Tuesday, April 3, 2018

MY REARVIEW MIRROR


After five days in Michigan, my car is pointed west. Headed home to Oregon, with a couple more stops along the way.

I've been impressed with the ardor my friends along the way have expressed for their home towns and home states. It's good to love the place where you stand. However, demanding that your friends share your jingoism -- not so good. One went so far as to tell me I wouldn't be welcome back because I said and wrote unkind things about his state.

Michigan, my home for nearly four decades, is now in my rearview mirror. The hospitality of my hosts was big-hearted -- as throughout my travels. No one I met in Michigan seemed offended by my frequent complaints about the state's terrible roads. Everywhere -- freeways, local streets, parking lots -- are tire-busting potholes. It gives the place a tired, run-down feeling.

A state's potholes, dreary weather, and gray landscape do not, thank goodness, define its people. Old friends I met are spending their work lives making Michigan a better place -- environmentally, culturally, economically. They are meeting people where they are, enriching their lives with art, music, and dance.

Some are bringing hope to real people who have to live in the squalor of Detroit's shambles. They're helping real children growing up in Flint -- still unable to drink or bath with their tap water, and still living day-to-day with bottled water for everything. And, by the way, paying two times higher water bills than most places, despite being surrounded by the Great Lakes, which hold one-fifth of all the surface fresh water on earth.

I wrapped up my Michigan visit with a four-mile hike with Tim through the still-bare woods of southern Michigan, a land sculpted just ten thousand years ago by mile-high glaciers. We watched dinosaur-like sandhill cranes fly overhead, and debated whether the hills were glacial eskers or moraines. I learned how my friends recently had saved one special hill off in the distance, the highest point in the county and an island of biodiversity, from being ruined by gravel mining. I learned that the hill is a "kame," formed where a melting hole in the ancient glacier poured down meltwater, dirt, and rocks to create this special kind of hummock.

A friend of Tim's joined our hike -- an expert on the area's ecology, and the person about to become volunteer-president of the conservation nonprofit where Tim and I had worked long ago. The group has fallen on hard times, like most of their ilk, and demonstrating but modest political influence or media visibility. I shared with him my pessimism that environmental and conservation groups, including his own, can ever regain the clout they wielded in the decades following the first Earth Day in 1970.

"I hope you can prove me wrong," I said, and wished him well. Like so many others I met on this trip, he's trying his best to make his world a better place.

That's all behind me now, and I'm happy to be right where I am -- headed back to the West Coast, back to my own home state. As I had to repeatedly point out to virtually everyone I met in MICH-i-gun (not mich-i-GAN), it's OR-a-gun, not or-eh-GON.



Day-before-yesterday: POSITIVITY




http://wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2018/04/positivity.html

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