Voices: Earthly Concerns
Like most Scrantonians, I've spent hours in Nay Aug Park these past few years. Yet it wasn't until this very month that I finally gazed on its infamous gorge with my own two eyes.
It was a gorgeous September 12 and my daughters and I were still on a kind of good vibe high from the meditative hours we spent at Everything Natural's "Creating Peace Open House" the day before. The wholesome, whole-earth event proved to be a thankfully reassuring way to deal with that lingering September 11 unease.
In wanting to maintain that comfortably connected feeling, we explored every nook and cranny of the Davis Trail we could find -- wandering off the proper path so we could see the rushing water from another angle, giggling about the unusual mushrooms lining one section of a trail, taking time to poke at patches of moss to see how cushy they felt. We were delighted when the trail came out at the new community-built playground. And having come across the trail at some point in the middle, it felt like genuine discovery when we came out under the trail's actual entrance arch.
"So that's where the greenhouse is," I sighed with exasperation at my former ignorance. "And those must be the earth boxes."
What I hadn't hear about these so-called earth boxes from people I admire, I had sort of read about in news articles. With the exception of a few culinary herbs, I've killed more plants than I've been able to grow, let alone harvest. And though these little nurturing habitats could potentially end world hunger, they just aren't much to look at, even after you see them in action.
The greenhouse, however, is something to look at. It's not glamourous or anything; it's actually rather weathered and unkempt in spots. But I had never seen a real greenhouse before, not one with history and character that wasn't affiliated with Home Depot or some florist. When a boy no more than 12-years-old appeared out of nowhere to offer us a tour, we jumped on it. He knew everything about the plants growing within and without its glass walls, I assume, from training he's received via Scranton School District's BEST program. Annual trips to the pumpkin patch and some goofy children's book about vegetables I forget the name of aside, it was the first time my little city kids got to see how food grows from the earth.
As we rounded the front of the greenhouse I saw a crumbling sign from past that reads, "Community Garden." I imagined Nay Aug in the early '70s sprinkled with happy hippies trying to make sense of life on their own terms.
Funny, isn't it, how they added that the "dippy" connotation to hippie and then it never went away. If you care about things like where your food comes today they'll call you new-agey or granola-head or some such nonsense instead. In feeling nostalgic about the self-sufficiency with which our ancestors lived off the land, we're inadvertently denying progress. The family farm is a dying breed. We treasure it as part of Americana on one hand but continue to commodify on a corporate scale every aspect of life on the other. We can't even catch and eat our own fish anymore - unless we want mercury poisoning, that is. No, now it's only safe to eat to good processed and tested freshwater fish (and seafood, too, I suppose) the grocery store provides.
Yes, that picture of State Rep. Jim Wansacz and the Lackawanna River Corridor Association's Bernie McGurl standing in front of a big inflated fish at a recent press conference did make me giggle. But there was nothing amusing about the accompanying cutline. They and others supposedly concerned about the environment had invited the press to Courthouse Square to draw more attention to the issue of mercury pollution. What use is the Clear Air Act, they implied, if it's not being enforced? Why allow companies to release even more mercury into the air when our world is already so poisoned we can't eat the product of our own backyard?
But fewer of us fish for food. Hunting is more often a sport than a survival skill. And while more of us may invest in landscaping, fewer will tend a garden to put vegetables on the dinner table. What's dippier -- using the earth or losing the earth because we've forgotten that it's there?
--alicia grega-pikul, 23 September 2004
Send e-mail to: apikul@timesshamrock.com.
