Write Yourself In

Ann (USA)

[Writing experiment]

In my preliminary first weekend exercises, I imagined myself as a human drone able to zoom close and then far, spotting the day glow edges of threads of my research. This varied flight allows me to spot loose ends to tie together in my investigations' complex, relational weaving. This writing metaphor helped me frame week one's writing exercise on 'write yourself in', which led me to focus my visual research on flood lines and water lines in a very hyperlocal sense.

I live on a floodplain and have gathered some background about past engineering and design projects that reclaimed this former swampland. I recently located project notes between the Olmsted landscape architecture office and John Ripley Freeman, an MIT civil and hydraulic engineering professor. I wrote myself into a meeting to explain that the concrete straightening and channelizing of the Alewife Brook and Alewife Brook Parkway (1909-1912) may have been a success and is listed in the US National Register of Historic Places in Cambridge, MA) but it is problematic. It may have audaciously drained the swampland, reduced industrial runoff and malaria, and allowed inexpensive enough reclaimed property at the edge (for me to be a property owner). But I explained that more than 100 years later, we still have sewage dumped into the straightened brook during storms, and with climate change and sea-level rise, we will soon be reverting to swamp land. Please imagine other solutions!

I often escaped by walking along creek beds and railroad tracks when young. I find the most comfort when walking at the edges and on paths less known–urban wilds. This summer, I am trying to reconnect with others through walking. I invited a fellow mother of 23-year-old twins who now lives nearby (we have been loosely connected since our children were kindergarten-age in school together in another neighborhood). We walk quickly and leave the groomed paths at the edge of the lab and corporate park. She says that she has not gone this way before. I lead as I wandered this same path by myself a couple of weeks ago. We follow a highway ramp where the path is overgrown and are surprised by a break in the chainlink fence, revealing a body of water that we can't quite place. I consult a map the following day and let her know it was Little Pond that we viewed in the breech (the same water system as Alewife Brook, part of the former Great Swamp).