The memory came as I thought about my granddaughter who returned to Vermont in February and the snowy winter Vermont has experienced this year. Right now she's living where there is a long, sometimes steep, sometimes gradual driveway, and her mother and her uncle and I used to slide down it on runner sleds and plastic. We didn't have to worry about getting as far as the road because the driveway rose slightly near its end. The only trouble was the long walk back up.
I was seven years old in 1955 — the age of my granddaughter — and in second grade, as she is now. One time I carried the book "The Last of the Mohicans" to school, impressing —perhaps — my teacher with my reading capability. I never read more than a few pages of that book, though. I'm afraid that Cooper's style of writing lost to the more active voice of Carolyn Keene and Nancy Drew's adventures of mystery. Cooper also lost to Thornton Burgess and the lives of Johnny Chuck and Peter Rabbit, Reddy Fox and Sammy Jay.
I grew up in a very small town of about —I would guess —900 residents in southwestern New Hampshire. Westmoreland had three distinct areas: the South Village with the only store was about a mile from my family's very small farm; the North End where the trains from Rutland to Boston and back ran close to people's homes; and East Westmoreland, a cluster of houses on the highway from Keene to Walpole.
South Village had the town's library, a small, one-room building that was open only on Saturday afternoons. Occasionally, a shopping trip to Keene included stopping at the library. More often, Saturday afternoon was spent walking the approximate mile and a quarter with one armload of books (no backpacks in those days) down Glebe Road to the village. And down was correct because the road had a steady, although slight, downward trend.
Sometimes in the summer as I got older and braver, I would cut the length of the trip by taking a trail through the woods and cross a stream on a zig-zag set of planks. But that missed the small store in the village, not that I ever had much in the way of money, but a nickel bought a candy bar or an ice cream back then. A half hour or so was spent picking another set of books to lug back up the road home. I enjoyed re-reading favorite stories, a good thing in that admittedly small collection. I hazard a guess that there might have been maybe a couple hundred children-oriented books at that time. Old Mother West Wind and the Merry Little Breezes, Nancy Drew (but not the Hardy Boys), and the Bobbsey Twins were favorites.
Gene Stratton Porter became another frequently read author. She wrote of the Limberlost in novels that had such grounding that I must have known they reflected a real place. "A Girl of the Limberlost" was the first one I read, and "The Harvester" became the best-loved. Her vivid imagery evoked the wonder of a forest that was damp and boggy, with giant moths and butterflies that caught the interest of a teen-aged girl growing up along its edges. Her descriptions of the flowers and plants that were herbs and harvested for medicines have never left me. Whenever I see tall mullein stalks, I remember "The Harvester." Even though I grew up in a countryside of woods and streams and blueberry patches, the richness of the Limberlost was impressive.
Orion Magazine's recent issue included essays on the power of the individual: short pieces about the difference created when a person decides to do something about something. One essay described a man who was a farmer in eastern Indiana, who discovered that his farm and his neighbors' were created by the logging and the draining of some 13,000 acres of wetland forests known as the Limberlost.
The farmer became aware of his land's history after observing the frequency with which the fields in his area flooded after heavy rains. He discovered the story of the big timber-cutting and the drainage when he first visited the Limberlost State Historic Site in Geneva, Indiana, where Gene Stratton Porter had lived. His discovery changed his life's work for he restored part of his farm to wetland forest, stopped farming, purchased additional land to rehabilitate, returned to college and got a degree in natural resources, and now is the wetland manager of the Historic Site, successfully overseeing the rebirth of larger pieces of the original Limberlost.
The difference that one person can make should never be predicted — nor under-estimated. It was the "yop" from the tiniest Who child that broke the sound barrier and reached the kangaroos' ears and stopped the threatened destruction of the Who universe.
But I am afraid that in our self-preservation fears, we are not "yopping" loudly enough. The Bush administration is systematically devastating hard-won environmental protections and social programs even as it presses mightily to bomb Iraqi people. Day after day after day, yet another rule or regulation is changed, overturned, or ignored. Or fiscal budgets have marked decreases and in some cases no money for operations and for enforcement of what decent regulations remain.
It is hard to fathom that two years of this abominable administration could accomplish such a striking turnover. When the winner of the presidency was decided in 2000, I was one among many in the environmental field who wondered how on earth we would survive four years of this administration. We've now seen what two years have brought, and it's downright ugly.
This president needs to be taught that the power is with the people, and the people need to remind their duly elected representatives that corporations don't vote —at least not yet —but people do. And one of these days, the people will rise up and say that we care about and must have truly clean air, water that's free from taint, food that is not genetically impaired, and goods and services that do not harm our health. Hoping, of course, that the world survives or subverts the proposed Bush war on Iraq, on civil liberties, on the United Nations, and the United States stops being a rogue nation aimed for world tyranny.