Silas Creek and Me

As a young pup, from age seven on--in human years--I spent a lot of time in a creek down below my neighborhood--Silas Creek. The name now has a biblical ring to it for me, but back then, it was just the creek where my two older brothers and I spent hours digging up crawdads, gobs of slimy blue clay and where we blew up many a plastic battleship and jet fighter with fire crackers.  It was where we recreated Robin Hood's fight with Little John (We lived in an rea called Sherwood Forest, for real) and generally beat up on each other.

This creek was pretty wild for a more or less urban creek. Trees provided a thick canopy of shade; it flooded now and then, as creeks do.  Wild things were there-a family of ducks, the occasional snake, minnows, salamanders, frogs, tadpoles.  This is all a boy kid needs, maybe a vine to swing over the creek on for Tarzan hollering.  God, we were so loud, I'm sure we scared the shyer critters away, humans included.

As childhood idlyls go, Silas Creek was a good one--close by, but not too close--out of parental earshot; wild but not too wild.  The thing that makes this creek more than this is that my parents have stayed all these years--1959 on- in the same house, and I have visited this creek and walked the same bridge over it again and again, year after year.  The story of its degradation into a ditch in the rough years of the 1970s to its  more recent restoration gives this creek a touchstone quality. It lets me track how the city I grew up in--Winston-Salem--changed its practices and the way it looks at this creek, and presumably other, creeks over time. 

It is not a happy story.  As more houses were built along the creek flood plain, residents complained of the flooding and the snakes.  Bulldozers came one day and a few hours later the creek was nothing but a deep ditch. Everything in it was gone.  What water flowed was brown and barren.  It seems now like a perfect symbol of one view of nature--it's inconvenient.  Fix it so it's convenient for homeowners, safe for overprotected children. 

You can imagine my anger at age 18 upon witnessing this desecration. This 'maintenance' went on for years. 

Finally, thinking began to shift and the creek was left to grow back some. Trees came back, minnows returned, water cleared, and the city set up a "riparian zone" where no mowing is allowed and posted signs explain why.  The creek has become a site of ecological restoration, an attempt to reverse the damages of the past, a limited success story.  But I don't see any kids down there in it, doing the things we did. 

More later . .  .

My Father’s Front Garden

My father has a tiny garden that he loves so much. I grew up watching him bond with it. I touched its flowers, smelled its roses, and enjoyed dad’s company in that tiny space. He redecorates it every year. It gives him great satisfaction to dig its soil, plant the seeds, and wait endlessly for them to blossom. Every flower in my dad’s garden has a story that we all know since my dad doesn’t spare us the details. I can’t see it now, but I can feel my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm whenever its time to redecorate it.

My mother put her favorite fountain in the middle of that tiny garden. The moving water falling from the top to the bottom makes a musical sound that attracts bees, birds, and butterflies. My sister and I planted seeds, smelled the daffodils, and danced with the butterflies in that tiny space. His garden is so special to my heart because it reminds me of the wonderful memories we had. It’s the ultimate manifestation of harmony, happiness, and family. I can’t interact with my father’s garden now the way I used to do, but whenever I’m on skype my dad takes the laptop to his lovely garden and narrates the story of each and every flower. His garden is just like him so telling, so wonderful, and so magical.

Orangeville, OH

My parents moved to Orangeville, Ohio when I was seven years old. It is the place I remember most as home. Once a hub along a river with which I am well acquainted, but the name of which I do not know, Orangeville's bank, post office, grocer, cheese factory, and other shops have mostly closed down. There is a park next to the river where old men fish and where young kids come to throw rocks in the water and swing and slide at the playground. I used the park as my starting point for what I then thought was trespassing; though, then, I didn't give it much thought (I had yet to learn about the Public Trust Doctrine). I "trespassed" along the bank of this unnamed river every chance I got, in summer and winter. I ran into beavers building dams, geese protecting their nests, and deer confused by the shallow, miniature archipeligo of sandbar and island and fallen tree and mudbank. I crossed thin ice with trepidation to explore banks I had not as yet learned to reach by land. My mother told me to stay away from the river. Obeying her never crossed my mind.

When I think now about why I love nature so much, why it seems to take precedence over so many of my thoughts, I think of this place. I think of the mist in the morning and the exhilaration I felt running along the shrouded maze of inlets and ravines. It seems to me so beautiful and elemental that I almost fear to go back to it, that such a return would erase the meaning the place provides, the kind of ancient wellspring of inspiration I envision it to be as it lives in my thoughts.

I know that this strip of wilderness is not wilderness at all. I know that it is created by the Pymatuning Dam, that it is left alone because it is too steep to be farmed by the Farmer's who own most of it and because the rest of it serves as public hunting grounds. I know that it is a relatively narrow area, surrounded by fields of corn and soy and likely polluted by agricultural runoff. I know from old people in my town that the old cheese factory along the river used to stink up the town and dump whey into the river, which would kill the fish. I am not so naive to think it exists in reality as it functions in my thoughts. Yet, it lives in my mind so beautifully, so usefully, that I deplore the denial of the watery arbored sanctuary of youthful imagination.

Rock's Place: Costa Rican Refuge

The Costa Rican jungle holds many mysteries, but many others reside in those that venture into it. The first few days I stayed in a cabin, which was about 100 yards from the ocean, I learned quickly that this experience would be unlike any other I had had in my life: I knew I better take advantage of it.
We were told the first day in the Curu Wildlife Refuge that we should not wander alone; we should, at least, be with one other person.
Never one to follow the rules, I often woke up with the sunrise, because it hit me square in the eyes each morning from my top bunk in the cabin. And each morning, I would grab my mother's camera she had loaned me for the trip and take a picture of the sunrise. After each picture, I would quietly get up, dress, get my gear, and take off to find the white faced capuchin monkeys, my study subjects.

Capuchins are timid but occasionally bold small to medium sized primates that are active mostly in the morning. I know this well because my study provided me data on what activity they did and when. But I often went beyond the scope of my "scientific" study and attempted to communicate with them; I wanted them to understand that I only wanted to understand them better. In my hubris, I wanted them to become more like pets than study subjects.
Part of the thrill of waking up was figuring out where the group might be. Most often, they were held up in a grove of mangoes resting, eating, grooming, or, even on rare occasions, playing.
My experience in the jungle is that a jungle is not that much of a jungle. Not the steamy, romanticized one most people think about. More, it was a forest with very different animals: monkeys, cougars (puma or mountain lion, if you prefer), iguanas, red-stripe squirrels, insects of all kinds (most exotic), even crocodiles. More still, the plant and tree life was distinctly unique from my Midwest beginnings: bigger in leaf structure, deeper and richer green colors, and a more enclosing feeling.
Stay tuned for more from Rock... 

We just called it the gully.

It's more than just a little unlikely that anyone not from Utah has heard of the city of Sandy, but pardon me as I take you there for a little bit of nostalgia. Sandy is actually one of the largest cities in Utah, encompassing most of the Southeast end of the Salt Lake Valley. At the feet of the Rocky Mountains it enjoys the picturesque majesty of their towering peaks, and it was in this town and with this view that I grew up and lived for what is still a majority of my life.

Growing up, urban sprawl had not yet grown up the sides of the southern point of the mountains nor filled up the fields (mostly of sage brush) that separated Sandy from the Oquirrh Mountain range on the west where the Kennecott copper mine (the world's largest excavation and copper mine) has slowly grown into a hole in the face of the earth visible from space.

While Sandy had once been a sugar beet farming community, the last sugar beet farm had long disappeared before I was born in 1978, but Sandy still had some of its rural trappings, the most important of which for me were the large fields of undeveloped land where enterprising youths could create dirt-bike trails, and in the winters, with the greatest snow on earth covering the ground, abundant sledding hills.

Among our favorite slices of wilderness left in our otherwise suburban existence was the gully. To this day I don't know if it has any other name. Created by a usually small stream that flows down from little cottonwood canyon, the gully is a steep-sided gouge through the middle of Sandy that to this day remains one of the few pieces of, mostly, natural wilderness in a valley where urban sprawl has flowed even over the tops of the smaller mountains.

Shanghai and Shanghainess

I came from Shanghai, a place that I escaped from about three years ago. It doesn't sound as horrible as it is, although I used to tried my best to leave it and succeed. It is entitled with glamour: the door of China, the center of economy and everything except for politics, the ever-bright city, and so forth. However, its citizens have been labeled by a popular Chinese writer as a bunch of people who have "no root." Somehow it turns out to be true. People born in this city clutch at its weight built up by steel, concrete, and urbanization, but not soil. To a nation that derived from agriculture, Shanghainess became the sinners of the race who detach themselves from the cultural essence, although too often they claim themselves to be the true possessors of the essence of Chinese cultures. With all the definitions, arguments, stereotypes, and noises, I was convinced that I am not born an urban guy, that brown earth and greens run in my blood instead of the grey concrete. So I strived to apply for the graduate program I like, English, in other countries--ones that have English as their mother language. By leaving Shanghai, I became another insignificant evidence for the unrooted tribe.

The Farm

It's hard to separate my memories from the photographs I've seen over the years, but I've come to think that a memory is a memory, and why I remember it really doesn't matter. The memory is there, so it is.

The farm was dusty. Everything--no matter how many times dusted--had what seemed to be a high-definition coating of dirt. Slightly obsessive compulsive and severely allergic to everything, I honed in on those granules of dust and gave them a-talkin'-to: "Not today pollen. Not today ragweed. Just leave me alone today." I was convinced that this stern conversation worked, and until I was about 10 years old I honestly thought the dust could hear me, but refused to listen. I loved going to the farm, but the allergies so often ruined it for me.

My most vivid memories, one of which no pictures exist, take place near the pond. I thought of the pond as a hideaway. Everything was so green and so mystical. During the day white fluff floated in the air only near the pond; at nighttime the glow bugs sponsored a light show far superior those I would later pay to see at the University of Louisville Planetarium in my teenage years. It was a place of magic, and when I talked to the cattails, unlike the dust, they'd talk back.

I learned about things on the farm. I learned that, like my uncles, horses farted--a lot. I learned about being born when I found frog eggs on the bottom of a rock by the pond and again when Jimmy the horse gave birth in front of me. I never learned why they named her Jimmy, though. I can safely attribute this to one of my farting uncles. But most importantly, I learned about death on that farm--a lesson I'm still learning. (Who isn't?)

Welcome to the blog!

Hello eco-rhetoricians,
Welcome to our main course blog. Here you will find links to your individual blogs (once established). I will post some blog prompts here and you will post your reading presentation "handout" here.

Feel free to use this as a community discourse space. You have "author" rights on this blog. I ask, however,  that you post your regular blog posts to your individual blogs rather than here.

While regular posts are required (as are commenting on others' posts),  it is my hope that you approach your blog, each others' blogs, and this one as a means for thought, ideas, support, feedback, insight, humor, and formation of a writing/thinking community.  Since we will meet face to face only once a week, the blog element will, I hope, help us to achieve a vital intellectual community.

--Albertoid