Downstream from Somewhere

A couple of years ago, Iain and I walked the Nature Trail that begins across Plymouth Road from Sunken Garden Park.  The trail goes along a stream that seems to appear out of nowhere from underneath Plymouth Road.  We decided we wanted to see where the water ended up, so we followed the stream as it  continued north-northeast through greenspace into Lenox-Wildwood Park.  We continued to follow it along Lenox Road until it joined the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, near Lenox Road.

There's another stream that seems to come from nowhere, on the other side of Cumberland Road, where Wessyngton Road ends.  Google Maps shows it starting on the Wessyngton Road side of Cumberland, heading northeast toward the intersection of East Rock Springs and Sussex, and then running alongside Sunken Garden Park before appearing at the Nature Trail -- the same stream that Iain and I followed several years ago.  Now I know that Google Maps is not necessarily the definitive word on geography, but I haven't seen a stream on this side of Cumberland.  What I have seen are five storm drains at the intersection of Wessyngton Road and Cumberland Road, one on each side of Wessyngton, at the intersection, and three along the curb across the street.  The storm drains must empty into the creek that we can see from Cumberland Road.  I don't know where it disappears into below ground storm sewers as it makes its way toward East Rock Springs, but I know it's not visible at the end of the Haygood parking lot, near East Rock Springs, or in Sunken Garden Park.  It only emerges above ground again on the other side of Plymouth Road, along the Nature Trail.

Whether the map is exactly right or not, I am pretty sure that the runoff from Wessyngton Road does end up in the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, and I had never thought about that until I saw that thin blue line on the map.  When we've had construction on the street, there's been inches of silt at those three storm drains on Cumberland.  There's the oil that's leaked from cars and the leaves that we didn't rake.  It ends up in Peachtree Creek, and then the Chattahoochee River.

In Baltimore and Boston I've seen signs on storm drains, reminding people that what they dump in the street ends up in the bay (brass signs, set into the street, or stenciled onto the pavement) but I have never seen any signage here that indicated that what goes down storm drains end up in the rivers.  So I was surprised to learn last week that Fulton County has storm drain signage they make available to volunteers to mark storm drains in their neighborhoods -- "Keep it clean -- Drains to River."

I emailed Sharon Smith at Fulton County Public Works, asking if the City of Atlanta participated in the program, and she referred me to Julie Todd, Environmental Compliance Manager for the City of Atlanta.  So then I emailed Julie, who responded quickly and told me that the city has stencils for marking storm drains.  She's mailing me some.

When we get the stencils, Iain and I will be out there, with a couple of orange traffic cones and a can of spray paint.  There's only so much water, and we're all downstream from somewhere.

Walking to Work

On Monday my car needed to go to the shop, and it was a nice day, so I decided I'd walk to work. I've been meaning to do this ever since relocating to Clifton Road last summer. There's not room for all the cars on campus, so we've been encouraged to ride the bus or carpool or walk or ride a bike. I thought it would take about 45 minutes, if I maintained a decent pace. So on Monday morning I headed off on Cumberland, towards North Highland. Smiles and hellos from other pedestrians, some of whom were people I knew or people I'd seen around and others complete strangers. A co-worker on Cumberland who looked incredulous and asked me if I was walking to work. Did I need a ride? No, I'm going to walk, I told her. I've been meaning to do this forever, and I'm doing it today.

I have no idea how many times I've driven this route, but I'd never paid much attention to the contours of the land, when I was in my car. (Except of course for the hill on Clifton Road, where I always seem to get behind a bus.) Walking, you notice the uphill and downhill parts. Several of the downhill parts take you to the South Fork of Peachtree Creek. And then it's back uphill.

And there was more. There are cherry trees in bloom on Reeder. At Cumberland and North Highland, the cluster of middle school kids waiting for the school bus, and the one small boy, 30 feet back, keeping his distance from the other kids. The sections of sidewalk on Johnson Road near Meadowdale that have bits of colored glass embedded in the concrete. (On the way home I learned that they reflect the late afternoon sun so intensely that from a distance those sections of sidewalk look like they are wet.) There is a painted metal pink flamingo in someone's yard on Highland that I'd never noticed before, and wisteria in bloom along Clifton Road. And there was a dead bird -- a red male cardinal -- lying on the sidewalk on Clifton.

Walking home Monday afternoon on the last day of winter, the temperature was in the 80s and I wished I had a water bottle with me. But I'd felt strangely energized at work and I slept better than I usually do that night. Yesterday, I walked again, this time with a water bottle. I saw the same small boy keeping his distance from the other kids at the bus stop. On Cumberland Road late yesterday afternoon I said hello to the co-worker who had offered me the ride Monday morning. She seemed aghast. "Are you going to do this every day?" I don't know, I told her, but I did it today.

Tom has been taking meditation classes at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery and as a result we've had some conversations at our house about mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health promotes mindfulness as a stress-reduction strategy. There was an article in the New York Times last month about "mindful eating" as a way to address our bad habit of eating bad food whether we're hungry or not. Today I listened for the birds and noticed that the pink dogwoods on Johnson Road that had not been in bloom on Monday were today. It's not just that it's easier to be mindful when walking than when driving; there are more interesting things to be mindful about.

Today, as I was walking up that long hill on Clifton Road, I saw again the same large man who had jogged slowly past me, downhill, on Monday. This morning, I smiled and said hello. He smiled back.

The Closed Door

I just finished reading Yoani Sánchez's book, Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth about Cuba Today. Sánchez is a blogger, who since 2007 has written about daily life in Cuba and her efforts to live in her native country as "a free person." She writes about growing up during the "Special Period," when times were particularly hard after Cuba lost the subsidies it had received from the Soviet Union following the break-up of that country, and the food shortages that persist today. The bureaucracy that answers to no one (or at least not to the country's citizens), the repression directed against anyone who questions the regime, the struggles to get the things the family needs at the government-run stores and on the black market. Although she has received many international journalism prizes, she has never been allowed to travel out of Cuba to receive them, and only has seen smuggled copies of her book (a collection of posts from the blog), as shipments from the publishers have been seized by the government. In Cuba, the internet is censored, and her blog cannot be accessed from within the country. She's been abducted off the street by thugs and beaten. She is under surveillance. Last fall Tom and I went to a talk on Cuba, and the speaker mentioned her work. How has she not been arrested or thrown into prison? The speaker said that he thought at this point that she was well enough known that she was protected by her prominence. 

In this repressive country, the film The Lives of Others was shown in 2007. This German movie, made in 2006, tells a story (set in the former East Germany, beginning in 1984) how surveillance changed those who were watched and those who did the watching. Sánchez writes about chanting "Open up!" out on the street, as they waited for the theater to open its doors, and how that phrase stayed with her, and how it summed up her desires for her country. I do wonder who made the decision to show this film in Cuba. It doesn't come down on the side of those doing the watching. They must not have realized how the story ended.

The speaker we heard last fall talked about how Cuba is run by old men, and how the ruling Communist Party has been unable or unwilling to include any younger leaders in leadership positions. There's only so many more years that these aging men can keep the door closed. At some point, it will open up. It's only a question of when, and how.

When the Street Disappears

I saw the email Thursday afternoon, that East Rock Springs was closed because of a sinkhole. Coming home that evening, we drove down Cumberland past Sussex, and multiple strands of yellow tape were strung across Sussex. Just driving by, I didn't see anything very dramatic that warranted closing a street.



After we got home, I walked back up with my camera to see what was going on. Bobby Potter and I stepped between the strands of yellow tape to get close enough to see, but Sheila Bookout, the Haygood pastor, intercepted us and sent us back to outside the blocked off area. She told us that between 3:15 and 3:30 that afternoon a six foot-wide sinkhole had opened up a few feet from the curb near Haygood on Sussex. Depressed asphalt extended toward the opposite curb; the undermined area could extend across the street or even farther and endanger both trees and utility poles on both sides of Sussex. She said the hole was 7 or 8 feet deep and maybe 20 feet across, under the smaller opening in the asphalt. It was something of a miracle that no cars or children had fallen into it, given the place and time of day that it appeared.

By yesterday afternoon when I got home from work, the city had trucks and excavating equipment and workmen in hardhats on site. This time we didn't try to get on the other side of the barricades, but could see that the opening was much larger. When I took this picture, they had stopped digging and were looking at something down in the hole. Moments later a worker stepped into the cup of the excavator and was lowered into the hole, presumably to inspect something at the bottom of it.




Of course we don't know what caused this latest failure of City of Atlanta infrastructure. Thursday night a neighbor told us that old maps showed a septic field in this area. The most likely thing is a leaking sewer line; water carries soil away through the sewer line, slowly creating an empty space above it, and when the empty space gets big enough, you have a sinkhole.

I have no idea how long it will take to fix this. Tom said it could be fixed by Monday. ("It depends on what they find," I said. "No," he told me, "it depends on how hard they work.") But Atlanta's problems with water and sewer lines go a long way back, and it was Mayor Shirley Franklin who finally did something about it. Fixing all the things that have to be fixed will take a long time and cost a lot of money. Atlanta residents can pay it through our water bills, or we can share the costs with everyone who works and shops in the metro area can pay it by continuing the 1 cent sales tax that otherwise will expire later this year. This is on the ballot on Tuesday.

So go vote on Tuesday. But if your polling place is at Morningside Elementary, at least at the moment you can't get there via Sussex Road.