outside of the clearing, I turn and look back. I will continue to come here and keep this blog after the class ends. I feel like I have only begun to know this place.

Place 11: Opening

Tuesday November 17, 2009 1:32pm

On the way to the clearing today I noticed the evergreens in the cemetery more than ever before. When the deciduous trees still had their leaves the evergreens faded into the background. For the first time today I started to notice the different shapes and colors of the evergreens – full and pyramidal or spindly and asymmetrical, with undertones of blue or violet or rust. The shapes and attitudes of the bare trees are becoming more familiar too. I notice that some have straight, smooth branches splayed heavenward like gigantic brooms and others are twisted, knobbly and curving. With some practice I think I might be able to identify them even in winter.

Today is windy and colder than it looked from inside my car, despite the blue skies and warm sunshine. As I enter the clearing the wind gusts strong and rattling, blowing away the sun that is trying to warm me. The clearing feels so much more open this week, like the walls have all come down. Now on every side I can see clearly the landscape beyond the trees. The boundaries of this place have all but disappeared. When I look towards the gate, this is what I see:

Looking into the ravine this week, the way down is perfectly clear. All obstructions have vanished. I see another part of the cemetery stretching out below and I see streets and houses beyond that. Next week I want to finally go down the ravine to explore.

Although most of the branches in the clearing are bare, some leaves still hang on. When the sun hits these leaves they shine out golden against the backdrop of gray branches crisscrossing sky.

There aren’t nearly as many fallen leaves on the ground this week. They must have been raked up or blown away with leaf blowers. I saw several groundskeepers blowing leaves when I came into the cemetery. The clearing floor looks better than it has in a long time – it has reverted to the dry, cracked light-brown soil that it had when I first came here. The tire tracks and the puddles that had collected in them are hardly visible. The expanse of dry soil soothes me.

I wonder how I would have conceived of this place if I had come to it first in winter; maybe I wouldn’t have called it a clearing at all. The way we first see something has such an effect on how we view it after that. I think this is true with people as well as places. When I’ve known someone for a long time, I see them as a kind of composite of their past and present selves. I lose the ability to see them with new eyes. When I look at my clearing now it is with an awareness of its other seasonal identities. I see it lush with green leaves; brilliant with yellow, orange and red; bare and open – all at the same time. Time and repetition create this layering. Having spent almost my whole life in Pittsburgh, I walk through these layers everywhere. But the layers are internal too – I’ve walked into them in first-time places, and on the other side of the world.

Response 11: Jimmy Santiago Baca

I thoroughly enjoyed Jimmy Santiago Baca's poetry, especially the selections from Martín and Meditations on the South Valley. I was surprised that this poem had such a strong narrative flow; it was like nonfiction and poetry at the same time, and not just because it was autobiographical. This poem placed me in specific scenes and places and moments and told a cohesive story – in this sense it reminded me of prose. But Baca’s language and image and metaphor certainly belong to poetry. (I’m not saying this because I feel like it’s necessary to debate whether this piece is poetry or prose; I’m just trying to get at qualities that make it unique.)

One of the first things I noticed as I read Martín and Meditations was Baca’s sparing use of articles: “Grandma Lucero at the table / smokes Prince Albert cigarette / rolled from a can, / sips black coffee from metal cup” (15). The lack of articles creates a pared-down language and evokes a more essential or elemental (as Sheryl calls it) type of language, or perhaps a language that has been translated into English. When language is translated, articles are often omitted. Leaving out articles also seems to intensify the meaning and purpose of each word, and when Baca does use an article it seems more necessary and meaningful. I think I tend to ignore articles a bit when I read, but I found myself paying attention to each of Baca’s words.

I also noticed that I read Baca’s poems very slowly. His images and ideas are so rich and emotional that I had to pause and reread to try to absorb them. He uses many words that I hadn’t heard before, Spanish words or words particular to features of the southwestern landscape. These words transmit a culture and a specific setting in ways that translations never could. As I encountered and investigated unfamiliar words, phrases and allusions, I gained a glimpse into a cultural surround that had previously been unknown to me.

Another interesting aspect of Baca’s language is his use of words that are usually nouns as verbs. For instance: “and pail windmill water to calves and pigs” (22) and “where sun hacksaws tin sheets of glistening air” (113). I found some of Baca’s constructions challenging because I first had to figure out what part of speech different words were supposed to be, and then how to understand the syntax and interpret the meaning: “whose yellow teeth tore the alfalfa out of their hearts, / and left them stubbled, / parched grounds old goats of tecatos and winos / nibbled” (21). Phrases like the ones above disoriented me and slowed me down, but in a good way. The result was that my attention became fixed on Baca’s language, and on language in general. I stopped and chewed his words.

Baca’s use of metaphor is magical. Here’s one of my favorite: “The lonely afternoon in the vast expanse of llano, / was a blue knife / sharpening its hot, silver edge on the distant / horizon of mountains, … /” (22). I read those lines again and again, trying to let the image and the feeling sink in.

I really loved reading these poems and I plan to read more of his poems in the near future. His writing is arrestingly, hauntingly beautiful. I admire the way that he weaves together personal history with dream and mythology and landscape and culture. The story of his life is incredible in and of itself, but his way of capturing and sharing his experience is even more incredible. I am so excited that he is coming to Chatham and that we will have a chance to meet with him and ask him questions.

Place 10: Night

Tuesday November 10, 2009 5:56 pm

I waited until evening to come to the cemetery today because I wanted to see it at night. I brought Stephen with me because I thought I'd be too afraid walking around by myself. The path to the clearing was dark, darker than I anticipated. There are no streetlamps or other lights in the cemetery.

In the darkness the landscape is pared down to shapes and silhouettes - white tombstones and black trees. The trees seem quiet and still as we pass, like they're holding their breath, but not in a menacing way. In contrast to my experience here at dusk a few weeks ago, the cemetery grounds feel completely safe. They also feel completely empty, at least of people. We don't see one single human. We do see several deer. The first one bounds up a hillside amongst graves and the second, with two slender single-pointed horns, stands stock still a few feet from the road. He seems to believe his motionlessness confers invisibility and maintains it perfectly even when we approach. I'm surprised at how calm and benign the cemetery feels tonight. Perhaps it's because of the unseasonably warm weather - in the sixties on a November evening.

The clearing is even darker than the road. I think I know this place so well now that I'm more aware of what I can't see. The sky is an expanse of uninterrupted cloud cover that seems to hold the light of the city and reflect it back amplified. In the day this sky would probably be flat Pittsburgh white, but by night it glows soft lilac, brighter near the horizon. From inside the clearing I feel encircled by bare trees, their delicate black script written from the ground into the dome of the sky, thinning as it ascends.

The sound of the wind through the trees is different now than it was before the leaves fell. Now it is crisper, smoother, more direct. It catches branches in its grip but doesn't hold on for long. Over the summer the wind roared through the trees, catching each individual leaf and shaking the heavy green limbs. I know that it will change again as winter deepens, growing harsher and raspier and more rattling, but tonight it feels warm and gentle.

The darkness makes the clearing monochromatic and until I take a flash picture I forget all about the colors. Looking at the picture is strange and disorienting and the colors don't seem real. It reminds me of watching an old movie that's been colorized: everything in the foreground is too saturated and the background is still in black-and-white. The color pictures don't represent what the landscape looks like so I will use black-and-white photos to approximate it. When I try to take close-ups, the flash hits the objects and makes them stand out white against a black background, resulting in an image that is the reverse of what it actually looks like.



The piles of dirt lose their sense of scale as I look at them in the dim light. They start to look like mountain ranges and gigantic hills. Seeing them this way makes me wish I had a flashlight so that I could examine them more closely, and makes me wonder why I've never looked closely at them before. I haven't gotten close enough to see what kinds of insects live in them or what kind of plants grow on top of them. One dirt pile near the marble slab collection hasn't changed at all since I've been coming here. The grasses growing out of it suggest that it hasn't been disturbed in a while. A few weeks ago I talked to some people that work in the cemetery's administrative office and they said that some of the old gravestones piled in this clearing have been here for decades. They don't know if they'll ever use them for anything but they keep them here just in case.

Response 10: Sewage and Sandblasting

When I bought my first house in 2006, one of the points of contention in our contract with the seller was who would pay for the cost of repairing the home’s water drainage system in accordance with new city of Pittsburgh regulations. Our real estate agent told me that the EPA had ordered Pittsburgh and all of Allegheny County to revamp their outdated sewer systems because storm runoff was flowing into the same sewer lines that carry waste and causing raw sewage to overflow into the rivers. This was the first I had heard of this problem, and I don’t know if I fully believed it. But I looked into it and found out she was right. Pittsburgh residents would soon be forced to reorient their gutter downspouts so that they didn’t flow into sanitary sewer lines and then there was a dye test to make sure that homeowners were abiding by the regulations. Our agent said these regulations had been a long time coming and all the other municipalities in Allegheny County had already fixed the problem. Pittsburgh would be the last. We asked the seller for a credit of close to $2000 to make the necessary repairs and they gave it to us. When I thought about all of the homeowners who would have to pay a similar sum of money, I started to realize the magnitude of the problem. Not to mention the environmental damage the raw sewage had already caused.

This project will end up costing the city and county billions of dollars and residents will have to pay too in terms of alterations to their homes and higher bills. I think it is well worth paying more to fix Pittsburgh's sewage problem, but I worry about the sewage that has already found its way into the rivers. I read that the deadline to eliminate sewage overflow into the area's rivers is 2026. And what about cleaning up the sewage that's already there?

If I wanted to write lyrically about the sewage problem in Pittsburgh, maybe I could connect it to a narrative about the relationship I was in at the time I bought my first house. There are some parallels, like the idea of problems lurking below the surface and the fact that the solution (whether repairing the sewer system or breaking up the relationship) didn’t really fix things.

Another topic I might like to write lyrically about is growing up in Pittsburgh as it worked to change its reputation from a smoggy steel town to a clean, thriving place to live. When I was a child, many Pittsburgh landmarks were still covered in soot. I remember walking around in Oakland and seeing the Carnegie Library and the Cathedral of Learning and thinking they were made of black stones. Then little by little crews of sandblasters came in and cleaned the stones. Sandblasting was a part of my childhood vocabulary and the process was mysterious and intriguing. I didn’t understand that the stones were not naturally black and it was hard to grasp the idea that they had been turned black by air pollution. I think it would be interesting to explore some of these ideas from a child’s point of view and to integrate current reflections and research.

Writing an environmental argument would be a challenge for me because it’s not the mode I’m used to writing in. I like the idea of including resources at the end of an essay or a book related to environmental issues, like Janisse Ray did at the end of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I also like the idea of writing a small section at the end of a piece with a discussion of steps that people can take to address environmental issues discussed. For instance, if I were writing a lyric essay about sandblasting and my memories of Pittsburgh, I could include an afterword about current air quality in the city and steps for improving it.

Place 9: Bones

Tuesday November 3, 2009 9:34 am

Many trees are bare-branched today and crispy brown leaves coat the ground. Intricate patterns of trunks and branches appear black against the bright late-morning sky, strewn with motionless clouds. The slant and intensity of the sunlight are undeniably wintery. Against the vibrant blue background of sky, I follow the curves of trunks and branches, imagining in time-lapse progression how they might have grown up from saplings. Now that most of the leaves are gone, my eyes are drawn to the color and texture of the different kinds of bark, some marbled green with lichens. The bare trees remind me of blood vessels, the vena cava of the trunk branching into venule-like limbs and ending in tiny capillaries.

The cemetery is beautiful today, a different type of beauty. Since many of the leaves are fallen, my eye has time to rest between flashes of color. Somehow I appreciate it more when my gaze lands on a yellow and red star maple still in leaf, or notices delicate gray seed pods or bright red berries at the ends of bare limbs. Some trees have just a few leaves left at the ends of their branches and they look to me like lights at the end of a string.

Crows caw loudly from time to time and smaller chirps fill in the quiet intermittently. I learned recently that many local bird species, including some crows and blue jays, don't fly south for the winter. I'm glad they'll be around to punctuate the cold with their songs. I feel the cold in my nose and throat and especially my ears – I can sense the contours of my ear canals from the shape of the cold air inside.

On the way to the clearing I see three Japanese maples planted together. Last week they were deep crimson purple and breathtaking but this week they are totally bare. All at once they lost their leaves and now they cover ground underneath like a pool. The leaves on the ground look like blood running out of the trees, beautiful blood. I wish humans left something beautiful behind like that. The human corpse doesn’t seem very beautiful; maybe that’s why we bury it. But then again who knows how the trees view our corpses. Maybe our corpses seem beautiful to them.

Now that many of the leaves have fallen, I can see the clearing through the thicket as I approach. In the summer this view was totally hidden. The change reminds me of the way curtains in back of a play’s set turn translucent at the end of a scene, just before they lift away. As I enter the clearing I see that its floor is covered in leaves and I feel relieved that the tire-torn landscape is hidden.

Around the perimeter of the clearing, the Japanese knotweed has lost its leaves and turned reddish-brown. It looks like a fence made of long rusty nails welded together. Although the leaves behind the knotweed have thinned, the clearing doesn’t feel as open or exposed as I thought it would.

I can’t believe that the trees near the gate are the same ones that seemed so fully dominated by vines several weeks ago. The canopy of one of the trees - I thought it was an oak but now I'm not sure - is in full leaf, green like the first green of spring. It is as if the tree has begun a second life since the vines relaxed their hold. The only sign of the vines, for now, are clutches of naked woody stems. They don't even show up in the pictures.

I’m becoming more interested in what’s down the hillside at the bottom of the ravine – I can see so much more of it now than before. It's dizzying to stand here, looking down. Without the leaves, I see birds alighting in the trees. When I first started coming here I rarely saw a bird, only heard them. Next week I will bring binoculars to try to identify some of them. I don’t know anything about bird watching but it seems like this would be a good season for it. So far this season I’ve seen wild turkeys, crows, geese, blue jays, sparrows and others I can’t identify. I’ve noticed that once I learn to identify a plant or animal I suddenly see it everywhere. Blue jays are easy to spot and they are active today in the clearing. I’ve seen five or six fly overhead since I arrived, moving from one tree to another. Now two jays come to rest in the upper branches of the smooth, white tree that rises from the center of the ravine, long dead.

Through all of the changes from week to week, this one dead tree has remained constant. I’ve wanted to identify it but I don’t know how; it lacks the conventional markers like leaves, twigs and fruit. Even the bark is all but stripped away. The task of identifying this tree might be something like skeletal analysis – deducing gender from the angle of a femur, strength from the size of muscle attachment points, intelligence from cranial capacity. How elegant the death of this tree: to leave behind its graceful body, still standing upright; its beautiful bones swept clean by the wind.