In an article in Orion Magazine,
Sandra Steingraber, an expert in toxics, says we’re aware of toxics in
water bottles but not in the water under our feet. We don’t notice that
“nature” is in the city and the suburbs as well, in the cracks, the
margins, underground, and that those bits of the environment also need
protection. Worth reading. My dad would have liked the article. He
talked to me about the need for a person to have a sense of place—quite
aside from any worries about pollution in the ground. A few years ago I
was taking a class in writing for children and one of the assignments
was to write “First Memories of Nature.” Some of mine were about camping
out in the Sierras, but most were about Berkeley before the empty lots
got filled in.
When
I was about six, we moved from Russell Street below College to Cherry
Street at Stuart. Three blocks up Stuart, the houses ended at a
cul-de-sac and the long grass and scrubby oaks started. We called it
Grass Bomb Hill and had clod fights there, and dug up the clay that was
just under the surface to make figures. We didn’t know how to fire them
so they would dry and eventually break and crumble. In the rainy season,
we could slide down clay trails on pieces of cardboard and get
wonderfully dirty.
Stuart Street came down at a lesser slope than Grass Bomb Hill.
It had big maples on it with gnarly roots prying up the sidewalks and
piles of leaves to kick through. When I had no one to play with on rainy
days, I would make little dams in the gutter with stones and sticks and
leaves to divert the water.
My father would take me for walks up behind the School for the
Blind, pointing out the different kinds of trees on the way: oaks, horse
chestnuts, redwoods, bays, eucalyptus. When we got up where we could
see Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco spread out below us, we would
take turns pointing to landmarks with long curls of eucalyptus bark
while the other tried to guess what we were pointing at.
I made friends with Bart Crum, who lived up on Panoramic Way, and
sometimes we chopped down eucalyptus saplings from the thickets near
his house. I don’t remember using them for anything, just cutting them
for the sheer joy of seeing them fall. Last weekend I sang at a fair at
Pt. Pinole where Ranger Tim put up one of his eucalyptus sapling
climbing domes. I had never seen one before but evidently he is famous
for them. Bart and I--our young selves--would have loved it.
Nature
is still there up behind the old School for the Blind, now the Clark
Kerr campus of UC, and also in the canyon to the north where Strawberry
Creek runs. When I lived in a co-op on Prospect Street in my freshman
year at Cal, we would walk the fire trail up the canyon, day or night.
Now the university proposes to build a big research center for biofuels
funded by BP close to Strawberry Creek, an ecological study area. I
reported a few posts ago
on a meeting opposing the building. They say it’s a green building, for
green purposes (we know ethanol ain’t green), but it will be replacing a
lot of actual green trees in an already over-built watershed. This is
where the cyclotron is, and a lot of current research buildings, and
there are already worries about what’s leaching into the water.
When
I was at Emerson School, I remember walking with my class (early
elementary) on some field trip and a kid waving at the Berkeley hills
and saying “They’re smashing atoms up there.” This would have been early
forties. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Atoms are too small to smash.” I
was visualizing a hammer. Little did I know.
In another post, I promised to tell you more about Ginny Walter, my fellow library school student who was arrested during the Free Speech Movement at
the University of California in 1965. She worked for Los Angeles Public
Library for years, then she went back to school to study public
administration and is now teaching at UCLA. She once told me about the
boyfriend she met at school. He came from the Sudan, where many people
were illiterate and depended on word of mouth for news and information.
He himself read perfectly well and all the time, of course, but when he
came to a textbook passage he had difficulty understanding, he would ask
her to read it aloud to him. My father, when he and my mother were
sitting reading in the evening, would sometimes ask her to read a
passage aloud. I never thought anything of it at the time, but when I
heard about Ginny’s boyfriend, I wondered if my father’s preferred way
of receiving information was also through the ears. He certainly was a
storyteller himself and would lecture me at great length, as his mother
did, and I suppose as his mother did him. I was amazed when we went to a
reunion of my grandmother’s family in Michigan when I was twelve and
and a couple of cousins my age said, “Oh, when gramma goes on like that,
we just leave the room.”
Ginny and I have been friends for forty years now, and we are each still doing our bit to change the world. Ginny’s new book, War & Peace: A Guide to Literature and New media, Grades 4-8,
came out last year from Libraries Unlimited. She lists fiction and
nonfiction and picture books, web sites and recordings for young folks
and the adults who work with them. For each, she gives a thoughtful
description and possible uses with children. As an introduction to the
list, she talks about children’s interest in and involvement in war--as
victims, as forced soldiers, on the home front. Subjects range from the
terra cotta soldiers buried in China over two thousand years ago to an
American single mother who has to leave her child when her reserve unit
is called up during the Persian Gulf War. As you might expect, books
about peace are in the minority, but they are here: legends, heros of
nonviolence, stories of various peace movements. Since this list is for
grades four through eight, it’s missing my favorite peace book, Why?
a picture book by Lindsay Camp (Putnam, 1998). Lily’s questions
sometimes annoy her father, but when the alien spaceship lands, “Why?”
is exactly the right thing to say.
One
of the central figures of the Free Speech Movement, Michael Rossman,
died May 12 of cancer. I had run into him here and there around
Berkeley, but I didn’t get to know Michael personally till the rally at
the oak grove to protest yet another UC building project. After he spoke
we sat and drank coffee and had a good talk. He had already been
diagnosed with cancer then. When I emailed him about my concert of
Malvina songs and stories at the Freight in March, he sent regrets that
he couldn’t be in indoor crowds so couldn’t come. He had written an
article about my mother for the Cal alumni magazine back when she was
alive, and he managed to get it reprinted in the Daily Planet just before the concert, bless him. So I’d gotten to know him just in time to miss him, but better than not at all.
©2008 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
THE GRASS THAT GROWS THROUGH THE CRACKS
