LauraThe sun is much lower already as September bleeds into the damper, cooler Autumn of October. There is a haze that is nearly fog and that weakens the strength of the sun. Today the lagoon is sultry and slack. I don’t want to spend more time in my little apartment, even if I love it. I go out on an expedition looking for birds but I find something else completely.
This week I posed some questions on Twitter about the role of Mose, the tidal barrier that operated successfully, in a real Acqua Alta producing sea state, for the first time on 3rd October 2020. What became clear to me as various knowledgeable people sent me links to excellent online resources is that there is no one problem in Venice or it’s lagoon and consequently no one solution. At one end there is the priceless cultural heritage of the city – it’s floors, walls and ceilings. As explained in Jeff Goodell’s Rolling Stone https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/venice-flooding-2019-mose-corruption-913175/ article by Pierpaolo Campostrini, past Venetians didn’t much care about preserving their city. They just built higher, happy to obliterate what had gone before if the new structure could be safer and/or offer them more prestige.
At the other end of the scale, sweeping past the needs of every day residents of the city, the commerce that keeps it alive and the evolving concerns of extreme weather events, sits the ecology of the lagoon, that delicate balance between an environment that was historically developed to both protect and feed the island communities within its tidal basin and the flora and fauna that has also learned to thrive in this particular place on earth. This balance is not and has never been a fixed thing. Iris Loredana https://lavenessiana.com/acqua-alta-in-venice-29-october-2018/ interesting writes about the evolution of two lagoons, the north being more fresh water and the south more salty with a watershed that maintains the status quo but also the many modifications made by man over the centuries.
I love the beauty of the structures that make up Venice. I marvel at the engineering that made it so enduring. I am endlessly flattered by the kindness and generosity of its residents. I can’t imagine a Venice without it’s spirit of trade and commerce – indeed just those few months when Venice was empty of people during the Quarantine of Spring 2020 revealed to me a city that was dead without the meeting of peoples from around the world and those that make their home here. But I particularly adore the lagoon. I write this on #MentalHealthDay2020. This is significant for me as I struggled with anxiety over recent years. I feel inordinately blessed and privileged to be able to look out across an open stretch of ever changing water beneath a sky that is so big and varied and spectacular, it takes my breath away. Today my very generous friend Jane https://rowvenice.org/boats-belle-batele/ took me out in one of her beautiful wooden boats.
Rowing, standing up and facing front, as is the practice here, allows you to observe the city, and the lagoon, in a truly mindful way. You must look forward. You mustn’t get distracted and start thinking about other things. Yesterday, instead, I took a trip to Terra Firma but more importantly to some of the barene or salt marshes that fringe the lagoon. I went to look for migratory birds. I’m not a very good birder but the excuse to find new places to look out across gentle waters to the dreaming spires beyond, obliterates my failures at bird identification and replaces it with an awestruck wonder at the utterly unique ecological features that make up the Venetian Lagoon.
I’m not sure why there weren’t great swathes of migrating birds. I found an excellent resource from Luca Boscain suggesting places worth visiting www.adriaticnture.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/where-to-go-birding-around-Venice/. Maybe I didn’t go far enough. Maybe it was the wrong time of day. Maybe it’s still too early in the year. Maybe the tide was too high. Or too low. I see a solitary heron and some little brown jobs, as my brother in law, Lev Parikian www.levparikian.com/index.php/books/ calls them in his excellent writing. Later I spot the obligatory egrets and cormorants, the latter drying their wings outspread like a Roman military emblem. I enjoy looking at the heathers and grasses that are in the middle of changing colour to russet browns, sunset oranges and regal purples. I start taking pictures of a collection of dead boats, abandoned up tiny creaks or maybe washed there by exceptional tides, slowly turning into homes for wild and plant life alike. I didn’t expect to find a boat graveyard. I didn’t expect to find a graveyard of another type either.
Every now and then there are breaks in the tamarisk bushes that line the edge of the marshes. I started by walking along the lagoon edge, close to Marco Polo airport and have been heading steadily towards Parco San Guiliano – a lovely but somewhat managed open space, created from an old industrial site, into a generously proportioned water front municipal park for the residents, in particular, of Venice’s land based satellite city, Mestre. I like the gaps along the slightly raised bank, because they afford me better views back across the barene and the shallow lagoon waters towards Venice on the horizon. A different angle means all the landmarks are in different places due to the snaking nature of the Grand Canal. This makes every view surprising. But also at each gap there is an increased sense of human inhabitation. Not just the abandoned fishing boats but plastic bottles and food wrappers, the odd bucket or even a disposable mask. I round a corner and my long dormant ‘idgy’ gene is immediately activated. As a child I didn’t like irregular or disrupted textures. Old buildings were a horror to me. I think it had something to do with being short sighted or maybe a fear of nature gone mad like the eruptions of cancer cells. Now, regardless of my sister’s long standing jibes, I love to see multiple textures, colours layered, rusting, intricated carved detail or water corroded surfaces. I don’t however much enjoy seeing hundreds upon hundreds of water bottles embedded into the ground, so multitudinous to look like shiny, transparent warts erupting out of the skin of the earth.
I start to take photos and the a video. As I round a corner, I see so much plastic, it looks like an iceberg has started to form between the marshland and the high reeds beyond. What is this? Why is it here? My original thought that the rubbish was coming from kids hanging out in their own secret spots – much like they were doing on Pellestrina beach – flies out of the window. No one group could cause this amount of rubbish to build up. It has to be caused by the flow of the waters gathering these items, that I now see include shoes and bags, buoys and scooter wheels, into one specific place. A bit like the plastic island in the middle of the Pacific. But why are they up on high ground? Is this the result of past recent Acqua Altas that pushed the plastic beyond the fringes of navigable water – where they were certainly discarded by pleasure trippers, fishermen, tourists AND residents – and into this particular ecological haven.
My big concern is not plastic per se. It is an effective material when used wisely. The biggest problem that has emerged during the course of my life is one use, disposable goods. Plastic bottle are the poster child for this terrible waste. They can be recycled but most Western countries have perfectly adequate tap water these days. It’s pure laziness. And not having to pay the real cost of these things.
As I walk around, taking more pictures and becoming slightly less repulsed by the organic but equally sterile vision before me, I also start to wonder why no one has reported this rubbish dump. A few days ago, the day after the Acqua Alta was held outside of the lagoon in fact, residents and visitors to the city took part in a big clean up of the canals and shores around Venice. No one had obviously put this place on the list.
Water birds, specifically two white herons, fly past. Butterflies do that flittering thing. I find a monster moth that I’ve yet to identify clinging to a white litre bottle half buried in the ground. Remarkably the wildlife is living around this abomination. But for how long? How big will this plastic bottle infestation get and what will that do for the flow of life in this little corner of the lagoon? In a way, the sea tides that act as lungs for the lagoon have also swept it clean of these bottles. They have pushed them to one location and then, over a series of exceptional high tides, pushed them out of the lagoon completely. At least that is my best guess. It makes me wonder again at how Venice is still standing. Not just due to the actions, well meaning or not, of human activity and ingenuity over the last 50-70 years but over it’s long 1600 year history. Maybe the sea gods like their little jewel. Maybe the annual tribute from Doge to Sea at the Festa Della Sensa is not in vain. But meanwhile, maybe Venice AND Mestre should turn their boats and their feet towards Campalto to clear up this nasty case of plastic bottle cancer. Maybe they could even make some sort of sculpture out of it, to sit in Parco San Guiliano and remind everyone that our time on earth is only temporary. We will leave a legacy whether we realise it or not. It might be an iron and concrete barrier. It might be a new improved, flood resistant floor for Basilica San Marco. Let’s hope it’s not the lagoon’s own plastic island.
