White Clay Creek State Park
I visited White Clay Creek State Park the evening of Monday, February 17th, 2014 with another student in the class. I anticipated the snow would cause problems to get close to the creek, so I wore snow boots. The recent snow and ice storms caused the snow to be crispy and hard on top, only to cave in and make your feet sink to the hidden grass within seconds. Snow boots were definitely a good decision. White Clay Creek was truly a beautiful sight to see covered in snow, and the pictures I took almost resemble paintings of what a perfect snow-covered forest would look like.
Once I tackled the snow sinkholes and got closer to the creek, the first thing I noticed was that there were still leaves on the tree next to me. This struck me as odd, considering I was calf deep in about 10 inches of snow. The leaves were small, a pale yellow, and speckled with brown. There were also some leaves on the tree next to it, but they were very small, withered, and brown. I heard birds chirping in the distance, and the creek slowly flowing along. The creek was very calm, and not even a foot deep right in front of me. The bottom third of the banks were exposed, as well as the side of about five stumps and logs in my general area. However, snow was covering the ground everywhere else. There was still ice in the creek, mostly along the banks. There was a spot of snow and ice in the middle of the creek a little ways down. It was an island of white in the middle of a perfectly flowing creek. It looked as though there were rocks under the island, and that the water level was probably very low.
Trees in winter have a weird way of looking even more melancholy than they already are. The trees that I observed had mostly thin branches, and lots of them. This immediately made me think of spider webs. A whole forest of decaying, brown, spider webs, tangled together and taking over the land as far as you could see. Some of the trees on the bank were even arching towards the opposite side of the creek, resembling half of a canopy and framing the river. A large tree directly across the creek from me had fallen over some time ago, and was starting to bend up towards the sky on the left side. I couldn’t help but think of yoga when I saw the tree.
There was something specific that I saw during my time in White Clay Creek that I thought was especially stunning. This was the reflection of the creek a little ways down from my spot near the creek. The colors of the setting sun, the sky, and the trees hit the water just right that it looked like a painter had just come in and dragged a paintbrush from bank to bank. The fluidity of the lines also reminded me of the aesthetic of the 60’s and 70’s, which could easily translate into a mod dress hand painted with natural dyes. I see nature and the environment as the predominant inspiration for my designs this semester. I truly can’t wait to see how my little spot at White Clay Creek changes over the next few months.
The day I picked up my textbooks from the bookstore I browsed through all of them. It just so happened that in New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, some of the corners of the pages had been folded down. I’m not sure if there were folded down because they were favorites or because they were assigned readings, but after reading “Sun” and “The Summer Day” I knew that I would devour this wonderful book. There was also a beautiful, makeshift bookmark left in the book, made of thick artist paper and painted blue and yellow to make an interesting abstract design. An artistic soul evaluated the pages of this very book before I did, and now it was being passed down to another artistic soul.
The last few lines of “Winter” were, “in this world I am as rich, as I need to be”. This struck me as something that was definitely written a couple decades ago, because most people would not say that today. People today aren’t concerned about happiness, all they want is money and power. Even when people are extremely rich or powerful, they still want more. This insatiable need gets in the way of happiness, which is the real indicator of how “rich” a person is.
I found “Lonely, White Fields” to be particularly dark. However, this is the circle of life that goes on unnoticed to most people. I really liked that “Some Questions You Might Ask” dug deeper into the mysterious thing that is a soul. The poem asked about the consistency of it, the shape, and who has it. Oliver even went one step further to question whether things in nature have souls, such as maple trees or stones. Considering there is currently snow on the ground, I thought that “First Snow” did an excellent job of describing snow, and the feelings and sights associated with it.
It’s remarkable how much I’ve learned in one class, a prologue, and two chapters of What’s Gotten Into Us?. This “plastic plague” that the world is now experiencing was really put into perspective with the section of the prologue about the discovery of the Titanic. There was no plastic found on the ship, but how could that be when the Titanic sunk just over 100 years ago? People from that generation seemed to be living happy lives without plastic, even the rich ones. I question whether our society is “advancing”, or whether companies and industries are just discovering cheaper ways to make millions of dollars, regardless of the consequences to the general population. Should we really be using something on our lawns that Hitler used to make bombs? Before fertilizers and pesticides were invented, lawns were growing just fine.
Petrochemicals are something that scare me, especially since I put a plastic retainer in my mouth every night. After the readings, I’ve become so much more conscious about the products I consume. I was going to go to Walgreens to buy a tube of red lipstick, but not anymore. The thing about lipstick is it doesn’t just go on our lips, some of it will probably get on our delicate face, we’ll definitely breathe it in, and it will find its way into our mouth and body. As a female in the world we live in today, you’re expected to wear makeup after a certain age to look “pretty”. The ingredients in cosmetics are listed on the packages that you buy them in, so I flipped over my makeup remover wipes and scanned the ingredients. There were over 15 ingredients, and I could only pronounce two of them. If that many chemicals are in the things used to take off makeup, what’s in the actual makeup?
Something that really hit home for me was the fact that “One in three women will die of cancer”. That means that out of my Mother, little sister, and I, one of us will die of cancer. There is something terribly wrong with this. There’s also something wrong with the fact that hybrid cars and organic canned vegetables both are made with hidden carcinogenic chemicals. What really baffled me was the fish experiment where potentially harmful chemicals were “tested”, and how we’re all exposed to these chemicals at some point.
Someday I want to have children. However, I do not want to transfer hundreds of chemicals to them. It’s unreal that even in an umbilical cord, which is internally in the body until the end, can be so saturated with chemicals. I had to reread the paragraph about the umbilical cord blood experiment to fully grasp the severity of it. This really shows that although we can’t see or feel chemicals, they are internally in our bodies, sometimes forever.
The home was always thought of as a safe place, but now I’m rethinking this. As I look around my room I see old windows that probably contain lead paint, a dresser with fake wood this is most certainly glued together with formaldehyde, and plastic everywhere. This is just my room, what about the kitchen or the basement or the garage. As in most houses full of college students, a couple weeks into the semester the kitchen area starts to secrete an odd burning smell after somebody uses the stove. The basement is only used to do laundry, and is filled with spider webs and probably mold. The garage is used for storage of miscellaneous things, and plastic is unfortunately not the worst offender. I never thought about these things before, and am now noticing how toxic my own house is. I try to live as sustainably as I can, but there’s definitely even more I can do to limit my exposure to toxic substances.
Nice post. I will have to take a look at Mary Oliver’s poems.