When first signing up for this course, I was not really sure what to expect. I guess at first when I was thinking of nature writing, I was thinking about Thoreau, John Muir and other conventional nature writers of the past. I have always enjoyed writers like these ones and have taken solace in reading about their encounters with this pristine image of nature involving lakes, flowers, mountains and the sky. These images resonated with me and inspired a lot of my own journaling and meditations about the outdoors, especially as I have traveled to our state and national parks. In my visits to these places though, there has always been something unsettling to me about how some of these places, at times, seem to act more like a business than a retreat for lovers of peace and beauty, so it has been increasingly difficult for me to reconcile even these places as places of true nature due to their influx of human activity and economics.

Coming into class with ideas like these, I was intrigued by the title of “21^st century Nature Writing” because I wanted the ability to open my eyes to the differing perspectives of how people could view and write about nature in our anthropocentric age. In the first class though, as we discussed these complex topics about how we were supposed to view nature in the 21^st century and how we were to reconcile using digital tools to write about nature, it was reassuring how others in the class, living in different environments with different surroundings of “nature” shared the same concerns about these issues as I did. Going through the readings of the course, I think they were really carefully chosen to challenge our typical notions of nature. The varying degrees of nature they exposed us to varied from the rolling prairie lands of Kansas to the inner city of L.A., with narratives sometimes focusing on primarily geological and environmental change, such as Jonathan Byer’s “Memories of Ice,” to very human focused narratives such as Lauret E. Savoy’s “Trace: Memory, History, Race and American Landscape.” The variations in the readings really helped me to open my eyes to a wider view of nature and also inspired me to be creative in the place we chose to focus on and how we went about telling the story of this place.

Before this class began, when I knew that we were to eventually choose a place of nature and do a project on it, I was assuming Lizzie and I would choose a place like Letchworth, because of its grandeur and prestige as a place of nature. However, as we began to do more research, our research librarian, Liz, mentioned something about the Genesee Valley Greenway. I had never before heard about this place, which surprised me because the Greenway connects my home in Rochester and my home in Geneseo. As Lizzie and I did more research we became really intrigued by the Greenway and its past history as a canal bed, railroad tracks and current day nature trail. Along with this historical intrigue, we also wanted to use the Greenway to challenge ourselves when thinking about how nature could manifest itself in more simple places, rather than just in our state parks.  

In creating this website, the archives really helped to give life to this place and inspire a lot of creativity with our writing. I had never taken part in archival research before, and this project gave me the opportunity to realize how cool old maps, journals and newspaper clippings can be. It was so much fun for me to look through these archival materials and use these voices from the past to create a more real narrative for me that would not have been possible if I was just looking through secondary sources. As I would read through journals of an old boat captain reflecting on his adventures as a kid on the old Genesee Valley Canal, the place would come alive to me and I could hear the sounds of the boat and its horn and people hollering at the various locks as I walked along the old canal bed on the present day Greenway. These archives really gave me a profound appreciation for the place and its history, with these archives being a good spur for the imagination to inspire my own writing about the place.

Before this course, I never would have considered myself to be good with technology. I would always get easily frustrated when trying to do things on a computer if they were not functioning properly, and working with WordPress often rekindled these frustrations. However, after creating this website, I am very proud of myself somewhat overcoming these struggles to create a website with a lot of technical tools within it. I am very proud with how JuxtaposeJS and ArcGIS cascade worked out in the website and how they fit in pretty seamlessly with the rest of the work.

Putting together the archival research, digital tools and personal narratives really helped to give me a clear vision of what I wanted the project to be about. It was useful to look at the history and look at the trail as it is today and explore how the trail was shaped by America as it tried to shape its identity. The canal bed remains remind us of the First Industrial Revolution and the bread basket America of the 1800’s, the railroad tracks remind us of the late 1800’s and 1900’s as America desired rapid expansion and technological advances, while today perhaps the Greenway suggests, or at least I would like to think, a focus on environmentalism and a more profound connection to nature.

While this path tells its tale chronologically, it also was useful to look at it as a whole and understand how the past and present combine to inform us of important enduring elements. Exploring the trail and using archival elements to support individual places along the trail, I was able to understand the importance of this place. For instance, in the Natural Resources page, I began to understand how the resources the Earth provides often give a key source of identity to people, fostering a healthy relationship with the Earth. In the Geology and Engineering page, I realized manmade ingenuity and the geology of the Earth – both of which the canal, railroad and greenway represent – can combine at times to create an awe in both man and nature. In the Abandonment page, it was cool to me to look at how past failed ambitions of man sometimes give way to something equally as valuable. In the Economics page, I realized that I still am questioning how easily economics and environmentalism fit together in this age, and in Environmentalism I was able to look at the varying degrees of “nature” along the Greenway and find some sort of reconciliation among the differences to form a more all-encompassing idea of nature in our present day. By looking at the path in this way and organizing our pages based on theme, more so than chronologically, we were able to comment on how the landscape presents a deep history in terms of what it can tell us about its geological past and the marks its history has made on the Earth, but also what it tells us about the people around this landscape and the values of the people at the time that have shaped it in certain ways and altered its evolution over time.

I get very obsessive about getting all the details when I am doing a project, so if I had more time  I would have loved to cover more about the place. The scope of the place is so large, both in terms of length of the Greenway itself, and the amount of archival information available, so with more time (and with better weather) I would have loved to visit the whole Greenway, or at least explore many other parts of it along with explore more of the archival information available in our library. I would have been excited to see the different directions this project could have gone when really getting an even deeper understanding that the scope of this place deserved.

Overall, this course was something different, interesting and challenging and I am so glad to have gotten the opportunity to take part in it this semester. I want to thank Dr. Wiebe and Dr. Cooper for being so great at facilitating stimulating conversation (even when you at first had to deal with a lot of awkward silences) and introducing us to ideas and writing that really challenged us to alter our viewpoints and be creative. I also want to thank all of my classmates because it was so awesome to be a part of such a diverse and intelligent group of people, and I learned so much from listening to your opinions and knowledge you shared.

This week I experimented with Scene VR as a potential tool. I was also trying to get a sense of the diversity that the Greenway presented, even within a half hour drive from Geneseo, so I found myself following the thin gray line of the trail on my Maps app attempting to find some good places that I could easily access the trail. This situation proved much more difficult than I imagined; at some points where it claimed the trail was, I was met instead with a creek or at times a small dirt one-way street. As the weather warms up though, I am hoping to be able to bike a little along the trail so, rather than hopping along it, I can see the trail in a much more continuous way.

I chose to try out the Scene VR tool because I thought it could potentially be an interesting way to display the diversity that the trail offers. Lizzie and I were thinking about doing some sort of map of the Greenway with videos that we take to showcase the different parts along the trail, so I am thinking that something like this could be an alternative if we decide. Using Scene VR was very simple, besides the fact that it took me a while to figure out what kind of image files to use (your photos have to be uploaded onto Flickr beforehand), but once I figured that out it was very simple. The photos I used are all panorama photos that I took with my iPhone. The one thing I do not like about the way it turned out though was how the pictures do not have a lot of height to them, resulting in the black space above and below. I am wondering if a GoPro might work better, or if anyone has any other ideas about this. I also do not love how the text is just at the bottom because I feel like it could be very easy to not pay attention to. I know the New York Times has 360 videos that they do where text shows up directly on the image, which I think would definitely be more ideal. So if anyone has any idea about applications that can do that, that would be great too!

I had some trouble embedding this also, so below is a link that should work.

http://scene.knightlab.com/scene.html?source=1uPyHmcAXXtL-2EJYrgmErwnq_zxfpOKb-u0VUmj84Vc

 

 

The air was cold and the skies were a dreary gray as I got out of my car to venture onto the Genesee Greenway for the first time. I was in the small rural town of Mount Morris, parked right off the main road, and I was intrigued to discover how this nature path would mesh with the immediate civilization that surrounded it. As I set out on the trail, my senses were immediately hypercritical of the place, as they picked up on the old beer cans and fast food wrappers mingled in with the trees and the sound of a nail gun intermingled with a distant bird call. The trail wound itself right through the edge of town, passing in close contact with the backyards of homes, war memorials, bowling alleys and laundromats. At some points, the houses were so close to the trail that I had a lingering feeling I was trespassing,  as I walked past mobile homes and easily peered into the small and cluttered kitchens. At one point along the trail, large concrete foundations of an old home sat on the side of the path, and I thought about whether the building of this trail uprooted these people from their home, in an ironic human-induced version of nature’s take-back of civilization.

I imagined this place in the spring, when the sun would shine through the full, green trees, blotting out the nearby street and the small, rural poverty that ran alongside it, and I imagined that this trail could present some kind of elusive escape from its immediate surroundings, but today with the bleak gray February skies and the bare trees, the harsh reality of the trail’s surroundings really challenged my thinking of this place as nature. To see nature as a thin line intruded upon by an all-encompassing human society was difficult. To me, this trail reminded me of a good place where teenagers could go to hide from their parents and smoke cigarettes and drink stale beer, rather than a place to find solace and experience the outdoors.

I departed from this first section of the Greenway in search of something more familiar and suited to my expectations, and I drove in the direction a county park in the area, parked my car, and descended a very steep, slippery hill to find the path crossing through the trees of this park. A steep hill covered with trees and leaves ran along one side of the path, concealing the houses above and the sounds of the street, while farmland ran alongside the opposite side. I heard the wind rustling through the trees and the sound of water melting and dripping in the swamp-like area that ran immediately on one side of the path. As I was walking, a bright red male cardinal chased a female cardinal across the path.

In this place, all seemed right and aligned with my ideas of nature, yet it bothered me why these disparities between the two parts of the trail existed and why I could not reconcile the first part of the trail with the idea of nature. To see this trail as continuous rather than in discrete parts could offer an analogy to the acceptance of nature and society as ends of continuum, in which the majority of our world today lies somewhere within the middle of these two ends. In a world that is decreasingly less wild and increasingly more civilized, it seems like places like these might offer a solution as to how we can alter our stereotypical view of nature in order to make nature more accessible to the variety of places in which we occupy.

Letchworth State Park is a state park located near SUNY Geneseo in Livingston County. It is a pretty sizable park, about 17 miles long, with lots of different distinct locations within the park, so I thought it would be a cool place to try out the StoryMap application. I found some archival material in the school’s library, mostly looking at old journal articles and books published about the place. I had been to Letchworth a couple of times before doing this project, but I had not known much about the history of the place before I started looking at some of the archives. For instance, I did not know the Seneca Native American tribe had such an important presence in the park, and I did not know that the Genesee Valley Canal once crossed through the park. I think going forward there would be a lot of cool things to look at for Letchworth regarding the Native American history, especially because the Native Americans were so connected to nature, it might make for some interesting writing on the subject. The StoryMap application took me a little while to figure out, especially regarding some little details about the appearance, but I can see how it would work really well in a project like this. In my story map that is attached, I did not really have a clear narrative or theme within it, I more used it to see how it could work with the archival materials, but I think that once I get used to this application and create a more clear narrative arc within it, it could make for a really cool project.

Going into the archives at Geneseo was really eye-opening for me because I had no idea just how many resources our library held. Liz, our archivist walked us around the Special Collections section of the library, showing us old maps with all the property owners, old historic architecture drawings and various other things such as papers in the Wadsworth collection showing property transactions and data on the town. Some of the stuff Liz showed us was not exactly pertinent to what we will be doing this semester, but it was really interesting to see the impressive quantity of old records that the library held and how detailed and personal things were.

When discussing the four places that most interested us, Lizzie and I decided upon the following: Letchworth State Park, the most obvious place because of its proximity and grand scale of nature it provides; the Retsof mine area, an old salt mine that collapsed and eventually filled with water; the Conesus lake area; and the old Genesee Valley Canal area, which eventually turned into a railroad and now is a greenway.

Letchworth is a place that I know will provide both the impressive scenic views that can inspire any kind of art, and also a wide variety of archival materials to work with. The library itself has lots of materials in its Genesee Valley Historical Collection and there is also a museum in the state park that I am sure will have lots of stuff we can work with. Letchworth intrigues me because of its grand scale of beauty and placehood. Its designation as a state park and the “Grand Canyon of the East” give it a place firmly set in the scope of “nature” in the past, present and future, which is nice to both observe how people used and viewed it as a place of nature.  I have been to Letchworth many times and its extreme beauty of the canyons and waterfalls are sure to inspire interesting and beautiful writing. Given the scope of this place, both geographically and its natural intensity, and the scope of its available archives though, I know working with this place will take a lot of narrowing down and creativity to create something new and different.

The Retsof mine area is an area Lizzie brought to my attention, and before she talked to me about it I had no idea it existed. The mine collapsed in 1994, caused by (or causing) an earthquake,  which led to sinkholes popping up and the mine filling with water. Lizzie showed me the place on Google Earth and you can see a square-shaped lake within some trees and surrounded by farmland now. This place is cool because it is a strange sort of nature that was accidentally and dangerously formed by man. The library has some legal papers on the mine, so there is definitely some archival information out there, but I think this spot in particular presents the most challenges regarding research.  The uniqueness and instability of this place interests me though, and I think it would be particularly cool to look at this place in the context of Anthropocene.

Conesus Lake is a place I have also been to many times and have done some nature writing there because I find it very peaceful and beautiful. Lizzie and I thought of this place when we were meeting with Liz because she mentioned some materials the library has in the Genesee Valley Historical Collection. I like the idea of doing a project on Conesus Lake mostly because it is personally one of my favorite places that I have a lot of good memories regarding, but also because it might be cool also looking at it in the context of Anthropocene because of its algae problems and invasive species such as zebra mussels.

The final place is the site that I know the least about, yet I am very intrigued by it. This place was once the Genesee Valley Canal, then turned into a railroad, then morphed into a greenway. I have never been to this place, but I am interested to see if this place has a lot of remnants of its past lives. I think Lizzie and I will be able to find a fair amount of information about this place because of all the government funded projects surrounding it and the library has a section on their webpage now entitled 20th Century Remains of Genesee Valley Canal, so I am hoping we could find a fair amount of cool stuff surrounding this place. I think when looking at the surface of each of these places, this might be my favorite one because I think it challenges the definition of nature by its close association with man. This place is cool to me because it changes and morphs to fit the changing needs of society and I think it offers a lot of opportunity for nifty technological things that could emphasize and parallel the change with the events of man.

Whenever tasked with writing about a place important to me, my mind always reverts back to a small campground in the northern Adirondacks called Rollins Pond. My family and our friends have been traveling to Rollins Pond every summer since before I can remember. It is a place that is distinct from home, but a place that is so comforting to return to that I am positive that a part of me remains behind at Rollins Pond even when I depart from it.  There are many things that make Rollins Pond special, but the thing that I think continually traps me into writing about it all the time is its singular quality of being the most “natural” place that I have been in frequent contact with. Rollins Pond is located twenty miles away from Saranac Lake and far from any big towns or busy highways. Driving into the campground, there is minimal cell phone service, no motor boats allowed on the water, and no houses built up around the lake, leaving it isolated from most modern amenities besides the electricity and running water in the bathrooms scattered about every couple miles or so and the ice cream truck that drives through the campsite around dinnertime. It is a place full of such simple beauty that made me fall in love with it when I was younger and continues to still cast its spell on me. From the misty mornings where one can listen to loons call to each other across the water, to the whimsical creeks that twist and turn through the trees, there is a strange, yet simple allure to this place.

When I was younger coming to Rollins Pond, I was always most excited to go off with my friends to all our favorite designated places – Fishing Rock, Swimming Rock, Slippery Rock, Skull Island, Blueberry Island – to spend our days fishing, jumping into the water off rocks, picking wild blueberries and exploring together. Being without a television and other distractions forced creativity beyond which I think I will ever experience again, resulting in numerous skits and songs performed and other bizarre games created — some of which I remember involved fishing for squirrels or balancing on logs trying to push people off. Nature became a place for the imagination to run wild and a place to put aside time to mess around and laugh with people, something often difficult to make time for with the interference of modern life.

One of my most vivid memories I have of Rollins Pond was when I was around ten years old and there was a meteor shower. It was late at night and we went out on the canoes to view a crystal clear, vibrant sky that was filled with distinct sparkling stars and a mystical Milky Way. We held on to each others paddles so our canoes could connect to each other and laid back and watched in amazement as the galaxy entertained us. I still remember that first shooting star I saw that night and the awestruck feeling I got along with it. Still to this day, I have not seen anything like it. We gazed up at the sky for an hour or so trying to count how many shooting stars we saw, with the number totaling over two hundred. I remember going to bed that night brimming with happiness and not being entirely sure why I felt so content. It was a night firmly implanted in my memory because I was amazed at what the Earth was capable of doing and also because I got to share in this memorable experience with so many people I adored, which I think has the capability to bind people together in some sort of way.

As I continue to return to this place, my appreciation is still intact, but it definitely differs. I am still aware of the uniqueness of this place on Earth and aware of its magic, yet I am also more in tune to the tiny details that give this place its intrigue. It’s the smell of pine trees mixed with fires burning. The sound of a canoe slowly breaking the smooth water. The purple/blue/pink sky that hangs over the trees at dusk. The sharp peal of laughter that breaks out amidst a silent night. The morning fog over the water and the mysterious calls of loons that soon disappear beneath the water. The magic of this place exists, yet it exists in the simple and concrete, rather than the complex and abstract.

I think the most reassuring aspect of this place stems from its seeming ability to resist change, which is comforting in a world that changes at dizzying speeds. Growing up while being able to return to a place that is unchanging is a very self-reflective and unearthing experience that forces one to profoundly recognize and analyze changes that have occurred among themselves and their relationships with the people that they love. It was not necessarily something I analyzed when there, but now that I am thinking about this idea, I am aware of how this place accentuated the differences in our lives. As us kids got older, the raucous play mellowed into casual conversation and we began to realize the difficulty of very different people forced into being friends by our parents. When we got even older, the group fell apart and we found ourselves continuing to show up to Rollins Pond but at different times and with new faces to replace the old. It was sad, but also, I suppose, a necessary stepping point of growing up and moving on. Yet as the differences among the people emerged, the place remained the same and the vast geological time scale now serves to remind us of the comparatively rapid and finite human time scale.

This past summer, I returned to Rollins Pond with my mother and brother after being away for two summers. It was strange to be away for this amount of time, and my brother and I both felt the subtle differences. Across the lake, we noticed two docks and two small cabins built alongside them and in the morning we would hear small motor boats disrupting the morning silence and loud music drifting through the air at night time. It was a small, relatively insignificant change, but it stressed me out imagining a future with built up houses alongside the trees and motor boats criss-crossing the lake, all filled with people trying to maximize their time in an eroding “nature”. Things change, but it frightens me to think that things that were so reliable and grounding must be put under the pressure of humanity and submit to society’s rapid changes.

When I look back at what I have written just now, I realize the complexity of discussing this place in and of itself without also discussing the people whom I have experienced this place with. It puts an almost oxymoronic twist on discussing this place within the context of Anthropocene, because it is inevitable that this place would not be as special to me without the interaction between myself, my human companions and the Earth. The Anthropocene is a difficult concept because it seems to assume that humans are not a part of “nature”, but within Rollins Pond, it seems to me, the two have always been able to seamlessly bind together to create something in which humans and nature are able to recognize beauty and meaning by interaction with the other.