Grading

When grading the earth, our actions hearken back to the telluric, hydrologic, and aeolian forces that originally shaped the place we shape now. Grading engages the human ability to understand, describe, predict, and respond to terrain, climactic conditions, and physical phenomena. We grade terrain so as to isolate dry patches of land from a potential inundation.

Today, there are only a few marginal places on earth where humanity has not controlled and redirected the flow of water across the land. Beginning along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Yellow River, humanity has continued to purposefully canalize water and reshape the dry earth to fit human life. We channel water away from the dry places we occupy, drain marshlands, irrigate fertile lands for cultivating crops, and use water to flush away excrement. Human life is bound to the dry and arable spaces between the fountain and the sewer.

Through swales and watersheds, the slope of land defines a place. When we grade the land we must recognize of the flow of water. Gravity’s pull and the unpredictability of water’s actions make the prospect of dry earth a challenge for all ground dwellers. Parched land parts, shrinks, and disintegrates to windblown dust; supersaturated ground can avalanche in disastrous mudslides. An equipoise between wet and dry must be made, a balance that moistens the land enough to retain the vitality and spread of flora, and protects areas leveled flat for human occasions from swift-flowing wash.

The basin of earth rose up from the depths and the waters parted; as the saturation receded, dry land appeared and began to flourish with life. The wrinkled surface of the earth displays eons of hydrologic erosions and deposits of accumulated silts. The cycle of heaven’s clouding, water vapor precipitating into rain, cascading runoff along the rip-rapped ground, collecting in gullies, streams, creeks, rivers, bayous, and basins . . . brought skyward again by God’s solar energies, evaporating in wind drawn wafts, hovering across the shimmering face of the water. So the land rises, distinguishes itself from ocean, and sets into being the unending cyclic flow of water upon which all land-borne life depends.

Whence did our penchant for flat ground emerge? Is it an acculturated preference, a creaturely requirement, a mandate borne by conscious intention, or a reciprocal combination of all the above that has evolved over time? . . . vacillating between the entwined influences of culture, biology, and human will?

We grade the earth into a raised platform; beyond the subtle rise of our miniature plateau, the earth slopes away carrying the rains away. We shape a small area of clemency, and make it fit for human use. Puddles and mudflows drain off in a pattern shaped by human intellect. A thoughtless person is considered to be, “all wet.” When we tell another that we “have it covered,” we suggest that we’ve made secure plans that won’t fall prey to a dousing. High ground and high-minded, humanity seeks a dry place out of the damp to live out their days and store their belongings. The term “dry goods” connotes the preserving benefits and qualities of dryness.

Water, though essential to life, if stagnant and standing, can breed a miasma moribund to human life. As we grade the ground, we must consider how our efforts to slough off water may affect neighboring lands. When we redirect the flow of surface water, we reform ecologies. One person’s runoff is another place’s deluge. Humans try to reside upon a convex crown of ground; when the surface of the earth is bowled and concave in curvature, water mires and floors flood.

All places made fit for humans must be contoured to shed water evenly away and be raised to elevations high enough to avoid submersion in the flow. Within the incline and decline of the land is the difference between livability and a thorough soaking.