Living Lightly
By
LILLIAN VALLEE
14.
Lending a Helping Hand
The rainy season alternates
days of aching clarity—the bluest of blues, cottonwood yellows, and willow
russets—with days of blurred and milky horizons. Enormous flocks of blackbirds
billow and contract overhead, like disembodied lungs. Native plant gardeners
scatter their wildflower seeds, dreaming of spring displays like those described
by Thomas Jefferson Mayfield or John Muir. Native grasses, cheered by the
cooling weather and warm rains, begin rustling their skirts and filling their
tank roots. Backyards are full of hungry birds.
At a local refuge the
volunteer restoration work resumes: creeping wild rye plugs go into the ground,
poison hemlock seedlings are pulled out. We marvel at the tenacity of wild rose,
California blackberry, and quail bush. The area we have cleared of hemlock
becomes a stage for towhee foraging, cottontail nibbling, and gopher and ground
squirrel plowing.
We are struck by an
overwhelming sense of responsiveness to our work, as if the natural world were
pitching in or having a look. The little triangle of earth we have been
cultivating, hard as concrete when we started, is littered with piles of gopher
excavations so rich we spread them like manure around the base of the wild
roses. In other places the soil gives slightly; it is porous, spongy, and
hummocky. The hard repetitive work of hula-hoeing, bending, pulling, and raking
gives way to a moment of rare equilibrium: the work of a community of volunteers
is beginning to show as the native plants gain a foothold. The land, the plants,
and the animals are responding to the touch.
How much we need that sense
of a responsive world was brought home to me in an unexpected and painful way.
One Saturday as I waited for volunteers at the refuge, I noticed a burgundy van
near the restroom. A man was throwing things out of it onto the gravel and first
I thought he was a traveler rearranging his things. Yet his movements held my
attention: they were jerky and the pile near the trash can was growing.
Something signaled distress.
When I approached, three
small children—ages two, four and six, I would guess—surrounded me with such
speed and energy, I was taken aback. They were eating dry Top Ramen noodles and
the four-year old said to me: “Our dad is mad; he’s angry.” Pause. The
father looks at me and smiles sheepishly. His eyes are rimmed red, from
sleeplessness? From drugs? “Our dad said he was going to run over our mom with
the car, but it was just a trick. He didn’t run her over. It was just a
trick.” It is freezing cold and the children are barefoot. The two year old is
in a paper diaper and nothing else. It occurs to me the children are hungry, and
I pull out every edible snack I carry in the trunk, mainly Girl Scout cookies. I
ask the father if it is okay to give the kids what I have, and he smiles and
nods his head. The children grab the bags and won’t let go.
The mother is in the front
seat of the car. Occasionally she says something to the children. They stay
close to me, confident that I can solve this problem I assume is homelessness
and maybe unemployment, a family in crisis. Someone has slept on the concrete
floor of the bathroom on a linoleum strip and sheet. I don’t have a cell
phone, so I have to drive to get help. When I return with someone who can help,
the family is gone.
I am haunted by those three
children, surely a small cipher in the vast statistic of homeless children with
angry fathers and helpless mothers. I am haunted by them because they run to
adults they believe can help them and they expect the world to respond. They
were beautiful children and their directness and lack of fear of the father may
have been evidence that there was a better person there than the one who wanted
to run over their mother.
Refuges are not really
refuges. They reflect, as do our city parks, the state of our collective health,
our collective shortcomings. Refuges can be the sites of mysterious encounters
and quickening, even healing, restoration work, or they can be the migration
sites of malnourished children. Parks can be the sites of leisurely walks and
observations or the setting for hardscrabble dwellings cut into Arundo reed.
I try to imagine those
three children after years of no response, after ten or fifteen years of a world
indifferent to their homelessness, and to the violence and desperation of their
parents. Will they still be appealing to adults to solve their problems? Will
they be capable of appreciating the beauty of a world that is indifferent to
them? These are the thoughts that plague me as I remember the children’s
expectations.
My friend Lynn Hansen and I
have a fantasy about a Magic School Bus. It is packed with equipment for
hands-on science, and all over town we pick up kids who never get to the rivers
and vernal pools. We feed them lunch and let them explore natural places. They
learn about salmon, cougars and tadpole shrimp. Then we drop them off exhausted
and happy. The Magic School Bus is a fantasy, but the desire to be part of a
responsive, healthy culture that restores landscapes and nourishes children is
not.
People without nature to
tutor them in the judicious use of their own powers can be grasping and
ignorant. And nature without vibrant people to sing, dance, and sometimes lament
its intricate melodies is a barren proposition. But there is no philosophy, no
nature, and no restoration on an empty stomach. The gopher made a good point:
bring to the surface the richest thing you have and encourage others to help you
spread it around.
Lillian Vallee is a Professor of Literature and Language Arts at Modesto Junior College.
Edited by Myrtle Osner from The Recycle Rag
Way back in World War II, people were encouraged to recycle to support the war effort. Have times changed. I certainly haven’t heard any calls to recycle to help this war effort. I say this because, it seems to me, that things do indeed change and consciousness can develop. It really wasn’t until the efforts of many, many people that Vietnam produced the feelings, now prevalent, that war is not a heroic thing.
And now we recyclers know that even if war does use more metal for the bombs and the bullets, it’s not a sustainable reality. When we use up for a one-time use, whether the one-time use is a cup or a bomb, it’s not sustainable. While recycling does have its place, and is certainly far better than burying stuff in a landfill, by itself it does very little to change the situation we are currently in of dwindling resources. (But continue to recycle whatever you can!)
Where do we go from here? …. We have exported the dream of a TV set in every house and a car in every garage and everyone wants them. …. In terms of global warming, the effects are already being seen. Industrial production and the use of gas-powered machines create a huge outpouring of heat. This is what the planet cannot sustain. Something has to give. And that something has to be consumption.
The new hero is the one who uses less — the one who takes delight in fixing and renovating. The one who knows when enough’s enough. …. We have been persuaded that we need all this stuff. But we have been sold a bill of goods. All this stuff merely clutters up our lives and makes them more complicated. Do we really need to be able to download our email via a cell phone? Does it make you happier?
Seems to me that our message might sound like a real alternative to the kind of attitude our current administration has toward the environment; an attitude that has taken environmental law backward. …This administration has worked tirelessly to break the spirit of the Clean Air Act, a bill passed by the president’s own father. And we have become isolated from the world through our refusal to ratify the Kyoto Treaty (among others).
Can we begin to value cooperation, value the earth that gives us nourishment, and understand that as a whole human family we are related and need to honor each other?
From The Recycle Rag,
published by Garbage Reincarnation, Inc., Santa Rosa, CA.
