a white man speaks of rivers

quite cold this morning, a scant 8 °F at the airport. i wore everything except the goggles, which i would have if i had found them. sorry, i have no pictures, as the older son took the camera with him this morning. the bench has a two-inch thick, wind-sculpted layer of snow atop it, white, in its way, but glinting yellow in the slanting morning sun, slanting in nearly as low as it gets, just two weeks shy of the solstice. the deer is looking ghastly; i saw crows there yesterday, and from a quick glance as i rode by it appears as though it is being eaten from the rear end forward. so this circle is closing perhaps relatively quickly.

the song stuck in my head is “i’ve known rivers”, by gary bartz (the alto saxophonist from baltimore). it has lyrics that are based on a poem by langston hughes, called “the negro speaks of rivers”, and musically is one of those two-chord major mode things that bartz and his contemporaries exploited so fully in the 1970s. hearing this song again is heavily symbolic; it strongly connects events in my past with the present-day reality. there is not only mr. bartz’ beguiling alto playing, which inspired me so much back then, inspired me to pick up the alto again, in fact, not abandoning the tenor but adding to it, giving myself “another hand” as john coltrane once said about the soprano. i could perhaps be saddened to remember a time when the only thing that i needed to make myself happy was to be able to play alto saxophone like gary bartz. life will never be that simple again, but don’t you know, being able to play the alto like gary bartz would still make me just as happy today as it would have then, if only for a while.

but that’s kind of the point - only for a while. happiness only has real value during that time in which you are happy, and right then, well, it is the most important thing. it is sort of the life lesson for me, that what it means to be grown up is that i will move from time to time, being fully whatever i am during each of those times, whether that is being incandescently happy or seethingly angry or exhilarated with exercise and cold and alertness. in terms of the cliché, make sure you eat all your cake whenever you have it. then go on and eat the next thing that you have.

but to be connected with that young man and his saxophones, and his piano, is to also be connected with his fascination with rivers and his desire to stand or sit beside them and watch them flow. and that has not changed either, but has also been added to by education and career. i think i can honestly say that the study and application of hydrodynamics, of fluvial mechanics, of geomorphology has only increased my affection for rivers, has only deepened my appreciation of their symbolism, rivers as a metaphor for the eternal renewal and continuity of everything. there is supposedly a chinese proverb that speaks to how rivers flow in places uninhabitable by man. i need to find those words, because they resonate with me.

what is less satisfying in this present, however, is how my understanding of environmental regulations and the hard reality of human impacts on the quality of the planet’s waters relates to an earlier notion of the horrors of pollution and the need to “save the earth”. i makes me sad, sometimes, to be so far away from those achingly sincere saviors of the planet. it’s not that i have compromised my principles or something like that, but rather that i’ve gained an understanding of the scope of the problem, the scale of the problem, and have been in the bellies of various parts of the problem and have had opportunities to learn what actions can help and what actions can’t. and this is not secret knowledge; to be sure, we try to take every opportunity to share what we know, to explain how the science works, and even how the regulations work, and to show how there are some problems you can fix, and some you can’t, and some that are not really even problems in the first place. what is tiring is the stance that some self-styled environmentalists take, that they must smoke out the culprits, the so-called “polluters”, and get them to just do whatever it takes to clean up their mess, so that the earth can be pure again. and that is just so naïve (not to mention just plain wrong) that i can only shake my head and wonder. in particular, the portrayal of wastewater treatment plants as the enemies of clean water is revisionism of the highest order. whose feces is it, exactly? when you pull that handle and flush it down, do you believe some toiling multitude of elves somewhere (in hardhats and blue coveralls) will make it “go away”, for ever and ever? or could it possibly be more complicated than that, more like the so-called “real world” where there are causes and effects and residuals and consequences and things like that?

if man is here living on this planet, man will leave his mark. moreover, the nature and appearance of that mark is necessarily dynamic; the mark looks a little different every day. it doesn’t ever have to be ugly, but it can never go away. any appreciation of the distance between pristine and polluted has to consider the nature of the mark, so that we can place the mark in the right spot between the two. the science of analytical chemistry has evolved to the point where we are fully capable of quantifying amounts of substances in the environment that are wholly insignificant, not just to the relatively robust organisms we call “human” but even to the most sensitive forms of life. yesterday a colleague shared with us a presentation he gave at a recent conference, summarizing the work he was doing modeling PCBs in the delaware river (if you like whopping-big downloads you can learn more here). we are all just so staggeringly far from what the average person might consider “clean” that it is hard to know where to begin. the idea of implementing a TMDL (there is good information about this at http://www.drbc.net/) for PCBs, the production of which has been banned for decades, might strike the uninitiated as strange, or even unnecessary. isn’t that stuff as supposed to be cleaned up and taken care of? what do you mean, it’s going to take 100 years no matter how we approach the problem? what do you mean, we should just leave the sediments where they are? and so on.

i’ve gone on too long. i need to get back to work...in this case, on a temperature model of a reservoir in georgia, so that a new discharge can go into the lake without resulting in unacceptable increases in temperature at the fish hatchery downstream. this is some fancy modeling shit, but for now i just have to get the thing to run without crashing.