Watershed Journal: Spring 2011 by Watershed Journal

watershed Brown & RISD’s Journal of Environment & Culture

“Sea Change”: Tidal Photography By Michael Martin Urban Foraging In Providence By Stephen Higa Ceramic Glazes From the Ocean Floor By Joan Lederman A Place To Paddle By Marshall 1 oore watershed M

Editor’s Note

watershed Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 watershed_journal@brown.edu

CHRISTINA BODZNICK

Dear Readers,

��Editor in Chief

Watershed presents our longest issue to date, and, with it, a happy return to our large format. The pieces in this edition are primarily clustered about two ideas: food and water. Jonathan Leibovic’s essay on fish farming is an unmistakable link. How better to connect the twin topics of water and food than with seafood! “Blue Revolution” explores the international, indeed inter-ocean, ramifications of our growing consumption. There are less evident threads that tie too. By turning our attention to food and water, we implicitly consider the realm of the mundane.The authors and artists in this issue pull simple elements from the quotidian background into focus: vegetables, the tides, cups and bowls, backyard weeds, weather patterns, our mothers’ cooking. Their work points to the mystery in the everyday, leading us once again to ask our founding question: “What is natural?” With his tidal photography, artist Michael Marten captures a natural disappearing (and reappearing) act; he reminds us of a landscape’s complete transformation over the course of one day. Urban forager Stephen Higa encourages us to delight in the edibles we find in our own backyards, while Christi Zaleski reflects on life as an urbanite when your backyard is Lake Michigan. Writer and chef Caleb McIntire turns our attention inward and considers the synapses that must fire to deliver us a taste of our grandmother’s cooking. In all cases, Watershed’s contributors give voice to forgotten complexity. They remind us that every once in a while, if we allow it, the natural can surprise us, inspiring us to get lost in the Everglades or in the streets of our city, to get our fingernails dirty with deep ocean mud or with the soil of a community garden, or, simply, to write a poem. With this issue’s publication I pass the post of Editor on to Jehane Samaha and Molly Cousins, who will share the position in the spring. Both are long-time members of the Watershed community, and I can’t wait to see where their committed vision takes the magazine. It has been an honor to work on the journal and to bring this issue to print.

JEHANE SAMAHA NINA RUELLE ��Art Director

MOLLY COUSINS VERONICA CLARKSON ��Features Editors

LIZA MITROFANOVA ��Prose Editor

GRACE WATSON �� Poetry Editor BEN CARMICHAEL EVAN FRAZIER IAN GRAY BEN GODDARD NICK NEELY ALICE COSTAS HELEN MOU DENA ADLER ��Editors Emeriti ELIZABETH TAYLOR NORMAN BOUCHER THALIA FIELD RICHARD FISHMAN KARL JACOBY DAN JAMES SIMONE PULVER CAROLINE KARP

��Advisory Board

Front & Back Cover Illustration by Kyle Norris Inside Front Cover Illustration by Sarah Greenfield Inside Back Cover Illustration by Charis Loke

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Christina Bodznick Editor in Chief

Watershed is published with funding from Brown University’s Creative Arts Council and Undergraduate Finance Board, from the RISD Illustration Department, and from invidividual donations and subscribers.

C ontents

Abacus 3 ·

Switchboard 4 ·

Features 7 ·

Contributors 57 ·

F eatures A Foraged Bounty: Providence’s Urban Edibles......................................... Stephen Higa Sea Change.................................................................................................... Michael Marten Ceramic Glazes from the Ocean Floor...................................................... Joan Lederman A Place to Paddle.......................................................................................... Marshall Moore

7 21 35 45

P rose Rhode Island & the Hurricane of 1938.......................................................... Dena Adler A Food Narrative........................................................................................ Blair MacNamara Blue Revolution.......................................................................................... Jonathan Leibovic Inclusion on Chicago’s Front Lawn............................................................ Christi Zaleski Appendices to an Essay on City Farming................................................ L. Brown-Lavoie I Can’t Taste Red Wine................................................................................ Caleb McEntire

11 17 29 41 50 53

P oetry Field Notes........................................................................................................ Emilie Lygren The Shallows The Woodstove.................................................................................................. Ethan Reede Argosy.............................................................................................................. C.R. Resetarits

20 40 59

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Abacus A Spot On Your Apple~ Year modern pesticide use became widespread: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1940 Peak year for pesticide usage in the States: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1979 Amount in pounds used during that year: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.46 billion Pounds of pesticides used globally in 2001: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.35 billion Percentage the US contributed to global total: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Percentage of US food sales represented by organic foods: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Year the EPA stopped collecting pesticide data: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2010

Clever Title?????? help!!~ Number of farms in America: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of farmers in America: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2,064,700 960,000

Percentage of farmers over age 55: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Number of people who eat food in America: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307,006,550 NEED TO ADD FACT NEED TO ADD FACT

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: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.46 billion : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5.35 billion

Switchboard

Astrobiology

A clock- and tree-independent approach towards evaluating evolutionary divergence in early microbial life.

Conventional studies in species divergence construct phylogenetic trees and often assume a clocklike model of evolution, separating evolutionary rate and time, and inherently constraining our current understanding of divergence. In addition, tree reconstructions rely on one sequence alignment without incorporating any measure of alignment uncertainty. These constraints are increasingly problematic in the context of timing ancient microbial taxa. This study investigated a clock- and tree-independent approach to evaluating divergence, which combined rate and time into one parameter, crown-group taxonomic diversity, and incorporated alignment uncertainty. It was hypothesized that Cyanobacteria and Archaea would exhibit similar diversity levels, providing a greater understanding of alternate estimates of Cyanobacterial divergence. Distributions of Neighbor-Joining trees from alignments My summer research project evaluated a widely used of 5 genes across 11 taxa groups were obtained using a Bayesian method in evolutionary biology, called phylogenetics, by statistical algorithm: Bali-Phy. Pairwise distances across the roots which the majority of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s extant and ancestral species were compiled into diversity distributions for each individual taxon. are dated, by which the family tree of all life is constructed. Cross-gene comparisons and two-tailed difference tests revealed It is a technique that powerfully improves our abilities to that Cyanobacteria and Crenarchaeota exhibited similar levels of investigate the evolutionary history of life on Earth. My diversity, which have significant implications towards the divergence evaluation of phylogenetics specifically concerned life at its age, evolutionary rate, and extinction history of the taxa.This study oldest roots, the ancient microbes that arose during the era of affirmed the feasibility of using an alternative approach to describe the last common ancestor, an era with which the paradigm evolutionary history without constructing a phylogenetic tree. The of phylogenetics may run into greater error and uncertainty. potential contribution of alignment uncertainty to the pairwise My exploration into an alternative methodology leads into distance distributions deserves future attention which is beyond the the greater context of comprehending the full evolutionary scope of the current study. road of life itself. How large is the window of uncertainty in our understanding of the origins of present-day biodiversity, ~Sarah Rosengard and the progress of species diversification during its multibillion-year time frame? Acknowledgements: Beth Shapiro, Ph.D.; Chris House, Ph.D.; and Erik Bloomquist, Ph.D. Following is an abstract of the study which ensued: Funded by the National Science Foundation strobiology is the field which evaluates the existence of life in the universe, studies its origin on Earth, and considers its possible origin elsewhere. It is a unique area of study that blends a variety of disciplines, theorizing the state of our planet in the past and, consequently, today. In studying life at the universal scale, no other specimen compares to planet Earth itself, the one and only successful environment in the cosmos known to sustain life. There are currently 12 astrobiology research centers funded by NASA in various institutions around the nation, one of which is located at Penn State University, and housed my Research Experience for Undergraduates during the past summer.

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Reflections 1. Start solid on your own husk-haunches. Paticles light but add up, don’t they, sure do, sitting solid heavy at the base of things, holding you to the ground, stone ground, stone mountain ground and damn these people, full of grit Rachel Economy and clay. Don’t show it   much. My people, little family on a red hill, grit-clay grins like come in, sit down, have a bite. The sweet formalities of love. Underneath is the secret: don’t show it much, who it is being bitten. It’s parenthetical, they say, that we are all becoming one substance. And why not? Unity! Unity!   We will all be husk-green-kernelled with the same cornblueprint, word for word, match each other’s genomes and the same disease and maybe then (never mind oil never mind border border border never mind which holy fountain your sky-god lives in) maybe then we will look something like peace.

2. Oatmeal I am concerned that my children will grow up thinking that water comes from a faucet and not a mountain. I am slightly more concerned that water will stop coming from the faucet at all, and I will choose not to have children because I will have forgotten how to believe in something called future and anyway I only ever fell in love that once and he had already moved West. In the Sierra, my parents, newly married, got down on their rough knees marked with the gravel-kiss of the ground and drank water that still recognized the sun. Warm spices the color of pumpkin know the salvaging of winter tongues. I return to these things again and again- cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg grated watch your fingernails grated got your knuckle grated soft into rich dark honey. Like the scraped woods named after black stones made of ocean- it is not sustenance, it is overwalked and underloved and the trees are silently dying, it is not your father’s soup or your mother’s grace, but it is red-brown-orange-enough.

Though ashamed at our exaltation and idolatry towards Like how grass and corn resemble each other, but only one what is actually the color of death, the absence of all things, is good for eating, and even then it must first sit for months, the pale shade with its red-line veins of invisible wealth, trying to know itself, swallowing the dry dry sun. I am quite enjoying my newfound knowledge: against all probability, my stomach at twenty-two can still swallow the Here is how you will know that bliss of oatmeal cooked tender in the sweet white froth of someone loves you: if she comes some other being’s perpetual motherhood. over to take you to the beach when your throat is in open revolt, if she It was never about separation. The one in the other, spare wakes up early on your birthday to change poured into each others’ pockets, the yin diving make grits the right way, only way, headfirst into the salt ocean at its side. Or: the way brown milk and salt and long-stirring loysugar moves into things, starting solid, becoming the same alty in an old iron heft of a pot. spiral of morning as the rest of the bubbling heart. It was not about watching. The slow-cook told us it had been done real, with fire, the heaviness returned to each particle and grain. Slow-soaked, my body in the ocean, all my lost salt returning through pores the size of hominy. See how it looks like home.

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At the table, I make noises like a body in motion, like the edge of some wilderness, like swallowing a million hot moons.

~Rachel Economy

Sungolds and Cherokee Purples

hen Stella bails hay her skin glows golden, and I give in to the arcs of her arms. She tends tomatoes. Her soft round babies. Plump and sweet, she weaves them baskets for cradling. Lulls them to sleep with her soft Tennessee tones. Reads them poems and tells the trees and the wind to take care. She doesn’t care much for people. “No time for foolin’.” And so she works the earth under the cathedral sky and writes stories between rows of Cherokee Purples and Sungolds. She ties trellises with speed and grace, touching her children gently, collecting a light layer of each of them on her skin as she moves along. She breathes them in, and they enter her pores. She sweats yellowgreen, and by the time five o’clock rolls around she is part of the Solanaceae family. Mother of the nightshade plants. She means soothing, and she bears her flowers to the sun and its rays. She says they’re like people. When you cut them they scar and they weep. Can carry infection. Disease. They break, and they spoil. They wish to travel indeterminate lengths. Winding around and playing games with each other. They can look so pretty when the light is right. Her crow black hair is braided, and a straw hat sits on her back like wings. Stella rides in the backs of pickup trucks almost everyday. She never drives. She sits up on the side, her fingers wrapped around the roof racks above. She faces ahead, and her braids billow behind her. She wears the sea on her left arm. In thick black ancient Greek. θάλαττα. Stella sways with the seasons. She has two lives. When August lets out and the humidity breaks, she migrates to a far-off city with a heart as heavy as a bucket of tomatoes. She abandons her babies mostly rotten. She craves fried green tomatoes and okra. Heavenly husks. She gets off the truck bed to travel fast subterraneously. She hopes for Indian summer days.

~Lara Crystal-Ornelas

spring 2011

A Foraged Bounty Providence’s Urban Edibles Stephen Higa My parents have always been foragers. My dad grew up on a sugarcane plantation on the island of Oahu. Often left to his own devices during the day, he quickly learned how to take delicious advantage of his tropical home. From what he tells me, it sounds as though half his daily fare was plucked or dug or fished from the local fields, canals, and forests. As for my mom, money was tight in her single-mother home in Los Angeles, so she grew up supplementing her diet with the things that grew in the sidewalk cracks and vacant lots nearby. So you can imagine that my sister and I inherited some pretty strong foraging instincts. Yes, money was still tight, but by this point foraging had become so ingrained in our family that we did it out of sheer habit. Our parents taught us how to nourish ourselves on the serendipitous (and free) bounty of California, and we gorged ourselves on everything we could gather, from cactus pads and wild fennel to lemonadeberries and dates.

When I relocated to New England, I was thrown into botanical shock. I no longer recognized anything around me; I might as well have landed on Mars. But as soon as I got past my bewilderment and took a closer look, I began to recognize some old friends and also acquaint myself with new ones. So let me introduce you to a few of these friends. Not only are they delicious but they are also plentiful right here in Providence. They should prove welcome additions to your autumnal palate. But first, the obvious caveat. Don’t eat anything that you can’t positively identify. Even though there are a few illustrations here, and I have endeavored to describe main identifying characteristics, you should get yourself a field guide and make sure. After all, the following is not intended to be a field guide but an invitation.

ONION GRASS/WILD GARLIC (Allium vineale) Onion grass looks like a long, sometimes curly version of regular grass, but is actually related to onions and garlic and chives. You can identify it by breaking off a leaf; it should be hollow inside (like chives) and smell oniony. Poisonous imposters (and there are some) aren’t hollow and don’t have the oniony smell. Chop it into pieces (or use scissors to snip it) and try adding it to biscuits, potatoes, or eggs.

Photographs by Christina Bodznick

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PURSLANE/PIGWEED (Portulaca oleracea) Purslane is a fleshy plant with juicy brown stems and thick green leaves. It is pretty distinctive, looking for all the world like some desert succulent stranded in the Northeast. You can find it spreading out flat in disturbed areas, like dusty spaces near sidewalks or flower beds. You can eat both the leaves and the stems. Raw, it has a slight sliminess, kind of like okra. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s actually rather pleasant chopped up in salads. Or, you can sautee it; cooking it really brings out its nice lemony flavor.

Illustrations by Stephen Higa

ROSE HIPS (Rosa species) The red fruit of the many varieties of roses that grow around here (both wild and cultivated) are all edible, and give you good amounts of vitamin C for the winter months. Try picking them in the fall and drying them; you can then add them to tea for a tart pick-me-up. Of course, you can also eat them straight off the plant, although many varities have unpleasantly fibrous centers. Simply eat the outer flesh. Rose petals are also edible, and should definitely be steeped in cold water to make a refreshing beverage.

LAVENDER (Lavandula species) I include lavender because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a wonderful but underused autumn/winter herb and is pretty ubiquitous in Providence. The flowers have a strong perfume, so I would use them sparingly; try flavoring shortbread with them, or add them to your favorite tea (I add them to Japanese sencha, or to plain black tea with a little sugar and milk). The leaves are just as good, but their flavor is less flowery and more herbal. Lavender is related to the mints (you can tell because it has a square stem), and its leaves have a similarly fresh flavor. In the fall, when other herbs are fading fast, lavender leaves stay going strong. Try adding the leaves to roasted winter squash, or sprinkling them into fruit compote.

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CHICKWEED (Stellaria media) I think chickweed is the real star of the foraging world. It is delicate, refreshing, tender, and delicious enough to be found in the market (though it never is). When my sister and I were young, chickweed was definitely our favorite, and my mom taught us how to identify it very early on. It was the plant that we would joyously seek out, grasp by the handfuls, and pop right in our mouths. It is one of the identifying flavors of my childhood. Chickweed has long straight stems, oval pointed leaves, and tiny white flowers with star-shaped sepals and five pairs of slender petals. The main identifying characteristic, though, is the single line of fine hairs that run down each stem. If you’ve identified this line of hairs, you have identified chickweed. I don’t recommend that you cook chickweed; it is much better raw. Put it in salads or sprinkle it on finished dishes. The slightly earthy flavor goes particularly well with roasted beets.

LAMBSQUARTERS (Chenopodium album) Lambsquarters (along with nettles) are my mom’s particular obsession. Plentiful and easy to harvest, lambsquarters are as useful as spinach and quite a bit more nutritious. There are many forms, but around here you are most likely to see it growing on long stems branching from a central root, creating a spindly bush about waist-high. You can identify it by looking at the underside of the diamond-shaped leaves: you should see a silvery dust. Often, the stems will also have vertical red or purple lines. The tip of each branch should have tinier versions of the diamond-shaped leaves, and these versions will often be so silvery as to be almost white. Later on in the fall, some leaves will turn a beautifully vivid crimson. Any tender part of the plant is edible. You might consider gathering enough to freeze; simply strip the leaves from the stems, rinse them in a bowlful of water, spread them out on cookie sheets, and put them in the freezer. When they are frozen, store the leaves in ziploc bags. You will have them throughout the winter and can use them like frozen spinach.

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MUSTARD FAMILY (Brassicaceae) Miraculously and wonderfully, everything in this family is edible; this is the same family that includes mustard, cabbage, broccoli, radishes, and kale. Let me tell you why I love this family so much. Once, a friend and I decided to go backpacking in Northern California and live off what we could forage. This worked marvelously for a while (and was massively cleansing for the body), but as we began to make our way into a particular area of Big Sur I stopped recognizing anything. This is it, I thought. We’re totally going to starve. All I saw around us were redwoods, ambiguously edible ferns, and carpets of dark green, glossy leaves of a plant I didn’t know. That was basically it. But then, as we continued down our road to certain doom, I noticed something: occasionally springing from the soil along our path were small spires of white flowers with a familiar physique. These spires were attached to the same dark green leaves I had seen growing plentifully all along--they were the same plant! So I took out a plastic bag, gathered these leaves, and we basically feasted on this until we reached the shore and were able to partake of the ocean’s bounty. You see, you can recognize a mustard by its flowers. Look closely--the flowers are often very small. You will see that each blossom has four petals and can be divided into four parts. Each petal has an associated stamen, and there are also two smaller stamens that you can’t really see (so that’s four long stamens and two short ones). The blossoms are usually arranged in a cluster, with the young buds in the center and the opened flowers at the edge. They can really be any color (we get glorious golds, purples, and pinks in California), but here in New England they are usually white or yellow. Once you have identified the flower, remember the leaves so you can identify it when it is not in bloom. Depending on the species, the time of year, and the amount of water the plant has received, the flavor of wild mustards can range from pleasant and peppery to horrifically bitter (I’m not aware of any that are as mild as our cultivated cabbages). So, taste and see! You can eat any part of the plant that is tender enough to chew. Try some flowers in salads, or use the leaves to make a nutritious and pungent soup along with potatoes and plenty of garlic.

WILD VIOLETS (Viola papilionacea) White or purple violets, with their glossy leaves and shy demeanor, grow profusely around here. The young leaves are delicious in salads, and the flowers make quite a show wherever you use them. You can add them plain to salads; I love tossing them into pasta salads along with olives and grated parmesan. You can also candy them by brushing them with egg whites and dusting them with sugar. Once they are dry, use your candied violets to adorn cakes or puddings. Even foraged fare can be ridiculously extravagant.

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Rhode Island & the Hurricane of 1938 Dena Adler

Ole Tillmann

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“The story can never emphasize too much the element of people’s unawareness of the hurricane’s imminence, and the strange, weird thought, even as the wild storm was shattering the community, that it was a fantastic piece of imagination, a mad dream. It was so alien a thing: an anachronism, that did not belong here in the northern latitudes. It was this very element of the unawareness that cost scores of lives of those who stayed and thought they were safe, and were swept away when a sea whipped to great heights engulfed them and their homes.” The Providence Journal Company, 1938

Meanwhile, the Great Hurricane, continues its relentless charge at 67mph directly towards Rhode Island. It The trolley car rolls along a fixed path through down- came into the world in the usual way for hurricanes, stirred town Providence in the usual way, bell screeching its im- into existence around September 4th in the warm surface minent arrival. Men in suits wrap elbows around railings waters of the Atlantic doldrums, four hundred miles off the as they shake out the creases of the daily paper, reading the coast of Senegal. Warm air rose and cooler air wrapped itheadlines. War is coming over the European horizon as Ad- self around the core, twisting into a tropical storm that was olf Hitler prepares his forces to enter Czechoslovakia while guided by the late summer pressure systems up “hurricane France and Britain watch limply from the sidelines. A little alley.” It edged westward along the high pressure wall of the closer to home, in the neighboring state of Massachusetts, central Atlantic until encountering North American landthe gubernatorial race climaxes with days left before the locked systems that squeezed it North. On September 18th, vote in dizzying flurry of accusations, counter-accusations, a Brazilian merchant ship reported the storm, 300 miles off and campaign promises. the coast of Puerto Rico. Florida battened down its hatches Perhaps after gleaning the “real” news, readers spare a and ships heeded their radios and sought safe harbor. But passing glance at the weather report before stuffing their with all the ships docked, almost no one was out on the wapapers under an armpit and marching off to work. After all, ter to notice the hurricane’s divergence from its expected it had been raining heavily for four straight days in New route further east where it would have blown itself out over England. Weather-related headlines are reassuring: other cool water. states are hard hit, but Rhode Island remains relatively unscathed. The rise in river levels is nothing to worry about. II. 12:50 pm In fact, the water had been higher several months ago. For A telegraph arrives warning the Rhode Island Weather those who do find a moment to consider the weather to come, predictions “for Providence and vicinity: Heavy rain Bureau Office of an approaching gale.Those gazing out the this afternoon and tonight; cooler tonight, Thursday fair windows or ambling along the streets may notice a strange grayness to the air, but it is an indicator without meaning. and cooler” fail to raise any alarms. Away from Providence’s nestled cove up Narragansett In Florida, hurricane warnings go out and folks prepare Bay, the coastal towns have little more indication that any- themselves or get out of the way. But this isn’t Florida. This thing is amiss. In southern Rhode Island, families are still is Providence. Hurricanes don’t come to Providence. Well, “summering” along the sandy spit extending from Watch they had in the past, but they don’t now. The Great Storm Hill, which arcs back towards shore like a backstroker’s out- of 1815 had flooded Exchange Place, the commercial hub reached arm. In Watch Hill the morning is mild and hazy as of the city, but that story had died in the dusty lines of an people peruse the shops, hum at daily chores, or steal their old pen & ink drawing. It was a legend rather than a workfinal dip for the season. Many bathers notice the water is ing societal memory. Hurricanes did wind their way North especially warm. Laughter and conversation flow freely at through the Atlantic parallel to the coast often enough, but they always turned eastward out into the sea, each unwindluncheon parties near the sparkling cost. Not far away fishermen from Galilee and Jerusalem em- ing in a slow, unwitnessed demise. bark in search of their daily catch. All over the state, Rhode Islanders crisscross the landscape rushing about their busi- III. 3:00 pm ness: completing errands, replacing farm equipment, visitThe Weather Bureau sends out a warning to the Proviing relatives, attending classes, and earning a living. dence Journal for 40-45 mph winds. Ten minutes later, a

I. Morning of September 21st, 1938

news service delivers a hurricane warning by telegraph.

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Outside of the office, pedestrians do not yet know this is a hurricane. Trees begin to fall left and right, smashing automobiles, heedless of their occupants. A woman indignantly calls the forest service demanding they do something about a downed tree on her property. Meanwhile, electrical wires plummet in a hundred places, whipping the yielding ground as communication fizzles out. On the streets, people bend themselves forward trying to push through the wind, squinting to protect their eyes, and raising forearms like explorers on an artic expedition. Gusts scoop up folds of jackets and skirts, tugging unwary passersby astray.

IV. 5:05 pm Winds are clocked at 87 mph in Providence. Further out on Narragansett Bay, 121 mph winds pile water into the upper bay, shoving it through the narrows of the harbor until the mass of water overflows the Providence River in the center of the city around 5 pm. Within ten minutes the market square and surrounding business district is submerged in a pool of water, reminiscent of the Great Salt Cove that it once had been. Hampered by drenched dresses and heels, a number of women are helped up the hill by perfect strangers.

V. 5:16 pm Power flickers out at the Evening Bulletin. Windows bulge inwards as the pressure plunges unlike any time in even the oldest citizen’s memory. Slates fly off roofs and smash on the pavement like fatal discs. Chimneys topple, raining brick and crushing cars. Downed trees everywhere make the streets impassable. The water continues to rise, first above tire lines, then above car doors, and soon above cars. In less than 30 minutes the water reaches 6 feet. Newly-born rivers wind between building, rushing over submerged cars and the sleek roofs of the trolleys. The threearmed branched of streetlight break the surface and create small eddies. Confused fish circle the contents of basements ruined by sea water. Workers retreat to higher floors as the first floors flood, and find themselves marooned. Five hundred are trapped in the Narragansett Hotel and hundreds more in the Biltmore. Pedestrians swimming and wading home are saved by daring rescuers who throw down ropes from the upper stories. Entire buildings wash down the Seekonk River. As one such structure collides against India Point Bridge, a woman lunges for safety, clinging to the bridge rail until help arrives. Others are less lucky and drown.

all out, and whose electricity of any kind has ceased. The radio lines are quiet. Communication extends no further than arm’s reach. Families huddle in living rooms with broken windows, often with neighbors from less sturdy houses. Waiting out the night, they are clueless of the devastation beyond their tiny huddle of candlelight. They worry about loved ones and friends who had gone off to work that morning in the city and relatives on the coast. Throughout Providence electrical wires dangle ominously, barely above the lapping waves in the street, whipping through the air. Through the night, short-circuiting automobile car alarms bleat incessantly. Headlights cast an eerie glow under the lapping waters. At 7:30 pm “more than 1000 persons, including hundreds of sales girls, are rescued from the Outlet Co. in Providence by police and firemen. Hundreds of others remain trapped overnight in other buildings whose first stories have flooded completely. They wait, at the mercy of nature and the receding tide while electric-powered pumps are inoperable. Water is suspected contaminated until proven clean and must be boiled. Bodies begin to float by, boilers explode, and firemen continue their work relentlessly. Looters smash windows of drowned store front displays, grabbing anything and everything at hand. As the city descends into chaos, martial law is enforced.

VIII. September 22nd, 1938

The next morning slowly surfaces from the depths. Families make painfully slow progress driving around the state, attempting to find loved ones despite downed wires and trees. Police attempt to keep gawkers out and permits become necessary to travel the roads. Though Providence is half-drowned, its nook up Narragansett Bay had spared it the full brunt of the ocean’s fury. The coastal cities, jutting out into the fray were less lucky. All along the shore from Charlestown to Westerly 30 ft waves mercilessly pounded the shore, sweeping whole communities away. Over the course of the day, stories begin to pour in. When the great wave rolled across Watch Hill spit along the edge of southern Rhode Island, 42 people still occupied their homes. As bodies begin to be found, and aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, and children are still missing, the dead are totaled at 15. Where once there were 35 houses, a yacht club, beach club, and bathing pavilion now there are only splinters. What formed the floors that little feet trampled, now only sticks of scrap wood, piled in a cruel giant game of pick-up sticks. Mr. Byrnes of Watch Hill left his cottage amidst the storm with his two daughters and wife. He had applied a tourniquet to Mrs. Byrnes, who has sliced an artery breakVII. 7:30 pm After high tide at 7:00 pm the waters begin to recede, ing through a glass door. They sought refuge in a less exunveiling an alien city. Occasional beams from ambulances posed house, but were torn from its safety. Mr. Byrnes was and flood lights cut swatches in the inky darkness of a state tossed from the wreckage barely conscious, washing up on whose homes beam no warm glow, whose street lamps are the shore of Osbrook, only to learn his wife and daughters

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Noah Frase were not so lucky. Prent Lanphear, a fishermen recounts traversing the swift currents in the “Hellu” to rescue three men and a girl who had survived the storm in a gun emplacement out on the point. The men had tread water, buoying up the panicstricken girl between them until the water receded. Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Moore miraculously escaped their cottage along with their four children and five others. Mrs. Moore recalls double pinning the laundry in the brisk breeze of a clear morning, watching her boys row out to sea for a boat ride. As the wind picked up she sent her husband and the coast guard out after the boys, who were at length retrieved. Mr. Moore was so exhausted from the effort that a doctor was called who ordered him to rest for 3 days. Water began to fill the garage and dining room up to knee-level and the family worked frantically to barricade the door with the dining room table, as the water relentlessly poured in. The family waded as they scrambled to put aside water, clothes, and candles before retreating to the second floor. The children began weeping and praying, one girl insisted, “Mommy if I must die, I want my rosary.” Mrs. Moore retrieved one and wrapped it around her daughter’s wrist, as everyone watched the houses all around them collapse and wash seaward without a trace. Soon, the second floor collapsed “like an elevator only with a sideways motion” and the family retreated as a unit to the third floor.

Certain that death was imminent, as the water rose and the roof prevented their escape, the family said good-byes and clung together. Suddenly, the wind tore the roof off the maid’s room, and the family scrambled aboard this haphazard raft. Pounded by the surf, the raging sea pushed them across the bay, until they chanced a leap for shore. They waited out the night on “Haystack” Island. Though, blue with cold and shoeless, they piled hay upon themselves to keep warm and held a long night vigil listening for the much prayed for murmur of a motor boat. With the bright morning sun, help eventually arrived, ferrying the family to safety. A little further north along the coast in Misquamicut, Westerly, elderly Mrs. Mary McEvoy trudges heavily away from the upper half of her home, which had been “swept” ½ mile inland from the beachfront. Dressed all in black with deep creases around her mouth she maneuvers around chairs, screens, mattresses, and bedding heaped against the slanted roof of the first story of her house. The level of disarray suggests the aftermath of a cyclone scene of Wizard of Oz proportions. Yet, heedless of the hundreds of homes in Quanotchontaug, Charlestown, Matutuck, and Jerusalem the hurricane had continued north, determinedly rounding Point Judith and entering the bay. Everywhere in these towns, houses are slanted, as though frozen in some bizarre geological upris-

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ing. Even a little ways inland in North Kingston the damage is heavy.The 150 year old South ferry Church stands starkly, strangely decapitated with the loss of its roof. It’s undergirding and naked foundations revealed for all passersby. White shingles scatter the ground nearby. The islands in Narraganett Bay were isolated early on in the storm when the ferries shut down. On Conanicut aisland, an stalled automobile on a bridge prevented a school bus from crossing. The bus driver bravely tried to

get the children out, but faster than the speed of human thought, three large waves swamped the bridge, drowning all seven children. Meanwhile, the vehicle, two passengers and all, had been dragged out to sea. In coastal Newport, a small girl and reverend also drowned before they could escape from their vehicle. Surrounded by beach grass, roofs of cars barely break the surface. The tops of their windows are just visible, like shiny alligator eyes, watching for prey. As water piled up the bay, sweeping towards Providence, it encountered Oakland Beach in Warwick. Here a house wife clad in a full length printed dtress negotiates a tangle of splintered beams using a broom for support. Her eyes downcast and chin-length hair tucked behind her ears, she searches for valuables amidst the debris of a home only recognizable by a fallen sign turned over on its side: “Raymond cottage.”

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In Conimicut, a little girl with raven dark chin length hair, hugs a naked doll to her chest. The doll’s long limbs rest akimbo across the girl’s lap, reflecting the strange angles of the debris all around her. Furniture, benches, chairs are all shattered and heaved around her. She sits on the tile floor with nothing but beams resting above it, walls and roof are no more. Yet next to her a bowl of six eggs rests intact. Mothers and daughters sort through the wreckage, their hats with black bows bobbing solemnly.

Noah Frase Further up the bay, in Pawtuxet, locals describe the sight of the Rhode Island Yacht club slowly sinking into the New England depths like a modern Atlantis. In Providence, waters reached a maximum of 13 feet 9 inches in Market Square. Water-laden bodies are found trapped under cars and in basements.The smell of rot and mildew saturates the air. Hundred year old trees lay strewn like saplings. Yet the “greatest generation” does not wallow in yet another set-back. The Evening Bulleting arranges to print on the presses of the Boston Post and news reaches Rhode Islanders. Several hundred Brown freshmen enter their first year of college up on the hill. Families salvage what they can and begin to rebuild. Slowly, the city again emerges.

IX. September 21st, 2009 The category 3 Great Storm of 1938 caused roughly $300 million in damages and took the lives of over 682 men, women, and children throughout New England. In 1954 Hurricane Carol wiped through Rhode Island, again transforming the business district into the cove it had once been. Their water levels, and that of the Great Storm of 1815 are etched into the walls of the Providence Journal Building. After hurricane Carol, the Army Corps of Engineers designed a barrier on the Providence River to protect the city from future flooding. In November of 1960, Rhode Islanders approved financing the $15,000,000 project through the issuance of bonds. Today $7.5 million are slated to repair the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier Gates, which are in severe need of maintenance work. Frank Fedele, manager of the Cape Cod Canal for the Army Corps, says that one of the five pumps associated with the barrier had a “catastrophic” failure when its shaft broke earlier this year. Even while survivors of the 1938 hurricane still live with their dramatic memories, Rhode Island has largely forgotten the force of the storm in the past 70 years. Every summer, weather forecasters consistently remind New England of the inevitability of another big storm, but still the vast majority of people remain unprepared to be “autonomous” for one week: to have the food, water, and first aid supplies necessary should the world as we know it be shut down by a storm. A recent study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency predicts that were Rhode Island to suffer a storm like that of 1938 today, property damages and business losses would exceed $3.8 billion, 10,000 Rhode Islanders would need to vacate their homes, and 8 million tons of debris would need to be cleaned up. Isaac Ginis, a scientist at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, explains that for such hurricane to hit Rhode Island it would have to be carried up by the jet stream in 24 hours. No matter how much better our forecasting gets that means little time to prepare for disaster, or even get out of its way.

Works Cited Behner, Norman. The hurricane and tidal wave of September 21, 1938 ; Charlestown, R.I. and vicinity. Providence: Roberts and Browning, 1938. Print. Brown Alumni Monthly 1928-39 (Vol. 39:4 November, 1938) “A University and a Hurricane.” : Brown Archives, Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I. C.A. Log of Hurricane at Brown University (source unknown) received from Raymond Butti, archivist at John Hay Library through email correspondence. Farham Oral Histories Collection Part I: Women and Brown University (Porter, Margaret). Mary [Dolan] (1939) and McElroy, Eleanor Rosalie (1937)): Brown Archives, Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I. Hammond, Charles F., ed. “Watch Hill in the hurricane of September 21st, 1938, including the survivors’ stories of the Fort Road tragedy. [30th anniversary reprint].” Seaside Topics [Watch Hill] Nov. 1968. Print. Hurricane I.250 folder OF-1C-11: Brown Archives, Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I. Lord, Peter. “Recalling the Katrina of its day.” The Providence Journal 21 Sept. 2005. Lord, Peter. “Stimulus dollars to pay for hurricane barrier, dam, levee repairs.” The Providence Journal 19 July 2009. Lord, Peter. “Will Rhode Islanders be ready for the next hurricane.” The Providence Journal 19 July 2009. The Providence Journal Company.The great hurricane and tidal wave, Rhode Island, September 2l, l938. Providence: The Providence Journal Company, 1938. Print. Scotti, R. A. Sudden Sea The Great Hurricane of 1938. New York: Back Bay Books, 2004. Print. Scrapbook Volume 34 (SB-1E-1): Brown Archives, Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I. South Kingston High School, comp. In the wake of ‘38 : an oral history project / of South Kingstown High School and the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities. Providence: R.I. Committee for the Humanities, 1977. Print.

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A Food Narrative “It’s a story of variety and convenience. That is the difference between then and now.” Blair McNamara

olette Petrofes raised seven children in the 1950s and ‘60s outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Her duties involved looking after the children, tending to the house, and cooking all of her family’s meals from basic ingredients available at the grocery store. Colette finds the abundance and variety of food available today mindboggling--everyone seems to be looking for easier, faster ways to get out of cooking meals. When Colette was raising her family, meals might have lacked variety and a fast preparation time, but this was made up for by the larger number of items made completely at home, less worry about food safety, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from making something yourself, seeing the skill you have acquired put into a meal and having people enjoy it. Today, enjoying a home cooked meal each night is an ideal that many yearn for in the presence of pressure from back-to-cooking movements. In the past, dinner not only took the majority of the day to prepare, but also followed pretty much the same weekly pattern. Colette, my grandmother, had a repertoire of around ten dinners she rotated through every week. The most popular was roast chicken with stuffing, mashed potatoes (from whole potatoes), gravy made from the drippings, and applesauce. While today this might sound like a feast prepared for a food-centered holiday such as Thanksgiving, in decades past it was merely a weekly dinner option. Another principal player on the dinner scene was pasta with tomato sauce and meatballs. In the modern kitchen this would involve about 15 minutes of preparation time—long enough for the pasta to cook and the pre-formed meatballs to brown. However, for my

grandmother this took the majority of the day to prepare. The sauce took all day to thicken, Colette told me, and so it had to get on the stove early in the morning, often before the children left for school, for it to be thick enough by dinner time. With jarred pasta sauces so easily accessible today this intensive process is hard to picture. Other dinners were pot roast, round steak, corned beef, beef and noodle casserole, and on Fridays, in the Catholic household that my grandmother maintained,“Fish Day,” which consisted of either macaroni and cheese or frozen fish sticks and French fries. While individually each of these dishes sound gloriously “home made” (with the exception of fish sticks), eating them week after week would seem torturous to those who today can get any dish they want delivered to their home, or who have the ability to make a much wider range of recipes because of the convenience of partially processed ingredients cutting back on cooking time. My grandmother remembers this monotony all too well, and the repetition of the same recipes got tiring for her as chef and for a whole family as eaters. This led her at one point to try and create an entirely new dish every week, the recipe for which she would find in the cooking section of her Good Housekeeping magazine. However, inserting novel dishes into the never-ending cycle of one-pot meals seemed to yield mixed results, and these new recipes admittedly took longer to pull together and required more ingredients. One particularly egregious and nearly inedible dish (that had to be pawned off to unsuspecting neighbors when her children wouldn’t eat it) was ground beef and rice with an

Victo Ngai

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overwhelming vinegar sauce. Surely a rotation of tasty but dull dinners was more preferable to new but potentially disastrous ones when so much time and effort was required every day. According to my grandmother, the contrasting variety of food available “then and now” is also very apparent in grocery stores. She remembers the stores being much smaller, microcosms of the modern grocery-warehouses that just seem to be getting larger and larger. Most notably, the selection of fresh produce she could choose from in the 1950s sounds as though it was an order of magnitude smaller than what one can buy at even the most basic of super markets today. She recalls the options as only one type of lettuce (I’m assuming iceberg or romaine), celery, carrots, tomatoes, onions, and potatoes. One common vegetable staple of Colette’s grocery list that today lies in the shadows of the freshly misted produce stacked high in every grocery store was the canned or frozen vegetable. For my grandmother, some vegetables were only available in this form, such as peas and corn. As keeping costs low to feed a family of nine was always in the back of her mind, canned vegetables of this sort were the norm, representing a true departure from the standards of produce held by many today. The fruit available actually varied with the seasons, with no berries available in the winter but rather just the staples of bananas, red delicious apples, and oranges. One would have been hard pressed to find a mango or kiwi at any time of year. In the era before the globalization of the produce industry and efficient refrigeration systems, these produce options were all that could be available. Part of my grandmother’s weekly purchase did include some highly processed items, which greatly contrasted the basic ingredients most meals were prepared with. “Wonderbread” was a lunch bag constant in the ‘50s and the only cheese product she ever bought came in Kraft packaging in the form of American cheese slices and blocks of processed cheddar. The concern over the price of food seems to have been stronger, on average, than it is today. Colette would do her grocery shopping only once weekly, and would go armed

with a list of ingredients and the corresponding coupons and advertisements that the different local supermarkets had put in the paper. Sometimes she would go to three different stores, buying what was offered at the special price at each, to ensure she was spending as little money as possible. This sentiment seems to have been reflected in the advertising of the day, as my grandmother remembers price being the only aspect of food products that was advertised for in newspapers and grocery stores, nonexistent were the ads promoting the health benefits or nutritional qualities of products that are so commonplace today. At least with meat, though, there was a sense that price went along with quality. Thus Colette felt it appropriate to spend a little more money on the meat because it was better from Borsey’s butchers than it was from the supermarket. This meat from the butcher wasn’t “better” because she considered it to be safer than the less expensive supermarket cuts—in fact she doesn’t remember ever having to be concerned with the potential of food poisoning or food borne illness at all—but it was truly the taste and overall quality that spurred her to invest a bit more money into the meat. The point of departure between the past and present food systems in America that my grandmother feels most strongly about is the all but lost sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with preparing a meal from scratch. She says that, “seeing everyone enjoy what you had prepared made it taste better. Today we don’t get that feeling as Nicolas Nadeau much.” Authors such as Michael Pollan would agree with this sentiment. In fact, in his article written for the New York Times Magazine this past July, he argues that the rise of The Food Network’s popularity as a cultural staple had coincided with “the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.” As priorities in our society have shifted to no longer include the preparation of homecooked meals, people are left without this satisfaction that my grandmother describes to be unlike anything else, and have thus turned to television programs to satisfy their need for this connection to food. Although she doesn’t make it much anymore, my grandmother will still boast about her

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homemade pie crust (she made a homemade dessert every night for after dinner) and talks of the “art of the crust,” which takes real skill to get it as crisp as possible while holding up under the weight of the filling. Colette’s cherry pie was an all-time favorite and she would make little cherry cut-outs from the crust and place them on top, a detail that her children always loved. Without trying to sound quaint, these little details and elements of cooking that that gave my grandmother a sense of ownership and made all the arduous preparations worthwhile. “At the end of the day, it was fun,” she recalls, because everyone enjoyed her food so much and the success of a meal truly depended on the skill she had used to prepare it. My grandmother mentioned that The Food Network didn’t exist when she cooked dinner every night—and surely it wasn’t necessary as there was a real-life version going on in her kitchen for a large portion of every day, which everyone could take part in. To conclude whether food was truly better today or 50 years ago is a question that is, at its core, much more difficult to answer than it would first seem. The two aspects of Colette’s description of how food and our relationship to it has changed that stand out most noticeably are the variety of foods and produce available to the majority of the population today, and with this an increased convenience my grandmother couldn’t even have imagined of preparing dinner from partially processed foods. From the perspective of a cook or an eater, the increase in variety is really hard to argue against, and my grandmother posits that in this way food is better today in both its healthfulness and potential for enjoyment.

The issue of convenient food and dinner, however, cannot be separated from several other implications besides reduction in quality. It is important to remember what modern convenience and an increase in the level of processing in foods before purchase has allowed a sector of our society—namely women who like my grandmother had to spend all day in the kitchen—to do and accomplish. My grandmother told me: “My job was to devote my whole day to my family and cooking. I didn’t work, I couldn’t have had a job and have done what I did for all those years.” This is something that the popular “real food” supporters seem to have forgotten; it is something that Michael Pollan fails to stress in his critique of the current state of the home cooked meal, and has truly made me have to think twice about my stance on the sentiment that if the food in America were what it were 50 years ago, we would all be better off. For this home-spun tradition to have stayed alive (something that I have definitely wished on more than one occasion) the enfranchisement of the female population would simply not have been able to occur. How can we reconcile the quest for real, wholesome food with the female empowerment that the convenience of processed foods has enabled? I’m not sure which I’d be willing to sacrifice, and the two concerns are, as evidenced by my grandmother’s testimony, inexorably linked. Some things must be lost in order to truly make progress in other ways.

Claire Schipke

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7/6/10 - Yuba Pass Slick-backed rocks once ripped from mountainsides, pieces of glass, broken-off branches of trees and so many small charms of the earth all find the river. They are given to the constant working currents, the blue undersides of streams, to mud unstuck from banks and wed to clear movement. Here, water, such a soft and patient teacher, reduces rough edges into roundness, sands sticks into gleaming, bare swords, holds stones until their shapes converge. Stay here long enough and the parts of you, too, that have been broken will be rubbed smooth.

Field Notes

7/20/10 - Upstream, camp What happens as flowers fade, as the marveled emblems of spring and summer dry and fold themselves away? After bearing their faces to so many winged visitors, to the repeated presence of sun and dew, when do they know that they have done what they intended, that there are new seeds in the ground? I hope to leave the world with half as much grace, with the knowledge that I have spent a short, quivering season standing with this earth, opening my colors to the sky.

7/23/10 - Under the White Firs, camp There is more kinship in this world than we realize. Think how the lichen pastes itself to tree bark with the smallest fastenings, or how the hawkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s talons clutch its nest. Flowers stand upright in earth, where their hairs create tunnels in the dirt that would otherwise not exist. By the river, rocks are hugged close by tree roots and the shining bark shapes itself to those round forms. And water fills each empty space with graceful humility, always seeking lower ground. If you are ever lonely, remember that you are always embraced by air with ferocity and tenderness, with a constancy that is unbridled by shyness or worry. Give yourself this kinship and feel again the way earth fills the cracks on the bottoms of your feet.

~Emilie Lygren

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Sea Change Michael Marten

call this series of photographs Sea Change for two reasons. First they’re about a change in the state of the sea, between low tide and high tide. More fundamentally, they’re about seeing how landscape changes - not through human intervention, but in itself, by natural processes. The tides are one of our planet’s great natural cycles, transforming our coastlines twice each day. Even if you spend a whole day by the sea it’s easy to miss how dramatic tidal change can be. A camera that records both ebb and flood enables us to observe at the same time two states of nature, two appearances of the land. The photographs record landscape as dynamic process rather than static image. They also comment on what the great environmental scientist James Lovelock calls global heating. The tide floods in and quickly recedes again; rising sea levels will flood our shores and not recede for thousands or millions of years. Many of the views in these pictures may have disappeared in 100 years’ time. All these photographs have been taken round Britain over the last 7 years.The British coast has tides that range from 1 metre (3 feet) in some places to 15 metres (almost 50 feet) - the third highest tides in the world - in the Bristol Channel. The time between low and high tide averages 6 hours and 20 minutes, and the photographs in these diptychs were usually take on the same day or consecutive days. The two pictures that form each diptych are taken from exactly the same viewpoint, even when it doesn’t seem like it. People often ask whether I sit by my camera for 6 hours from low tide to high tide. Unfortunately I’m rarely that relaxed, as I’m rushing from one place to another to take two or three views during the 50 minutes or so while the tide remains at its lowest or highest. When I take the first picture, I mark the position of my tripod with stones or sticks and then I put a piece of tracing paper on the ground-glass screen of my 5x4 camera and make a pencil trace of the horizon line and other features that won’t change when the tide rises or recedes. When I return 6 or 18 hours later, I put the trace back on the ground glass and can then align the image to exactly how it was before. Each successive tide varies slightly in its height and timing. Higher tides occur every 14 days, at new and full moon. These higher tides are called ‘spring’ tides in English. This isn’t because they’re related to the season of spring, but because the sea rises or ‘springs’ higher at these times. Very high spring tides occur 6 or 8 times a year in February-March-April and August-September-October, around the equinoxes. It’s on these occasions that the sea rises highest at flood and recedes furthest at ebb, and it’s at these times that most of these pictures were taken. - Michael Marten, 2010 www.michaelmarten.com

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Porthcawl, Glamorgan. 17 May 2007. Low water 12 noon, high water 8pm

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Salmon fishery, Solway Firth. 27 and 28 (opposite) March 2006

Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall. 25 and 31 (opposite) August 2007

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Low water 5.20pm (opposite), high water 12 noon

High water 4.30pm (opposite), low water 2pm

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Severn Bridge, Monmouthshire. 8 and 9 March 2008.

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Low water 2.30pm, high water 8.20am

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Cuckmere Haven, Sussex. 12 August 2006. Low water 9.15am, high water 2.50pm

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Hayle river mouth, Cornwall. 18 March 2010. Low water 12 noon, high water 6pm

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Blue Revolution Jonathan Leibovic The Occasional Fish Farm Detailed information on the management of barramundi net pens operating in Southeast Asia and Taiwan was unavailable when this report was produced, and thus. . . . Barramundi farmed in open net pens or cages rank as “Avoid” according to Seafood Watch criteria. Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch®, 2006. Skimming across the Java Sea in his midsize yacht, Eyang Peang1 looked up from his Time magazine and faced me, expressionless. “So,” he began, “you are from Greenpeace?” I laughed and assured him I was not. Then: “You are against farmed salmon? How about GMOs?” I said I had come to learn.

Thousand Islands Dressing Combine: 120 islands 450 species of coral 2,000 species of fish 17,000 humans as many mangroves as you can muster Add: pinch of dynamite dash of cyanide the occasional fish farm (to taste)

The Java Sea separates the seething metropolis of Jakarta Beat mixture until it reaches a uniform consistency and from the idyllic Kepulauan Seribu, or Thousand Islands simmer at 28˚C. archipelago.2 My uncle owns three of these islands, and Then, selamat makan – that is, bon appetit. And hurry toward them we sped, through a gyre of candy wrappers, back for seconds! Quick, before it’s – plastic bottles and clove cigarette butts. Beneath us, currents swept marine snow west to Sumatra. I sipped murky coffee and scanned the horizon.

Mando Veve 1 “Uncle Flat-Head” 2 “When the Dutch came to the Java Sea, they said, Ho! There must be a thousand islands here! Of course there are only about a hundred and twenty. But it has a nice ring, right?” Tante Pia, Peang’s wife.

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Massachusetts, Australis Aquaculture uses an indoor recirculating system to maintain a controlled environment for You’ve probably heard that we’re running out of fish. Wild its fish. Everyone from Barry Estabrook to Oprah Winfrey tuna, cod, and salmon stocks are barely treading water, and raves about recirculated barramundi, but Seafood Watch’s we’re fishing down the food web.3 “As a planet,” writes glowing report glosses over one glaring omission: energy. Mark Schleifstein, “we already consume at least 12 million “Seafood Watch is aware that energy concerns for closed tons more seafood than the oceans can produce, and de- recirculating systems may become a sustainability issue in mand is soaring. . . . Aquaculture fills the gap. Sometimes, the future,” it baldly admits; “however, this issue was not it is done well. Too often, it is done poorly. Either way, it is considered in this report.” the key to the future of fishing.”4 I found this answer highly unsatisfying, not to mention irEyang Peang says he does aquaculture well. He has cer- responsible on the part of Seafood Watch, especially containly done well by it: in a day, his workers can slaughter, sidering that the “Avoid” ranking was partially a result of gut, and export three tons of barramundi. One half of each “unavailable information.” So when Eyang Peang invited fish becomes filets or fishsticks; the other half, fishheads for me to tour his fish farm this summer, I hungrily accepted.

Wave of the Future

soup, scales for cosmetics, and bones for fishmeal (to feed more fish!). Peang makes, you might say, a killing. But how long can he keep it up? Is it – deep breath – sustainable? The farm employs about a hundred former fisherfolk and produces about 440 tons of meat annually, with little visible impact on the recovering reef. Beneath the surface bloom lilac brain coral and giant clams, teeming with parrotfish, cowries, and sea cucumbers. Above the surface, fruit bats swoop from palm tree to papaya. Kingfishers cackle on mangroves, and monitor lizards fight beneath the bungalows at night. Compared to its predecessor, Peang’s barramundi farm it is a downright miracle, a poster-child for the blue revolution. Since the mid-20th century, Thousand Islanders have decimated fish stocks with poison, amputated coral reefs with explosives, and crippled the local economy in an alltoo-common tragedy. They have pimped out the remaining reefs to wealthy developers, who have built resorts for wealthy tourists. Whatever fish they can still find, they sell to pet stores at exorbitant rates. They have even mined the sand. They are still very, very poor – 75% of Thousand Islanders depend on fishing for their livelihood, and over a third live on less than $3 a day. If there is any hope for the Thousand Islands, it is aquaculture. So why does Seafood Watch want us to avoid this fish? Actually, it is not barramundi per se that Seafood Watch pooh-poohs. It’s just barramundi from Indonesia, or anywhere else in the world except for Australia (ranked “Good Alternative”) and the United States (ranked “Best Choice”). In these industrialized countries, barramundi are raised in factory farms instead of the open ocean. In Turners Falls, 3 Humans catch the biggest, healthiest, most fertile fish in the sea. The more quickly a fish can reach sexual maturity, the better its chances of passing on its genes. Thus we pressure fish into younger and younger sexual maturity, and they mature smaller and smaller. The lions of the sea – the shark, the bluefin tuna – yield to a new apex predator, and we move eagerly on to their prey. 4 From “Are the world’s fisheries doomed?” in The TimesPicayune, 30 March 1996. And he landed the big one – a Pulitzer!

Chain of Foods One of these mornings, the chain is gonna break. But up until that day, I’m gonna take all I can take. Oh! Chain, chain, chain… Aretha Franklin The barramundi (Lates calcarifer), or Asian sea bass,5 inhabits rivers, estuaries, and coastal waters from Taiwan to Australia and west to the Persian Gulf. It is a euryhaline, hermaphroditic carnivore. Its flesh, high in omega-3 fatty acids, is reminiscent of firm, buttery flounder. When we eat carnivorous fish, we get two fish for the price of one because carnivorous fish, of course, eat other fish. Or rather, in the case of aquaculture, they eat protein pellets, which are about 40% wild-caught fish (or the processing byproducts of other farmed fish).6 Let us assume, generously, that the fish in the pellets has been harvested sustainably. Even so, don’t we lose energy and protein by feeding the middleman instead of eating lower on the food chain? The feed conversion efficiency (FCE) for his fish, Peang claims, is between 1 and 1.5; that is, every pound of barramundi flesh requires 1 to 1.5 pounds of fish feed. This number is impressive, especially compared to terrestrial livestock: typical FCE for chicken is 2 (about the same as farmed salmon); pasture-raised cattle tip the scales at 8.7 5 “Also sold as barra, giant perch, seabass, giant seabass, white seabass, twofin seabass, blind seabass, giant palmer, narifish, kokop putih, bekti apahap, palakapong, nokogirihata. In some cases, Nile perch from Africa may be mislabeled as barramundi.” – Seafood Watch®. If you’ve never heard of this fish before, that’s a good indicator of its sustainability compared to more familiar (i.e. more frequently eaten) fish. 6 Aha! you say. Isn’t this how we got mad cow disease – by feeding beef to our cows? Surely this is the worst possible idea. But fishmeal is (ostensibly) pasteurized first. Still put off by cannibalism? Rest easy, sailor – these fish readily cannibalize each other in the wild. On Peang’s farm, as a preventive measure, workers constantly separate the young fish by size. Nevertheless, in every batch of juveniles bobs a barra bully, betrayed by its bloated belly. 7 “Because they don’t swim against gravity or artificially raise

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Tilapia and catfish are such diligent grazers that they boast a FCE of less than 1; that is, they can grow more than one kilogram for every kilogram of feed by eating algae and stray mollusks. According to the International Fishmeal and Fish Oil Organization, global aquaculture is so good at recycling its own byproducts that it actually produces two fish for the price of one. But remember, this is the International Fishmeal and Fish Oil Organization we’re talking about; it’s probably best to take their estimates with a teaspoon of saltwater. To think of not only our food, but our food’s food, makes the mind reel. Yet even this chain is only one strand in the wider food web. I was impressed to learn that Peang’s farm operates with full genetic traceability; that is, if you send them a bit of barramundi, they can determine whether it was raised at their farm. Traceability is key to transparency and accountability in the food system, especially since most of these barramundi will be shipped via a distributor in Los Angeles to supermarkets and restaurants throughout North America.8 Without traceability in our global food system, we will never know where our food comes from. Food-borne illnesses can run amok with no way to find the producers responsible, environmental impacts are impossible to connect to specific brands, and human rights violations hide behind the many curtains that separate us from our food. Peang is also integrating up and down the food supply chain: his company already processes all of its own fish, and soon it will operate its own feedmill.

The Pescetarian’s Dilemma One balmy morning, Peang’s head scientist, Henri, found a swollen fish floating limp on the surface of a tank. “She’s dead,” Henri announced, “and pregnant.” He rushed the fish to the operating table, seizing a vial of semen on the way. With the love of a father and the precision of a surgeon, he squeezed out her eggs and mixes them with the sperm in a beaker of seawater. “If it works, we will see the embryos tonight.” Barramundi are incredibly fecund. A single female can produce 40 million eggs at a time. On Peang’s farm, about 10% of these survive to maturity, and thanks to Henri that proportion is growing. A seasoned aquaculturist, he oversees a their body temperature, fish require substantially less energy than do land animals.” Paul Greenberg, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. It makes sense, although as far as I’m aware, land animals don’t swim against gravity, either. 8 North America! You exclaim. Isn’t local food sustainable food? Not necessarily. In fact, it produces more carbon to drive to the grocery store than to truck your broccoli across the continent. Local food is more sustainable insofar as it supports direct relationships and sidesteps the corporate commodity chain.

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meticulous selective breeding program and fends off disease. Every fish is vaccinated against streptococcus, and females are sometimes injected with gonadotropin, a hormone that induces spawning. “Standard practice,” Henri assures me, but my brow remains furrowed. “Gonadotropin occurs naturally in barramundi gonads. And we use no artificial growth hormones.” Post-mortem artificial insemination, however, is not standard practice. When we check on the eggs later that evening, they have sunk to the bottom of the beaker: duds. Henri shakes his head. “I really thought it would work.” “GMO salmon has nothing on you,” I say. “A real frankenfish.” “If you want to feed the world,” Peang retorts,“you can’t do it organically.” Though dozens of studies have concluded otherwise, this remains a widely-voiced opinion.9 (Regardless, if Peang really wanted to feed the world, he would address Indonesia’s rampant hunger instead of exporting to wealthy, overfed Americans.) Americans, remember, aren’t supposed to eat Peang’s fish anyway, at least according to Seafood Watch, which says that: Minimal control over temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen generally result in higher use of marine resources. . . . the presence of predators and weather events has led to documented cases of escapes. . . .The open nature of net pen systems also creates risks of disease and parasite transfer, as well as potential problems with pollution and habitat effects. Let us begin with the first claim, which is absurd. These waters are the fish’s natural habitat; the regular equatorial climate is positively ideal. Since the Thousand Islands have been fished bare, no natural predators threaten the fish, and Peang uses the best available pen material, polyvinyl chloride with a breaking strength of 165 kilograms. Nevertheless, a few fish have escaped. They do not, however, contaminate wild stocks with their genes or diseases; rather, they linger meekly around the periphery of their pens, waiting for feeding time. Pollution, on the other hand, is a legitimate concern. Concentrated fish feces can smother even a healthy ecosystem, to say nothing of a reef in recovery. Fortunately, the current through the Java Sea is strong enough to flush every ounce of waste out of sight. “We have a natural, solar-powered recirculating system,” Henri brags, and it’s true – at least for now. But over the next three years, Peang wants to ramp up production from 440 tons to 44,000. At the very least, 9 See especially Hepperly et al. 2006, The Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trial, and Badgley et al. 2007, Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply. Are these articles? Add quotes.

JooHee Yoon

spring 2011

they will need to begin monitoring the health of the reef and investigating where the waste goes. Even flushed-away waste has to settle somewhere, and the eutrophic refuse of 16 million barramundi could feed legions of algae, which could literally suffocate the shallow sea. So perhaps the question is not “Is this farm sustainable?” but rather, “How many fish can this sea sustain?”

Keep Fishin’

Rather, it is a patchwork plot where the soil, reeking of sweet decay, still smolders after our ancestors slashed and burned it. Here, in the dappled shade of a forest in succession, we search constantly for fresh alternatives and gather new knowledge at every opportunity. But, despite the best of intentions, we cannot be sure of the sustainability of our choices until the future has come and gone. So we content ourselves to struggle toward truth, elusive though it will remain.

Keep fishin’ if you feel it’s true. There’s nothing much that we can do to save you from yourself. Weezer Henri is the only person I know who can in one breath quote Michael Pollan and praise Monsanto for doing “very good research.” He knows which species of seaweed are edible and he collects left-handed seashells. He dreams of a floating island of solar panels to power his laboratory instead of the island’s obnoxious diesel generators. But when I asked him about effluent monitoring systems or sustainable sources of feed, he balked. “The problem is not too many fish,” he said, “but too many people.”

William Smith

These were the thoughts that swam in my mind as I wandered the hallways of Jakarta’s airport, ready to fly back home. I bought a box of chocolates for the 38-hour flight The search for sustainable foods is not a supermarket where and stuffed my last Rp. 10,000 note into a UNICEF do10 every item is clearly marked and all prices paid are final. nation box. Then, between the duty-free perfumes and bamboo trinkets, I happened upon a heap of thin amber blades wrapped in plastic, ranging in size from a scallop to a salmon and fetching prices in excess of Rp. 500,000. It’s hard to imagine seafood less sustainable than sharkfin soup (except perhaps sea turtle satay). A sick sort of relief accompanied the realization that all this time I had been worrying about small fry while the Jakarta International Airport sold sharkfins. There will always be bigger fish to fry, but whatever Peang and Henri are doing in the Thousand Islands, it’s better than fishing with dynamite.

William Smith 10

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Rp. 10,000 = $1.12

Mando Veve

spring 2011

Glazes from the Sea Ceramics by Joan Lederman

A year later the first unsolicited sample arrived at my door.

Provenance Chris Griner, who I barely knew, was a crane operator on the deck of Research Vessel Oceanus when he had the idea to bring me a bucket of surplus mud that had been retrieved with a box core, one kind of equipment used for collecting stratified sediment. In July 1996, when extra sediment was in a five-gallon bucket about to be thrown back into the sea, Chris intercepted it. Later, I asked him what went through his mind when he saw Surplus mud in a bucket Bearings the sediment about to be dumped overboard. Chris replied simply, “I couldn’t stand to see all My studio is a boathouse by the ocean. Saltwater slosh that good mud go to waste.” marks stained the wall in the back, reminding me that hurricanes and high tides come. I’m not in charge of opening or closing nature’s gates; I did set up shop in a flood plain, willing to accept nature’s terms. The place calms me and boosts my ability to handle stress, and it also propels my creative drive to deal with difficult challenges. I feel I speak for the sea -- I’m part of Her similar salinity, as part of the ocean’s wisdom, best put by a Bhuddist saying that the ocean knows how to leave the risings in the risings. I feel ‘right-sized’ by the sea, and ‘She” has offered me a place to renew and maintain a resilientlyThe original glob fired in the kiln toned body ever since I learned the truth that we can’t swim faster than the water. He thought it would be a forming clay- it was dense and malleable. Neither of us imagined it would be a glaze. Scattering cremains of my husband (he died after a long When he arrived with it my kiln was on, so I put a walnutbout with cancer one year before the first sediment sample sized glob into a spy hole. When the firing was completed arrived at my door) prepared me to receive ocean sedi- and the kiln opened, I discovered that the mud had melted. ment. When his gritty bone ash fragments drifted through Since then I’ve always been pulled along by hunches. I was my hands from a kayak I visualized the migration of all life excited to have mud from 4,500 meters down through the that has settled onto the seafloor. My mind didn’t need to water. The material had charisma, so I began asking quesstretch far to remember our elemental commonality among tions, sought more materials, and tried to determine if early life forms. outcomes were typical or simply anomalies.

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Sediment before firing I have no formal relationship to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Some individuals who work there, if they are in a position to route some excess materials to me, offer me samples. I don’t ask and I do say thank you.

Contingency Thinking If you want to differentiate the abilities and goals of scientists and artists, compare their methods and outcomes. A scientist’s experiment might not be considered reliable until another scientist has replicated the results. Reproducibility is crucial to science in ways I barely understand (because that hasn’t been my goal), but I do understand what it’s like to aim for control of materials and methods. Beyond that, I seek serendipity and revelation.

In 1996 when I began using sediments, there were clearer distinctions between art and science than there are now. Bridges uniting these fields are becoming more common and boundaries are vague. I think beyond art and science because separating them is a struggle for my brain. I see them merging via nature’s truths and if we understand the forces of nature better, maybe we’ll live more peacefully with them.

Chance is a player, but my intelligence and practicality want optimum results so I prepare, prepare, prepare . . . and then accept outcomes. I call it contingency thinking. I visualize what each glaze might do in a range of temperatures and atmospheres, on concave or convex surfaces, and how calligraphic writing will survive when the glazes flow. I think on multiple—sometimes parallel—tracks. If this, then that; if this, then that. I project likelihoods as my livelihood. Sediment after firing

spring 2011

(Above) Before firing. The center is basalt from a lava pillar suspended in seaglass and refined glass.The framing is 1. rock slurry from a spreading mid-Atlantic Ridge, 2. sediment from a subducting Pacific Ridge, and 3. foraminifera-rich sediment from the Gulf of Mexico (golden speckles are shells that give researchers data about climate-change.) (Below) After firing, front and back views.

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Glazes from sediment collected (from top-ctr clockwise): Bering Sea, Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, South China, Black Sea, Red Sea, Atlantic Ocean

spring 2011

Geospatial Memory I’ve become an archivist of sorts. I keep everything that’s attached to the sediment samples that come to me: labels, spreadsheets, notes of what people tell me, maps and photos. I mark buckets of sediment with numbers describing latitude and longitude of the samples. Gradually geospatial memory forms in my mind, and I can share this with others. For example, when I glaze with drillings that came out of Earth’s crust, I write on the clay before firing, “Drillings into Mid-Atlantic Ridge/23.5 degrees north 45 degrees west/slurry from cut rocks melted.” I enjoy watching how this kind of information, when shared, helps people care about a thing. It helps them feel kinship with the flesh of the earth.

canvases for geological stories. Using marine sediments and their provenance gives me a niche that suits how I care to tell stories about Earth, or even better- how I get out of the way and let the stories of Earth tell themselves. Maybe it’s a political and sociological statement too -- each piece is Earth (like a fingerprint or ecosystem), as we are each a creature of Earth -- and we can partake of a sample and be grounded in the geological process that cycles sediment into the deeper layers where it melts and then in millions of years it surfaces again as volcanic rock. The geophysical truths are reminders that we are participants in all this . . . not owners of it.

Space and time are all a puzzle that I keep putting together. Joan works within sight and sound of the ocean in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I like making utilitarian artifacts that are clay Contact: lederman@capecod.net. www.thesoftearth.com.

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The Shallows

The Woodstove

True ruth; actue, gill-greased My father

A stump set in the gravel; the hard-juiced snap split to clop and plank a mark: wetless snow

wresting hooks. My calves swamped, biting odious shallows fathomed through thumbed. A child erupts plaque-bestowed a plash; fathered.

pliant wood-muscle clenched tight and severed - burned still balled still coiled in hardness. There he labors bucking against the cold red as a winter apple. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Let the weight of the maul work crystalline breath cutting Life and sever; a grunt - a blast The wood will warm you twiceâ&#x20AC;? I gaze at the woodstove the fire fringing throatward brumal, resolute an inchmeal truth Now - replenished.

~Ethan Reede

spring 2011

Inclusion on Chicago’s Front Lawn Lakefront Parks as Agents of Democratization Christi Zaleski

he land southeast of Lake Michigan was an un- public property has come under constant contestation from likely site for a metropolis. Swampy and nearly both industry and government since Lake Park was first uninhabitable, native tribes passed through the area never built in 1836. Pushback against this privatization from indistaying for long, demonstrating their disdain for the area by vidual citizens and civic groups asserts Chicagoans’ democalling it “Checagou” or Land of Smelly Onions.1 The only cratic right of equal access to these parks. As both subject draw to this giant marsh was its prime location as a trading and agent of democratization, Chicago’s lakefront parks spot. Checagou sat on top of Mud Lake, a disconnected wa- have played a significant role in shaping the city’s history terway linking the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River and its citizenry. and effectively connecting the northeast with the south by The early Lake Park quickly fell into disrepair as inproviding a continuous waterway from Lake Michigan to dustry and government alike neglected it. In the 1840s Lake the Mississippi River. Mud Lake, as its name implies, was Park became increasingly subject to erosion.As the powerful a shallow muddy channel only traversable by a series of surf threatened to wash Lake Park into Lake Michigan and portages in canoe. The earliest non-native pioneers to leave the city’s inhabitants with a built environment right Checagou used the land in a similar way to their native up to the edge of their beautiful lake, the city government predecessors, as a small but useful trading post. It wasn’t acted to save the park, and the industry and homes that lay until some enterprising frontiersmen came to Chicago in beyond it, by building a breakwater. The city treasury was the early 1830s and proposed converting Mud already badly overextended so leaders looked instead The shoreline Lake into a canal that a modern Chicago beto private entities to contribute to the construction that was meant gan to take shape. With the construction of project.4 In 1851 the Illinois Central Railroad agreed to be “forever the canal in 1836, Chicago rose up out of the to finance the project in exchange for a prime piece open, clear, mud and started to establish its position as an of real estate just north of Lake Park.1 The railroad and free” would integral part of a young nation’s trade system. laid down tracks on this small plot of land and soon now have tracks As a gift to the city, the canal owners set aside requested permission to expand construction along and rail cars a patch of land along the lakefront for pubthe lakefront.The city agreed, grateful to have a maincutting the city lic use.2 Badly eroded and unsuitable for contained lakefront at all, and charged the company about residents off from struction without significant repair, this early a third of the price at which the land was valued.5 their most prepark, later named Lake Park, was designated The shoreline that was meant to be “forever open, cious asset. as public land to be “forever open, clear, and clear, and free” would now have tracks and rail cars free.”3 With that, these early industry executives started the cutting the city residents off from their most precious asset. tradition of preserving lakefront land for the free use of the The city had gone back on its promise. Known more for people that would play an integral role in shaping the char- its massive cattle yards and grain elevators that supplied the acter of the city and its inhabitants. nascent commodities exchange market with enough work Chicago’s lakefront parks are both an agent of and a to keep busy, that early city government could see no rearesponse to the city’s democratic impulse. Historically, son to prioritize cultural and natural assets at the expense lakefront parks have functioned as a primary site of social of industry.6 For residents whose homes abutted the land, upheaval, playing host to significant protests, movements, this mindset was unacceptable. A promise made to preserve and riots throughout Chicago history. The Parks’ status as culture cannot and would not be sacrificed to the ben1 Bachrach, Julie Sniderman. City in a garden a photographic efit of some faceless firm. These citizens formed the first of history of Chicago’s parks. Placitas, N.M: Center for American Places, what would be many civic groups devoted to saving Chiin association with the Chicago Park District, Distributed by the Unicago from an onslaught of industry at the expense of public versity of Chicago P, 2001. 2 Wille, Lois. Forever Open, Clear, and Free. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1972. 3 “Grant Park.” Chicago Park District. Chicago Park District. 3 May 2009.

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4 Wille, Lois. 1972. 5 Bachrach, Julie Sniderman. 2001. 6 Becker, Lynn. “Forever Open, Clear and Free.” Chicago Reader 14 Sept 2007, Architecture sec. 3. May 2009.

Katharine Patch

spring 2011

spaces. Together they successfully lobbied the City Council to employ the funds gained in the sale of land to Illinois Central for the benefit of all citizens. The resulting income, about three million dollars in today’s terms, was used to create a parks commission.7 These early civic groups set a precedent for Chicago citizens to unite to counteract government decisions. Through the power of the public voice, this group was able to change policy decisions. Chicagoans would not be subject to the tyranny of a few powerful individuals dictating decisions about public spaces. The city government had shown here, as it would time and again, a proclivity to advance industry interests. Only through the power of democratic unity could citizens push back against this impulse and moderate government decisions to more closely reflect the collective will. One of the most important aspects of outdoor public space has been its ability to actually be an agent of democratization. Public spaces serve as sites where people are forced to interact with strangers. Often this means that different groups are placed in proximity that would otherwise never meet. This was the case during the Race Riot of 1919 that would become the deadliest riot in Chicago history. The three day riot would claim the lives of 38 people and leave over a thousand African Americans homeless. The lakefront served as the catalyst for this explosion of racial tension. A group of black teenage boys went to one of the black beaches in Chicago on 26th Street on July 27.They constructed a makeshift raft which brought them far from shore and drifted northward into white beach territory. There, the boys encountered a white man throwing rocks from the shore, aiming to hit the raft. One rock reached its target and struck Eugene Williams, drowning him. The other boys ran back to the black beach and related the story of what had happened to their friend, inciting those beach goers to retaliate violently at a neighboring white beach. The ensuing riot was one of many that occurred in the US during what would be called a “red summer” that brought significant public attention to the plight of black urban dwellers at the time.8 It was only because these public spaces 7 8

Wille, Lois. 1972. Tuttle, William. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of

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caused different cultures to interface that this awareness was gained. The lakefront parks serve the democratizing function of putting people into close proximity. They make it impossible to exclude certain groups from a definition of citizenry if they allow those groups a forum for expressing their rights. In this way, lakefront parks and public spaces serve as the site for democratic expression and expansion. The riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention have similar thematic elements and demonstrate the democratizing potential of Chicago’s lakefront parks. A group of non-violent war protestors gathered on Lincoln and Grant Parks on the eve of the DNC in August in the hopes of drawing national attention to their struggle. Mayor Daley responded to their presence on the park lawns by sending an army of 12,000 police officers, 6,000 national guard troops, and 6,000 army troops to patrol the protest and the city.9 At about 3:30 pm on August 28, violence broke out as police responded to verbal epithets with physical violence. The episode, which injured hundreds of protestors, came to be known as a police riot for the police’s role in instigating the violence.10 The violence of both of these riots was tragic. However, both communities used the visibility of the lakefront parks and their status as public lands to advance their cause. The African American community was using public space to assert their right of access and their right to equal citizenry. War protestors garnered sympathy for their cause by showing the polarizing effects of their mere presence on public space. Stephanie Davidson The lakefront parks, in this way, function as sites for democratic expression. These are integral spaces for the expansion of democracy and ideas of citizenry. By the 1920s, most of the lakefront had been converted to park land. This decade saw the emergence and proliferation of a number of private institutions all along lakefront parks.These include a gun club and tennis club that required fees as high as $500 for initiation and annual membership fees as high as $200, equating to about ten times that in to1919. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois P, 1970. 9 Jaffee, Ina. “1968 Chicago Riot Left Mark on Political Protests.” NPR.org 23 Apr. 2008. National Public Radio. 4 May 2009. 10 Walker, Daniel. Rights in conflict; convention week in Chicago, August, 25-29, 1968; a report. New York: Dutton, 1968.

day’s dollars. A series of private yacht clubs were also established on lakefront parks at this time, catering to the city’s wealthiest residents. In 1933, Chicago had a second World’s Fair on lakefront property, and again was able to make a significant profit in the midst of a depression. Mayor Ed Kelly saw this as a sign that the city’s desire for carnivals was insatiable and proposed converting Northerly Island into a massive carnival and conventional hall site. Within a month of the proposal 550 groups had announced their opposition.11 The city of Chicago was again pushing back against the privatizing forces of government and industry. These civic groups formed a coalition to oppose the conversion of their beloved Northerly Island. Kelly refused to listen to their calls to preserve the park land and instead went ahead with his plan. Kelly’s plan failed to receive funding from state government not because of the public outcry but because of safety concerns due to a last minute addition that included a small airport for private planes. Eventually the airport would be built, but the permanent carnival would be forgotten. Although these civic groups were unable to influence Kelly, they survived past the issue of Northerly Island and went on to oppose the trend toward privatization in the courts in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. In 1944, an appellate court ruled that Chicago parks were set aside for the equal benefit of all people: membership fees for gun, tennis, and yacht clubs were illegal.12 Chicago citizens understood their rights and the importance of retaining equal access to lakefront parks. They used their democratic rights to realize this moral impulse. In doing so, they strengthened a tradition of civil society pushback and rebellion that had begun with the early push to establish a parks service. When Mayor Richard M. Daley was elected to office in 1955, he quickly established himself as the sovereign of Chicago. Ignoring the protests of civil groups which had by now become quite extensive, Daley built up a parks empire that allowed him to both advance private interests and facilitate patronage. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Daley flooded the park district with an estimated 3,000 patronage employees who were more interested in maintaining their place in the machine than they were in developing public spaces. During the same period, Daley presided over the construction of two huge filtration plants, one on a north side lakefront park and one on a south side park; McCormick place, a giant convention hall set squarely on top of Burnham Park in the middle of the green lakefront corridor; the conversion of Northerly Island into Meig’s Field, the first airport in the city devoted exclusively to private planes run and financed by the city of Chicago and its taxpayers in the aftermath of Ed Kelly’s failed attempts to do the same. In response to this rapid appropriation of lakefront land for private interests, a number of pro-parks organizations formed a loose coalition. These groups called themselves the Hyde-Park Kenwood group and had a num11 12

Wille, Lois. 1972. Wille, Lois. 1972.

ber of successes in thwarting further privatization. In 1965, another large pro-parks group, going by the name of the Daniel Burnham Committee, emerged in a campaign to “Save the Trees.” In protesting the expansion of Lakeshore Drive on the grounds that creating a huge highway along the lakefront would cut the city off from the lake, members of the Daniel Burnham Committee pinned signs to old oak trees in support of their cause. Some of these protestors were arrested for littering; however, the campaign was a partial success as the highway was expanded to only six lanes rather than eight.13Small groups of committed individuals like these have been the most influential watchdogs of lakefront property since the city’s beginnings. The lakefront and citizens have formed a symbiotic relationship on the basis of democracy, with civil society being strengthened by the lakefront’s existence and the lakefront being preserved by that civil society. The lake today faces the same challenges it has always faced. Mayor Richard J. Daley has recently implemented a series of policies that rolled back some of the parks destruction that his father undertook. In what was described by opponents as a middle of the night land grab in 2003, Mayor Daley closed Meig’s Field and converted Northerly Island back into a public park.14 He also realized the goal that so many parks proponents before him had dreamed of by linking up the parks in the north with Grant Park downtown and building 24.5 acre Millennium Park.15Simultaneously, Daley seems to be embracing a more Burnham-like idea of public space because in revealing these new parks, he has also added significantly to privatizing spaces on existing parks. The Art Institute on Grant Park, for example, has become more exclusive recently by increasing its entrance fee 50%, from twelve to eighteen dollars for adults.16 Additionally, Daley has supported the construction of a new children’s museum on Grant Park first proposed in 2007.17It is yet to be seen whether or not these elements will inspire significant pushback. If the history of the Chicago parks system can be extrapolated to these events, then it is likely that this privatization will reach a tipping point and will cause Chicagoans to again unite to save their lakefront. The lakefront parks have long inspired this kind of democratic unity and have fostered democratization and inclusion throughout their history. There is no reason to fear that this trend will end with the second Mayor Daley. Chicagoans have shown for the last 160 years that they are committed to their lakefront parks and to maintaining public spaces. 13 Wille, Lois. 1972. 14 Pierre, Robert E. “Chicago Quietly Closes Lakefront Airport; Mayor Cites Security Reasons, but Critics Blame Development.” The Washington Post [Washington, DC] 1 Apr 2003, sec. A: 2-2. 15 “Park History.” Millenium Park. Chicago Park District. 4 May 2009. 16 Mullen, William. “New price for priceless art; Art Institute’s admission fee going up 50%.” Chicago Tribune 12 Mar. 2009: 17. 17 Becker, Lynn. 2007.

spring 2011

A Place to Paddle Marshall Moore Illustrations by Ole Tillmann

ollin says that each Florida sunset breaks a day-old record for beauty. From our vantage point on two 11-foot pieces of plastic, floating in the middle of Big Lostman’s Bay and surrounded by 1.5 million acres of protected and undeveloped Everglades wilderness, it certainly appears he is right. But as the sun sets, Collin and I will become lost men ourselves, for as hard as it is to navigate the weaving, intersecting mazes of mangrove tunnels interspersed in the open-water bays of the Everglades on our kayaks, it is nearly impossible after dark. Even during the day, the only landmarks we use are mangrove islands and points, and the occasional wooden water trail-marker emerging like a heavenly beacon pointing us onwards. Today in the open bays the relentless northwest wind blew strong enough to produce Langmuir currents in the slightly saline waters, creating waves that crashed into our crafts and inundated our decks.They made it hard to keep a compass heading, which, in turn, made it hard to find small creeks that serve as the outlets from the bays. All of this would be nearly impossible Two days ago on the first dawn of a new decade, Collin after sunset, even with a full moon to guide us. “Well…” and I launched our kayaks, loaded down with gear almost to the point of sinking, from a small concrete bridge off Collin says as he looks toward me, “we’re screwed.” of the Tamiami Trail. Best friends and adventure companions since high school, we had a quickly-cooked-up goal to thru-paddle from the northernmost tip of the Everglades National Park to the southernmost point of the Florida peninsula. Our bow hatches were filled with food, knives, lights, tents, and a few extra clothes. We couldn’t wait for the 125-mile wilderness adventure. Our stern decks were devoted to water. A little over eight gallons of it. Each. For perspective, that’s 70 pounds of water on the back of a 50-pound piece of floating plastic that also happened to be holding my ass above the gator-filled water. Our first simple joy of life would be to drink it all to shed the weight. Today, as the last of the fiery streaks in the sky turn to purple over Big Lostman’s Bay, I realize I am tired. I want to give up on navigating to our Indian shell mound campsite in the dark. We have already paddled nearly 20 miles today, and every stroke taught us the hard way that the tide is the life-blood of the Everglades. When and where it flows,

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you must flow. If it’s not flowing where you’re going, then you must wait. It will turn soon enough. Like the ignorant newbies we are to the strength of the tides in the waterways of the Everglades, we wore ourselves out paddling all day without heeding the tides.We had to in order to have a shot at making the 20 miles. It makes me resent the nosy Moon and its propensity to get into matters that are clearly Earthly.

opens into a small bay. I squint into the darkness, beginning to give up on finding our destination, and realize I am staring towards the Indian mound, no more than a clearing among the mangroves the size of a small house built up years ago by the natives from shells.

I begin to construct the possibilities in my head. If we stop here, we won’t be able to get the tent out because there is no high ground, and even the roots of the mangroves are inundated. The shell mound and a few small wooden platforms that come right up out of the salty swamp water, called chickees, are the only dry places to spend the night in the backcountry of the Everglades. Any chickee would be just as hard to find and a further paddle than the shell mound. But maybe we could tie up to the mangroves and spend the night sleeping on floating kayaks. The thought of trying to sleep on an unstable platform with alligators inhabiting the waters below makes me realize we need to continue on.

There is a reason the Everglades, despite repeated attempts, were never claimed and inhabited by U.S. citizens. The swampy water makes farming or colonization nearly impossible. Chickees, the sideless house-platforms rising from the water, were only adopted by the Seminole people when driven from better lands into the heart of the Everglades by aggressive U.S. forces during the Second and Third Seminole wars.

In the last shimmering rays of light, by the grace of a higher power, we find the woody entrance to the creek we need amongst the solid green shoreline, and we follow it for what seems like an eternity. We turn our headlamps on to full beam, but they still fade into darkness, illuminating only the evanescent shadows inhabiting the clear water beneath us rather than the twisting watery paths in front of us. The task of finding our night’s high ground seems increasingly hopeless. We realize that we don’t know where to find the Indian shell mound. At some point, after my body has become completely numb with cold and lack of circulation from paddling, the creek

We’d found it.

In fact, it can be considered a miracle of life that plant life exists in the Everglades; of course the dominant vegetation, the mangrove, is a tree like none other. Its twisting roots emerge from shallow saltwater to form a labyrinth that Daedalus could not have engineered. Its roots visibly converge a foot or so above the mud like the tentacles of an octopus on the thin trunk of the tree. Upwards from this convergence, the tree is, well, a tree – but imagine growing your houseplant in a pot you filled with salty water twice a day. It would be lucky to live for an hour. Here in Florida, entire trees spring out of the salty, oxygen-deprived soils. And millions of them. It is nothing short of miraculous. When the average American thinks of the Everglades, the mangrove tree is probably not what comes to mind. In much of the interior Everglades, also called “‘The Inside”, they are absent. But close to the Gulf, where the water becomes salty and the tides dominate, the water is stained red with the tannins of Rhizophora mangle, forming the Red Mangrove. Almost anywhere you see land in the tidal Everglades, you can bet it’s a mangrove island. These

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islands are the fundamental terrestrial structures of the region, and the mangrove is one of the only land-based plants around.

have natural enemies and thus must remain alert. The bull shark proves as much, and just before heading off into the Gulf it comes roaring from the water with a flash of jaws In the Everglades, as in all ecological systems, everything is con- and fins, leaving only white feathers floating where a wadnected. Plants don’t just spring from thin air to fuel the rest of the ing egret once stood. The screech of a bald eagle as it flies creatures in the system. Resources like nitrogen and phosphorus, low above me to intercept an osprey with a prized fish concritical nutrients for life, have to be available to fuel new plant firms that physical ability and lawless, wild west-like battles growth, and these resources are available because nature is the ulti- still govern the partitioning of limited resources. Even durmate recycler. How does it work? Poop, my friend. Poop. Mangrove ing the height of the Everglades tourist season, humans are islands provide structure for herons, egrets, pelicans, kingfishers (my temporary visitors that are not to remain. favorite) and all sorts of other birds to nest and take refuge in. In return, the birds poop on the islands, re-supplying the mangroves with the nutrients to grow, completing the cycle of life. But the Everglades ecosystem, like every ecosystem on earth, is one that is altered by human behavior.The evidence of that alteration may not be as obvious as in other parts of the world, but it It is not just mangroves and birds that we see as we fly is certainly present. The changes made to this ecosystem generally down the Rogers River. On the far bank, the sleek shape of are not direct. Instead, they come from far upstream and cascade a primeval croc of monstrous proportions materializes out down through the entire Everglades, altering the natural state of of the brownish green mud flats, exposed by the low tide. the swamp. The spiked armored plates on its thick, muscular tail sparkle a dark green in the sunshine, and I can tell they pulse with It may seem obvious, but the Everglades are a set of systems that energy despite the relaxed look in its eyes. I glance back revolve around water. During the summer when the skies turn at Collin to receive the nod I was expecting. He doesn’t dark and open up to pour rain every single day, an unfamiliar visihave to say it – we both think – “Let’s investigate.” I paddle tor would never guess they are located in the middle of one of the over cautiously and get my camera out without losing all world’s 30 latitudinal desert belts. The land is literally shaped by form of tracking, a revolutionary accomplishment for me in water – in the freshwater marsh systems of the Everglades, water completing this particular maneuver. I take a couple good flows slowly towards the ocean, shaping high-ground islands of shots and float on; the whole scene seems surreal. I just larger trees into water-carved tear-drops. floated 11 feet in front of an 11-foot croc sitting on an 11-foot kayak and survived, I think to myself. I look at the But water isn’t good for crops or human development, and so screen of my camera, flipping through the pictures I have the struggle to claim the Everglades for human well-being began just taken when behind me the sound of a small tidal wave with its first explorers from the New World. And failed. Again crashing back into still water startles me. and again. The Spanish couldn’t colonize its native people, and the Americans who later gained rights to the land could neither “Ha… he… ha…” I hear Collin sheepishly chuckle behind colonize its people, nor drain all of its waters to make cropland, me. despite tremendous efforts. But even the unsuccessful efforts still greatly affected the system – the natural diversity of creatures in the “What the fuck just happened?” I shout. Everglades declined, the spatial heterogeneity of the system disapCollin nervously replies, “Ha… I just came about six inches peared leaving one giant system that was all the same, and even from broad-siding that croc… ha… I’m talking straight up the amount of organic carbon in the mud declined by oxygenating T-boning this guy, I don’t think he would have liked it…” the soils. These changes resulted in the shrinking of the extent of Impounded at the mouth of the river until the tide the Everglades from the entirety of Southern Florida, starting near changes, Collin and I decide to rest in the sunshine and modern day Fort Lauderdale, to only the Southwestern quarter of keep an eye on the landscape around us. Lying flat on my the state, and development did not seem to be slowing. The Everhome-on-the-water, it is hard to imagine the Everglades glades needed a savior. as anything but wild. Gators and crocs lining the muddy banks, somehow spared the fate of so many other top pred- And so one came. Just about the time Leopold spoke up for the ators now extinct at human hands, speak to the primeval land and Carson mourned the silence, Marjory Stoneman Douglas order of the food web. As does the large fin of a bull shark stepped up for the swamps by publishing The Everglades: River of that slowly surfaces, undulating and making me nervous as Grass. “There are no other Everglades in the world,” she began, it makes its way out of the river before the tide traps it. Low and in many ways, so Everglades conservation began. Years later, billowing clouds of graceful snowy egrets taking off from a when the Miami-Dade County library moved locations, River of tree at the mere sound of my paddle confirm that they, too, Grass was the last book to be transferred, carefully carried on foot

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by a runner as if holding a sacred torch. But, I realize, the fight for the Everglades is far from over. In fact, the greatest challenges lay ahead – we must now continue to be stewards for this land even in the face of an exponentially growing human population. Our own welfare depends on it: this seemingly worthless land provides critical ‘ecosystem services’ like protecting against hurricanes and purifying polluted waters. “The Everglades is a test,” it’s been said, “If we pass we may get to keep the planet.”

into the air, exposing the smooth, dark head of a dolphin that soon transitions into a sleek body and jagged dorsal fin. Just as I can taste the salt from the misty water droplets it has sprayed into the air, I again hear the human-like gasp as the mammal gulps air for its next dive. I can only half-sleep now. I thinking about the Everglades as a whole – the beauty and the ugliness, the simultaneous melting away of the stresses of everyday life in an era where change is as certain as the sun rising, and the crystallization of uncertain, primitive stresses like finding food and a safe, warm place to sleep tonight. When the Eastern horizon, glowing a greenish-yellow from the vast lights of Miami, begins to fade to purple and orange, I realize it is time for us to load up and continue onwards.

As we pull close to Flamingo, starving and smelly, with long hair and beards unkept, I understand with regret that we must end our journey.The Everglades are wild and will stay that way; humans will never be more than guests in their realm. A young park-goer, fresh out of the Visitor Center and looking for gators and other Everglades wildlife, catches a glipse of us in our last moments before re-entering A loud gasp breaks the stillness of the night and startles me; civilization. He turns to his father and pokes him with exwhatever made the noise is directly behind my tent. On a cited urgency. Turning back, he lifts a finger and points to tiny wooden island-platform rising up out of the middle of us, lifts a camara to his face, and snaps a picture. Perhaps the small bay surrounded by over a million acres of swampy even guests, no matter how transient, can learn from and wilderness, I didn’t expect to hear a human sound. Now become a part of a place. I’ll consider it fair exchange, for the sound of rhythmic splashing fills my ears, reverberating in my travels the Everglades became a part of me. with a pounding urgency – something is thrashing. Soon there is silence. Heart beating quickly now, I cautiously peer through the open rain-fly to find bay water so still that it mirrors every star in the sky – so many that they run together and produce a neon green blanket covering the surface. The near-full moon has just passed its zenith and makes the night glow a dark purple. The calm night stands in stark contrast to my unsettled and racing mind… were the sounds real? We had seen a number of small planes earlier in the day – had they been searching for this person? And the thrashing? The ugly thought of the aggressive gators that sometimes hang around the platforms enters my mind only for a split second. I jump into action, and my body struggles to free itself from an unruly sleeping bag with a broken zipper. “ZIIPPP”, the sound pierces the silence. I grab the closest sharp object I have – my flimsy 7-inch fillet knife –and step slowly onto the platform and into the night. Staring into the dark purple, I can see only the light green stars upon the water, disappearing where they meet the dark form of twisting mangrove roots. Expecting that at any moment a gator could come roaring from the water, reality smoothly reasserts its dominance, bringing me back to my senses. To my left a bulge of water rises like a small submarine surfacing on the flat bay. A plume of water sprays

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Appendices to an Essay on City Farming L. Brown-Lavoie Appendix A: Acknowledgments

the earth and being cared for by it, these relationships are of grace, picking beans is a genuflection. Some things stay green through the winter. A plot of Instructions for Feeding Yourself: frozen ground to kneel in, peeling back the thin plastic— One year before you think you’ll want to feed yourself, start to make soil. In the meantime, if you are especially a lettuce! Can’t pick it in mittens, and anyway bare hands hungry, find someone who is already feeding herself and express awe more easily, clasped together praying heat into offer to pick her beans. Sing along with the gospel choir numb fingertips. In a frozen field it’s nice to end up on that is a row of cabbages, those purple martian flowers the bended knee, lowering the heart until it feels the pull of size of bike tires. Amen says the sunburn on the back of Mecca or the worn grooves of the prie-dieu at Mass. Noah your neck. Red neck, hallelujah, red knees, the dirt brown must have held the dove this way. To come home with finsmile at the tip of each finger. Carry water until you cannot gers frozen but brimming; it is winter and our plates are lift your shoulders and continue to carry water until your astonishingly sunful. The grace of the relationship between the farmer and shoulders lift your shirt and you find yourself He-Man posthe land also suffuses the relationships between workmates. ing in awe before the mirror. Identify which tiny muscles are required to separate a bean from its stalk without up- I baked cookies and cakes and tarts for the farm folks, I rooting it. Do this over and over again until you have filled showed up to work with them in the sweatiest heat and on a pail with the mantra of your fingers in motion. Ask what days of cold that ate at my earlobes. But it is a feeling that edible looks like. Train your eyes to see edible in its natural surpasses gestures, this gratitude. I think it is community. habitat, dirt in its hair like a newborn’s caul. Develop the authority of ripeness. Work until you are so hungry that Good work is not just the maintenance of connections— as one is you pull food from the soil and eat it grit and all. Then go now said to work “for a living” or “to support a family”— but the home and lean ecstatically over the aroma of your labors. enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not Sit someone down and tell him how a radish makes itself support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is known by pushing up from the dirt, a technicolor sunrise, one of the forms and acts of love. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America and then feed him a radish and then feed one to yourself. When my mouth wasn’t full of vegetables it was full of You love your workmates, and yes, it’s physical—these thank you. I cannot remember what it was like before I felt this gratitude, a vertigo bowing me towards the earth and bodies are linked. When the cold finally came, we took towards the people who care for it. I find it fitting that we breaks together in the station wagon, rubbing our hands must kneel in the fields; planting and harvesting, caring for in front of the weak stream of warm air from the vent. We were connected by the tingling in our fingers just as,

Hannah Lawler

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months earlier, we’d been connected by the reddening of our bare shoulders, by the relief of a jar of cool water passed slowly. It’s physical because of the weather, and also because of the tasks—we have matching blisters, matching aches in our knees, matching dirt in our teeth from radishes eaten right out of the ground. And, of course, it is physical because it is food. One cold day a pizza appeared at the end of the row where we’d been picking all morning. We ate in mostly silence, piling justpicked spinach on top of the steaming cheese.There is great pleasure in sharing food with people after physical work. Everyone is the same temperature, the same achy, tastes the same thing, and loves it, loves it, ravenously. Especially to cook and eat what you’ve just harvested. And especially to do it together.

so lucky to have found myself standing with them in the dumpster at the zoo shoveling horse shit into a trash can, or elbow deep and scratched up in the raspberry bushes talking about Aristotle and how to convert a toilet for composting without your landlord finding out, or climbing to the highest “peak” of Providence, or swimming in its secret holes. The farms are my favorite spots in this city and their inhabitants are as close as I’ve come to kindred here. So, thank you,

Rich for making compost the rite it should be, Catherine for dubbing me the queen of parsley and making me believe it, Matt for bringing pizza and promising to help me build my Urban farms have to be added together to make a farm. So when I hoop house someday, say I’m an urban “farmer”, I’m depending on other urban farmers, Than for entrusting me with a Paw Paw seed and bringing too. It’s only with them that our backyards and squatted gardens me to the Desert, add up to something significant. Sean for picking summer from his garden and eating it with Novella Carpenter, Farm City me off the grill, Noah for showing me a new view, City Farm, Red Planet, and Scratch Farm sell their pro- Camus for knowing what you like to do and doing it, duce in cooperative to restaurants and to the Providence Tess for being the best “PO-TAY-TO” picking companion, farmer’s markets as the Little City Grower’s Co-op. It is a Katie for handing me plastic and wire and telling me I business version of the solidarity Carpenter is talking about. could have greens in the snow, Their community is not just a business model, it is also Isa and Noël for m’avoir introduit à la belle vie agricultrice, a social model. These people share a common labor and Sylvie and her brothers for making me chop vines until I common beliefs: that citizens of cities must stop assuming discovered muscles I’d never had, what we need will be brought to us, that cities can be fer- And Kathy for showing me I’m not the only one around tile and productive, not just wasteful and consumptive. The here who loves to talk about kale. end-of-the-season parties are full of faces familiar from the Thank you to the authors garden. Our beds are tucked who inspire me to live and in; we sit outside around the write, all at once, altogether. brick oven glowing with the relief of autumn, the softenThank you cabbage, collards ing of our callused fingers. and kale, sun, soil, and bees. I had not realized how There are not enough words much I was missing this for this list of Acknowledggroup until I found them. ments… It turns out Providence has plenty of people who will There is only the bliss of a stand around reverently and biting into a tomato still sunchomp into the first cloves hot, of garlic pulled from the soil on the Fourth of July (garthe memory of that mouthlic is a holiday plant: it goes ful, now, in December underground on Halloween, and comes out fat and spicy and the promise of its rearound Independence Day), turn… who will cough sheepishly and pound their chests at the heat of it, the fireworks. I feel Hannah Lawler

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Appendix B: Soil

There is giddiness in overturned earth. Today we will build a composter. Building a composter is investing in a space. It is sayThe soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease ing: one day, a year from now, this place will be fertile and passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper self-fertilizing. I’ve heard farm people call compost “black care for it we can have no community, because without proper care gold.” Making a composter is like opening a safety deposit box. It is a simple process: we drill together five wooden for it we can have no life. palates so they sit in a box-shape with no cover or front, in Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America a corner of the foundation. Sean found the palates for free in a parking lot nearby. We picked up coffee grounds from Instructions on How to Make Soil: Consider the buried corpses of the plague and how no the coffee shop, food scraps from the restaurants, manure one was sickened by the wheat that eventually grew there. and sawdust from the Police stables; save the price of a few How much less there is to fear in your own returning, to screws, these structures are free. Dumping all that waste into and to, or the return of your eggshells, when green is a the box feels somehow ceremonial—the first act of a new destination. Take today’s headlines, so many fresh corpses, garden. It is a cold day, we are wearing hats, blowing on our and lay them across the peelings of your last meal; wonder hands. We pass a bottle of brandy in the twilight and smile what you will say if someone asks you for a final statement at our handiwork, a quiet toast. and whether you will look your victim’s mother in the eyes. “We’ll put the snipers there, and there,” Than points to Be absolved, the beatific presence of earthworms. Envision the two corners of the lot, where a chain-link fence droops yourself circular and encircled; you and the police horses at the park and your friend’s pet rabbit, everybody shits. Shovel off its posts. “Someday we’ll have to guard this food.” shit with the grace of one who lays a palm frond across the He is joking, I think. But for the first time it occurs to road for a passing savior. Do not blush at the grandeur— me that one day, maybe in my lifetime, city farming could onionskins, coffee grounds. Read the omens at the bottom become survival. Ever since I started helping people grow of your teacup and then add that vision to the pile. Stick food in Providence, I have chafed each time I bought a a thermometer deep into the center of your rotten world. vegetable at the supermarket. But, that being said, the suThere is heat! It may be enough to melt snow. Think of the permarket is always there. In an “emergency” I can always buried fruitpits that depend on winter to crack their shell. swing by the store for a bunch of carrots to put in my Frost heaving the sidewalk apart. Do you see the spaces soup. But standing in this post-apocalyptic gardenscape, I between buildings? This city cracks open and begs you to imagine for a moment what it would feel like to live in a city where no one bothered to truck me the vegetables I notice its loamy grin, its many fertile fissures. need. The snipers are a joke, but all jokes have the scent of reality, or a reality we fear is swift approaching. (Or a reality Soil for the Apocalypse: Farming in the late fall, we look sweet in our red noses. realized— see FOOD DESERT, see especially Detroit.) Today we prepare a new garden in an old foundation behind a florist’s shop. On the ride over we listen to the news on the radio—it was the deadliest month so far for Americans in Afghanistan, hundreds of people were blown up in a ministry building in Baghdad. Behind the florist’s, Sean has already cleared the rubble of bricks and cinderblocks and piled them in a corner: “I’m thinking about building a little brick oven over there.” City farming is a dystopic version of its rural forbears; early settlers cleared the land and used the rocks they found to build their homes or walls.We take the broken bricks of neglected cityscapes and dream of pizza. He has already loosened the soil for the beds and the dark brown looks alive in contrast with the gray of the cement walls the garden is sunk in, the gray of the houses, the gray of the sky. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote of the “painful look of plowed earth.” Broken soil is somehow JooHee Yoon animate, gaping open to receive seed, sun, rain. Perhaps it looked pained to him; to me it looks audacious.) Audacious, too, is reclaiming an old cement foundation— these are not ruins, we declare, these are the walls of a newfound eden.

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I Can’t Taste Red Wine Caleb McEntire

Lorraine Nam

can’t taste red wine, but that’s not because red wine lacks flavor. A ten-dollar bottle of wine can contain over 200 aromatic compounds including: eugenol, most often found in cloves; cinnemaldehyde, from cinnamon; the enchantingly named 2-acetyl 1-pyrroline, from popcorn and many fragrant rices. Each sip from that bottle is a little microcosm of flavor. Each sip delivers hundreds of minuscule scraps of taste. So why is it that when I sip Shiraz it just tastes… red? I can tell that one wine is tannic, maybe, and that another is a little meatier, but I cannot for the life of me pick out those “hints of X” that wine experts proudly tout. I am sure trained sommeliers taste more finely than I do, but I cannot

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help but feel skeptical; I know what I’m tasting, and there is no pineapple or spearmint or aftertaste of butterscotch in a glass of Chardonnay. As it turns out, this is absolutely true. For me. Not for the sommelier. The reason I’ve had this disconnect is that I always thought of tasting as an experience, not an activity. Flavor was a fun byproduct of eating. When I munch a grilled cheese sandwich it creates a sensation in my mouth wherein I taste cheddar and bread and browned butter. I feel the crunch and silkiness of the sandwich in each bite. What a terrific incidental feature of food! And so I took flavor at face value.

This doesn’t make much sense when I think about it; why should flavor be so passive? When I first hopped behind the driver’s seat of a car I had smooth patches and jerky ones, and I knew that the smooth ones happened because I jiggled the steering wheel less, because I avoided the potholes in the pavement, because I learned to ignore my mother stifling her gasps in the driver’s seat. I didn’t think to myself “hey, there are patches where I’m not bumping up and down. Great!” and then leave it at that. I learned what I was doing right and I focused on it. I started anticipating other cars, keeping the wheel steadier, and easing onto the gas instead of jamming my foot down. Because driving was important to me, I worked hard – I earned the ability to drive well through hours of practice. Flavor is a skill in exactly the same way as driving a car or riding a bike or any other qualitative ability; why should I be able to taste wine or cheese without practice any more than I could’ve roadtripped out to California at age thirteen? If I want to taste nuances of flavor I have to put in the time and energy the skill deserves. Recent developments in the scientific study of taste and smell support this claim, and offer definitive evidence that you can learn to taste. If you put in the time and energy, you can learn to pick apart food and appreciate more of its hidden flavors. Smell and taste are called the “chemical senses” because they are qualitatively different from sight, touch, and hearing. Instead of responding to stimuli like a voice or patterns of light, our nose and mouth respond to molecules. They’re covered with microscopic receptors, each one a lock into which fats, sugars, or the scent of violets fit like a key.

brain processes each individual particle and produces a sensation we recognize as “smelling wine.” We would get an ever so slightly different sensation if the balance of molecules were off in that buttery noseful – if there happened to be an extra smidge of diacetyl, the feeling our brain produced would be a smidge different. Synthetic olfaction is more holistic. It means that when we take in a noseful of aroma our brain recognizes patterns it’s seen before, and gets the general gist of a scent or scents. Rather than analyzing twenty different molecules and creating a sensation based on those, it recognizes the general feel of the wine based on previous wine experiences. It then outputs the “wine” feeling it’s developed based on those. If there are a handful more diacetyls or a handful fewer lactic acids, it doesn’t make a difference; it’s still Chardonnay. As with most scientific debates, the answer to the analytic-synthetic question lies between the two poles.We seem to learn smells analytically, but then get better at recognizing them until we use synthetic processing. Think of it as the same way we learn reading. When you pick up your first kindergarten reader you have to puzzle out each letter. P plus I plus G equals… pig! Every word is a task. As you get more practice, though, you recognize more and more small words with just a glance, and then bigger ones, and then pretty much all of them. Eventually all that’s left are the complicated words you don’t know yet. The first few times you read “onomatopoeia” you probably needed to sound it out.

We build up our vocabulary of smells in the same way we sound out those complicated words.When you first come across a complex aroma like a glass of wine – one made up of many different odor compounds – you take it as Olfaction – smell – in particular is interesting, because our the sum of its parts.You analyze each molecule and, just like nose is where the vast majority of “flavor” perception takes assembling the word “pig,” you add diacetyl to lactic acid place. Our mouth is mainly used for what we know as the to the other aromas and get… Chardonnay! As you drink five basic tastes: sugar, fat, salt, sour, and that rising and smell more Chardonnays, though, you can star, umami. Yes, it detects flavor compounds other get the gist of different smells – because you’ve than these, but the main place for tasting anything smelled butter and grapes before, you can detect from coffee to gumdrops is the olfactory epithelithose aromas of butter and grapes in the wine um, the membrane in your nose that holds millions without even thinking. All the components were of receptors for all sorts of scents. there before, but now you can recognize them Aaron Warder more easily; a kindergartener might not be able The big debate among olfactory scientists is whether we to pronounce onomatopoeia even though all the letters smell “analytically” or “synthetically.” Analytic olfaction are there, but once they’ve learned to break the word into means smelling by picking apart molecules, as when a whiff manageable chunks of “on” and “mato” they have an easier of buttery Chardonnay hits our nose and locks into specific time recognizing it. receptors that tell our brain we’re dealing with diacetyl and lactic acids and a host of other specific compounds. Our There are two studies on olfaction that support this idea of

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chunking the analytical into the synthetic. The first measured the improvement in subjects’ identification of familiar versus unfamiliar odors. It was based on an experiment by Laing and Glenmarec (1992) in which the two experimenters gave their subjects one particular odor (the “target” odor) to smell, and then followed that with a blend of anywhere from one to twelve odors. The subjects had to identify which blends contained the target. Performance was, in a word, miserable. Even when they were given just a single odor--so it was either the odor they had learned or a different one, with no in-between--the test smellers were only right 55% of the time. This dropped to 12% for a two-odor blend, and kept falling until they hit zero percent correct at five components. Jinks and Laing (1999) built on this experiment. That performance wasn’t terrific, they reasoned, but on the other hand the smellers were given a random scent out of the blue.They might have never smelled it before, which would make it hard to remember. With this in mind they gave smellers a whole bouquet of scents and told them to pick the three most familiar to them. They then used these familiar scents as the targets, and per-

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formance skyrocketed. Instead of falling to zero percent accuracy with five components in the mixture, subjects could identify their targets in twelve-scent blends! Because they used familiar scents, and had already formed representations of it in their mind, they had an easier time recognizing the block of “rose” or “coffee” they’d picked. The second experiment shows that we can make these recognizable blocks by smelling complex scents – even without knowing the smells beforehand, we can pick a cup of wine or a block of chocolate apart into its component parts. At least to an extent. In this experiment, Staubli et al. (1987) gave rats two mixtures of two odors each, with one odor that was in both. Let’s call them AB and AC. The AB mix was at the end of a hallway that had food in it, and the AC mix was at the end of a hallway with nothing. What the rats were really being taught was that B meant food, and C meant no food – if they could pick those scents apart into A, B, and C they should be able to recognize that B on its own meant dinnertime. That’s exactly what the results showed. In mazes where

Jessica Lamb the scents were reversed, the test rats took much longer to learn the new layout than did a control group for whom the scents were changed completely (say to D, E, and F). While this is admittedly a modest accomplishment (only two scents), it was also a short experiment – the rats had only a meager handful of test runs to learn their scents.

in a glass of wine? Take a deep breath over your grapefruit in the morning. Steal a whiff of butter before throwing it into the cookie dough. Get familiar with the scents around you, and you’ll learn to smell them where you couldn’t before. Do this, and when you sniff your wine you’ll start to pull out flavors like threads – one at a time, you’ll unravel what makes your drink a Chardonnay and not a Pinot Grigio.

With these two results combined, anything is possible: the first experiment shows that we can recognize one scent among many if we’re familiar with that scent beforehand. The second shows that we can familiarize ourselves with the components of a two-scent mixture even if we’ve Works Cited smelled neither of them before. With both of these abilities, there’s no reason we can’t pick apart even the most com- Jinks A, Laing DG. A limit in the processing of components plex scents bit by bit. in odour mixtures. Percept 1999;28:395–404. Laing DG, Glenmarec A. Selective attention and the perThe bottom line is that taste is not a passive experience. It ceptual analysis of odor mixtures. Physiol Behav 1992;52: isn’t something you’re born with, a sense you either have 1047–53. or you don’t. Taste is an ability, like riding a bike or playing Staubli U, Fraser D, Faraday R, Lynch G. Olfaction and the the guitar. As we’ve seen with the science behind olfaction, data memory system in rats. Behav Neurosci 1987;101:757– you can learn to pull out an individual odor where before 65. you smelled an indecipherable jumble. If the subjects in that first experiment could recognize their familiar scents in a blend of many, why can’t you recognize your familiar scents

spring 2011

Contributors DENA ADLER (Brown ‘11) is an environmental studies

concentrator focusing on the interface between science and policy. Though raised in the concrete jungle of New York City, she searches for pieces of home scattered in the mountains, and sometimes finds them. RACHEL ECONOMY (Brown ‘10.5) grew up in Atlan-

lustrator living in a tiny apartment in Rochester, NY with her boyfriend Grant, her cat Nina, and lots and lots of houseplants. OLE TILLMANN (RISD ‘11) is an illustrator/graphic de-

signer. Portfolio: www.ole-t.de. Process/snippets/blog: achtungole.blogspot.com

ta and wishes that Providence understood grits, trees, and two-month spring, but loves the converging river, the bay, MANDO VEVE (RISD ‘11) was raised in South Burlington, Vermont where he began drawing and constructing and how easy it is to walk anywhere. imaginary landscapes at a very young age. Two decades SARAH GREENFIELD (RISD ‘09) is a mixed-media art- later he will be graduating this Spring from the Rhode Isist living in Boston, MA, where she is pursuing a master’s land School of Design with a concentration in Illustration. degree in art education at Lesley University. She misses Providence on a daily basis and enjoys taking the commuter CHRISTI ZALESKI (Brown ‘11) sleeps better outside. She rail back down to spend time with the communities where appreciates the many parks staff and quiet kids who have let she left her heart (New Urban Arts and RISD in particular). her nap peacefully on Chicago’s front lawn over the years. Look for her in a shady spot on a warm day at Prospect STEPHEN HIGA (Brown ‘11) is a Ph.D. student in Medi- Park. eval History. Studying the premodern has made him question the hegemony of the cult of “modern convenience,” JESSICA LAMB (RISD ‘10) is a recent graduate from and he can often be caught red-handed in a number of the illustration department at the Rhode Island School of Design. She enjoys illustrating all sorts of things for women inconvenient acts. and girls, including surface patterns and products. She loves bright colors, childhood wonders, and traveling everywhere JOAN LEDERMAN has been comfortable moving with a brush in her hand most of her life. After getting a BFA she can get to. as a painting major from Boston University the oils and refined pigments in her brush switched to metallic oxides and ground-up rock deposits. Instead of controlling the immediate outcome of each stroke, she offers work to fire for completion -- using stoneware clay pots as geological canvases is a form of partnership with nature that never fails to inform.

NATALIE MCGARVEY has a deep fondness in her heart

for hoagies and Philadelphia where she currently resides. She draws stuff, occasionally, and paints in her sketchbook, frequently. CALEB MCENTIRE (Brown ‘10) graduated with a degree

in cognitive neuroscience. He’ll be putting that degree to good use by indulging his passion for food working as a CHARIS LOKE is fascinated by old scientific illustrations, cook. Studio Ghibli, Persian miniatures, and molecular structures. She is convinced that a daily dose of visual eye candy and BLAIR MCNAMARA (Brown ‘12.5) likes food best when teh Interwebs keeps the doctor away. it’s from her garden. She recommends basil and oregano for easy to grow dorm-crops. Yum! MICHAEL MARTEN lives in London. He founded the Science Photo Library picture agency in 1979 and has NICOLAS NADEAU (RISD ‘10) is an Austin-based artist/ co-authored several books of scientific imagery. His ‘Sea illustrator. He likes loud music, root beer and cryptozoology. Change’ landscape series has been exhibited in the US, Italy, To see more of his work visit www.anartwebsite.com. and Denmark. MARSHALL MOORE (Brown ‘11) is a lifelong explorer

KATIE PATCH (RISD ‘10) is recent graduate from the

RISD illustration department. She was born and raised in and, more recently, a biogeochemist. Becoming a natural the Washington, DC area. You can find her work at www. scientist has had a beautiful feedback on his meanderings, katiepatch.com. coloring and enlivening his view of the world. CLAIRE SCHIPKE (RISD ‘10) is currently a freelance il-

watershed

AARON KENT WARDER (RISD ‘10) will use his BFA

in illustration to open a restaurant for cats on the lowereast side of planet Mars. Daily specials include Meatball Mondays, Tuna Tuesdays, Whipped Cream Wednesdays, Thirsty Thursdays, and Fish Fry Fridays. Sorry, no dogs allowed at this classy establishment.

age of 5. Since then, her art has gotten (a little) more sophisticated, and she now enjoys oil painting, collage and game and editorial illustration. Her website is http://hannahlawler.carbonmade.com/

JOOHEE YOON (RISD ‘11) was born in a foreign

metropolis but spent most of her childhood in a pleasantly rainy region of the west coast. When she is not making things she enjoys cooking obscure root vegetables. SARAH ROSENGARD (Brown ‘11) is a native New

Yorker who lives with a family of two parents, one younger sister, one rabbit, and- for part of the time- one more aunt, one more uncle, one more cousin, and one grandmother. She is interested in studying ecological-climate modeling, as well as human ecology. She likes to roller-blade, bicycle, meet different people, eat spicy food, and eat spicy food with different people. KYLE NORRIS (RISD ‘11) is a senior in Illustration, and

he has no idea what he’s going to do with his life. He loves music, skateboarding, paint pens and cheesecake. Hopefully his future career will involve some clever combination of those things. www.kyle-norris.com VICTO NGAI (RISD ‘10) STEPHANIE DAVIDSON (RISD ‘10) C.R. RESETARITS’ work has appeared in numerous jour-

nals including Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, Dalhousie Review, Gender Studies, and Fabula. Her most recent fiction will appear in Broome (2011) and in BATTLE RUNES: Writings on War (Editions Bibliotekos, Brooklyn NY). Her most recent poetry is in the Native Issue of Florida Review. She splits her time between Lubbock,Texas, and Millbrook, New York. LORRAINE NAM’s (RISD ‘10) work has appeared na-

tionwide in publications such as Bitch Magazine and the Women in Film International Short Film Festival (WIFI) and she has shown in Drift Gallery in Kittery, Maine. She currently resides in Brooklyn as a freelance illustrator. www. lorrainenam.com. HANNAH LAWLER’s (RISD ‘10) first foray into the art

world was drawing cartoons of her family dogs at the young

submit to watershed watershed_journal@brown.edu

spring 2011

Argosy Blurred in snow white whirls at waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge the airy cranes. Their fretwork necks bolt-and-bar feathered: stork, heron, dragon, troll. Fortuneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birds, Jabberwocky guides, ascending fiends poised at white-washed shore. Shipyard, grave dock, beast of steel, monster heart beats monster thrall. Snow laid blanket, lies put to curves, to lusterless dusk, to darkening turns and the reckoning of cranes.

~C.R. Resetarits

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spring 2011