ANONYMOU[S] is a brief series of texts submitted, read, and published anonymously, with the agreement of the author not to reveal themself.

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King Coal

An interpretation might emerge anywhere. A non-narrative documentary might invite the unwanted, or unwarranted. N.’s non-narrative flick, SEOHDOC, portrays southeastern Ohio’s encounters with extractive industry. It contains three chapters, each concerning a distinct cycle. The first cycle concerned timber, the second coal, the third solar power. What’s going on here? My friend and colleague E., who watched the film, says even images have a grammar. The syntax here is one implicating solar in extractivism. I ask N. about it after the screening of SEOHDOC the evening of the first day of the conference. He interrupts me as I’m staging the question, before I’ve made any suggestion about meaning—his intention, he says, was to show rather than tell. N. is a rhetorician and approaches his argument using a rhetorician’s tools. He says he wants pathos rather than logos. Nonetheless logos rears its ugly head in me (and E.), who reads his images.  In a room like the Executive Forum where N. presented and SEOHDOC was screened, logos can’t help but pop up. The body floats in beige nothing lit by fluorescent lights. It is a non-place—uniform, bland, detached, priming the frictionless transfer of information and expertise. It invites the disembodiment requisite for our reasoning. I’m disembodied. After this first day of an autumn conference, I’m primed to critique. N. lives in southeast Ohio, his film was inspired by his memories of his encounters with King Coal, he sees things I don’t see.

E.

One young-looking pre-conference field tour participant wore a UAW 6 hat. I told him I was getting involved in my university’s union and we went from there. We connected on a few different things. Throughout the conference we hung out. We ate lunch at the same table, sat together when we were in the same room—at G.’s talk he called our table the “student corner.” Some encounters in the field are on something like equal footing, or a simulacrum of equality. E. was a student in geography at another university. Nonetheless I think I got more from him then he did from me. He introduced me to a man working for an environmental nonprofit called the Monday Creek Restoration Alliance, pointed me in certain useful directions (like towards H.), told me about what he’d found in his work so far. He was working on the uptake of coal refuse in rare earth element economies. In a way he functioned like a kind of mentor; he was definitely a guide—here he is a figure, a character, data.

Pines

At the third stop of the pre-conference field tour there was a pine forest nearby. This stop concerned a passive treatment system for a stream called Rock Creek polluted by acid mine drainage (AMD). Upstream of this treatment system, you could see the impaired stretch flowing into the system. It was the typical orange of an AMD-impaired stream, which is the orange of iron oxide. E. and I walked a ways along the stream into the pine forest. It was quiet and it was hot. As far as we walked the stream was orange. Downstream of the passive treatment system, watershed monitors conducting fish surveys have found brook trout “for the first time in nearly a century,” as the handout for the field tour reads. Once, AMD discharges killed the aquatic community in Rock Creek’s lower two miles. All along Rock Creek’s main stem nowadays, brook trout are now naturally reproducing.

Ramada Hotel & Conference Center by Wyndham

A thing both placed and erasing place: a valley hotel embroiled in Ohio ridges, but also a conference center responsible for the smooth operation of conferences. The presentations took place in the Ballroom, the Chairman’s Room, and the Executive Forum. These rooms escape attention. Any PowerPoint swamps them. Underneath the tablecloths in the Ballroom: old wood folding tables. We lunch in the hotel atrium. This room calls our attention. Potted tropical plants fill the corners, or organize space. The hotel pool is in here so the place smells of chlorine. Above the pool hang the banners of the Big 10 schools. Hotel room doors ring the rooms first floor and balcony. E. tells me we’re in the 1980s here. The conference has a front stage and a backstage here in these rooms. G. intimates to me that he’s sure plenty of dealmaking happens behind the scenes here. When conference goers briefly cease to use the conference as “a forum for the dissemination of information” (as the “About” page on the conference web page reads) they presumably shift into the backstage schmooze-talk—according to G. (he doesn’t disapprove, of course; it’s part of the game). Or maybe they’re socializing, or bored, or exhausted. I could not maintain conference-mode during every phase of the life of the conference. I slip through many states of mind, many footings over the course of the conference—but I never slip backstage.

Juniata

This ethnographic text starts with myself: driving up U.S. 35, sun in my face. Scenic highway, portal to the field. I was on my way to the Ohio Abandoned Mine Reclamation Conference to investigate ecosystem restoration, ethnographically. Here outside the city limits the trees had turned already. Way out here the highway loops around ridges and valleys and finds the notches. There is a river to my left, what’s its name? I keep glancing at the useless map on my phone, and it keeps refusing to display the river’s name. The field materializes in this little vignette. The field materializes through my body, in its encounter with a land, a person, a site, which then gets called field. When I was done driving, later that day, I looked up the river name: Juniata. An uncited passage on the river’s Wikipedia page claims Juniata is perhaps a disfigurement of an Iroquoian word, Onayutta. Juniata, my guide to the place I make a field—my own kind of performance of misapprehension, or disfigurement. On 35 the sun scanned my face and approached my eyes from all sorts of angles. I moved the visor constantly. Juniata left me at Gallipolis. I was on my own to make the rest of the trek to the Ramada Inn, to configure more vignettes of the conference I call my field: future beginnings of future academic articles, my little career.