Earth Day and Privying Preconceptions and Premonitions

Earth day in Missoula, Montana was wild. Preconceptions were dashed, premonitions were ousted, and privy green ideas and events were uplifted.

You might assume Earth day, which has been filled with rhetoric dating back to JFK's eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963 to promote it, would be a rather elegant sunshine-y day. You might hear a few ducks plummet into a pond, the waves ebbing and flowing. You might watch the patches of sunlight graze the exterior of a deer, bronzing hindquarters for fractions of seconds. You might feel a little wind brush up against your backside, or blow through a minute kernel of hazel hair.

But not in Missoula.

Local temperatures did not surpass thirty-four degrees. The sun did not touch our faces until four in the afternoon. And yet when the local television cameras came out they reported, "Hundreds of people turned out in Missoula's Caras Park on Sunday to help celebrate mother Earth."

And yet thirty booths were set up neatly beneath the downtown canopy in order to spread a frame of mind and a way of life, while speakers and various musicians played (including my mother) into the night jet stream. Booths of Global Warming Solutions called out to passerbyers, local builders discussed their tact to employ sustainable wood, water efficiency advocates chimed, and people chatted about regulating school bus idling for safety, economical and efficiency reasons.

I volunteered from 12 to 5 at the local Sierra Club table, where we passed out literature about the proposed ski resort on Lolo Peak and made passing references to S. David Freeman, who will speak to an audience on May 13 about the three toxins: foreign oil, coal, nuclear energy.

When you cast away your might's and what-have-you's, your preconceptions and premonitions, you are left with exactly as mother nature intended-- the unpredictable, unlamentable beauty of a Sunday afternoon. What I'm trying to say is that nature, even on a day when you're given many assumptions about weather and beauty, still throws you a curveball. All the while, your fleshy hat is filled to the brim with thought. That is was what I think Earth Day 2008 represented in my town. I wouldn't have dug the weather any other way!