Thoughts on Nine Mile Run

I can’t shake that unfortunate image of a manhole cover caked in toilet paper.

I went back to Nine Mile Run this afternoon, wondering what the trail might look like after the rain we’ve had over the past few days.

The tour Sarah gave us sparked an idea for a piece. I’ve been researching the history of Pittsburgh’s sewers in light of Sheryl’s comment about how we’re still dealing with the repercussions of our bad decisions. It turns out that like lots of other cities, Pittsburgh is now asking the same question it asked itself over a hundred years ago. We answered it incorrectly back then, and as much as I’d like to think we’ve learned from that mistake, things don’t look all that reassuring.

Here’s what happened.

*

It’s 1873. The Monongahela River creeps westward, slow and thick and congealing brown, bunching over pipes, scraping along crusty banks, struggling like blood through a jammed artery. A few miles to the north, the Allegheny River does the same. Up and down the Ohio Valley, pipes pump into the rivers and pipes pump out. The sewage of three hundred and fifty thousand people chokes the intake valves, which pump drinking water into the city.

           

The young sewer system doesn’t work all that well. Cesspools and privy vaults overflow, rising in backyards and basements, slinking into the neighborhoods and streets. “In warm weather, many parts of the East End are absolutely unfit for habitation,” one complaint reads, “owing to the polluted atmosphere arising from open runs of filth of every description.” The excruciating smell hangs in the smoke that never seems to clear, a sour viscosity that pools on the tongue and burns behind the eyes.

A few miles away in the South Side, conditions are even worse. The soil—saturated year-round with human excrement—bubbles and belches. Noxious gas lingers over steep slopes, seeping into walls, blankets, and pores. Men and women with bleeding noses stumble through narrow, sewage-slick streets, dizzy and coughing, their skin spotted red beneath their clothes. In the cramped rooms above, workers speak Italian and Polish and German, tending to loved ones bathed in sweat, madness rising in their third or fourth weeks of fever as they approach their disease’s breaking point—the moment at which a person either begins to get better or slips into what’s known as a typhoid state, a period of motionless purgatory when eyes close halfway and death waits at the threshold.

This scene repeats itself thousands of times until one in six Pittsburghers has typhoid fever. For every 100,000 residents, over 130 die of typhoid—the highest mortality rate in the country, more than twice that of the next-highest city (Washington, D.C. at 60 deaths per 100,000.) A minimum of four people die every month, but the polluted water kills somebody, on average, every other day.

The city decides, after about 30 years of this, that it needs a better sewer system. Physicians and engineers, however, can’t agree on which system is better. Physicians want a separate system: one set of pipes for sewage, another for stormwater. Engineers argue that it’s easier and more cost-effective to build a combined sewer system—to flush the city through a single set of pipes.

*

The question, then, was this: is it better to spend big now and reap the benefits in the long term? Or is it better to do what’s most economical now and then deal with problems later?

Since you saw this, you already know which option the city chose. I’m oversimplifying, of course—Pittsburgh didn’t have much money to spend, microbiology was still in its infancy, etc.—but in the end, doesn’t everything come down to cost vs. benefit, short-term vs. long-term?

Today the EPA is forcing ALCOSAN to cut back on CSOs like the one we saw. ALCOSAN submitted a plan to the government, which ignored green solutions to the problem (rain gardens, permeable pavement, etc.) in favor of cheaper, easier “gray” solutions. So here we are asking ourselves that question again—should we invest in ourselves now, or put yet another patch on the problem?

                       

The answer, as usual, has to be somewhere in between. There are real complexities and restraints that will always prevent us from a perfect solution. The good news is that the government rejected ALCOSAN’s plan as not doing enough to solve the sewage problem. What’s less clear, though, is whether we’re really willing—as a city, as a state, as a nation—to commit to what works, even if the price tag scares us.

On a side note, here’s a cool song (and video) that I think fits the spirit of the class. Also some links below if you want to read more about what's going on. 

 A comprehensive article from the City Paper that looks at the pollution problem.

A starting point for green vs. gray solutions.

A local organization that's working on this. 

This Could Be the Last Time

For a change in perspective:

Here I am at night. The wind’s white noise is the only sound. There’s a collective ambient light, just enough to write by, coming from the libraries, streetlamps, and cars.  The fountain across the street gushes water for the first time this year, marking spring and the near-end of this project. I can smell the water in the air, an almost sweet freshness that reminds me of humid summer evenings, and it seems triumphant, for some reason, to watch the fountain’s plumes against the purple and black sky.

A couple passes. They’re holding hands. The woman says something about Rolling Rock, about how beautiful it is, about how she’d like to take the man there someday, and it takes me a minute to realize that she’s talking about a landscape. Which is disappointing. How interesting, I’d thought, to talk about beer as a place, which I guess in many ways it is.

How would I tell someone about this place? Now that I’ve done this project, something’s different about my relationship with the plaza. It’s become a familiar addition to my life—an extra room in my apartment, a tattoo. I see it and I sit in it and I try to transcribe it. It’s where I’ve gotten over the self-consciousness that comes with writing in public (although tonight, sitting here alone under the darkened tent, I’m pretty certain I look like a psychopath).

A procession of clouds drifts southward, dimly lit from below as if retaining a few final ounces of residual daylight. The birds, who’ve been waking me up this week, are silent, and I realize that I never think of them—those tiny, trembling puffs of energy—as animals that need to sleep.

(They do, of course, and later I’ll read that birds have the ability to put one half of their brains to sleep at a time. When the right half sleeps, the bird’s left eye closes. When the left side sleeps, the bird’s right eye closes. Sleeping birds can react to stimuli in their open eye, thus protecting themselves from nighttime dangers.)

On my way here I stopped at a gas station. When I went inside to pay, a man with a bundle of newspapers under each arm charged ahead of me toward the clerk. The clerk shot him a what the hell do you think you’re doing? look through the bulletproof glass.

“My mother died,” the man said. He started to weep. “I need these. She’s gone.”

The clerk’s eyes softened.

I’m thinking about this—about how the man needed something to mark an end—as I step over the plaza's protective rope, standing for the first time in this lawn I’ve been staring at and writing about for ten weeks. The grass is damp and it swallows my bootheels, leaving a pair of divots that the rope was no doubt intended to thwart. But it feels right to be standing here after so long, listening to the breeze in the quiet night. It feels right to leave a mark.

***

Friday Afternoon in the Universe

Wow. I mean, I wander out of the Carnegie Library, having wasted a few hours in the Pennsylvania Room researching an essay that’s going nowhere, feeling sorry for myself, pissed off and ready, for the ten-thousandth time, to give up writing altogether.

So I come down the marble stairs, trying not to look at anyone, keeping my eyes on the floor as I sulk toward the exit. I hear footsteps behind me, but they’re far enough behind that I push through the door without looking up to hold it for anyone. Another set of stairs now: cement, broad and awkwardly-distanced so that you can’t simply put one foot in front of the other, you know, one on each step—instead it becomes an embarrassing game of one foot on one step, then two together on the next step, then deciding which foot should move forward next…should you alternate? Or does it not matter since you’re returning to baseline every other step anyway?

It’s too much to think about. To hell with this essay. To hell with this winter. To hell with these stairs that lead to sidewalks that lead to Schenley Plaza.

And then I feel it. Not quite spring, but better than winter. Warmth.

I stumble into the plaza, avoiding my usual spot under the tent, trying to get into the spirit of new perspectives brought on by the uptick in temperature. I try (and, triumphantly, fail) to sight a cloud in the thawing sky. I feel, in taking my scarf off, almost indecent. Scandalous even.

But then I crumble as I always do on the first warm day, overwhelmed by thoughts of what I should be doing for maximum enjoyment and advantage-taking of the weather. It’s a kind of paralysis: I start one thing and think about another, about how that other thing would surely be better than what I’m doing now, and then I go do it and the cycle repeats.

And I almost feel ashamed, sitting here and writing, ready to explode, feeling that I should be doing something. I try to remember that I am. I am doing something. I’m here, writing, feeling hopeful in a very general way on a Friday afternoon.

This notebook, this assignment…today, they’re anchors. Today they force me to sit outside and just be; to sit here and soak it in.

Everything feels new.

New attitude. New seat (a warm green park bench I’ve had my eye on all winter, covered in ice heretofore). New weekend. New list of submissions logged in Submittable. New movement in other, less infuriating essays. New tone of voice in the passing conversations (jubilance—the verbal equivalent of skipping). New sun on my neck.

The patches of snow that remain are pathetic, defeated, dirty and cowering.

I put on one of my favorite jazz albums, Medeski Martin and Wood’s Friday Afternoon in the Universe, and let it loop in my headphones. The music’s great, but sitting here watching the sudden buzz of people leaving work, high-fiving one another as they shuffle around this greening, roped-off lawn, I realize what I like most about the album is its title—the ability of a phrase to conjure the limitless energy and hope that everyone in the plaza seems to feel today.

"I still had two friends, but they were trees."

March now. I’ve been away for a while, coming back to what looks like (at first) disappointingly little change at Schenley Plaza. Still the sound of dripping water, still the thin layer of snow, still the breath between my face and my notebook, still the park workers clearing ice from sensitive places, still clips from passing one-way cell phone conversations (“I feel bad, you know, we broke windows and stole stuff from their yard, you name it, everything but hard drugs, we did it, skipped school the next day…”), still my hand going numb before the first page is half-full, still the self-consciousness of being the weirdo who writes outside here in 16-degree weather, still wearing one glove (on my right hand, so thick it distorts my handwriting) because he lost the other one in December and hasn’t gotten around to buying a new pair yet and figures we’re so close to spring that it’s probably not worth it and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

(Forgive him, he just read the Jamaica Kincaid essay, and is feeling parenthesis-prone.)

No birds today. Just the distant passing of trucks and buses.

Some changes, however few:

Our snowman is no more. Reduced to a white divot. Reduced to somehow more than gone. To say that he never existed (or that he was erased) would be an understatement—by the looks of it, our snowman in fact lived some kind anti-existence. Like when you erase a word so thoroughly that you tear the paper, leaving a hole instead of blank space.

The rebel footprints on the lawn, which must have thinned the snow, are now patches of green grass side-by-side. As if Spring herself walked through here (but kept going).

Workers clear ice not only from the pavilion, but from gardens and plane tree braches as well. They use scythes mounted on long yellow poles, scraping the freeze until it breaks so the trees won’t suffocate when they come back to life. I asked one of them (the workers, that is).

Which reminds me of a poem by Larry Levis I heard at AWP, the poem that’s been stuck my head ever since (in the spot where there’s usually a song). All I could see was this plaza, as if it’s become the Default Background of my mind just as it’s the background of this journal and this blog (and it occurs to me now that I’m about to fill the last page of said journal, the one I started right here in this park seven years ago).

I, too, read late at the library (back then) and looked out black windows onto (this) black lawn.

I, too, felt (and still feel) brother limitation and his clinging.

I, too, have walked home on dark winter nights thinking of acquaintances.

Most of all, I, too, have sat amidst the joggers trying to find this place and make it my own.

(I hope you enjoy it like I did.)

***

The Two Trees

by Larry Levis

My name in Latin is light to carry & victorious.
I'd read late in the library, then
Walk out past the stacks, rows, aisles

Of books, where the memoirs of battles slowly gave way
To case histories of molestation & abuse.

The black windows looked out onto the black lawn.

                                  ~

Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced
By failure. It clung to me & did not let go.
When I ran, brother limitation raced.

Beside me like a shadow. Have you never
Felt like this, everyone you know,

Turning, the more they talked, into . . .

Acquaintances? So many strong opinions!

And when I tried to speak—
Someone always interrupting. My head ached.
And I would walk home in the blackness of winter.

I still had two friends, but they were trees.
One was a box elder, the other a horse chestnut.

I used to stop on my way home & talk to each

Of them. The three of us lived in Utah then, though
We never learned why, me, acer negundo, & the other
One, whose name I can never remember.

"Everything I have done has come to nothing.
It is not even worth mocking," I would tell them
And then I would look up into their limbs & see
How they were covered in ice. "You do not even
Have a car anymore," one of them would answer.

All their limbs glistening above me,
No light was as cold or clear.

I got over it, but I was never the same,

Hearing the snow change to rain & the wind swirl,
And the gull's cry, that it could not fly out of.

In time, in a few months, I could walk beneath
Both trees without bothering to look up
Anymore, neither at the one

Whose leaves & trunk were being slowly colonized by
Birds again, nor at the other, sleepier, more slender

One, that seemed frail, but was really

Oblivious to everything. Simply oblivious to it,
With the pale leaves climbing one side of it,
An obscure sheen in them,

And the other side, for some reason, black bare,
The same, almost irresistible, carved indifference

In the shape of its limbs

As if someone's cries for help
Had been muffled by them once, concealed there,

Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark

—while the joggers swerved around me & I stared—

Still tempting me to step in, find her,

                        

                          And possess her completely.  

You Are Here

I woke up feeling sick.

I didn’t sleep well last night, kept up by a series of imagined What-Ifs and Worst Cases too horrific to get into here, but all of which involved time and deadlines and deepening self-doubt; thoughts that led to my waking every couple of hours, terrified, clutching sheets damp with sweat, mind confused and speeding before veering under again for the sixth, seventh, eighth time.

I brushed a thick, flu-like bitterness from my mouth and caught the 75 outbound for Oakland. I tried (as a courtesy) to sit alone, rebalancing my temporal checkbook and gauging in feverish, panicked fragments the academic consequences of a day lost to illness.

If I’m too sick to write, I’ll finish my multi-genre piece tomorrow, and get to my lit paper on Friday,

                        But I have to pack Friday, plus we have class, and really I should sleep in some that day so I’m rested

            for AWP, especially,

                                                and what I’m feeling is either the flu or sleep

deprivation,

Was that a sick cough or a smoker’s cough?

Don’t touch anything

                                                on this bus,

Shit! I still have three books to read—

Am I hot or cold? This can’t be good,

Maybe I can just read

in bed

all day,

Worry about writing        later

             

STOP REQUESTED

You Are Here.

That last thought wasn’t so much my own as borrowed from the map I found myself in front of. I stood at the western entrance of Schenley Plaza, having come here in my delirium almost automatically, fever steaming up the inside of my nylon jacket. My phone buzzed.

Reminder: Wednesday, 9:30 am—Schenley Plaza for Nature Writing (posts due @ 12a Sundays)

When I’m overwhelmed, I stop thinking and do whatever I can to keep up with my calendar. I go where it says I should be, I stop when it says to stop.

I stared into the reminder that I Am Here, into this sign confirming my place in the world. I saw myself in its dim reflectiveness and let myself breathe.

Suddenly I felt ridiculous.

I’d left the house without putting socks on beneath my boots.

I’d come without my notebook.

In the plaza’s wide-openness I stopped, for the first time that morning, the gush of anxieties that’d been plaguing me all week. There was nothing beautiful or unusual about the plaza, but standing at its entrance on a drenched sidewalk, all of a sudden I understood the phrase ‘coming to your senses.’ The day was cloudy and cool but warmer that what I’d been used to. The soft humidity smelled like rain—an incredible, elating smell after the punitive sharpness of settling snow. I unzipped my coat, applying the breeze directly to my overheated skin. Patches of green grass rose from gaps in the lawn’s snowcover. Water dripped from the edges of everything: from the circular white pavilion tent, from the circular food stands, from the circular abdomen of our still-unfinished snowman. The drips came down in staggered rhythms, like a roomful of ticking clocks, making a backdrop for the noticeable uptick in bird noise.

I wonder about birds and their calendars. According to Kate St. John’s Bird Blog over at WQED, the tiny gray swirls around the tops of buildings that surround Schenley Plaza may have been peregrine falcons, which visit Pittsburgh in the winter and perch on her high roofs before heading north for the summer.

It’s hard to imagine Pittsburgh as a place to escape the cold.

But as I came out of Pitt’s library after taking some recycled paper to write on, feeling less feverish in the warming breeze, it seemed, for a minute, that maybe I’d escape it too. And I felt better.

***

(As a side note, I usually listen to music for a few minutes while I'm outside. I figured I might as well start sharing that as well, as it's part of my experience of the place. Enjoy!)

Welcome Back

There’s something strange about trying to get familiar with Schenley Plaza. Sure, it’s a park. A park with less trees than (the other) Schenley or the Frick, but a park nonetheless. It meets Ryan’s Personal Criteria for nature: grass, trees, sky, birds. Seems simple enough.

But it isn’t. It might be easier to feel a place is “mine” if I were truly alone. A stump in the middle of a forest, an island flecking a lake. Getting to know Schenley Plaza—a place passed through by so many people every day—is like getting to know a sidewalk or a manhole cover. Granted, the plaza is more interesting and natural and changing, but it’s just as…public.

Maybe that's irony. There is nothing more public than a forest. But there’s also nothing as private as being deep within one.

It’s impossible to get deep within Schenley Plaza.

Schenley Plaza is the size of a city block.

It is a city block.

It’s a perfect square of open white, like winter farmland seen from planes.

A forest is a destination. A stopping point. Something to stare at and sleep in and wish for. Schenley Plaza is none of those things. Schenley Plaza is a well-decorated hallway leading to grander rooms. Even I won’t stay there. I’m taking a packed suitcase with me (to drag through two inches of snow), and I’m headed south by way of the 28X and Southwest #4745 nonstop to Nashville.

*

This was all on my mind as I headed to Schenley Plaza on Wednesday afternoon. Here we go again: the snowman the gray skies the library the people etc. etc.

But really, it’s amazing what a sunny day can do. The snow at the plaza looked disinfected. Restored. Even the snowman seemed in better spirits (though he remained unfinished). The ice atop the circus tent moaned as it broke apart in the clear light, making the pavilion look like a translucent tortoise shell.

I heard the ambient street noise of impermanence, the sound of moods upturned across the region, of shovels against warming sidewalks, of my pen scratching a black Moleskine I’ve had for six years, only now coming to its end and pondering future notebooks…

Even the bare trees brought good news as my head drifted off. Called London plane trees, they were planted here as an experiment in urban horticulture right about the time I bought this notebook. Their bark is a speckled gray-green, almost like camouflage, rough and smooth at the same time like a driveway. The oldest of them, the ones that didn’t die after the original planting, were discovered to be resistant to insects and disease on a genetic level. Their DNA is now used to breed hardier London planes planted throughout the city. Pittsburgh is tough down to its trees.

*

So Schenley Park isn’t private. It’s not a forest. It’s not “mine.” It’s ours, and sitting here with my suitcase under the tortoise shell on a sunny afternoon, thinking about (of all things) plant DNA and feeling as if the fact that our trees are improving is the last remaining piece in the puzzle of my day, I realize how much I’m looking forward to coming back.