Connecting

One of the first lessons that has been reinforced by what I've been learning is the depth of connections that flow between people and places in our various natural, built, and modified environments. I remember one experience I had almost four years ago, right after the conclusion of my first year at college: the dorms had shut down for the summer, and I had chosen to spend a week on my own, wandering between friends' houses by whatever means that presented themselves (I had left my trusty Chrysler at home for that school year). After a few days of drifting, I found myself sun-napping in the sand on the beach in Holland, MI, right along the confluence of the Grand River as it flows past the quaint and gaudy tourist spots out into the Lake Michigan blue. I read and slept and pondered how deep the waters might be, and whether those sorts of hidden, deep things even mattered: "What beauty and life is caught up down there in the flux of change, decay, and growth?"

Resting and, eventually, standing on the beach that day ended up being one of the more bright and clear experiences I had during that sometimes rough "first-year" transition, and it has stuck with me——although, until recently, it seemed a sort of far-removed, otherworldly sort of memory. With what I've begun to discover, though, I now see the patterns that connect me where I am now with that distant day. And it's not just my own memory that circulates between then and now, but an actual body of water that runs between that watershed moment in my past and my current place in this world. Just a mile or so south of me, in fact, is the current that continues to pass from outside of the city to the confluence in Lake Michigan, where the sediment and trash and industrial waste-waters flow out towards the blue horizon of the lake.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to get together with some friends and do an introductory clean-up project along a small stretch of Plaster Creek. Although our numbers were modest, the half-dozen of us that could make it out our gorgeous Saturday afternoon received a warm, autumnal introduction to the creek and, as was our intention, managed to harvest a fair bit of trash: about 8 trash bags of general litter and waste, some empty buckets, a hose, shopping carts, and a few other more bizarre items. We found that .

Another huge problem was the abundance of plastic bags that we found strung through the roots and grasses and branches along the banks, sometimes at knee-level or higher because of 1) the wind and 2) the creek's unhealthy propensity to flood with agricultural run-off (i.e., that E. coli stuff) and urban drainage. Nearly impossible to untangle, these synthetic pouches collect all sorts of secondary debris, disintegrate into even messier shreds, and stand out like tattered surrender flags where there should be plentiful riparian growth.