Sample Chapter The Secret History of Empty Lots Introduction Requiem for a Muscle Car I found the Impala by accident, on a hot Saturday morning in the summer of 2009. It was not long after capitalism had collapsed, or so we thought at the time, making the discovery of a vignette from some end of the world movie unexpectedly plausible, even though you could still hear the cars on the nearby highway mixed in with the insect chorale of the swamp. And the minute I saw it, I knew it was not a sign of the end, but a window into a new beginning. An abandoned car is not the sort of thing you are supposed to be excited to find next to a piece of real estate you have just bought with borrowed money. But for me, in that moment, it was a sign that I had found a way to escape. A landmark that beckoned across time and space from a version of the world you would actually want to live in, instead of the misery masquerading as affluence that I saw everywhere I looked, including in the mirror. The old Chevy was way off trail, in the back part of a wetland I had stumbled upon walking the secret woods hidden between an urban river and a factory. They were the kind of woods no one is really meant to roam, made from volunteer trees grown up between the busted-up curb cuts and demolition debris dumped in a downzoned stretch of interstitial wilderness at what once was the edge of town. The negative space of the metropolis, where nature fills in the gaps we leave and wild animals feel free to roam in the absence of human gazes. I had spent most of my life exploring those kinds of places, and now I had managed to buy a little slice of one, where I had the half-baked idea to build a home for my broken family. When I first saw that old car as I bushwhacked through the tall water grasses, it looked like it might have been there for thousands of years. But I could also remember when cars like that cruised the streets, cars with Batmobile lines forged from Rust Belt steel, sometime after the assassination of JFK and before the resignation of Nixon. The sun had baked it down to the color of primer, speckled with fungal green. Aquatic plants grew up out of the seats and the engine block, watched over by the big herons perched on the branches of the tall sycamores that ringed that secret sanctuary hidden by the drone of the old highway. You couldn't tell how it had gotten there. It might have washed downriver in a big flood, or been driven down there at some time when the river channel was different. I would go back and look for it once in a while, and it was always there, but every time you went you needed to intuit a different path through the impenetrable vegetation and knee-sucking muck. It manifested different forms with changes in the river, sometimes almost completely submerged, at other times almost ready to fly off, with its steel hood and trunk popped out like asymmetrical gullwings. A mystical motorhead Ozymandias that transported you in ways its designers never intended. It disappeared in the fall of 2013. I never knew whether it had been washed away in that October's dam-busting deluge, or hauled out by the municipal stewards charged with cleaning up the edgeland and turning it into a park. Sometimes it still shows up on the digital maps, a ghost in the machine. In my memory, it persists as a glimpse of how beautiful the end of the world could be. Even after the Impala was gone, I found myself drawn to the spot where it had been. Partly because the power I had found in that apocalyptic landmark lingered on, and also because I began to better appreciate how wondrous was the wetland where I found it. It was a kind of urban oasis--a little backwater that on dry days was a wide marshy creek bed and on wet days a green lagoon that filled with the overflowing waters of a rising river. The wild aquatic plants gave it a primordial feel, and you could sense that it was full of animal life. The dense cover made it so you rarely saw the terrestrial critters on the move, but when you did, they were usually magnificent, like the mysterious coywolf I spotted at the marsh's edge one morning in 2015, or the pair of huge snapping turtles I caught making roly-poly aquatic love in the highwater creek on a spring day in 2012. In the liminal seasons, crazy flowers would bloom in the most remote parts of the swamp, and you got the sense this was the kind of spot where a botanist might find a species long thought extinct. Even as you also would always find flotsam trash down in there, like the metal folding chair that has spent the last decade being slowly sucked back into the earth, right by the spot where I found those turtles mating. Taking it in, I came to see what a rare thing I had discovered--an intact remnant of what this area along the river had been like in the period before European settlement, somehow preserved by a mix of intention and inattention, an accidental byproduct of the industrial land uses on the streets above it and the way they kept other human activity out. Or so I thought. In the summer of 2018, I walked the area with a guy named Lanny. Lanny is a serious amateur historian, an oil field services engineer by day who spends his weekends searching for evidence of the past in the contemporary landscape. We met through an email thread I had somehow ended up on with Lanny, a group of like-minded searchers, and a reporter from the local paper, documenting forgotten places, and Lanny reached out to me to come investigate some of the sites I had mentioned. Like a lot of such buffs, Lanny seemed disturbingly interested in ghosts of the Confederacy, but as we walked down in the riverine woods looking for remains of old ferry landings I think he could tell where not to go with me in our conversation. He reminded me of some of the guys I had once gone on a Bigfoot hunt with, the sort of fellow whose search seems to be about something else entirely, and prone to rationalized confirmation of theories that fit his preferred narrative (something I was learning I was also prone to). But he knew a lot about the land, and had a patient obsessive's knack for documentary research. Not long after our walk, Lanny sent me an email with links to Google Earth files on which he had overlaid a series of historic aerial photos of the area. It showed that the wetland I had indisputably declared an antediluvian remnant had, as recently as the 1930s, been the site through which a major road passed, ferrying passengers over a temporary bridge that had been constructed when the old wooden bridge had washed out and the new steel bridge was under construction. After the new bridge was completed, that spot became used for several decades as a gravel pit where aggregate companies would dredge river rock to make building materials. In the mid-1980s, the city finally banished the mineral operations to the other side of the bridge, which more or less marked the eastern edge of town, and it was only since then that the dumpsite had become a wetland. It was not a remnant of what was here before, no matter how much it felt like a place where you would be as likely to see a Tonkawa forager or a stray Sauropod. It was a place that had, in two decades or so, transformed from a scar made by humans into a biodiverse wonderland, right there below the highway to Houston and the flightpath of the airport. Living proof of nature's resilience and capacity for self-healing, if we just leave it alone to do its thing. In time, over a chunk of a lifetime spent here at the edge of these urban woods, it taught me how to do the same thing for myself. And to see how the real path to building a greener future goes through the windows such places provide us into the deep past, where we can come to understand and then learn to express our own true natures, as individuals, as communities, and as participants in an ecosystem with which we have developed an abusive relationship. In the seasons since I first discovered that Impala gone wild, I made a home here in the American edgelands, building a little house in the trench left behind by a petroleum transmission pipeline and restoring the land around it into an urban pocket prairie. Healing the land, I learned to heal myself, and build new family, navigating my way out of the many small failures, everyday traumas and overclocked burnout that characterize life on the American treadmill, aided by new relationships and new understandings. I came to know the animals that live inside the city--coyotes and foxes, ospreys and owls, armadillos and snakes, vultures and hawks, opossums and raccoons, waxwings and warblers, majestic deer and wily skunks, and the infinite bounty of bizarre insects that move in with you when you make your roof into a wild green garden. I witnessed the ways in which those animals have adapted to survive in the realm of our dominion, and experimented with making our own home a habitat we share with our animal neighbors. I got to know my human neighbors, some of them the descendants of people who walked these lands before Europeans arrived, others men who live outside or in abandoned buildings and exist off the city in ways that may be more in touch with the truth of human nature than they or we know, and came to see how much of the American experience of nature and the outdoors is wrapped up with the privileges of race and class. Through my neighbors, and the land, I learned to see more clearly the extent to which I was living in colonized space, and how the everyday gentrification battles here in the fastest-growing city in America continued the violent history of our taking of this continent and displacement of the peoples and ecosystems our ancestors found here. I learned to experience deep time, picking up the traces of Cretaceous bivalves and neolithic wanderers that sometimes wash up on the banks of the ancient river as it flows from downtown Austin to the Gulf of Mexico. I channeled these experiences into three novels that viewed the America I learned to see through a dystopian mirror, all in an effort to find my way to the utopia I could see lurking in our popular visions of apocalypse. As a lawyer, I came to better understand the ways in which our legal system, behind its aura of dispassionate reason, legitimates a millennia-long history of conquest and a civilization founded on control of land, water and the reproduction and labor of others, be they plants, animals or other humans. I read widely about the anthropological roots of our Anthropocene dilemma, and the mythology and folklore that encodes much of the secret history of how we got here. And I learned I had agency over our ecological future, or at least my little place in it--through learning to better see and find connection with the natural world as it exists in our shadows, by working to restore and rewild the parcel of land on which my family and I live, and by joining my neighbors in their ongoing fight to protect our natural inheritance and the planetary future. The aim of this book is to distill those experiences and learnings into some field notes that might help others make their own similar discoveries, without presuming to be more than one guy's journal of what he saw while out for a walk in the urban woods. Excerpted from A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
