This Earth Day column begins with the lingering imprint of a meeting a long way from home, even as it will end with an Earth Day opportunity brought to us by the Cathance River Education Alliance and the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust.
It’s a cold March day in Asheville, North Carolina, where a weather front has just blown away the promise of spring. Even at 2,000 feet above sea level, research said that 60 degrees Fahrenheit seemed a reasonable expectation; flowers would unfurl, trees bud. For a Mainer just in from another round of shoveling, the lure was large.
The wind that just stripped off my hat is running 35°F below that thermal propaganda. Hat retrieved, I scoot through the door into the sanctuary of the Black Mountain School Museum, which today features a collection of Robert Rauschenberg prints. Rauschenberg, famed artist of the late 20th century, attended Black Mountain College as an undergrad, and it had an outsized influence on him and on American culture writ large, especially for a tiny school that lasted only 24 years (1933-57). The list of famous alums or teachers — Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Josef and Anni Albers, Susan Weil, and Charles Olson among them — reads as a gathering of cultural icons from the mid-20th century.
One of Rauschenberg’s signature forms is a print made from an image or images of popular culture, which, transformed by a technique that featured the use of solvents, helps a viewer see what’s common afresh. An advertisement or a street scene in a Rauschenberg print seems to float, has a watery softness; the viewer pauses, looks more closely, begins then to float a bit, too. He achieved this effect, I learned, by immersing an image in a solvent — at first and often, water — and then, once the image was saturated, laying the soaked scene over fresh paper and rubbing the image onto that paper. Achieving that image transfer via water feels evocative — water transforms and solves so much.
It is a long way from Asheville, North Carolina, to Brunswick, Maine, but here’s the link: In 1970 (and in many other years), Rauschenberg rubbed up an original print poster greeting for Earth Day. The one I spent long minutes with says “Happy 15th Earth Birthday” in a jarred banner stretched beneath a central image of a stern-looking eagle. Our national symbol is surrounded by scenes of pollution, distress and decay. Um, okay; message received.
But the print held me there. Its dreamlike quality suggested something further. It, too, acted as a solvent; “It could be otherwise,” the print seemed to say. Which is only a short hop from, “It should be otherwise.” “Yes,” I thought, as I stood there, “it could be, should be.” That’s where we — out of the print’s frame — come in; we can help make our Earth “otherwise.”
Some 38 years later, Earth Day nears again. Here in Brunswick, one of its offerings is a chance to do a little restorative work in parts of the Mere Brook watershed to work to solve the problem of our brook’s having been declared “urban-impaired.” On April 22 at 9:30 a.m., volunteers are invited to gather on the deck outside the Cathance River Education Alliance’s and Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s offices on Neptune Road at Brunswick Landing. Just downhill, placid water spills from a small retention pond into the Merriconeag streambed that flows soon to another pond and then down into Mere Brook. Which, itself, soon hurries through a final culvert and arrives at head of tide above Harpswell Cove.
All of the water that falls onto the Landing’s nearby roads, parking lots, woods and grasses flows to this brook. What we — who would see our world and waters healed — pick up from the tossed and windblown trash gets plucked from the Mere Brook watershed. It is a small but vital gesture in support of the waters that define our local world, the watershed where many of us live. Robert Rauschenberg and his Black Mountain cohort would approve, I think. As we bend to pick up discard, we draw closer to the watery Earth. We walk and work to make the day and this watershed otherwise.
For more information to and sign up for a bit of watershed renewal on April 22, visit creamaine.org/event/2023-earth-day-clean-up/.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.
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