The Tao of River Trash
How to embrace a growth mindset anywhere
As I go through another career transition, I’ve been thinking a lot about the growth mindset. Carol Dweck captures the difference between growth and fear with a simple phrase: “the power of yet.” For recovering academics, this is the difference between I can’t get a job in industry and I haven’t found a job in industry yet. But this change in thinking is much more difficult than it seems. Many academics are socialized with a fixed mindset. I began graduate with a survival mentality that I’ve likened to the reality show Alone. When you know your odds of landing a tenure-track job are 300:1, you’d be delusional to think that the world is your oyster. The feeling of precarity persists even for those who earn tenure. As I discussed with Gabrielle Filip-Crawford last week, many faculty are mired in a fear-based mindset. What if enrollments drop? How can I stop the bleeding in my discipline? How can I save my position or other tenure lines in my department?
In many cases, these are valid fears. One of these weeks I’ll find time to write about the AMC series Lucky Hank, which nails the powerlessness that many faculty feel as their institutions contract. In a climate of uncertainty, a vigilant realism is far preferable to gaslighting about how every crisis presents an opportunity. And many of us have recognized that leaving academe is our only hope of experiencing true growth. Sarah Trocchio describes this as embracing the “curiosity mantle.”
Today I’m sharing a chapter from my memoir about a similar shift in my thinking after I accepted a faculty position at Central College, a private liberal arts college in rural Iowa. Many academics know that they can’t choose where they live. For Erika Gault, a tenure-track job offer meant leaving her family and vast friend network on the East Coast and moving to Arizona, where the combination of heat and stress nearly killed her. My own move from the Pacific Northwest to rural Iowa was not so dramatic, but I really struggled initially to embrace Iowa on its own terms. All I could see was the absence of mountains and a polluted landscape. I’d won the job lottery, but I was trapped in a fixed mindset about geography. My memoir tells the story of how I came down from the western mountaintops and learned to embrace the prairie as home, and I’m re-reading some of those later chapters to remind myself of the power of yet. Hope you enjoy this one, which recalls the unexpected pleasure of harvesting river trash with students.
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Even from the Tomb the Voice of Nature cries,
Even in our Ashes live their wonted Fires.
—Thomas Gray
A Westerner steeped in timbered ridgelines and thousands of acres of wilderness might, at first glance, regard Iowa as a lost landscape, all plowed under and fouled, like Leopold’s nightmare of a place and time when the young would have no country to be young in. That pretty much summed up my view when I first arrived in Pella, Iowa, for a faculty position at Central College. I enjoyed a good rapport with colleagues and students, but after coming of age in Montana and returning to the mountains for ten summers through college and graduate school to work with the Forest Service, I hoped to settle somewhere west of the plains. Since I didn’t plan on staying in Pella for more than a year or two, I signed a lease on an apartment in Prairie Village, a former retirement community that could not keep pace with its turnover rate and had begun recruiting younger tenants. The complex was a warren of ranch-style rentals with a central laundry facility and mail room, which both smelled of urine. I often fled to the bike path — out of town to the Des Moines River — and in some of the wooded stretches of the trail I could almost forget where I was. In truth, it was difficult to take in what I saw. Corn stood along the highways like prison bars, and the river bore the filth of the feedlots upstream.
In time I would find wildness in Iowa: the sky darkening beneath a funnel cloud at midday, oaks and maples whipping in violent wind. I would learn that the uplift I had felt on granite peaks might also be a frame of mind capable of illuminating any place. But because I had been raised in the solitude of cedars and pines, my first stance toward the prairie was retreat.
After I recognized the flights out and back on the bike path as little more than exercise in a giant cage, it seemed wise to seek a new center, and so I became a harvester of river trash. The idea struck by chance, when I happened by a coworker’s office and saw a photo on her wall of a glass bottle nearly buried in dirt and gravel, a thick colony of clover growing from the soil inside. Beads of moisture hung from the glass above the clover, and from the slant of light in the photo it appeared to be mid-morning. Drawn by the little field of green straining skyward with nowhere to go, I imagined the sun passing its zenith, heat building beneath the glass until the clover wilted and collapsed. When I asked who’d snapped the photo, she said, “Oh, that’s my husband Ken’s. He likes to walk along the river watching for things that wash up on the bank. He has a whole series of those.” He did, indeed – an orange bobber glowing beneath receding ice, a doll’s head topsy-turvy in tall grass, a shoe buried sole-up in oak leaves. My impulse was to look away from litter at the river’s edge, offended by the eyesore, but here was a different way of seeing. I began to wonder what I was missing right under my nose.
Ken said if I liked his photos I ought to look up his friend, David, who runs a river cleanup each year and builds a sculpture at the Iowa State Fair with scrap metal salvaged from the water. David looks like a Harley rider with his barrel chest and beefy arms. “I love coming home after a long road trip,” he says. “Driving down out of South Dakota into the cornfields, that rolling, sexy loam...mmmhhh.” David’s art studio, which was once his home, is built entirely of refuse, a hardwood floor recycled from an old basketball gymnasium, and most of the lumber scavenged from driftwood or collapsed barns. Each of his sculptures tells the story of water conservation in the form of a giant water droplet made of rebar and steel or great rusted oars fashioned from an abandoned car frame or an iron bicycle seat and gears welded into the shape of a fish. Searching for footing on the prairie, I am fortunate to have found these two guides, Ken with his camera and David with his forge and acetylene torch, who can stare down a car frame rusting in a river and see more than a lost cause. Even here, they suggest, a kind of raw beauty might be found, and this is not to ignore the ruin so much as to bear witness to it with both love and sorrow.
So it is with both fear and hope that I set off, on a sunny day in April with a blue vault of sky overhead and a southern wind gusting off the water, to harvest trash with my first group of student volunteers. Every spring Central College sponsors a service day on which classes are canceled and all members of the campus community are encouraged to join one of the twenty or so projects organized by non-profits in Pella and a few surrounding towns. I have volunteered to lead a project upriver of the Red Rock Dam, where the Corps of Engineers has marked a stretch of shoreline to be cleaned. Lake Red Rock, named for the town it flooded when the dam was built in 1969, is the largest lake in Iowa, running about eleven miles northwest along the Des Moines River watershed. Despite the gnawed look of the clay banks, where the water level can fluctuate by more than thirty feet throughout the year, the shoreline at Red Rock can be a fine place to walk, as I discover while scouring the water’s edge with forty students. As much as the tires, bottles, and propane tanks littering the shore confirm my worst suspicions of Iowa waterways, the energy of the group wakes a different yearning within me, and I begin to understand that this attempt to leave the lake better than we found it might mean more than climbing a backcountry peak for the view. As we comb the shoreline, I feel our common cause rising in my chest like a buoy.
There are a few rules for harvesting trash, as I have explained to my team of volunteers. Plastics such as drinking bottles and milk jugs should be drained and separated for recycling, so long as they are not filled with sludge or slime. Anything like a propane tank or an aerosol can with a hose attached, a bluish valve, or milky residue should be left untouched and reported to the local police as possible methamphetamine gear. If the recyclables and trash can be bagged in different colors, so much the better.
Each castaway item has a story: a flip-flop with a pregnancy kit, a yellow Pennzoil bottle, a foam smiley face from a boat antenna. Tires and propane tanks pile up by the dozens. Sometimes a refrigerator finds its way downstream. Where does it all come from? What is the story? After years of traversing wilderness, practicing the ethic of invisibility, I struggle to decipher this new text scribbled over the shoreline. It’s too easy to dismiss it as the general flotsam and jetsam of the marketplace. What I need is expansion, a larger view. “The eye is the first circle,” Emerson writes; “the horizon which it forms is the second.” As I walk the shoreline, searching (almost hoping) for trash, I begin to think of all of the individual choices made, why someone might choose Arrowhead water over Fiji and why after buying clean water — after making that conscious choice — one would toss the bottle into the lake. Soda bottles tell a clearer tale, but nearly half the recyclable detritus in Iowa waterways once held commercial drinking water. How can this be?
I picture a man on a boat eating potato salad while watching a heron sail overhead. He drains the last of his Aquafina, and what next? He could toss the bottle in the bottom of the boat or bag it for recycling later, but instead he pitches it into the lake. What I want to know is whether there is any hesitation, whether this is an offhand gesture or whether he studies the water lapping against his boat and contemplates the difference between it and the drinkable sort, whether he is careless or so mindful of place that he deems it lost and therefore incapable of further injury. An empty bottle won’t hurt, he might think. This lake is filthy anyway. Maybe then he tosses the bottle, lies back so the walls of the boat shield him from all but the sky, and rocks to sleep beneath the innocent blue. The man who throws his tires into the river may be past hope (if anyone is truly past hope), but it’s the man with the bottled water whom I want to understand, because the hieroglyphics of his thoughts might explain this lake, where the pelicans take turns fishing and mallards flip upside down, kicking their feet with what could be anguish or glee.
Trash gathering is good for such musings, because it requires little conscious thought. While the students chatter, shaking lake water from Gatorade bottles onto each other, I smile and urge them on and puzzle over the man with the Aquafina. Maybe he feels some aversion to sugar and caffeine, feels he must protect himself from the general drift of things. It is this conscious defense of his own wellbeing, this self-preservation, that compels me. Perhaps he knows that most bottled water is fancy tap water, that regulation of water treatment is more aggressive for municipal supplies than for the bottled water industry. But he might still think this purchase is good for the earth, despite the vast oil resources needed to manufacture the twenty or thirty billion plastic bottles purchased each year. Would he still make his choice if he knew that producing each bottle of water consumes three to seven times as much water as the bottle contains, or that the exotic places featured on some labels offer potable water to only half their residents, or that he pays one thousand times more for water in a bottle than for a liter from his tap?
What I am trying to learn from river trash is how to understand this man, how to see the place he has shaped as more than a wasteland. “The heart can be filled anywhere on earth,” writes Bill Holm, and I want to harbor that hope. Here on this clay bank, where I and my students are now wrestling a buried cable free, here in this pile of driftwood, where the water bottles outnumber the empty liters of Mountain Dew, what can I learn other than despair? What is the story? I hear someone call my name and turn to find a student with his arms full of plastic bottles. As I open my bag, he smiles and drops his burden, and for a moment there is music as his trash drums upon my own. His face reminds me of another young man, and I have a feeling then like the threshold of a dream, when strange images leap together. The open bag gapes like a portal, pulling me in, pitching me back to the summer when I said goodbye to the western woods.
🔹
At the start of my last season leading a wilderness crew on the Moose Creek District in Lowell, Idaho — the summer before I moved to Iowa — I drew the worst team I had ever seen. This was my tenth summer with the Forest Service after six years with a fire crew in Montana, a summer tending mountain bike trails in Colorado, and two seasons as the foreman of wilderness trails at Moose Creek. Each year I discovered that those assigned to the wilderness crew had no notion of what they were in for and little desire to spend the next three months lugging an eighty-pound pack through the forest while manning one end of a crosscut saw. But recruiting summer staff to clear remote trails was a lower priority for the Forest Service than handling revenue sources like timber contracts. And since budget cuts had whittled the wilderness crew to three positions, including mine, it was easiest for my supervisor at Moose Creek to hire from a small pool of returning hands or local college students, hoping I could get them up to speed. So it was that when I arrived for orientation at the start of my final season, I learned I’d be spending the summer with Nat and Brad.
Nat was fresh out of high school, a skinny kid with curly brown hair and a thin beard covering most of his neck. He rolled his own Drum cigarettes, which would have made him seem tough if he could have kept a lid on his nervous laugh. Nat giggled when he had no idea what I was talking about or when he felt anxious or when he wished he could go lie down, which meant that he laughed nearly all the time. His father was a professor at Boise State University and kept a cabin near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where the two often went to fish. Beyond that he had no backwoods experience.
Brad was a beach bum from California and a two-year veteran at Moose Creek. He’d been assigned to my crew as a demotion from the construction crew, which spent the summer building bridges or retainer walls. His former supervisor had tired of Brad’s mood swings and passed him on to me with the caveat that he was a good worker but prone to “wigging out” from time to time. Like Nat, Brad seemed an amiable sort at first. He had shoulder length blond hair, a winsome smile, and the build of a linebacker. But if he had difficulty coping with the construction crew, I thought, the mental strain of three months in the backcountry might prove too great. Trail work was the most physically demanding of the forestry jobs I’d known, and the wilderness crew upped the ante by living in a remote cabin from June to August where groceries and mail arrived every ten days by mule. It was a steep learning curve for a newbie like Nat, and I feared it would be a recipe for more than one of Brad’s meltdowns.
I knew trouble was brewing when we all lined up with the firefighters to take the pack test, a three mile speed walk on flat ground with a forty-five pound pack. Those who could not finish in forty-five minutes or less were deemed unfit for fire duty, which was considerably lighter than trail maintenance. A firefighter might dig feverishly for an hour or two to contain a lightning strike, but most days at the fire cache passed as slowly as a tractor through town, whereas trail hands swung an axe or a pick mattock all day. It was a point of pride for us to dust the fire crew in the pack test, but when Nat and Brad lurched in just under forty-five minutes and spent a few moments yakking in the ditch, their faces lathered in sweat, our prospects as a crew dimmed considerably.
The fact that it rained steadily throughout our first hitch did not improve morale. Water soaked under our tents through the forest duff, leaving our sleeping bags moldy and damp. When we weren’t clipping brush from the trail, drenching ourselves each time a waterlogged branch toppled onto our backs, we were either huddled around our gas stove warming a batch of noodles or taking shelter in our soggy tents. This was a rough introduction to wilderness work, I assured Nat, who looked more haggard each morning. He’d left his cigarettes behind, an error he had discovered after hiking five miles to our first campsite (“Oh, no!” he moaned. “No fucking way! No fucking way!”), and he now had the look of a starving dog, the hollows in his cheeks growing by the day, his eyes bulging like a levee. Gone was his laughter, his boyish grin. Nat now spent the day working a muscle in his jaw while clipping brush, wiping water from his eyes with the back of his wrist. During our breaks, he searched the forest floor for hollow twigs, stuffing them with dead grass and huffing what smoke he could from the joint. “This would be a great time to quit,” I offered, but Nat seemed to take my meaning wrong, because he packed his things as soon as we returned to the wilderness cabin, lit out for the trailhead, and never looked back.
So that left me with Brad for the rest of the summer. The weather improved, as it always did in late June and July. We camped near Grizzly Saddle, where alpenglow throbs in the fir at dusk, where small patches of snow linger in the shade until midsummer. We cleaned waterbars along Moose Ridge, taking turns busting the clods with a pick mattock, then scraping each basin smooth with a shovel, so rain could sweep from the trail in a storm. We lingered over dinner at Ditch Creek, the pines creaking overhead while Brad worked himself into a frenzy ranting about the cost of college and how unfair it was that our senators weren’t sending their sons or daughters to war and how it was bullshit that a CEO could make three hundred times the average worker’s salary and then lay off a thousand people without a second thought. Mostly I agreed with him, nodding as I sipped my evening tea. These were pleasant moments, the sort I recall now in an attempt at fairness. But more often trouble cast its pall over us.