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
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