Robert Root

 

I was born and grew up in Lockport, New York, in the northwest corner of the state, a short distance from Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and Niagara Falls. The town is named for the locks built along the Erie Canal to aid shipping and boat travel across the state to the Hudson River. When my father sometimes on Sunday took my sister, my brother, and me to a newsstand and cigar store on Main Street, he would let us cross to the Big Bridge to look down on the locks in hopes someone would be using them to raise or lower a vessel from one level of the canal to another. On the far side there was a pathway that would let people descend to the locks for a closer view.

 

There are caves underneath Lockport. In childhood my friends found an opening in the wall across the towpath from the Locks, but none of us were brave enough to go deeply into it. We suspected it was man-made, not natural, and someone claimed rattlesnakes lived in it. Rattlesnakes were more believable than alligators under the Big Bridge, and we only peeked into it. Other caves were said to exist under streets elsewhere in town and someone tried to open one up for tourists. From what I now know about the formation of caves and sinkholes in the cuesta, I imagine the escarpment here has many hidden caves. One prominent and accessible cave near the canal is the site of the Lockport Caves Tour, its office above the canal, its entrance off the Erie Canal Heritage Trail. Some years ago, I took that tour.

 

At noon, Ken, our guide, led me and a dozen others to the top of the trail. We descended with intermittent pauses as he filled us in about the history of Lockport, the locks, and the canal. He was polished, knowledgeable, and entertaining, explaining that scenes in the movie Sharknado 2 were filmed in the Lockport Cave. Past the Locks and remnant stone wall ruins Ken unlocked the entrance door to a large lighted metal tube and then ushered us into a well-constructed, dimly lighted room that would lead us into the tunnel proper and the stone interior of the escarpment.

 

The New York State Legislature first authorized the construction of a tunnel on the north side of the canal in 1839, to provide waterpower for a mill. Eventually Birdsall Holly, an entrepreneur and hydraulic engineer, expanded the excavation into a 1600-foot-long downward sloping tunnel for hydromechanical power. He constructed a seven-story factory and devised a water distribution system giving firefighters a more powerful and effective way of fighting fires—ironically, one night a worker in the fire hydrants building knocked over a lantern and the factory burned down.

 

We passed through a stone arch doorway into a lower, narrower passage. The walls were rough and uneven and the lighting minimal. We carefully walked single file on a narrow gravel path alongside a continuous pool of water, pausing sometimes to consider the limestone walls. As in any limestone cave water seeps through the rock and forms small stalactites and traces of flowstone. Irish laborers worked eight years to complete the tunnel in tight, dark, enclosed underground space.

 

At the far end of the cave the tunnel floor was completely flooded. We boarded a long flat boat lined with benches to float deeper into the escarpment, almost up to the top end of the cave but not as far as the water channel went. In the dank semi-darkness, we sensed the weight of the dolostone strata above us and in the uneven walls understood the challenge of chipping away all that subterranean stone by hand. When we returned to the dock, everyone seemed relieved to be shown a nearby exit—we wouldn't have to retrace our footsteps back to where we started. Outside, in daylight, we started a steep climb up to the escarpment's edge. It felt good to be in the open.

 

These memories of the canal arose when I encountered recent online news items about that flat-bottomed tour boat capsizing in the tunnel, spilling out 29 passengers and drowning an older man by trapping him under the overturned boat for an hour. Rescue workers soon broke through a wall of the cave. Eleven passengers were taken to a hospital, several suffering from hypothermia, the worst injury a broken arm. Most could wade out. They were all event planners visiting the cave to consider possible tours. None had been required to wear life vests. It was the first such accident since the tourist attraction opened in the 1970s.

 

If I ever visit Lockport again, I'll likely stand above the locks inviting memory, though my sense of being deep in the cave may have altered.

Although I had enjoyed several of Ann Patchett's novels, I ignored her nonfiction, assuming This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage would simply be a cheerful memoir. But when, online, I happened upon "The Getaway Car," her essay about writing, tried to find a physical copy in my local library, and discovered it was available only in that essay collection I'd deliberately overlooked. I immediately checked out the book and have since renewed it four times. It's a good collection and "The Getaway Car" is a good, long article about writing, centered on her fiction ("consolidating the bulk of what I know about the work I do in one place") but applicable to creative nonfiction as well.

 

 "Every writer approaches writing in a different way," Patchett declares, contrasting approaches between "people who write in order to find out where the story goes" ("if they know the ending of the book there would be no point in writing it)" and people, including herself, "who map out everything in advance," (like John Irving, who "can't start writing his books until he thinks up the last sentence"). I haven't written fiction for decades, but I identify more with her first group than with the group she identifies with. I usually have the urge to write about something but need to write about it to discover why I want to write about it.

 

Asserting that "to get to the art you must master the craft," she advises, "If you want to write, practice writing." She believes, "I get better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages." She emphasizes self-forgiveness as key: "I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself." When people ask her if writing can be taught, she claims, "I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say." Her observation reminds me of the challenge in teaching writing to students. Textbooks often center on grammatical correctness or, in subject matter courses, on approved interpretations of subject matter, both easier to evaluate than comprehension and individual understanding. Sounding like you know what you're talking about is different from actually having something to say.

 

Patchett also suggests that the influence of reading other writers is often unpredictable, because a particular work can somehow impact you "in moments when you are especially open." She was influenced by Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, reminding me of how idiosyncratic responses to writing usually are. I remember college professors who completely dismissed writers I found inspiring, like Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stegner, and Ivan Doig. Feeling her two years at the University of Iowa (where I spent six years) was "an imperfect experience," she claims, "An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned." (Once, in William deBuys' writing course, I listened to a discussion of one of my drafts and remember feeling only one classmate had actually read it. I followed her advice and ignored other remarks.)

 

Patchett's advice about writing fiction usually draws on experience. One example: "If you decide to work completely from your imagination, you will find yourself shocked by all the autobiographical elements that make their way into the text. If, on the other hand, you go the path of the roman à clef, you'll wind up changing the details of your life that are dull." Another example: "ranking everything in my life that needs doing," writing fiction always number one, then zooming through "a whole host of unpleasant tasks to avoid item number one." (I've operated that way myself.) She also recommends "picking an amount of time to sit your desk every day. . . without distraction: no phone, no Internet, no books. . .. Sooner or later, you will write because you will no longer be able to stand not writing, or" you'll give up altogether.

 

 "If I'm writing a book," Patchett claims, "I'm racing to be finished; if I'm finished, I feel aimless and wish that I were writing a book." One January, daily for thirty-one days, she spent at least one hour composing and usually wrote for more than an hour. When it produced "some of the best writing I'd done in a long time," she continued through the year. She concludes, "Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world." She's right. I really ought to follow Ann Patchett's example.

 

 

Finding a recent essay by Terry Tempest Williams online in The New York Times' opinion section, I not only copied it—in case I can't find it again on the Internet or in my public library—but also browsed the collection of her books in my study. I'd begun reading her among other western nature writers—memoirists and essayists modeling how to engage terrain unfamiliar to a Great Lakes boy like me—when I served two weeks as an artist-in-residence at Rocky Mountain National Park and later attended writing workshops in Montana and Idaho. Like Gretel Ehrlich, Kim Barnes, and Reg Saner, Terry Tempest Williams became one of the most reliable western writers I continually sought.

 

The first book of hers I read was Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, a multi-faceted book, thoroughly informative about the history and climate of Great Salt Lake. Williams grew up near Salt Lake City, her Mormon family residing there for generations. When she wrote Refuge, she was partly concerned about the effect of nuclear testing on people in Utah. Her closing chapter, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," deals with health issues—including cancer and death—due to radiation. A parallel narrative running throughout, ostensibly centered on birds, focuses on her mother's death. It's both a significant family memoir and a powerful narrative of place.

 

In the thirty years since Refuge appeared, Williams has published a number of books I considered essential reading. For example, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks takes her to twelve different parks. To each she brings her own individual perspective. I've visited eight of them, a couple for the first time after reading her book. Erosion: Essays of Undoing, grounded in landscape, is one of her more forthright argumentative collections, examining issues of place that call for remedying.

 

In Spring 2017, while teaching graduate writing at Ashland University, I assigned students to read Williams' Leap and respond online to each other's reviews of it. It generated a lively discussion among my students about her reflections on Hieronymous Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardín de las Delicias). Williams had visited the painting at the Prado in Spain several times, her reaction to it initiated by having reproductions of the two end panels depicting Paradise and Hell posted above her childhood bed while the central panel displaying a garden of earthly delights was deliberately kept hidden. Leap follows Williams into that central panel at considerable imaginative length, reflecting on its Christian commentary and her Mormon education. I found it to be a powerful book on every level and my students' readings of it were rich and insightful.

 

Williams' New York Times opinion piece, "I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake," is an intense essay. Describing her visit to Great Salt Lake with the photographer Fazal Sheikh to examine drought conditions that had lowered the lake, she mentions how construction had divided the lake into north and south arms and cut off the flow between them, which "could be a terminal decision for a terminal lake." Images supported information about the shrinkage of six major salt lakes around the world, illustrating how Great Salt Lake, once 100% full in 1872, has declined to 29% in 2023, having "lost almost two-thirds of its total volume since 1985" due to industrialization and agricultural consumption. "Two-thirds of the natural flow going into the lake is currently being diverted: 80 percent of that diversion by agriculture, 10 percent by industries and 10 percent by municipalities." Politicians claim melting snowpack will replenish the lake, but Williams points out that "very little if any of that runoff will find its way" there and that "one high water year does not solve decades of overconsumption."

 

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources reports that "[b]ecause the Great Salt Lake is terminal (i.e., with no water outlet), large amounts of minerals have built up in the lakebed, including heavy metals such as lead, mercury and arsenic." Lakebed exposure allows dust particles to enter the air and "pose a significant concern to public health." Williams identifies several: "cardiovascular events from strokes to heart attacks to respiratory diseases such as asthma, pneumonia and lung cancer." She emphasizes: "The laws of nature do not negotiate with generations of abusive behavior. Our needs are overtaking the needs of Great Salt Lake at our own peril."

 

Reading Terry Tempest Williams' reliably observant books, you come away feeling as enriched as if you yourself have been to the place she's recreated on the page. Especially with her Great Salt Lake books, you become aware of the effects of the passage of time not only on her thoughtful perspective but also, memorably, on your own sense of place. It haunts you.

 

 

Notes:

 

Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights

 

Terry Tempest Williams, "Opinion: I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake". Photographs by Fazal Sheikh. The New York Times, March 25, 2023: 25.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/opinion/great-salt-lake-drought-utah-climate-change.html

 

Nathan Rott, "More than half of the world's largest lakes are shrinking. Here's why that matters." NPR, May 20, 2023: 5:30 AM.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/20/1177221645/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-largest-lakes-are-shrinking-heres-why-that-matters

 

Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. "Great Salt Lake water levels," April 13, 2023. https://wildlife.utah.gov/gslep/about/water-levels.html