mountain laurel that hangs over the way. Although enticed to linger and listen, I head home, my running shoes slapping pavement between the stone and wrought iron entrance.
Civil engineer J. Gardner Sanderson designed Forest Hill as a rural cemetery, a parklike escape from the work world.39 In the post–Civil War era, when the rapidly expanding industrial economy shifted into high gear, “rural cemeteries represented society’s desire for stability.” With more people alienated from their work, they needed a place to rest, relax, and recreate. An important part of the rural cemetery, water “not only provided a natural break in the scenery but also encouraged meditation and relaxation.” Its life-giving symbolism suggested the mid-nineteenth-century shift from the colonial fear of fiery damnation to an assurance of “happy eternal life.”40
In the late 1860s, west-running Meadow Brook left Gypsy Grove swamp, meandered through the woods, and flowed into Forest Hill, where it spilled through three eye-shaped ponds; leaving the cemetery, the stream slipped across new house lots, pooled in another pond, and then slid off an esker to find the river. The clear running brook, then home to trout, is now no more than a ditch funneled into a concrete pipe. Already forced underground as it entered town, Meadow Brook lost its water in 1962 when the federal highway system built Interstate 81.41 Except for storm runoff, these days Forest Hill is bone-dry.
Robert Frost writes about the hubris behind a similar channeling in “A Brook in the City,” a poem that opens with a farmhouse, once nestled in the stream’s “elbow-crook,” now swallowed by a “new-built city” (4, 24). Representing a dying life that hangs on, the farmhouse sits in town off-kilter, cockeyed to the street, a reaction against the expectation that it must adjust to an artificial order, one that pins it down with a number and no name. Although the house may have once freely used the stream as a water source, the city system must now pipe a metered supply indoors. Unlike the farmhouse, which had conformed to the land, the city demands that the land conform to its idea of itself. A farm—at least the better ones, these days—works within nature’s seasons, but a city refuses to accept such limits, imposing on the ground an out-of-time grid.
To extend the grid, planners pave meadows and burn apple trees, but a brook is another story: “How else dispose of an immortal force / No longer needed?” (13–14). Flushing “cinder loads dumped down,” the speaker notes, cannot stop the stream “at its source” (14, 15). A living thing, water will find a way, planners know, so instead, “The brook was thrown / Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone / In fetid darkness still to live and run” (15–17). But, as the poem’s central line wonders, “Is water wood to serve a brook the same?” (12). How many gardens must go? Are we not mad to channel the brook after we’ve burned the orchard? To cut up an apple tree may be a sin, but to straiten a brook is to erode our being.
Out of sight, the brook is, however, not out of mind. Its absence haunts us because a built environment doesn’t help us to answer ultimate questions about being and knowing. We made the city, we know, but the brook that we cannot destroy is not of our doing. Despite its current “kept forever under” streets, the water leads us to “thoughts... that so keep / This new-built city from both work and sleep” (22, 23–24). The fact that the stream can now be found only on “ancient maps” tells us how far we’ve come in separating ourselves from nature, the wellspring of life (20).
We may demand that the brook “go in fear,” but, deep down, we know our own bluster: we can never discover all the answers (19). Poetic imagination, however, leaps beyond the handmade; it checks our hubris by placing our work within larger patterns, wider contexts. Nodding to this idea, the speaker, a poet who once knew the long-gone brook’s “strength / And impulse,” dips his finger in the stream to make “it leap [his] knuckle”; afterward he tosses into the “currents where they crossed” a flower, an aesthetic object, an emblem of art (5–6, 7, 8). Symbolic of inspiration and creativity, the brook’s energy—unpredictable, uncontrollable, unstoppable—challenges our rage for order with the intimation that there are forces beyond reason. All we can make within life’s flow is a momentary stay.
Can buried brooks inspire?
Can wastewater sustain us?
Without water, Forest Hill desiccates hope. When Meadow Brook ran free and clear, the place represented transition, life to come. Without living water, the cemetery stockpiles bodies with nowhere to go. Although designed to balance “civilized dominance of nature and sublime wilderness,” Forest Hill long ago lost its wildest thing, erased in favor of easy travel, leaving us only a fake wild, as nice as that may appear. Accumulating moments in time, Forest Hill once gave place to community memory, but with its water gone, a key link in that memory has evaporated.42 Meadow Brook, the most natural and ever-changing tie between the cemetery and its community, was thoughtlessly destroyed, making the cemetery not for the living but for the dead. Although the stream once knitted, in time and space, the cemetery and its neighborhood, from the start mine acid tainted the link.
On 30 July 2010, I interviewed Forest Hill superintendent Norma Reese. Her office occupies the west end of her long and narrow house, which sits tucked under a row of trees a hundred feet inside the cemetery gates. Baskets of flowers hung from the front porch and stood in pots on the front steps; inside, wind chimes hung from the ceiling, cemetery files lay open on the desk, and a 1915 map of the grounds hung from a wall. A collector of angels and unicorns, Norma sat behind George Sanderson’s bank desk, her graying hair pulled back. She wore a “Merry Christmas 2008” T-shirt, silver-wire glasses, and clogs. Having overseen Forest Hill for twenty years, she’s become part of the place; she’s not only its caretaker but also its defender and historian. She’s fond of the Forest Hill sassafras tree, the hemlocks and ground pines, and the red and white oak; not long ago, she discovered something she’d never seen in the cemetery, a red berry elder. Recognizing me as someone who runs in the cemetery, someone she had long ago named the pusher for helping her to get a riding lawnmower unstuck, she now had a name for the face.
Norma informed me that in the mid-1860s J. Gardner Sanderson and his father, George, convened their next-door neighbors to form a cemetery board of trustees, which included Elisha Phinney, two doors to the east; J. Atticus Robertson, who lived next to Phinney; and C. Dupont Breck, who owned the parcel directly opposite George. In 1868, the board bought land from the Pennsylvania Coal Company to found Forest Hill because culm banks were quickly overshadowing the city’s Pine Brook cemetery.43 Not only fears of being twice buried, but also the hilltop ground’s geology may have guided their purchase. Cemeteries tend to occupy moraines, glacially deposited piles of earth and stones that are often “steep and hummocky, with erratics and boulders. Yet it’s easy ground to dig in, and well drained.”44 And the topography didn’t invite culm dumps.
In the same year that the association bought land for the cemetery, J. Gardner and his wife, Eliza McBriar, purchased property along Meadow Brook, about three blocks from where Bridget and I live. Drawn by the purity of the water, which they traced to its source, the Sandersons built an impressive house on Meadow Brook’s north bank, excavated a fish pond—similar in size and shape to the Forest Hill ponds—and piped water into their home.45 Surrounded by flower gardens, a fountain, and an arcing drive, they had a sweeping view of the river as it curved gracefully along the valley floor, a view soon interrupted, however, by new-built homes, the billowing smoke of a D & H rail yard, and the black breaker at Centennial mine.46
At about the same time, maybe in the same year, the Pennsylvania Coal Company opened the Gypsy Grove mine, two miles upstream from the Sanderson property. Water pumped from the mine coursed through a company ditch into Meadow Brook, polluting it. Corroded pipes, dead fish, and undrinkable water forced the couple to abandon brook water sometime in 1874; in November 1875, they sued Pennsylvania Coal for damages. First heard in the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in 1878, the case reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which in 1886 ruled in favor of the coal company.47 Ruling against water quality, Pennsylvania Coal turned property law on its head.
Pennsylvania Coal advanced several arguments. The company asserted that water pumped from its mines was natural—“its impurity arises from natural, not artificial causes”—and that it reached Meadow Brook by natural