These headings are alchemical shortcuts that bring together collections of elements in particular or peculiar physical states, undergoing change at vastly different rates. While these behaviors appear chaotic at several timescales, we’ve become reflective organisms particularly attuned to observing, modeling, and theorizing about the pockets of order in the systems around us. We use our patterns to achieve balance, stability, safety from the variable and the unknown: imposing periodic forces and aperiodic threats posed to us within an epoch. As terrestrial creatures with a historical predilection towards protecting ourselves from the elements and each other, we’ve sought firm ground upon which we can build fortresses and make them progressively more comfortable, often at the cost or ignorance of our place in a larger ecology. Stuck as we are in the present moment, we reduce the complexities of what underlies our constructions and whether they’ll withstand the chaotic whims of our Earth. By developing an informed view of the site’s initial geographic formation and subsequent expansion, we can begin to anticipate possible catastrophes and propose modifications to preemptively enhance the performance of urban form before disaster strikes. Graphically, the development of elegant abstractions or analytic filters for captured views of my site’s natural character will presumably suggest cartographic dimensions for elaboration as proscriptive mapping tools.

 
WRITE AS RAIN
LOGIC 001.
Suddenly you’re in the air. You’ve become gaseous. What's it like all up in air?.
It's a mostly vacuous place. You’re a part of a parcel of moving air, you go along with the flow. So, whereya flowin’? Low pressure. Haven’t you heard, nature abhors a vacuum. Water has a way of collecting, though. Condensing. Falling in drops or some precipitous form.
Tumbling down to ground, your weight at wind’s whim.

LOGIC 002.
You’re on the ground. Adhesion’s worth mentioning, but hardly ever before cohesion.
C’mon, you’ve got places to be, you follow gravity’s rule. If you don’t sink right into the hill, you’ll roll right along to your nearest neighborhood local minimum. Good job. You made the grade. Surface impervious from human substrate articulation? That’s life. You’ll likely join a puddle, or else make your way through a swift labyrinth of sewers and somewhat systematic drainage. But if find yourself absorbing, in dirt connecting to deeper dirt…

LOGIC 003.
Underground it’s a different game. A player always present in the backdrop steps to spotlight. Direction is dictated not by gravity, but by pressure gradient. You move in paths described by experts as ‘tortuous’. Usually just the least packed, but fissures are afoot. You’ve no choice but to follow whatever’s pulling you along. Resistance is a variable, and it’s exciting in a way, in comparison to time in the acquifer. Riding the cycle is a lucky adventure. As you snake through the earth, you imagine a little tucked away pocket of earth in the water table that you might call your own. Silently you join a pool and what was you goes to sleep.
 

             AGROUND WE GO
Earth and water have a long history in shaping each other. Boston is situated in a geologic basin formed by seismic activity.¹ As glaciers slid across the earth, friction and pockets at the interface lead to accumulations of soil forming bumps elongated in the direction of the ice’s movement. As the glaciers melted, sea level rose, shifting our attention to a different interaction between earth and water, the salient, saline coast. A coastline is a negotiation of the boundary of exposed topographic elevations with fluctuating sea levels. The accumulation of these prior geologic events gives us Massachusetts Bay and more locally, Boston Harbor, an alcove of water into the mainland, populated by a plurality of peninsulas and drumlin islands.

The distinction between peninsula and island is one worth investigating. These are both formations of earth, connected together at some submerged substrata. By chance of sedimentation, the peninsula’s connection to a larger mainland is visible, where as the island is completely surrounded by water. Let’s examine the threshold cases with examples from within the Boston Harbor.

Straddling the threshold is Bumpkin Island, a small drumlin off the coast of Hull. At high-tide it is an island by our definition of surrounding water, but at low-tide, a walkable spit connects it to contiguous land. The existence of this disappearing, re-appearing spit is self-reinforcing. It has a definite effect in diminishing and deflecting ocean currents and tidal flow, these forces causing it to undergo variable rates of material accumulation and erosion.

Just above the threshold is the pre-colonial Shawmut peninsula, connected to the land by an isthmus. This isthmus, bordered on both sides by water, remains dry at high tides. It becomes a rather narrow 120 feet of earth at its thinnest point. This location was later referred to as the Boston Neck, perhaps a play on headland, which is land surrounded by water on three sides. The narrowness of the neck is so marked, in comparison to the central promontory’s bulk, that bodies of water on each side of the isthmus approach the inverse of a headland, that of water surrounded by land on three sides: a bay. This semantic distinguishing of a coastline’s undulations is dizzying, full of part and parcel relationships. Why, even the etymology of peninsula is from Latin, pćne "almost" + insula "island."

The process of establishing names can have a lasting impact on both the memory and imagination of a place. Let’s first look at Shawmut, a name derived from the language of Native Americans. There is some debate² as to its meaning. The most common association is with a freshwater spring, advertised by the first colonial settler William Blackstone around 1630. Charles Shaw in 1817 suggests that Shawmut itself means peninsula, which would make the phrase Shawmut peninsula as silly as ATM machines and PIN numbers. Others offer, “a fountain of living water,” “a great spring,” “where there is going by boat,” and from a ‘Mr. Drake,’ “Free Country, free land, or land unclaimed,” more of an advertisement than a definition.

A trend discussed by Algonquin scholar Dr. Trumbull of Hartford for Native American geographical naming conventions: “Every name DESCRIBED the locality to which it was affixed.” The description was either topographical, or historical, or indicative of position with reference to or distance from some place well known and fixed. A summary of the syllabic breakdown follows:
Ut: location, at near, against, on this side, on that side, etc.  ^.
Um: attached to a preposition, adverb, or adjective converting it into a noun ^.
Sha: adjective meaning parallel-sided^{3  .}      
Sha+um is concluded to be the neck. Sha+um+ut is that which is affixed to neck. Thus the name is derived from the very feature that narrowly defines it as a peninsula, the parallel-sided sliver of land making it not quite island. A feature so narrow that it created two perceptible sides; that which is connected to a bottle neck? That the Native American name embeds shape description and attachment features makes it seem like Sha-um-ut could be a name for other things happening to fit this set of constraints.

Being surrounded by water save a narrow passage meant this shawmutt could play defense like an island. A fresh water source meant it could support a growing human population. Out of this populations impulse towards self-description, the peninsular inhabitants called themselves Trimountaine, after the promontory’s three distinct hills. There are ambiguities here as well, in trying to discover just what these hills were called. Copps Hill; check. Fort Hill, check. Beacon Hill, check. Mount Whoredom, check. Pemberton Hill, check. Wait, that’s five, not three; what’s up? Further investigation reveals that the last three were a part of one larger hill, the Trimountain. Not only was Boston a city of three hills, one of the hills was comprised of three hills! The name Trimountaine was scrapped probably by some select men to pave the way for the next episode, and the settlers, growing older, thought it sounded a little too fanciful for a city of sophistication. Boston’s classy, some place in England, good alliteration with baked beans. The spotlight dimming, Trimountaine lost some weight and became Tremont.

As the colony grew and broke free of its parent government’s authority [Boston, the Cradle of Liberty], so began a new timescale of geographic deformations marked by human intentions, desire, and problem solving. As the name Trimountaine was ousted in favor of Boston, soon the geographic features for which it was named would go too. Imagine the thinking of colonial settlers on a near-island, living in a colony that is quickly expanding. Wharves extend like little peninsulas into the water at high-tide, but low-tide exposes vast mud flats and salt marshes. A salt marsh might be fun for other plants and animals, but it’s no good for standing upon. You’d sink in the sludge. One can’t build in a swamp, but you could build a dock, by driving wooden pilings down to something sturdy. Take land, of which we’ve got mountains and molehills of, created by excavation for level construction, and dump it in the swamp. Connect two wharfs, make a dam. Widen it, make a road. Those hills on the horizon? “free Country, free land, or land unclaimed,” chimes in Mr. Drake. What would stop us from lopping just a little off the top for a little breathing room. With that, vertical height and accumulated convexity was traded for horizontal expansion into the watery coves of earth’s concavities.

What does this all mean for the Neck? The isthmus was presumably sturdy enough to have not worn away by erosion or succumbed to salt marsh in its years of precolonial use⁴, its exposed surface presumably supported by a gradually widening base of firmer-than-swamp sediment eventually landing on bedrock. Its reliability as terra firma could have been compounded as it was subjected the traffic on what could very likely be one of the most historically traversed roads in the Boston metropolis. An overhead flux of people, carriages, the establishment of buildings, impervious roads easing automobility, tracks for trains, massive truckloads of dirt carted and added the banks enabling a collage of increasingly modern drainage and subterranean infrastructures… all this translates to plenty of heft bearing down upon the soil, vibrations and accumulated weight over time causing a by-some-means measurable degree of soil compaction. If this is a correct assumption, it follows there might be a difference in the water table height or decreased overall soil water content in the sub-city level, between our infrastructural underbelly and the bedrock. How would this area react differently in a situation of seismic activity? Would constructions on the Neck fare better against the Unknown and Variable?

The Puritan City, surrounded by muck. Stagnant water from dams and ad hoc sewage disposal only hastened the desire to fill it all in, with little clue to ecological impact beyond our own self-interest. As the settlement grew, the Trimounts were trimmed, both hills and two of the Trimountain’s peaks were spread out, leaving only a truncated Beacon Hill behind. When it came to filling in the Back Bay, the area to the northwest of the neck, more fill was acquired from Needham gravel pits, a task that was technologically dependent on steam-power for digging and transporting. And with that, water molecules are released into the air that once may have been a part of frozen glaciers. Suddenly you’re in the air.