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.

Response 9: The Solace of Open Spaces

In her essay “The Solace of Open Spaces” Ehrlich connects Wyoming's vast spaces and severe, sudden weather to the way social relations are constructed. Ehrlich asserts that the solitude people live in makes them quiet, that their language is pared-down and communication takes place through silent understanding and interpretation of subtle gestures (6-7). She writes that “people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is a stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals” (11). This description of the way people interact with one another is reminiscent of Ehrlich’s rendering of the unforgiving landscape and weather. Both the bluntness and the severe climate serve to toughen people up. People who live in such isolation must learn to be self-reliant. Ehrlich dramatizes this through anecdotes like the one about her friend who cut off half his foot but stopped to open and close the ranch gate on the way to the hospital. In “The Smooth Skull of Winter” Ehrlich expands upon the idea that “good-naturedness is concomitant with severity” (5) when she discusses the ways in which people help each other during harsh winter months. To illustrate the sense of “camaraderie” (73) that such extreme conditions bring, Ehrlich writes much of this essay using first-person plural, “we” and “our.”

Even though Ehrlich’s connections between Wyoming’s nature and culture do make sense to me, sometimes I find myself doubting her generalizations and questioning her ability to speak for the residents of the state when she has only been living there for eight years. For instance, in “About Men” Ehrlich writes, “In our hellbent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true nature” (49). I find it ironic that she replaces “our” mistaken romanticization with her own. Ehrlich still asserts that there is a true cowboy nature (“his true nature”) and spends the rest of the essay articulating it. At least Ehrlich's characterization has more depth and dimension than a superficial depiction like the Marlboro man, and it adds valuable complexity to the idea of a cowboy, but I still feel like something is missing. Perhaps what's lacking is the perspective of someone who has lived in Wyoming their whole life, and of course Ehrlich can never have this. I can still appreciate and enjoy her work despite this, but her outsider-ness is often in the back of my mind.

I think the landscape of Pittsburgh has influenced the city by making individual neighborhoods more insular and self-contained. Hills and valleys and rivers and mountains create natural boundaries between neighborhoods, and people often seem content to stay in their own areas. Pittsburgh neighborhoods are organized largely according to race and ethnicity, and each has its own business district that reflects the needs and identities of its inhabitants. Much of the city’s commerce and recreation takes place within these neighborhoods, rather than downtown. I haven’t spent much time in other cities so I can’t be sure how different the situation is in Pittsburgh, but I have noticed that downtown is usually an area where people from different neighborhoods come together. Downtown Pittsburgh is certainly not such a place, although it seems to be getting closer.

Pittsburgh grew up around the steel industry and the culture of working in steel mills, and still identifies itself as a scrappy, hard-working, blue-collar town. Workers in steel mills worked long shifts doing punishing, physical work and came to pride themselves on toughness and resiliency. Although the steel industry no longer plays the role it once did, Pittsburghers still define themselves based on the perceived characteristics of steel workers. I think this is especially clear in the way Pittsburghers relate to the Steelers, who are often referred to as a “blue-collar” team. Pride in the steel industry and its workers seems to persist in the city’s football obsession.

These days, many Pittsburghers are originally from other cities, or have parents from other cities. Both of my parents are originally from New York and only moved to Pittsburgh in 1981, although they lived sixty miles away for nine years before that. Many of the friends that I grew up with are also first-generation Pittsburghers. I think this fact dilutes the relationship between nature and culture. In Ehrlich’s essays, I got the sense that most of the people she wrote about came from families who had lived in Wyoming (or at least in the West) for generations. People didn’t seem to move in and out of Wyoming too frequently and so a certain purity of culture was maintained, unpolluted by transplants from other areas. Also, people in Ehrlich’s Wyoming live much closer to the natural landscape than a city girl like me. So while there are connections between the nature and culture of Pittsburgh, I think they might be a little harder to see and difficult to generalize about.