In the last year I have noticed that it has become trendy to out oneself as an Introvert, as though it were an identity along the lines of one's ethnicity or sexuality, or at least one's political ideology. Such declarations are usually accompanied on social media by memes asserting that Introverts Are Like Such-and-Such. The more neutral statements are about how Introverts "recharge" via time alone rather than time spent with friends, or some other essentially attributionless assertion; the less neutral statements charge the Introvert's apparent nemesis -- the Extrovert -- with being shallow and insensitive, while the Introvert's withdrawal from the world is evidence of deep contemplation and the spiritual superiority I suppose the West has always associated with hermits. In any case, I find this mostly silly: like all online personality type assessments, it is based on scanty or no evidence. But more to the point, it strikes me as a pre-fabricated categorization of the Self, and such can only be inadequate, especially as a way of announcing your essential nature to the world. This latter urge I understand well: curating the documentation of one's life -- through social media or otherwise -- is a declaration that one's life is worthy of being recorded carefully. I think this is an essentially positive inclination: all human lives are worthy of respect and attention (unless some Donald Trump-type character demonstrates decisively that they are an outlier worthy of no such things), and a healthy self-esteem regards oneself as a person whose life matters. A life that matters requires examination and record-keeping, even if finding an audience for that project is not guaranteed. But while broadly understood descriptors can be useful as short-hand -- "I am a socialist" -- they rarely suffice.
All of that being said, I don't much like spending time around other people. I have a collection of loved ones whom I am happy to see from time to time, but otherwise I prefer to be alone, and even when it comes to those loved ones, I prefer to be alone the majority of the time, give or take the fact that I live with my husband. This is a rather new phenomenon, increasing in intensity as I have aged, although I don't think it's an effect of aging per se. Rather, I think that when I was younger I took being constantly surrounded by people as an indication that I was popular with others, and I took that as an indication that I was a Good and Worthy person. My self-esteem was more fragile then, and this kind of external buttressing made sense; I don't regret it, and it was a useful formulation for me at the time. But over time, my self-esteem has become less fragile, and so I no longer require so much validation from others. This has allowed me to foreground all of the things that feel off-putting about other human beings -- which can mostly be summarized by saying that many of them are not very smart, but they are very loud. And so random other people are no longer of much use to me, but they do feel like a small burden. Thus I keep to myself more. This makes sense, I think.
But how to keep to oneself? There's always the living room. But I have also found as I have gotten older that I am not only less enamored with humans, but I am also less enamored with their works. This marks a decisive change in my attitudes. I grew up in a benighted small town and longed to move to the city, which, I assumed correctly, would be a more diverse and cosmopolitan place. I did this at 18, and was enthralled for many years by the urban environment. The physical mass of human construction was a demonstration of command and will that was nowhere in evidence in Hometown; the scale of things bespoke a competency and artistry that I felt I had been deprived of in my environment growing up. The sheer quantity and variety of Things to Do was a beautiful remedy to the effects of many emotionally frustrated years of confinement in a very provincial place. And I am still happy to live in the city because of all of the options and amenities it provides. In the same week I can go to the symphony and a pizza festival along the same three-ish mile stretch of road; go to a banjo night or a punk show; see a classic Japanese film, attend a beer festival, visit a modern art museum, try Nepalese food, and take a hike in an enormous wooded park. I'm not inclined to do some of these things, but I CAN. These things are available to me, and this is very comforting to someone who grew up with no escape from a stultifying rural culture of anti-intellectualism, even after many years.
But those many years HAVE passed, and feeling secure now that I am not going to have these amenities and opportunities stripped from me, I am more inclined to see the urban environment more realistically. It is dirty, it is crowded, and it is often crumbling. It is noisy and frenetic. In other words, it is STRESSFUL. I'm already an anxious person by nature; miles of broken sidewalks and a never-ending, jackhammering sewer line infrastructure project doesn't help that.
This year and last I've been retreating to Frick Park as a remedy to the stress of the urban environment. This is also a new inclination in me. I have never been an outdoorsy person, I think for two reasons. The first is that I spent the first half of my life having my physical capacity constantly denigrated, such that I thought I was a physically incompetent person. The origins of this message were both systemic and individual. Systemic because I was fat, and the world at large communicated constantly, starting at a very young age, that my body was WRONG, and BAD. Media, popular culture, family members, doctors, teachers, peers -- all of them contributed to this message. It is very difficult to be told repeatedly and in innumerable ways that your body is Wrong and Bad without concluding that it is those things, and not merely in terms of appearance, but also in terms of its functioning. If my body functioned correctly, it wouldn't' be so Wrong and Bad, right? If I wasn't so incompetent at having a body, it wouldn't be so Wrong and Bad, right? (Never mind that I had been fat since I was an extremely young child.) Clearly, I had a body that either didn't work right, or I couldn't operate correctly. This was a message that was and still is widely abroad in American culture: fat people's bodies are Bad, fat people are incapable of having a body in the Right way, fat people do not deserve to have their bodies and use them freely.
But I also received more individualized messages about my physical inadequacy. In the first place, I did and do have poor health: my body has produced several major catastrophes starting in adolescence, such that I have come to think of myself as what they used to call "sickly." As an endocrinologist put it recently, "You've got bad genes -- it's bad luck." But I was also an only child raised by a single mother who was herself an extremely anxious person. Every day of my young life, I heard about what wasn't safe to do. Spoiler alert: basically everything wasn't safe. The world wasn't safe. And it was difficult to translate this into anything other than an indictment of my own competency, because many of the things my mother declared unsafe I knew were, in fact, objectively, much safer than she claimed. This was not adolescent hubris: my mother's anxiety skewed her ability to accurately estimate risk. As a child, upon being told that I was not allowed to do X because X wasn't safe, but also knowing that in general X was safe, I was left to assume that I was the problem -- X was not safe for me, apparently because I was incompetent in some important way. Since I was already routinely told that I was physically incompetent, I thought that this conclusion was confirmed. To this day, my mother discourages me from doing regular and even actively healthful things because she deems them unsafe -- "You'll hurt yourself." Maybe. But the opposite side of the sickly coin is that I no longer expect not to hurt myself: Hurt is no longer particularly threatening.
Having been convinced of my physical incompetency from a young age, it was difficult to imagine a place for myself in the outdoors, which I discerned was a more physically challenging place to be than indoors. But there was a second reason for my antipathy to the natural world, and this still plagues me: my own anxiety involves a lot of hypochondria. (The previous paragraph should shed some light on why that might be.) And the natural world is full of unknown threats to one's health -- is that plant poisonous? Can you get the Hanta virus from falling in the dirt? Do these mosquitoes have Zika? Is this water even clean enough to allow on my skin? Could something with rabies bite me without me realizing it? On and on.
And so I am still slightly at cross purposes: the built environment is stressful, the natural environment is stressful. But only the former is often ugly and full of strangers, and so over time I'm tipping more towards nature.
Frick Park is the first step out the door, so to speak, for a Pittsburgher. At 644 acres, it was the city's largest park until only recently, when the Hays gift was announced. Henry Clay Frick, who was a true capitalist ratfucker, gifted 151 acres adjacent to his East End mansion to the city, along with a trust to support its maintenance. Henry, being a capitalist ratfucker, didn't provide this gift voluntarily -- his daughter Helen made him do it. Over time, the city acquired more land and expanded the park, which now reaches into Squirrel Hill and through Regent Square to the Parkway East.
The topography of the park is characteristic of the western Pennsylvania woods generally. The hills of this portion of Appalachia are not a mountain range but rather a plateau: an upland, 1200 - 1300 feet above sea level, that has been riven by water erosion from many many streams and rivers over time. Thus it's less accurate to say that Pittsburgh has hills than it is to say that Pittsburgh has valleys. And so Frick Park is shaped by the Nine Mile Run watershed; Nine Mile runs along the southern edge of the park, and streams that feed it flow down from Squirrel Hill and along the main flatland of the park, running south from Frick's mansion to the Run. Nine Mile Run is filthy, as one might expect of an urban stream, particularly one in a city whose history is marked chiefly by coal mining and iron and steel manufacture -- and now fracking. The Nine Mile Run Watershed Association, however, has made progress in its uphill battle; Nine Mile underwent the largest urban stream restoration in American history in 2006. But sewage overflows, storm water runoff, and non-point source pollution generated by the third of the watershed that's covered in concrete (imagine the winter road "salt" alone) still leave its water unsafe to touch.
It looks nice, though. There's nothing I find quite as nice as being around water. The ultimate water one hopes to sit near and recreate in is the sea, of course. Failing that, lakes, streams, cricks, and fountains serve the purpose, although not for recreation, because look, brain-eating amoebas are real. I even enjoy sitting and staring at the swimming pool in the summer; I often listen to the soundtrack of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou while I do so. Needless to say, I also love to swim (in salt or chlorinated water, ahem).
But the West Anderson soundtrack for a walk in Frick Park is Moonrise Kingdom. I'm not so drawn to the open areas of the park -- the field and wetlands surrounding Nine Mile are important to the Run's restoration, but leave me feeling exposed. To the sun, which is its own consideration on a hot day, but also in a more existential sense -- imagine yourself on an open plain, vulnerable in high grass that masks predators but allows no place to hide. My brain goes back to the stage of evolution when my ancestors were little things ducking dinosaurs. Ironically, although dense urban spaces like Downtown leave me feeling claustrophobic, the woods closing in on me makes me feel safe.
My favorite part of the park is Falls Ravine. In the spring and autumn a crick trickles down about a mile of little waterfalls, finding its way towards the Run. The path is broad, a bit uphill, and the sides of the valley rise up on either side of you, populated with leafy, skinny trees reaching up and up, surrounded by open space that seems to give each tree trunk its own stage; more little rivulets run down between these into the ravine. There is a constant trickle, if there are no other people to make noise and drown it out. In the spring and summer, this little strip of the world is bright green and clothed in variegated light; the ascent isn't overwhelming, but it reminds you that life is work. When I am there by myself, I feel like I am discovering something, despite the fact that the path has obviously been made by human hands.
This relationship between man and nature takes on different shades in the park than in the city itself. Pittsburgh has recently, as part of its third Renaissance, been building this and that to be Green -- we have a number of Green Certified ("Certified"!) buildings. I gather that Green, here, largely means "energy efficient," and this is not for nothing, since it's very clear that climate change is going to kill us all sooner rather than later without some action on our part. But buildings are not Green in the true sense of the world -- they are not plants. They do not grow. They do not invite things to live in and use them, except insofar as some of the benighted creatures on this planet prefer a good hard, cold, enclosed space in which to operate, among them pigeons, cockroaches, raccoons, and human beings. The chief experience of the urban environment is of domination -- Western humans do not seem to be able to interact with their environment other than by subduing it, and not in part, but rather in vicious totality. We only feel comfortable with and think we understand a part of the natural world when we have completely conquered it. At which point, out of necessity because of the negative consequences of this conquest, and a kind of spiritual malaise that we mostly refuse to name, let alone describe, we go back and begin to try to re-Green what it is we have paved over. But this is not real greenness, it is a simulacrum. Parks are the best simulacra of nature available to us now.
In a way, Pittsburgh's topography prevented the full and total conquest many other cities managed to procure over the nature they arose on. I live in a dense neighborhood of mostly row houses, with very few street trees and very few yards of any proper size (my own being an exception). And yet there is also a hillside adjacent to my lot that is too steep and unstable to build upon; it has never been built upon, and its trees and undergrowth shelter rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, cats, turkeys, squirrels, deer, snakes, a plethora of insects, I am sure, and a variety of homely little birds. Turned into an island by the concrete around it, of course, this hillside does not represent any kind of original, untrammeled wildness -- which has not existed in Pennsylvania for many thousands of years, as indigenous, pre-contact peoples managed their environments extensively, if somewhat less obviously, than we colonizers do. And, anyway -- humans are a part of nature; our works are "natural" too, at least up to a point. What that point is changes depending on whom you talk to, but I think industrial capitalism definitely falls after it.
This is the irony of the Pittsburgh landscape: on one hand, compared to many major American cities, the land here has resisted complete conquest by virtue of its physical difficulty: Pittsburgh does not sprawl, and there are many hillsides like the one adjacent to my house, too steep to build upon, too steep for a road or a sidewalk … many of these hillsides are surmounted by stairs, which are now too numerous and costly to maintain, such that many of them are being reclaimed by the hillsides they burrow into, and using them is more like a climb into the canopy than a walk up the street. The city is very Green, in the real sense of the word, when seen from above or on Google Maps, compared to many others.
And yet very few American cities have seen such complete environmental annihilation as Pittsburgh. Between the 1780s -- when settlers had mostly killed or relocated the area's native population -- and the 1830s, Pittsburgh was chiefly a gathering of scattered settlers working small farms wherever enough moderately sloped land could be found for the purpose. Their first cash crops were wheat and rye for whiskey. Over time the Monongahela Wharf became a busy spot for river transport, and a frontier city began to grow up. But even in the early years of the 19th century, Pittsburgh was choked by smoke. By 1850 there were 80,000 people in the area -- first digging out clay (for bricks), sand (for glass), and iron, but then digging out coal. Tons and tons of coal, which was put to the tons and tons of iron to turn it into pig iron. The "unmatched urban-industrial landscape" of the city created an aesthetic unique to industrial capitalism: enormous complexes of mills, eventually for making steel, and the railroads that attended them, sprawled over hundreds of acres lining all three rivers. They dominated the landscape and were integrated directly into the city's main population centers. People at the time chiefly responded positively to these structures, in a manner not unlike the way I received the city at 18: as a monument to human enterprise, power, and invention. Pittsburgh proudly trumpeted its built environment throughout its industrial age.*
The rivers were practically obliterated, visually and otherwise, by mills, railroads, wires, and barges. The city's impressive waterways were completely subsumed into the built, industrial environment. The many flowing streams that had characterized the landscape the city came to subsume were culverted into the sewage system. Water, water everywhere, and somehow none to stare at. It is still startlingly difficult to access Pittsburgh's waterways throughout most of the city.*
Tastes change over time, of course. For example, living in a hideous industrial landscape of filth and pollution eventually seems less like a tribute to human ingenuity and more like a way to contract disease. The public-private partnership of the Pittsburgh Renaissance after World War II created parks but also highways ("parkways"), skyscrapers, and a new stadium. 1960's-style "urban renewal" destroyed several city neighborhoods, but air and water quality was also targeted for improvement, relatively successfully. The second Renaissance preserved historic structures and, as Pittsburgh deindustrialized, cleared brownfields and more or less entirely dismantled the industrial structures left vacant by the shifting economy. Pittsburgh continues to "green" through its third renaissance -- in spite of its river fronts being largely blocked by railroad tracks, its air being continually polluted by the region's coal power plants, and its waterways now being used as sewers for mostly unregulated fracking waste. The Green simulacrum is difficult to maintain, but better than the alternative.*
Living in conflict with nature also means striving for accommodation with it; but it's easy to lose sight, in a city, of the ways we're constantly shaping and being shaped by the natural world. The park looks like a mostly "wild" space, set aside from the city -- but it is very much a human-made space, and we make choices in developing it. Frick Park has very little access for disabled people -- many of the flat trails are inaccessible without first descending stairs or very steep inclines. There are very few bathrooms within the park. And so we choose to make it difficult for disabled folk to access the "wild" -- we make it easier for men than for women to spend time in "nature." Meanwhile, the city itself looks like a space of conquest over nature -- but floods and overgrowth threaten every spring and summer, and every winter we grind to a halt because of the difficulty removing snow and ice from all of our ravines covered over in cracking asphalt. The deer come out of the cemeteries and parks to eat our tulips. We pump hexavalent chromium into the water supply in fracking waste. We do a much better job of spiting us than the deer do.
But even knowing it's not the real wild, I retreat to the park, to the "woods" to "hike." (What is the difference between a hike and a walk but setting?) And I pretend the wild world still exists for me to encounter -- which is also pretending I am something apart from and different from the wild world. The division between the Human -- which frustrates and exhausts me -- and Nature -- which is now only a museum display -- strikes me chiefly as a question of dharma: people violate the cosmic order, the right-way-of-living, routinely; nothing else does. And yet our museum-piece, dramatically moderated and altered Nature is itself perhaps a violation of dharma -- or more accurately, a simulacrum of it. And our own cruel and dominating natures are apparently just that -- nature, built-in, universal to our species, evolved in this cosmos right out of the same dust as everything else. All of our radical difference and radical similarity to that which we destroy and then struggle to resurrect and preserve is flattened into a map like Borges's -- it covers the territory completely, then, as Baudrillard says, replaces it.
So I visit the place on the map where the fewest people are in evidence, and pretend briefly to have escaped into the woods. X marks the spot of my imaginary world. Terebithia ended tragically, but I suspect I'll just float on mundanely through the simulated woods, unless and until someday I retire to the sea, with my incompetent and sickly body that will seem very moot in the comparison.
*Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region, by Joel A. Tarr
