Last year, I spent hours on Google Earth while working on a few personal essays. The reasons varied. Sometimes it's for bits of information. Other times it’s more exploratory. Or a reaction. It helped keep the essay writing on its toes.
Combined with research, the memory of a place and its relationship to other elements allow essay writing a deeper and wider dimension. I’m sharing my notes here as an example. I like stumbling into facts. I also like the resonance, beat, and silences when I read my notes later. I’ve highlighted a few sentences I decided were pertinent to the project I was working on. Some I chose for the details. Others for what they evoked or illuminated.
Before the pandemic, I would map my writing on foot, on the road, from airport to airport. Most of my stories in Strata (Salt Hill Journal, Issue 48) took place in perilous moments and locations in San Francisco and Manila, places where the city spilled its guts, fault lines, epicenters, and geologic time. I touched rock surfaces. The relationships between the experience of writing from outside and writing from Google Earth often have interesting conversations. I often find them helpful to both the process and outcome.
NOTES: I looked up the site of the Diamond Island memorial in Phnom Penh on Google Earth. The inverted drop locator pinned it on a riverbank where three great rivers converge and diverge.
I drew a straight line along the riverfront—from the memorial to the Temple of Lotus Blossoms, a ten-minute walk, about 800 meters.
I zoomed out on a 2D map view of the site. The straight line lay on the confluence of three rivers: the Tonle Sap River, the Mekong River, and the Bassac River—a distributary of the first two.
From this straight line, I drew a rectangle, covering an area where water meets water in the nation’s capital—a one-mile river crossing. I learned that this rectangle is known locally as Chaktomuk, the old name of the capital. In Khmer, Chaktomuk means City of Four Faces, signifying four river branches.
I examined the Chaktomuk rectangle on Google Earth. I like how it properly framed the crossing of major arterial rivers in Phnom Penh. One river comes from Lake Tonle Sap, the nation’s beating heart. Pumped by a monsoonal river, the lake quadruples in size, flushing floodplains with water and life in sync with well-defined wet and dry seasons.
On April 24, 2012, five months after hundreds of monks chanted at the memorial, a blue boat could be seen cruising the brown waters of the Chaktomuk rectangle. It was a small boat, fifteen meters long. A metal pole stood on its bow with a rotating device mounted on top, a multibeam echosounder that sent pings in the water and collected readings. An international team of scientists mapped the riverbed for two days.
They call this “mowing the lawn”. It was the hottest month of the year. The water level was at its lowest. The team wanted to examine the impact of human activities and climate change in the Chaktomuk rectangle. The last time riverbed elevations in the area were investigated was in 1960.
The 2012 initiative was a result of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s meeting with foreign ministers from the lower Mekong region. During their meeting in Phuket, the state leaders agreed to strengthen water management in transboundary areas. One of the outcomes of the Lower Mekong Initiative was to develop tools that can be used for forecasting.
The colorful maps, downloadable from the U.S. Geological Survey homepage, showed clear satellite images of the city with the rivers layered in—in rich bathymetric colors. Red, orange, or yellow where it’s shallow; green, blue, and violet where it’s deep.
A close examination of the maps reveals dunes, shoals, and holes. Up close, they show deep excavation pits, a scarred landscape, the effects of dredging. Mining sediments to keep sand and silt from filling harbors was a routine necessity. The massive ships that bring in the bulk of imported goods to the country need safe passages. They require deep and wide channels to navigate and dock at the port.
I pondered this map online, a riverbed pockmarked with deep excavation pits, or as Simon Schama put it, “this irreversibly modified world… that is all the nature we have.”
Comments