Lake Nokomis--no-KO-mis--is one of the chain of lakes in the Minneapolis Park System; a most remarkable and beautiful series of lakes enhancing the city. I once calculated that I had walked around that lake, nearly every morning, for a total of about 3000 miles. I continued walking.
Mari and I have just returned from about a 3000 mile trip with our little camper, actually back to that little lake, and down and around to friends and relatives living in the region. Spencer graduated from high school, you see, and if he is lucky--if all of us are lucky--he will only do that once.
I have been thinking about time and space, not as Einstein did, because I can't, but in the most prosaic, ordinary ways.
I can walk 3000 miles, but it will take a long time, and I do not think I have the time, anymore. My own remaining time is part of what I have been thinking of, not in any desperate way, but in a most ordinary way.
Locavores--how is that for a term? What is it, a crazy vore? A local vore? Or, more likely, one who devours local foods. It is a lovely little idea, intending to procure locally produced, possibly fresher food, and to scratch each other's backs. Once, almost everybody was a locavore, by necessity. One can only walk so far between breakfast and dinner, carrying a haunch of hog. A codfish, carried inland in a gunny sack, is soon a fragrant fish. Columbia, not Florida or California, produces most of the fresh flowers sold in the U.S. King Crabs do not come from Kansas. I have a tin of fishballs in brine from Norway in the kitchen, and Midwest corn and soybeans are shipped all over the world. My spice cabinet is a global collection of great tastes.
Mari's dad liked to tell how once it was in Lake Mills, Iowa, when farmers would load their wagons with corn and drive the team of horses a hundred miles to Decorah, or wherever it was, to gain a better price, taking care when they had to ford creeks and rivers. They knew the safest places. It took long days.
I can remember, just barely, my grandfather talking about taking a wagon into Tacoma, rarely, twenty miles away, to fetch something. It was long before my time; a slower time, a smaller space.
I am not a locavore, nor am I opposed to it. But it is long since the time of back-packed produce, and sailing ships, and steam cars. It is even almost past the time of air-mail postage stamps. We are not sure what a national border is, or how to use it, while at the same time some of us want to build a Great Wall along it, and pretend that we do not, in plain and simple fact, live in much faster times and a much larger space than ever we had imagined possible.
I recall, one morning in Decorah, Iowa, when Mari had gone to work earlier than I had, getting there myself and, while e-mailing Per in Norway, saying that I did not know where she was. Per said that she had gone back to the coffee shop, where I had been: he had heard from her, too.
In an information age, time and space are, in many ways, almost eliminated. The information we need is almost instantly accessible, no matter where it is physically stored. We are no more just locavores. Our neighbors are everywhere. When Joe Aparacio got his 1000th hit as a Tucson Old Timer baseball player, he told me he received a congratulatory phone call from Don K. in France.
The America of coal miners blasting holes through rocks is almost gone. Instead, machines remove the whole mountain top and shove it into the river. The ships at sea, piled high with cargo containers, move like sea-faring ants exchanging goods. Once, and still, sometimes, archeologists marvel that our human ancestors traded projectile points and pottery across hundreds of miles, and wonder how it was done. The cars we drive are multi-national, multi-continental contraptions, and our shirts were sewn in Asia. Donald Trump sells neckties made in Asia and scorns international trade pacts.
Making America isolated, again, is a fools' game. It was never quite that, even at its slowest and smallest. What we have to do is to figure out how to manage what is actually the time and space we live in, to our mutual advantage, because we do truly know, it is to our advantage.
Mari and I have just returned from about a 3000 mile trip with our little camper, actually back to that little lake, and down and around to friends and relatives living in the region. Spencer graduated from high school, you see, and if he is lucky--if all of us are lucky--he will only do that once.
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| maritime-connector.com |
I can walk 3000 miles, but it will take a long time, and I do not think I have the time, anymore. My own remaining time is part of what I have been thinking of, not in any desperate way, but in a most ordinary way.
Locavores--how is that for a term? What is it, a crazy vore? A local vore? Or, more likely, one who devours local foods. It is a lovely little idea, intending to procure locally produced, possibly fresher food, and to scratch each other's backs. Once, almost everybody was a locavore, by necessity. One can only walk so far between breakfast and dinner, carrying a haunch of hog. A codfish, carried inland in a gunny sack, is soon a fragrant fish. Columbia, not Florida or California, produces most of the fresh flowers sold in the U.S. King Crabs do not come from Kansas. I have a tin of fishballs in brine from Norway in the kitchen, and Midwest corn and soybeans are shipped all over the world. My spice cabinet is a global collection of great tastes.
Mari's dad liked to tell how once it was in Lake Mills, Iowa, when farmers would load their wagons with corn and drive the team of horses a hundred miles to Decorah, or wherever it was, to gain a better price, taking care when they had to ford creeks and rivers. They knew the safest places. It took long days.
 |
| www.grit.com |
I am not a locavore, nor am I opposed to it. But it is long since the time of back-packed produce, and sailing ships, and steam cars. It is even almost past the time of air-mail postage stamps. We are not sure what a national border is, or how to use it, while at the same time some of us want to build a Great Wall along it, and pretend that we do not, in plain and simple fact, live in much faster times and a much larger space than ever we had imagined possible.
I recall, one morning in Decorah, Iowa, when Mari had gone to work earlier than I had, getting there myself and, while e-mailing Per in Norway, saying that I did not know where she was. Per said that she had gone back to the coffee shop, where I had been: he had heard from her, too.
In an information age, time and space are, in many ways, almost eliminated. The information we need is almost instantly accessible, no matter where it is physically stored. We are no more just locavores. Our neighbors are everywhere. When Joe Aparacio got his 1000th hit as a Tucson Old Timer baseball player, he told me he received a congratulatory phone call from Don K. in France.
The America of coal miners blasting holes through rocks is almost gone. Instead, machines remove the whole mountain top and shove it into the river. The ships at sea, piled high with cargo containers, move like sea-faring ants exchanging goods. Once, and still, sometimes, archeologists marvel that our human ancestors traded projectile points and pottery across hundreds of miles, and wonder how it was done. The cars we drive are multi-national, multi-continental contraptions, and our shirts were sewn in Asia. Donald Trump sells neckties made in Asia and scorns international trade pacts.
Making America isolated, again, is a fools' game. It was never quite that, even at its slowest and smallest. What we have to do is to figure out how to manage what is actually the time and space we live in, to our mutual advantage, because we do truly know, it is to our advantage.
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