My Apologies To The Albatross

There's a whole lot of packaging in the world.

I'd already ramped up my quest to avoid packaging, plastic in particular. I'm not moved by packaging that purports to be biodegradable. I suspect that it is biodegradable in certain conditions it is unlikely to encounter in real life. People are going to buy it greenily and it will still end up in a storm drain on its way to an albatross belly. I'd prefer to not have it in the first place.

First step was to ditch my Costco membership. Man, is stuff cheap there. But it's all wrapped up in plastic. Some of it is plastic stuff wrapped in plastic and shrink-wrapped to several of its closest friends. I can get all the same stuff at other stores for a little more money. Olive oil in glass bottles. Tonic water in glass bottles. I bring cloth bags for my vegetables and bulk foods, and if the only way they sell mushrooms is in Styrofoam with plastic wrap on top, I look for a different recipe.

All was going well. Many people do a much better job of avoiding waste than I do but my own personal midden shrank considerably. I could even go to small-can once-a-month garbage pickup, except that I know I would forget to put it out at least half the time.

And then some virus showed up and although some things did get better (less traffic, less noise), some things did not, as you may have heard. In my case, I decided to keep my elderly respiratory apparatus out of the grocery stores and get curbside pickup. Which works splendidly well, but it blew my packaging diet all to hell. Vegetables come in plastic baggies. Nothing comes in butcher paper. Feta cheese comes in a hard plastic shell. Okay, it always did.

They run out of stuff, though, and ask if they can make substitutions, and I say "sure." But then there are surprises. (Seltzer is not a substitute for tonic water, Petunia.) I ordered one (plastic) bottle of 600 Benadryl tablets to hold me for the next thirty years and instead I got a tower of little boxes with 600 individually-wrapped tabs in plastic bubble-packs. It took me five minutes to excavate just one. I'd rather have hives.

And of course so much is ordered online. Last month seemed like a package thunked onto the porch every day. I thought it was over and then a big box showed up. It didn't weigh more than a bag of chips. "What is it?" Dave asked, and I said "I think it's for the cat," except our cat doesn't sit in boxes, or, frankly, do any other normal thing. (Her own packaging, however, is first-rate.)

What the hell.

Inside the big box--which you could ship a Labrador Retriever in--were three more boxes. All empty. It was like God's Nesting Dolls Of Waste. I pulled everything out and found one small scrap of paper. Oh! My internet "provider" sent me the boxes so I could send back any old devices of theirs I wasn't using anymore. They'd just installed a new router. I sent back the old device and a couple random cables. They would have fit in a Kleenex box with room to rattle. But there was no preprinted label as promised. I contacted the company and they said they'd send me a new label.

Guess what fluttered out of a big box on the front porch a few days later?

Meanwhile Dave and I are fluttering around in a 2700-square-foot home in a town full of homeless people. A hundred and fifty years ago people routinely jammed all their kids, including the spares, in a small bed like a pile of puppies, in a one-room shack, and not without joy. But I can hardly bear to think of inviting more people to live here even though they'd still rattle. Best I can say for myself is I don't put a lot of heat in the place. I sweater up, and wait for the rest of my heart to thaw.

Against The Wind

It's easy to justify driving your car when you're going to Costco to pick up a shipping container's-worth of food and paper products. But I was just going to buy a little camera and decided to take my bicycle. I used to ride it daily, but it's been moldering in the basement for a while. At the last minute Dave surprised me by offering to join me.

 

Huh! Back in the '80s he found a bike at Goodwill for $15 and bought it on a whim. It was a classic, and identical to the bike he rode in college: a bright orange Schwinn Varsity. The sucker weighs in at a smooth two hundred pounds if you take the saddle off, although that makes it marginally less comfortable, and you do need a strong dwarf with a wrench to take off the wheels. 

 

He rode it straight downtown to surprise me at work, and we rode home together, uphill, and then he stashed it in a dark corner of the basement. Fifteen years later he peeled a felt of dust off it and joined me on a half-day trip, after which it was dispatched to an even darker corner of the basement. The geyser of inspiration for Dave to ride a bike has a fifteen-year periodicity, and I guess he was due again. So we hauled out our bikes, pumped up the tires, blew up one of them with a boom that dropped war vets for a mile around, and eventually spanked them into working condition.

 

Our route took us along the Columbia River on a dedicated bike path. It was swell! It was grand! The temperature was mild, ospreys wheeled in the sky, herons struck picturesque poses along the shoreline, wishes were lavishly granted. I marveled once again at what a wonderful invention was the bicycle: with almost no effort at all, we were gliding along at a nice clip, with Mt. Hood smiling in the blue in front of us. We were strong! We were sailing! There was no limit to our powers! We rolled smugly through the acres of SUVs at the Costco parking lot and found, to our amazement, a bike rack right out front. It didn't have a scratch on it. I bought my camera and we headed home.

Within a few blocks we were back on Marine Drive and nothing was right. We ran into something a lot like Shinola. We were pressing miserably into the wind, pedaling hard just to stay ahead of our own dark impulses. Here's the thing. When the wind is at your back, you don't even notice it. You think you have superpowers. But a headwind is debilitating. You'll brave the rain; you understand the rain. You're fine with pushing up a mountain; you understand a mountain. You expect to work harder when you've loaded up your saddlebags with heavy things. But you can't see a headwind. You can only feel it, and it feels pervasive, and wrong, and deeply unfair.

Still you battle on, with salt in your eyes, inching closer to home. But you can dream. You can imagine flipping it around just one more time, just to feel those righteous sails billow, to be mighty and invincible again. All we need is one U-turn, and we're suddenly awesome, we're right back in charge. Just two white kids flying into the future we so deserve.