Crossing Over Water

Most everyone knows I love the Cottonwood Trail, a small trail system that winds through the flood plain of the Lawson’s Fork Creek with a trailhead less than a mile from my house. I have often blamed the trail and its owner the Spartanburg Area Conservancy (SPACE) for my moving to Spartanburg because I ran on it during a weekend visit to town to interview for a job.  Now nine years later I have run on the trail hundreds of times in all weather and every season, in deep untracked snow, sloppy mud, and dry dust. Right now wild roses bloom, and the creek flows deep. I have enjoyed seeing the system expand. I also now serve on the SPACE board, in part because of my commitment to the trail.

from SPACE website

But one part of the trail system is one of my favorite third places—the wetlands area, now crossed by a boardwalk that allows visitors to rest in the middle of one of the most interesting environments in Spartanburg. I’ve seen owls, deer, songbirds of many sorts, turtles and other amphibious critters on my crossings of the wetlands. Mounds and tufts of green pop up from the water, which rises and lowers according to the season and the particular drought conditions. Those wild roses climb toward the sun, and skeletal trees stripped of bark and limbs are scattered among the living flora. The place has even been the site of scarecrow weddings, courtesy of Hub-Bub artists-in-residence a few years ago.

But beyond the scenery, I have a thing for crossing over water. All the usual feelings—elemental, cleansing, flow—these all play into my crossings. But there’s a pull, indescribable, I reckon, even for one who tries to describe all things. I don’t always feel that tugging toward water, but a few places around have left me physically and psychically moved.

A few years ago I had a job in Inman, and my route to work crossed over the headwaters of the Lawson’s Fork, just before the various streams coalesce into one, the spot where maps first identify it as the Lawson’s Fork. The road descends into the floodplain, crosses the waters and rises again. There I feel a pull distinct from gravity, one that drew me both into the waters and downstream somehow at the same time. I, like the water, coalesced into stream, and the sensation felt healing.

Another of my favorite Lawson’s Fork crossings is over the abandoned bridge at Glendale. Our SPACE board meetings are held at Wofford’s Glendale Shoals Environmental Center, and late for my first meeting, I parked on the south side of the bridge and walked over to save the time of driving the longer way around.

The bridge passes over the calm pond created by the mill dam, over which water spills in cascades, proceeding on its eastward run over the Glendale Shoals that paddlers play in throughout the spring, and where my children have played over the years we’ve visited the Shoals. I have always loved the place where water fall over drops, whether natural or human-made like this one. There’s a solidity that reminds me of the substantial part of water, combined with the constant moving which reminds me of the ephemeral element of water, where you can’t put you foot in the same river twice, the philosopher tells us. The Shoals are a dynamic place, shifting with the rising and lowering of the creek levels.

All these crossings of the Lawson’s Fork keep me feeling a part of the flow of waters of the Earth, even just this small volume a universe itself. Every crossing is new, a ritual re-enactment of every other crossing if I let it, new water and ancient passage, changing course and matter.

Reflect for Safety

The City and County of Spartanburg kicked off a new pedestrian, cyclist and driver safety campaign, Reflect for Safety. Let's all pay more attention to other roadway users to make the streets safe for all of us.

"Every trip begins with walking"

At a conference I attended recently, a transportation planner said something so elementary that I had never thought about it in this particular way.  “Every trip,” she said, referring to car trips of all sorts, “begins with walking.” In other words, we walk out the door of our houses to our vehicles. Continue the thought, and every trip ends with walking as well.

Thinking about the way we design our houses for access to our vehicles is a little silly, but imagine if you had to walk around the block to get to your garage.  What if, instead of a front walk, we exited our houses directly onto the side of a busy road, one that had no sidewalk? Or suppose we had utility poles installed right in front of our doors.

Of course, these designs would never make it to the building stage.  But it doesn’t take much looking to see them around many towns and cities. Because the focus of street design has been for so long on moving automobile traffic, we have lost sight of the elements of our everyday transportation. Next time you leave the grocery store, for example, pay attention to the atmosphere for even walking to your car. Seldom is there a dedicated pathway for us, and we must put ourselves in automobile lanes as we traverse the sea of parking lot.

And look at this failure of design:

There are so many problems here: I stood on the sidewalk –protected pedestrian way, right?—to take the picture.  The two cars that passed me felt like I was in such danger there that they moved out of their travel lane to give me more room. The two poles so narrow the sidewalk that I couldn’t get through myself without turning sideways.  Now put a stroller, or a wheelchair there. And my favorite: someone with the city decided that this spot would be ideal for the Bicycle Friendly Community sign. Was that a sense of irony, or just straight ignorance?

Or this one:

This is dismissal time at a local high school. Of course there are students walking in the street, between cars waiting to turn left, and right in front of me driving straight past the line of left turners. Not a crosswalk in sight, no traffic signal, and I didn’t see any law enforcement directing traffic.

Or how about this one:

The new sidewalk you see extends about a half mile back past an elementary school, a community park, and a library, but ends about 30 yards or so from the entrance to a subdivision.

While we do see some renovations that try to add in facilities for walking, the incompleteness almost makes it more dangerous because it may give a false sense of safety.

These failures are not permanent, but fixing them will take a conscious effort on the part of planners, designers and engineers to allow for transportation choices. Our streets can look more like this one:

Or this one:

Streets are only safe if users make them that way, through vigilance and attention, but street design works either for or against those efforts.  If we remember, and remind our policy makers and transportation folks, that we are all at some point pedestrians, then perhaps we will see improvements made that keep us all safe.

Undisguised and naked

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
                                                Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Right now in our fair ville, spring blooms are blowing up all over the place. Since January with the yellow Carolina jessamine, we have had a constant blur of color. In my neighborhood, rows of pink and white dogwood trees line the streets, piles of pink, white and various shades of red azaleas front the houses, and the noble trees are shedding flowers, leaving the allergy afflicted whining and oozing. It’s the type of shocking gaudiness that had TS Eliot thinking that April was the cruelest month, perhaps because of his own allergies.

Like Walt Whitman, I like the perfumes, but I will not let them intoxicate me. I prefer the blooming in the woods, where wild dogwoods are scattered about, white blooms floating among the greening forest. Wild forsythia fronds splay nearer the ground. The forest blooms more subtly, more naturally, perhaps, and you have to broaden your gaze to catch glimpses of flowers. 

Redbuds peak through the trees; closer to the ground purple and white flowers tint the mosses, but you have to look closely. To run in the spring woods reminds me of my intentions, to be a part of something much larger than myself, a nature that in many cases excludes us, sometimes harsh and forbidding. I give my attention to the small things, and begin to feel a pull, becoming not as one but as a piece of the whole, where the feeling of oneness depends exactly on our separateness. Each tree, each bloom, each rocky footstep, each breath, each pounding heartbeat, each rotting limb. As the detritus of the forest decays into life-giving soil, so too do the parts of my immediate surroundings coalesce into life-affirming epiphany.

But only for the moment, and then the return. Back into a design not of nature but of human beings, our division of gossip and toil and worry, fueled by a need for wealth and recognition and extraction.

Until the next run, and the attempted fulfillment of my deepest hope to become undisguised and naked.