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.
The firehouse at Snow and Dresden had a gravel driveway in the back, which yielded a number of Paleozoic fossils, all lost in the many moves since. I have no idea where Parma got its gravel--the question may not have occurred to me then--but I suspect from nearby. I know that I found a decent trilobite somewhere around there.
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