Place #5: July 27th. Nine Mile Run and Reclamation in Nature. 2:48 P.M. Hot, Pleasant.

Nine Mile Run is not what I expected.

Its entrance is just below the Parkway, completely invisible to the unacquainted. Unlike the Ravine Trail, which greets you with cardinals, aromatic flora, and muted traffic, Nine Mile Run, after drawing people in with the sound of its faint, trickling stream, stops them in their tracks with the sour, blunt odor of sewage overflow. Up close, it resembles the L.A. River far more than any of the three that carve Pittsburgh into a triangle, a creek held within, together, by a corridor of boulders and concrete. Discarded plastic bottles outnumber the sycamores and cottonwoods. The sound of the Parkway reverberates throughout the woods.

It’s not what expected. It’s my fault for having expectations. I don’t blame the stream.

After a fair warning about dogshit on the trail, the smell of sewage quickly dissipates and becomes hard to describe. I remember a conversation I had with an ex-girlfriend, not one of my brighter ones, about photosynthesis—exciting pillow talk, I know. She said she loved the image of a plant, happy and fat off of ingesting sunshine, devouring waves (and/or particles) of it much like we do food. For better or worse, I’ve never forgotten that image, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school. I bring it up because that image reminds of the particular, organic fragrance—the one that followed the sewage—that I only find comes out in late spring and summer, and only when the sun is its peak hours bearing down on green plants. Closer to the water where fish and bullfrogs have been sighted, a smell is more tangible: Slight chamomile.

Not much further up the trail, the water becomes a cloudy turquoise, greatly obscured by a chain-link fence suffocated by small vines. Our guide tells about the old philosophy of streams, its function to be cleanse and take away sediment, all that is gray, all things we no longer have use for. I find this appalling, wondering about the need to suppress a stream of water instead of building around it and taking away any potential function.

I find the mismanagement of water to be the most abominable form of pollution. But I’m calmed when I take in the scenery: Canadian thistle, creek willows, spider webs refracting light, dragonflies dueling and/or mating.

I thought about my expectations for this place, still trying to manage them and the reality of this place. That’s when our guide speaks of Nine Mile Run as a reclamation project.

Often, we talk about conservation, preservation, the meaning of wildness, the ethics of access. But this is the first time I’ve ever really thought reclaiming natural landscapes. It’s a rather triumphant concept, isn’t it? Urban saxifrage, roots splitting sidewalks and roads, ragweeds growing over railroad tracks, ivies and hops covering homes, modern day hydras that only multiply when divided.

Mercy. I think I need a moment when I think about reclamation. Abbey and Foer have gotten to me in regard to expressing unadulterated passions, about letting your emotions show in writing. The environment is always approached with a zero-sum mentality. Worse than a zero-sum game. We have rationalists, devil’s advocates, and mealy-mouthers. Where is our abundance of advocates and proponents? So much of nature writing involves stopping the hemorrhaging, the sprawl on wild lands. The only direction to go is down. But taking it back, now that’s something.

(And thus we have the have the opening statement of how I became an eco-terrorist.)

I’m getting off track now. But I was wrong to look at Nine Mile Run with such disdain. It’s in a state of recovery. The guide, those familiar with the area look more delighted than anything else, recalling just how much worse it used to be.

Oh, expectations.