From: Tom Sweetnam (savamutt@trailnet.com)
Date: Mon May 15 2000 - 16:26:19 PDT
Strata Rosa Chalup (aka Ms Gaia...not to be confused with "misguided")
said...some good stuff.
As a matter of fact, right up until that guilt/slavery nonsense, I was about
97.63% in agreement with everything you'd said.
Until very recently, I was one of the more fortunate Californians who
habitated the far north, Humboldt County, up there in the shadow of the
giant redwoods...or what's left of them anyway, where tree-huggers and Earth
Firsters are everyday decent people, and include amongst their ranks Vietnam
veterans, conservatives, small independent foresters, sawmill owners,
democrats, doctors, lawyers, transvestites, Indian chiefs, and maybe even a
transvestite Indian Chief...who knows? When they are you or your neighbors,
they are something quite different from the media anecdotes they are
portrayed as being outside of Humboldt County.
When I first moved to Humboldt Bay, I rented an old house on the outskirts
of Eureka near the zoo. The park adjacent to the zoo has a 150 acre stand of
old-growth redwoods, most of them 250 ft high or higher and most of them
more than 1200 years old. The house I rented had two big tree houses on the
premises, one of them about sixty feet off the ground. I'd climb up there
on warm evenings, where I could see everything, the park, the city, the bay,
the ocean, and if I was lucky, I'd also see one of the most beautiful
phenomena in nature.
The big trees in the park weigh up to one million pounds each, and can drink
up to 1000 gallons a day or more of water, and if conditions are just right,
they begin to perspire in the evening, and over the park a fog bank begins
to form, a fog bank generated by colossal trees, and because of the
prevailing winds in the late afternoon, these fog banks, carrying an incense
of pine mulch, ferns, and soggy soil, drift over the city and out to sea,
and not the other way around as happens anywhere else in the world.
Tomorrow morning I'm tearing myself away from this keyboard and for the next
5 months I'm living 3D. Don't forget digitheads, there's a beautiful world
out there, and you don't have to look very hard to find it either. ;-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 15 2000 - 16:31:04 PDT