I do not travel well.
I suspect anyone who cares about the health of our planet knows what I mean. Put an environmentally-aware individual into a car or an airplane and monsters begin to dance in our heads: We know about the tons of carbon our trip is dumping into the atmosphere. Our brains are awash with images of polar bears stranded on melting patches of ice.
I flew to Ohio last week to visit my mother. She’s 80, lives alone, and I felt that making the trip was important. I helped Mom plant flower beds in her yard and I did a few handyman, fix-it jobs around her house. I guess I'm not much of a carpenter because, try as I might, I have found that hammer and nails are ineffective at closing the three thousand mile gap between Seattle and Cleveland.
I flew red-eye. Landing in Cleveland at sunrise, I pulled the snapshot camera from my pocket and photographed the moon and the stunning early morning color I saw from my window seat on the plane. Unfortunately, much of that orange glow probably comes from the sun shining on pollution in the atmosphere.
Like I said, I don’t travel well.
Ohio is a beautiful place. There are fine, hardworking people there, some of them very dear to me. I guess Ohioans are probably the kind of folks political strategists have in mind when they talk about “family values.”
There’s a wonderful old Ohio barn--very bright red-- that my mom and I often pass, but I wonder how much longer the barn will be there. Every time I visit Ohio, I see that more and more farmland now grows subdivisions of houses. Nearly all those houses have lawns, and the hardworking folks are out on rider-mowers, cutting the grass. A conventional lawn mower pollutes as much in a hour as 40 late-model cars.
I don’t mean to pick on Ohio. I read recently that in a single day, Southern California’s lawn tools spew out more pollution than all the aircraft in the Los Angeles area.
It ain’t easy, being green. But I know two things for certain: If I cut the grass today, I'll use a reel-type push mower. If I travel today, it’ll be by bicycle.
