If They Hold A Rally, And There's Nobody To Report It, Did It Really Happen?

Thousands of us showed up for Portland's Climate Action rally downtown, but, buried as I was in the middle of it, I couldn't get a feel for the size of the throng. Fifty years ago, when all my peers were busy having a growth spurt, I was still working on my coloring book and missed the whole thing. Consequently, when I'm in a crowd, it's all tits and armpits to me. I let my husband report to me like my own personal periscope and raised my camera as high as I could to get a better angle on the congregation.

Those of us in attendance are united in believing we need to keep what remains of our fossil fuel supply in the ground, or risk catastrophic climate change; and that the time to switch over to a sustainable economy was probably about thirty years ago, but now would be immeasurably better than later. Brutal arithmetic informs us. And in our little corner of the nation, we are among the custodians of the spigot, and we want it cranked shut. It is our hope that if we refuse to let the coal terminals get built, and refuse the passage of oil trains, and shut down pipelines, and otherwise turn off the spigots, we can help shut this monstrous folly down. It's naive as hell, but movements start somewhere. Thirty years ago, I never thought I'd see people hiding their cigarettes or walking around with baggies of dog shit, either.

The local newspaper thinks we're adorable to have such concerns, but Daddy's got everything under control, and although there might be a few problems down the line, there will be plenty of time to work on them after he's run through all the oil. And in the meantime, we should turn up the AC and watch TV, and let Daddy read the paper in peace.

If he does read the paper, and it's the Oregonian, and he gets all the way to page nine, he'll see a small captioned photo of the 400,000 (or, as they put it, 100,000) marchers in the People's Climate March in New York City. He won't see anything at all about our march, even though it stretched for blocks, and the governor showed up to speak. Our paper's editors are solidly on the side of the grownups, and they patiently explain, as often as they can, that transitioning from fossil fuels will cause a severe economic disruption.

Which it will. There's a disruption coming any way you look at it.

Look, they say. Yes, there's a wildfire approaching the house, but it might just blow the other way--you never know--and we got you a sandbox, so play in that and put the hose down before you ruin the carpeting.

It's those who consider themselves grown up who say we need to let the free market work. And that might well be a functional system, as long as all the costs are figured in. But they never are; not even close. The price of a two-by-four does not include the cost to the atmosphere of the loss of a carbon sink, or the irreversible loss of the topsoil, or even the cost to the taxpayers of bulldozing the landslide off the highway. You sell gasoline for a piddly four bucks a gallon, you're making someone else pay the real price. Not only those in the sacrifice zones, in Alberta, in Appalachia, in the Amazon, whose lands have been skinned and blown up and tossed aside, whose water has been poisoned; and not only our grandchildren (of course, our grandchildren), but our own children, a decade or two from now, who will say you knew about this--how could you? Disease and contagion are on the rise, we're engineering a major extinction event, we're squandering our fresh water, and we're all paying for it, and will pay much, much more later. And we're fine with that as long as we don't have to shell out for it at the pump right now.

All across this country are people who are flailing in the sandbox with their tiny buckets, people who believe that squiggly light bulbs are an assault on their personal freedom, and that their worst problem is the price of a tank of gas. They've been laid low by a paper economy whose rules were written by people much more powerful than they are. They're squashed so flat they can't see over their own scrawny wallets. There's no view at all down there. It's all tits and armpits.

A Hare Under 5'4"

Says here they tried to reintroduce a population of bunnies into central Washington and it didn't take. They put twenty little pygmy rabbits out there in the sagebrush and got nothing for it. Nineteen of the bunnies fell to predators and they rescued the twentieth after a brief debate with a creationist over the likelihood of immaculate conception.

It's hard for me to imagine trying and failing to achieve full bunny saturation. This is not a moonshot. It would be like swinging a bat in Portland and not hitting a barista. But fail they did.

The problem, as I see it, was with the bunnies themselves. They were very small and cute; nuggets, they were. The biologists might as well have thrown out a handful of popcorn. Apparently the local coyotes found them utterly adorable, all the way down.

I've banked on the notion that small equates with cute all my life. I remember being the smallest in the class the entire time I was growing up. That, and having a name that started with a "B," kept me in the front row, where I had to develop skills not required of more easily hidden people. But I had hope. We got measured every year against the kitchen door frame, and I could see a positive trajectory in pencil marks. My mother was short; my father was short; my paternal relatives were uniformly tiny and had to develop curmudgeonliness, scowling, and, in some cases, seizure disorders just to scare away predators. My great-grandfather was barely five feet tall. He was a popular author who did a lecture circuit with Mark Twain. The poster for the tour featured the two under the title "Twins Of Genius." The "twins" part was a joke because they were such different heights. Also, way different genius, but we won't get into that. Anyway, when it came to verticality, I looked at my heritage and figured: hey. I'm due.

Unfortunately, there is no chromosome for being due. After an exciting couple years when I made progress measurable in actual inch fragments, the pencil mark intervals went into millimeter territory until the last one, which is very dark from having been drawn over and over. When you stand to get your height measured, you give it all the stretch you've got, but it never makes a dime's-width of difference. Your eyebrows fly up and your ears pin themselves back but there is no more height to be gained. I was ready to begin phase two of the Brewster growth pattern, all of which is lateral. It makes sense, evolutionarily. We go for a lower and fluffier center of gravity to guard against tipping injuries.

Still, I never felt terribly short. I felt more on the low end of average. Then, as an adult, I got a mail route that included a high school. Walking down the halls towards the office, I navigated a swarm of adolescent giants plumped from birth with high-fructose corn syrup; I bobbed along a trough in a sea of tits and armpits. It's disconcerting.

It only just occurred to me that we could dedicate another door frame for yearly measurements again. I could have visual proof of having approached five feet from both directions. It could be interesting. I'm fine with it as long as I'm adorable all the way down.