When I was seven years old, we moved from Cleveland to New York City. I remember when my parents announced the decision to me and my two sisters. We were eating dinner at the aluminum kitchen table of our suburban home. Their tone was excitingly conspiratorial. They told us not to tell anyone just yet, not until plans were settled. The aspects of the move that might have troubled me—leaving relatives, friends, my bedroom, and my school—paled in comparison to the fact that I had been entrusted with a secret.
Essays
A Living Infrastructure
By SCOTT GEIGER
Oysters in the Raritan Bay, courtesy of SCAPE Landscape Architecture
Next week Thursday, April 3, the amazing Rebuild by Design competition concludes in New York City. The finale event on Vesey Street in Manhattan is open to the public, and I think it well worth attending, even if you’re only just now learning about the competition. I’ve wanted to write about this competition since its launch last summer, and now as it comes to a close I can speculate a little about its significance.
House by the Railroad
The railroad track that ran behind my childhood home–one of several cheaply built ranch houses set on the edge of a small town, pre-approved for FHA loans–seemed a link to everything in the world, the same as every river or creek I passed over on bridges or waded in while fishing, led to bigger water: the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Gulf. Rails led on to other towns, led to St. Louis, which, according to elementary school textbooks, led everywhere west, connected everywhere east. And I wanted to be close to them.
Providence
On the last day of the conference, we take a short bus ride to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a sleepy town in the Blackstone Valley, just south of the Massachusetts state line. Situated along the Blackstone River and close to the Eastern Seaboard, the area was at the forefront of early American industry, powered first by water and later by steam. Today, a bright winter afternoon in February, snow melting underneath a clear uncurtained sky, the town center of slow-moving traffic and brick storefronts fringed with weathered canvas awnings has the distilled reverie of an elegy.
One Version of a Daily Practice
1. The Origin of the Species.
Put the yellow kettle on. Ignore the floors in desperate need of cleaning. Fill the small metal base of the Bialetti with water (just to the safety valve). Spoon coffee from the ice-cold Viennese candy tin into the funnel. Screw the top on (tight, but not too much so) and put it on the stove. Don’t let the flame overtake it. Tuck the yellow and green-leafed curtain behind its hook. Look out at the ugly building across the way, the Greek and American flags, the third floor doors to an abandoned idea of balconies.
What Is RiverFirst?
By SCOTT GEIGER
The Mississippi River meets only one waterfall on its wayward transcontinental course. It comes early, in the northern Midwest, at a site the Sioux knew as a place that was part real world, part spirit world. Seventeenth-century adventurers rumored about a “pigmy Niagra” called St. Anthony Falls. Pioneers from the young United States reached these waters early in the nineteenth century; they established simple mills for grist and lumber just as soon as property rights could be legally defined.The mills grew and industrialized over decades, triggering the rise of Minneapolis. A feature of nature became a technology servicing the city. The names Gold Medal Flour and Pillsbury still loom in enormous metal type on opposite sides of the historic railway bridge leading into Minneapolis that was new when F. Scott Fitzgerald was a boy. The historic mills themselves have gone, though, and today Stone Arch Bridge belongs to pedestrians, cyclists, and the students of the University of Minnesota. Looking north from the bridge they see an amphitheater of a spillway, tall gray waters pouring between a research lab and hydroelectric plant on the east side; a lock-dam barge elevator run by the Army Corps of Engineers on the west.
Death Trip
By SAHIBA GILL
There was no after-the-rain smell when I was in Varanasi, not even along the river Ganges where waters are wide in January; the white fog curtain erases the farthest bank so that just sky, boats, and water make up the shore. In the city’s brown streets, trash runs steadily through silt-carved gullies. Waste sandcastles build in its empty lots.
Confederate Jasmine
By BILL PITTS
Jim’s garden, like all gardens, was a work of deception.
I had a view of it from my side yard where the bamboo hedge had been reluctant to fill in, framing what it was supposed to hide: a sort of jungle fantasy some two hundred miles north of the tropics, shaded by laurel oaks.
Ancestor Worship: Help, I’m Becoming an Internet Genealogy Addict
Hello, everybody. My name is Julia, and I am becoming an Internet genealogy addict. I don’t believe in higher powers, except, like, the NSA and the IRS. So I must rely on my failing willpower. Unless you find a rich uncle, Internet genealogy is hard to justify as useful. Why should I care that four hundred years ago, some remote ancestor was a rabbi in Moravia? Geni.com, where I listed my family tree, says it has 74,346,170 people on its site. I’m already up to 1,820 blood relatives.
Pause

We met friends north of Seattle, then drove to catch the ferry to Orcas Island and talked about Washington’s bikini baristas. It would be another three hours before the ferry left, so we walked through cars and trucks parked in lanes straight as garden rows to the snack shop and overpaid for sandwiches, a banana, soda. You sat on the asphalt behind a Chevy Tahoe, petting a pit bull someone had tied to the trailer hitch, and I took your picture.
Conversation and knowing there was no option but to wait made time pass easily. When the boat departed, we sat on the observation deck and cruised west into the pale sun and gray gauzy clouds, toward forested islands rising black from the sea. It was cold.