There was a moment when I discovered something truly magnificent — when a great light struck me, when something new, different and special opened up for me. I may have been still in grammar school when my friend Julius took me on a hike above his neighborhood. We passed a small pond on the edge of the golf course where he waded to recover golf balls then sell them to the golfers. Cool, spare change, no big deal. We then hiked higher up the mountain and deeper into the woods. All of a sudden it appeared. Sparkling in the sun through the pines was a huge lake, like James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass” from “The Deerslayer.” I felt exhilarated and something wild, something without boundaries, opened up before me.
This lake lay at the base of the cliffy peak — 1,202 feet elevation! — on the ridge above my hometown. The entire montane expanse has been in the conservation of the Commonwealth now for over a century. That lake, now a small lake to me, was where my sense of the wild and my passion for the natural world opened. It became my retreat, my recreation and chapel, all in one.
Did you have a seminal event? A week at your grandfather’s farm, a raft trip down a river, a starry campfire with the Girl Scouts, sleeping in a snow cave with buddies? An event when a door opened and a part of you, previously undiscovered, burst forth?
This place became to me what many of us referred to in the 1960s as “my Walden Pond.” Walden Pond refers to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden, Life in the Woods.” Thoreau wrote a series of essays when he retreated to a tiny cabin on that lake for two years to live with nature without distraction. His writings critiqued the social mores of the 1850s and lauded a more simplistic, minimalist and self-sufficient lifestyle. To idealistic and impressionable children of the post-war boom, traumatized by life in the shadow of the bomb and the voracious proliferation of shopping malls in a disappearing natural landscape, Walden Pond represented an “escape to reality.”
Hand in hand with the Walden Pond series was Thoreau’s essay on “Civil Disobedience” written in 1849 when he was jailed for non-violent tax protest and delinquency as he railed against slavery and the Mexican-American War. Non-violent civil disobedience found pertinence in the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era. Thoreau’s argument that individuals prioritize their conscience over unjust laws and wars was as potent one hundred years later in the
1960s as it was one hundred years earlier with our country’s fight for independence.
Don’t be naive, for civil disobedience is not proprietary! Die hard people on the left and right, both rife with their beliefs and patriotism, tout their ideals. Perhaps the key word in Thoreau’s interpretation of this act is non-violence.
But what about environmental obedience? Is there not a code of ethics and behavior that man should follow out of respect for the earthly domain that (thus far) has sustained us? Respect, if for no other reason than to protect the basics of water, food and air that are requisite to life. Adherence to best practices must support the ecosystem which maintains the health and well being of everyone. There is a breaking point at which sustainability is no longer.
I paraphrase a pearl of wisdom told to me by one of my elders and mentors in the Upper Crystal Valley half a century ago: “You can only poop in your nest so long until you are nesting in your poop.” So simple, but so succinct. This was central to the Thompson Divide movement in defying drilling in our headwaters. Wild animals know not to dwell or foul at their water source.
In my lifetime there were certain things that seemed to be universally accepted and trusted. Decisions of the justices of the highest courts in the land and science have been the rudder of policy that shapes political direction in our country. In this latest “reign,” the former is openly compromised, the later is vehemently refuted. Both of these influences now seem to be administration tools to manipulate an agenda bent on amassing ultimate power, dismantling departments and agencies developed to protect the common good is a coup d’etat.
The next four years stand to be the greatest threat to our democratic republic in the last 250 years. Paul Wellstone verbalized what sentient beings already knew: “We all do better when we all do better!”
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