Your failures leave destructive and constructive features on the landscape of your life.
The Monongahela River is not a big river, but it is an avenue for barges carrying coal from the bituminous mines of western Pennsylvania and western West Virginia. As a waterway, it ranks proportionately high in tonnage because of the coal barges. Along its narrow valley, trains pass on either side of the river, also mostly for the transport of coal. It is not, however, as a throughway for coal that the Monongahela is the focus here.
In the Native American language of the pre-Colonial region, the little but important Monongahela means “river of falling-in banks.” The hilly region that includes not only the Mon, as it is locally called, but also the lower Allegheny River and upper Ohio River is known for its numerous landslides. The falling-in banks occur not only along the main river courses, but also along the tributary Youghiogheny River, Cheat River, Beaver River, and on the sides of now dry valleys that once hugged their own streams.
Hills in the region give way at unexpected times and places, so landslides aren’t very predictable phenomena though one might hazard a guess that this hill or another seems prone to giving way to gravity, particularly after saturating rains. Sometimes cracks in the ground foreshadow a slide, but not all slides give forewarnings.
When a hillside undergoes a slide, it usually leaves an arc-shaped steep wall where rocks and ground let loose. That arc-shaped steep wall is called a scarp. You can think of it as a concave cliff at the uppermost boundary of a landslide. The material that was once part of the hill slumps or falls below the scarp to cover the lower part of the hill and to fill the valley beneath the scarp with debris: Rocks, soils, and plants that grew on the side of the hill.
Old landslides reveal themselves by worn scarps that appear as muted cliff-like breaks in the slope of a hillside. The same processes that formed the original scarp continue to smooth out rough edges and steep slopes. With time neighboring slides also form scarps, scalloping the hill.
The inevitability of landslides and the formation of scarps make the seemingly stable geology of the region a questionable place to build any structure. Land above the river is destined to slide into it to be washed to the sea. In the case of the Monongahela River Valley, the washing continues through the Ohio River and into the Mississippi River. Eventually, the land of western West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and Eastern Ohio is destined for the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. The journey is sporadic and long, but the movement of the riverbed is inexorable.
So, if you drive through the region and see a muted or fresh scarp, think of this. Yes, the hillside failed, but the people of New Orleans would have no ground on which to stand if those scarps did not exist. Thousands of years, more thousands of landslides, and thousands of miles of meandering transport in riverbeds all combined to provide people with land on which to put Bourbon Street, a street that could not have existed a mere 8,000 years ago before the Delta formed. Where would all those jazz musicians play if there hadn’t been landslides along the banks of the Mon?
Failure upstream in a life does not mean failure downstream. Each of us can take the material of a failure to build a new landscape at the edge of a boundless sea. Our past failures can make the landscape of our future successes. Downstream from destructive landslides lies a new place where you can play your music.
The Monongahela River is not a big river, but it is an avenue for barges carrying coal from the bituminous mines of western Pennsylvania and western West Virginia. As a waterway, it ranks proportionately high in tonnage because of the coal barges. Along its narrow valley, trains pass on either side of the river, also mostly for the transport of coal. It is not, however, as a throughway for coal that the Monongahela is the focus here.
In the Native American language of the pre-Colonial region, the little but important Monongahela means “river of falling-in banks.” The hilly region that includes not only the Mon, as it is locally called, but also the lower Allegheny River and upper Ohio River is known for its numerous landslides. The falling-in banks occur not only along the main river courses, but also along the tributary Youghiogheny River, Cheat River, Beaver River, and on the sides of now dry valleys that once hugged their own streams.
Hills in the region give way at unexpected times and places, so landslides aren’t very predictable phenomena though one might hazard a guess that this hill or another seems prone to giving way to gravity, particularly after saturating rains. Sometimes cracks in the ground foreshadow a slide, but not all slides give forewarnings.
When a hillside undergoes a slide, it usually leaves an arc-shaped steep wall where rocks and ground let loose. That arc-shaped steep wall is called a scarp. You can think of it as a concave cliff at the uppermost boundary of a landslide. The material that was once part of the hill slumps or falls below the scarp to cover the lower part of the hill and to fill the valley beneath the scarp with debris: Rocks, soils, and plants that grew on the side of the hill.
Old landslides reveal themselves by worn scarps that appear as muted cliff-like breaks in the slope of a hillside. The same processes that formed the original scarp continue to smooth out rough edges and steep slopes. With time neighboring slides also form scarps, scalloping the hill.
The inevitability of landslides and the formation of scarps make the seemingly stable geology of the region a questionable place to build any structure. Land above the river is destined to slide into it to be washed to the sea. In the case of the Monongahela River Valley, the washing continues through the Ohio River and into the Mississippi River. Eventually, the land of western West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and Eastern Ohio is destined for the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. The journey is sporadic and long, but the movement of the riverbed is inexorable.
So, if you drive through the region and see a muted or fresh scarp, think of this. Yes, the hillside failed, but the people of New Orleans would have no ground on which to stand if those scarps did not exist. Thousands of years, more thousands of landslides, and thousands of miles of meandering transport in riverbeds all combined to provide people with land on which to put Bourbon Street, a street that could not have existed a mere 8,000 years ago before the Delta formed. Where would all those jazz musicians play if there hadn’t been landslides along the banks of the Mon?
Failure upstream in a life does not mean failure downstream. Each of us can take the material of a failure to build a new landscape at the edge of a boundless sea. Our past failures can make the landscape of our future successes. Downstream from destructive landslides lies a new place where you can play your music.
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