Originally published by email, October 5 2024
Hello, friends! I have not written to you all since May - can you believe it? Summer got strange and busy. Projects grew like vines, putting tendrils into the available time each day. It was a time of action and a time of focused communication. And it's done, and my energies for the Dispatch are back to historic norms. So here we go!
A Productive Summer
A beautiful neighbor, tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), getting fast food nectar outta this 'Black Knight' butterfly bush (Buddleja genus) in the lower 'Chessboard' garden. These plants are controversial for their profligate tendencies, tending in some areas towards invasiveness. That said, they have, pound for pound, attracted more pollinators faster than anything else I've planted, and I'm here for the widening of the trophic cascade. I've even seen hummingbirds swing by!
2024 was my second full summer here in Observatory HIll, and it has made for wonderful garden bounties. The back garden is established in the ground. The ferns have moved from the front room (indoors) to the area below the edges of the deck (outdoors), where rain water and excess water from the potted plants gets caught by the ferns and the spongy matter around them, as it would in a natural forest. Slowing the pace of water as it drains from this ridge is an important duty to my neighbors in the watershed below.
The potted plants, a seed- and food- and flower-generating group, grew wonderfully on the back deck, the sunniest part of the north-facing property. The common milkweed I bought last year made a beautiful crop of flowering plants and then seed pods. The two swamp milkweeds I ordered this last December did well too - I have saved dozens of seeds to grow out seedlings over the winter, and plant them next spring down in the real garden ground. I grew tomatoes and peppers, and rhododendrons too.
It's so important to my mental health to have beautiful things growing. Many friendly indoor plants spent the summer months on the back deck thriving, and they've returned fat and healthy to the inside of the house, near the windows. It's not the summer sun, but I try to put some artificial LEDs onto them for winter, so they don't totally freak out at the lack of any photoperiod at all. For my birthday, I was gifted a beautiful dwarf orange tree, and so now my front room is not a sunroom but an orangerie.
It feels like Fall when I work out on the back deck, putting the garden to bed. Annuals in pots I uproot and compost, putting the pots on outdoor shelves for the winter. Perennials, I have been preparing for a winter of torpor in the cool, temperature stable basement, by pruning everything above the soil, and carefully labeling them for future reference.
Brook Street Poop Lagoon
Some Channel 11 footage of the Poop Lagoon at its worst. You can find this TV update and more on this youtube playlist.
It took all summer, but I got the city and sewer agency to drain and (mostly) rectify an open sewer lagoon in one of the City's neighborhoods.
What a mess. This fetid swamp of murky water has been growing and deepening down at the end of Brook Street, in Carrick, one of Pittsburgh's southern neighborhoods (and annexed former town). The lagoon began its life more than a hundred years ago, as a covered chamber to redirect the local creeks and rainwater flows, while also allowing for very occasional overflows from the combined sewer, an 15in pipe which drains the neighborhood. Over the centuries, the cap failed, and the lagoon filled in, becoming a strange, buried system that was usually a sump but was occasionally a sewage seep.
In 2019, that all changed. A massive landslide from the '50s-era hilltop development above (Bon Air) crushed and blocked up the City of Pittsburgh-owned outflow pipe, disabling whatever draining function the lagoon had left, and causing the water to pool up into an extensive lagoon, rising and leaking across the road, straight into the brook. The built up water disabled the proper function of the combined sewer, causing raw sewage to exit the system into the lagoon instead of down the (perhaps under-capacity) 15in pipe (which the landslide seems to have missed).
Annotations on a 1939 aerial photograph, from the Pittsburgh Historic Maps ARCGIS
For the last six years, the City and the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (a separated entity, now rebranded PgH20) pointed fingers at each other and took no action to relieve the residents. Many neighbors called the lagoon into the local councilman, Anthony Coghill, as well as the Mayor's 311 hotline, but when those complaints were forwarded to PWSA, they seem to have been immediately binned. Certainly they were never passed along to regulators.
I filed a 311 complaint in July of 2023 about the lagoon, and in July 2024, the lagoon was still there. Civic issues should not have anniversaries of any kind, except to mark their resolution.
I made a lot of calls, escalating who I spoke with until I found someone willing to take responsibility or point towards a more responsible party. I don't have the full story, but it became clear by late August that the Pennsylvania Utility Commission (the body which oversees utilities of all types across the Commonwealth) had never been told about the lagoon's existence by any party until I brought the situation to their attention - such silence is a serious breach.
That lack of transparency is something PWSA seems to do to everyone. They have not sent any kind of notice over the last half-decade to any of the affected parties - the hundreds of houses and dozens of businesses who expect that their poop leaves Carrick in a safe and sanitary manner, when PWSA and the city have known for years that it just leaks out of the bottom of the hill. I filed complaints with the Pennsylvania Utility Commission (#4003670), the federal Environmental Protection Agency (#1405515), and the local Allegheny County Health Department, as well as the Allegheny County Conservation District, the organization which issues permits related to overland (natural) drainages.
In the end, I think it was the councilman's insistence that got shovels in 'dirt' by September. Anthony Coghill lobbied the mayor's office and Department of Public Works to get immediate action for the neighborhood, and that's commendable.
In August, WPXI brought an aerial drone out to take shots of the lagoon, which was pretty wild. Apologies for the screenshot crud - it's not easy to extract stills from their web video player.
Who knows if the agency investigations, which are often a remote request for internal documents (a form of oversight open to deception-by-omission), will reveal the historical truth of the six years of inaction. I have no idea what action happened behind closed doors, but the actual lagoon is getting addressed in the present day. It was a busy September of excavation and pumping and gravel-moving and new culvert installation.
Over the last few weeks, the City has rebuilt a realigned drainage pipe on their half of the lagoon-site. Throughout this on-the-ground process, the local Councilman's office, Anthony Coghill, has been helpful for residents.
Now, PWSA claims that their system will return to 'normal dryweather function', but they also left a diesel pump running for a week solid trying to drain said system (and keep the poop water off the city's Department of Public Works workers), and still won't update the residents. I've been told to contact their press office. PWSA's press office did finally return calls this week, but not with any new information. I was expecting a call from their Sewer Operations Project Manager, but he left the company in the last week or two. I have been told that the Allegheny County Health Department swings by the site each day in an unmarked vehicle and fines PWSA daily for whatever mess they've left across the neighborhood. PWSA still has not announced any kind of plan, or a concept of a plan, or even an explanation, of what went wrong over the last five years in terms of inaction. It's crazy that they knowingly leaked millions of gallons of sewage, unaddressed, into the middle of the city. I was told by their press office to expect some kind of letter-to-affected-customers within two weeks, so mid-October.
The historical details and system size is something I've had to piece together, and may be riddled with inaccuracies and suppositions thanks to the many bureaucratic blank walls I hit in my quest for more information. 'No' is not a valid answer when the public would like additional information about their own infrastructure. I was told that perhaps terrorists would abuse such knowledge. What more damage could a terrorist do to Carrick that our own utility hasn't already done?
The poop lagoon / brook alignment as of September 25, 2024. The sign does not stop the neighborhood kids from poking at the frogs and eels that you can find down there.
WPXI, our local News Channel 11, has generously covered the goings-on down at the lagoon, and it seems like that public journalistic pressure is an effective tool to spur the various players to action. I don't love that the City and Sewer Authority are stretched so thin as to be driven by the latest-and-loudest projects, those which are a public shame.
Going forward into the coming three quarters of this century, I hope our public leaders can be clear with the public and with their regulators about the inadequacies and hazards of our civic infrastructure systems, even (and especially) if the extent of failure is embarrassingly vast. They might only have legal requirements to discuss such things retrospectively, but they have a moral imperative to start talking about them proactively and frankly.
Pittsburgh has had two hundred years of behind-closed-doors governance, with dubious and unjust results. Perhaps we can move on to a different way of doing business, one with a lot less lying and avoiding calls?
Axis and Field (more Land Art!)
The fast-friends of the Lightning Field - Jacob, Roberto, Barbara, and me, Connor.
Last year, my friend Jacob and I ventured to see City, the enormous sculpted land form which Michael Heisner spent the last fifty years creating out in the remote Nevada scrublands. This year, we saw two more pieces, both begun in a similar wave of Land Art in the 1970s. Both of these were in New Mexico (City is in a different desert, north of Las Vegas, NV). We flew into Albuquerque, rented a car, and spent a few days driving from one side of the state to the other, before departing again from the Sunport to our respective east coast cities. First, we visited the Star Axis. The next day, we went to the Lightning Field and stayed there overnight.
NO PHOTOS.
This seems to be the rule with these pieces. No one knows yet how to steward these things into the future, so extreme conservatism is the robotic, logical choice. NO PHOTOS. I'll be using photographs of some of their printed public material instead.
Star Axis
[from the recently published Library of Esoterica: Sacred Sites]
I've had the privilege of visiting many celestially aligned sites across the world. To see the north star appear just in line with the main axis of a space is an ancient, primordial comfort. To watch the sunset line up with the city blocks or the forest trees and make thousands of parallel beams is an ancient delight that still enthralls. Star Axis is a serious, carefully aligned site in that grand human tradition, this one constructed to unfold and explore the long periodic relationship our planet has with Polaris, the star we currently think of as our North Star.
The piece is a complex pyramid and staircase, combined with the high sweeping walls of a huge, open pavilion, built into the side of a mesa. To ascend the outside of the pyramid is to bring one's head and eyes into the focal center of the sun, its shadow, and the vast horizon around you. To wander the grounds is to be girdled by the great ring of constellations which we slowly realign through every 26,000 years (axial precession).
To ascend the eleven story staircase, looking always north, up at a small circular window at the top, is to peer at the spiralling nightly 'orbit' of Polaris, itself not ever perfectly aligned with our planet's polar axis, but getting incredibly close (the closest it ever is) in the year 2100 AD. That's the lowest step on these eleven stories of stairs. As you climb, you are moving yourself forward in time through that celestial procession, as if the huge star-walls outside were shifting (it is we who shift, but that's harder to visualize), and the pole moves away from its alignment towards Polaris, towards Vega and other stars. Midway up, the window has grown from dime sized to quarter sized, letting you see the increasing 'inaccuracy' of Polaris' alignment. The steps are labeled in a geometric pattern (accelerating as you get towards the top) through time, with the top step being 13,000 years in the future (or, if you are 'running the clock backwards', 13,000 years in the past), when Polaris is least aligned. At this point, the window is as wide as your field of vision, seven or eight feet, and the future-star's nightly circle brings it under the horizon and then way back up, an enormous arc that is nothing like the fixed-point nature of the star as we perceive it now.
After eleven stories of steps, even at the unhurried pace of a curious art-visitor trying to drink it all in, one has a bodily appreciation for that deep pulse of 26,000 years of cyclical time. Ours is a dynamic universe. We are embedded in big, but knowable, cycles and rhythms. We are smaller than we think, but we connect and flow with patterns of light that are profoundly old and distant.
Lightning Field
[from the recently published Library of Esoterica: Sacred Sites]
"No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing." - Prince Feisal, Lawrence of Arabia .
The wide open spaces of the Southwest invite big questions about one's place in the landscape. One is small in the American Southwest, whether in the cactus-rich Sonoran desert or the yucca plains of the Mojave. Slow navigation reveals animal life, sparse and water-conserving. Lightning Field presents an 'empty' desert space of exact dimensions - one mile wide and one kilometer high. A grid of poles whose tips are at equal elevation grid the space out, and nominally attract lightning bolts towards them during the frequent storms.
There is a little cabin adjacent to the Lightning Field, a home away from home next to this odd space. Once our guides dropped us off, the four of us visitors were alone with the Field for about twenty hours. We four were myself, my friend Jacob, and a couple from Mexico City, Barbara and Roberto. Maybe five cars passed during our time. The isolation and remoteness was an important factor.
Left with a demarked space in a vast and trackless world, we had little choice but to wander and explore. The alignment of the poles is quite precise. To approach a row of 25 of them (or a column of 16) feels like moving through an doorframe or space-where-a-window-would-be, but intense and palpapable, like the air pressure had changed. Barbara and I had a similar thought about it, when we talked later: zona perdita, the place to be overlooked. It made me think too of Area X, the subject of the book and film Annihilation.
Knowing the visible distances so clearly - the poles are visible most times except high noon - the weather and light become animated phenomena of knowable size and guessable distance. Just sitting and watching the place was enough to feel a great profundity. In daylight, the space was wonderfully alive. Hearty plants formed water-retaining ridges of their past sprouts. Little lizard-toads made themselves known as one passed by, scuttling at speed. Small birds, the smallest I've seen, landed on low thornbushes like regular birds land on trees.
----
The book I photographed for the above images, Sacred Sites, was published just after my visit. I found it synchronistic that the publication places these two sites on adjacent pages; the rest of the book is not otherwise so geographically organized. The book lists them as places of minimalism and detachment from the modern world, a cousin to the intentions of each site. The rest of the book lists temples, mosques, pilgrimage squares, holy caves, and many other physical sites associated with religion and spirituality, and that sacredness was also not an explicit intention of either site. Both sites speak to an idea which is deeply artistic but not necessarily religious: the profound. Star Axis is a particular, mathematically precise hinge between earth's poles and the star Polaris, establishing a human connection to that long cycle of shifting light. Lightning Field gives our sense-making measurements a physicality in this small part of the land, enough to expand the precision of one's senses.
Each of them gave me a feeling of expanded knowing similar to the feeling I get from a really good museum exhibit, or an excellent concert. I feel honored and privileged to have experienced them. I wish both sites would be replicated (or, more specifically, relocalized) across every state, so that more of us can walk the earth with such profundity under our belts. We would benefit from such cultural knowledge. Other civilizations on this continent were much more prolific with their sacred site alignment and creation, to their benefit.
An internet meme that is not wrong. Out of all the objects westerners have built on the continent, the land art pieces will survive past much of our other building efforts, and their meaning will be much more legible to future historians than our thoughtless suburbs and wanton highways.
Laying out the Field Guide to Newtopia
[Scott's incredible gift to me, the Alpha copy of the Field Guide, which he did a fast layout of and had physically printed.]
The last few months have been a rush of work. I have deep gratitude to my friend Scott. Since the last Dispatch, he took the draft manuscript of the Field Guide, typeset it roughly, and sent it off for printing. Two copies, one for me and one for him. The miracle of 2024? Each copy was less than $20, for a print run of two. The printing turnaround time was just weeks, not months.
This physical prototype is a game-changer. I've really written a 400 page book. I question myself - it's a real mess! But it is more real than not-real. So what's left between this version and a final finished one?
Layout is the biggest step, and one I've put off for years in this process. I was wrong to do so - I should have jumped to page layout a year ago, and worked on drafts from that place, rather than the text-only manuscript without visual structure.
It is a physical artifact I'm making and the physical page has the final say when questions are asked. Only so much text will fit nicely. Illustrations must be marshalled like cavalry. The page edge is a sacred place where the edge indexes are to be printed. The page layout tool Scott recommended is the industry standard alternative to the Adobe Suite, a program called Affinity. (Adobe has been moving its products towards AI tools and built-in licensing structures, neither of which sits well with me. Why work with tools which claim ownership, and which make one's own ownership-of-craft dubious? My work is mine, and I don't need to tithe to a tech company just to create books.)
[A screencap from Affinity, showing the bounding boxes of these linked text boxes, on a left-facing page (the spine would be on the right edge of this page)]
I have middle school memories of using print layout programs. There was a class newsletter, maybe? I remember the long seconds it would take for the computer to chug away when one moved a text box somewhere new. Affinity, for all its idiosyncrasies, is like having two fists of middle-school lightning. Text flows with satisfying speed. The layer tools are easy to use, and let me quickly add the trove of images I've been drawing. I've been migrating the manuscript into page-by-page layout. It is a big process but not an endless one. The master pages function allows for very fast templating of material with consistent structure. And the Field Guide to Newtopia is the most structured material I've ever created - a nested table of tables of information about this fictional planetoid. I've grown and the software has grown too.
Soft Call for Artists
As you may guess from the screen capture above, each page will see around six illustrations, all greyscale, most hexagonal. I have many of these illustrations drawn already, but I have many more to go, and I don't want to be the only artist that brings this world to life. After I've finished bringing the manuscript into laid out pages, I'll be seeking that art, and artists to draw it. Maybe that's you, dear reader? If you are interested, reply back with questions. I'll be compensating my collaborators, using the WAGE artist fee schedule found over here. In general, I seek a greyscale, comic style with a focus on biology and fantastical architecture, ideally as ProCreate digital drawing files.
This is such an exciting time in the project. Newtopia comes alive, not just for me but for a growing number of readers and collaborators. I hope to have the book out by next year.
Blessings and Kind Regards
Tuesday and Josh on a Wisconsin camping trip!
I hope that fall finds you all relaxing into the end-of-year. The fading plants and falling leaves remind me to let my own days go silent too. It is alright to rest, to restart. The earth does it every year. We do it every day.
Warm regards from Pittsburgh,
Connor
