A 5 minute History of the DSM

As part of ITP's 35th anniversary celebration, I gave a Pecha Kucha on the DSM.  Here's the slideshow, talk, and transcripts. Enjoy!

my talk: 3:17:50 - 3.23.15

Hi everyone, my name is Crys and I’m going to talk really fast for 5 minutes about some research I did for an art project. For those of you who don’t know,  The DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder, is an attempt to give clinicians, legislators, researchers, insurers, the courts, and organizations like the FDA, a common language for understanding and discussing human mental illness. The following is some highlights from what the DSM’s history:

The first known attempt at gathering statistics of American mental health came with the 1840 census.  Some example questions were "number of slaves and free colored persons...” and "number of insane and idiotic in public or private charge, by race”. Published results of the census indicated that alarming numbers of black  persons living in non-slaveholding States were mentally ill, in striking contrast to the corresponding figures for slaveholding States.” John Quincy Adams described the census as having a ‘multitude of gross and important errors’ but Secretary of State John C. Calhoun carefully examined the stats and maintained their correctness. 

The next stab at data gathering was the 1880 census.  The categories were expanded to include dementia, dipsomania, epilepsy, melancholia, monomania, and paresis. As I read through the ‘Defective, Dependant, and Deliquent, classes of the untied states’ report, I thought I had inadvertently discovered the first Data Viz!

A few wikipages later, I found, to my disappointment, the real first data visualizations. 

These come from the 1870 census and were made by Francis Amasa Walker. Walker was the superintendent of the 1880 census as well as the Indian Affairs Superintendent. Walker described native americans as "voluptuary," "garrulous," "lazy," "cowardly in battle," and "beggar-like”. He also recommended that Native Americans be kept on reservations of limited mineral or agricultural value so they could be educated and reformed. 

side note: butt plugs were invented 22 years after this census report by Frank E Young. 

Anyway, back to the DSM.  The next major player in the development of the standardized diagnostic criteria for mental health came with Medical 203

Medical 203 represented a shift away from Freudian psychoanalysis and instead introduced the idea that external circumstances could affect your mental life. 

It really brought our understanding of mental health into the 20th century.

The next big factor in the development of the DSM was the APA. The APA had its own ‘Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease’ and was first headed up by this guy, G Stanley Hall. 

 some wiki highlights  about Hall: 

Hall had no sympathy for the poor, the sick, or those with developmental differences or disabilities. A firm believer in selective breeding and forced sterilization, he believed that any respect or charity toward those he viewed as physically, emotionally, or intellectually weak or "defective" simply interfered with the movement of natural selection toward the development of a super-race. 

also,

 Hall ‘theorized that African, Indians and Chinese were members of ‘adolescent races’ in stage of ‘incomplete growth”

Hall also coined the terms Knismesis and Gargalesis. The medical terms for tickeling

Lastly, Hall mentored this guy, Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to get a phD in psych as well as the father of ‘black psychology’. 

So, the first DSM is published in 1952, it has 106 Disorders and was heavily influenced by the concepts of Emil Kraeplin.  Kraeplin believed that genetics and biology played a key role in mental disorders. These ideas also played into the 3rd revision of the DSM

Kraeplin is quoted as being the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, as well as of psychopharmacology, and psychiatric genetics. 

From his wiki page:

"He was a strong and influential proponent of eugenics and racial hygiene…. He thought things like the school system and the welfare state broke the process of natural selection and undermined the German’s biological ‘struggle for survival’. 

The DSM II is published in 1968, has 182 disorders, and remains with largely the same underpinnings as previously outlined. The next revolution for the DSM comes in 1980 with the 3rd revision. 

DSM III contained now 265 disorders and was chaired by Robert Spitzer. 

Spitzer was described by his colleagues as a man who lacked empathy and is quoted in the New Yorker as having no idea what to get people for presents.  In other words, the man charged with writing the book on extreme human emotions doesn’t understand the simplest of human emotions. Anyway, The DSM III went through some significant structural changes, and began to favor a more empirical approach to diagnosis. It was also around this time that the ‘homosexualty’ diagnosis came into controversy. 

In the first DSM, the APA listed homosex as a sociopathic personality disturbance.

After a lot of activism, it was eventually taken out the seventh revision of the DSM II. Spitzer was actually a leading advocate on removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. However, In 2001, spitzer wrote a controversial paper entitled Can Some Gay Men and Lesbians Change Their Sexual Orientation?.  His take, if you were ‘highly motivated’ you could. 

DSM III up to DSM IV went through a number of revisions but the real shift occurred when federal bans against direct-to-consumer marketing were lifted. ADD rates tripled ...bipolar rates doubled in adults and increased fortyfold in children. 

The DSM came into public awareness with the highly controversial DSM 5. clinical professionals have bashed this revision as unnecessarily pathologizing and medicalizing. DSM IV’s chair, Allen Francis  cites the removal of the ‘bereavement exclusion ‘ for depressive disorders as potentially labeling a parent loosing a child after a few weeks of mourning.  I won’t even go into Premenstrual dysphoric disorder. 

The largest most troubling thing that changed with the DSM 5 wasn’t the shift from roman numerals, but Big Pharma’s relationship to the creation of diagnosis, its subsequent research, as well as its labeling of Americans.

A 2012 report clearly showed the Conflict of Interest between DSM task force members and the  companies with which they received money for speaking engagements, research grants, things like that. To this day, even though this is transparent, there are no regulations to mitigate this relationship. 

The DSM is also being used in clinical assessments of individuals looking to immigrate to the US. This report from the ACLU outlines about what you would expect in the misuse of the “psychiatrists’ bible’ in relation to border issues and xenophobia. Especially considering what we just learned from its history. 

I’ll end with some actual disorders from the DSM as it is now. They themselves are a great reflection of the complex and contradictory history of the DSM itself. 

Lets see, we have

Erectile Dysfunction

Female Orgasmic Disorder , Female Sexual Interest / Arousal Disorder

Gender Dysphoria

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Alcohol Intoxication Disorder

Caffiene Withdrawel

Fetishistic Disorder (body parts, non living others, things like that)

Transvestic Disorder

and on

and on

and on

thank you….     

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Artists Are In Tents

This last week I went on a fantastic artist residency in the Wallowas, several hours south of Portland Oregon. The group is called Signal Fire, and was started back in 2008 by Ryan Pierce, aka  "Tarp Tarmac" as he is known on the trail. Most of us got trail names. Mine was MARS as my middle name is Marcelle which is greek for Mars and I am admittedly obsessed with the barren red planet.

The theme of the trip was "Year of the Wolf". Our trip leaders were Tarp and Diamond Breath (Nina Montenegro) who provided a reader geared toward orienting us to this wild and contested landscape. The trip was peppered with guest visits from Rob Klavins of Oregon Wild and George Weurthner, prolific writer and photographer on all things ecological. 

We drove into the Eagle Cap Wilderness section of the Wallowas, divvied up food, packed our bags, and set out on the trail. We hiked to Eagle Meadow where we set up camp for the night. The next two days were followed by hiking further up into the mountains and setting up camp, cooking delicious dinners, playing "HOT DICE!", having discussions, and jumping into ice cold glacial lakes.  The last 3 and half days, we set up a base camp to make work, relax, hike, read, or whatever else we wanted to do. 

photo: Tarp Tarmac

I went on the residency with the intention of examining the experience as a manifestation of Queer Ecology. Thinking about Signal Fire as a space which dissolved boundaries between studios, artistic practice, permanence, mobility, and temporality.  I left with quite an extensive reading list and an experience that frayed edges, cracked assumptions, and inspired thinking.

As part of reintegration into civilization, Tarp told us to take an mental image and hold onto that feeling from something special we remembered from the trip. This, if only temporarily, would sustain some of the wildness that we had begun to reconnect with during those 8 days. I have many, but the most poignant was an emotional moment alone in my tent.  After an exhausting day of hiking, setting up tents, blowing up air mattresses, bear hangs, and the special experience of cooking dinner outdoors, I crawled into my tent and allowed myself to relax. The doors of my tents were unzipped, the breeze flowed through along with several forms of flying insects, and spiders began to make webs at the entrances. I watched ants scour my tent for a while, and I picked up my reader. I read essays about wolves and the horrific mistreatment they'd received from humans and their extirpation. How wolves have become symbols of ideology that Man has used to propagate the destructive myths of Man vs. Nature and Civilization vs. Wild. I read some hard stuff and had no where to go. No Instagram to check, to text message to send to my girl friend. I had to sit there with it and feel it out. I just cried, for myself and for the wolves.

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photo: Liz Harris - Letharia Vulpina ('Wolf Lichen" - a fungus that was used along with glass added into the carcasses of dead animals to poison wolves and foxes)

I read about horrific things happening in the world everyday. I read about horrific things that happened hundreds of years ago, yesterday, and horrific things that are probably going to happen in the future because of humans. The trip was a slowing down. No endless streams of headlines to process as quickly as possible. Just the material in front of me and all the time in the world to absorb it. It was devastating in the best way.

photo: Crys Moore - koan #2 (hanging and draping)

Of all the things I missed from civilization, I missed having a chair the most. My back was in so much pain from the pack and all the bending over to do all the things. I became acutely aware of how addicted to comfort I am, how that dictates my relationship to my environment, and how that underpins my definitions of 'home'. To think some of this through, I created a few prosthetics for supporting my body in various positions, relieving my spine of the pressure of supporting my body and bringing me closer to that feeling of 'comfort'. I prototyped them out of found sticks and rope as that was what was available.. They functioned mostly as props for my weary body, connecting it to the landscape and rendering it subservient to this wild space that I called home for 8 days. This was a private performative experience, and therefore I have almost no documentation.  As I engaged with these temporary devices, I thought a lot about a koan I'd heard recently. During a dharma talk, Eido Roshi of the Zen Studies Society told a student who had slid off their cushion and propped up against the zendo wall: "You will carry that wall on your back the rest of your life". The student resumed zazen posture immediately.

photo: Crys Moore - Queer Ecologies 1  & 2 composite

I also set out on the trip with the intention to try 3D scanning. I want to eventually recreate the experience I had using either a game engine such as Unity or piggybacking on top of Second Life. The initial sketches turned out beautiful and strange, and will make for great large scale prints.

The trip fostered an intimacy that I had never experienced -  an intimacy with myself, my body, the landscape, techne (as read through Heidegger) , my inspiring camp mates, and those wolves that I would never see. That intimacy and the subsequent vulnerability is the queering that I was looking for. 

Here's a slideshow of some selects:

Created with flickr slideshow.

An Emoji Eigen Face

Above is a screen recording of a program written by Greg Borenstein running face detection on a selection of Unicode emoji faces.  The program, Eigen Faces, is running an algorithm  that loads in test images, analyzes them using vector math and Principle Component Analysis, and is able to understand what a face looks like, remember it, and recognize it.  

In that process, the algorithm creates an interesting artifact, the eigen face.  An eigen face is the result of obtaining a mean image from your training set, finding the difference between that and the test image, and then performing some covariance matrix math. It ends up creating a ghostly specter that wants to stand on its own as a cultural artifact. Our faces are our identities, and this object is so much like trying to pin point who you are.  Like when you sit and think about something, take a second and then ask yourself "who said that?', it creates a dissonance that feels uncanny and a bit liberating. 

This experiment is a sketch for the DSM-E, a project I'm co creating with Kate Tibbetts. I wanted to do this because I wanted to see if this process, creating eigen emojis, could decouple emojis from electronic communication, placing them in a space of their own, giving them identity and individuality. Emojis are meant to be vessels and objects of transference. What happens when they start to operate on their own? Can they become unique? Individualistic? Are there affinities across emojis?

A Few Relics in the Discipline of Geomatics

Mt. Whitney, the tallest point in the contiguous U.S., rises out of the Sierra Nevada fault-block upwards to 14,505 ft. Its also the closest to space that I'm able to get to at the present moment.

Some other basic facts about the mountain:

The granite that composes Whitney was formed during the Cretaceous (145-60 MYA) and was slowly and violently pushed into the sky by the twisting and rotating of the Sierras and the stretching and spreading of the Great Basin. From the view point of a satellite, this would look something like stretch marks. All this happened between 2 and 10 million years ago.  Before their eradication, the local Paiute Indians believed that The Great Spirit resided with the mountain, watching over the land and people. They called the peak Too-man-go-yah-, or 'very old man'.  The white man calls the mountain, Mt. Whitney, after Josiah Whitney a California Geologist and another white man. The first men (in 'recorded history') to reach the top of the peak called it 'Fisherman's Peak', as they were local fisherman from Lone Pine, a small town at the base of the Alabama Hills below Whitney. The first trail to the summit was completed on July 02, 1904 and paid for by residents of Lone Pine. The first recorded death on the mountain occurred just 4 days later. Nowadays, the main trail is one of the most popular hiking routes in the US and you can get perfect cell reception from the top of the summit. You can also hear airplanes flying over regularly, reminding you that wilderness is still a myth, even above the tree line. Lastly, you can, using Google Earth, obsessively explore the mountain from the comfort of your home, making the summit without ever getting off the couch.

Remote sensing and the invention of the satellite has enabled our species something entirely novel: the ability to see the earth from space and the ability to watch the whole earth change over time.  Sensors attached to satellites in space have undoubtedly proved that we, as a species, have made an impact on our planet that is threatening our own survival. Most mammalian species tend to survive around 2 million years and according to the Copernican Principle, we are destined to be around for a minimum of five or so thousand years, with a maximum of a few more million years.

Google Earth reconstructions are limited by the resolution of the sensors attached to the satellites. As technology advances of course, something called the Ground Sample Distance (relationship of a pixel to a quantity of area on the ground) will eventually reach enough of a 1:1 ratio to call up Bonini's paradox . One pixel to one inch, One pixel to one cm, One pixel to one mm, ad infinitum. The greater the resolution, the more meaningless the representation becomes. It makes me think of Borges:

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. - From On Exactitude and Science

Google Earth has a history scrubbing tool, allowing you to transport back into geographic time. As you travel further back, the resolution becomes lower and the world within GEarth becomes more and more abstract and fantastical. GEarth gets its images from government satellite programs as well as private companies such as GeoEye and Digital Globe. GeoEye-2 currently has the best resolution for commercial imaging, approximately 9.8 inches per pixel from a distance of 423 miles. Interestingly enough, because of Government regulations, GeoEye can only release images up to a little over 19 in resolution (50 cm).  

RAND corporation wrote a paper in 1946 entitled A preliminary Design of a World-Circling Spaceship in which they outline the cultural and technological implications of putting a satellite into orbit. They also anticipated the Cold War in their analysis of if a foreign power were to beat the US in such an achievement. 

Its amazing to me that less that 70 years ago, the worlds most sophisticated think tank dreamed up a machine that would circle the earth and take pictures of it and now each and everyone of us can see our world from the perspective of this machine. For free! This is truly astonishing. What is more astonishing, is imagining what we, if we survive, a million years from now, could watch a movie of the earth changing over time from the POV of a satellite. This is a ridiculous idea that has possessed me for almost two years. So much so, I almost made it the subject of my graduate thesis. Since discovering RANDs paper, I think I may have found a format for the manifestation of this obsession. 

A Million Random Digits

In 1955, RAND Corporation Published a book called A Million Random Digits with a 100,000 Normal Deviates. You can still buy this book on Amazon. In fact, the reviews are hilarious. I came across this gem reading George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral. Dyson's book was a historical exploration of the origins of the (Von Neumann) electronic computer and its one of my favorite books. The late 30's and early 40's were a fascinating time in American history and the development of the first computers were right at the intersection of many things that shaped who we are as a society today. The computer, essentially, was developed out of need for making bomb calculations. Scientists needed to understand the behavior of an unfathomable amount of (vector math/statistics) electrons as they were squeezed and squashed and slammed into one another. 

In the 1940s, Stanis Ulam invented a methodology of problem solving called the Monte Carlo Method. In short, he realized that large, infinitely complex problems such as electron behavior or even search algorithms today, are more efficient when seeded with random numbers or when they use some stochastic process.  This was an incredible breakthrough, and therefore created a vast need for a large source of truly random numbers. 

RAND generated these numbers through the creation of an 'electronic roulette wheel'. While the specifics of the hardware are obscure, essentially it worked by creating noise through a series of random pulses, about 100,000 per second, which were then gated once per second by a constant frequency pulse. In 2009, Thomas Daniel Jennings, MFA candidate from UC Irvine did his own artistic exploration involving RAND's book in his thesis entitled Rocks and Code. As part of his artistic inquiry, he created his own random number generator in which the source of randomness was defined by the radioactive decay of atomic elements. A lovely choice in that it reflects back to the original cultural landscape of the late 40s early 50s and the beginning of the Cold War. 

Reading his thesis, I was delighted to find that his advisors were Robert Nideffer and Beatriz Da Costa, whom I've come to know intimately in the last couple of years. That is a whole other story, one which I've outlined in an article for Art21.  In some ways, the discovery of this connection illustrated the paradox of randomness and the colloquial phrase: 'that's so random!'.  Jennings was interested in the idea of randomness as a limit to human knowledge and subsequently Truth. Anna Deveare-Smith once said "Find the threads of meaning". This to me, is the project of the human, sorting through the noise, creating narrative by weaving together the threads of meaning. The moment I found Jenning's paper was incredibility and understandably important. 

With the advent of psuedorandom algorithms, number tables fell out of fashion. Random numbers generated by software aren't truly random. Their generation, in some way or another, follow a deterministic process. Truly random numbers can only be generated by some  unpredictable and chaotic process such as atomic decay or cosmic background radiation.  This distinctions presents an interesting philosophical question in which I'm trying to wrap my brain around. 

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Screenshot of the app running

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Screenshot of the final output and timestamp

As a first step toward this, I created a program in Processing that used the native Random() function to generate the pseudorandom numbers. I assume that Processing's function relies on Java's Random Class, which is based on the sturdy old linear congruential generator algorithm.  The program  took 4:34:43 to generate the million pseudorandom digits. The digits are saved into a .txt file that is 6MB. The code is located at  this github repository. 

From the moment I read about RAND's book, I knew I wanted to use Processing to recreate this monumental object. I'm curious, what does it mean when a non specialist like myself can create with open source tools, what it took a body of experts something close to 8 years to create? What does that say about our species' progression of knowledge and technology and how do those 'advancements' construct and inform who we are today? In short, a recreation in some way is an attempt to use the past as a lens for today. 

Knowing of course that these numbers aren't truly random, I intend to create a true random number generator using an Arduino based system. Once the numbers have been generated into a .txt file, I can use Processing to put the numbers into a book format. I know the final output will be a physical object, but there are still many decisions to be made and many things to be thought through. 

A Swadesh Haiku

A Swadesh List is an index of basic words that seemingly exist across all languages. Named after American Linguist Morris Swadesh, they are compiled for the purposes of understanding linguistic similarities across cultures in an effort to create an essential human vocabulary. Basically, they are words throughout 'all' cultures that have resisted change over the course of much of human history. 

There are many Swadesh lists and they have been revised by various linguists. The Long Now Foundation is keeping an archive of the Lists here.  

I came across the Swadesh List today while reading John D'Agata's About a Mountain. He was writing about it in the context of Yucca Mountain and the 'warning: keep out!" signage that was being designed to stand the test of (deep) time.

Studying Heidegger in undergrad, I became deeply imprinted with the idea that technology is a force of evolution, more than a simple tool that we use at will.  This idea has influenced much of the post humanist thought, Science Fiction, and contemporary Futurism that I follow . As we progress closer and closer to developing a unique singular Artificial Intelligence, how we understand ourselves and our species unravels  byte by byte. Thinking about a 'homo sapien' and a 'homo technologicus' is something that is super fascinating, super terrifying, and very seductive. 

To think through some of this stuff,  I sketched out a Swadesh Haiku on the margin of the book.  I've had a thing for Haikus for a while and I've written some amazing ones about the banalities of an office job that I had for four years. I'd give anything if I had saved those poems. 

Writing out my haiku, I paired words that not only made sense, but were loaded emotionally. I tried to see if I intuitively followed any sort of structure:

 adjective + noun, adjective + noun, / adjective + noun, adjective + noun as adjective/ adjective + noun, subject + verb

The resulting scribble in the margin of About a Mountain :

Haikus themselves are algorithms. According to Wikipedia, the basic requirements of haikus, are that they have an essence of 'cutting', a 17 syllable structure, and some sort of seasonal reference.  The 'cutting' aspect is interesting.  Machines and algorithms are really very good at parsing information, breaking up and adding together chunks to achieve a desired result. The 'cutting' aspect, I assume, is a Zen characteristic: a principle of  asymmetry inherent in the world - dialectics - a great Cartesian riddle to solve...Dr. Frankenstein: or how i learned to stop worrying and love the New Aesthetic. Charles Stross dubbed this philosophical relic and existential quandry the Cartesian Theatre.  Machines, now more than ever, are co-conspirators. 

Anyway, Using Daniel Shiffman's rita library and this code, I took an initial stab at creating a computer generated swadesh haiku. Not surprisingly, its pretty ugly. The first one I generated was the most interesting, the rest complete nonsense. 

The inherent problem with the Swadesh list is that the words in the list are either one or two syllables. The original code looked at words or word pairings up to 5 syllables. In order to make these more interesting, I'm going to have to dive into Markov Chains and be pretty heavy handed in the generation of the haikus. This list might be more suited to Truisms a la Jenny Holzer. 

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A Virtual Friend of Bill

A month or so ago, a simple and obvious thought occurred to me: I wonder if there are 12 step meetings in Second Life?'. After a couple of minutes of Googling, I had the Second Life software downloaded and an avatar complete with ironic username - WYSIWYG1. It was my first time on Second Life. The only thing I really knew about SL were my judgmental assumptions and the work of artist Micha Cardenas. Cardenas did a performance where s/he spent 365 hours in SL as a dragon as a way of exploring the very real lives of transgender folk through a Deleuzian framework .  Cardenas has a great essay up on Cnet here expounding the philosophy behind the work. 

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Micha Cardenas - Becoming Dragon  - Installation View - 2008

What surprised me most about the interactions in SL was the need for social mores. When I got to the meeting room, I was understandably anxious. I walked around the room, checked out the literature and AA paraphernalia. I wasn't  really sure what to do with myself. I noticed a character/lady/person/avatar/state vector sitting on the couch and I walked up to her. Because I was still learning the controls. I kind of awkwardly stood in front of her and immediately felt embarrassed at my avatar's rude behavior. Eventually I figured out how to appropriately address her and we were able to converse.

S/he was very welcoming and gave me the run down: format of the meeting, meeting lists for future meetings, shorthand code for 'sharing', and the conventions around cross talk. Cross talk is something to be avoided in a 12 step meeting. Its when you address another person or something someone's said. Its a way to make sure everyone has a safe space to share what they want.

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Instagram of my SL avatar  

12 step meetings are interesting entities in themselves. Some say they are a cult while others say that without a 12 step, their lives would inevitably end in jails, institutions, and/or death. They have no mandatory rules, but do have 'Traditions' which are a set of  guidelines that are meant to act as a way to structure the group and maintain its clarity of purpose. Some see these as nefarious, but they function in the same way as any other social contract - some individual liberties are sacrificed for the greater good of the whole. The greater good of AA always boils down to the individual member, especially the new member. The power structure of AA is rather anarchic in that its power distribution is horizontal. Even though there are committees, decisions are made by individual groups.  

More people teleported into the meeting. One did a twirling dance routine before she sat down, another just lounged the whole meeting. Most people were awkward and shy, which I can only assume is how they are in the physical world. The meeting progressed awkwardly but smoothly. Once it was over, people teleported back to wherever they came from. I spoke with my mysterious friend and thanked her/him for their generosity and for making me feel welcome. 

The contents of the meeting itself weren't that interesting and I left feeling as unaffected as if I had played a video game for an hour. I did have an interesting impulse to do something shady, like see what sex in SL is like. I didn't end up looking for it, but I'm sure its there and I'm sure there's a large community around it.  No one wants to fantasize about doing something good for yourself, like going to an AA meeting (if you're an alcoholic). Fantasy is more about living out those things that we can't in 'real' life.  It won't be long before Virtual or simulated Realty becomes indistinguishable from what we think of as the 'real' world.  We are getting closer and closer to the blurry line that we are already questioning with what is reality and what isn't. A defining question, for me, in that debate, will be something along the lines of If an AA drinks in SL, is it considered a relapse? 

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A 15 thousand year old Swimming Hole

“[if you are] going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside—to say, ‘This is the way it was.’ ” 

― John McPhee

The great thing about living in Los Angeles is that you can jump in your car, and anywhere between 30 min and a couple of hours, you can be on a trail in a shrubby desert landscape, another planet essentially, hiking toward a secret swimming hole in Ojai or to the highest point in the continental US. Two years after moving to New York, I finally discover an easy way to escape from the overly oppressive urbanism of the 5 boroughs.  After some research, Stacey (my partner) and I decide to fill our packs with gear, food, maps, and jump on a bus upstate to Harriman State Park. 

We took the Shortline bus from Port Authority toward Southfields. Directed by some blog posts I'd read, I asked the driver to let us off at Arden Valley road by the 'Welcome to Harriman State Park' sign. The bus took about 1 1/2 hours and the bus driver let us off just where we requested. We used Harriman-Bear Mountain 118 & 119 maps to find our way to the swimming hole - Island Pond. 

Many of the local lakes are remnants of the last ice age approx 15,000 years ago. The retreating glaciers shaped the area's hydrology as well as the face of the landscape. The mountains of the east coast are unspeakably old. They were formed during the Ordovician (400+ MYA).  These mountains have been ground down over millions of years, their particles carried by destructive forces (such as retreating glaciers) and turned into sediment, ultimately making their way to the bottom of the Atlantic. I like to remember that the seemingly immovable mountain is just on a different frame of reference than us. Unless something volcanic or tectonic stops the process, you can imagine it all as dust, underwater, waiting to be reborn in the tectonic escalator - utterly cosmic, happening over millions and millions of years.  In the meantime, humans have exploited this area for one reason or the other. Stacey and I's intention being to escape the city heat and relax.  

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section of interest in map 119

From the Parking area, we hiked the AT trail to Island Pond Road, turned left onto the Arden-Surebridge trail and left on Island Pond Road up to the lake. The trail dead ends at the lake, a beyond perfect spot for swimming. We had the lake to ourselves for the first day. The second day, we hiked the Arden Surebridge trail back to the parking lot, but after making a detour to the Boston Mine.  

Boston Mine

Harriman is littered with old mines that date back from the 1700s. According to the USGS, the NY Highlands were responsible for up to 17% of the worlds Iron. The iron was smelted in local furnaces that were fueled (as charcoal) from the local forests (leaving the landscape barren). Fe3O4-magnetite, a highly magnetic iron ore, was the primary ore, but pyrite, biotite, and even nickel were mined from the area. 

The water in Island Pond was discolored orange with (I assume)  oxidation from the high iron content of the local geology. My first thought was that it was some aberration as the result of climate change and industrialization, but soon realized that it probably wasn't acid rain, rather something local to the geology. 

The mining industry has taken a sort of dystopian turn over the last few years. Precious and of value metals have been accumulating through a different geological process - human industrial activity. Urban Mining, exactly what it sounds like, is becoming a viable economic venture. Instead of digging up forests upstate, prospectors are now looking underneath cities, on the sides of roads, and in landfills. There are are some obvious challenges as digging up city streets is disruptive and expensive but as with every industry, small steps forward are made everyday.

Hiking up to Island Pond was the perfect mix of weird industrial ghost town adventure and urban escapism. I expect to do a lot more bus trips, hitch hiking, and geologic contextualization.  

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