'The Scabrous Memory Writhes Here, Underneath'

I’ve just learned that some thirty percent of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, is paved, covered in concrete and asphalt. That doesn’t count buildings and other structures. It amounts to roughly 384 square miles of ground surface that is “case-hardened, carapaced,” to use Maryann Corbett’s words. In land area, Houston is the size of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia combined. This includes roads and interstates that cover the landscape, as well as vast parking lots, often attached to abandoned factories and shopping malls. We have more than 3,800 miles of state-maintained roads in the county. Think of the heat reflected off those surfaces and the volume of rainwater that pools and puddles without being absorbed by the soil, plus the toxic runoff. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 dumped an estimated trillion gallons of water on Harris County. 

Here is Corbett’s “Pavement,” subtitled “Arlington, Virginia” and published in the journal Ecotone in 2020:

 

“Asphalt, bituminous, concrete, cement—

the whole place is case-hardened, carapaced.

The air shimmers with heat; tree roots can’t breathe;

no poured libation seeps down to the dead.

 

“When we were children, this was open ground,

farm field once, where we scraped and scrounged, intent

on grubbing up that other world, the past.

Old wounds—the Minié ball, the arrowhead—

 

spat blood here. Now the grimy runoff seethes

into the storm drain from the parking lot.

This is the way we cloak our own unease,

muzzling what the cracked clay might have said.

 

“The pavement lies tight-lipped, impenitent.

The scabrous memory writhes here, underneath.”

 

As a kid I was always aware of the subterranean world – the moles and worms, the buried human artifacts, the graves. I remember digging in an old trash heap in the woods behind our house and uncovering, among the rusted tin cans, glass and porcelain insulators from long-gone power lines. The glass was blue and the porcelain white. It was like digging up gems in suburban Cleveland. They weren’t Civil War relics but as close to treasure as we ever got.

    

Almost twenty years ago, at the suggestion of a rock-collecting editor, we took the boys to Lake Livingston, eighty miles north of Houston, to hunt along the shore for petrified wood, pottery shards, spear points and arrowheads. We returned with fifteen pounds of rose quartz and lake-polished stones, and one genuine prize – a honey-colored hide scraper seven inches long made of chert. My wife keeps it in her jewelry box. It’s a beautiful piece of human cunning and a bittersweet reminder of the boys when they were little.

 

All that pavement documented earlier has another human, non-ecological cost: it cuts us off from what’s going on beneath our feet. Kids, especially, love to dig and hunt. I think of Guy Davenport’s finest essay, “Finding,” collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). He describes his family’s weekend outings “to look for Indian arrows.” This was in southern South Carolina and northern Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s. He celebrates the joys of purposeful looking:

 

“What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things – earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem never to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums.

 

“Thoreauvian, because these outings, I was to discover, were very like his daily walks, with a purpose that covered the whole enterprise but was not serious enough to make the walk a chore or a duty. Thoreau, too, was an Indian-arrowhead collector, if collector is the word. Once we had found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them. Some men came from the Smithsonian and were given what they chose, and sometimes a scout troop borrowed some for a display at the county fair. Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

 

Among the most valuable skills we can teach our kids is attentiveness to their surroundings. Look under that rotting log. Dig in that alluring pile of trash in the empty lot.