Lovers of the less-than

By SANDY LONG

An eastern milk snake lost its life crossing the road out front last week. Despite the wreckage, its beauty was unmistakable: milky cappuccino and creamy cocoa patches co-mingled.

Many of us don’t view a dead snake as something worthy of remorse. Why should it matter, if what’s lost is something we deem less than desirable?

It’s easy to love the beautiful and well-behaved child or the sun-struck, cloud-studded crisp and fresh fall day when the foliage is at its finest. But what of those days and people and places that offend our sensibilities? Why do some of us still relish the less than lovely?

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, recently penned an elegy in response to the loss of a beloved place. No lofty peak with dramatic views, no fine forest landscape, Oliver mourned the conversion of her town’s retired burn dump into a sewage treatment facility.

Viewed through the lens of modern life, most of us would find little to love about a dump—that community catch-basin for all we consume and cast away. But for Oliver, observing the natural processes of reclamation occurring there transformed an under-appreciated place.

A pair of black snakes, box turtles, a hummingbird, grosbeaks, palm warblers, indigo buntings, peppermint, raspberries, blackberries and honeysuckle, vied with car batteries, melted and misshapen glass forms and old stoves.

As the dump claimed Oliver’s attention, she became disturbed to discover that she was largely alone in her interest. In “Waste Land: An Elegy,” she laments, “Only one question, really, frightens me. I wonder why, in all the years I walked in the old burn dump—this waste place, this secret garden—I never met another soul there, who had come forth for a like reason.”

For some, perceiving the wild beauty of such environments is difficult. But for lovers of the less-than, it’s not unusual to become fascinated with seepage pits studded with discarded grocery carts behind the strip mall, where bulrushes rise and spring peepers outperform autos.

I confess a passion for a truly discarded place, where acrid smoke seeps from the ground, resulting in the relocation of an entire Pennsylvania town. Ironically, Centralia’s still-smoldering 41-year-long mine fire may have started in a burn dump. As its red roots found their way into the coal region’s anthracite veins, a wondrous and terrible circumstance was born.

Deepening the irony is the unofficial garbage dump it has once again become. As the fire smolders and creeps along underground, humans deposit all manner of trash across the surface of this landscape. In greatest abundance are beer bottles—intact, in shards, and layered in gritty glistening heaps over the culm banks. I am drawn to explore this wounded landscape, walking among steaming fissures and photographing its fantastical evolvement.

Underground embers consume living trees from the roots upward. Smoke stings eyes and assaults respiratory systems with its caustic and disagreeable sulfuric odor. Still, in the fire’s wake swirl the reclaimers—grasses and insects and birds and small mammals—that play their vital everyday roles, unaware of their importance to this place, but endlessly fascinating to me.

If you happen to be a fan of the less-than, I’d like to hear about your special place. Send your story to Sandy Long at The River Reporter, PO Box 150, Narrowsburg, New York 12764.