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.

Six Degrees of Baltimore

I was in Switzerland last week, and one night over dinner we talked about family history.  The discussion got me thinking again about Tom's family. I've tried a variety of strategies to supplement what he remembers about his grandparents, to try to track them down and the people before them. For the longest time, I couldn't find the Bewersdorfs, because we weren't spelling the name close to correctly; I finally found them in the same household in the 1900 Census with Tom's grandfather, who had married into the family. I've tried tracing back from cousins and more distant relatives, with the thought that what I can't find directly someone else may have already found.



Last week - having drawn a blank on the Schmitts once again - I started looking again at cousins. Tom's grandmother Johanna Bewersdorf had a cousin, Otto Doroff, who lived in Baltimore. (When Johanna's mother Wilhelmina died, the obituary notice in the Chicago newspapers included a sentence, "Baltimore papers please copy." That puzzled me when I first saw it; I later figured out that Wilhelmina's brothers Herman and Frederick both had lived in Baltimore.) Otto was Herman's youngest child, and in the 1920 Census, he was in Baltimore, living with his wife Edna and his in-laws, Franklin and Celestia Gladfelter. The Gladfelter name seemed familiar -- Gladfelters had emigrated around the same time as the Reins -- so I thought if I could find Franklin's ancestors I might be able to find some connection to the Gladfelters in York County, Pennsylvania, and a connection to my family tree. It took a couple of days before I had time to work on it, but on Saturday I found records for Franklin's father Cornelius who had been Iowa during the 1880s before returning to York County. Cornelius Glatfelter's great-grandfather was Casper Glattfelder, and Casper's niece Elizabeth Glattfelder married Jacob Rein, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who had emigrated to the colonies in 1738. Tom's grandmother's cousin had married a woman whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Felix Glattfelder, my 7th great-grandfather.

I tried to explain this by email to Tom by email, but failed miserably. When I got home I asked if he'd understood what I send him. No, he said. So I told him, leaving our the "first cousin 2 times removed part," and all he said was, "How did you figure that out?" I told him I just remembered the Gladfelter/Glattfelder name, and had thought if I could go back far enough I might be able to find a connection.

Edna and Otto married right after World War I; Edna's and my common ancestor was born in Switzerland in 1669. I told my astonished children that if we go back far enough, we're all related. And of course, this is pretty far back. I don't even know what else to say about this. How can my husband's family (they were midwesterners, from the Chicago area and from Iowa) and my family (in the southeast from since before the American Revolution) have gotten entangled in Baltimore?

There are a lot of things in life that are due to chance. Tom and I were introduced by my third Russian teacher; I met her through an ad she had placed in Creative Loafing, after my second Russian teacher left to go to the (then) Soviet Union for the summer. Of course, if I hadn't started Russian while I was at Johns Hopkins, when I was living in Baltimore ...

Never mind.

The History of Everything

I got to Geneva early afternoon last Sunday, and since I didn't have any work I had to do right away, I decided to go for a walk and try to stay awake until at least evening. Even though I have come here many times for work, I never have done much sightseeing; with nothing in particular in mind, I walked along the river for a bit and took some pictures, and then crossed the river and headed into the old city. I don't really know my way around, so I just wandered. On a narrow street festooned with flags, I heard the sound of a voice in the distance, which resonated in a haunting way in that long narrow space. (At first I thought it might be some kind of medieval call to worship, but then I heard a phrase of a familiar tune; it was a man with a guitar singing "Moonshadow," his guitar case open on the sidewalk in front of him.)



I wandered up and down stairs and through narrow streets. Walking around the corner of Saint Peter's Cathedral, there was a poster about an archaeological exhibit, and a sign with an arrow pointing to an inconspicuous set of stairs going down, the kind of stairs that go to places where you aren't supposed to go and end with a door that's locked with a sign that says "Authorized Persons Only" (or its equivalent in French). But at the bottom of the stairs was a door that was not locked, and through the door was a small lobby where one could buy a ticket to see the exhibit, "The Secrets of Ancient Geneva." I bought my ticket, walked through the turnstile, and got to see something something, well, amazing.

The cathedral itself - the one visitors can walk through, that hosts worship services on Sunday mornings as well as the occasional concert - was built about 800 years ago, between 1150 and 1230, according the brochure I picked up there. In 1976 an archaeological excavation of the site under the cathedral was begun that went on for 30 years. This was no small effort; almost 400 "micropiles" were added to help support the building, the floor of the cathedral was removed, and the excavations extended under adjacent streets and buildings.

Underneath the cathedral were the remains of the buildings that preceded it on the site - large structures made of stone, baptistries with water brought through wooden pipes from some distance away, small rooms where monks lived with an early kind of central heating system. A beautiful mosaic floor that is thought to have been in a bishop's reception area. The exhibit lets visitors wander through walkways that take you back to before the beginnng of the Christian era, through the structures that preceded the cathedral over the centuries on this site. The exhibit is beautifully done; you wander through the walkways on your own, not knowing what is around the next turn, sharing the amazement of discovery of all of this. It feels like you are exploring, not going through a museum.

Geneva was also one of the intellectual centers of the Reformation. In 1535, the Roman Catholic mass was suspended at the cathedral, and the following year, Geneva became a Protestant republic. So the statues and the art that had been in the cathedral all were removed; only the stained glass windows were left. In the nearby International Museum of the Reformation, there are the Bibles that were published in the languages that people spoke, that took away the clergy's monopoly on access to the scripture. In the room where these 16th century Bibles are on display there is a model of a printing press. Why is that there, I wondered momentarily -- but of course it was the printing press (one of the great examples of a disruptive technology) that made mass production of books possible.

But back to the cathedral. The oldest area under the cathedral that was excavated is a grave that dates from around 100 B.C. It is thought to have been the tomb of an Allobrogian chieftain; the first known structure on the site was built over his grave, and there is evidence that there rituals on the site around his grave for a century or two after his burial. Later in the 4th century a complex of buildings was constructed that were the seat of religious and political power of the city of Geneva. Over the centuries that followed, there was a succession of large, impressive structures on the site.



In the centuries since the (current) cathedral was built, towers were added and other changes were made, creating a building that reflected the customs and tastes and preferences of many different eras. The 20th century's contribution to this continued evolution doesn't show in this photograph; it's underground, in academic publications, and visible to visitors who walk down those stairs and explore its walkways.



The printing press was a critical innovation; it changed how people thought, and how they related to the church and to government and to other institutions. It allowed the influence of new ideas to spread widely, and knowledge to accumulate and to be shared beyond a select group of scholars. Freedom of thought and expression is our most powerful tool against tyranny. So, walking through the dim aisles of this 12th century building, I was optimistic. The printing press allowed information to be shared at the rate that people could carry books from place to place; now all it takes is a cell phone to expose the work of despots halfway around the world, and an internet connection to give a young person in a developing country access to an education. This will change the world, and I think it will be for the better.

Living on the Grid

It was a couple of weeks ago; there had been rain and thunderstorms for much of the weekend, and then, there were MARTA buses coming down Wessyngton Road. I heard the traffic before I saw it, but when I went outside, there was a steady and uncharacteristic flow of cars from the North Highland end of the street toward Cumberland. The power had gone off, too, so I figured there was a tree down on Highland and cars were detouring down our street. On my way up the street to try to find out what was going on, I saw Lynsley and Bill and Linda. They'd heard that a power pole was down, maybe struck by lightning.

On North Highland, yellow tape blocked the street and the sidewalks; there were Georgia Power trucks at the other end of the block, near Lanier, so I walked around the block to get a better look. By the time I got there, there wasn't much going on, and if a power pole had been down, a new one had replaced it already and the old one had been hauled away. People were starting to walk around or under the yellow tape that blocked the sidewalks and make their way past the trucks, still parked in the middle of the street, and the workmen who looked like they were waiting for directions on where to head next.



On my way home, back down Wessyngton from North Highland, I had to pay more attention than usual to the traffic -- there still was a steady flow of cars toward Cumberland -- but there were lots of pedestrians out, doing the same thing I'd done, trying to figure out why all the traffic and when the power might be back on. I saw lots of our neighbors that afternoon. One said, "I love it when there's a disaster." I think she meant it was fun to see everyone out walking around when Something Happens. I didn't say, "I do, too," but I did smile in response.

Many years ago -- before I moved to Atlanta -- I read a book about city planning that described what's now called New Urbanism -- the idea that cities should be designed to be pleasant and walkable with mixed use, for the benefit of everyone and not just people driving cars. One of the principles of the New Urbanism is that streets should go somewhere; they should be connected to the street grid, easing movement and dispersing traffic, rather than the tangle of deadend streets in many subdivisions that forces all the traffic onto arterial roads. I had never thought about this before I read that book and decided at that point that I never wanted to live on a street that didn't go anywhere.

There was an article in the Times last week about the housing market in Atlanta, which over the last year had the largest declines in prices of any major metropolitan area. But the neighborhoods described in the story weren't intown; they were in Marietta and Dacula and Jonesboro and Norcross. It's not that we didn't have foreclosures in our neighborhood -- we did, but that was a year or two ago. At least here, it's better now.

The New Urbanism people say that houses on streets that are connected to the grid of other streets in the community appreciate more in value than houses on streets that don't go anywhere. The occasional MARTA bus on Wessyngton Road is a small price to pay for living on a street in a real neighborhood, where there are places to walk and streets that will get you there.  

Enough of this; it's time for Iain and me to walk to Alon's and the farmers' market.