The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City

by John Tallmadge

What wilderness lover, asks John Tallmadge, "would ever dream of settling deep in the Rust Belt astride polluted rivers?" The Cincinnati Arch holds the provocative answer to Tallmadge's question, which was prompted by his unplanned relocation from rural Minnesota to urban Ohio. Tallmadge tells of dismaying early encounters with the city's seeming barenness, his growing awareness of its vitality and abundance, and finally his new vision of all nature, from the vacant lots of his neighborhood to our great New England forests and Western deserts.

New to the city, Tallmadge saw only its concrete, glass, smog, and debris. Soon his interest, stirred by the wonder of his children at their surroundings, focused Tallmadge to the "buzzing, flapping, scurrying, chewing, photosynthesizing life forms" around him. More deeply, Tallmadge began to learn from, and not just about, the city. Nature's persistence―within him and wherever he looked―wore away at old notions of wilderness that made no allowances for human culture.

The "arch" of the book's title is richly as the name of a geologic formation molding the urban landscape Tallmadge comes to love; as an archetypal building form; and, in its parabolic shape, as a metaphor for life's journey. Filled with luminous lessons of mindfulness, attentiveness, and other spiritual practices, this is a hopeful guide to finding nature and balance in unlikely places.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2004

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this for what it is, but was disappointed to find it isn't the book it presents itself as in title and description. It's far more a reflection on "wildness" and the value of wild nature in contemporary America than it is an exploration of Cincinnati or urban nature. I would have liked more direct attention to the specific urban landscape, to see how some of the provocative and powerful ideas Tallmadge develops in response to _other_ landscapes he travels to can be applied or even challenged by his immediate experience of Ohio. As another reviewer notes here at Goodreads, this is done somewhat in the "Mill Creek" section of the book, near the end, but that wasn't quite enough to prevent the book feeling a bit distant from the landscape it purports to be about. After having a similar response to a couple of other works in the "narrative criticism" mode (particularly John Hanson Mitchell's The Paradise Of All These Parts , I have to wonder whether this struggle to fully focus on the place that is the impetus for writing in the face of personal reflection and philosophical wandering is endemic to the approach somehow. On the other hand, John Elder's Reading The Mountains Of Home managed to be both deeply local and philosophically broad at once. So in the end, as much as Tallmadge interrogates his own lifelong sense of nature as something "out there" rather than close to home, I'm not sure he really managed to undo that assumption in writing this book, at least not as much as I'd hoped.

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

With its moorings in both 20th century American nature writing and New England Transcendentalism (Tallmadge has done excellent scholarly work on Thoreau), The Cincinnatti Arch attempts to import Thoreuvian "wildness" into the city. Tallmadge's project is to give ethical consideration to the Rust Belt's creaking, oil-rainbowed version of nature. Tallmadge's prose can be comfortably slated in the "narrative criticism" tradition that tries to bridge scholarly and popular audiences, and as a result feels a bit strained and self-conscious (and not in the Robert Coover kind of *good* self-consciousness). I feel like Tallmadge sort of shoots himself in the foot with this book, since his engagement with Cincinnatti's "urban nature" is more cerebral and Emersonian than anything else. One would hope the dude could at least take the trouble to name some of the local flora and fauna, instead of cogitating in his den. The "Mill Creek" section at the end of the book redeems this tendency somewhat.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Story of a Professor who leaves the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota as a newly married man and moves to Cincinnati. It is his struggle in appreciating the wilderness in a highly degraded urban environment. It is also about the Mythology around wilderness based on Aldo Leopold “Sand County Farm”, Walden, and others. He makes an interesting point that the folks who try to powerwalk the Appalachian trail, or “bag” 14,000 feet mountains, are really in a state of arrested development. He suggests that military service or time in the wilderness are both initiation rituals. However, if you keep trying to experience those items in the same way (or keeping trying to push the limits), then have you really grown up?