Today in Travel Writing: Saturday, Feb. 20

Lecture: Travel Writing as a Career Part 1
Pre-Trip Discussion: Judith Vollmer's Reactor, AWP Chronicle interview
Workshop exercises 2-6

Trip to Turtle Creek Watershed, Trafford, Westinghouse

During today's trip, you'll do a modified version of exercise #12. Collect in your notebook: bits of dialogue; luminous details for development of scene and character; sensory descriptions; aha! moments.

At home: Do exercise #16 (present and past tense). Write one piece based on today's trip and bring for workshop during our next class. Set up your own travel blog (using Blogger/www.blogspot.com) and post your pieces, thoughts, notes. Send me your blog address and I'll link your blog to the class blog.

Read: Susan Orlean's My Kind of Place. Review Toker/Strip District.
Next trip: Strip District

Prosody Interview with Judith Vollmer

Be sure to listen to this interview with Judith Vollmer on WYEP's Prosody: http://radiotime.com/WebTuner.aspx?ProgramId=38935&TopicId=32169673& The interview features Vollmer reading new poems and discussing place, family, stories, voices, water and more. A wonderful way to prepare for this Saturday's class.

NPR Story Featuring Robert DiRinaldo, Master Shoemaker

For background on shoe (and more) repair and craftsmanship in America, check out this NPR story. It features Robert DiRinaldo of Trafford, PA, who we'll try to visit on Saturday. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4802146

Turtle Creek Watershed Facts

Watershed Facts from The Turtle Creek Watershed Association http://tcwa.org

* The term watershed has two definitions. For many years, “watershed” meant the dividing line boundary where a raindrop falling on one side went towards one body of water and a drop on the other flowed to a different body. For example, the Continental Divide is the line where precipitation on one side heads to the Pacific Ocean and on the other side to the Atlantic Ocean.

* More commonly nowadays, “watershed” is defined not just as that boundary, but as the area of land within it draining into a specified body of water – in our case into Turtle Creek.

* The Turtle Creek watershed is a part of the larger Monongahela River watershed, then the Ohio River watershed, and then the Mississippi River watershed.

* The Turtle Creek watershed starts at the eastern edges of Murrysville and Hempfield Township, the middle of Delmont, and the western edges of Salem and Washington Townships and Greensburg then moves downstream to the Edgar Thompson Works on the Monongahela River – a total of 147 square miles.

* The highest elevation in the watershed is 1,520.0 feet above sea level in Hempfield Township. The lowest is 718.8 feet where Turtle Creek enters the Monongahela River. Most high points of the watershed boundary are between 1,200 and 1,400 feet.

* Included in the watershed are all or parts of 33 communities in Allegheny and Westmoreland Counties.

* Turtle Creek has ten major tributaries for a combined total of 315 stream miles.

* For the purposes of study, our watershed is divided into fourteen sub-watershed units. Upper, Middle, and Lower Turtle Creek form three. Upper and Lower Brush Creek form two more. The other nine tributaries form the rest.

* Our two greatest economic, environmental, and health & safety problems come under the umbrella headings of Abandoned Mine Drainage (AMD) and Stormwater.

* AMD is formed when ground water, which was pumped out during active mine operations, pools in abandoned mine tunnels or when precipitation flows through mine spoil piles. Mine-related materials, such as pyrite (an iron and sulfur compound formed at similar geologic times to coal), dissolve in the water.

* The only two sub-watershed units unaffected by AMD are Haymaker Run and Steels Run.

* Excessive stormwater runoff is the source of numerous problems including: combined sewer overflows, drinking water source contamination, erosion, flooding, habitat destruction, lowered water tables, sanitary sewer overflows, sedimentation, and streambank destabilization.

All parts of the watershed are impacted by excess stormwater runoff problems.

Historical Footage: Trafford Westinghouse Plant

If you're interested in the kinds of work that used to be done at the Trafford Westinghouse Plant, you can find historical video footage at The Open Video Project here: http://www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=4718 (This particular film, Tapping the Furnace, was shot in Trafford in 1904 and shows, even in black-and-white/silent footage, how dangerous steelwork would have been.)

Backgrounding: The Turtle Creek Watershed Association

Find out more about the Turtle Creek Watershed reclamation here: http://tcwa.org/B/index.htm

This Saturday's Trip: Judith Vollmer Gives Us a Tour of Lost, Ruined, and Reclaimed Spaces

This Saturday, we'll be with Judith Vollmer, whose book Reactor has given you a preview of the kinds of spaces we'll be inhabiting on this trip. Please be sure you've read Reactor and have questions ready.

Also, be sure to wear warm clothes and boots. We'll be spending time in nature. I'll bring hot chocolate!

Our trip will feature these highlights, per Professor Vollmer's description:

"We will do a tour of the reclamation project of Brush Creek (aka Sulphur Creek) on the border between Level Green and Monroeville. It serves as an apt metaphorical site for damaged places that look, to the naked eye, otherwise innocuous, unlike the Sulfur Creek of the past.

"Interestingly, while children were swimming in Sulphur/Sulfur Creek, very high-level white-collar experiments in nuclear testing were being conducted at Monroeville Research and Development (my dad's later years w/Westinghouse). I'll talk about water
reclamation at Sulfur (now called Brush Creek and part of the Turtle Creek Watershed, an interesting contract to, say, the Sewickley Creek Watershed, the much cleaner water source that runs through UPG's Slate Run, for example).

"We will also visit the site of the Trafford plant, since both it and Sulfur Creek have been definitively linked to mesothelioma. I'll talk about low-level and high-level nuclear waste from there, with comments about how Pgh. area workers traveled around the country and into Western Europe to do refuel and repair, based on their experiences at places like Yukon. Those workers, because many of them were children of slaves of the coalfields, were considered to be fearless, I've come to conclude, the way our grandparents from Eastern Europe were sent into the mines because they too were fearless, would work for low wages, etc."

You might be able to link some of what we cover on this trip with what you saw in the Vanka murals.

Time-permitting, we will follow this trip with a visit to Mr. DiRinaldo, one of the last master shoemakers in the country, and stop by Sherm Edwards, a family-run chocolate shop and the birthplace of the chocolate-covered pickle.