I watched the movie Bobby tonight. I remember staying up late into the night in 1968 wondering if Bobby Kennedy was going to live. As a young teenager it was an overwhelmingly painful moment and it was also the moment that politicized my awareness. Watching the clips again brought tears to my eyes and to hear his speech about violence, well I wonder if we have learned much. Here is a link to contemporary photos along with his historic speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Vll-t0H6A
It did bring so many memories to mind. One of those was the wooden portable bookstore that used to be rolled from classroom to classroom in the sixth grade. It was from one of those shelves that I picked out some of my first books that focused on the degradation of our environment, including Silent Spring by Rachael Carson. Part of the dream I used to have was to live on a piece of property, in the country, where I could take care of it. Through so much of my life there have been variations of that theme: back-to-the-land phase; wilderness man phase; anti-ownership phase... all with a theme of living surrounded by the natural world. In my middle age that dream has come to fruition.
The burning river in Cleveland has become an iconic image of our excesses and ignorance. The stories of DDT killing so many birds became a rallying cry. Our natural environment is much cleaner than it used to be even though now we deal with large scale environmental problems like global warming. We have become much more aware and adapted our lives and thinking. Aisling is mostly clean though in the orchard there are thousands of tiny black plastic pieces.
This week we planted three almond trees, two Asian pears, and two filberts. The almond trees came from a company called One Green World (Mollala, Oregon). They have been authorized by a nursery in the Ukraine to grow these hardy almond trees. We'll see if they produce over the next three years. When Bobby Kennedy was shot the Ukraine was behind the Iron Curtain and locked away from the rest of the world. Now we are buying almonds from them, as well as pears that originally came from Asia. The world has become so much more intertwined in trade, economies, and culture. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall... world events that have lead us to having these almonds in our garden.
Prior to watching the movie tonight I was planning on writing about chopping wood and wood fires. Another thing that have a long lineage in my memory. It is like a drip line in a back burn that reaches brightly into the line behind me. There is a pleasure that comes with chopping wood and burning it in a stove. We will have a new stove soon to replace this circa 1980 wood stove... fewer particulates in the air. Maybe another night I'll write about the pleasures of chopping wood. In the Northwest, when wood is piled in the Fall it needs to be covered to keep it from being saturated by rain.
I shall close tonight thinking about those times 40 years ago.
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