Miami Beach: Urban Solutions 02: — EATING FLORIDA

 In many ways, Miami Beach is the creation of one man, Carl G. Fisher, a partially blind, high school drop-out. Fisher became a successful manufacturer of compressed acetylene headlights used by the first cars, which then evolved into the first automotive headlights. After selling that firm to Union Carbide for nine million dollars, Fisher morphed into a land developer in Indianapolis who built the Indianapolis Speedway. Before he arrived in southern Florida, Miami Beach consisted of a 200-foot wide continuous strip of barrier island-sand bar that paralleled the coast. It was occupied largely by tidal mangroves, plagues of mosquitoes and those always nasty sandflies. Only a few feet above sea level, the island sloped gently east and west away from a line of fragile sand dunes. Not many years before Fisher showed up, an 81-year-old Quaker farmer, John S. Collins, had established an avocado plantation on the slightly higher northern end of the island and was chiefly interested in furthering his silvacultural pursuits. But Collins family members had other ideas about developing the island, primarily as prime oceanfront property but ran short of the needed capital. And thus Carl Fisher became involved.

Recognizing that opportunity as the gold mine it was, Fisher immediately bought more land from two local bankers, the Lummus brothers, and began dredging what ended up as three million cubic yards of sand and mud from the bottom of Biscayne Bay. It should come as no surprise that that action totally destroyed that part of the Bay as a natural biological community, perhaps for the remaining period of human occupance on Earth. The spoil was piled on the sand bar to create a “real” island. As an aside, Fisher paid absolutely nothing for the fill materials dredged from Biscayne Bay. Not one thin dime. His only costs were for labor and machinery, not materials. After the pumping was completed, Fisher got down to the real work. In 1921 alone, Carl and his associates sold over $23 million in lots lining the recently poured streets and sidewalks of the newly named “Miami Beach.”

Say what you want about his appalling lack of environmental concern, Fisher was a modern Spanish conquistador, driven by his own vision of gold, Florida land speculation gold he hoped would start filling his pockets and never stop. The Miami Beach we see today, with all its marvels and foibles, is a testament to his single-minded determination to succeed no matter what havoc he wreaked on the environment. But we’ve come to praise Carl, not to bury him with hindsight. Or at least to praise what he wrought, if only indirectly.

Carl Fisher wanted Lincoln Road to be the Miami Beach counterpart to Fifth Avenue in New York, serving as the link connecting development on Biscayne Bay with that fronting the Atlantic Ocean. Although in the South Florida boom times it came close to matching any number of upscale shopping districts in major U.S. cities, that bubble eventually popped and the area fell into a slow decline.

Today, Lincoln Road is a pedestrian mall between Alton Road and Washington Avenue. It is thriving as a shopping and dining destination for locals and tourists alike. Restaurants offer indoor or outdoor seating or both. If you pay attention you’ll hear a cornucopia of languages, including the ubiquitous Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Arabic and many that you may have trouble identifying. Street people of all varieties wander up and down the Mall: tourists from Iowa gawking, well dressed straights, strikingly attired gays and trans-gendereds, mothers with children, bicyclers, roller bladers, skateboarders, muscle-heads in wifebeaters, even jugglers and magicians to spice things up. It’s diversity up the ying-yang.

If you Road Trip to Miami Beach the first thing that should catch your eye is the marvelous Art Deco design. Art Deco as a style of painting, architecture, industrial and interior design was widely influenced by a combination of modern and ancient art. It started with Art Nouveau and the Art and Crafts movement and rapidly evolved with inputs from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Constructivism. However, it also freely borrowed themes first expressed in the highly standardized design styles of several ancient cultures, particularly Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian. Art Deco designers used stepped forms, rounded corners, multiple-striped decorative elements and black decoration characteristic of those cultures. The critical elements were frequently aligned in geometrical order and expressed in a simple format stripped of excess ornamentation and typically relied on modern age, machine-like materials.

The style we define today as Art Deco had two principal sources. The first was a synthesis of numerous exotic and dynamic cultural influences that became popular in the first two decades of the 20th Century, culminating in Paris, that eternal hotbed of artistic accomplishment. Some art historians believe the nick-name, Art Deco, arose as a semi-official abbreviation of the 1925 Paris Design Fair, the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.” Others correctly point out that the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs was formed back in 1901 in Paris with the goals of merging industrial mass production with the decorative arts. And still others claim the name was first used in 1966 during a retrospective of the 1925 Paris show. Whatever the origin of the name, in the early 1920s the movement was essentially taken over and championed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. His stunning set designs, borrowing heavily from African and Oriental art and characterized by visually sensuous patterns and materials, became the rage of avant-garde theater-goers throughout Europe and popularized the movement among upper-crust trend setters.

That exotic development in Paris merged with the more technical influences of the Italian Futurists and such leading Cubist artists as Dali and Cocteau. It also borrowed extensively from Egyptian funerary artifacts (especially inspired by the discovery of munificent riches in Tut-ankh-amun’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1922 that so excited international society) as well as the art of the Mayans, Aztecs, Moors, and Assyrians. Early Art Deco also luxuriated in the application of rare and expensive materials and capitalized on the fluidity of nature by using fountains, curves, seashells, and rare and mythic animals as central motifs and themes.

The second great source of Art Deco inspiration was its assimilation into modern American culture of the late 1920s and 1930s. Among the major artistic and architectural influences were the Chicago Century of Progress (1933) and the New York World’s Fair (1939). Of special significance was the movement’s adoption into the American mass production mainstream of industrial design. Household appliances, cars, women’s fashion accessories, fine jewelry, furniture, hotels, apartments, even factories were designed in the Art Deco style, which incidentally is also known to building-type specialists as Art or Style Moderne. By the mid-thirties, Art Deco had literally exploded on the international artistic scene as a major force. In New York City alone the famous Radio City Music Hall, the Chrysler Building, and the Waldorf Astoria are striking examples of Art Deco design.

The tropical Art Deco architecture of Miami Beach proudly shouted its rejection of all that was staid and conventional with its racing stripes, rounded corners, raised eyebrows (otherwise known to us cultural low-lifes as canopies) over porthole windows and glass block walls. Constructed largely during the mid- to late-1930s, the colorful Art Deco structures brought to full flower a design style that was visually stimulating, exuberant, daringly seductive, sensual, theatrical, original and alive with an irrepressibly vibrant dynamism. The rich combinations of curved surfaces juxtaposed with flat walls, luxurious ornamentation, steel railings, curvilinear windows, flat roofs, and pastel colors dazzle the eye and excite the imagination. Although each Art Deco building exhibits considerable individuality, the power of the striking architectural theme results in a remarkable visual unity throughout the South Beach area and much of the rest of Miami Beach.

But architectural styles inevitably fall out of fashion and are no longer at the cutting edge of style. Or even interesting. Shortly after World War II the South Beach area settled into twenty years of genteel neglect. Salvation arrived in the mid-1970s when Barbara Capitman and Leonard Horowitz visited and discovered a forgotten treasure trove, hundreds of visually exciting but aging Art Deco buildings. Capitman and Horowitz were so enthused by the idea of saving the wonderful architecture they helped found the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 with the express purpose of reversing the downward trend and immediately halting the demolition of buildings in varying stages of deterioration.

In 1979, after well more than a decade of neglect followed by a decade of rampant decline, one square mile of Miami Beach was listed an “Historic District” in the National Register of Historic Places. Suddenly, restoration was in the air as developers realized they could earn substantial tax credits for bringing buildings designated as historic back to life. The District is officially located between 5th Street on the south, 23rd Street on the north, Ocean Drive on the east and Lenox Court on the south. It contains more than 650 buildings in the distinctive Mediterranean Revival and Art Deco styles. Although many additional examples of these designs types can be found in other sections of Miami Beach and in the Greater Miami Metropolitan Area, the District contains more buildings in the Art Deco style, nearly 500, than any other single area in the country. And many of those structures are truly outstanding and are among the finest examples of that design type existing today.

But all is not perfect in that sub-tropical paradise. Crime and poverty are not unknown. And a substantial number of the lovely old structures face a harsh reality, one that may have no viable upside. City of Miami Beach building officials say the reality is that many of the old Art Deco buildings, as historically significant as they are, may not survive the ravages of time and shoddy construction. No matter how much money and effort are expended, whether by private owners or developers. The heart of the problem for some of the structures is neither age nor a lack of maintenance that inevitably leads to deterioration but with the original building materials. Which all too often included beach sand and sea water. The simple fact is that not long after the internal reinforcement rods come in contact with salt they begin to erode. It’s only a matter of time until the surrounding concrete starts deteriorating and eventually crumbles.

Little can be done about saving original structures that are infected with those problems. The truth that many preservationists don’t want to acknowledge is renovation and restoration can be a bitch because you never know what’s behind a wall or the ceiling until you rip it out. And either find rot and decay or an usable whatever it is you’re looking at. My heart is squarely on the side of preservation but when it’s your money at risk renovation decisions become far more complex.

Exacerbating that already difficult situation is old-fashioned human greed. Many developers would rather see their Art Deco buildings crumble and then rebuild with modern structures containing three or four times more floors. Thus, making considerably more money. Although some developers have offered to rebuild replicas of the hotels that are facing the wrecking ball it’s not certain whether that alternative would be acceptable to historic preservation board members.

One reason historic preservationists are upset is because they believe that the City’s Building Department itself is adding to the problem by being too quick to condemn deteriorated structures. And they have accused developers of adopting a policy of deliberate neglect. Because it’s so much less expensive to knock the buildings down and replace them with larger structures than it is to restore them. Again, it’s a complex situation with no easy answers.

Now for a change of pace. After a long day trudging around South Beach’s Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue you might get tired of the preening, beautiful people. And the milling hordes of middle-class strainers and strivers desperate to spot those preening, beautiful people. And making themselves as obnoxious as humanly possible by intruding in ways that would embarrass a stone. The solution is to take a Road Trip to North Beach, SoBe’s prole relative. It doesn’t have a single high-fashion model draped around a light pole. Or photographers dashing up and down the streets eager to snap a photo to sell to the grocery store rags. And yes, North Beach is decidedly unhip and even on the wrong side of grungy. Ain’t no doubt about it. Commercial uses that have seen better days are everywhere. North Beach is the type of urban place where the Walgreens is an anchor store. Only it’s anchoring a gaggle of inexpensive ethnic restaurants — Italian, Argentinean, Cuban, Peruvian. And a kosher deli or three, of course.

However gritty North Beach’s urban ambiance, it’s refreshingly real when compared to the more touristy part of South Beach on Ocean Drive. It’s a lot like the old urban neighborhoods I was familiar with as a kid. So, I find that it fits like a comfortable old shoe. Not especially attractive but somehow reassuring and appealing on a gut level. It delivers more substance than the other-worldly South Beach, with its nose stuck high in the air, so desperate it is to attract beautiful people, the moneyed crowd, and assorted phonies. You’ve got to remember, as an urban planner I get paid to turn places like North Beach around. So I find communities like that, with workable urban fabric and with a lot more opportunities than constraints, to be absolutely irresistible, at least on a professional basis. But certain parts of North Beach are definitely on the edge. So, don’t walk around with your head up your ass, to coin a phrase. Vigilance should be a way of life, especially for women. No matter where you are or what time of day it is.

Implications

The thing is, despite beginning as an unmitigated environmental disaster, Miami Beach succeeds in doubled spades as an urban place where its neighbor Coral Gables makes an only slightly better than passing grade. Despite the oh-so-tony Miracle Mile and nearby and adjacent blocks of higher density development, Coral Gables is mostly a low-density suburb. Yes, a teeth-rattlingly attractive suburb but a suburb nonetheless.

Miami Beach, especially South Beach, features much higher densities, many more mixed uses, and far greater socioeconomic diversity, making it an urban place of great excitement and vibrancy. And I’m not talking about a block or two but mile after mile. Make no mistake, Miami Beach is about celebrating life for a wide range of social and income groups largely because of its higher densities and greater variety of mixed uses. The State needs more Miami Beach-type solutions — meaning higher densities, mixed uses, increased connectivity, and diversity — to slow developers from eating land and water resources at prodigious rates. Period. Well, not necessarily Miami Beach with all its warts and baggage but you should get the message.

Incidentally, warts and baggage are what you get with real cities rather than faux creations like Disney’s Celebration. But more on that topic later.

Composition of the Earth

Earth, Composition of the            The Earth is composed of three zones characterized by distinct mechanical properties — crust, mantle, and core — separated by transition layers or discontinuities. Those zones and transitions will be discussed from the surface inward.

The rigid, outermost layer of the Earth, called the crust, is divided into two sections, oceanic (younger and denser) and continental (older and less dense). Oceanic crustal materials, which range in thickness from five to about ten kilometers, are typically composed of dark igneous rocks, particularly basalt (also known as sima — silica magnesium), which can also be found on the surface, especially in the form of extruded materials like lava. The continental crust, which ranges in thickness from 30 to over 65 kilometers, is composed of a variety of igneous rock types whose average composition is similar to granodiorite (known as sial — silica aluminum), but as we know also contains all the other rock types with which we are familiar, including sedimentary and metamorphic.

A strong seismic discontinuity (simply known to all geoscientists as the Mohoseparating the crust from the mantle is named in honor of its discoverer, the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić. Although the rock above and below the Moho is solid, with increasing depth the upper mantle gradually becomes soft and pliable. It is that soft zone that allows tectonic plates at the Earth’s surface to slide about. In plate tectonics, the soft, ductile zone is the asthenosphere in which rocks experience plastic flow/plastic deformation owing to the heat and pressure and the hard rocks above it constitute the lithosphere, which is actually a combination of the crust and upper mantle extending to depths of about 80 kilometers.

The mantle extends from the base of the crust, whose boundary is marked by the Moho, to almost 1,800 miles below the surface (marked by a seismic boundary zone that separates the outer core and the mantle that is variously known as the core-mantle boundary, the Gutenberg Discontinuity, or the D’’ layer — D prime prime) and contains over 80 percent of the Earth by volume. It is divided into lower and upper mantle, thought to be composed of peridotite, an ultramafic magma primarily made up of the minerals olivine and pyroxene. The top layer of the upper mantle, 60-210 miles below surface, is called the asthenosphere and is made of silicon, oxygen, aluminum, iron, and magnesium. It is mostly a solid but very pliable type of silicate rock that flows plastically in response to heat and pressure. Separating the upper mantle from the lower mantle is the 670-km discontinuity, a boundary that may function as a natural barrier to whole-mantle convection.

The Earth’s internal structure changes abruptly about 1,800 miles beneath the surface, where the solid silicate rock of the mantle lies immediately adjacent to the molten iron of the outer core, at what is known as the core-mantle boundary (CMB). It is at this boundary that the two giant heat engines responsible for plate tectonics and the geodynamo interact. At one time scientists thought that that thermal and chemical boundary was sharply defined, smooth, and homogeneous. But, in the past two decades, by analyzing seismic waves researchers have found that the mantle-side portion of the CMB, known as the D’’ layer (the term D prime prime was established by the well-known New Zealand geophysicist and mathematician, Keith Bullen, as part of a larger classificatory system that is seldom used today) is the site of dynamic processes that may involve both thermal and chemical heterogeneity at various scales, seismic discontinuity, and substantial seismic anisotropy. That research evidence has demonstrated: 1) mushy regions, 2) a thin patchy zone of rigid material immediately below the CMB where the outermost core is more solid than fluid, 3) fuzzy patches, 4) an ultra low-velocity zone immediately above the CMB that has been interpreted as molten, 5) large dome-like structures, and 6) zones of avalanches. Today, scientists describe the region as being as dynamic as the Earth’s surface.

The nature of the CMB has been the subject of more scientific attention in the last several decades than during any period in the history of geophysics. The CMB is important because researchers now think it influences phenomena ranging from the behavior of Earth’s electromagnetic field to the magma plumes that rise through the mantle and erupt on the surface at volcanic hot spots such as Hawaii. Research in 2005-2006 demonstrated that the 660-km discontinuity may be a complicated structure characterized by single and double reflections at depths ranging from 64- to 720-km. The researchers conclusion was that that data almost required the existence of multiple mineral phase transitions at the base of the boundary zone that are consistent with a pyrolite mantle composition (pyrolite is hypothetical spinel-garnet facies and a term coined by the Australian geochemist Alfred E. Ringwood to represent a combination of basalt with dunite).

The outer core, about 2,050 miles below the Earth’s surface, consists of superheated, molten materials that are mostly iron that flow plastically, with lesser amounts of nickel and silicon that combined with small amounts of other elements, most likely sulfur or oxygen. The inner core is thought to be composed largely of a mixture of solid iron and nickel (owing to the enormous confining pressure of the thousands of miles of overlying rock) and has a radius that has been estimated at around 800 miles and is stronger than the liquid outer core. Until recently some theorists argued that electromagnetic forces inside Earth cause the core to spin separately from the planet’s outer layers while others hypothesized that the core spins in synchrony with the mantle and the crust. But evidence compiled since 1996 and most recently in 2005 that seems to demonstrate the core actually spins faster than the rest of the planet. Geophysical data collected and analyzed by scientists working independently at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Harvard University indicated that the inner core appears to make one full extra spin relative to the Earth over a period that has been estimated at a minimum of 120 years.

The inner core was only discovered in 1936. The Danish geophysicist Inge Lehmann was the first to demonstrate the existence of a change in composition midway through the core at 5,150 kilometers, dividing it into an inner core and an outer core, a division now known as the Lehmann Discontinuity or the inner-core boundary. In 1980, Adam Dziewonski (Harvard University) and Freeman Gilbert (University of California — San Diego) proved the inner core was solid, rather than liquid, postulating it to have formed by the freezing of iron. In 1986, Andrea Morelli, John Woodhouse, and Dziewonski, working at Harvard University, found that the inner core exhibited anisotropy. Shock waves from earthquakes travel through it in a north-south direction faster than in other directions, a situation attributed to the crystalline structure that iron, the major ingredient, assumes under the intense pressure near Earth’s center, more than a million pounds on every square inch. In 2003, Dziewonski and research associate Wei-jia Su showed that the axis of symmetry of the inner core tilts about ten to twelve degrees from the north-south axis of its rotation by analyzing records from 15,722 earthquakes that sent shock waves though the inner core. Working independently of the researchers at Harvard, Xiaodong Song and Paul G. Richards of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found that the inner core rotates in the same direction as the rest of the planet but about one degree per year faster. The Lamont-Doherty and Harvard scientists and other teams of researchers are now examining different seismic records to test the discovery and to more precisely measure the core’s rotation. A critical set of measurements was collected at the Japanese High-Sensitivity Array from a magnitude-7 earthquake that rocked Mozambique in 2006 and analyzed by James Wookey and George Helffrich, geophysicists at the University of Bristol, and reported in Nature, (August 14, 2008). Wookey and Helffrich were the first geoscientists to detect two sets of the ground motions associated with core-crossing shear waves — one set triggered by left-to-right vibrations and the other by up-and-down shear waves. The seven-second disparity in travel time recorded between the two sets of ground motions indicated that the crystal structure of the inner core is anisotropic and likely composed of solid, hexagonal, close-packed iron.

In the fall of 2002 Harvard geophysicist Dziewonski and graduate student Miaki Ishii announced the discovery of an inner inner core at the center of the Earth. That previously unknown sphere, about 360 miles in diameter, was detected by examination of 325,000 records of earthquake waves that passed through the Earth’s center in the past 30 years. When they looked closely at more than 3,000 records of earthquake waves that traveled closest to Earth's center they found an obvious change in wave speed with direction — a phenomena known as anisotropy — in an area 360 miles in diameter at the center of the inner core.

Naturally, many geoscientists expressed some degree of skepticism at their discovery. But in 2008, Xiaodong Song and Xinlei Sun, geologists at the University of Illinois, confirmed the existence of an inner, inner core and have created a three-dimensional model that describes the seismic anisotropy and texturing of iron crystals within the inner core. In their analysis, Sun and Song used three-dimensional tomography to invert the anisotropy of the inner core and parameterized the anisotropy of the inner core in both radial and longitudinal directions. They then used a three-dimensional ray method to trace and retrace the seismic waves through the inner core iteratively. They discovered a distinct change in the inner core anisotropy, clearly marking the presence of an inner inner core with a diameter of about 1,180 kilometers, slightly less than half the diameter of the inner core, confirming the earlier discovery of Ishii and Dziewonski.

In Between Two Worlds 02 and 03

In Between Two Worlds 02

After leaving Marynook Novitiate after two thoroughly miserable months, I discovered that living my high school days in the all-male atmosphere of Maryhurst Prep had ill-prepared me for normal boy-girl relationships. As recorded elsewhere, during the summers when I had been home from Maryhurst (which was a boarding school where I lived for ten months of each year) on occasion I dated JoAnn C., literally the girl across the street. But that was it. After leaving Marynook, JoAnn and I dated regularly but broke up several times for months on end. During those separations I went out with a number of other girls but was very insecure, nervous, and unsure of myself.

It was a new world for me, driving, dating, and working. One that took me quite a while to adjust to. And one in which I never felt comfortable in many telling ways. Well, not the driving part, that’s for sure.

The first year I was back home I took JoAnn to her senior prom at Incarnate Word Academy. That occasion marked the first time I went to a formal dance in a tux. Afterwards we stayed out until 4:00 AM, parked just up the block from her house, necking and engaging in all sorts of heavy breathing, groping, and so forth. Her parents were justly furious. I had to call her father the next day and apologize for keeping her out so late. Maybe I just should have reassured him by saying that we were safely parked only a half block away playing kissy-face and touchy-feely until I thought I was going to explode. Nah. Probably would not have been a good move. Then I had to tip-toe around when I picked her up from her house for a couple weeks until all was forgiven.

Less than two weeks after returning from Wisconsin I landed a low-level job at R.L. Polk that introduced me to the ways of the business world. I worked in the shipping and receiving department and also as a bonded messenger. One of my duties as a bonded messenger was to pick up checks for shipping and handling from our local clients since R.L. Polk was one of the country’s largest Yellow Page and fulfillment firms. Many times these checks would be for thousands of dollars so when I was first hired the company had me fill out all kinds of forms and become bonded. No big deal.

Because the company refused to allow me to drive the company car and they were too cheap to pay for taxis, I had to take buses. To keep from dying of boredom, I would always bring a book with me and read it while riding the bus.

One day, my boss’s boss, a pinched-face, mean-spirited, ill-tempered bitch from Hell if ever there was one, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, saw me returning from a client’s office with a book in my hand. She ordered my boss, Mrs. S., to reprimand me for reading on company time and to prohibit me from doing it again or be fired.

Mrs. S. was very angry with me, a situation that, in my innocence, I could not understand. I asked her why, if it was all right for me to stare out the bus window on company time, it was not appropriate to read. No reading on company time, I was told, or you’ll be fired. Period.

I thought that that was absolute bullshit. So from then on I brought books to work and either hid them down on the first floor loading dock or put them in plain sight on the workbench where I regularly had lunch. A couple days after the first incident the front office bitch from Hell came through the loading area around 10:00 and must have seen my book on the shipping counter. Not a minute later Mrs. S. reprimanded me and asked if I wanted to be fired. This time I was ready and told her with a smile that I read while taking the bus to and from work and on my lunch break. I innocently asked if the company had a policy of not letting their employees read during lunch. With Alma, our union shop steward, listening to her every word, what could she say?

The very next time I had to pick up a check I slipped a book under my shirt and belt and sauntered out as meek as a lamb. Nobody was going to stop me from reading. Fuck them and their ignorant attitudes. Up the rebels!

Things went okay for a couple months and then, of all things, I got fired. It was sometime in late March. To set up the story properly, you have to know a little about the building, which was located downtown at the intersection of Tucker Boulevard and Washington Avenue. It was an old building and in poor condition, especially in the shipping and receiving area where I worked. The wooden floor was a patch-work quilt of sections of new hardwood boards, old but seemingly adequate boards, and decaying, rotten, and sometimes splintered boards that made pulling the heavy skids of paper and envelopes difficult, even for strong young men like my co-worker Roger and me.

One morning Mrs. S. told me to load up a skid of boxes filled with printed materials that had been damaged in shipping. The company had received permission from its insurance carrier to destroy them and she had called the man we used to take care of our bulk trash. Roger wasn’t busy so he and I loaded the skid. It was difficult since the boxes were different sizes and shapes. Tying them together so they would be stable and not fall over when they were moved proved a difficult task. There were simply too many boxes of varying sizes. In addition many of the boxes had been damaged and were no longer rigid or square. I warned Mrs. S. that it would take two people to move the skid over the floor to the shipping elevator since the boxes were unstable, one to pull the skid lift and the other to stabilize the boxes so they wouldn’t fall.

Not long after that I was dispatched to the Post Office to deliver a check for postage. When I returned, the building’s head shipping and receiving clerk, an older fellow named Bill, laughingly told me that when I went upstairs they were going to fire my ass. What? I thought he was joking. But when I got upstairs Mrs. S. told me to leave at once. I was being fired for loading the skid wrong.

It turned out that right after she sent me to the Post Office, one of the main folding machines broke, and Roger rushed off to a hardware store for a replacement part. That’s when the guy came for the skid of damaged boxes. Naturally, instead of waiting for either Roger or me to return, Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell tried to move the skid across that uneven floor to the freight elevator. And equally naturally, the boxes fell from the skid as they moved it, injuring Mrs. S’s ankle. Of course she looked around for a scapegoat and found me. I protested that the boxes were damaged and of unequal sizes and they could not be loaded right in the first place and that I had warned her of that problem.

“You’re fired,” was all she said, not being the slightest bit interested in logic or rationality. I angrily asked her if Roger was being fired as well since we both loaded the skid. Fat fucking chance. His nose was too far up her butt for that. It was my ass that was toast.

That’s when Alma, our union shop steward, pulled me aside. I know she saw the tears in my eyes; I hated the unfairness of it all. She told me not to worry, the union would get me back on by threatening to file a grievance for me and the company would almost certainly have to reinstate me. Just go home and relax for a few days, she said. I felt absolutely terrible, upset, ashamed, hurt at the rank injustice. Such the innocent.

A week and a half later I was back on the job. It turned out Alma had been right. The union had raised the issue that it was against work rules for supervisory personnel, like Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell, to move freight. And if they wanted a strike, they had one. Of course, the company backed down, knowing the union had them by the balls since everyone on the work floor had witnessed the two women moving the skid and said that it all was a misunderstanding. Certainly, that’s one reason I have been a strong union supporter all my adult life.

That next week I was back at work and was paid for the days I missed, I might add. But everything had changed; the atmosphere was absolutely poisonous. Mrs. S. spent most of her time trying to catch me doing something wrong and finding fault with everything I did, whether it was correct or not. She gave me every nasty and dirty job she could find and generally made my life miserable. It was brutal.

Roger’s head was so far up her ass you couldn’t see his shoulders and he stayed as far away from me as humanly possible and still work in the same place. Two months later they laid me off, ostensibly due to a lack of work. I was so exhausted from the stress and tension I was relieved and didn’t give a shit. Less than a month later I was working full-time with my brother, Jack, at the Dairy.

In Between 03

One quick summertime story before heading off to my college days. As little boys grown large, we were fascinated with firecrackers. And I mean utterly fascinated. During that magical summer before attending SLU Bob J. discovered that we could legally buy “Two Inch Salutes” in Alton, Illinois. They were reputed by the cognoscenti to be even more powerful than the justly famous cherry bombs.

Naturally, we decided we had to buy a whole bunch. One balmy early summer night after collecting a couple bucks from everyone, we drove to Alton in Bob J’s 1957 Chevy and bought a gross. Yes, Mother, we bought 12 dozen of those dangerous puppies. On the drive back to St. Louis, we immediately proceeded to try to kill each other with the fireworks, lighting them and casually tossing the lit mini-bombs out the windows as we drove along. Oh yes, we were mature, safety conscious guys.

The cool air rushed in the car filling it with all the various wonderful wetland smells generated by the nearby Missouri River and contrasting sounds of violent explosions as the salutes ripped the quiet night apart and set dozens of dogs barking madly.

My brother, Jack, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat, turned around and grabbed a salute from the rather large box John E. was holding on his lap. He lit the salute and with blasé indifference tossed it out the front passenger window. Unfortunately, it hit the vertical strut that separated the main window from the small vent window and bounced right back into the front seat. You have to remember, this thing is sputtering angrily as the short wick quickly burned down to nothing. And a whole gross of salutes was sitting in an open box in the back seat. Oh, yeah.

After several seconds of muffled curses and near absolute panic, I desperately slapped at the firecracker with my left hand, knocking it out the open window where, not ten feet from the car, it promptly exploded and almost deafened us. We six youthful fools sat absolutely still for a minute or two as the car whizzed down the highway. No one felt up to saying a word. I’m certain we all were thinking about the consequences if the damned thing had blown up inside the car. We could have been badly burned, seriously injured, deafened, or even killed in the resulting explosion, a sobering thought even for young idiots.

Then and there we passed a rule that we never broke. Only people sitting next to a window could light and throw the salutes. When you think about it, it wasn’t exactly a safety paradigm. But it was all a bunch of testosterone-crazed 19- and 20-year olds could agree to. And the truly surprising thing is we all thought of ourselves as responsible adults. No shit.

As ludicrous as it may sound, that turned into a strangely enchanted summer, tooling around in our friend’s 409 Impala, laying rubber with abandon, throwing fireworks at every possible target, and tasting the fruits of freedom as I had never experienced them before. By mid-summer we had gotten the timing of the firecracker wick down to a science. If we stopped at a traffic light, we could drop a lighted salute on the pavement timed to explode under the second, third, or fourth car behind us, depending on which was our target. I can’t tell you how many fights that little trick nearly got us into.

Naturally, Jack and I took several salutes home for our personal forms of devilment. One of the first things we did was conduct a “scientific test” of the power of the salute in our backyard and its ability to explode underwater. We filled Dad’s highly prized three-gallon metal bucket with water and tied a heavy bolt to the salute to make certain it sank to the bottom. Then we lit it, dropped it in the water and stepped back a healthy distance. Several long seconds later came a terrific Ka-Boom!

A perfectly formed column of water rose majestically straight in the air, as if shot from an enormous hose, followed shortly by the bucket itself, grossly deformed by the force of the explosion.

Our first reaction was to hide from the curiosity of the neighbors by ducking inside the house. After a few minutes inside we casually strolled into the back yard to examine the damage. The bucket was history. The bottom had separated from the sides and the metal seam holding the vertical sides of the bucket together had completely failed. The result was a totally flat, curvilinear piece of metal that didn’t even remotely resemble a bucket.

Naturally, we threw that incriminating evidence into the trunk of the car for later disposal far from home. For weeks, Dad searched the basement high and low, angrily complaining that someone had hidden or misplaced his favorite bucket. We claimed total innocence in the matter, saying not a word, knowing how justly outraged he would be if he ever found out we had destroyed it. We never did tell him. Never. And we never replaced the bucket since that would have announced our guilt. We were indeed idiots, but not stupid idiots.

In Between 01

Charles Darwin

Darwin, Charles R.             World famous naturalist and geologist (1809-82) who achieved lasting fame by presenting the scientific community with the argument that there was such a thing as evolution and it could be explained through natural and sexual selection. That theory is now one of the critical foundations of biological-paleontological science. Darwin was born into a well-educated and cultured family. His grandfather, the well known Erasmus Darwin, and his father were medical doctors and his mother was the eldest child of the famous pottery industrialist, Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin first studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh but it soon became obvious he was not cut out for a medical career, since he was horrified by the brutal surgical practices of the day. After two years he transferred to Cambridge University (Christ’s Church) in 1828 to train for the ministry.

Not many people realize that Darwin was a first-class geoscientist. Certainly he was a world-class biologist and evolutionary thinker (pun intended), but a geoscientist? His ideas on the formation of coral atolls alone should be enough to disabuse skeptical readers of that bit of misinformation. But there’s much more to the story. The irony of Darwin’s success as a geologist was that he had practically no formal education on the subject. In his second year at the University of Edinburgh (before he dropped out — take heart all ye who harbor thoughts of turning to cosmetology or truck driving rather than staying in school) he attended the lectures of one Robert Jameson, a geology professor who was a staunch proponent of Abraham Gottlob Werner’s neptunist theory. Apparently all Darwin remembered of that chilling experience was that Jameson was incredibly dull, as was his discipline.
Author’s Note: Jameson must have been not too unlike several of my first geology professors, one of whom — the departmental chairman no less — would read to his classes from notes written decades previously on yellowed paper so old and brittle they looked as though each page would break into tiny pieces if he didn't exercise the greatest care when turning them. 
However, the sole effect that experience produced on young Darwin was the determination that never as long as he lived would he crack open a book on geology or in any way study such an intellectually boring topic. Darwin left Edinburgh for Cambridge to complete a degree that would prepare him for a safe if not exciting life as a member of the Anglican clergy. At the same time he continued his extracurricular pursuit of the natural sciences and met various distinguished scholars and first-rate intellects, including John Stevens Henslow (mineralogist, botanist and Anglican priest who became one of Darwin’s lifelong friends), Adam Sedgwick (famous field geologist and reluctant Anglican priest), and William Whewell (a towering intellect who was an Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, astronomer, geologist, and historian of science whose second volume of the three volume History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time, published in 1857 and reissued 1976, contained an analysis of uniformitarian and catastrophist views of Earth history; note that his surname is pronounced Hugh-ell). Darwin’s enthusiastic interest in science impressed those men, each of whom became his mentor in various ways. As a result, despite an initial antipathy for geology and what he thought were terminally boring practitioners, Darwin, who graduated with a degree in divinity in mid-1831, spent the better part of August 1831 on a geological tour of Wales with the well-known geologist, Adam Sedgwick, who at the time was studying rocks that he would later define as the Cambrian system.

On that extended field trip Darwin was exposed not only to a brilliant mind but for the first time to a trained scientist who was in the process of inventing and pioneering the techniques of geological field research. Darwin (who was 22-years-old) returned home at the end of August to learn that he had been recommended by his Cambridge botany professor, John Henslow, as the naturalist for the upcoming H.M.S. Beagle voyage under Captain Robert FitzRoy (an illegitimate descendant of King Charles II and at the time only 26 himself but already a master seaman and highly skilled hydrographic surveyor). It turned out that Darwin had been recommended for the position more for his skills as a well-bred gentleman that would enable him to socialize with the Beagle’s aristocratic captain than because of his formal training as a naturalist. Darwin’s father graciously agreed to pay the costs of his son’s passage (and that of the young man’s personal servant no less) aboard the hydrographic survey ship Beagle, which at a compact 90-feet-long and a crew of 74 was thought by many naval officers to be too small to survive the horrific winds and life-threatening storms at the southern tip of South America. However, they sailed in 1831 with Darwin acting as an unpaid naturalist and gentleman companion for Captain FitzRoy, who financed the expedition entirely from his own pockets.

Author’s Note: In one of life’s truly delicious ironies, Robert FitzRoy had hoped to use information gathered on the voyage to produce scientific proof that the creation story in the Book of Genesis was literally true, since at that time the Good Book was under considerable fire from geologists who advocated uniformitarianism over various combinations of neptunism, catastrophism, and what amounted to a strict creationism (Additional Author’s Note: James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656, famously published a chronology that dated the Creation from the evening of October 22, 4004 BC.). Darwin was only 22-years-old at the time and would be 27 when the ship returned to England but he was more than able to hold his own with FitzRoy in forming and defending his rapidly emerging geological and evolutionary concepts.

Life, of course, takes twists and turns few of us would believe if found in a work of fiction. One of those strange occurrences came as a welcoming gift when FitzRoy presented Darwin with the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which had been published the year before. During the many long and boring days at sail, Darwin dedicated himself to exhaustively pouring over the text as well as the next two volumes, which were sent by his father to upcoming ports of call while the Beagle was at sea. Needless to say, he became self-taught in geology, home schooled (under sail) as it were; a totally different type of years before the mast than experienced by the author Richard Henry Dana Jr.

In Chile on February 20, 1835, Darwin experienced a very strong earthquake and shortly afterward observed first-hand evidence of uplift (vertical throw) in the region in the range of at least several feet. One important aspect of Lyell’s principles was the concept of a steady-state, nondirectional Earth. Uplift, subsidence, erosion, and deposition were all in balance. But the evidence in front of Darwin’s eyes contradicted that theoretical construct. In his mind Darwin coupled the unmistakable and dramatic evidence of uplift that he had witnessed with the processes of subsidence, erosion, and deposition and began developing concepts that were totally unlike anything he had read in Lyell’s work. Consequently, he hypothesized, before actually seeing coral reefs or atolls of the Pacific or Indian Oceans, that they may have developed on the margins of subsiding land masses, passing through the three stages of fringing reef, barrier reef, and atoll.

In his very well received 1842 book on coral reefs, Darwin published a map of the southwest Pacific showing the distribution of fringing and barrier reefs and atolls that firmly established his reputation in geology long before his ideas on evolution became known. Although Darwin’s theory of coral reefs and atolls was his best known contribution to the then new science of geology, he made others of equal interest that are not well known today. For example, he observed that country rocks were altered by contact with hot lava; surface rupture and displacement resulted from earthquakes; extinct organisms were fossilized; he demonstrated cleavage and foliation in metamorphic rocks and the relation of those rocks to the formation of mountains; he showed that evidence for differing climates in the past was based on fossils and glacial deposits; and noted dramatic changes in physical geography especially those related to sea level fluctuations. Perhaps even more significant than the above examples, in 1844 Darwin described igneous flows from the Galápagos Islands in which the lowest flows contained greater proportions of feldspar crystals, leading to his pioneering theory that density differences between crystals and melt would result in mechanical separation of those two phases and the formation of different magma types. Today that process is known as gravity settling and was the focus of detailed experimental studies by the famous geochemist and experimental petrologist, Norman L. Bowen.

In 1859, after several decades of writing, intense reflection, and rewriting Darwin published his master work, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.[1] The book was a run-away success and an instant scientific and popular hit (the first edition was sold out on the first day it was offered for sale) over which the dust has yet to settle. The point Darwin made in his best-seller was clear. Just as humans can selectively breed dogs or cattle or horses by exaggerating one or another minor variation (like size or speed), so nature selects similar variations by only permitting animals with the most successful variations to survive and reproduce in the struggle over limited resources. Darwin named that theory natural selection. In 1868, he published The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. In 1871, he came out with what were really two block-buster books in one volume: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In 1872, The Expression of Emotion was published in which he discussed the evolution of the signals that animals use to communicate and related those signals to human emotional expression, fields now known as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. In addition, Darwin wrote Fertilization of Orchids (1862), Climbing Plants and Insectivorous Plants (both in 1875), Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877), The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), and the Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881).

Additional Author’s Note: Agree or disagree with Darwin’s ideas about evolution and the survival of the fittest or natural selection, he was one of the truly great contributors to science in history and to the way we understand the natural world and the place of humans in it. If you’re looking for a good read that dives head first into that topic, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, who proposed the theory of punctuated equilibria in 1972 with Stephen Jay Gould, has written several fascinating books on evolutionary theory as well as a more popular work focusing on Darwin himself, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005, which was a companion to the 2006 Darwin exhibit organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Eldredge is Curator of the Department of Invertebrates.

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[1] Available online at: http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/.

In Between Two Worlds 01

After graduating from Maryhurst and before I left St. Louis in the summer of 1961 for Marynook Novitiate in Galesburg, Wisconsin, my younger brother Bill and I—well, truth be told it was mostly me—terrorized a Goodfellow Terrace policeman. It happened in the following manner.

One mid-July evening around 9:00 Bill and I were returning from a trip to the corner store at Stratford Avenue and Jennings Station Road when we saw the police car parked on the side of the road to trap unwary speeders. The Village of Goodfellow Terrace survived financially almost exclusively on revenue from speeding tickets. Everyone I knew hated those damned cops because they would give you a ticket for being two miles per hour over the 20 mph speed limit.

On the spur of the moment I decided to take the law into my hands and exact a small measure of revenge for all ambushed motorists. I told Bill to light a cigarette and hand it to me (I didn’t smoke). As we passed the police car I inserted the cigarette into the closed end of a book of matches and bent over as if to tie my shoes. I placed the match book and cigarette just under the trunk of the car and slid the two-inch salute I had been carrying in my pocket for just the right occasion into the other end of the match book so the wick was in direct contact with the match ends. And we casually sauntered away.

We hid in a clump of trees on a small rise overlooking Stratford Avenue and waited. To our consternation two or three minutes later the cop accelerated away from the curb, lights flashing, and pulled over an unwary speeder. We thought it was all over. But ten minutes later the cop finished writing the ticket, turned the police car around, and parked in the same spot that he had left minutes ago. We silently rejoiced, hoping beyond all hope that everything would work right.

Minutes later the fire-cracker went off with a tremendous roar, splattering rocks and pebbles and road debris against the undercarriage of the police car, which was enveloped by a cloud of dust and dirt. Inside the police car it probably sounded like an all out military assault. We could see the cop struggling desperately to open the car door. Finally, he threw open the door, trying simultaneously to leap from the car and pull his weapon to repel unseen assailants, and promptly sprawled face-first on the pavement.

What a sight that was. The guy lying prone in the middle of Stratford Avenue, his gun ready to fire and no one was around except the neighbors watching silently from their porches, hiding their laughter behind their hands. Bill and I laughed until our sides hurt so bad I thought we’d be sick. It was hysterical. Stupid, of course, but still hysterical.

*     *     *

After leaving Marynook Novitiate after two thoroughly miserable months, I discovered that living my high school days in the all-male atmosphere of Maryhurst Prep had ill-prepared me for normal boy-girl relationships. As recorded elsewhere, during the summers when I had been home from Maryhurst (which was a boarding school where I lived for ten months of each year) on occasion I dated JoAnn C., literally the girl across the street. But that was it. After leaving Marynook, JoAnn and I dated regularly but broke up several times for months on end. During those separations I went out with a number of other girls but was very insecure, nervous, and unsure of myself.

It was a new world for me, driving, dating, and working. One that took me quite a while to adjust to. And one in which I never felt comfortable in many telling ways. Well, not the driving part, that’s for sure.

The first year I was back home I took JoAnn to her senior prom at Incarnate Word Academy. That occasion marked the first time I went to a formal dance in a tux. Afterwards we stayed out until 4:00 AM, parked just up the block from her house, necking and engaging in all sorts of heavy breathing, groping, and so forth. Her parents were justly furious. I had to call her father the next day and apologize for keeping her out so late. Maybe I just should have reassured him by saying that we were safely parked only a half block away playing kissy-face and touchy-feely until I thought I was going to explode. Nah. Probably would not have been a good move. Then I had to tip-toe around when I picked her up from her house for a couple weeks until all was forgiven.

Less than two weeks after returning from Wisconsin I landed a low-level job at R.L. Polk that introduced me to the ways of the business world. I worked in the shipping and receiving department and also as a bonded messenger. One of my duties as a bonded messenger was to pick up checks for shipping and handling from our local clients since R.L. Polk was one of the country’s largest Yellow Page and fulfillment firms. Many times these checks would be for thousands of dollars so when I was first hired the company had me fill out all kinds of forms and become bonded. No big deal.

Because the company refused to allow me to drive the company car and they were too cheap to pay for taxis, I had to take buses. To keep from dying of boredom, I would always bring a book with me and read it while riding the bus.

One day, my boss’s boss, a pinched-face, mean-spirited, ill-tempered bitch from Hell if ever there was one, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, saw me returning from a client’s office with a book in my hand. She ordered my boss, Mrs. S., to reprimand me for reading on company time and to prohibit me from doing it again or be fired.

Mrs. S. was very angry with me, a situation that, in my innocence, I could not understand. I asked her why, if it was all right for me to stare out the bus window on company time, it was not appropriate to read. No reading on company time, I was told, or you’ll be fired. Period.

I thought that that was absolute bullshit. So from then on I brought books to work and either hid them down on the first floor loading dock or put them in plain sight on the workbench where I regularly had lunch. A couple days after the first incident the front office bitch from Hell came through the loading area around 10:00 and must have seen my book on the shipping counter. Not a minute later Mrs. S. reprimanded me and asked if I wanted to be fired. This time I was ready and told her with a smile that I read while taking the bus to and from work and on my lunch break. I innocently asked if the company had a policy of not letting their employees read during lunch. With Alma, our union shop steward, listening to her every word, what could she say?

The very next time I had to pick up a check I slipped a book under my shirt and belt and sauntered out as meek as a lamb. Nobody was going to stop me from reading. Fuck them and their ignorant attitudes. Up the rebels!

Things went okay for a couple months and then, of all things, I got fired. It was sometime in late March. To set up the story properly, you have to know a little about the building, which was located downtown at the intersection of Tucker Boulevard and Washington Avenue. It was an old building and in poor condition, especially in the shipping and receiving area where I worked. The wooden floor was a patch-work quilt of sections of new hardwood boards, old but seemingly adequate boards, and decaying, rotten, and sometimes splintered boards that made pulling the heavy skids of paper and envelopes difficult, even for strong young men like my co-worker Roger and me.

One morning Mrs. S. told me to load up a skid of boxes filled with printed materials that had been damaged in shipping. The company had received permission from its insurance carrier to destroy them and she had called the man we used to take care of our bulk trash. Roger wasn’t busy so he and I loaded the skid. It was difficult since the boxes were different sizes and shapes. Tying them together so they would be stable and not fall over when they were moved proved a difficult task. There were simply too many boxes of varying sizes. In addition many of the boxes had been damaged and were no longer rigid or square. I warned Mrs. S. that it would take two people to move the skid over the floor to the shipping elevator since the boxes were unstable, one to pull the skid lift and the other to stabilize the boxes so they wouldn’t fall.

Not long after that I was dispatched to the Post Office to deliver a check for postage. When I returned, the building’s head shipping and receiving clerk, an older fellow named Bill, laughingly told me that when I went upstairs they were going to fire my ass. What? I thought he was joking. But when I got upstairs Mrs. S. told me to leave at once. I was being fired for loading the skid wrong.

It turned out that right after she sent me to the Post Office, one of the main folding machines broke, and Roger rushed off to a hardware store for a replacement part. That’s when the guy came for the skid of damaged boxes. Naturally, instead of waiting for either Roger or me to return, Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell tried to move the skid across that uneven floor to the freight elevator. And equally naturally, the boxes fell from the skid as they moved it, injuring Mrs. S’s ankle. Of course she looked around for a scapegoat and found me. I protested that the boxes were damaged and of unequal sizes and they could not be loaded right in the first place and that I had warned her of that problem.

“You’re fired,” was all she said, not being the slightest bit interested in logic or rationality. I angrily asked her if Roger was being fired as well since we both loaded the skid. Fat fucking chance. His nose was too far up her butt for that. It was my ass that was toast.

That’s when Alma, our union shop steward, pulled me aside. I know she saw the tears in my eyes; I hated the unfairness of it all. She told me not to worry, the union would get me back on by threatening to file a grievance for me and the company would almost certainly have to reinstate me. Just go home and relax for a few days, she said. I felt absolutely terrible, upset, ashamed, hurt at the rank injustice. Such the innocent.

A week and a half later I was back on the job. It turned out Alma had been right. The union had raised the issue that it was against work rules for supervisory personnel, like Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell, to move freight. And if they wanted a strike, they had one. Of course, the company backed down, knowing the union had them by the balls since everyone on the work floor had witnessed the two women moving the skid and said that it all was a misunderstanding. Certainly, that’s one reason I have been a strong union supporter all my adult life. Another, of course, is I'm a flaming leftist.

That next week I was back at work and was paid for the days I missed, I might add. But everything had changed; the atmosphere was absolutely poisonous. Mrs. S. spent most of her time trying to catch me doing something wrong and finding fault with everything I did, whether it was correct or not. She gave me every nasty and dirty job she could find and generally made my life miserable. It was brutal.

Roger’s head was so far up her ass you couldn’t see his shoulders and he stayed as far away from me as humanly possible and still work in the same place. Two months later they laid me off, ostensibly due to a lack of work. I was so exhausted from the stress and tension I was relieved and didn’t give a shit. Less than a month later I was working full-time with my brother, Jack, at the Dairy.

Coastal Wetlands

Coastal Wetland                 A rich variety of freshwater, saltwater, and brackish environments and habitats characterized by wet and spongy soils located in the transition zone between dry land and the ocean that comprise the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems. Coastal wetlands may be known as bayou, wetland hardwood forests and swamps, seagrass beds, coastal marshes or ponds, mangrove swamp, tidal flat, tidal marsh, salt marsh, bogs, and many others. Whatever their local or regional names, those areas are rich in wildlife and are critical nesting, spawning, and nursery grounds for resident and migratory birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, shellfish and crustaceans. They easily constitute one of the most sensitive, valuable and productive habitats on Earth.

Author’s Rant: All across the U.S. coastal wetlands have been disappearing for the last 100 years. Rather than that process being slowed over the last 60 years as a result of rising environmental attitudes and practices, the rate of decline and destruction has been accelerating. The systemic and institutional failure of any U.S. governmental agency to protect those fragile environments is nothing less than appalling and heartbreaking. The agency most directly involved in those losses is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged under the law with their protection and regulation. So, why coastal wetlands are in decline? Here’s but one specific example.

The delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana contains about 40 percent of the coastal wetlands in the coterminous U.S. No other wetland comes close to its size or environmental significance. That complex web of natural levees, natural ridges, freshwater wetlands, tidal marshes, beaches, shifting bars, and barrier islands was created by the enormous sediment load deposited by the Mississippi River over thousands of years. The sediment load was largely from three main river systems that fed into the Mississippi: the Missouri, Ohio, and the Arkansas. So, historically the delta area experienced several opposing forces. The deposition of mud, silt, and sand built up and extended the land into the Gulf of Mexico, renewed the soil, prevented salt water intrusion and encroachment, and created an interrelated system of barrier islands, sand bars, and wetlands that resulted in an extraordinarily high level of natural productivity. At the same time, natural coastal erosion and marine processes tore down and carried away many of the deposited materials. Although those erosional processes didn’t come close to making the game even, they never stopped; year after year the waves and currents continued working and reworking the sediments. Second, the entire coastal area of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was sinking isostatically under the enormous weight of the deltaic deposits. Since that process was also very slow the delta grew as sediments continued to be deposited.

Barrier islands lying in front and to the side of the Mississippi River delta plain buffer the effects of ocean waves and currents on associated estuaries and wetlands. But today those barrier islands are eroding at a rate of up to 60 feet per year. As the barrier islands disintegrate, the vast system of sheltered wetlands are exposed to the full force of wave action, salinity intrusion, tropical storm and hurricane surge, tidal currents, and sediment transport that combine to accelerate wetland deterioration. The result is that today the barrier islands are disappearing, coastal erosion has increased, the shoreline is retreating, and the delta’s wetlands are being swallowed by the Gulf at the alarming rate of over 25,500 acres or 40 square miles each and every year. That wetland loss is about 80 percent of the total wetland loss recorded in the United States and is a process that not only is accelerating and but is also predicted to continue with marginal relief into the foreseeable future. If that rate of loss is not slowed, by the year 2040 an additional 800,000 acres of wetlands will have been eaten by erosion and subsidence As a direct result, in certain areas the Louisiana shoreline will have moved inland as much as 33 miles.

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands extend as much as 80 miles inland and along the sea shore for about 180 miles. The State has lost over 1.2 million acres or 1,900 square miles of that fragile coastal habitat since the 1900s. Although not all Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are receding, in fact some areas are stable and others are growing, at the present rate of net loss all of that crucial habitat will have disappeared in about 200 years.

So, what’s really happening? The answer is neither complicated nor difficult to understand. The critical process is human alteration of a natural system. As people streamed across America, settling the land, they cried out for government help when natural disasters struck, like floods in the Midwest, South, and Great Plains. Congress responded by having the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build levees, dikes, dams, and reservoirs as flood control measures. The once mighty rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas were tamed by a system of dams and levees that continue upstream for nearly 1,200 miles. Their sediment loads decreased dramatically as mud and silt were dropped in the reservoirs created by the upstream dams. Today, the lower Mississippi River is nothing but an artificial channel contained by levees and embankments that prevent flooding and ensure that its sediment load is not distributed across the floodplain, where it would create and replenish wetlands, but instead is sped straight to the mouth of the River and into the deep waters of the Gulf. As a direct result of that human intervention, insufficient sediment is being deposited in the wetlands and without that replenishment, they are disappearing under the continuing and unabated assault of natural coastal erosion and subsidence.

In 1990, the federal Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection Restoration Act, (PL-101-646, Title 111, abbreviated as CWPPRA and widely known as the “Breaux Act”), provided authorization and funding for a multi-agency task force to curtail wetland losses. It took that task force, which included the State of Louisiana and four Federal agencies charged with restoring and protecting the remainder of Louisiana’s valuable coastal wetlands, eight years of extensive studies before a new coastal restoration plan was adopted in 1998. The underlying principles of the new plan, Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana, are to restore or mimic the natural processes that built and maintained coastal Louisiana. The Plan calls for basin-scale action to restore more natural hydrology and sediment introduction processes and proposes ecosystem restoration strategies that would result in efforts larger in scale than any that have been implemented in the past. The largely unappreciated irony is that the federal government, through environmentally disastrous actions of the Corps of Engineers, has taken away millions of tons of natural resource treasures with one hand and returns ounces with its other hand, and then claims to be solving the problem. Which leaves most objective observers more than a little cynical and bitter.

Make no mistake, at heart the disappearance of coastal wetlands is not a natural environmental problem. The crisis is cultural in nature and goes directly to the way American politics and government work. Few Americans have more than a passing interest in the natural environment. Unless millions of voters experience a drastic change of heart and begin demanding change, nothing will happen. But you have to remember we’re talking about Louisiana where politics is a game played for real. Second, wetlands and swamps don’t vote. Period. More importantly, they don’t contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns, as do agribusinesses, barge companies, chemical firms, oil refineries, and urban developers. Until that situation changes, coastal and other wetlands will continue to disappear at staggering rates while no one listens to the scientists or to the fishermen who daily see their livelihood disappearing.

Additional Author’s Rant: It is possible that that wetlands restoration situation was given an enormous boost in late August, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina savaged the Gulf Coast and dealt New Orleans a nearly fatal blow, which came at least in part because of a Presidential Administration that for three years running diverted many millions of dollars from the New Orleans Corps of Engineers budget for levee repair and strengthening and used that money in the war effort overseas. The initial word from Congress was that the coastal wetlands restoration effort would be strengthened (Katrina’s damage to the natural environment may be partially revealed in the damage done to the offshore Chandeleur Island chain, which lost up to one-half of its pre-storm land mass). But only time will tell if people will become distracted and the Katrina disaster disappears from the front page and falls into the great black hole of public indifference, and we are reminded yet again by the actions of our elected leaders that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Real World Problem: In 2003, former petroleum geologist Robert Morton, who at that time was working for the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss in coastal Louisiana occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and natural gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After studying available data, Morton concluded that that coastal subsidence was related to the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water associated with the near-shore petroleum deposits. That massive removal of petroleum resources and related water led directly to regional depressurization, slippage along nearby subsurface faults, and induced subsidence of the land above. The great difficulty is that if Morton is right, no amount of coastal wetland restoration efforts will be effective in those areas as long as gas and oil are being removed in large quantities. If that is the case, land subsidence will continue to characterize southernmost Louisiana as will the disappearance of coastal wetlands. And who out there thinks we will voluntarily stop oil and gas production in coastal Louisiana?

Real World Examples: approximately 81 percent of coastal wetlands in the continental U.S. are in the Southeast and Louisiana has well over half of those. Other coastal wetlands of national significance are located in Florida around Choctawhatchee Bay, Apalachicola Bay, northeastern Florida between the St. Mary’s and St. John’s Rivers, Cape Canaveral, Tampa Bay, Biscayne Bay, and Florida Bay. The Paraná Delta in Argentina and the area around Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, are two of the larger coastal wetlands in South America. If you’re in southern France you might enjoy visiting the Camargue, a fascinating wetland between the Mediterranean Sea and the two arms of the Rhône River delta, Western Europe’s largest. 

Maryhurst Prep 07

Early one Saturday morning while dew-gems glistened on the grass and the wind was sweet with promise, I decided to drive to Maryhurst instead of writing another chapter for my dissertation. The year was 1972. We were in St. Louis during our summer semester break from my teaching responsibilities at Eastern Michigan University. I had never been back in the eleven years since high school graduation, probably in no small measure because I felt residual guilt about leaving. Actually, the guilt was not over abandoning a religious vocation but leaving a life I had loved that had allowed the wounds inflicted by my father to heal. Consequently, the idea of walking once again over the grounds where I had been so happy appealed to me. My wife, Sandy, and the children had left at 8:00 to help her cousin, Carol, prepare for an afternoon birthday party. Leaving me free to do as I pleased.

I drove south on Kirkwood Road to Big Bend. The area had developed so much since I left that I hardly recognized it. Then, without warning I saw it. A huge, vulgar Venture store and a strip center squatting toad-like in the middle of an enormous parking lot where Maryhurst Prep had been. I was completely stunned. My stomach knotted into a hard ball. The car seemed to stop of its own volition, almost as if it were as horrified as I. The lovely blue spruce were gone, as were the mighty oaks and maples. The gently curving entry drive and the athletic fields were acres of asphalt. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Maryhurst was no more. In its place stood a modern temple of Ba’al, vomiting people laden with gifts for self-adoration in the strange reverse homage that characterizes contemporary American society. Gone was everything but the most important — my memories of and love for the people and the place that profoundly affected my life.

Tears moistened my eyes and curved down my cheeks when I first wrote this material. I was unable to hold them back, though I could not tell if they were for the person I had been or for my wonderful memories of the past. Certainly they were for a place, a time I loved that could never be again.

But all memories are bitter-sweet flashes that make you laugh and cry in random disorder. So much has changed since I was a postulant. I am no longer that apprehensive boy in search of foundations. Bro. Vincent Gray is dead as is Bro. Al Stein, Fr. Michael Dorsey, Bro. Fred Weisbruch, and so many others, including my old friend and accomplice in so many mis-adventures, Herb B. (who died as a result of a brain injury he received while serving as a young man in the military). Bro. Xavier Shultz is alive [Author’s Note: he was when this section was originally written but died in 2001] but not particularly healthy in his life of retirement in Hawaii — he later moved to California for better medical care. My former classmates live separate existences that I hope are filled with satisfaction and contentment, though I know life is seldom that kind. I have lost track of each and every one, though once every two or three years I see Gerry M. at the supermarket or the Mall.

Despite all that, I visit Maryhurst several times a year. I slowly walk its wide corridors and smell the familiar mustiness mixed with chalk dust. I open my locker in the Rec Room; pull on the sweatshirt rank from the exertion of half a dozen yesterdays. Watch my mother patiently sew the miniature name labels on each piece of clothing. Lose once again in ping-pong to Ed M. with his powerhouse backhand. Wear pajamas for the very first time in my life on that initial night in the dorm. Hear my friends’ excited chatter as Billy W. and I, arms around each other’s shoulders, prepare to sally forth with barely containable excitement to defeat our erstwhile foes on the playing fields. Smell those gloriously sweet mornings in Spring when the buds explode their greenery across the landscape. Learn how to make rosaries. Play a viciously competitive, winner-take-all game of hearts with Charpy, Habs, and Eddy M. Rub my hand across the glass cabinet in the Chem Lab that Herb and I blew to smithereens. Taste once more Bro. Leo’s fabulous caramel rolls, his mouth-watering pizza, or that unbelievably delicious maple syrup drenched cornbread. Shock my face into shuddering awareness every morning in the dorm’s freezing water. Serve daily Mass with the familiar-forgotten Latin phrases rolling with ease from my tongue. Lose myself in the beauty and rolling majesty of Night Prayers. Polish the brass spigots in the toilets until they shine brilliantly. Run the base paths with abandon. Make another desperate but successful dive for a football that seemed to everyone just out of the reach of my outstretched fingertips. Attend Bro. Xav’s Geography class that made me aware of the world around me. Go reluctantly to work periods. Talk eagerly with my friends who, like me, haven’t aged a day. And with my fellow postulants, watch our much loved Bro. Xav do a fancy dive at the pool to our amazement and heartfelt pride.

Of course Maryhurst Prep will die one day. But only when my last breath whistles in the wind. For I am Maryhurst and we shall never part.