What goes around comes around

The Columbia Earth Day celebration was rained out last week. Seems fitting, in a way.
Rain is the epitome of recycling: Raindrop to stream, stream to ocean, ocean to cloud, cloud back to raindrop. Repeat for a million years or so.

Earth Day is very special to me. I was a freshman in college in 1970 when θ -- the Greek letter theta – began appearing on bumper stickers and posters. Theta on a green field was the new symbol for ecology, which itself was a term that never made it into my textbooks.

By April, I was wearing the symbol myself and part of the organizing team for Earth Day 1 at Shasta College in my hometown, Redding, CA. I have seldom felt so proud as when I carried the giant θ-emblazoned flag as we marched through downtown.

I tell that story to my students now and their eyes roll. Few know what “Earth Day” means – nor do they care. I suppose I should be upset, but I’m strangely pleased. Their ambivalence means that hippie-haired gaggle of protesters in 1970 succeeded. We changed the world.

Earth Day did not arise to promote hemp seed, belly dancing and henna tattoos. It came on the heels of warnings by Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich and others that we might not make it to our dotage unless we started taking care of our world.

In my hometown, the lumber mills burned their waste in huge “teepee burners,” which likely were not as bad as the noxious clouds from the burning garbage dump. Clear Creek, near my home, was anything but and lined by 20-foot-high rows of gravel left behind by the dredges that plowed the valley for gold nuggets.

The national picture was bleaker. I remember my eyes burned and I hacked up brown gook while visiting Los Angeles. The Potomac in our capital was known as the river you could smell before seeing. Bald eagles were fantasy creatures – on the verge of extinction from the effects of DDT pesticide.

So we marched. Better yet, we voted. And year by year, life not only went on, it got better.

Now my students watch bald eagles glide over the Missouri River, put their cans in city-provided recycling bags and think DDT is a rap group. Blissfully.

And Earth Day? Just a rain delay. The anger was mostly gone, replaced by gardeners, solar panel salesmen and kids with face paint. But you can’t keep a good movement down.

Like a raindrop.

History writ big on a hillside

In 1966 I became a temporary Virginian when my father moved the family east for three months so he could attend a National Guard NCO school near Washington, D.C. On weekends, we would tour the myriad museums historical sites in the area -- especially Civil War battlefields.

My dad loved seeing the ground over which great military minds plotted strategy. One of my favorite memories is watching him standing in his khaki uniform, gazing from the Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, where Union artillery snuffed out Pickett's Charge.

"The fool. The damned fool," he almost shouted, pointing to the large treeless field over which Maj. Gen. George Pickett marched a whole brigade of Confederates to their deaths. The Old Soldier could see the whole  battle before him and the absurdity of the charge.

Not me.  I could see a big field of grass and some old cannons with National Park Service signs. Battlefields look an awful lot like farms to me. Except for the one we visited today: Little Big Horn.

Better known as "Custer's Last Stand," this National Monument is where Sioux and Cheyenne arrows did to Lt. Col. George Custer what the Union canons did to Pickett.

Last Stand monument, from the Indian Warrior monumen

Custer was also on Dad's list as another "damned fool." Custer wouldn't wait for reinforcements, left his big guns in camp and told the supply train with ammunition to wait behind the hills.

The Montana battlefield itself makes it quite clear why the Old Soldier disliked Custer. To my knowledge, this is the only battlefield that marks the place where each soldier fell.

There is a big cluster of white markers on a small hill where Custer and a small band of soldiers made their famous last stand against a tidal wave of warriors. But the heart-rending story of futility is written in the dozens of other markers scattered across the scrubby hillsides.

When my son and I stopped here on a 2001 trip, the battlefield held Garrett in awe.  That's saying something: Garrett was 16. You go try to impress a 16-year-old guy (Hot cars and pretty girls excepted).

Scattered white stones mark where 7th Cavalry troopers fell retreating up the hillside

But the analytical mind that in time led Garrett to be a successful engineer clicked into action.  I saw in his eyes that same vision of the past that my dad glimpsed that day at Gettysburg.

Today it was Cecile's turn to be introduced to the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The sagebrush was higher this time and the markers of the fallen harder to see.  Still, you could easily sense the desperation of the few hundred 7th Cavalry troopers pushed by an impatient Custer toward thousands of Indians. Indians he was trying to force onto a reservation. You can see where soldiers were picked off one by one as they retreated up a hill, or where four or five troopers were surrounded and slaughtered.

It's a stunning lesson that the land tells better than any movie or book.

The markers of the dead today look down from Last Stand hill

(Side note: I was surprised to find that the Sioux, like the whites, were interlopers at the Little Big Horn.  The battlefield is today on a Crow reservation and the Crow scouts fought with Custer.  A ranger explained that the Sioux was a big, aggressive tribe that had decided to push the Crow off of their hunting grounds. It's hard to find good guys in war.)