It is possibly hard to imagine why we are all so fascinated with our little Butz Mill river spot without being able to see it for oneself. So here are some photos of our favorite treats so far:

upon arrival of our hillside entry point, we noted a suspicious and alarming needle. we did not find any other needles after the initial sighting but we did notice a number of spoons, leading us to believe more concretely that this is a location frequented by heroin addicts and other drug users.

despite the abundant garbage, this place is so lovely.  

a shot of the whole dam from about halfway across the river (thanks waders).

we were intrigued to note some children’s play things on the far shore once we had crossed the creek.

The Easton Public Works building hides just beyond the trees at the lip of the creek, here is a pile of cigarette butts, nearby was an abandoned can of worms and some footprints. Perhaps our lovely little creek hideout is a popular lunch or fishing spot for the workers.  

We were very interested in this apparent throne constructed from old stone materials. What was the original use for these stones? And who constructed this current structure? This really began to trigger some of our thoughts about infrastructure and its relation to nature. There is a sort of cyclical use of materials that matches the cyclical nature of an aquatic ecosystem. We will continue to explore these ideas with future findings such as this one.

View of the wall from the bottom, above is the road.

One of many funky bricks we stumbled upon. This one was Ginny’s favorite.    

Spotting a ladder beneath the surface.

Some wildflowers reclaiming an old trailer near the Public Works buildings.

Some gems of Easton’s past. Traffic lights, road signs, etc.    

Trekking back down in our stylish ensembles.

Funky little critters on another neat brick.

Ginny moving around some (possible?) building materials. More connection to infrastructure and nature.

My favorite bit of pottery/ceramic from the river. Things like this are scattered everywhere. Some seem old, some seem newer, all seem perplexing in their abundance.

A brick we ultimately took with us for further exploration and hopeful identification. 

Ginny leading the charge to see the other side of the dam.

Ta-da! A pristine view from atop the dam.

We set aside two and a half hours for our trip. From the start I was in the mindset of exploring and wasn’t bothered by the fact that Aaron and I had to find our location. We were dropped off in the wrong location and realized after the car left that our location wasn’t in a walkable location. I knew the general direction of the factory but not exactly. It was on the west side of the river and we were on the east side. The only thing separating Aaron and I to the Pigment Plant was the river and another factory. Not wanting to trespass too much we decided to find another way across the river. We walked along the road and found a trail that seemed to lead down to the river, we went down the trail on a whim. Thankfully it lead right to the river but then we had to find a way across. At first we tried walking up and down the bank to find some cluster of rocks that would serve as a bridge across, however nature does not work like that and there was no clear way across. Determined to cross the river I somehow convinced Aaron to cross right on the top of the dam ignoring the many signs that told us not to.

I did not expect the water to be as deep as it was crossing the damn but we were already half way across. Upon reaching the other side with our shoes soaking wet we found two paths, one to a building and one up a hill towards a tower. The path down to the building just led towards people we knew would get mad at us for being on their property so we turned around and tried path number two. The second path lead to another building even bigger than the fist one but we wanted to get further in. We left the path and walked through the woods to a large rock formation to get a better vantage point. Climbing over rocks, fallen trees, and thick brush we made it to a fence that marked the end of our journey. We set aside two hours for our trip, I didn’t think it would take that long but looking at my watch when we got back, we took three hours.

A thought we constantly discussed while exploring this neglected place was the potential it contained. Right at the sharp bend following this dam, the velocity of the flow slows and a pool that looked ideal for recreation. We constantly thought about what this area would look like if cleaned up and the paths made slightly less treacherous. Perhaps if done it would become a popular spot for the community; a way for the people of Easton to get acquainted with their backyard Bushkill Creek. Looking around this area and letting our imaginations run, we could see this place rid of a plethora or litter and enjoyed by people who have missed out on bonding with the Bushkill.

In addition to our return visit to the site, we also looked into some history of the property. Joan Steiner’s The Bushkill Creek gave us some great information on the place. This source informed us that the Butz family had flour, grist, planing, and saw mills which they began to come into ownership of in 1800. They lived along the creek and also managed two large farms in Forks. After the death of Christian Butz in 1821 the property became part of the Butz’s estate and was passed on to his son. The property continued to pass through the hands of family members and in 1839 Captain Daniel Butz and his brother Michael Butz decided begin a woolen manufacturing business that would include a fulling mill, dye and drying houses, and power looms. After considerable losses they abandoned the venture and converted the mill to a gristmill. In 1861 the entire gristmill burned as well as the adjoining frame plaster mill. They rebuilt the grist mill and in early 1865 it was noted that business was booming. Joan Steiner states that, “The Butz family’s holdings were an illustration of a merchant milling operation expanding to include other businesses, in this case all located on the neck of land created where the Bushkill made its first turn to the north” (1996).

Besides discussing the history and potential future of this site, we also came upon a thread around which we would like to center our story. As mentioned in the earlier progress report, we came across tons of remnants of infrastructure in the creek. Broken chunks of concrete, innumerable bricks with logos carved into them, etc. were all apparent during our first visit. During the most recent visit, we discovered more of the aforementioned things, but we also came across a fallen piece of concrete and metal which may have once held up a park bench, even more consumer waste of all kinds, a large manhole cover, and even a traffic-infrastructure “graveyard.” We climbed up the bank right after the elbow of the creek to the backside of the public works facility and discovered piles of old traffic lights and street signs. They looked as if they hadn’t been touched for months, if not years.

After seeing the prevalence of nature taking over broken pieces of forgotten infrastructure, a theme clicked in all of our minds while we were marveling at the heaps of rusting street signs: this place is a constant battle between neglected public infrastructure and the natural world. Right near the dam, moss, lichens, water, and time have eroded bricks and dismantled structures. Behind the public works building, useful structures of past times have been left to the elements. Overwhelming evidence of the presence of homeless people who have also been neglected by the infrastructure of society litters the embankment right where we climbed down. Food wrappers, aerosol cans, beer bottles, even a few bent spoons and needles represent the population who, like the bricks in the creek, have lost their role in modern society. It’s also noteworthy to mention that the only “gate” that we have to go around to slide down to this spot is yet another piece of road-infrastructure: a guard rail. Publicly provided infrastructure also prevents the public from seeing this part of the creek from the road and sidewalk along Pearl Street. The huge fence with vines growing on it makes this battleground invisible to passersby.

We’re sure that more visits to Butz Mill will reveal even more dichotomies between public infrastructure and nature and that is what we wish to highlight in this story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/10-key-excerpts-from-pope-franciss-encyclical-on-the-environment/

Tiger Beetles? We don’t need no Tiger Beetles. I don’t need to study no stinking Tiger Beetles! Not when we got Mayflies!

My Citizen Scientist project begins….Summer 2014, Dubuque Iowa

Twice I thought I might drown in the Mississippi River. For someone who grew up more or less near The River—my hometown was known as a river town—I had little experience with it. I never felt compelled by it; never felt particularly lucky or unlucky to be within its reach. My parents showed no interest in it; our family had no money for a boat and we never spent any time along its banks.

When I was nineteen or twenty, I was pulled from the river by Mike Heiderscheidt, a co-worker of mine who made a spectacular dive off our boss’s boat to save me. Dick—his real name—was a weasel and a prick, but the boat party was his attempt to show he was not. It was a weird night. It didn’t take long for everyone on board to get sloppy drunk on the boss’s beer and booze, and things started to happen that I didn’t want to see. People were pitching beer cans into the water and laughing way too hard at jokes that weren’t funny. One of the 60 year-old office ladies was sitting on Dick’s lap letting him squeeze her like a stress toy. I looked over and saw my friend Chris, a hemophiliac in fragile health, smoking cigarillos he’d been given by the creepiest of our night managers. Chris caught my eyes and before I uttered a word told me: “Shut the fuck up.” I thought I’d have a better time in the water, so I jumped in for a swim.

The river was a relief, except for the odd beer can floating by. I was treading water about 20 yards off the end of the boat, watching the raucous party of Captain Dick. Everything was fine until a big wave hit me and I took a mouthful of brown water. In fact, everything was still fine, but Heiderscheit didn’t think so. I don’t remember any fear or even the notion that I might be in trouble. What I do remember was Heiderscheit in action.

Someone had seen the wave hit me and called out, asking if I was OK; I waved back, but was coughing out what I’d just gulped. I saw Mike grab a life preserver and launch himself through an arcing dive into the water. It was a pretty dive, and in four seconds he was shoving the orange vest in my face. I was soon back on the boat, and for the rest of the night kept wanting to jump back in. Only through the insistent warnings of my shitfaced co-workers did I begin to consider I might have been in danger.

I guess that was the second time the Mississippi almost got me. The first time was when I was about ten, when my brother and I went out in a boat with our crazy Uncle Red. I loved my uncle, who was a river fisherman, and the few outings he took me along on were, for me, all about spending time with him, not about any special passion or intimacy I felt for the river. My dad didn’t like Red much, thought he was irresponsible and a drunk—which he was—and he didn’t like to give us too much unsupervised exposure to him. Once when we were all fishing with Red below the bluffs of Eagle Point Park, on the upstream shore near the big Lock and Dam Number 11, my dad screamed at me to not stand so close to the edge of the water. “You could fall in,” he warned, “and you’d go right under those big doors and that would be it for you!” I edged back, pissed. Every time I saw the Lock and Dam after that, I stared at the doors and the white, choppy water roiling out of them. I learned to fear them and repeatedly imagined being sucked beneath the wide metal plates, knocked out and choking to death under their suffocating, silty pressure.

I don’t remember how we were allowed out on the boat with him, but there we were bumping directly toward the Lock and Dam, Red maneuvering the Evinrude to a spot just below the big gates so that we could fish the edge where the churning water met the calm. Even though we were anchored safely downstream from the great wall of concrete and metal, I could see the violent water sucking driftwood back toward it, banging the flotsam up against the silver face of the dam. My brother Scott and I fished but had no hits, all the while I stared at the maelstrom in front of me, my dad’s words conjuring images of my destruction in my head.

Red decided we needed to reposition the boat to get us closer to the dam, so we pulled up the cement anchor and waited for his word as he edged the aluminum boat upstream. The idea was to go to the edge of the rough water, then throw out the anchor so we could try the vein where the fish were holding up. When we reached the border of rough water Red cut the engine, then told my brother to throw the anchor off the bow—only Scott was not ready for the throw when Red called for it. The boiling water spun the boat around and as Red yanked the cord for the restart, the anchor rope wound about the propeller and killed the engine. Powerless and without an anchor on the bottom, the boat was sucked toward the dam. Quickly we were being jostled and tossed and in a few seconds we were up against the doors. Metal boat smacked steel wall, scraped up its side and scratched back down.

The arms of each huge section of the dam protruded out into the river so that up against the doors, you were in a room with three towering sides. The only exit was back out, through the white water. I was sitting in the mouth of the monster that wanted me in its belly. And now it had me. All it needed to do was open wide and swallow.

My brother was white and rigid, and Red was bent over the back of the boat cutting through the layers of rope that had the propeller in a death grip. The roar of the water surrounded everything and if any words were spoken I never heard them. To steady myself, I reached out and touched the malevolent silver face of the dam, pocked with huge rivets no boy was meant to touch.

But I didn’t even get wet.

After several banging minutes on the belching water, Red had the propeller free and the outboard did its job. I couldn’t hear it, but the blue smoke was there and the world brightened as we moved out from the shadow of the walls. I looked back to see the monster, still spitting its froth from its metal teeth, shrink behind us. I could hear the Evinrude again now, and see my uncle mouthing something toward us. He was saying it was time to get off the river.

Now, when I return to my hometown river town to visit my mother during the holidays, I always make it a point to drive to the river just below the dam. Usually the season is cold enough for the water to have iced over. And there you see the eagles—dozens of them—bald eagles sitting on the ice’s edge, staring into the open water and looking for fish to rise. The black water remains open for a hundred yards below the dam, then eventually ices up as the water flattens and slows. There, on that sharp edge of liquid and solid worlds, sit the eagles. From where I sit, they seem to be staring down the metal monster, forever foaming at its mouth.

Over the past week, we’ve decided to focus of our project on the impacts of flooding on the area surrounding the Bushkill Creek and the greater Easton area. On Thursday we plan on going to the Nurture Nature Center to try to gather as much information as we can about the history of flooding in the city and what sort of public education the Center currently provides. The Center, which was founded in 2007, offers various programs on environmental risks for the general public. We think this would be valuable to get an idea of what the public perception is about flooding and the risks that people may or may not be aware of when they live so close the water. After some further research on the Williams Arts Campus, which is in the 100 year – flood plain, we were able to find some the of the plans for the project. We want to look further into why the college would build in a flood plain if you know the risk and what precautions they take. We plan on reaching out to Prof. Mary Wilford-Hunt, the schools architect, for additional information.

In addition to this, we looked into what used to exist on these sites in the past and perhaps try to find out what happened to those place. We used what photos we were able to find online as well as the Sanborn Maps of Easton from around 100 years ago to investigate what used to be in this area. Specifically, we are interested in examining why there used to be two streams the flowed under the North 3rd street bridge. Attached are some of the photos and maps we found:

A map of the North 3rd Street area, circa 1919

Our goal is to compare flooding to development in the area. Does periodic flooding have anything to do with the redevelopment of the space? Is architecture in the area focused around flooding? What companies or buildings have occupied the space over time and how were they effected by flooding? Separately, when did Lafayette begin to take control of the space? Who used to live there and were they forced out by the college? These are just a few of the questions that we are looking forward to exploring throughout this project.

I volunteer with a girl scout troop in Easton and today was our first time of the semester to go down and see the troop. When I got down the Boys and Girls club I was pleasantly surprised that our craft was centered around celebrating the beginning of fall. To celebrate we went on a nature walk with the kids and collected the leaves that have already fallen off the trees. It was nice to take the time out of the day to walk outside and it was a fun experience to be outside with elementary school aged kids and hear their perspectives and thoughts about nature. When we finished our walk we took the leaves and used crayons to make leaf rubbings. After we used mod podge and glued some of the leaves we found on to our pictures. Below are some of the pictures the girls in the troop made. It was a nice little encounter with nature.

Lastnight on my way to dinner at Marquis I looked up and noticed a crest on the top of Marquis Hall that i had never seen before. I have walked by this building millions of times without seeing it!!  Has anyone else noticed this before or know what it might be?

I know that this isn’t exactly an image of nature that we were asked to snap photos of but its definitely something in my environment that stood out to me.

Extreme Apple Picking

This past weekend, I went up to Ridgefield, CT, the hometown of my boyfriend, Jesse. I’ve always loved his town, house, and the property on which his house sits. As I said in class, his house is a barn built sometime in the late 1700’s in upstate NY which was picked up piece by piece and moved to Ridgefield, CT by some guy who eventually sold it to Jesse’s parents in the early ’90’s. Although his house includes all modern conveniences, it reminds me a bit of Thoreau’s house. Jesse’s house is also made entirely from wood, near a pond, a few miles from the nearest town (there aren’t really even any neighborhoods in this area, just a house every few acres), and is surrounded a thriving ecosystem which can truly breathe life into whomever lets it.

Less Extreme Apple Picking

I had the unique and wonderful opportunity this past weekend to take part in the most bountiful harvest of the two massive apple trees that sit behind Jesse’s house yet. According to Jesse’s parents, this fall has yielded the most amount of apples with the highest quality (large, round, without wormholes). We climbed up on ladders to pick the apples, but then Jesse’s dad brought his backhoe around to the tree, put Jesse up in the bucket, thus increasing the range of apple picking. Throughout the rest of the day, we grinned apples into pulp and pressed them to make cider, we cut them into slivers to bake into apple crisp, and we cooked them down and used a device to create apple sauce. It’s a truly amazing experience when you can follow a food from harvest to processing to consumption all in one day.

There was something truly special and refreshing about yesterday. I don’t think it was solely from the apples. It was because I got to roll around in the grass unbothered by a bustling campus around me. It was because I was energized by the change of the seasons which was far more present there than here in Easton. Thoreau may have been whispering in my ear while I was imbibing the crisp air, apple smells, and gnats around me: “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still” (141). It’s true. A lot of things could have bothered me yesterday. I could have easily felt an urgency to get back on campus to get ahead on homework. I could have mourned the end of summer and all of my summer goals left unaccomplished. Although sometimes Thoreau is contradictory or purposefully abrasive, a lot of the times, he’s simply and honestly correct. Many of my friends have pointed down at “Walden” while I have it out in the library or elsewhere and said something along the lines of “Ah, Walden. Great isn’t it?” Not as many people would say that if the key thing they took from it was his prickles and irony. People say that because this work of art has spoken serious truth to them that they cannot dispute and, hopefully, try to fold into their everyday lives. I know that’s how I feel about “Walden” thus far and I cannot wait to get to the point where a piece of “Walden” is relevant to every day of my life. Guess I have to read the rest of it!