Into Dusk-Charged Air
On local flooding and local vernacular
The Delaware and Schuylkill, the two main rivers of Philadelphia, have risen to flood level this week, following heavy rainfall intermixed with snow. The flooding has not been a direct threat to me, living as I do in Manayunk, a hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. The business district lies along the Schuylkill and is vulnerable to it rising, but in the space of a few blocks, the terrain rises steeply, enough to require stairways along certain footpaths, putting me solidly and safely above the level of the river. It would take catastrophic geological action, some massive erosion or subsidence or earthly inundation, to threaten my home—not an impossibility, more of an inevitability, but the frequency of these events is measured in the hundreds of thousands of years, if not the millions.
My problems with water—“wooder” in the local accent—have been confined to a municipal pipe bursting, the result of incomplete repairs to the system. I watched the “wooder” bubble up—that was how the utility crew pronounced it—rising from beneath the steel road plates and thawing out the frosted asphalt, while the “waader” inside the house was temporarily shut off, allowing the repairs to be completed, though it was unnerving to lose a basic service. There is plenty of water in the area but not much that is directly potable. I would have to walk a mile and a half to Wissahickon Creek or one of its branches to collect it. Meanwhile, tap water in a jug had to do. It lasted until the service was restored, but the episode reminded me of how difficult it was to get the essentials of life in the past, or how it still is for many people around the globe.
The old municipal water pipes certainly needed replacing. Taken out of the ground, they were blackened and pitted, filled with sediment, more like something from an archeological excavation than modern infrastructure. The custom here, like in other older East Coast cities, is to regard the crumbling built environment as part of the texture of local life, the same as cheesesteaks and deranged-looking sports mascots. Elsewhere regional cultures might be dying, accents fading away, but the tradition of saying “wooder” remains strong. Linguistic research indicates a self-conscious preservation. But the utility workers, talking amongst themselves, had no public reason I could think of to emphasize their accent. It had become customary in multiple senses of the word
These utility workers could have very well grown up in Manayunk, like my postman and my handyman. The latter lives on the same street, my street, he lived on as a kid. We tend to think of America as being a very mobile place, where people frequently pull up roots, but that’s not really the case. This generalization is true for me though. I live thousands of miles away from where I was born and raised (Colorado), and even more thousands of miles from where I’ve lived my adult life (Washington State). But most Americans stay within a home range of a few hundred miles—certainly not the day’s walk that defined the peasant life, but surprisingly nearby given the convenience of modern transportation.
Philadelphia preserves a certain neighborhood provincialism. People often groan when I tell them where I live. An old joke has it that travel to Manayunk is difficult, the reason time zone change. For the most part, at least from what I’ve observed, Philadelphians tend to socialize where they live and are not very eager to leave. This is understandable. The roads are terrible to drive on, narrow and in disrepair, and fewer people own cars to begin with. The transit system is extensive but not particularly reliable. Bus stops and bus routes are more of a suggestion than anything. More texture to There are also just more people around in the same place, and newcomers have an easier time meeting their neighbors than in the more socially atomized cities of the West Coast. There is also, as alluded to by the postman and handyman still living in the neighborhood, less displacement of everyday workers out of the city.
A few years back, I worked the graveyard shift at a post office in Seattle. My coworkers would often drive an hour and a half to sort packages, since outer exurbs were the only places they could afford. I was practically alone in living within city limits, or even within easy driving distance, aside from the veteran mail carriers, they having had the opportunity to settle down before the city became so prohibitively expensive. I hope I’m not reproducing Seattle-like conditions here, gentrification I mean, but that will happen, if it does, regardless of whether I have scruples about it or not, and is dependent on economic factors (other than the power of the purse) that are outside of my control. I just don’t want to summon a demiurge of high finance. Don’t call up what you can’t put down.
Local flooding has also given me the opportunity to try and spell Schuylkill without digital assistance. So far I’ve been unsuccessful. The pronunciation, if not the spelling, is also something of a regional shibboleth—SKOO-kel. The name comes from early-modern Dutch: kil for creek and schuylen, for hidden, sheltered, or skulking. One explanation is that its confluence with larger Delaware was obscured by densely wooded islands. Early colonial settlers were amazed at the size of the waterways along the East Coast, which, despite being considerably shorter, are equal in discharge to the major navigable rivers of Europe.
Another bit of local history, from the early Republic, brought the flooding into relief. At Bartram’s Garden, the oldest botanical garden in the United States, a series of flood markers are found, one dating back to 1784. The highest are from the 1820s, which the flooding from this week almost equaled. But these markers were made before the Schuylkill was controlled through damming and channelization; it underscores just how chaotic the weather has become.
The flooding also brought to mind “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” by John Ashbery. In the poem, Ashbery enumerates various rivers across the world and their qualities.
Far from the Rappahannock, the silent Danube moves along toward the sea. The brown and green Nile rolls slowly Like the Niagara's welling descent. Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire Near where it joined the Cher. The St. Lawrence prods among black stones And mud. But the Arno is all stones. Wind ruffles the Hudson's Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing. But the yellowish, gray Tiber Is contained within steep banks. The Isar Flows too fast to swim in, the Jordan's water Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats Were dark blue. The Moskowa is Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly. Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes Underneath. The Liffey is full of sewage, Like the Seine, but unlike The brownish-yellow Dordogne. Mountains hem in the Colorado And the Oder is very deep, almost As deep as the Congo is wide.
Ashbery, who died a few years ago, was known as one of America’s preeminent postmodern writers, but this particular poem feels more primordial than anything else, a remnant of a time (most of human existence) when knowledge was oral, all disciplines including geography, recited as poetry for pneumonic reasons and compiled into manuscripts only after hundreds or even thousands of years had passed. The poem echoes, among other things, the opening chapters of Genesis:
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
Going into downtown Manayunk, doing errands walking along the Schuylkill and its canal, I was turning over these passages in my mind. The only Pennsylvania river Ashbery mentions is the Allegheny. The scribes compiling Genesis were, at least to my knowledge, completely ignorant of the state and its precursors. I have my own inventory of rivers, among them the Columbia, the Colorado, the Washougal, and now the Delaware and the Schuylkill. It will run as long as I keep going, which, barring some localized calamity, should be for a while yet, just not on a geological or even historical timescale.
