So, I’m starting to realize that this blog might need to become topical rather than chronological. I think I’ll try that for a while, anyway. I’ll still, though, post near the bottom of each post a “daily status update” regarding the condition of the River that day, and my eavesdropping report.
For today’s topic I think I’ll choose …
INDUSTRIAL PRESENCE
The Concrete Plant
When we sit on our front porch we are looking over into Alabama and, to use Eudora Welty’s beautiful title, a “Curtain of Green.” The hillside is almost totally covered with kudzu which, as those of us familiar with kudzu already know, creates strange shapes. Well, there’s SO MUCH kudzu over there on the Alabama riverbank that the strange shapes become one big green monolith – the “Curtain of Green.” Our fantastically lush curtain is interrupted by only one intrusion -- a concrete plant.
I used to think that the concrete plant was a terribly ugly intrusion, an eyesore, but lately I’ve come to think of in a new and different way. It all started when the McCullers Center had a visitor in town, one Andrew Zawacki, a poet who currently lives in Athens. I was giving my regular “downtown Columbus” tour to Andrew and his wife, Sandrine, and their poet friend Donna Stonecipher. When I pointed out the “ugly concrete plant,” Andrew, who was very politely exhibiting all sorts of enthusiasm for Columbus and my tour, remarked, “Well, I’ve come to see industrial landscapes as sometimes very beautiful, in fact.” Andrew’s comment gave me pause. And then I remembered that Fred, too, had been paying particular attention to the concrete plant and had several times tried to bring my attention to it in a positive way. So I began to look at the concrete plant in a different way. I’m asking you to do that, too. First, I noticed the lines of the thing – the bones. I've come to love that inclined conveyor belt – that “stairway to heaven” – and how it’s juxtaposed between those other big geometric shapes – a cylinder, a rectangle, a couple of trapezoids. The color is nice, too – everything’s all silvery because it’s tin and metal. It looks good against the green of the kudzu. Nothing is brightly colored. And nothing is plastic – or, it doesn’t look to be from our vantage point. The whole thing is framed by these two giant kudzu-covered trees. (Fred insists that one has “eyes,” but I can’t quite see them.) There is a newer, modern red brick building on the property, but, thankfully, we can’t see it from our front porch. Further on up the Riverwalk you can see that building, and it does interrupt the pleasant monotone of the original part of the plant.
Another good thing about the concrete plant is that it doesn’t seem to produce any noxious fumes. I’m sure there’s dust around the immediate vicinity, but at least there’s no smoke swirling up from the place. And I don’t see that it puts any kind of dirty water into the River. Maybe it does, but I don’t see any evidence that it does.
The plant does produce a sound, a steady clinkity-clink sort of sound as some ingredient makes its way up (or down?) that inclined conveyor belt. It’s not at all a loud sound, but we can hear it as a low background noise when we’re on our front porch or outside in our yard. One of our neighbors said that when he first moved into The District and heard that sound he thought, “Man, I’m not going to be able to tolerate that sound in the background all the time.” But he went on to say that he had come to appreciate the sound – that there was something comforting about it.
The Powerhouse
Is that a thing of beauty, or what? I'm afraid that my photographs don't begin to do justice to the Powerhouse which was, by the way, the Powerhouse for Eagle and Phenix Mill. The spot right there near the Powerhouse is one of my very favorite places on the Riverwalk – partly because it’s so scary to me. I’ve always been terrified of the idea of machinery under water, turbines and all such as that, with snakes all twined around and intermingled in the machinery – and that it just exactly what the Powerhouse offers, I’m sure. But something about it is beautiful. I mean, just look at those brick arches. Just look at that fern-covered wall. I keep reading about these ultra-expensive designed “plant walls” that have been installed in some big cities, as pieces of living sculpture, and I look at this one here at the Powerhouse and marvel at the fact that we have our own beautiful, naturally occurring plant wall. And the sound! The water flowing over the dam and through the remnants of the Powerhouse produces well, a waterfall.
Believe it or not, I went inside the Powerhouse once. When Fred was working on the History Gallery exhibit in the Columbus Museum, he and I got a tour from the man who worked there. We had to walk out on that long, narrow walkway to get out there, and then we got to peer over into the area where the tanks are. The man told us stories of what lengths they had to go to deal with the snakes that got down into there. I have put some of those details right out of my mind. But I’ll never forget my visit inside the Powerhouse. I hope we’re able to keep the Powerhouse as a part of the Riverwalk, and that if it is ever restored and adapted to some new use that it’ll be a good one, and one accessible to regular folks like me and not just rich ones.
I'll conclude this "Industrial Presence" post by pointing out that there really is very little industrial presence along the Riverwalk, especially considering the fact that ours is an industrial town. There's more -- north of where I usually walk -- but there really is surprisingly little along the whole course of the Riverwalk. And the industrial structures that do exist are historic, so they tend to be a whole lot better lookin' than what we humans build nowadays. Hmmm. Second thought: Should I count the TSYS and SYNOVUS buildings as industrial? Maybe, but they sho ain't historic. (And there was no reason they needed to have been built on the River, and important historic structures were destroyed to make space for one of them, and the other occupies what could have been publicly accessible green space, and they're FUGLY -- so there.)
Eavesdrop Report
I didn’t have much opportunity to eavesdrop today because every single person I encountered was exactly that – single. There were no couples, no trios, no groups. I did overhear one guy, but he was talking on a cellphone. I heard him advise whoever he was talking to that he “needed to have his front-end pulled.” At first I was intrigued, but when I realized that they were probably talking about automobiles, I quickly lost interest.
Water Conditions
Smooth and clear today. Now, when I say clear, I’m sure you realize that we’re not talkin’ crystal clear here – as in Silver Springs or the Carribbean or someplace like that. No, we’re talkin’ about “Chattahoochee brown clear.” You just have to see it. It’s nice. I’ve come to really like the hue.
I have tried and tried to locate a gauge that tells me something about the level of the water on any given day – but I cannot find one on the River itself. You can go to the Corps of Engineers website and get some weird, funky number that doesn’t mean much, but I don’t care about that. I want to make a daily personal observation of the level of the River here near where I live on the Riverwalk. I think I remember that there used to be a gauge attached to one of the bridges, but I can’t find it. So, I’m going to use the pilings underneath the railroad bridge as our gauge. I’ll try to photograph the same spot every day so that we, you and I, can look at the photo each day and contemplate the changes in the River’s level.
I've always liked the juxtaposition (ooh oh art word!) of the deep south greenery and rusty old industrial buildings. It makes me feel at home, probably because my playground as a child was a junkyard.
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