The Horror, the Horror

          Who lives in these featureless houses that edge ever outward, away from the city, consuming forest and field in their destructive march?  Who plans them, and builds them, and buys them?  What hapless child of the Universe will have the misfortune to call these boxes home?  Who will play in their tiny backyards, and how will all the suburban dads know which blades of grass fall under the domain of whose riding mower?  They all run together.  It's not just suburbia encroaching; it's the flat, utilitarian monoculture, assimilating everything into itself.  This is the new norm, until the madness can no longer sustain itself.  Then...it all falls down.

          This is the valley of Chartiers Creek.  These damnable eyesores are newly constructed on the cusp of the western wall of the valley, and the hill in the distance is the eastern wall.  If it flowed through most any Midwestern or Western state, Chartiers Creek would be called a river.  It's a good sized body of water that runs up from the coalfields of Washington County and joins the Ohio River just west of downtown Pittsburgh.  Chartiers Creek makes a nice kayaking trip on its northward trek through a wooded valley, passing through the dumpy towns of Canonsburg  and Bridgeville.  I've seen many a blue heron on the water.  The creek was named for Pierre Chartiers, the tattooed Frenchman who had a fur trading post at the mouth of the creek in 1743.  Chartiers' mother was a Shawnee, and no one ever really knew where his loyalties lay; he mounted attacks against English settlers in this region and disappeared west shortly before the French and Indian War broke out.

          As one character in The Heart of Darkness says, while looking out over the Thames in London, and thinking of the far-off Congo, "This too was a place of darkness."  The savagery, the bloodshed, the wilderness.  I wonder which darkness is worse: the one Pierre Chartiers knew and negotiated, or the one that settles over his valley today?