Hallelujah, it didn’t rain after all and a good (observed) Earth Day was had by all, one assumes. So first stop, the co-op two blocks away from me, where lots of unneeded stuff was being recycled, trees given away, and later, a darn good 12-piece jazz band entertained the crowd. And our Sunday farmer’s market was as lively as usual, what with all the commerce and this popular banjo-player, but for Earth Day we were offered cooking and gardening demonstrations, too. Nice.
Then I caught a train into the city to see the big Earth Day whoopla on the National Mall. No real schedule was posted – anywhere, for anything – so I can only report that there were lots of speeches and some big-name musicians, prominently Sting. There was also NASA, the Department of Energy, some corporations and a few nonprofits handing out literature and demonstrating aquaponics, lightweight cars, what plastic bags look like in a big wad, and whatever it is that PETA thinks they’re selling by – yet again - displaying naked women (or the illusion they’re naked, here on federal property).
Now dare I weigh in on which experience I enjoyed the most? (See, no judgments, y’all, just a preference). I think the photos tip you off that the local celebration was the livelier of the two, probably because it was mainly what neighbors are already doing, every week, and not intended to demonstrate anything at all.
But I DID get into the spirit of the Mall event when I saw these adorable students from my alma mater, one of whom hugged me when I ID’d myself as an alum. They and 30 others had taken a six-hour bus trip to be part of these event and will be schlepping right back to Northern Ohio this afternoon. I hope they’re glad they came.
Here’s the class of six, plus teachers Adele Schmidt on the far left and Sam Hampton on the far right. My co-director, the talented Mario Starks, is second from left. The students are a United Nations of aspiring filmmakers, and a wonderful bunch who produced some great 3-4-minute documentaries over six weeks. It all happened at Docs in Progress in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.
Winter's a lot more beautiful with the right architecture and some river birches, don't ya think? Like this view of the Mall side of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. (Still, I believe, our hottest tourist attraction.) I was passing by the other day on my way to the Iranian Film Festival going on at the Sackler Museum. To complete the Southwest Asian experience, I took in the Falmana: Book of Omens tour while I was there. All free, of course – like almost all museums in D.C.
To the people who live here, inaugurations are a big annoyance if you don’t like the incoming adminstration or a very cool thing AND a big annoyance if you do. So there you have it – for locals life is all screwed up for a week or so. But waaay more than for the Carter and Clinton inaugurations I’ve seen, nobody I know minds a bit. Euphoria’s breaking out all over the damn place.
Inauguration Day Plans
For us the conversation starter of choice for the last 10 weeks has been to ask each other whether and HOW we were going downtown on the big day, and local newscasters can’t get enough of it, either. Almost daily we hear alarming new crowd estimates and the prediction that it’ll take us four to five hour to get home via public transportation. The Porta-Potty-to-human ratio is announced and we calculate the outer limits of our bladder control. We hint at invitations to stay with close-in friends, or to use their parade-route office as a home base for the day.
Then this week we learned that all the bridges into D.C. would be closed, leaving Virginians creepily isolated from the North, and we all feel a bit under attack. And the big open question – the weather – is now a known factor and the news is not good. Could be worse, sure, but the expected HIGH on Tuesday is 31, and it’ll be in the low 20s when people gather on the mall and along the parade route…to wait for hours.
So after 9 weeks of scheming and dithering about my own plans for the day, the answer is: I’ll gather in a nice church hall near my house to hang out with like-minded friends and neighbors. We’ll eat, drink, and watch the whole thing on a big screen. PERFECT!
Dems from Other Places
So I say let the out-of-towners take my place downtown that day – God bless ‘em! They go to a lot of trouble and expense to get here, and lucky me gets to see a few of them that I know. In the gardening world that includes one gardenblogger – Mary Ann Newcomer the Idaho Gardener - and my new friend at Gardeners Supply Company in Vermont – Maree Gaetani.
Photo: On Tuesday some lucky people will be standing on the balcony of the Newseum where I was last month when I took this picture, and they’ll have a pretty awesome view of the parade.
Remember all the cheerful articles I’ve written about becoming a D.C. Master Gardener? I wrote excitedly about the classes, then missing everybody when the classes are over, about starting to create an organization of Master Gardeners, and then changing our name to DC Urban Gardeners, independent of the city’s Cooperative Extension Service at the Univ. of D.C. But finally, we started working on Projects, including the news blog those stories are on, and our website.
Well, the time to be coy about what’s really going on is over. (Only readers of our blog saw the clues.) Several of us, after trying to correct a really awful situation from within, have gone to the top. We’ve written to the City Council, the Deputy Mayor for Education, and the acting president of the university. The encouraging elements here are the new mayor and an evolving City Council who are focusing on the university, holding hearings, asking for input and apparently willing to see heads roll. So at the urging of a staffer at the Council, we’ve submitted testimony for their oversight hearings. I’ve copied my testimony below the "Continue reading" at the end of this article.
I’ve gotta say it’s weird, and not in a good way, for hands-in-dirt volunteer gardeners to find themselves in a role we basically hate – the whistleblower. But because we’re just volunteers we have nothing to lose – at least we don’t THINK they can hurt us for speaking up. Funds for good urban projects are limited, dammit, and we’re just trying to correct this total waste of taxpayer money. Actually, it’s worse than that because in this case city employees are working against the mission they’re tasked to complete.
Now there’s nothing left to be done, except wait to see if anybody gives a damn – anybody who can do something about it.
There’s nothing like grand architecture as a backdrop for just about any plant. So even after living here 35 years, I have to stop and admire the view. It helps to not think about what’s going on inside.
