Lave New World

     There are zero pieces of trash along the road this morning, a first in over ten years of walks to work. No Walmart bags. No DQ straws, Bud Light cans, or Juhl boxes. Not even any condoms. I resort to cigarette butts, something I only normally notice when squatting to grab larger pieces. What in the world?

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    This world has already changed with the new coronavirus. Carbon dioxide levels have dropped, smog has lifted, and air travel has plummeted. There's been less driving despite historically low gas prices. People are staying home, making their own food, cleaning their own houses, even taking care of their own children. 

     Before covid 19, I never imagined we selfish humans could actually make the selfless choice to do or buy less to improve the environment. While this global act of restraint is probably as much for self preservation as concern for the planet, it's impact is here for all to see: A cleaner world.

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     When this terrible pandemic has subsided and life resumes in all of it's manifestations, I'm hoping we can all walk more like my first grandchild recently started doing at one-year-old - with surprise at the miracle of movement, with joy at a newfound sense of autonomy, with purpose to live and laugh and love. This may be our best and last chance to save the Earth from ourselves.

Out In The Cold

     I wore one too few layers on this morning's walk to work at thirty degrees. Eyeing a projected high of fifty, a lighter jacket and baseball cap seemed the right apparel for an Appalachian spring day. Arriving at the O school bleary eyed and chilled to the bone, my stiff fingers are barely able to type these lines. It's a familiar feeling.

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     We humans are an inadequately adapted animal for temperate climates. Being bald and warm-blooded, we're unable to regulate winter internal temperatures without outside help. That aid comes in a few major forms - fire and it's many substrates (peat, coal, oil, electricity), caves and their human-made surrogates, and animal skins or facsimiles thereof.
     I grew up in Bound Brook, a working class borough in central New Jersey that resisted the movement to school regionalization that had started in the 1960s. Consequently, it was the job of children to get themselves to school in the roughly two-mile square district without buses. Our family did it's best to keep the kids appropriately dressed for the frigid northeast winters. An annual fall trip to Great Eastern Mills saw us selecting the school clothes we liked and our mother putting them back for the cheaper and often thinner versions. Christmas brought a flannel shirt purchased through Green Stamps and perhaps a sweatshirt or coat from an older sibling who worked. As the youngest of seven, my best and most loved bet for winter warmth was the often threadbare hand-me-downs from three older brothers. Still, on the coldest mornings with temperatures in the twenties and windchill well below, it took an hour or two to revive in the heated classroom of LaMonte Elementary School.

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     It's overused but also really true that what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. Learning to defrost after icy walks to school made me ready to handle the sting of a hard baseball into glove or onto bat in early spring practices. Knowing that frozen fingers would limber up gave me the confidence to catch that opening kickoff and run with the football to start late season games. Amid the current grief from losses in this unusual springtime - livelihoods, lifestyles, even loved ones - it's good to recall that the hands will once again thaw to help make a new world a more sustainable place to eat, work, love, and play.

     

With The Flow

     Last night there was a torrential spring rain in the Greenbrier Valley. It splattered our tin roof all night long, spurring dreams of flash floods and various other means of drowning. On my way to work in the morning, splashing through the runoff while tossing a half dozen bluegills back into Price Run, I came across a turtle with it's back to the current at the side of Judyville Road.
     At less than a foot long, it was small enough that I started to reach to help it back into the channel. In a nick of time, I saw the massive head and neck tucked into the front of an algae-coated shell. This was no meek water turtle or wayward terrapin.

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     Sexual dimorphism exists among many animals, and the turtles display an odd dichotomous version. Among the terrapins or land turtles males are usually larger than females of the same age. Not only do those poor guys have to fight for the right to mate, they then have to wrestle to do the deed with a reluctant bride-to-be.
     Water-living turtles, on the other hand (or whatever appendage), have a more free flowing sexual experience. A lady-in-waiting lounges on a silty cushion while her paramours engage in a watery dance above her. When a guy's combination of colors and movements strike her fancy, she turns tail but doesn't run. The nimble Chippendale who succeeds is usually smaller than the object of his affectations.

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     I'm happy to report that the stream had subsided on my walk home from work. There in the muddy trail of my snappy new friend's path over to a pond is three-quarters of a bluegill, it's head chomped off instead of my careless hand. In an emerging world of water, it's probably best for all of us guys to be like him and go with the flow.