"There's a meadow I can't stop coming back to" - Carl Phillips


There's a place I can't stop coming back to. A short walk from the house where I grew up there's an opening in a fence just off the street. I've walked down these broken stairs, this wooded path to the Mississippi River more times than I can remember. I've photographed every inch of this path and this beach; I've explored the places you can't see from the path. I call this place White Sand Beach, but it's more than that. It's solace, it's my city, it's part of home.

Homeostasis

Homeostasis

Homeostasis—the tendency of interdependent elements to form a relatively stable equilibrium

***

Summer mornings and evenings, in the back meadow, this was where my sister’s husband could be found. An ardent communitarian, for two decades he’d tended the public land that extended from the back of their property to the bike trails that were once railroad tracks. But the year of Jim’s cancer diagnosis he could not mow or trim, weed or pull, plant or water. And this grieved him.

I remember how Jim's story began. One moment, so blessedly normal—the next, a whisper, a shift, and suddenly all reference points were speeding away.

Watching an unremarkable devastation

I am watching, waiting for the signs of devastation to reveal themselves.

The patch of land and water between a row of industrial plants and rail yards appears as an idyllic Midwestern wetland. An inlet situated near downtown Saint Paul, Pig’s Eye Lake is a stillness of the Mississippi River.

Here the river that carved the city into its separate parts, its caves and cliffs, resists its own impulse. It stalls out, lingers in a backwater that is still Pig’s Eye, historic Saint Paul, the part that didn’t have its raucous drunken soul soothed over by the Catholics.

The land has become some strange mutant, but it doesn’t reveal itself easily.

Night City

“But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark …”
—Li-Young Lee

1.

Second shift. The night drags. Half-burnt lights flicker like an unbraided nerve.

Hunched over the day’s embers, we gash through stories, mired in our secret wells of paranoia & dreams.

We hold the tattered edges of the city’s story.

We warm ourselves by its fire. The city is burning. The presses are burning.

Bleary, insomniac, we step into the shadowed streets.

It's Spring

It's spring. Suburban Avenue Pond is showing signs of life. I've seen several Canada geese grazing in the field next to the pond. As soon as they get the lay of the land, I expect to see them in my backyard. There are a few mallards as well, though no other waterfowl as far as I can tell. I wish them all good luck in their search for fish and plants in the brackish water of the pond. Suburban Avenue Pond serves as a watershed for storm water; and there is an "interrelationship between what happens on land and what happens in the water."

Integrity: A Work In Progress

Sigh.

“The building has strong integrity,” Mary Klein, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, said to me as we looked out the sunroom window to the red barn past the backyard lawn. I frowned, she chuckled and was quick to add more.

       

“I know it doesn’t look like it, but the structure of the building is very strong; and the interior is mostly new,” she said. 


(names, besides the writer's, have been changed)

Stranger Danger/ Karen

    I was camping alone on a lake on the border of the Boundary Waters Canoe area, about 12 miles up the Echo Tail, and I heard noises outside my tent—sounds of something moving, panting, thumping. I heard pans jangling. Then, I heard water being lapped from my dog’s dish. My dog was curled up at my feet, sound asleep.  I was scared.
     I grabbed for my cell phone, and punched in 911:  “I am having an emergency -- animals near my tent, come quick,”  I imagined  telling the dispatcher.  The sounds of the beast came closer, then receded, then moved closer again. I forced myself to acknowledge that only once in twenty years has a bear attacked a camper in the BWCA. Bees kill more campers than bears, and falling and drowning are the greatest risks. Then the noises stop. My heart slows to a regular rhythm. Eventually, I sleep, and a few hours later I am awakened by squirrels racing back and forth across my site, up and down trees, cheeping loudly at each other, not at all concerned with me. 

Lessons from a Canine Landscape

Last week our dog Olive jumped out of the window of a moving car while on our way to obedience class, killed the pet hen on our friend’s hobby farm, jumped the 4-foot fence into our neighbor’s yard, ran head first into a freshly painted wall, and dragged a 8-foot section of newly-trimmed branch across the back yard. Olive has three legs.

Olive lost her right front leg when she was just six months old. I don’t know how she came to be so injured that amputation was the only solution. You see, Olive came to live with us just a little over two months ago. In her short life (she’s just 14 months old) she lost her leg and her first family. She was surrendered to a shelter in southern Minnesota just before the end of the year. Having recently lost their home to foreclosure her family could no longer afford to care for her. Olive was then passed from shelter to shelter until a rescue organization retrieved her.

A Building, A River, A Swan

Report: In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on the Eau Claire River, Raymond Gillette started a rubber company in 1917. This became U.S. Rubber, the city's largest employer and one of world's leading producers of automobile tires. By 1965, it was the third largest tire plant in the U.S. In 1967, U.S. Rubber changed its name to Uniroyal. In 1990, Michelin purchased the plant, and a year later, the last 1375 employees were laid off and the plant closed.
1.9 million square foot of unused space, called Banbury Place.
I’m asking why.

How much can an empty house hold?

Homestead on County Road N

Established circa 1870.

Samuel Hicks, occupation farmer, from Ireland, traveled with his wife Mary (English), and their two children, Helen and George, from Illinois to Wisconsin and built this house around 1870.

Samuel and Mary had four more children, Jane, Francis, Alice, and Scott, as listed on the 1880 census.

There aren't many of these houses left. I no longer see one every quarter mile along the county roads. I get glimpses of some, still occupied, hidden in thick copses of trees on old farmsteads. On some farms this house stands empty while another newer, modern farmhouse- split level or ranch- has been built next to or behind it. I lived in a house like this that had been used for grain storage. You could see the imprint to corn kernels on the wooden floors. A farmhouse like this one, on the farm opposite our driveway, was torn down, and replaced with a mobile home. Occasionally the local fire department burns down one of these houses during a volunteer firefighter training session.

You Are Where You Eat

The eastern boundary of my Minneapolis neighborhood is formed by the Mississippi River, while the western edge follows a line of industrial buildings along Hiawatha Avenue. Some of the buildings are in use, some are vacant, but one grain elevator in particular, with broken windows and a faded wheat stalk painted on its side, catches my attention each time I pass by.

My house in Ghana was on the edge of the village, between the road, the clinic, and the neighbors’ steeply sloping farm fields. Local livestock – cows, goats, chickens – frequented my yard for grazing, but one rooster in particular, with curly feathers and a jerking, frenetic stride, caught my attention each time he trotted by.

VIEWS from the BROKEN MIDDLE

 THE THORNTON QUARRY by Terry Evans

FROM BARRIE JEAN BORICH:  I can't post this photograph directly—as I don't have copyright—so for now click the underlined link above to see a gorgeous version of one of my broken places (as I define this idea. Please feel free to create your own definition.) And here are a few lines from an essay I published recently in ECOTONE—to give you just one idea of a way to approach the violence and beauty we will discuss in this course. I'm interested here in ways to acknowledge the brokenness and restoration that comes of remembering the ways we are made by that which we've left behind :

One of Terry Evans' photographs frames a limestone quarry in the near-south suburbs, close to the house where I lived when I was that girl, still in high school. While sitting in our kitchen, my family occasionally heard the excavation blasts, almost loud enough to rattle the plates in our cabinets. This was some of the limestone out of which the downtown skyline was made. The Thornton Quarry I remember is a grind of trucks and shovels, steel against stone, but from the air, in Evans’s photographs, the scarred stone walls become also sculpted sand, the truck road descending to the canyon bottom remade as a delicate spiral.  

from "GEOGRAPHICAL SOLUTIONS [A Map of the Middle West with Insets Past and Current]"  by Barrie Jean Borich, published in Ecotone #8/ The Brutality Issue, Fall 2009

Former Glory

When I look at this grain elevator, I see the history and former glory of my neighborhood. More attractive than researching the building’s owner, its purpose, or its future, I like to imagine its back-story and former backdrop.

Dorothy Day Center

At the heart of St. Paul, there's a dead zone. The streets are empty. Many of the towers have high vacancy rates. The city feels empty, ghostly and full of sorrow to me. When I was a teenager, we went downtown on the weekends. Now, after dark, there are small spots of activity and other zones, at bus stops, where teenagers fight.

July 2008

July 2008--

My brother-in-law, Jim, was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme stage IV. These photos were taken a day or two after surgical resection of Jim's brain tumor. In the days after this grim diagnosis, grappling with an uncertain future, my sister, Sara, and her beloved husband took respite in sleep. Day and night they retired for countless siestas, often entwined, dreaming cures.

Integrity

I came across this old American barn when in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It is situated on a plot of land, right near a creek, across from a large field which appeared to be free from any sort of farming.

"There's a meadow I can't stop coming back to" - Carl Phillips

There's a place I can't stop coming back to. A short walk from my house there's an opening in a fence just off the street. I've walked down these broken stairs, this wooded path to the river more times than I can remember. I call this place White Sand Beach, but it's more than that. It's solace, it's my city, it's part of home.

Barren Pond

This pond with surrounding park is located in Battle Creek-Ramsey County. The park is framed by Suburban Avenue-north, White Bear Avenue-west, Upper Afton Road-south, and Ruth Street-east. The pond once provided habitat for egrets, herons, loons, Canada geese, and mallards.

Don't Tread on me

Tripod Wonder

When I think of landscapes that represent home to me, I think of the lands that surround me, but I also think of the bodies of beings that nurture in me a sense of home. Olive is one of those beings. We adopted Olive from a rescue organization just a few weeks ago.