Groundglass, p.1
Groundglass, page 1
GROUNDGLASS
KATHRYN
SAVAGE
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Minneapolis
2022
Copyright © 2022 by Kathryn Savage
Cover design by Tree Abraham
Front cover images © terradron/Shutterstock.com and maccontritutor/Shutterstock.com
Book design by Bookmobile
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Savage, Kathryn, 1985-author.
Title: Groundglass / Kathryn Savage.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022008400 (print) | LCCN 2022008401 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566896405 (paperback) | ISBN 9781566896481 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC PS3619.A833 G76 2022 (print) | LCC PS3619.A833 (ebook) | DDC 814/.6—dc23/eng/20220304
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008400
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008401
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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For Dad and Henry.
For the daughters of a place and the mothers.
When I say fathers I imagine the picture of my gentle father with his brother (dead now) and his mother (also dead) and his father (now also dead, although at the time of first writing not yet dead), laughing, no one looking at the camera and no one noticing the photographer, who must be a friend or maybe my uncle on my mother’s side, and who is in the room but invisible, and who for us has handed down these bodies as they once were, and outside the room the crush of history goes on
—Éireann Lorsung, The Century
Error, disease, snow, sudden weather.
For those given to contemplation: this house, …
viewing on groundglass an inverted image.
—Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
Humboldt Industrial Area
Trains at night, keening. Years ago, in Victory, a street dead-ended into a large railroad switching yard, bright-lit, voices of men carrying. I can remember the noise of industry coming through the screened windows of my childhood. The place I’m from has long been a magnet for illegal dumping.
Once, a warehouse fire at the Howe Chemical Company, located in the industrial area, burned over one hundred different pesticides. Water to put out the fire washed pesticides and fertilizer into Shingle Creek, named after the asphalt-shingles manufacturing plant nearby. Soils and groundwater were polluted from runoff, so berms were built to pond the water on Howe property, to keep runoff from traveling farther into the backyards, our rhubarb stalks and tomatoes. The watershed. Eventually, the Mississippi River.
One day in high school, I come home to my father taking a sledgehammer to the back walls of our house. Wood floor matte with sheetrock dust. He wants a wall of glass, has a sliding door he’s pulled off some jobsite to brighten the view. A hole in our house opens onto the backyard, where he’s stacked lumber, PVC pipe, sheet metal, and cinder blocks. Before he illegally installed the solar panels that heat our home, they’d been used to warm a catfish farm. He keeps propane tanks in the grass; they cap with snow in winter. The spring before, his project was a garage addition. He rented a backhoe to dig the trench. Before the frost came, he dug forty-two inches below the frost line; poured the concrete footing, on top of which he lay block; backfilled the trench; and then added the anchor bolts, the sill plate, framed the plywood subfloor.
“Learn how to build this,” he always told me, and I tried to keep up. A room was composed of layers. It had depth and hidden parts. Together we made rooms. That day, so many years ago, he walked me over to his newest project: he’d framed one eight-foot wall and needed me to hold the beams. I lifted them; they were heavy.
He’s dead, and I replay this memory.
Curtains
“Join the club,” my friend said over drinks, handing me the book Some Thing Black weeks after I stood in the crematorium where a man I did not know and would never see again pushed a button and I watched my father’s body move toward flame in a cardboard box with our surname scrawled in marker on its side.
On that day, I had been bothered by and too aware of the curtains over the window that separated me from him. Chintzy pink satin, heavy pleats. The man who worked the button asked if I wanted to see. I realized the question was if I wanted to see my father’s body burned to ash. I said I did. The curtains parted slowly, loudly. I stood. I looked. I said, Stop. I understood why they were there.
Or it was like this: In the Republic, Socrates tells the story of a man, Leontion, who came upon dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and disgust; he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him, and pulling his hand from his eyes, he ran up to the dead.
My father’s body was on the other side of glass. I felt a responsibility to look. I was his only daughter. Looking can be many things, and one of those is love.
The book Some Thing Black was strange. This made me love the friend who’d given it to me more, because my grieving was strange.
Jacques Roubaud wrote Some Thing Black in the years after the sudden death of his wife. It is a transcription of his loss and the ever-present “not-there-ness” of her—her things, his memories. Roubaud writes: “Through simple repetition of there is no more the whole unravels into its loathsome fabric: reality.”
While my father was in the hospital, his diagnosis and the particularities of his disease were presented on during a medical conference. I was standing in the hallway outside his ICU room, talking to his surgeon, who had done the presentation. The conference attendees had been very interested in my father’s gastric cancer and its unusual progression, he said, as if paying my father a compliment. I knew by then that his cancer occurs at a slightly higher rate in areas that produce industrial waste and pollution. Was what made it unusual that we had long lived on the fence lines of industry? Was it the outside toxins within his body? It would be impossible to know, the surgeon said. What was and was not possible tethered us to the questions his body posed.
He died because his body was unwell. The industry we’d long lived near was a part of his cancer, I was coming to see, or maybe this was paranoid. It crossed my mind that it could be both, but I didn’t yet know how.
I couldn’t watch his body burn, but I decided I could visit the Superfunds.
The Soo Line Dump
Drought pales the dip of meadow coming into view. Treed and ryegrass-covered, this place is unrecognizable as a former rail dump. Today, the dog pulls hard at the sight of a coyote up ahead. I’ve seen rabbits and pheasants here other days; watched birds building nests. The low hills of the dump are between the off-leash run and the fence with No Trespassing signs. Across the fence is Shoreham Yards, the 230-acre polluted train, trucking, and bulk-distribution site two blocks from my house.
Up ahead, a structure of wood. At first I think it might be where someone is living, but closer, it is a discarded shipping pallet with a rail tie over the bed. Maybe I keep coming here because as much as this is a site of burial, it is imperfect. No ruin but active. Diesel particulates catch the breeze. Nothing from the past peeks through the tallgrass, but I know that the surface and subterranean, past and present, meet here.
It is June; ephemerals line the fence. Snow trillium and skunk cabbage. Across the chain-link, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has determined this brownfield to be vast and complex with significant petroleum and solvent-related soil contamination reaching deep below, down to the water table, and impacting groundwater.
The dump poses questions of scale, perception, and concern. What has died here? What grows from the violent soil?
Walking, I think about Terry Tempest Williams visiting the Great Salt Lake to grieve for her dying mother and also the wounded water basin. “Death is no longer what I imagined it to be,” she writes. It is not a vacancy but a crowding and “earthy like birth.” She cannot prove or disprove that her mother developed cancer after being exposed to atomic bomb tests in their desert home in the 1950s, but one night, she joins nine other women who trespass together, entering “the contaminated country.” “The women couldn’t bear it any longer,” she writes in her memoir of personal and ecological grief.
Were the women restless, tired of waiting? It seemed some days that he was both dying and not dying. How to be with what is happening invisibly and relentlessly? The women walked onto a testing site to protest the long abuses of the land. When they were arrested, after being questioned about why they’d come, they answered back: “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim the desert for our children.”
Shoreham Yards, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Aerial image of Shoreham Yards and the neighborhood that surrounds the industrial site.
Live Map
At night, while my son is upstairs in his room, I scroll the
There are another 450,000 active brownfields, old polluted industrial sites, across the country, like the rail dump I walk past to the dog park, but no interactive map for such sites. They are common places to find lingering environmental contamination dusting dandelion leaves or the screened windows of living rooms.
The volume of polluted places overwhelms. A dailyness sinks in. The map sprawls. I scroll images of demolished mills and smelters. Pit mines. Long veins of creeks and rivers. Fields where grasses bend, exposing young pale shoots. Upstairs, Henry laughs, playing video games.
On Openings
When my son was breastfeeding, I was always leaking. My shirts smelled like hot milk, slightly sour.
Months before, I’d gone to the ultrasound alone the day I learned my bloodstream wasn’t providing adequate nutrients and oxygen to my baby. Something to do with the placenta, it had started to “shut down.” I asked the doctor what to do but there was nothing. I ate sugar so my child would squirm. Dig a bony elbow into me.
Years later, I will learn that if a woman cannot consume sufficient calcium, her body will take from her bones to give to her infant. That toxins can be passed in breast milk. Body burden—the load of environmental pollutants bodies hold—can be transmitted genetically, so it is intergenerational, becoming a strange inheritance.
The placenta is the environment shared by mother and fetus. Particulate air pollution the mother breathes can harm placental health, so a question I will ask myself, later, is: what place-history coursed in my blood? When I heard the words “placental insufficiency” I was twenty-four and had worn calf-high boots to the appointment. It was September. In the obstetrician’s curtained room, the child’s body lit on-screen. Later that night, my child’s father, who loved me, was terrified for us, but I felt good, young and strong, walking briskly up the stairs to our apartment.
When my body became an emergency, my child came out early. The placenta was tested by a pathologist in a lab. The test results were inconclusive; clotted pit pulled out of my low abdomen, then chucked. I never held the wild pomegranate but if I rounded with life again I’d make them give it to me. A smear off someone’s blue-gloved hand. Arsenic, tetrachloroethylene? I’d conduct my own examination.
Returning
I go back home. This isn’t such a dramatic return, only a four-mile drive along roads that hug the Mississippi River. June. The sky blue as a pool. My son’s at his elementary school and I’ve got the day off work, so I drive past the industrial corridor north of the Lowry Avenue Bridge. A metallic sharpness rides the breeze. Here are the same industries that have dominated these riverbanks for more than a century. The tar-shingles factory, power station, concrete producer, two plywood and lumber suppliers, and an acrylic fabricator.
I park on the cul-de-sac before the maroon-trimmed house. The small white house that held my small white self and small white dog, beside track carrying oil bound for other cities. Oil that leaked onto earth. Two decades later, the pine tree in the front yard is plump and bushy, gorgeously tall.
Some days, kids play by the high fence spooling vines that divide this street from the rail yard. I did this with my friends two decades ago, kicking a soccer ball in the flat, open patch of grass.
I started coming back after his funeral.
When he stopped working the odd construction job, as his disease advanced and his memory declined, his bills were mailed to my house. Some days, there would be cleanup reports from Canadian Pacific Railway in the mail about Shoreham Yards, the polluted rail yard at the end of my block that connects, by miles of track and history, to the polluted yard I grew up near, Humboldt Industrial Area. The yards crisscrossing the Mississippi.
In 1872 Horace W. S. Cleveland advocated for a Minneapolis city park system that preserved open space for public use but left this stretch of river out. The waters south of Saint Anthony Falls—two miles downriver and closer to downtown—would have parks and trails along the banks, but city planners, wealthy landowners, and businessmen deemed this northern water too valuable as a place of commerce.
People who live along this stretch of river in North Minneapolis suffer from the highest rate of asthma-related hospitalizations and the highest concentration of lead poisoning cases in the state. North Minneapolis remains one of the hearts of the Black community in Minnesota. It was a place where people experienced poverty and oppression in Minneapolis. This stretch of river is a layered ecology, where 140 years of industrial use, expansion, and plant, animal, and human life coexist. “No patient is sovereign,” Anne Boyer reflects in The Undying, the memoir she wrote after her cancer diagnosis. We are all “marked by our historical particulars, constellated in a set of social and economic relations.”
This stretch of river is my home. How common is a lifelong proximity to industrial contamination sites? Who else held similar stories in their bodies? According to the findings of a 2020 EPA report using census data, approximately 200 million people live within three miles of a Superfund remedial site or brownfield, which is roughly 61 percent of the U.S. population. The racial and income inequities among impacted populations are stark. Of the 21 million people who live within one mile of a Superfund, 49.8 percent of the residents are described as minority and low-income populations in the most recent EPA site census demographics report available at the time of this writing. Terri Hansen, reporting for Indian Country Today in 2014, writes that 25 percent of all U.S. Superfunds are located within the boundaries of sovereign tribal nations, on tribal lands. All U.S. land is Indigenous land; this legacy of violence and trauma to Indigenous peoples predates the fund.
In a moment of dialogue between Anne Boyer and her daughter, in Boyer’s memoir, she comforts her daughter with the good results of a genetic test: her daughter’s genes do not predispose her to cancer. “You forget,” her daughter replies, “that I still have the curse of living in the world that made you sick.”
We were poor, our lives an inconvenience to our neighbors, capital. It was nothing revolutionary I was confronting through my father’s death, just the hard truth that disease can be accelerated by lived experiences. By our proximity to extractive capitalism and legacy pollution, a structural inequity that unjustly impacts, locally and globally, communities of color and Indigenous peoples and low-income people of all races and ethnicities the most. Fence-line communities are also called “sacrifice zones.”
I hold this place, this maroon-trimmed house, this block of complexity and inequity, in my body in the form of memory, and in the form of industrial particulates that inhabit me epidemio-logically, and in the form of grief.
Walking my old neighborhood, I stopped to sit beside Shingle Creek. It had rained heavily the night before. The water was high up the sandy banks, propelling what floated along: today, a hunk of driftwood, splayed candy wrappers, a plastic Coke bottle. This one artery flowed urgently toward a point of confluence. I watched the water move.
Teaching Hospital
One night, when I am seventeen, breathing hurts and doesn’t stop. My lung has collapsed. I am treated at a teaching hospital. A tub wedged between my ribs. Medical students move in and out of my room. Classes come to study me. What had happened inside me was unusual in such a young woman, the doctors say.
At the teaching hospital, no one asks if while my lungs were developing I lived near an asphalt-shingles plant, a city refuse, a sooty switching yard. I am not suggesting that the air pollution I was exposed to as a child caused my body to breach. But to the curious, because I had moved away from my old neighborhood by then, the presumption of geographic permanence that necessitates such comparisons is limiting. I believe such limits of the imagination foreclosed the asking of the questions.
