Author: David Gorsline

Annotation

Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved. The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion. Mystery finally claims us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe.

—Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods, p. 304, n. 136

Silver Line progress report: 17/a

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has submitted a list of dull, wordy station names to the Metro board. These names are for the new Silver Line stations that lie within the County, so the Loudoun stations aren’t on the list. Emphasis mine in the quote:

The WMATA policy indicates that station names should involve the following:

  • Identify the station location by geographical features or centers of activity;
  • Geographical names may be derived from those of cities, communities; neighborhoods, squares, circles, Metro-intersecting streets, etc.;
  • Centers of activity may be derived from schools, stadiums, parks, hospitals, airports, depots, shopping centers, galleries, museums, government installations, etc.;
  • Names should be distinctive and evoke imagery; and
  • Names should be relatively brief and be no longer than 19 characters.

Most of the entries on the Board’s approved list fail to meet the fourth and fifth criteria above:

  • Tysons-McLean
  • Tysons I&II
  • Tysons Central
  • Tysons-Spring Hill Road
  • Reston-Wiehle Avenue
  • Reston Town Center
  • Herndon-Reston West
  • Herndon-Dulles East

Here are the names I would use. Several of them are the placeholder names that have been on planning maps for years—eminently useful because they told you where the station was located with no hyphenated hoohah.

  • Scott’s Run (or Scotts Run, if you want to be postal about it)
  • Tysons Center
  • Freedom Hill (sorry, there can be only one center)
  • Spring Hill Road
  • Wiehle Avenue
  • Reston Town Center
  • Monroe Street
  • Sully Road (I’m not so sure about this one, since it seems to lie between Sully and Centerville Roads)

I would also consider “Dulles Gateway” for Route 28, if some property developer hasn’t already snapped up that name.

Or maybe we should go the naming-rights-for-sale route and call the Tysons-McLean station “Tysons-Capital One” and be done with it. Until Capital One goes bust, of course.

Piney Branch headwaters

glassyOur last field trip for Land Use Planning was a squlchy walk through the headwaters of Piney Branch in southwestern Montgomery County, as we looked at stormwater management structures there. Piney Branch is within one of several Special Protection Areas in the County. About ten years ago, Human Genome Sciences built a campus on land near Travillah and Darnestown Roads under conditions meant to ensure best practices for stormwater quality and quantity control.

three poolsforebay gunkCurrent thinking encourages more, smaller retention chambers, like this series of three. In the image at left, you’re looking at the last chamber, where (behind you) the outfall structures drain into the stream. The two upstream chambers are the depressions you see in the middle ground, this side of the road and lie of bare trees. In the image at right, you’re looking in the opposite direction, at the first of the chambers. The dark gunk is sediment and petroleum washed from the various impervious surfaces of the campus and settled into the sand at the bottom of the chamber. The white PVC tubes at upper right at test wells for checking groundwater levels.

chambers and wallA little farther along Shady Grove Road Extended is this chamber. The primary outfall is partially obscured by the dead Typha stalks, and it carries water to the stream in a small pipe (about 10 cm diameter). In the event of a major rain event, the large outfall structure at center left carries water away in a big pipe (30 cm or more). Most of these large outfall structures are notched so that a medium-sized inundation can be slowed down by the chamber. Also notice the retaining wall at right, which is holding up the graded fill so that offices and parking could be built on level ground, out of frame at right. The retaining wall is already showing some cracks and streaks.

ducks like itOld-fashioned stormwater practices depended on in-stream dams that formed artificial ponds, like this one in a different development, part of the Universities at Shady Grove. At any rate, the three Ring-necked Ducks (Aythya collaris) that we saw were enjoying the water.

scrubbedDespite management efforts, Piney Branch is not in the prime of health. Scouring of the banks is apparent in the image.

At the park: 42

Nesting activity in seven of the boxes, as of this morning. We also spotted a pair of Spotted Turtles this morning, a species on the park’s target list.

plastic spamWe had a good complement of box-checkers this morning, so I spent most of my 90 minutes collecting trash from the area upstream of the main wetland. I gave some thought to leaving the dishpan, since it was flipped over and providing some habitat. I ran out of trash bags, so I had to leave some flotsam for next week.

yumBeavers have been active up and down the stream network. I was watching some sparrows, and then came across some female Red-winged Blackbirds, who looked huge by comparison. It’s only from a distance that you would confuse these birds with sparrows.

Some links: 52

Mitch Albom’s column in defense of NPR has been up for a few days, but it’s still worth a link.

If you really wanted to show a liberal bias to NPR, you could try to prove it by studying hundreds of its broadcasts. But studies take time and effort and they’re not as cool. Hiding a camera and playing “gotcha” is more fun.

Which is what [James] O’Keefe and crew do. Sorry, folks, the guy is no hero. Journalistically, he’s a coward. And I don’t get why NPR rolled over for his stunt.

Spenser decoded

So I’m working my way through the evening’s ten pages of Spenser and I come to a passage in Book II, Canto XII of The Faerie Queene where he apparently feels the need to demonize certain species of birds and flying mammals:

Even all the Nation of unfortunate
And fatal Birds about them flocked were,
Such as by nature Men abhor and hate;
The ill-fac’d Owl, Death’s dreadful Messenger,
The hoarse Night-Raven, Trump of doleful Drere,
The Leather-winged Bat, Day’s Enemy,
The rueful Strich, still waiting on the Bier,
The Whistler shrill, that whoso hears, doth die;
The hellish Harpies, Prophets of sad Destiny.

Whistler is glossed by the edition that I am recording as plover, and I don’t know where that disrespect is coming from.

But it was Strich that caught my eye. The word, perhaps already obsolete when Spenser used it at the end of the 16th century, refers to the various petite screech-owls, and was formed through some sort of collision between the sound the bird makes and the ominous, bloodthirsty Strix of classical mythology—or at least so Oxford reasons. To add to the confusion, nowadays Strix names a genus of much larger owls, among them the Great Gray Owl and Barred Owl, and it is the nominate genus of the True Owls family, the Strigidae.