A Sprawling History

The land I returned to each week is positioned both beneath and beside the red bridge on the Kokosing Gap Trail. It is entered through a thin clearing where a stream sometimes flows. On either side of this narrow channel is a mound of land, whose slopes are hidden by a dense succession of plants. One mound lays directly under the bridge, at level with a footpath that winds around the bridge’s base. The channel bends around it toward the road that leads to the BFEC, and is lost in fallen tree limbs and growth. The facing mound extends down the river, disconnected from the land that the channel seems to lead to from a bird’s eye view. Instead, the occasional stream hugs the contour of this second mound, which brings it into the Kokosing. The spot I chose is along the straight of this runnel, between each change of course. It is a small architecture of mud attached to the mound that touches the river, and can be seen in two parts: a ten inch vertical rise of mud that’s defined by two relatively deep indentations; and a flat, pond-like clearing of mud that the rise looks over, whose shape resembles a tear drop, and at its largest width extends about a foot from the mud wall.

On my first visit here, I wrote this:

The ridge resembles what mountain cliffs facing the sea look like. Except both the cliffs and sea are a warm brown tinged with green. There is a centipede slowly maneuvering her way around the ridge's textures, which has many areas and freckled indentations everywhere. By contrast, the flat area ("small mud pond") that the mud wall towers over and encloses is smooth, except for a few cracks where plants have sprouted…

Throughout my field notes, I am always applying new terms to this same spot, once calling the plateau of the ridge a “roof”. Yet “ridge,” which signifies those long stretches of hilltop with two sloping sides, is also not applicable here. “Cliff” would be more appropriate, signifying a steep, vertical mass and exposure of rock, often called a “face.” And the steepness that defines a cliff is only in relation to the viewer: Though sitting in front of this spot my head is at level with its top, its steepness is felt by the centipede, and I will be using “cliff” or “face” to describe the vertical exposure of mud, and “flat” to describe the oval of smooth mud that the cliff overlooks. This shifting, trying out of language speaks to a closer expression of the place no longer in front of me.

I imagine that initial sketch offers little information about that place. Throughout my time at the spot, I’m unsure if I ever captured a legible description of the land’s shape. Of four others, this is the last and most detailed sketch I made during my observations:

As one can see, an attention to surface detail does not assign a clearer image of what was actually in front of me. It might even make it more abstract. In drawing sediment, I was often tempted to depict a universal understanding of mud, rather than the specific texture of what was in front of me. My last attempt was in spite of this, as I tried to capture every detail that distinguished this section of land. This placed intention on its design, which is important when textural intricacies can tell how a space was previously occupied: The roots hanging over the two hollows are enmeshed with clumps of dirt, suggesting that the recesses formed with the erosion of sediment once occupying their hollow, and a movement of retraction eliminates the other possibility that the mud surrounding the recesses had accumulated and lengthened, constructing them by addition rather than subtraction. Each shape contains histories, but after many trials, the texture remains out of reach, and I’m unsure the extent to which anyone who observes my sketches in place of the land gets closer to its real presence.

So I will try another way, and place the reader in my experiences. I would situate myself before the spot the exact way every time: sitting (or crouched on my feet, if the stream was there) a foot away from a tree root (the width of my wrist), which emerged from the mud on the right side of the flat (from where I sat), and reentered on the left side where the flat draws the point of its tear. This root bordered the exact length of the spot, which likely contributed to the intactness of its architecture: The mud of the flat did not erode and crumble to the floor of the stream because the root held its accumulation of sediment in place, keeping it level.

From this seat, one feels the center of attention. In warm weather, luscious greens and long strands of vegetation reach out to me, although I know this direction is enforced by the sloping mound of the land, who composes plant life in rising heights. In cold weather, these strands pale and become angular, resembling a skeleton’s fingers more than the smooth life of grasses that sway with the wind. At any moment, one feels the place sprawling. This quality, in light of the spot’s relative stasis (it isn’t a coursing river), suggests you are witnessing something frozen in time, observing a scene that is paused in its fleeting: a painting. And this transience is not a feeling. Over 350 million years ago, the erosion of ancient Appalachian Mountains deposited sediment in a shallow sea, forming the Black Hand Sandstone that makes up Ohio’s bedrock. With what’s below me, I observe the imperceptible.

And I do perceive it. The vibrancy of many greens in summer pair well with the deep shade of brown that the mud has when the air is humid. The space feels alive in its utmost capacity. Come fall, leaves aggregate in the flat, helped by the enclosure of root and cliff. Some would fall face down, and their underbellies paled as the weather became colder. The mud too would attain a certain grey in dryer days. But this extraction of color from summer to winter is not exclusively the result of lost chlorophyll or dampness: adjacent colors affect the intensity of each other. Placing a primary (red, yellow, or blue) next to a secondary (green, orange, violet) results in a “pop” of both, which is called “simultaneous contrast” (Chevreul, 1839). When leaves are green, the warm hues of mud are drawn with a particular intensity, and this rosiness feeds back into the green.

I remember now the many lady’s thumb, or knotweed, or Persicaria longiseta, whose berried braids appear many times in my notes. These pink-red flowers, which I’ve seen nearly everywhere I’ve been, are native to Southeast Asia. Regular “weeds”, their presence may elicit a kind of disappointment, or nothing at all, which itself is a response. Yet discovering they’re not supposed to be there seemed to contradict to the particular attention I’d give them in my observations. There was a quality that drew me to them, and I see it might’ve been the “pop” of their lip-colored ends amid a blur of green. They were here and bore relationships to their space, changing the hues and forming the place in front of me.

Another frequenter of my notes was the moss that blanketed the cliff and sprinkled itself throughout. The particular moss of this landscape is Plagiomnium cuspidatum, or “Baby Tooth Moss.” Mosses don’t have the circulatory system other plants do: Without roots, stems, or leaves, they are made up of hollow cells that easily retain water (Reynolds, 2014). They anchor to the top of the cliff by rhizoids, small threads of themselves, which aren’t to be mistaken for roots as they don’t absorb water or nutrients (Reynolds, 2014). Their attachment makes the cliff more resilient against weathering erosion by minimizing the water flow from rain and holding the soil together (Sons, 2017). Moss are the first plant on earth, evolved from algae (Nierlich, 2011). What’s beneath the land and what covers it are my entrance to an ancient, furtive past.

I am drawn to streams, small dwelling places, and moss. My psyche can be easily read if one knows the landscape of my Uncle’s backyard in Vermont, whose pond was bordered by soft sediment and trees cracked down by beavers. In these broken stumps, frogs felt sunlight on their backs, crawling beings disappeared in recesses of wood, and beds of velvet green were made on stones and bark. I leave the part of Ohio I sat in front of for many weeks with its image kept in my retina. When we took a virtual field trip to Honey Run Waterfall, I saw the inner wall of one of the cliff’s notches in a face of Black Hand Sandstone, which too bore smooth and rapid undulations. Outside my house today, wet, tan mud sludged along the curb of the street (up the block was a construction site). As it accumulated, small streams of water dug deeper and deeper paths, and I saw that the often empty stream I sat in must have flowed at some point to have created that channel. This awareness tells of a changed relation to the landscape: In an early observation, I wrote that the large crack on the top face of the cliff resembled a gulley, unaware that I was sitting in the echo of one, walls of sediment enclosing me.

Entering the trail by the KAC, about ten feet after passing through the bridge and to the right, I will miss walking down those large, flat steps made of ground and uneven panels of wood. These led me to a dirt path that has been made path because of a paleness of form: As people step through here, organic matter, such as dead leaves or roots, do not decompose to form humus—the fertile, living, brown-agate of my spot (McLaughlin, 2020). Trail, bridge, walkway. In this crossroad of paths, another has been made.

Works Cited:

Chevreul, M. E. (1839). The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (3rd ed.). London: George Bell and Sons.

Michel Eugène Chevreul was a French chemist who discovered these ideas while working in the dyeing department of a tapestry workshop.

McLaughlin, R. (2020, November 17). What Makes Topsoil So Dark? Retrieved December 13, 2020, from https://homeguides.sfgate.com/topsoil-dark-70317.html

Nierlich, K. (2011, November 14). In The Beginning…There Was Moss. Retrieved December 13, 2020, from http://iheartmoss.com/2011/11/in-the-beginning-moss/

Reynolds, B. (2014, January 14). Where Does Moss Grow? Retrieved December 13, 2020, from https://www.creaseymahannaturepreserve.org/where-does-moss-grow/

Sons, T. (2017, July 26). The Many Advantages of Growing moss. Retrieved December 13, 2020, from https://blog.gardeningknowhow.com/trends/the-many-advantages-of-growing-moss/