Friday poetry challenge: Singing the bubbling-brine blues

You can't live and work near the confluence of two major rivers without becoming deeply interested in water. Our waterways bring daily pleasure, whether we're driving to work beside the Muskingum, riding a historic paddlewheeler on the Ohio, or watching great blue herons fish in our creek. We faced our first flood a week after we moved to the area and many more since then, so we spend a lot of time thinking about where our water comes from and where it's going.

Our well at home is fairly shallow and far from the reach of the fracking brine injected into wells far beneath Marietta, but I work in Marietta and eat at local restaurants, so when our little town's water system gets into the New York Times, I pay attention (click here for gift article).  That's my colleague Dr. Dave Jeffery sharing his considerable geological expertise on the topic of local geological formations that enable fracking waste brine to bubble up into gas and oil wells; he reminds us that no one seems to be doing the necessary tests to see how far the fracking wastewater has already migrated and how it may affect local drinking water.

Nobody is surprised to learn that once again Appalachia has been treated like a landfill. The 2019 film Dark Waters detailed the legal fight to force DuPont to take responsibility for polluting area drinking water with C8 just downstream from Marietta. Extractive industries left their mark on this part of Ohio for years, leaving behind strip-mined land and derelict gas and oils wells--including an orphaned well that injured six people when it exploded in the Wayne National Forest last fall (link here, though it may be behind a paywall). Chunks of coal from abandoned mines wash up in our creek regularly, reminding us that generations of individuals and companies that have profit from local resources while leaving behind a mess. And now a company wants to build a huge data center just a few miles up the Muskingum from us, drawing on the river's water for its cooling system.

I'm not an expert and I don't know the best way to address these issues while allowing necessary development, but let's give the scientists time to do their jobs, testing waters and examining environmental impacts before it's too late. We love our waterways and we need clean drinking water so we probably ought to sit down and take a breath instead of blindly opening the floodgates to more pollution.

That's too serious a topic for doggerel, so maybe it's time to sing the blues:

Well Pennsylvania sent its fracking waste to the Appalachian part of Ohio;
Yes the Keystone State sent fracking waste to darkest Appalachian Ohio;
They didn't want that gunk in their own state, 
So where's they expect that nasty brine to go? 

Well the fracking brine is seeping into cracks and gaps and bubbling into wells; 
I said the fracking brine is seeping underground and bubbling upward into wells;
Will it pollute the local drinking water?
Only time (and serious testing) gonna tell.  

Anyone want to take a stab at some blues? I'm too sad to add more verses.  

 

Take Your Maggot to Work Day?

When I first arrived at Marietta College, the English department offered courses focusing on the concepts of tragedy and progress but nothing on comedy or nature, and while some African American texts were included in survey courses, we offered no course fully dedicated to the subject. The first thing the department asked me to do was to design a course on African American Lit, which became a favorite. No one ever asked me to design courses focusing on comedy or nature, but I did it anyway. And now I will conclude my 26-year tenure here by teaching, in my final semester, African American Lit, Concepts of Nature, and a senior capstone focusing on comedy. It feels right to end with my three favorite teaching topics.

Other courses I've designed over the years have been more ephemeral: a Sports Literature class designed for remedial writing students; a Postcolonial Survey that I taught many times before it died for lack of enrollment; a condensed course on humor writing that died with our short-lived attempt at offering a January term; and a course focusing on literature of place that enabled my all-time favorite teaching experience--taking the California Literature class on a Spring Break tour of California, where students gave oral presentations on authors in places they wrote about. 

I hope my contributions to diversifying our offerings have made a difference, but I won't mourn if they die in my absence. Students' interests change and new instructors bring different areas of expertise, so the curriculum will evolve with or without me, which is fine. Change is good! Even small changes in existing courses can open doors to new insight.

Yesterday, for instance, while working on the Concepts of Nature syllabus, I came up with a new grouping of poems that made me laugh out loud. I've given up on the anthology I used for years; many pieces are outdated and students often refused to buy the book anyway. I'm still assigning a novel and novella, but in place of the anthology, I'm assembling pieces available online or via pdfs. Freed from the limits of the anthology, I've come up with way too many readings, so now I have the delightful task of winnowing the list and putting readings together in ways that will inspire interesting discussion.

Early in the semester we talk about the relationship between people and animals, and in one class period I'll ask students to discuss four poems: Walt Whitman's "I Think I Could Turn and Live with the Animals"; James Wright's "A Blessing"; Robinson Jeffers' "Vulture"; and Yusef Komunyakaa's "Ode to the Maggot." What a progression: from "I love animals!" to "Animals love me!" to "Animals will eat my carcass when I'm dead, and that's okay!" Maybe the class should sponsor a "Take your maggot to work" day. A colleague from the biology department is auditing the class--maybe she can dig some up for us. Wouldn't students relish an opportunity to cuddle with maggots?

I'm joking, I think. I mean, if I want to bring in examples of every animal we read about, I'll have to find a reliable source for weasels, wolves, bucks, herons, and whales, among others. And, sadly, we won't be able to visit all the natural landforms we'll read about; I'm afraid the classroom can't quite accommodate Mt. Katahdin, Kilauea, the Pacific Ocean, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

But what fun we'll have on those imagined journeys. All journeys must eventually end, but I intend to make this last leg of my teaching career a wild, wonderful ride through courses I love to teach--just one last time. I won't even complain if some maggots want to come along for the ride.

Getting the machine moving again

Mouse clicks, computer blips, quick checks with a colleague on items that need her input--these are the sounds of summer break moving swiftly toward its close, the sounds of deadlines looming and colleagues making decisions that dump work on my back, the sounds of the great education machine being prodded back into action.

Persistent piercing beeps from a bit of equipment in the moldy office building--why won't someone put that thing out of its misery? My office door sticks, swollen with moisture, and I've brought along a student worker (tall) to lift down books from the top shelf where the moisture is thickest. The books are slightly damp but don't appear to be moldy, and the tall person says the top of the shelf looks dusty, with some black smudges in the farthest corner. I'd like to take a look at my framed diploma and awards to see if they're moldy on the back, but they're hanging too high for my tall helper. The cleaning crew will have to take them down when they're working to de-moldify my office.

I fetched some undamaged books and took home my regalia plus the lovely teal-and-midnight shawl a retired colleague knitted for me years ago, a shawl that, unfortunately, I had left draped on a chair where mold patches grew. The shawl can be cleaned and the regalia shows no signs of damage, but I left it hanging outside in the sun all afternoon Saturday just in case. A hot, dry day with a light wind and plenty of sunshine can work wonders, or that's what I hope.

Mold makes no sound at all, creeping into dark, damp spaces and establishing invisible outposts before we're aware that we've been invaded. It would be much easier to manage if it came charging in accompanied by bagpipes, but apparently the universe thrives on the element of surprise.

The rest of campus remains mostly quiet, but here and there I encounter pockets of activity. The clock is ticking and the to-do list is calling, which would be fine if new items didn't keep getting added. (Surprise!)

I'm done preparing for New Faculty Orientation but suddenly I have to add a very recent hire to the list and replace a presenter who can't attend--and oops, I'd better go ahead and order lunch. You can't require people to meet for seven hours straight without feeding them.

Syllabi for my two fall courses are coming along, but classes start four weeks from today (!!!) and suddenly I have to add the senior capstone to my schedule, thanks to a long-delayed shift in staffing. I taught the capstone two years ago so I can recycle my previous syllabus, with updates to account for changing conditions. How do I teach a senior research class in the age of AI? I guess I'm about to find out.

And while my to-do list grows, some habitual tasks fall away. Normally in July I'd be working on my annual review, but what's the point of filling out a pile of forms to prove my worth as an employee when I'm retiring in December? And I've completed what I hope will be the last department assessment task of my career. I also set up an assessment plan for the grant I'm administering, but all the assessment activities will take place after I pass on leadership of the grant to another colleague. Yes: assessment is slinking out of my life the same way mold slinks in--unheralded, sans bagpipes.

In the quiet of the library I click and the computer blips and the colleague confers and we slowly, steadily, quietly get the gears of the great machine moving again. My final semester of teaching, already full of quiet surprises and promising more. I hope they are the happy kind and not more mold.  

Friday poetry challenge: The flood giveth and the flood taketh away

What's the oddest bit of flotsam our creek has ever delivered to our property? Floods have brought us chunks of brick, glass, dishes, clay, and coal, plus trees (whole and partial), zip ties, drainage tile, a child's car seat, broken toys, a car's gas tank and an LP gas tank, plastic 50-gallon barrels, mangled tires, and unidentifiable rusted bits of appliances and farm equipment. This is the first time, though, that a flood has delivered a saddle.

Someone must be missing it, right? I think you'd notice if your saddle got snatched away by a raging torrent. I thought about driving upstream to see which neighbors still keep horses, but the creek forks and stretches far into the next county so that's a lot of ground to cover. The neighbor who constructs floating docks came by and collected the plastic barrels and the LP gas tank, so now the saddle is propped up beside the road in hopes that someone will recognize it and take it home. 

The flood giveth and the flood taketh away. Our downstream neighbor pulled his mangled pickup truck and tractor out of the creek, but his garden shed is probably in bits at the bottom of the Muskingum. My husband spent untold hours scooping up gravel that had washed from our driveway into the neighbor's field, and two truckloads of gravel and lots of labor made the driveway usable again. To look around, you'd never know that we were living in the middle of a disaster area, unless you took a look at our garden. 

I keep telling myself that we've fulfilled our quota of disasters for the year, but the minute I say that, the sky will open and drop--what? We've suffered hail, flood, mold, cancer, marauding raccoons, and intransigent colleagues--what next? If we're suddenly called on to ride herd on another horde of marauding disasters, at least we've got a saddle ready.

Coal bits, clay chips, plastic, glass,
tires, barrels, zip ties;
the flood destroys but brings new toys,
disaster's sodden flip side.

Best I can do after the week we've had. Anyone else feeling creative about disaster?

 

Saddke up!

Big chunk of tree.

Nice catch!

Debris under the bridge, and above.

That's why they call it a FLASH flood

Remind me again why we live in the sticks, I ask, but of course I know the answer: birds and bees and butterflies, summer fireflies and spring ephemerals, creek walks with the grandkids, quiet nights, lovely days, space for a great big garden, all wonderful things until the rain falls and the creek swells and the garden is under water.

It was barely raining when I left campus yesterday but I had to pull over twice on the drive home because the rain was so heavy I couldn't see the road. It finally let up a bit and I followed a line of cars moving slowly up the highway past loose debris. A tree had fallen and pulled down a power line across half of the road, forcing us to drive perilously close to a drainage ditch swollen with fast-moving water. But I made it home! The creek was rising but didn't look dangerous.

There's a reason they call it a flash flood: it happened so quickly that no one had time to prepare. The first time I walked down toward the bridge, the driveway on this side was still walkable and the bridge and road were visible above the creek; by the time I'd walked back up the hill, the driveway was under water. Flood waters crossed the meadow but looked like they'd stay away from the edge of the garden, but the resident green thumb moved loose garden chairs and other floatables uphill just in case. 

From our side of the bridge I could just barely see my neighbor's blue pickup truck parked next to the garden shed he'd been building by hand for some months. Twenty minutes later, our bridge and garden and road were under water and the neighbor's truck and shed were just gone. The entire meadow had become a rushing mass of water louder than Niagara, and it sounded like the bridge was being hit repeatedly with battering rams.

The floodwaters came within a few feet of the chicken run, which distressed me immensely, but the chickens reveled in the bounty of bugs trying to flee the rising waters. Special delivery! 

Within an hour the water had receded, and this morning the creek is well within normal bounds. The bridge is covered with debris and we'll need a load of gravel before the driveway is passable again, and the garden is a big mud pit, with corn stalks bowing to the ground in a downstream direction.

The last big flood we suffered (click here) washed away our driveway and garden shed, so I'm glad we didn't lose more. Elsewhere in the county, a tornado struck down and buildings and trees suffered massive damage. We got off easily this time--nothing that a few tons of gravel can't fix. 

Except the garden. I went to look at it this morning and found mud where tomato plants ought to be. The garden might spring back, insists the resident green thumb. Good thing I married an optimist--otherwise I might find this situation a tad discouraging.

Just a little water in the meadow. Nothing to be concerned about.

The bridge sounds like it's being battered, but it's above water....for now.

You can just barely see the neighbor's truck behind the trees.

Wait, I was just walking down there and now it's under water....

Garden stuff on higher ground

That little row of plants is at the edge of the garden.

The electric fence around the garden is all that's visible

Lake Hogue

Wait, where did the bridge go?

Standing wave. You wouldn't believe how loud the water is.

Nope, still no bridge.

Looking toward the road, which is under water.

Where the neighbor's truck and shed used to be.

Chickens find higher ground

The garden....what's left of it.

Corn, bowing.

Flood debris with creek in the background.

The mud on the driveway is so slick I didn't dare walk on it.

Mold madness, part two

I have written previously (click here) about why The Thurber Carnival is so meaningful to me. First book I ever bought with my own money, a book I frequently re-read and use in comedy classes, etc. The book has survived multiple moves from Florida to Kentucky to all over Ohio and it has survived various campus offices for 25 years, but it did not survive the recent mold outbreak in my building. When I went to start packing up my office this morning, I found the book damp to the touch and covered in mold. I didn't check the other 500ish books in my office--who has time for that? Instead, I am staying away from my office and trying not to be consumed by anger. I mean, it's just a book. A whole lot of books. My books. Which may soon be consigned to the landfill.

 

Breathing, not quite easily

I was all set to teach my Nature Writing class right on time Saturday but nature got in the way--thunder and lightning and rain so heavy that I had to sit in my car in the parking lot waiting for a break in the deluge. I used an umbrella, but nevertheless I spent the next three hours walking around on wet feet. The class was great, though, and the rain stopped just in time for us to go outside for an observation activity, stepping out the door into what felt like a sauna turned to Broil. But the good news is the wildfire smoke had dissipated.

Friday morning I had walked out the door of my hotel room in Columbus and immediately abandoned my plans for a nice walk in a lovely garden. The sun was a dim hazy disc, like a fuzzy felt circle glued on gray; the heavy air tasted acrid and made my eyes gritty and my head dull. From the window of my son's room on the sixteenth floor of The James, I saw buildings a block away fading into invisibility. My son was released from the hospital under strict orders to stay indoors. What do we do when the very air feels hostile?

But I got him home and we stayed indoors and awaited the rain, which arrived on Saturday as expected, with winds whipping trees around and pushing my car across a road rippling with rain falling too fast to drain away. And then I stopped by my office on campus to pick up some things and found another indication of nature's resilience: blotches of mold growing on the carpet. I've been working in the library all summer because my office in the classroom building gets damp in the summer, but never before has that dampness transformed my carpet into a living ecosystem. 

Maybe it's appropriate to be reminded of the power of nature when I'm teaching people about nature writing. It's not all butterflies and rainbows, people! The group was lively and attentive, a dozen people, mostly women of a certain age, all eager to amp up their nature writing skills. I kept reminding them I'm not grading any of this, and by the end of the three hours they had stopped apologizing for their attempts. They sat around big tables covered with notepads, pens, drawing paper, markers, colored pencils, handbags, abandoned attempts at prose, and crumbled snack wrappers, but all I could see were the hands scribbling and drawing and writing accompanied by a low, gentle chatter that sounded like joy. 

Today the sun is shining and the smoke is gone and I'm still reveling in the pleasures of yesterday's class. Tomorrow I'll have to motivate someone on campus to remediate the mold infestation in my office, but today I think I'll sit here and enjoy the privilege of breathing freely. 

Oh, and I'd probably go back to the nature center and retrieve the umbrella I left behind. This time of year, we never know what nature might throw at us next.

Waiting for a break in the storm

The view from the 16th floor

Just a small section of my carpet ecosystem