THE LANGUAGE OF THE LAND

You all probably know me well enough to know that I am committed to lifelong learning. I’m now in the eighth year of my Retirement Party. One of the joys of this time of life is being able to study what I want to, pulling on a thread of discovery until I get to the end of it. I always thought the pinnacle of intellectual development would involve playing a musical instrument well and being fluent in a second language. So, I plug away at my piano lessons, still at the plink-plink-plink stage, but enjoying progress whenever I hear it.

Our parents sent my sister and me to parochial schools where religious ceremonies were conducted in Latin. We had to study that language in every grade. I got good enough at it that I was the high school Latin newspaper editor, even making up Latin crossword puzzles. The problem is that that was a LONG time ago and Latin is not a language you can use every day. I appreciate Latin’s role in botanical names and in helping to discover root meanings of words in our own language. But it is not as if you could go to Starbucks anywhere and order a soy chai latte in Latin and have anyone understand your order. So, every now and then I take a class in linguistically-related Spanish and feel new brain synapses firing as I struggle with verbs.

I took July off, to get away from our summer heat, to have a break from my volunteer work, and to learn a thing or two. I took a 7,263-mile road trip. Everything was new to me once I got past Little Rock. I drove all the way to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, as far northwest as you can go in our country. Along the way I stopped to tour three Frank Lloyd Wright properties, his only skyscraper (built for an oil tycoon in Bartlesville, Oklahoma) and a unique home and a hotel in Mason City, Iowa. I drove north to Fargo, North Dakota, then turned left and headed west across the northern tier states all the way to the Olympic Peninsula. Coming back, I drove south to Portland, Oregon, then headed east along the Columbia River Gorge, across Idaho (where the tourism office gave me a potato pin and declared me a “spudmuffin”), through Wyoming, across South Dakota, south through Iowa and the Missouri Ozarks. I was in Rolla, Missouri on a special day at the end of July. I stayed in a Route 66 hotel, ate in a Route 66 restaurant, and drove on that historic road with Manhattan Transfer singing their perfect version of “Route 66″ as I celebrated my 66th birthday there. It was an easy one-day drive from there to home.

I retired as a federal trial lawyer who spent most of my time doing coal mining litigation on behalf of the United States government. I couldn’t resist stopping at Butte, Montana to see the largest copper and silver mine there. The mine no longer is being worked, but there was no mistaking the earth scar where a billion ounces of silver were removed. It was interesting to see the impoundment ponds that contained the corrosive water leaking from the mine, and especially to hear the information officer’s description of the “foolproof” safeguards in place to make sure the poisons don’t get into drinking water or flood Butte. He didn’t know my work background, so he couldn’t have known what I thought of his assurance that “Nothing could ever happen here.” I worked in Kentucky coal seams that were between 4 and 7 feet thick. Imagine finding the coal mines in Gillette, Wyoming where the seams were 80 feet thick.

I drove through brilliant green corn tunnels along the roads in Nebraska.

I saw the damage done by the powerful flooding of the Missouri River in Missouri, Iowa, and North Dakota.

As I drove along the freeway through North Dakota, I saw agriculture on a scale I’d never seen before. In some places, no houses were visible; just miles and miles of what looked like wheat. Sometimes I would see a stand of trees a distance off from the highway. This was a sign that humans were there, in their home tucked into the middle of the trees, sheltered some from the heat of the summer sun and the howling snowy winds of the winter. There were few towns, so I imagined the carefully-planned shopping trips to pick up needed items. They must have been all-day affairs with awful consequences for leaving something off the list.

I saw the managed forests in Washington. Trucks loaded with tree trunks lumbered down every road. Their destination was a paper mill in the little town where I stayed. There were immature forests all along the way, with state signs announcing when the last trees were harvested and when the new trees were planted. I saw some six-year-old trees that reminded me that it takes a very long time for trees to mature.

In the Hoh Rain Forest near Forks, Washington (where the Twilight book series is set), I saw trees (and slugs!) bigger than any I could have imagined. Moss hung from the tree branches, clouds often hid the tops of the trees, and little creeks raced downhill making wonderful sounds passing over the rock beds. By the time I was there in July, they already had had seven feet of rain in that forest.

In the meantime, the lavender farms near Sequim, Washington, have to irrigate their fragrant plants because there is not quite enough rain on the other side of the Olympic Mountains, just 40 miles away.

Fences along the roads in Idaho’s high desert weren’t built to keep animals in or out. They keep tumbleweeds from blowing out on the freeway.

I read about the problems in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Millions of dollars have been spent on removing the invasive variety of euphorbia that was taking over, disproving my theory that you can never have too many purple flowers. Probably well-meaning campers recycling packing crates from Asia into campfire wood introduced the ash borer to the Park. Their infestation of a tree always is fatal. Half the trees in the Park are ash and they all are at risk.

I was there when the pipeline broke under the Yellowstone River in Montana. I heard about farmers going to hospitals because of pollution sickness. They knew they could not irrigate their crops with the oil-tainted river water and worried about what kind of harvest they would have and what would happen to their drinking-water wells.

One day I went to Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada. This garden is built in the mined-out limestone quarry for Portland Cement. Mr. Butchart made his family fortune in that business. Mrs. Butchart made things right with our planet by putting things back in better order than she found them. I knew the plants and saw varieties different from ours in the US. I was amazed at what can happen in a garden free of clay soil and Bermuda grass. Downtown Victoria looked ready for a party with the 1,200 baskets of flowers hanging from every lamp post, an annual tradition. There were colorful pocket gardens everywhere along the sidewalks.

I learned about the bubonic-plague fleas infesting the prairie dogs in The Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Cattlemen told me about the problems with free-roaming bison; 60% of the bison are infected with brucellosis which causes their cattle to spontaneously abort their calf-fetuses if they get infected.

And now when I hear a radio report or read something in the newspaper about the places I saw on this adventure, I can imagine exactly where things were happening. I can imagine exactly what our nation will lose if we are careless with our magnificent resources. I can imagine the challenges of recovery from accidents.

As I have thought about this trip, studied materials I brought home, and marvel at memories of all I saw along the way, I realize that I truly understood all that I saw and heard. Perhaps I have become bilingual after all, now becoming fluent in “The Language of the Land.”