Sheffield General Cemetery

By Sarah Alwin:

Walking is a habit that I have come to appreciate more as I have grown older, being perhaps more naturally attuned to the lure of the motor vehicle and a slightly horrified witness to the end of its golden age. The first time I was allowed behind the wheel of my parents’ car was when I was seventeen in 1995. It was a Honda Civic which my mum had astutely insisted on buying over any other make as it had been Car of the Year in 1984. It was a terrifying experience for my dad, even though we were in the relative safety of a deserted car park near where we lived on the breezy West Coast of Singapore. In fact it had such an impact on us both that I didn’t actually learn to drive until I was almost 21 and my dad played no further part in it, having died not long after that first test drive, though not as the result of trauma from that event I should add. It’s one of my funnier, fonder memories of him: his pulling up the handbrake and telling me that perhaps this was enough and shouldn’t we head back for dinner, to which, shell-shocked, I agreed without protest. I have always liked to jump in a car, either as a passenger inevitably nodding off to the soporific rhythms of the engine like a milk addled baby or as the driver, the promise of excitement just round the corner, armed with an A to Z or roadmap. Even the routine commute to work has in the past had the appeal of solidarity and often hilarity generated by the car pool or when undertaken solitarily as in recent years, the moments of quiet, cocooned in the seal of the horseless carriage, speeding down the motorway, or, more usually, stuck in rush hour traffic.

Now middle age has allowed me to enjoy a walk more. I used to run, and felt good doing it. Until I didn’t. My knees and hips still protest at the damage done running daily in my thirties, and my body in its forties has so far appreciated a good walk instead. And so the whoosh and vroom of my wheels or the urgency of the run has given way to the slower, more wholesome pleasures of a ramble. I have a lovely friend who once told me that she was a committed pedestrian and even though I rolled my eyes internally, she really meant it so that I wouldn’t go out of my way to give her a lift and I do appreciate her turn of phrase. I am certainly not a committed pedestrian (yet!) but may be one day.

In this one respect — walking a round walk — I was quite well prepared for the UK brand of lockdowns in the pandemic, switching to daily walking once for an hour in that first iteration of restrictions with relative ease in comparison to all the other adjustments life had in store during those slightly surreal times. I rediscovered some windy snickets and lesser used paths in those bright days when the weather was just uncharacteristically gorgeous, cloudless, and un-English, walking for pleasure and release rather than to work.

During consecutive rounds of restrictions I found a favourite walk and a place of sanctuary and intense contentment. I avoided the more popular parks, eschewing them in favour of the quieter spots near my home. This takes me neatly to the Sheffield General Cemetery, or ‘gen-cem’ as it is sometimes affectionately known. It is probably my closest green space and woefully underused by the many people who live in the vicinity. My children have been going there for years, first to hobble round the gravestones when they were toddlers, and then latterly unaccompanied by me to meet friends for football in the often overgrown central patch of grass which flattery would call a field. It turns out that this open grassy area had many more graves on it until the 1970s when some bright spark bought up the land, wanted to build houses on it, cleared the headstones (but not the remains!), applied for planning permission, didn’t get it, sold the land for a nominal fee back to the council... In all, between the cemetery’s inception in 1834, its opening in 1836 and its closure in 1978, 87,000 people were buried there, which is hard to believe given its diminutive acreage.

The Gatehouse – Sheffield General Cemetery.

There’s a wonderful radio programme by Tania Hershman, Who Will Call Me Beloved? (you should definitely check it out on BBC Sounds) and I listened to it for the first time on my way to swimming, taking a shortcut through the cem. It was recommended to me by a friend, Shaun, who I have only met briefly, once, at a conference but he was so warm and kind and I follow him on Twitter, and he is somehow part of my life now, exemplifying the very best and most miraculous part of social media. The programme is beautiful and Hershman contemplates what she would like inscribed on her gravestone as she walks through and discovers more about the lives of the people buried in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester. The first time I listened to it I had just read Bee Reaved by Dodie Bellamy which is a selection of her essays about the death (and life) of her lifelong partner Kevin Killian. Bellamy writes so beautifully and disgustingly about everything, not just death, and this book stays with me in my head and my heart. Hershman’s is a moving programme which sits well in tandem with Bellamy actually, about love and living and remembrance and I have listened to it more than a few times as I make my way around the cem. I like the sound of Hershman’s voice: soothing and serious, reflective and exploratory. It’s a multi-sensory experience and I like the juxtaposition of other people’s lives in Manchester on the lives of those lying in the gen-cem here in Sheffield. I like to listen to podcasts on the way round or actually mainly French synthy pop or any kind of easy dance music of the reassuringly numbing variety so that I don’t have to concentrate on lyrics but can walk to a standard four-four rhythm and allow my deep fried brain a gentle haziness. It’s leafy and quiet and there’s always a sense of calm even if on the odd occasion you catch a gathering of fervent dogs and their walkers or the enthusiastically demented toddlers from the nearby forest school schlepping about in all weathers.

The cemetery is not a maudlin place for me; rather it is one for contemplation before work or unwinding after. Sometimes it is a cool, shaded route to Ecclesall Road for the bus or shopping, and other times it is the shortcut to the railway station or town. Mostly though it’s a pleasant and extremely short round walk, a way of recharging efficiently. It is beautiful in all weathers, especially in winter when the bright of the snow sets off the gothic and abandoned Anglican chapel at the top of the cem so dramatically. 

The Anglican Chapel looking extra Gothic in the winter.

Another wintery snap – the cemetery is teeming with life all year round.

Recently, long overdue works have begun to shore up the foundations of some of the structures in the cemetery: repairs to the catacombs, walkways, and some of the more sumptuous and overwrought memorials. This work has disrupted my walks, taking me on different paths as JCBs and workmen close down familiar routes. The voluntary team from the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust who tend the cemetery so dutifully continue their talks and events with good cheer and so it happens that I attend one at the start of August on a bright, hot afternoon with my mother who I have not seen for three years to find out a little about the history of the gen-cem and its inhabitants.

The ongoing works to the cemetery … sometimes taking me on different paths.

The catacombs were not that popular as a final resting place – they were an idea borrowed from France that didn’t travel so well. Nonetheless work is being undertaken to avoid their collapse here.

The loveliest thing about this tour is that it reminds me that Sheffield is a place not only of industry but also, necessarily, of subversion. There are many beautiful monuments to the big names of the men who were cornerstones of the economic success of this city, but most pulsating, poignant, belligerent of all is the more modest grave stone of the Chartist and agitator, Samuel Holberry, who died in York Castle at the tender age of 27 after being made to work the treadmill illegally, a punishment which sounds barbaric and desperate. Peter Wingfield, our volunteer tour guide, tells us that in death, Holberry became a martyr and 50,000 people came to the funeral, which was a big deal at a time when the entire population of Sheffield only totaled 150,000. The Chartists were trying to secure the vote for working men. It is so moving to see Holberry’s headstone which is in the non-conformist section of the cemetery and today reads as urgently as ever: a utopian, idealistic epitaph. 

The Samuel Holberry grave

His headstone reads:

SACRED
Is the Memory of
SAMUEL HOLBERRY

WHO AT THAT EARLY AGE OF 27 DIED
IN YORK CASTLE, AFTER SUFFERING
AN IMPRISONMENT OF 2 YEARS AND 8
MONTHS, JUNE 21st 1842,
FOR ADVOCATING WHAT TO HIM APPEARED
TO BE THE TRUE INTEREST OF THE PEOPLE OF
ENGLAND
VANISHED IS THE FEVERISH DREAM OF LIFE:-
THE RICH AND POOR FIND NO DISTINCTION HERE,
THE GREAT AND LOWLY END THEIR CARE AND STRIFE
THE WELL BELOVED MAY HAVE AFFECTIONS TEAR
BUT AT THE LAST, THE OPRESSOR AND THE SLAVE
SHALL EQUAL STAND BEFORE THE BAR OF GOD:
OF HIM, WHO LIFE, AND HOPE, AND FREEDOM GAVE,
TO ALL THAT THRO’ THIS VALE OF TEARS HAVE TROD.
LET NONE WHEN MURMUR ’GAINST THE WISE DECREE
THAT OPEN’D THE DOOR, AND SET THE CAPTIVE FREE.

Also of SAMUEL JOHN, his son who
Died in his infancy.

This tablet was erected by his bereft widow.

I love the ornate language, particularly the line vanished is the feverish dream of life, which I will later embroider onto a tote bag in the evening while watching Netflix or cricket. Many founding fathers of Sheffield, and great men and women are buried here. But this is the one final resting space that feels the most remarkable to me, and I was glad to have taken the time to attend the tour if only to know about this grave. The Sheffield General Cemetery Trust started as the Friends of the General Cemetery and is run entirely by volunteers. They are cool people.

We leave Peter and the rest of the tour at the refurbished non-conformist Samuel Worth Chapel, where there are teas and cakes laid out for weekend visitors. He tells me quietly and generously that if I want to know anything more I can come and find any of them by the main Gatehouse on Tuesdays, as that is when the volunteers meet to garden and tend to the grounds. You could bob down there too if you are in Sheffield and want a moment of quiet and a gentle, shaded walk. You might see me stalking Holberry’s graveside or haunting the gloomy Anglican Chapel before work.

You can find out more about the Sheffield General Cemetery and the work of the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust here: gencem.org

***

Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

Minor Moorlands Roads – Part One

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Todmorden Old Road

It starts out as reach into the hills, around the back of a housing estate in Bacup. Known in my childhood as ‘Back Lane’ or ‘Dark Lane’, idioms abound suggesting a push to the edges. Todmorden Old Road rises as a single-file flex of rough tarmac, initially bordered by brambles on one side, a stretch of wall weathered into various states of moss-strewn disrepair on the other. There is the perpetual tang of wet bark and wood rot, exploded open through summer and into autumn by the florid fizz of somehow never-quite-healthy blackberries and a density of dandelions. 

Follow the road up far out of Bacup enough and a walker can reach the crest at Sharneyford where Lancashire slumps down on one side whilst West Yorkshire arches up on the other. I stand at that intersection now, the personal points of childhood and adulthood split by a glistening grey belt of hills and the ripped-up course of the road. This is a route rarely travelled by vehicles now  – other than the occasional shuddering tractor and red shock of the mail van – and yet once was a key link between two counties; though the county boundary itself a contentious blur of argument, artifice and echo. I imagine it hovering and drifting like a buzzard buoyed by the muffled prospect of prey, now fought over by public propaganda and irregular footfall. 

These minor moorland highways are alive with prospect and past potential. On Todmorden Old Road, I’m walking through what could have been, as someone now. There’s that wrench in the chest, a burn that the books of both childhood and adulthood would have a word for. A whole genre. A human heave I can feel at the edge of my eyes, in the skittering beat behind ribs and the roll of cold sweat between fabric and skin as I walk. 

Yet part of me doesn’t want to write about walking these roads at all. For in the aftermath of personal pain, why don’t I push off through wild upland and well beyond the mundane, the mechanical? Reflect on fumbling away from the footpaths and meeting the bite of bogland between my toes? Because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my own assumption that the landscape equates to escape. Ashamed of my tendency to want to fall into the revered narrative of walker meets wildness. Ashamed too, of the hurt I have caused and the ways I have reacted, acted, reacted.

And I’m coming to terms with, as readily as I will wander over hill and dale… most of all, I am drawn to these minor moorland roads; a place where the pedestrian seems seldom, their hard and their hold. 

Here, language lies in the cut and thrust of the route, how it writhes through stone and sediment in a surge of gradient that can be felt under foot. A force that seems to take on the lie of the land with a trodden truth.  

So much still does. Close by,  bumping the edge of my vision on the left is Tooter Hill – a site of ancient field systems, a possible ring cairn burial and traces thought to date as far back as the Neolithic. Touch upon touch upon touch. Now mine pits and pock-marked mounds stubble the escarpment, the bulge of earth enmeshed in yellow-green grass, the picked-out course of a footpath and the marks of a search. 

Searching for a hold.

In discussions of loss and heartbreak, John Bowlby posits the concept of ‘searching for the lost object’ as the state of angst and upset the individual goes through, sifting through fragments of the departed, fumbling over a promised future.

 Walking these roads has become my way of stepping into that promise, feeing it shift and crack as I tread. Here a sense  of place comes through a throb – a heart, a hurt, the human intent that still hums in the course of the route. The lost object forever lies in these roads. And to step out is to hold on in the only way I can. 

Allescholes Road

I step into a former thoroughfare, a channel of change and industry, blown by time to a track. The dialectical drawl of ‘the back of beyond’ is a mere breath away – and indeed, this a place now behind the routes we recognise, yet still reaching for something, fumbling further into a time we can’t quite fathom. 

Allescholes Road pushes into the Western hills above Walsden, and I stumble onto it as I make my way down from the moorland, having joined a friend for the first leg of the Todmorden Boundary Way. The area where the minor road intersects the sogged strip of footpath is still ripe with the reek of bogland. It is a particular Pennine flavour – peaty loam pummelled through with weeks-old water and sheep shit split open with rain. 

Beaten-grey clouds hang low and clot across the land, any hope of horizon blunted by swirling bouts of mist. Moisture moves over my face like a shroud and my chest heaves. The surrounding steep benchwork of hills throw their shadows through the fray; though what initially seems like a landscape drained of its colour, is punctured by the occasional stark shout of a foxglove. Swollen cyan trumpets laugh their colour in a wind that offers no regularity, captures breath with no answer. These plants point to our deficiencies, stirring as a reminder that all personal projections in this place are the past. The present is coarse and hard and rips off any romanticised attachment with the wrench of the wind. It catches in my throat with foam, phlegm and a click. 

I crave to locate to Todmorden somewhere to my left, Littleborough to the right, but direction drains away and my body, still hungering for traces, fixes on finding the road from the path. One hand still clutches a found clot of moss like wet hair. Absence arises as an angular feeling under the skin and I snort, sending more water skittering over my face. 

Then my foot meets the rubble of the roadway with a shudder. Semi-solidity after miles of ambiguous, uncompromising moor comes as a shock. And yet there is almost an urgency as to how the road – Allescholes Road–  takes on the topography of the valley, arching and unfurling with tactile intent. For how many people took to build this, whose hands, and when? I wonder– almost crouching in the body’s coil of relief – over what love and hate, what impatience and angst, what boredom and bitterness and sheer brute force did human hands drive this stone into place? Questions are quashed as the sound of each sogged footfall rises as a shh, shh, shhh. 

I drag my feet against saturated stone and look at how the route pushes parallel to the valley bottom, merging into Reddishore Scout. This was once the well-worn packhorse trail linking Walsden with Calderbrook (then towards Summit and Littleborough), and beyond, a linkage forged with prospect and promise, steering clear of the swampy valley base. It was only when the turnpike road was cut through the bottom in the early nineteenth century, that Allescholes Road became optional, then occasional… and now, touched with an air of abandon. 

I feel it too. I watch the straggle of settlements below me busy with human hum and bustle, and the raw roll under my ribs rises to meet them. Falls. Rises. Falls. On these minor moorland roads we find the hurt of ourselves in the hills, we trace back to feelings buried and impulses dashed. It is here I walk with a heart soaked open, and as the horizon hazes into the hill – I stop, reach out and watch the wave of my hand become a blur. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

Traces of Wildlife

By Karen Parra:

As we set out on the well-worn trail, I linger behind allowing them space and time. The cadence of their deep voices rises and falls over the crunch of leaves under my feet. Seeing the similarity of silhouettes between my husband and son, I adjust the strap of my camera, feeling content. This holiday has taken on a more festive note with our son’s visit, and reflecting on our gathering promises to be an exciting entry for my gratitude journal. The recent warm spell, a welcome reprieve from the bitter Midwest winter, has given the three of us a chance to walk off the second helping of stuffing and slice of pumpkin pie, highlights of our Thanksgiving feast. I've brought the boys to one of my favorite trails, and from the empty parking lot, it looks like we have the place all to ourselves.   

At this point in the season, and in the quiet of the late afternoon, I expect minimal activity, mere traces of the wildlife which inhabit the woods. The melted snow has uncovered leaves, withered berries, acorn shells, fallen branches, and dark soil to release a rustic, woodsy aroma. Hearing commotion in the midst of a pile of fallen leaves, I turn to see a squirrel searching for part of her cache she buried earlier this fall. Scanning the canopy of trees and finding the tallest one, I wonder how many years ago some squirrel forgot to collect that buried acorn. Or maybe it was an intentional act of the squirrel to bury this one small gift, knowing over time it would become a grand oak offering nourishment and a safe, warm home for future generations. Puddles are scattered along the path, and in the soft mud I can make out paw prints, likely raccoon tracks. Searching the network of intertwined branches above, I count a variety of nests visible now only for the lack of foliage. Off the path I notice several piles of fresh deer scat and wonder where this herd has bed down for the afternoon. As I move on, I realize our trio has been spotted.  From deeper in the woods, I hear the bold screech of a blue jay. Following us, she swoops to a new tree continuing her alarm call.  

It is typical for me to search for signs of nature, noticing individual elements. But, on this particular walk, I consider the evidence of life as a collection of essential living things. With every step I reflect on the significant role of each species, and yet, in a new way I see these as a part of something much larger. Like a cast of characters, each species within an ecosystem contributes to an encore performance. 

I hear the rap-rap-rap of a woodpecker off in the distance and wonder if it is gorging on insects, marking territory, or stashing a seed. In the spring, holes left behind by one species of woodpeckers will be oozing sap which renders a much-needed sugar boost for hungry migratory hummingbirds. Arriving too early to the Great Lakes region, hummingbirds and other pollinators such as butterflies will be unable to forage on nectar from the array of native flowers. Tree sap can be a vital food and energy source to sustain them until the spring blooming. I notice the ceiling of the forest begin to open to the blue sky. I feel a shift in the breeze, a signal we must be getting close. It is as if I’m entering the grand foyer of a mansion, an entryway leading to something unknown, but breathtaking. There is a sense of excitement of what is to come.

Though today the water of the low-lying marsh is dried up, the spine of a narrow wooden bridge stands ready for the wet season ahead. On previous walks, this overpass has served as an observation deck for me while taking photos of passing turtles, soaking frogs, and if lucky, a wading great blue heron or egret. I would focus my Canon on sunbathing dragonflies perched high on the peaks of cattails as they bow and aim their wings toward the warmth of the summer sun. At the perimeter of the wetland, the multitude of pink petals on the swamp milkweed would offer a pop of color to my images. Much to my delight, this plant would also try hard to grace the marshy stench of decay with a lighter more appealing scent. But now, with the quiet of the winter season and in absence of these features, I appreciate the rhythm of the seasons and this time of preparing for spring. 

Stepping off the bridge, my feet sink gently into the lag gravel. I notice trees that dwarf in contrast to those in the woods behind me. Now with full sun, a variety of grasses and shrubs line the sloping trail of sand. As I wander and adjust to the changing terrain, it feels as if I have been transported to a new land. Gazing across this area, one might mistake it for a barren wasteland unfit for wildlife. Exposed to strong winds, extreme temperatures and other harsh elements, what life forms could persist?  However, like the forest and marsh, this too has an assemblage of unique living things which thrive together in the dune habitat of the Great Lakes. 

The native plant Pitcher’s thistle, similar to our resilient frontier pioneers, is one of the first to establish and colonize a novel ecosystem for the good of others to come. This native plant with its heavy seeds and deep taproots can withstand the extreme conditions of an open sandy coastline. The presence of this valuable plant, some might mistake for a weed, is essential for the next wave of immigrating species, both flora and fauna, by supplying shelter, shade, and food. Now, with a more stable habitat, other vegetation such as Houghton's goldenrod can flourish and produce nectar to sustain pollinators such as the rusty patched bumble bee. Monarch butterflies, an iconic pollinator, will pass through during their migration north and east, and the bounty of these native plants will serve as a needed layover in their long journey. In addition, hundreds of migratory birds use this Mississippi flyway as an area to forage and rest before the next leg of their flight. Other birds, like the charismatic piping plover shorebird, make this their final stop to mate and raise their brood. The magnificent snowy owl represents other species who are year-round residents of this robust dune habitat. Each species with distinctive ecosystem functions, fulfilling a niche, and in concert with other wildlife, also lends balance and persistence to the dunes.     

At the top of the sandy ridge, I widen my gaze and scan the horizon. Similar to the illusion of an infinity edge pool, the lake appears never-ending, and the vast, vibrant blue water makes the sky pale in comparison. This immense body of water shifts my perspective, and I suddenly feel small. I try to imagine the size and magnitude of the series of glaciers that, in succession, scoured the land for thousands of years.  As they advanced and receded, the glaciers formed the five Great Lakes, leaving them abundant with fresh water and setting the stage for thousands of miles of dune and coastal habitat supporting an array of species. What they have left behind is stunning and unique.

Lost in thought, the squawk of a seagull pulls me back to the here and now. I notice my husband and son walking ahead and realize the gap between us is closing. Without the protection of the trees, the wind is brisk. I turn up the collar on my jacket, as the three of us come together where the trail fades and the shoreline begins. Taking turns with the binoculars we skirt the water’s edge, and after a time, the sun dips lower in the sky casting our long shadows on the sand, our signal to turn back. 

Once again, I look toward my family ahead of me on the trail. I follow their lead thinking of the future, and in my mind’s eye I see a little one with pigtails, no taller than their knees, stretching out her chubby little arms to hold their hands. Walking together in this place for us, they gently swing her between them.  As I envision this scene, I also notice a walking stick my husband is using to steady his balance, an indication that life moves on.

I stay with this thought, of leaping forward in time, and wonder what changes this natural space will endure and whether the wildlife will be able to adapt. While I retrace my steps on the path, I note the ecosystem as well as the essential parts. To protect the dune ecosystem will ensure a place for endemic species in addition to the wildlife only passing through. Further, I consider how the loss of one species might affect the system’s ability to persist. Would the dune landscape persevere in the absence of Pitcher’s thistle? Could pollinators and migratory birds thrive without the resources provided by this and other native plants? More questions continue to surface as I pass through the marsh and forest ecosystems. However, as I take the last few steps of this walk and rejoin my family, I realize it is the health and preservation of natural spaces like these which are necessary to support the indispensable species of plants and animals.  

***

Karen Parra is a graduate student of Project Dragonfly, an Advanced Inquiry Program offered through Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  Her work is a blend of her curiosity of nature, academics in biology, passion for environmental conservation, as well as the joy of photography. She lives with her husband in Illinois, near Lake Michigan.

Broken

by Lori Mairs:

Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them. 

The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it. 

I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.

Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated. 

Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.  

Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.

My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.

Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume. 

I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection. 

There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.

There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth. 

As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts. 

***

Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia.  She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work.  She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna.  In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry.  In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world.  For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.”  She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death.  She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.

Inches

by Mellisa Pascale:

I’ve lived here long enough to know that for a forty-minute walk, I should start northeast on Henry Avenue. In July, the full green boughs of the sidewalk trees reach out to each other like hands, shading ramblers from the searing afternoon sun. I march past the brick rowhomes, past the single stone houses, past the empty university grounds, and onto Henry Avenue Bridge. All the while, cars rumble by in noisy vrooms. 

After the bridge, a flat rock to the right marks the start of a narrow trail leading into Wissahickon, a 2,000-acre park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Almost as soon as I enter the woodland, a sound like crackling fire draws my eyes up and to the left. A deer lopes away, her tail flashing white as she’s swallowed by thick green brush. I imagine her fleeing deeper into Wissahickon, perhaps north through the long march of trees to golden Andorra Meadow, or maybe east down the valley to the rocky banks of the rushing creek, which is where I’m headed.

As Henry Avenue recedes behind me, the hiss of cars is gradually exchanged for the swish of leaves and the gossip of birds. In another life, it was birds, not deer, that I paused to admire: a fantail’s splayed feathers winking from a silver beech branch, or a kea’s emerald wings soaring in shadowy vales, the varied avian life that had ruled New Zealand’s gnarled terrain in whirrs and cries. But that’s another story. How to summarize New Zealand here, so you’ll understand? I don’t even know what verb to use. Traveling seems inaccurate, since the highlight of my trip was the seven weeks spent not traveling at all but hiding out with books and boots in Te Anau, a lakeside town on the edge of Fiordland National Park. Backpacking has two meanings: it could indicate that I bought an expensive oversize pack to go tramping in the backcountry or that I bought an expensive oversize pack to go from one hostel to another, and each of those is somewhat true but also somewhat imprecise. And wandering isn’t the right word either, for I’m the kind of person who likes to know where she’s going. Suffice it to say that I was once in New Zealand for a longish spell and that every walk in Wissahickon calls forth fragmented memories of heavy boots, quiet mornings out the hostel door, and walking and walking under the trill of birdsong, walking and walking routes with markers.

In Wissahickon, my feet know the way down the valley to the creek. 

A level dirt path, the undergrowth tickling my ankles as I pass the place where the deer once stood. Right, the trail dips and smooths out where mountain bikers usually storm through, but there’s no one today. Left, and my feet think a little harder as rocks and roots pock the descending terrain. A runner passes me, and then I almost catch up to her, my sneakers well-worn by this puzzle of a path. The lower we descend into the gorge, the louder the sound of rumbling water.

Eventually, I step onto Forbidden Drive, a wide gravel track following Wissahickon Creek. Together, track and creek bisect the long park, ribboning from the city limits in the north down to Philadelphia’s Wissahickon neighborhood on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Wissahickon is derived from a Lenape word meaning “catfish creek.” The catfish population has declined, but trout, bass, and sunfish flit through the cool, muddy waters, shaded by oak trees and American beeches. Crossing a stone bridge, I take a second dirt trail ascending the other side of the valley. Sunny tendrils stream through the trees, alighting flecks of schist embedded in the ground. All around, birds warble in the brush and branches. Wissahickon is home to buntings and thrushes, ducks and herons, woodpeckers and cardinals, over two hundred species of birds. I try not to picture myself somewhere else. This park could take my heart if I would let it.  

After coming home from New Zealand, Wissahickon was where I went to prove myself. I would spend three hours on the trails, pretending I was still the person who’d spent eight hours on her first big peak, three days on her longest backcountry tramp. Or I would spend three hours in Wissahickon pretending I was no longer the person who, prior to New Zealand, had considered a twenty-minute walk to be an extravagant lunch break from the office. Dimensions had always been everything: How long did I have to work to save enough money to travel? How many months would I spend in New Zealand? How far could I go when I got there? And when I came home, how much walking was required to keep up with the habits I’d built while away? Walking had been a vessel for connection, and the more I walked, through green farmland or over a mountain spine, the stronger my bond with the land had become, the stronger I had become. Now that I’m back, exploring Wissahickon, I can’t shake the feeling that if I stop walking I’ll float away.

Further north in the park, there’s a bridge that I used to cross on my three-hour rambles—Fingerspan, a covered, steel structure dotted with holes. From inside, I loved how Wissahickon became a mosaic of greens and bronze and blue-sky pieces wrapping around my tired body. “When I think of a bridge,” said Fingerspan’s architect Jody Pinto, from a nearby information placard, “I think of a reaching, a touching, a connection.” True to this vision, the narrow bridge bent over the gap like an appendage sprouting from one side and digging its nails into the other. Whether lingering inside Fingerspan or observing it from without, I could think of nothing but the strange bridge, and where I was.  

But it’s been a while since I’ve felt like doing that particular walk. My lungs are shabby, neglected, by the time this end of the trail spits me out at Rittenhouse Town, remnants of a seventeenth-century paper mill village. The woods at my back, ahead is an old stone barn and creaky picnic tables. Smaller buildings, more Rittenhouse relics, are visible through an outcrop of trees. Everything is still and quiet. Last week, I sat down to read at one of the picnic tables. Mosquitos had gnawed my bare limbs as sweat dripped down my back from the humid summer evening. I’d propped my elbows up and held a book in front of my face. Suddenly, my eyes had caught a fragment of a twig moving across the table’s grey wooden slats. It had scrunched itself up in an arc and then released its body into a flat line. Not a twig. The inchworm was just long enough to cross the gaps between boards, and he performed his strange glissade in an unbroken rhythm across the table. Anytime he hovered in his bent form, he looked like a miniature Fingerspan Bridge. 

Today, taking a seat at the same picnic table and facing out, I entertain the unlikely idea that I’ll see the inchworm again. The mosquitos are absent, and a steady gust breathes cool relief into the stuffy summer afternoon. I can still picture the inchworm’s peculiar gait: scrunch, release, scrunch. Only ever going as far as the length of his body. And I wonder if every time I reach for something, I’m going the same distance that I always do, whether it’s New Zealand or Wissahickon, three hours or forty minutes, the deer’s haphazard flight or a worn route. At the picnic table, I scrunch up my legs and swing them between the bench and the tabletop. I pull out another book. I don’t see the inchworm again. 

***

Mellisa Pascale’s essays and travel guides have been published by TulipTree Review, City Creatures Blog, Passion Passport, Matador Network, and other publications. She holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and will soon begin studying for her M. Phil. in Medieval Language and Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She is working on a travel memoir. Find her at mellisapascale.com

Strange City: The Umarells of Bologna

Umarells by Wittylama is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

By Dan Carney:

One of the more eye-catching new words in last year’s edition of the popular Zingarelli Italian language dictionary was umarell. The definition accompanying this rather unItalian-sounding term read: “Pensioner who wanders, mostly with their hands behind their backs, at work sites, checking, asking questions, giving suggestions or criticizing the activities that take place there.” Although this might seem too specific to suggest particularly common usage, those from the Emilia-Romagna capital Bologna, where these elderly self-appointed foremen are a common sight, could be forgiven for wondering why formal recognition had taken so long. 

The term, which derives from the regional dialect words for “little man” - omarello or ometto - was first coined back in 2005 by Bolognese blogger Danilo Massotti, when he started cataloguing online the many umarells he came across throughout the city. The concept resonated. Before long, people were sending Masotti pictures of umarells they had spotted. Bolognese construction workers, on completion of works, began putting notices up at the sites giving the location of the next project. Smartphone apps giving these details also started to appear. 

The fame and popularity of the umarells has continued to rise, with the concept now well known throughout Italy, and their commercial and cultural presence has increased accordingly. The highest profile tie-in came in 2016, when Burger King recruited five for a video campaign to promote their new Italian branches. Franco (78), Clemente (69), Salvator (70), Ugo (73), and Adriano (81) became site foremen for a day, with surveyors to log their recommendations. The advert went viral. The Milanese company TheFabLab have also issued an umarell desktop action figure, cast in the familiar hands-behind-back pose, designed to watch over you as you work. Last year, a board game, La Giornata dell’Umarell (“the daily routine of the umarell”), was launched. Massotti, the originator, has published a number of umarell-themed books.

Umarells have also found themselves honoured in popular culture. In May 2020 the prominent Milanese singer Fabio Concato released ‘L’Umarell’, a song in which he describes an encounter with one during the COVID pandemic. Neopolitan film director Adam Selo is currently developing ‘Umarells’, a full-length to be shot on location in the city, in which the umarells rescue the city’s construction projects after workers go on strike.  

The most concrete commemoration came in 2018, when a square on the outskirts of Bologna was renamed in their honour. Speaking at the inauguration of La piazzetta degli umarells, city councilor Matteo Lepore told Italian daily la Repubblica: “It is a way of saying thank you to the many people who every day commit themselves free of charge for the common good.” Elsewhere, in Pescara, a real-estate company has installed umarell-friendly viewing windows in the fences around their sites.

Emilia-Romagna’s most famous umarell is Franco Bonini, who in 2015 was the recipient of a specially created ‘Umarell of the year’ award for his dedicated observation of a shipyard construction site in the comune of San Lazzaro di Savenna, a few miles from central Bologna. He is still recognized due to the TV and newspaper appearances arising from his victory. The title also came with the prize of a day as honorary site director, conferred by the town’s deputy mayor and the site’s project manager. 

Bonini’s temporary promotion isn’t the only example of umarells being given direct involvement in the construction process. In 2015, the coastal municipality of Riccione budgeted €11k to pay retirees to observe sites, monitoring delivery of materials to prevent theft. This year, Uniamo Riccione, a centre-left political association in the town, have launched an Operation Umarell recruitment drive in conjunction with mayor Daniela Angelini. The advert, a stirring call to arms for community-minded retirees, read:

“Are you over 60/65 years old? Do you love your city, your neighbourhood, your avenue, your house, your building? Do you want a better future for your children, grandchildren, family, for yourself and for your community? Do you want to become an “attentive observer” of everything that happens and help solve it? There is a sidewalk to be fixed, an architectural barrier to be removed, a family to help, a tree to protect, children to accompany to school, shopping for those who cannot move. If all this and much more is part of your wishes, you are the GRANDFATHER or GRANDMA for us!”

Those who signed up were given a direct line to both Angelini’s team and the town’s police in order to report issues, as well as a badge to signify their status as one with whom concerns could be raised. The scheme is ongoing.  

A cynical interpretation of the umarells’ rise may be that it simply represents a marketing opportunity, a chance to drum up cash or attention, or – in the case of the Riccione initiatives - a neat way of getting around municipal funding gaps. But the fact that they continue to resonate, over fifteen years after their identification, might also stem from Italians’ inclusive and respectful attitudes towards older people. Italian life expectancy – and the proportion of the population over 65 - is among the highest in the world, with the elderly more visible, and integral to the family unit, than in most other developed countries. The celebration and inclusion of Umarells may, in part at least, be a result of this. 

Nevertheless, some of the connotations are undoubtedly negative. Massotti’s initial characterisation - old men with nothing to do who get kicked out of the house early by their wives - feels slightly derisory, although he has always emphasized the term is meant to be ironic and affectionate, rather than pejorative. The word has also become an everyday Italian expression for those who stand on the sidelines offering advice but never getting involved, a kind of Mediterranean analogue to Harry Enfield’s meddlesome and judgmental “you don’t want to do it like that” character. In 2021 Lepore, so approving when helping to inaugurate the umarell square but now running his (ultimately successful) Bologna mayoral campaign, stated in an interview that his political approach was proactive, rather than that of the umarell. Everyone knew what he meant.  

Overall, however, the umarell phenomenon has brought about more good than harm. As well as enabling the celebration and inclusion of the elderly, their ongoing popularity may also signify that they offer a still-living folk memory, a familiar Italian archetype that provides something reassuring: seniority, experience, and a prioritization of communal benefit over corner cutting and profit. This may be particularly pertinent given current economic and cultural uncertainties, with many feeling unable to trust that those in charge of infrastructure have their best interests at heart. 

This may, of course, be over-analyzing what is simply a funny observation of a universally recognizable subgroup of the Italian populace. But whatever the deeper reasons for the ongoing popularity of umarells, it is clear that they have something to offer beyond unsolicited sideline advice and a neat line in anoraks. 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychological research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Plum Cove

By Emma Johnson Tarp:

The beach is smaller than I remember and it’s high tide and the water is so blue it stings my eyes, the back of my nose, the back of my throat and there, I see them:

Three boys climbing out on the big rock, their hands finding the same cracks, cracks they know on instinct, like breathing, from summers and summers of swimming-climbing-jumping, summers of returning here just as I return here now but not like that at all because I don’t know those cracks and it stings in my eyes and nose and throat that I don’t and look—

They pull their small, hard bodies up and out of the seaweed,

One tall and dark, too big for his trunks—

One compact, a square all-over—

One slight with a shock of blonde hair that glows against his sun-brown skin—

And they jump into the water and they don’t come back up 

Until 30 years later when they return with me for the first time and we will wade through the seaweed together, my blue-white skin on edge from it all and their skin now lined, lungs lined, with sand and sun from endless summers right here and one that never really did end at Desert Shield and they will find the cracks— cracks they know on instinct, like breathing— and they will stare at their hands like they are magical instruments then lay them on me, pulling me up to join them.

***

Emma Johnson Tarp writes stories about devotion, bodies, and liminal space. She studied literature and religion at William & Mary and lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two rebel-hearted cats.

Americana – A trilogy by Shannon Finck

AMERICANA

Pulling strands of hair from my eyes,
I lose my dog down the beach
after gulls.

I watch her until she mottles
the rocks, small plants, 
hazy things.

My dad taught me to play the guitar
with America songs.
America songs are all I know.

Yet, here I am on the coast of California,
and America is just the horse 
with no name I rode in on.

I love this dog, who is 
always running away from me—
a sandy flightless freebird.

I’m writing a poem about you,
I yell to her—the speck of her,
the blur of her, her feet on the wing.

Later, at the foot of the bed,
in a dog dream,
she runs in place.

*

INVASIVE SPECIES

Despicable featherless bipeds, we roost 
under a threadbare sheet, 
tarred together by behind-knee sweat.
Spliffed, suntanned, we count 
each long day left of July, 
spending it, getting lucky
in a Pasadena pool house—
its owner, a slammer of screendoors, 
host to transcendental meditation parties
attended in pitch dark.
You say you saw David Lynch. 
I believe you. It’s pitch dark
as lakes in La Brea.
We squawk through the night— 
in the morning, the parrots talk to us.
The stalwart dachshund howls
at flowers by the mailboxes that, too, have mouths.
Something is said about the noise. 

I thought my bones were hollow
and yours were adamantium— 
a marvel, such mass—
but when we careen 
up HWY 1 in the superbloom,
you scream into sunlight,
and I find I have taken root
in the cane cholla with the 
trashed star map.

*

APPULSE

The robin has flung full
pectus and ventrum
into the window thrice.
It stands on the porch rail
not stunned, determined,
yellow legs like stalks of foxtail barley
swaying with the Diablos
as if made of wildfire. 

It will try again—
the avian arrhythmia
in its sunset breast,
wills the glass to give.
I want to think I know
what unknowable magnetism
causes it to see and not see
and move anyway.
But a bird’s heart
is its own ambit.

When your elbow
bumps the window
where you sit close,
I search the ground for red feathers,
for the body wrenched
like a stiff pocketknife.
It was only me, you say, standing—
only me, clumsy—
and I pitch into your arms, exhaling dryly
into the ridges and canyons,
the firebreaks of your ribcage.
The sky opens, and I fly.

***
Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, SWWIM, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.

Crookes

By Sarah Alwin:

A gentle tug of nostalgia helps me up the hill to Crookes, a place I have not been for about fifteen years despite still only living less than two miles away. I stride up purposefully, eyes stinging from the robust breeze and high pollen count, camera at the ready to contain those recalcitrant memories. Sheffield is a city of seven hills, like Rome, as everyone says gleefully, citing strong calf muscles as a prerequisite or maybe even benefit of settling here.

Today, artisan coffee shops like Whaletown Coffee Co. that would sit quite comfortably in Notting Hill instead jostle by the Londis convenience and Barnardo’s charity shop. I had forgotten how much my weeks had been punctuated by the pub and I had really forgotten quite how many of them there actually were in the short walk from Broomhill to Crookes. All the pubs now serve food. This would have been inconceivable, sacrilegious even, when I lived here in 1998. They all retain their original names: The Grindstone, The Ball, The Punchbowl, and The Noah’s Ark; but have a quietly different aesthetic. Outside The Ball, hungover hipsters tuck into avocado and poached egg crumpets. I remember taking over pitchers of lager from The Ball to the unlicensed Indian Chef across the road on a Friday night, careful not to slosh any over the zebra crossing.

It is when I turn onto Loxley View Road that I remember moving in at number 9 in July 1998, having just graduated and about to embark on a PGCE. I was earnest and a deep believer in my own edginess, and together with my housemate (also confusingly named Sarah – at one time it was a fashionable one) constructed a self-consciously adult domestic formula at Loxley View. In reality we were simply play acting.

Over the summer I turned 21 and four awkward boys moved into number 7. Sarah announced with disgust one afternoon that one of them had moved in early and wanted to get to know us. She said this as if he’d been a fungal infection. I was of course smitten with them. I had a battered Citroen AX and gave them lifts to work and to town in between my school placements, and the six of us eventually fell into comfortable, genial companionship, revolving around the pub in the main. The boys used to distinguish between me and the other Sarah by calling me Chicken. Ironically this was because they were too chicken to give her the nickname, probably sensing that underneath it all she thought they were fungal. One of the lads was a little feral, that much was true. But whenever his dad came to visit he would put on a shirt and tie, which we all found miserable.

Over the road from us, on the other corner of Loxley View, was an Indian and Bangladeshi restaurant called Jaflong. The lads next door were frequent visitors, as were our two cats. Today Jaflong is in bigger premises further down Crookes, and its original site looks worse for wear. 

I take this photograph to corroborate my presence there today. I kind of like the washing machine in there next to the rubble and my almost ghostly reflected squint into the murk.

In reality, my time at Loxley View Road was sometimes extremely painful. That winter I embarked on a difficult relationship with a much older, already attached man. It was part of that carefully constructed growing up that I had prepared for myself: ostensibly marginal in a nonchalant way but in reality quite difficult to navigate and more of a cliché than I could admit to myself.

Some afternoons I would walk to the end of Loxley View and look out over the view it was named for. 

Some nights I would go there if I couldn’t sleep, staring into the twinkle of lives across the valley. The view there today is as stunning and the stiff breeze throws up this crow who seems to fit in well with my walk. I am still moved by this beauty. It is so simple and so true.

I still know one of the boys next door though he doesn’t call me Chicken any more. We don’t see each other too often but he is steadfast and good, and I am glad that he got to know us. It was camaraderie and curry that got me through that time, that chastened me out of wanting to grow up sophisticated so fast. It was this vista too that stilled me and took me back to myself. 

***
Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

Seeing the River

By Nicholas Crane Moore: 

The first river I loved was the Truckee, which my family floated every summer for years. It spilled gently out of Lake Tahoe, clear and cold in the heat of August. From my uncle’s raft, much was visible to astound a little boy. I could see tiny pebbles on the bottom through four feet of water. And small fish, brown and rainbow trout, flitting in and out of the raft’s slowly moving shadow. I could see my feet, magnified somehow by the water as they dangled in the river. But there was much that I could not see. 

The river, then, was nothing more than a highway of water coursing through the mountains. It was just a current towing us across a summer afternoon. It was a feeling. A sensation of sun and water splashing on bare skin. A memory of joy with cousins. It was not yet the centerpiece of a watershed, a catchment for runoff and debris. It was not yet a reflection of the environmental conditions around it.

Even as a child, the presence of a road alongside portions of the river seemed strange, somehow out of place, though I was unaware that oil and particles of car exhaust make their way into the water. Or that the paved roadway increases erosion by transforming rainfall and snowmelt into fast flowing sheets. There was a road, and there was a river. They were separate things. The influence of humans on our habitat was not yet something I understood.

Sometimes I miss those days, when I knew less about the harm we inflict on the natural world. Sometimes I wish I did not know, for instance, that the EPA classifies the upper Truckee as impaired based on sediment volumes that degrade aquatic habitat, largely a result of development in the watershed. That the river’s endemic fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout, survives today in only a small remnant of its former range is something I have wished I could forget.

As an environmental lawyer, it is part of my job to know, and to learn. I have had to acquire a great deal of information that is painful for one who loves nature to bear. Knowledge is power, indeed, but it can come at a cost. Of this price the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” One lived alone because others, he sensed, did not share his understanding of what he called the land organism; ecology in the late 1940s was a burgeoning, niche field. That is no longer the case, but there is an enduring truth to the notion that most of us are not equipped to discern the subtle evidence of a compromised landscape. Quite simply, as Leopold wrote, “Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”

In many ways, the modern world is not arranged to promote a deeper understanding of human effects on the environment. Our economic system depends on a certain level of obliviousness to the byproducts of consumption. Businesses in the Lake Tahoe region, for instance, find it in their most immediate interest to speak of the lake and its outlet river solely in terms of their stunning clarity and hue, their restorative qualities. The EPA’s qualms about sediment do not find their way into the brochures of ski resorts and boat rental outfits. Given basin waters are safe for swimming and drinking, I cannot really blame them. It would detract from the tourists’ experience—and perhaps the amount they are willing to spend—to learn that in escaping the grime of Los Angeles or San Francisco they have fled not to some pristine vestige of Eden, but to a beautiful place in which human habitation has similarly altered, to a lesser but still significant degree, the delicate balance of life. To know that one is contributing to that disruption, however insubstantially, would presumably dampen the vacation mood, if only for a moment. I know at times it has for me.

One of life’s challenges, I have found, is accepting that we have hurt someone we love. There can be an instinct to look away, to deny, to assume that everything is fine. But I have learned the hard way that it is only through seeing the pain, understanding its causes, and acknowledging our role that we can begin to heal the wound. I think the same is true of the landscapes we explore and inhabit, which are as infinitely complex, and as sensitive, as any person.

Judging by trends in social media, advertising, and travel, it is a common desire today to find a connection with the natural world. If one is to develop a meaningful relationship with a mountain, or a valley, or a river, I believe it is imperative to engage with that place by learning more about it. Not only about the way it works, the way its dynamic balance is achieved (which can be immensely satisfying), but about the ways in which it has been degraded, and made susceptible to further harm (which can be sobering). By doing this one can begin to love a place in an active, real sense—not in the way we say we love a TV show or a restaurant, but in the way we love a friend. Because protecting ourselves from knowledge of the damage we have caused does not protect either the people or the places that we love. It only leaves them vulnerable.

This is not to say that every road near a river should be torn up, or that it’s reasonable to demand utter purity from every water body. Humankind cannot live on this earth—not in anywhere remotely close to the quality of life and health that we now enjoy—without substantial impacts on its lands and waters. But I think we should at least know what those impacts are. We should understand the trade-offs. Laws like the federal National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, which require disclosure and analysis of the environmental consequences of an array of public and private endeavors, embody this goal. If nothing else, they are triumphs of transparency in an opaque, often sugarcoated world. Combined with the amplifying power of the internet, each of us now has at our fingertips more information than Aldo Leopold could have ever imagined. One need not live alone.

Though my visits to the Truckee are rarer now, they still fill me with wonder. The rich blue of the deep pools, the grace of water as it slides over boulders, the pull of the current coaxing my body downstream—phenomena that can be explained in a scientific sense—evoke a mystery that no amount of scrutiny can dissolve. When I swim in that clear, cold water, I am still a little boy. And yet the river is more to me now than it once was, layered over with learning and meaning. It has become a reminder to look for what is not easily seen, and to accept whatever I find. I love the river more than ever.

***

Nicholas Crane Moore is a writer and public interest environmental attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. His writing on the environment has appeared in Edge Effects magazine, the Revelator, Environs, the Daily Journal, and the Daily Californian.