okay.

welcome to class today as, everybody doing all right? so this is history outside. a field school in finding america so awesome. esther, we've been going to different places around campus and trying to think about what we see how the landscape impacts where we are and what we think about where we. so those big questions for the semester are, where am i? what's the next one? can you remember that one? so we got where am i? what happened here? and then how do i fit into that? now? all right. so we're going to do that today to think about where am i? what happened here and how do i fit into it? and so to set this up in the long term, i'm going to pull a quote from a book called ecclesiastes from the old testament, and i'll read it so

that i don't mess it up, although there are a lot of different versions of it all. the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not yet full to the place from which the rivers came there. they return again. so one thing i want us to think about as we look at this creek that we're standing over is what happens to water. what happens when it falls from the sky and it lands up the hill near horseshoe in enough of the drops get together that they roll downhill and they roll past here. and so i want us to think about this creek. do we know what the name of this creek is? walking around? okay, so rocky branch and it's called rocky branch creek. so it's like rocky creek creek. rocky branch branch. i don't know why it has all of those different names in it, but the title, today's lecture is same as it ever was.

rocky branch as an american story. so we are going to reference the talking heads song once in a lifetime and we'll be talking about how time is plastic and human beings as part of time disappear, air and water disappears. but at the core of it is that these drops of water roll downhill and they've been rolling downhill centuries and more than likely, unless there's an earthquake or total, they will continue to roll downhill from this point forward. so one idea that i everybody to take away from today's class is so this is history outside of field and finding america how can we find america here so. one idea is to think find the low spot and look up. find the low spot and look and look around.

right? so we're going to be looking around. we're going to be looking up. we're going to be identifying things that surrounding us. but first, let's start off with is this a creek? if you look down this way, you can look back that way. is this a creek? does this look like a creek to you. so, sean, is this a creek? i say yes, it is a creek. why is it a creek? that's all the typical definition of a creek, i guess, except for the fact that it's kind of manmade. okay. so that's definitions of a creek. what would be the number one thing that a creek probably needs is so water, right? so it's got that. all right. we all agree that that's water down there. it's not a illusion. so. right. we've got water flowing. how deep is this water out there? and there's a couple of inches. it's flowing side to side. it's moving through. so we've been thinking about looking and listening and smelling and feeling. tell me, what are the material

is that you see just right here to think about how this landscape is an attempt to manage natural processes. the attempt to manage water flowing. what are some things that you see. concrete? so you see concrete. all right, so we've got concrete water, some other things pretty quickly. so metal, right. so we can bang on that figure up. that's metal. what are some other things that you see. if you look off the edge here, what do you see? trapped water. trash, right so lots of trash. all right. this is an urban creek. so all the plastic and woods and things that flow downhill, they get flowed into here. and many of them have gotten trapped on the pylon beneath this bridge. other things that you see around would not necessarily man human made what are some things that we see some trees. okay so we see trees some trees curving around the edge.

other things grass. grass what color? green. all right. so you've got the green and what is green mean? nothing healthy, right? it's life. it's photosynthesis. it's changing all the air we breathe. it makes it possible for us to breathe. all right. i want us to think about what it is that we're seeing. and ultimately what i want you to contemplate right. is how what we see here is, a map. and it's a map of human consciousness. and it is ultimately a map of dreams. right? so everything that we can see made of concrete or brick or asphalt or steel or the cars, if look across there to south tower patterson, we see east quad, we see booker t washington auditory dream, the blat. p.s. here, these are all things that were designed. people had an ambition for them

almost all of them. there was a committee that met to decide what are we going to do? and they had to raise money to do it. and so we may be seeing these buildings, we may be seeing concrete, but behind all of that is an american story and it's a human story. and at the core of it is comparable mies and conflict. so one thing about water ways is they often form boundaries and they often create problems. and as we talk today, what we're going to impart talk about is how this is a nuisance. why are there steel bars keeping people away? why has this been designed to shoot water as quickly as past this point? what looks dangerous about? this water? so like shallow, you know, it doesn't really have anything that can buffer a fall. okay so do not dive head first for sure. you probably don't want to jump

off of this bridge. and the answer is, it's not a fun creek. at least you couldn't move down. it probably. but what what is potentially dangerous? why spend as much money as they spent here to speed this water up? flooding the flooding? so what happens to this creek when there's a huge thunderstorm and it dumps a ton rain on top of those hills and on top of those hills and over there know all of that water gets channeled here. right. so this is a couple of inches here. there is a gauge just around corner down the hill, just a little bit. it's normally at about a foot, a foot and a half. last year on, independence day on july the fourth, it had its record height of 12.9 feet. so there was a very big, very fast thunderstorm form that dropped a ton of rain. and it this creek bed, at least down there over ten feet, it often will do that in less than

an hour and it often drops down less than. so it's very quick. it's very fast. and so this is a problem so we're going to walk up and take a more circular look at what's around us. one idea to think about with rocky branch creek is the pattern that it has in that is park ditch, right? so if you think about that ditch, park ditch, right. this looks more like a ditch. it's something designed to get water through quickly on the other side, we're going to go sit in a place that looks more like a park. and there are trees and leaves and it's rocky and it looks like a little mountain stream. just up from that is another park. just up from that is a major ditch and a tunnel. and then another park and then ditches. and so this is an urban stream that has that pattern of ditch,

ditch or danger, fun, danger. right. so we are in the dangerous part right now. and so let's if you've got your bags, we're going to slowly walk up here and. we're going to congregate right around where the water is coming, underneath the street there. and we'll talk about what's going on around us in the landscape. okay. so a couple of things that as we're walking through, we think about the look, listen, smell, fear. what do you smelling right now? okay, so it's flower so it's springtime or it's it's columbia, south carolina, springtime. so i guess it's going to be about 80 degrees today. and we are in late february.

what other things maybe that we're smelling grass. i mean, there's a lot of oak flowers in the grass. so we're getting some of these flowering plants up here. what are we feeling? how are your feet feeling? are you what's the what's the ground beneath your feet? so it's soft. it's not smooth, right? so it's going to cushion us. so we can think about our contrasts and what we're going to cross here. so this is wheat street and it's not so much there anymore, but there's rice street. so in the old maps of columbia, there was wheat and rice and indigo. and so these streets were named the major agricultural products of south carolina. when we get into the carr era, they are going to rearrange some of the street's work and they're going to create five points out of a swamp. and rocky branch is what created

the swamp that had to be dealt with in five points. and so this here is to try to deal flooding and it's ultimately to try to make it around here.ars to operate so let's move forward here so we can look around what building do we have over here? is that a building? it's a piece. so city center. can you see? does it have windows not on the side. not many like down at the at the bottom level. so the competition pool for the gamecock swimming and diving team is on the back part of this building and actually rocky branch flows along the edge of but we think about this as a building in the brutalism style or the style of architecture. do we know who its for? so solomon blatt right. so solomon blatt was speaker of

the house, he was a board of trustees member at one point. and so they named this building after him. the university did a study of its buildings and the people that they were named for. and in that study, one thing that notes is that solomon blatt opposed desegregation, opposed black students attending the university of south carolina and, used his power to block that. so it's 1963 when the first black students since the reconstruction era are allowed to enroll on campus here and the person for whom this building his name, one of the architects to try to prevent that work to get at least one faculty member fired because supported desegregation. all so we think about the south think about where we are in south carolina there is river of rice that runs through all of the history that's here. and so that's part of what we can see in this. what is the red building over

here? okay. so this is booker t washington. this was the african-american school, the university in the aftermath of school desegregation in the mid 1970s. but booker t washington high school and eventually tore down most of it, except for where the auditorium is here and, built things behind it. so east quad is built where the booker t washington high school was behind us in this direction over to the left is what is known as wheeler hill. this was an african-american neighborhood and the university procured, the land from it through urban renewal and ultimately would sell some of it and be part of its foundation. but this part of campus where we are was an african american neighborhood and the university would take over that neighborhood. and the african-american

residents who were deemed to be living in blighted areas and in a slum area that needed to be torn down for the goodness of the community, would have to move elsewhere, except for a few are still some remaining pockets of african-american homes just over this hill. right. so we have the blatt. we have booker washington obviously named after the defining higher education administrator and political figure of the 20th century in the united states as move forward here, we can see these dormitories dominate the landscape that way. do we know what building is over there, the kind of cream color? okay, so it's the rotc building. so this is the post-world war two period. so this area here is the cold war part of campus. this is the baby boomer part of campus. and so this is where struggles over race. this is where struggles over what america would be in its

superpower status. they're going to be represented. if you know, the history of the various things in the buildings that are around us. and so the rotc building is there training generations of military officers just right across the way and where we're going to end up on the creek bed, the rotc building is going to be directly behind me. i want to point out this historical marker, right? so if we go back to the 1860s, go back to the 1850s of a person that lived in this area who would become a brigadier general in the confederacy, who would be killed at battle of shiloh, at least according to the historical marker that is there, of died in 1861. right. so this area here was a area that was the home of a confederate general and has been commemorated to let, you know,

that this is where somebody in history and they were important enough for another group of people to put together some money and put together research to put a historical marker in place. all right. so as to think about general gladden was a think about solomon blatt. some people say blot. i don't know if that's the right way. say his name, but i'm from rural is yanna. and so it sounds like black to me. i can say solomon blatt, booker t washington, we have all the places for students live and just across way here is the children's center. and so if you're thinking about what's the value of history, the value of history is always trying figure out the future, right? so that, you know, history is this compromise between living about the dead in an attempt to try to figure out the best way to create future. right. and so the whitney houston's song, right, the children are future teach them well, let them lead the way. we're trying to teach them well over there.

so what we're going to do is make our way across which street and as we make our way across the way, you just think about all of the engineer, bring all of the design, all of the dreams, all the plans, all the committee meetings that make it possible for us to very easily walk across and we're going to walk. we're not even going to get our feet muddy, even for a raining we can getting our feet muddy all the way across and just contemplate all of the human mapping that has gone into place here. the last thing i'll say before we leave is if you all turn around and look behind you. so if we think about university buildings as forests and we think about forests that trees that get cut down to be turned lumber or into paper those dorms are green and they scheduled to come down and if you look, can you see the buildings behind it? what color those buildings over

to the red, red brick. and so that landscape, what's going to dominate the valley so you're going to have the gamecock village there that's supposed to open in the upcoming fall. those green buildings will be gone. so you'll red brick on that side and then you're going to have the older of campus on the other side of, the rocky branch valley to that side. but one thing that will be almost certain is that rocky branch is going to be here, and it may be the same as it ever was. all right. so let's take a walk across the street and then we'll settle in by the banks of rocky branch. so those are moving along. you can see clues that have been built in about how we're supposed to behave in this space. so these arrows tell us if you driving which side of the street you're on. the paint here tells. you don't park here if we look back here. oh, how they hide the infrastructure. so one of the things we do in

this class is look for hidden stories, right? so i'm pretty sure that's a sewer pipe, right? so things that get flushed go there, but it's hidden. you can't see it from the street. it's got a little graffiti on it. but as we move through here, think about planned landscapes. over to the left is a much have a more heavily planned landscape. but this is a wider landscape of. this is the hostile environment of the water rises here quickly. so these trees have to be able to stay rooted. the studies of this creek show that it's not very hospitable place to live. it's got low biological holding capacity. it is. i do not recommend drinking from it. it has very high counts of, bacteria that are in the human intestines. and so when it rains here, broken sewer pipes, other things

washed in. so it is a place of bacteria. it is a place where things get washed. if we can take second here to grab a seat, we're going to make our way down where there's along the banks here and we'll talk about rocky branch in a much larger. and as always, when we have a class here on the creek bank, be careful and look for broken glass. and when you sit down, try to make sure you're not sitting on a jagged bottle that has been broken. okay. has the smell changed? it has changed. what can you describe that smell? smell water. you can almost smell the dirty dirty.

oak algae or that category of water funk, which is pretty good category. it's pretty descriptive terms, though. the the wind is blowing this way. so you might be getting things coming off the water from there. so if you smell water funk, blame it on the water. that's one of the benefits here. you can also probably smell the mud, the dirt that's underneath you. this ground here stays wet for much of the year. i mean, this is where the water rolls down. so that's part of what do we see here as to that concrete chute? know we're just 100 yards or so away. what's different about this place? yeah, well, it really has throughout much of the capital, it has its own path. so it looks like it been messed with that much joy. it also seems to be flowing just a little bit like not as fast. so not as fast. okay. yeah. so right here, it's in a more of

a pool stage. so that's designed to get that water out of there fast. other things that we see here. yeah, sandbag. there wasn't. any sand? okay. yeah. so we've got a sort of a more natural flow of the water that's depositing sand over there. so there's this, you know, little place. so if you wanted to, you probably go set up a little chair or put something down there and you think, yeah, we'll trash still plenty of trash. yeah. can you identify the product of the trash. i don't want to out there that that's okay. that's potato chip bag. yeah. so it was mardi gras not too long ago. and this is a zaps, which was a louisiana potato chip company. and this looks like potato chips in the mardi gras color scheme. so it has gotten stuck on this branch. i was here the weekend a couple of days ago and it was stuck there and it is still stuck there. all right. so it may not be stuck there for very long.

it has been for a couple of days. right. so we've got this creek. how does look if you look that way, does it look like you're the middle of downtown columbia, south carolina? what does it what does it more look like, emily? turbulent landscape like it has eyed okay. so looks untamed looks like it has this a great phrase from emily it has it looks like it hasn't been curated by mankind. right? the water's flowing. there are these bricks. there are. can anybody does anybody good enough eyesight to see what these trout stream boulders are. does anybody want to go walk through water? i've just so lovingly described, just filled with bacteria that can give you serious indigestion and other things and so these are concrete blocks. all right. so these are shards of, concrete that somehow have been placed

there and they're there to slow the water down a little bit. they're there to create, you know, more of a natural kind of stream. but from this perspective. right. and so what happens if we're historians and we're that we're doing in this class, what happens if you just look that way? what kind of stream are we looking at? what kind of feelings you get? so we got that look, listen, smell and feel. what kind of feelings come from there? well, it's something you could see. okay. so something you see from any hike in any mountain. and it's right here. we've had class here before this semester. we've talked about being here. but before that time that we met here, how many people had been down here. so nobody. so right in this of close to 20 people, nobody had been down to rocky branch creek. and so one thing about rocky branch is that it is hidden. it is along the edge. it is either covered up, put into a tunnel or is off to the

edge of, a space where lots of people go. right. so there are all of these students in the dorms and yet this is down here the weekend there were people that had hammocks between the trees and it was nice weather and they were enjoying it and the water funk was not a problem for them at that point. yeah no, joy. oh, i never even heard of it before. and so you never heard of it before this class. okay. yeah. and so it has been here. so here's a quick little primer. so think of rocky branch as an american story part of that is to think human beings in the american era have been in cologne since the 1700s, at least in particular area. columbia was created be the state capital in a compromise. the upstate and the low country. and so this piece of water that has been flowing through here

was flowing at that point when there were indigenous peoples living in this area. there was some version of rocky branch creek flowing somewhere near here. it's very likely that it wasn't exactly. we are right now. one of the things that happens over time is that it's an piece of water it is a nuisance and people like to move it. and so it is periodically over time literally been moved. so they changed the creek bed. so one question i'll throw out is a creek, the water in it or is it the water bed is it the stuff that surrounds it? is it the container or is it the thing being contained. yeah, i would think so. okay. so both yeah. okay. so just pan so you can't have what would happen if we didn't have the creek here? what happens to water? where does it go.

okay, okay. soaks into the ground or it evaporates or it goes wherever. gravity is going to send it. it just finds its way downhill. right. and so if we don't have something that is going to contain it and stop at some level, then water just flows, right? so it is a relationship between water and the landscape around. so the water is constantly changing this landscape is a much easier to change this creek bed if you're a water than it is that concrete root. yeah. so that concrete is designed to handle a lot of abuse, a lot of pressure, a lot of power. okay. so rocky branch creek, there is a map in the 1890s that show it on the other side of blossom street before this street over here, which is pickens that we know of. so it likely another path when they created five points and they started having commercial

things in that points area it flooded too much it was too uncontrollable too unpredictable. so they built culverts. they built ditches. and eventually they're just going to completely cover up rocky bridge. and so now there is a tunnel that carries branch from the martin luther king jr park underneath all of five points. it comes out at the edge of a park up here and. then that's what we're getting here. is this flow. so it's between and six miles of stream. it is something. not too far away from here. it's almost impossible to find, but it's going to very quickly there are very steep hills on each side of it. those in water through very quickly. so one of the reasons you have such a sharp bank here is how fast the water gets. there are some people that are sitting up to the top. can you see anything peculiar

about the trees on this bank? so we think about the curation, a space by human beings and we think about a space maybe being curated by water. is there anything you can tell about the way these trees are bent? sloping. so they're bent this way, right? so there's one that's almost a 90 degree angle. this tree right here is bent the tree behind, it's bent down here. at the bottom level, there's a tree bent up parallel to the water. if we look over here, this bamboo they make, can you tell us anything about the bamboo that maybe is a clue about how inhospitable, where i'm standing can be. so what's the what's the bamboo doing here? so it's that way. so it's possible that somebody came through and did this bending and had a long term to just sort of make the stuff been way, but more than likely, it's the force of that water when. those big storms come through and rush through here that if

trained the vegetation to be pointed that way and, you can tell how high the water gets through here. you can see some of the debris line along the way. if you look across the way, you can look up and see it's a little bit better down the way leaves stuck about. i'm standing on the other side and so this gentle stream when it becomes an extreme stream gets very high, it gets very fast, it gets very dangerous. and at the end of today's discussion, i've got a couple of newspaper articles about people that have died in rocky branch over the past century or so. so rocky branch, we think about it as an american story and a columbia, carolina story starts. it was the early part of the 20th century known as valley park. this was a white only park, and it remained a white only park until the civil rights era.

in the two decades after world war two. in the 1980s, it was renamed martin luther king jr park. there's now the stone of hope monument to martin king jr in king park. it has baseball fields they have just tried to slow the water down there and done a massive water slow down project. and so if you go there there are walkways going through a heavily curated natural area so it's designed to look like a natural area but part of it is to try to slow things down. so that's there. then you get to five points, which is an early 20th century development. diokno at five points is is this an important part of your life in college? oh, i know they have changed some of the rules about drinking and it's really hard to get around illegal id and be able to drink under age anymore. and so five points has changed a

little bit. so right, that landscape has changed because laws have changed. but nevertheless bars, restaurants, youth, clothing, stores, vinyl records, it is not a highly polished new place. it is a place with old buildings in it. it goes underneath five points. it comes out by the railroad track, shoots through maxi greg park, maxi greg park. it started in the early 20th century because there was not a whole lot that can be done with that wet area. and so they turn it into a park it flows under pickens, which is one of those busy streets and it ends up here from, here it goes by the blat. it goes by what used to be the train station. it goes downhill and rolls through as a ditch under assembly street, and it goes into the textile mill area. so those textile mills start in the late 19th century, the

textile mill in the world at the time was olympia mills. i think some of you in here might live in olympia. mills it's now a really large apartment complex, mostly students, and so textile mills operated for several decades and were the anchor to carolina's economy. and this piece of water rolled through it. this piece of water was a place that people that worked in the textile mills were certainly familiar with. and then what happens after that? so it you may see rocky branch that lives in the textile mill area it's pretty well hidden. it does go through one park that's down there. how many people know about the quarry? so if you look google maps or you look on satellite maps, what is right by the river, if we keep going that way, it's big, huge hole in the earth.

there is a i think there's five k race now where you can run to the bottom of the quarry and run back up. that quarry is not something that was there a half century ago. and rocky branch had to be moved. and so as the quarry developed as they dug more dirt and rocks out of that place, they moved rocky branch, they couldn't move it farther than where it is now because it -- up against a railroad track, but it flows into the congo river there, right? so we got five or six miles of stream that run through columbia that make their way to the congo. re and then if we follow the writer of ecclesia stays from, i don't know, 2200 or 2500 over how many years ago was written. where does this go? eventually you get to the ocean from a poetic sense, where the the sea. right and so it's going to historically flow through the santee river to the sea.

so. right. so we've got a rhyme scheme. santee to the sea. what happens in the 1930s to where this water is headed? so if you think about lake marion, lake moultrie, so if we look at a big map of south, there are these giant lakes that form the santee river that are created in the deal. and why did they create what were they trying to get? what what what did this have in it that the federal government and the mayor of charleston and the governor of south carolina and all these, why did they want to cut down all these trees, build these enormous -- and dams to dam up the sand, to take this water that's coming from rocky branch. what were they wanting from it. energy. energy. so they're building essentially holding ponds of electricity and

they're going to build these power generating facilities that will take that water run it through turbines and electrify rural south carolina. and so if we think about that american story, the water that falls and such heavy quantities here and get shot down into the congo river through the rocky branch creek, makes it into the congo re, joins up with the watery joins up eventually with the santee and it's a source of power to turn light bulbs on to fire factories to bring modernization, to what was then seen as a backward south carolina. now, they're also going to displace a lot of human beings that lived in that area. they're going to have to move out. they're going to be a number. it's mostly timber and it's mostly agricultural areas. but the new deal fundamentally transform the landscape. and so is this water the same as

it ever was? is this just water running into the sea? or can you with enough money with enough engineering, enough dreams build, enough dams and -- to turn it into something that makes the night into day, that extends things all 24 hours during the day? is it the as it ever was? right. so that will eventually flow into the sea. what they will find out is that not enough water was going down the santee river into the sea. and so for lake moultrie, they build another dam or they build another diversion canal that will take some of the water from lake moultrie and send it back into the santee river. and then the rest of the water continues down, the cooper river. so if you know the cooper river in charleston, some of the water from here theoretically could be

rolling underneath that bridge or it could be rolling through the river out to the atlantic ocean or out to the sea. all right. so we're just one little spot here, but there are many prongs of a story that from it. so we're going to go a little bit close here toward the end. and want to throw out a couple of ideas of what have happened here along rocky branch. before we do that, i want to ask some questions. why do we have time in the way that we tell it? why do we have a calendar of the way that it's set up? why do we have seconds and minutes why don't we have some other way to tell time. really? right now, your day kind of makes sense. how the sun is right now.

okay, so how the sun rises and sets. what of our senses that been using today? what's the one that's most important for historically arriving at our current way of telling? so we think of the sun rising and setting so our site right? so light wins out, you know, vision wins out and how time works, right and that's much quicker throughout this idea of why did human beings not tell time by water? why did they not tell time by rivers and creeks, streams? the ocean is pretty predictable, right? i mean, they're tied there. waves that come in. seems like you could probably devise something. but why does a site win out? why does that become the way we tell time? so, yeah, joy, water is everywhere. water isn't everywhere. okay, water is in everywhere. so you may not be able to see

it. you may live next to a piece of water. how predictable, though, is. so if you were going to predict the future based upon branch creek most of the time, what does it do? it's this, right? so this would be a really long day, right? it's like, well, it's still at a foot. so we've been in our really long day and then it would get up really high and then it would drop down is like, well, that was a whole year, right? so what is the thing about how our conception of time, how we structure who we are and how we function in life is based upon these concepts that we had no choice in. but we've accepted it and we now how do you know what time it is? can you look up at the sun and get out a sundial and figure it out? we need a basic idea around time of day. okay, so you got to look a clock. so we now have machines that keep our time for us that i

think most of them are set the naval observatory clock. so we got this nuclear clock that tries to keep exact time. and so we are as in sync time wise as at any point in human history. but what happens? the electricity goes out in the clock. stop. does time stop? then what we have to rely on we'd have to look around and kind of figure out and guess like, okay, sun's getting low, so. right, so electricity, the segment of time are things that we have been trained to accept. so one idea for us to contemplate is the role that historians play in understanding time. and so i'll throw out this notion that historians are people who have been trained in science and art of and we decide how much time we're looking at. we decide when something starts,

when something ends. but how much of that is us imposing our vision on time right? so we're setting up those parameters so we can take a creek here and think, this creek has been flowing here. these drops of water have been rolling through here. they'll go up into the sky and come back down again and it'll be this cycle over and over again. but how long are human beings around for that. how long do you expect live? alice? how long do you expect to live? 70, 80? 70, 80. so the average age of death in the united states is somewhere in the seventies for white women. it's above 80. right. so, you know, there are different factors that go into it. but somewhere in the seventies, eighties, that's kind of what human life in industrialize parts of the world come to. and so we've got about, let's say, 80 years here. if everything goes okay, right?

so as a historian, we decide what kind of time we're going to be with. and so this is where i'll throw out a couple of lines from david byrne and the talking heads which i had you all listen to what want you think of this song. so is a once in a lifetime and it has that phrase same it ever was. so i may have a quick yeah. lily it's one of my mom's favorite songs, so i've always been familiar with it, but i never really thought about it. okay, so when your mom says your song, your mom's very cool, i guess, right? or other things. bill your check took your head, which is it's just a good song. it's a good song. it's got a good beat. you could dance to it. yeah, i know that reference. so that's -- clark. there was a tv show on the weekends and so that was always what the kids would say when they were assessing a record. it's got a good beat. you can dance to it. so anything else about this? oh, the song. what? the same as it ever was. me. granted, this is a song that you get to decide what it means.

we're not necessarily concerned about the five songwriters that created it. what? what is this about? will? you're an expert on time. yeah, i'm a history major, so i guess i think it's it's kind about how things will continue to happen regardless of us. i think it's it talks a lot about water flowing flowing underground. and that, as you touched on it, is going to continue to happen here, continue to happen everywhere, regardless of, us sitting here, cameras, we're all here. okay. so time happens water flowing underground. let the water hold down. right. so and i'll read a couple of these lyrics here starts you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack another part of the world may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. right. we are an automobile world and culture. you may find in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife.

you ask, how did i get here? right. so that's partly what this class is having you address. you know, where am i? what happened here? how do i fit in? how did i get here? we just walked a little bit and ended up on a creek bank on the edge of campus. the university of south carolina. we can say how we got here today, but in a bigger, broader sense, this song is asking some of those questions that the writer or writers ecclesiastes was asking a few things here, water flowing underground into the blue again, the money's gone. so what happens after the money? what? after the thing. that's so important to human beings. what's left? this water's left. what does this water have? if you take the human meaning away from it. water dissolving. water, removing. and then these lines here. time holding up. time is an asterisks. time isn't holding up time is an aspect. there's water at bottom of the

ocean. where does that highway go? am i right? am i wrong my god, what have i done? right. so this is the talking heads. this song came out around time that i was a fifth grade. sixth grade. i spent most of my life thinking that the lyrics of this song said, these days would go by eating water chestnuts right? so for much of my life, i sing this song in my head. i think these days go by eating water chestnuts. right. and so that's what's in my it we didn't have the internet when i in fifth grade or sixth grade you had to go the album to get the lyrics for it and sometimes i didn't have the lyrics in it. and so sometimes you didn't know what the lyrics were. but now we can look them up and we can go to david byrne's journal website and look at it. by the way, i'll say he has a really good book called bicycle diaries, where he a folding bicycle on tour, rides it around

the places where he was performing and writes these essays about what like to be david byrne riding his bicycle around places around the world and so i highly recommend that it's one of our books in our long biblio fee of books. so we think about time being an asterix, we think about time dissolving and water dissolving. these are a few things that have happened along rocky branch. creek 1903. girl charge. this is a headline girl charged with heinous crime alleged to have her baby newborn in. and there's a big trial and court case that comes out of this. in 1908, university, south carolina builds the thompson infirmary, which later gets a new building that's going to be known as the thompson health center. this is designed have an isolation wing so that when people have diseases are communicable, you can separate them from cysts. so we all went through the pandemic here and understood.

so in 1908, they're trying to figure out how to have students live together without making each other sick. part of the description of that is that there were beautiful views of the rocky brach valley, so you could look from the hill up there down here and see all the trees below. 1909 headline met his death in front carr white man killed near rocky branch saturday night. much of the newspaper is going to identify the race of somebody killed in in their headlines. 1909 maxey gregg park is going to be identified that's basically where it's going to be set up where it exists today. so 110 plus years ago that park the land for it. part of the park. that's over there right now, 1913 car fell from rocky branch bridge near train station the wife and killing her so the train station is now the

california dreaming restaurant that's over there and so there was a car accident in that area, a little over a hundred years ago where a woman died in the accident. 1914. the local newspaper wrote this about rocky branch. i want you to compare 110 or so years to what you're seeing here today, rocky brach, which is ordinarily a grubby little town stream filled with oil here, smutty and dingy there on sunny spring days. it's almost spring on sunny spring days, actually sparkled through a bank carpeted with new shoots entangle. vines of honeysuckle, right? so it's dirty. it's filled with oil, it's smudgy, it's moody. but the right angle in the right slant of light, you can see the flowers and the greenery that's there a few months before. the stock market crash in 1929,

this was the description of rocky branch. it was like a capricious woman swinging first this way and then that washing out a great curve here and left a sandbar there and has made uncommonly pretty little pebble beaches, right? little sandbar bars over here long legged mockingbirds walk, the beach like flappers. the strand at myrtle right. even in 1929, they were referring myrtle beach as what the dirty the dirty dirt. you said. that's not the official chamber of commerce description of myrtle beach 1949. their massive floods 1956 massive floods exploding over banks in every big rain. 1957. mr. leach fell into rocky branch near assembly street after watching a baseball game, someone held his head out of the

water, keep him from drowning. 1961, a massive storm goes through and leaves rocky branch as a raging torrent. on june 30th, 1961, two young black men drown in rocky branch during that flood about a decade. in 1974, there was a major oil spill that's going to foul waters of rocky branch. and so we think about some of the things that happened here. another i'll mention in 1970 in may at kent university, four people were killed by the national guard. that is going to trigger student protests, anti-war protest here at the university of south carolina, which will to the national guard coming in here the state police and just up rocky branch on the other side of pickens street in maxey grant park. an actress named jane fonda was

the lead speaker of an anti-war protest and the local cameras filmed her and. so rocky branch heading off to the edge of the park is the site of one of the major student protests in columbia is history and students were on campus at that point most of them remember that moment quite clearly. so as think about and we're close things up here what should we remember about rocky branch it's an american story it's a human story or is it just water flowing downhill? so anything that sticks out to you that maybe we should remember. i was going to say it's just water and not like the stories come out of it. how did you human interactions go? okay. so it's humans interacting with the landscape or near the water.

the water doesn't care at least far as i know. maybe. i mean, the wonder twins, if you watch any of those old cartoons, they were all about water and turning water into different things. so water seemed to have a consciousness for them. but for the most part, water, it's hard to figure it has a consciousness, but it's the human consciousness, right? so that's what we're here for. that's the stories that we tell, how human beings have interacted this landscape. anything else we to remember about rocky? i mean it's kind of cool to think that like there has so much history and even though it's just like pretty much a first little freak, like people have thought that for years. so it's a gross little creek that's probably maybe we should probably turn that into the subtitle of today's lecture branch grows a little creek. people sit in the news for i mean, i'm not your historian you're just saying in the evidence, right? yeah. all right. so we have the waterfall and the gross. a little creek with the potato chip bags and there are other

things floating in it, but in the right light, with the right breeze flowing, it can be not just a grubby little creek. it can be a beautiful place. and where i want to end is for us to take 15 seconds and not talk and just look at the water as it makes its way to the sea. oh, and so i will count in my as we turn and look at this moment right what we've done today is taken a moment of history outside and what will happen is we're going to look at this water for 15 seconds and then you all will get up and i will pick up your seats and then we'll move and hopefully we're going to leave no trace and nobody will ever know that we were here except for the fact

that we're in a microphone and there are people with cameras around and happen to be filming this so maybe that be remembered but these roots are probably going remember that we were here. the water is not going to remember that we were here. so let's take 15 seconds, stare at the water and then we'll be done. okay. and that's rocky brandt's creek, same as it ever was maybe. all right. thank you. see you next class meeting. thank