Where are we Headed?

Sugar snow snakes through the forested highland crevices like frothy white streams flowing toward their summer delta as sugar shacks exhale plumes of steam dotting the horizon from damp pockets. Below, remnants of winter can be seen along the stream’s bank and the house’s northern perimeter; also where the plow has left the most impure mounds. When they vanish, curled clumps of ugly sodden turf will remain, peeled from the lawn like skin from a potato. Spring has sprung on the Berkshire base.

As I sat in my truck in an upland hayfield, freezing rain drumming softly on the roof, dogs romping uninhibited toward a spring hole covered with punky floating ice, I was thinking about the sweet sap of the sugar bush surrounding me. Would it still run sweet for my grandson’s grandson? Or would fertile sugar maples follow the path of the Atlantic salmon out of southern New England north to more suitable climes? It’s a question worth asking; one the corporations and the politicians protecting them don’t want asked, but still worth asking, and asking, and asking again until their ears ring like a  target-range grunt’s.

And what of our native, speckled brook trout, most vulnerable to the airborne waste of Midwestern smokestacks, the same waste contributing to the warming issue along with our gas-guzzling belches? Where will our brookies flee when the local streams are too acidic to support them? Ever think of that?

Just a couple of random thoughts on a cold, rainy spring morn; subversive thoughts at that; spring-spawned food for thought.

Is it wise to ignore the rape of our environment in the name of prosperity and Wall Street greed? That’s the question I was asking before exiting my truck, whistling the dogs back and heading home.

And here I sit, still pondering.

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