Wow!

"A Washington-based technology company announced plans Tuesday to build a 20-square-mile model metropolis that would be used to test everything from renewable energy innovations to intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks. The replica city would be capable of supporting a population of 350,000, but would be the state's newest ghost town."

from The Huffington Post

Environmental Autobiography, Part IV

By 2004 both of my parents had retired, and it was time to start thinking about plans for the future. They knew they would always retire out to Whitewater Lake, and it had been clear for a very long time that the cottage wouldn’t be nearly large enough for all of their things. At first, my dad was pretty married to the idea of keeping the house intact, but adding onto it – an idea from which the builder he’d hired immediately tried to talk him down. While the builder knew that the house had great sentimental value for my dad, he also (correctly) recognized that my parents would need something far more stable and efficient, since they would be spending hopefully many more years there. In the end the builder won out, and my dad doesn’t regret this decision at all. Why not? Well, I’ll venture a guess: because one’s sense of place, while certainly informed and influenced by material objects, is never surpassed by them.

So my parents built a house which looks like a lot of the other houses on the lake. It’s beige, has a stone façade at the front door and a two car garage. It’s wired for satellite television, and they’re waiting for prices to drop a little before they buy their third high definition set. Although much larger than Aunt Lee’s place, it’s also more energy-efficient and takes better advantage of natural east-west cross ventilation. Meanwhile, each summer the lake itself gets a little more crowded, with bigger and faster speedboats pulling larger numbers of waterskiers. When I visit in the summertime, we wait until dusk to take out the pontoon boat where I’m regaled with stories of the latest homes for sale and what’s being built where. My mother gets to garden, my dad gets to tinker, and all in all they’re doing just fine.

Living in a hyper-urban environment for over fifteen years now – Manhattan, my sixth and current home – you might question what part of Whitewater Lake remains with me now. Since my parents still live there, and I visit at least twice a year, my question would be: what part of it doesn’t? In a lot of ways, I don’t think I’d be in graduate school studying sustainability if it weren’t for the experiences I had growing up in both the city and the country. Aunt Lee was living nearly carbon-neutrally for a very long time, well before there was a term for it. I might not have known it then, but I can certainly recognize it now.

What do I think of my parents’ decision to tear down the cottage and start over? In the end, Aunt Lee's house was from a different time and, in fact, a remarkably different place. But if I walk out onto the pier and sit down, I still hear the same water lapping at the stones on the shoreline, hear the same birds calling out. I still see the same trees, the same vista, the same horizon. Do I miss the old house? Not really. If I close my eyes, I can still imagine sitting in Aunt Lee’s kitchen – like it was yesterday, in fact. The places we love live on, long after they’re gone.

Environmental Autobiography, Part III

But then I grew up. As I got into high school, I stopped spending summer weeks out at Whitewater Lake – I had a job, for one, and other things going on. We would still make our trips out to see Aunt Lee, but my sister and I might not go every time. Then I went off to college in Northfield, MN and moved to Minneapolis after graduating, the second and third places on the itinerary of my life so far. Aunt Lee died in December of the year I graduated - she was 88 years old and still occasionally babysitting for neighboring families. I don’t remember how I felt on the day I first went back to her house after she was gone, and I think this is probably for the best – I’d much rather remember the house with her in it. My parents inherited the cottage, and continued to go on at least a monthly basis – and every weekend in the summer -  just like Aunt Lee would have wanted it, I’m sure.

Eventually, it was my turn. In 1996 I got an offer from some friends who had been subletting an apartment in Brooklyn to move out to New York and share an apartment with them. It was an offer too good to refuse, but before the new lease would start I’d have almost three months to kill and I needed to be out of my Minneapolis place. Enter Whitewater Lake, where I lived for April, May and June of that year on my eventual way out to NYC. But where my experiences for the previous twenty-plus years had been nearly idyllic, my time spent actually living on Whitewater Lake was incredibly different. While I had the same free time to sit and relax and enjoy, the lake and the house especially felt increasingly like a prison. It was small, and the television reception was horrible. I had been living with no fewer than three other people for the previous four years, and I was missing daily interactions with friends. The uncertainty I was feeling about moving away had infiltrated my relationship with my environment in a big, bad way.

Sometimes it’s hard being surrounded by silence when all you want to do is scream.

It didn’t help that the sun came out from behind the clouds maybe fifteen or twenty of the ninety days I lived there, or at least it seemed that way. Summer was late in coming that year, so even the trees were mainly dormant for most of those months, adding to the increasing sense of expectation (and anxiety) that was swirling through my mind - until summer finally exploded in late May. Here’s a photograph taken later that June, near the end of my time living on Whitewater Lake. What’s not nearly perfect about this picture? My shadow is the only thing that’s giving away how I really feel, though in that kind of setting sunlight you’d be hard-pressed to have a care in the world.

Environmental Autobiography, Part II

Driving out to Whitewater Lake was always an adventure, and I remember being acutely aware of the changing scenery that flowed past the car windows – dense suburban housing that eventually began spreading out, then rather quickly transforming into countryside. (I know that drive like the back of my hand, and could have directed you there long before I could legally drive there.) The house sat along a road on a ridge that bisects the lake, coincidentally called Ridge Road, and you have to take a rather winding trip up and down, left and right, in order to get there.

We visited basically every other week, not always precisely but it seemed to work out that way, through every kind of weather and each turn of the season. I remember how loud the screen door would slam if you weren’t gentle – which we rarely were – and gouging my knee on the weird concrete steps smack in the middle of the yard. (I still have the scar.) I remember the smell of freshly-mown grass, having been allowed to wield a push-mower from an early age, but especially the smell of burning leaves, which we would first rake into large piles and dive into before letting Dad loose with the lighter fluid. I remember the sound of the motorboats, but especially the sound after the motorboats fell silent, the sound of the lake making the sounds it’s always made, will always make.

Whitewater Lake was the place where I first lit smoke bombs, the place where I shot a rifle for the one and only time. (I closed my eyes and was physically thrown backwards by the recoil, but I somehow hit the can.) But what was the house to me? Was it just a place to sleep, a place to seek shelter from inclement weather – or was there more to it, how it exuded warmth from the moment you opened the door to the kitchen in subzero weather and smelled the apple cake that Aunt Lee had warm from the oven without fail each and every time you came to visit? How it freaked you a little bit to take a shower in the basement, in a dark corner without so much as a light bulb, with the cobwebs and the spiders and who knows what else? How in the winter you would access the basement through the hatch in the floor because there’s no way you’re going out in three feet of snow in your bathrobe, thank you very much.

I would spend several weeks each summer out at Aunt Lee’s by myself, bookended by visits from my family to drop me off and pick me back up. I’d work in the yard, mow the lawn, scrape and paint parts of the house that were peeling – anything she needed, because that’s why I was out there. I was there to have fun, of course, but I was really there for her – at least that’s how my nine-year-old self thought. Lying in the hammock drinking Dr. Pepper out of glass bottles. Catching butterflies in a net and letting them fly away. Fishing off the pier, but only when Aunt Lee was around – because if I caught anything, I would need her to take the fish off the hook. (To this day, I can’t touch a live fish.) It was those weeks where I learned how to appreciate simple things.

Environmental Autobiography, Part I

I haven’t lived too many places, geographically-speaking: barring a four-month stint studying abroad in Greece, I’ve lived in only three states – in order of appearance: Wisconsin, Minnesota and New York - and two cities per state (if you’re willing to count Brooklyn as a city). But while I was born and raised in Shorewood, WI, a small residential inner-ring suburb of Milwaukee, growing up I had the good fortune to be able to spend many weekends and several weeks per summer on Whitewater Lake with my Great Aunt Lee.

Aunt Lee – more specifically, Leora Emma Petronella Goelzer Frank – had been living on Whitewater Lake for a very long time, certainly as long as I could remember. She was my father’s mother’s sister, who had left Milwaukee shortly after marrying my uncle Carl Frank. He owned a small piece of land on a somewhat remote lake southwest of the city where he had built, with his own two hands, a small clapboard cottage some years earlier.

Of course, he had some additional work to do: the garage, for instance, took up more than half of the house. When it was just him, living in the small back room hadn’t been much of an issue – but now that Lee was going to be living there too, he had to lay tile over the garage floor, install another door and build an actual kitchen. The foundation may have been made of cinderblocks, but it was structurally sound and barely ever leaked. So what if the shower was a stall stuck in the corner of the basement? So what if there was only one toilet, a true water closet without so much as a sink? It was home, and Aunt Lee embraced it.

My dad had spent a large part of his youth going out to Whitewater Lake, where in a lot of ways he was like the child that Carl and Lee never had. So when my dad eventually got married and started his own family, we soon started our bi-monthly trips out to see Aunt Lee – Carl had unfortunately died shortly before I was born and Aunt Lee, stubborn as always, decided to stay on at the lake by herself even though she had no car (she didn’t know how to drive) and at that time there were few year-round residents. 

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SE562 BL1 ENVIRONMENT BEHAVIOR RESEARCH FALL 2011

This is my first entry for the class listed above, being taught as part of the inaugural Sustainable Interior Environments MA program at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I have to think some more about the Goethe quote, and I may post again shortly. Welcome to my blog - and though I had really kind of hoped never to utter those words, I'm more than happy to share my thoughts and use this as a learning tool. Hasta luego.