An Attempt to Exhaust a Small Wetland in Brockport, New York or An Homage to Georges Perec

I’ve come to say goodbye to what I think of, possessively and somewhat foolishly, as “my” wetland—the one that I adopted three years ago.

 
Early morning, mid-September. I grab my binoculars and a small pack, walk west on State Street, then turn north on Park. Once across the Erie Canal I head east along the towpath, where five minutes of walking brings me to a vantage point above a small wetland. I see no one during my short walk, although in decent weather I might encounter a few runners, walkers, or cyclists along the way—or on warm summer evenings, perhaps a small pod of village teens and tweens practicing the poor decisions that will lead some of them into the saddest of lives.

The wetland pond lies below a berm backing the Erie Canal and inhabits a bedraggled bit of space, colonized by human spoor and a legion of exotic plants. Even during wet springs the pond is only a few feet deep and in drought years it trends toward cracked mud—the sort of place no self-respecting Virginia rail or pied-billed grebe would ever frequent. On this September morning it’s a shallow bit of open water covered in pointillist swirls of bright green duckweed, ringed by cattails and a mix of moisture-tolerant trees turning toward red and gold: willow, poplar, and red maple, plus a morgue of dead ash snags, chewed to ruin by the emerald ashborer. Power lines traverse the wetland, with one supporting pole rising in its southwest corner, a utility company’s flag of proud possession.  

I make my way down the steep bank, wade through a thick tangle of goldenrod, brambles, Queen Anne’s lace, ragweed, and reed canary grass, past a small red maple that always burns to scarlet in the early autumn. I find my traditional observation spot, unfold a small camp chair, measure the air temperature and wind speed, open my notebook, and settle into a practice that has unfolded, week after week, over the last three years.  

During the next hour the light builds. The animals come and go, and the plants move in time with the winds, which on this bright September morning gently swirl and eddy out of the west.

∞

In a few days the meandering path of my life will take me far from Brockport, where I’ve lived these last 30 years. On this morning, I’ve come to say goodbye to what I think of, possessively and somewhat foolishly, as “my” wetland—the one that I adopted three years ago. My adoption was informal and brought with it no commitments other than a willingness to spend one uninterrupted hour per week sitting quietly amongst the cattails and willows, watching. I desired nothing more than a place to rest and a periodic escape from the intensity of my professional life and the political and social craziness fermenting away in a sour mash of SARS-CoV-2, Fox News, intolerance, grievance, and anti-science rhetoric. I wanted my tasks to sleep and my body to still. For a short, blessed while each week, I aimed to cultivate slowness. 

I chose this particular wetland for my observation project because it was within walking distance of my home and unremarkable in all ways: ignored by most everyone, and a repository for odd bits of trash and a host of invasive plants. And this neglect—this shabbiness—was partly the point, for I desired a quotidian sort of peace, a quality rising from the very ordinary, day-to-day course of my life and the wetland’s world.

I visited the wetland as best I could, given my professional obligations and peripatetic lifestyle, which often nurtured anything but stillness. Still, I baked and sweated in the summer sun, drew a thick down jacket around me on cold and snowy winter days, huddled in vernal rain, lounged in fall light. I greeted the great burst of flowering and growth that began each April, watched as the last leaves of October drifted through the autumnal air. Among the animals I concentrated on birds, partly because I know them best, but also because on most days they were the most noticeable creatures in the wetland. There also were mammals (usually gray squirrels, but also a few feral cats, dogs on the canal path, mink tracks in the snow), amphibians (spring peepers, American toads, northern leopard frogs, green frogs and bullfrogs), and reptiles (painted turtles and one prehistoric-looking snapping turtle, sunning on a downed willow log). Arthropods made their appearance, too (brightly jeweled dragonflies and damsel flies; orb-weaving spiders; baldfaced hornets, bumble bees and honeybees; and one monarch butterfly nectaring in a small patch of milkweed). But mostly the insects spun the soundtrack to my warm-weather visits―sometimes a full-throttled chorus of cicadas and katydids, at other times little more than a gentle susurrus, verging on subliminal white noise.

Each wetland watch became a kind of “sit,” as in the Zen noon of “sittng,” but with my attention focused on the external world. (Zazen with binoculars?) I did not emphasize counting or measuring things, although I scribbled my observations in a small notebook; once transcribed, they eventually totaled over seventy pages of single-spaced, typed field notes. A typical entry begins like this:

May 1, 2021; 15°C (59°F); winds light, W, ± 8 mph, sunny, clear.

And suddenly: fresh cattail leaves sprouting; willow leaves yellow-green, startling against brilliant blue sky, most trees bare except for swollen buds. Dandelions flowering on green-rich berm, tiny insects over water. Honeysuckle leafing out, wetland pond flush with water.

1330: MYWA [myrtle warbler] and YEWA [yellow warbler] M [males] in willows, YAWA chasing MYWA – several of each. 2 CAGO [Canada goose] at edge of pond when I arrive rise quietly (miracle!), slip into water, paddle off. No goslings. BLJA [blue jay] call, COGR [common grackle], NOFL [northern flicker] in dead ash, HOSP [house sparrow] singing (1st of wetland year), RWBL [red-winged blackbird] song, MALL [mallard] pair on pond (M’s green sheen brilliant in sun), F [female] quacking (rheeb-a-rheeb!), NOCA [northern cardinal], RBWO [red-bellied woodpecker] – everyone out and about.

1332: BLJA bothered by COGR; GBHE [great blue heron] lands (!) in top of dead ash – seems awkward up high, branches swaying under its weight, primordial. But settles in. Incessant NOFL [northern flicker] call to W [west].

1336: Cabbage whites ascend, a dance; YEWA gleans prey in shrubby willows to E [east], SOSP [song sparrow] sings to NE [northeast], then SOSP sings to W; 2 territories in wetland.

My typed entry for May 1st goes on for several pages, which when added to all the other entries—page after page of almost random observations—raises two related questions. First, why bother sitting by the wetland, doing next to nothing other than simply looking? And second, why write it all down, for page after page? As a partial answer, I’ll channel the ghost of the French writer Georges Perec, as he sits outside a tobacco shop near the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on the morning of October 18, 1974. Perec stares at the street, strokes his magnificent chin-beard, takes a deep drag from a Gitanes—a heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer at the age of 45. He scribbles hurriedly in his notebook, stopping every now and again to run his fingers through his unruly mop of hair or light another cigarette. Perec was a well-known experimental writer (he once wrote an entire novel without using words containing the letter “e”), but on this autumnal day he’s playing the dedicated empiricist—frantically trying to document everything that’s happening around him: the coming and going of people, rain, cars, busses, and pigeons. It’s a hopeless task, but Perec is interested in the “simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy” of one Parisian place—what he termed the “infraordinary,” or “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.”

Perec’s urban fieldwork unspooled over three days in October 1974. In 1975 he published his observations as Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien; an English translation, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, appeared in 2010. Perec’s Attempt is a brief work, comprised of short, staccato-like observations:

—Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a church, buildings…
—Asphalt
—Trees (leafy, many yellowing)
—A rather big chunk of sky (maybe one-sixth of my field of vision)
—A cloud of pigeons that suddenly swoops down on the central plaza, between the church and fountain
—Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)
—Human beings  
—Some sort of basset hound
—Bread (baguette)
—Lettuce (curly endive?) partially emerging from a shopping bag
Colors
               red (Fiat, dress, St-Raphaël, one-ways)
               blue bag
               green shoes
               green raincoat
               blue taxi
               blue 2CV [Citroën automobile, a “deux chevaux”]
The 70 [a bus] goes to Place du Dr Hayem, Maison
               green Mehari [another make of automobile]
The 86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Dannon: Yogurts and dessert
Demand the real thing, Roquefort Société in its green oval
Wholesale potatoes
               From a tourist bus, a Japanese woman seems to be taking my photograph
               An old man with his half-baguette, a lady with a cake-box in the shape of a little pyramid  

Perec’s narrative continues like this for 47 pages. When I first read An Attempt, I had no sense of what Perec was up to. The small book felt tedious and repetitive, nothing more than brief observation piled upon brief observation. But after settling into my wetland practice I revisited the book—and during this second reading, Perec’s lists became hypnotizing, then oddly touching and compelling: the world passing by; Parisians going about their business, often without any obvious purpose; advertisements; a stream of busses, trucks, and cars on the street; flocks of pigeons exploding off the pavement; marriages and funerals at the church across the street; parents attending to their children, and so on. For all its simplicity and brevity, An Attempt carried a surprising and affecting weight, and I was deeply moved when I reached the abrupt end of An Attempt: “Four children. A dog. A little ray of sun. The 96. It is two o’clock.”  

Life.  

Like Perec, I aimed to immerse myself in a familiar place and pay close attention to the waiting world—a facility that has withered in this virtual and hyperactive society of ours, where most children’s time outside is measured in minutes rather than hours and the average American spends seven hours or more per day staring at a screen. In a review of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Nina MacLaughlin wrote that “Our moment of attention is the most precious thing that we have to give.” And so, during my “Attempt to Exhaust a Small Wetland in Brockport, New York,” I gave my precious attention to the infraordinary of one neglected and slightly forsaken wetland, as a small exercise in personal generosity.

Patiently watching the stream of Perec’s infraordinary, whether flowing along a Parisian street or through a Brockport wetland: in such focused attention reduction becomes induction, and the precise details of the world are somehow writ large. It’s a metamorphosis best described by William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a Heaven in a wild flower, / Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour…”

∞

I continued my project for week after week, whenever I was in Brockport. Almost immediately after starting the project I began to anticipate my weekly visits and to breathe a bit more easily, and over the years I gained a steady measure of peace, an increased ability to remain fully present in this sensuous world, and a stronger sense of Brockport’s seasons. And recently I understood something else—that although I had always considered myself to be a westerner, the three years of my wetland practice, along with complementary long solo runs west along the Erie Canal, helped make Brockport feel more like home than it ever did during my first 27 years in the area. I was born and raised in California, and even after moving to New York I continued to spend as much time beyond the hundredth meridian as my professional commitments allowed. But sitting by the edge of that wetland—that chemistry of attention, an alchemy born from focused presence—helped settle me, where I was. I’m sorry that it took so long to realize such a homecoming, but I’m grateful that it finally happened.

I made my last wetland watch notebook entries at 9:50 a.m. on September 18, 2023:

1 EUST [European starling] perched in dead ash to NE.  

5 PATU [painted turtles] hauled out on log to NW, shells covered in dried duckweed, evenly spaced.

Background insect hum building. Warm sun on my back.

Goldenrod burning bright yellow.

The lone starling flies SE.

Afterwards, as I climbed the canal berm for the last time, I contemplated an irony that had blossomed in this small (but no longer?) bedraggled place, one cultivated by consistent practice: that although I finally felt that I belonged in Brockport, in a week I would be moving to Jackson, Mississippi, a place light years away from western New York in temperament and politics, climate and ecology. But once settled in Jackson, I planned on searching out a more southerly iteration of the infraordinary in a nearby Mississippi wetland, with the hope that my new residence might someday become, well, my home. I felt some hope and excitement in that understanding.  

And as I retraced my route to my apartment, I realized one other small thing about my wetland watch: that during all my hours of sitting by the edge of that small wetland, no one traveling along the canal path had ever stopped, looked down from above, and asked me what I was up to, while I was sitting there, doing nothing.