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Show PAGE 3 THE ZEPHYRSEPTEMBER 1994 S business near the Dry Tartugas? Another piece in the WSJ is going to require sane more time and reading and contemplation. Thaos theory seeps into ecology debate, stirring up a tempest. Jf Nature is not governed by an ultimate order, what's the place of Man?" That's just the title. Complementing that story is one I received called, "In his solitude, a Finnish thinker posits cataclysms. -- What the World needs now, Pentti Linkola believes, is Famine and a good War. Mon on Linkola and the Chaos Theory next time. Finally, I have received clippings from newspapers all over the country of a story that first appeared in the Los Angeles Times. An old girlfriend who I haven't heard from in 20 years even sent me a copy of the story as it appeared in the Hartford Current. It was written by Travel Writer Chris Reynolds. First of all, I should explain that most but not all travel writers are people who want to be writers but who don't have anything to say. They just have this thing about bylines. I talked to Mr. Reynolds for an hour on file phone last spring about Moab. I told him about the building explosion and the fear that maybe we've overbuilt. I explained file impacts of runaway tourism on the fragile desert environment I told him about our pork belly housing boom. I described Easter Weekend. I conveyed to him everything I've tried to convey to the readers of this paper. We covered a lot of ground. When the story came out this is what he quoted me as saying: a tourist-relate- d "We are completely overwhelmed. Everyone should stay home." That was it. An hour's conversation Bummed up in those two sentences. And what's worse, he misquoted me. Badly misquoted me. What I actually said was: "We are discreetly planting elms. Everything grows great in loam." All of Moab knows that my neighbor Toots McDougald hates elm trees and once called me a pain in file ass when I suggested planting them along the fence line. I have to be discreet about planting elms and I wanted Mr. Reynolds to understand that Seriously, we've all felt overwhelmed by the tourists at times, and anybody who won't admit But this classically it is either a liar or brain-dea- d. quote has fallowed me around all summer and I thought I'd put it out of its misery once and for all And my elms have never looked healthier. Must be that loam. xt . This has been a summer of anniversaries: Woodstock, Man on the Moon, the Manson 1944 invasion of Fortress Europe by the Allies, I Murders, Nixon's Resignation. Except for the ! remember all of these events. I remember them clearly, as if they happened yesterday. And it is difficult to believe that so much time has passed and so many memories have accumulated in a life that has seemed to pass like the blink of an eye. Yet none of those anniversaries was as personably remarkable as the one I attended this summer. I've always wanted to time travel...more than anything else I can imagine. One hot, humid Sunday afternoon last month, I got to do that very thing.- Sometimes, when the light is just right when the leava of the catalpa tree in my yard filter the sun in a certain way, when the breeze blows gently and the sounds of fire afternoon are muted and soft, sometimes-.- it reminds of being a kid growing up in the old neighborhood. The center of my life 35 years ago was a place called Glen Meade Road, a considerable distance from here. It was one of the first suburbs in Louisville, Kentucky. Behind our house was a great wheat field that looked as wide as fire ocean to a five year old. At the end of the street stood fire Woods, where we built tree ladders and carved trails through the cane brush. Beyond the Woods lay the Swamp, which was supposed to be bottomless and full of snakes. It was a great place to be a kid. Not everyday, or every week, but sometima, I've wondered where my buddia are. I think all of us wonder about childhood friends who played such an important part of our liva, but whose whereabouts now is a mystery. I knew that out there somewhere, David Kotheimer and Timmy Kremer were all grown up like me (a terrible thought really) trying to survive and make their way on the planet, just like me. Did our experiences in the Swamp help to prepare us for our lives as adults? And I wondered what ever happened to Michael Pottinger, the first kid to ever slug me, but who eventually became my good friend and fellow baseball fanatic. He taught me how to play the bad hop off the manhole cover when we played street ball. Where was Johnnie Jones, or Dougie Miller, or Greg Caudill, or Wayne and David Mark Yarborough? And where...oh where was Jayne Novicki? On that muggy Sunday I found out. Some of the neighbors on the old street who still live there after all these years got the idea last winter to have a block party reunion. To track down the original families going all file way back to 1954. It was a formidable task, but they did it And it was amazing. My entire family showed up...Ma and Pa, my brother Jeff and myself (along with Jeffs wife and kids). But as we parked in the church lot where the wheat field used to be, I was skeptical When push came to shove, did I really want to know what became of the neighborhood? Maybe I was better off with my memories. I looked at my brother; I could tell he had his doubts too. But we were committed, and so we cut through the Pot fingers' backyard and stepped into the Twilight Zone. We saw a registration table where we and everyone else picked up name tags. As a result, hundreds of people were walking tentatively down Glen Meade Rd. staring at each other's chat. I spotted a big guy with a ball cap and a mustache. I gazed at file name tag.- "David Kotheimer?" I said, amazed. "Jimbo Stiles?" David replied, equally stunned. For the next seven hours, I was Jimbo Stiles. I forgot, I guess, that everyone called me Jimbo in those days. At one point in the evening, Johnnie Jones' dad stopped to chat with me. "Jimbo," Mr. Jones said, "I hear you're living out..." Then he paused. "I guess you don't go by 'Jimbo anymore." "Today I do, Mr. Jones," I said. He chuckled. "Call me John; you're old enough now." The old gang slowly found each other and settled in by the sewer grate in front of Joey Fowler's house. If s where we met in the mornings to plan the day ahead. There were important decisions to be made. Should we get ball game together? Or head for the Woods? Or should . . D-Da- y, we see how dose we can get to the old Huntsinger House (a huge old mansion at the end of the street) before Old Lady Huntsinger sees us and scares us half to death in her black dress and raised wooden cane? Or maybe just a good game of Guns (prior to discovery of Intermittent Explosive Personality Disorder)? Before Nintendo and Super Nintendo and 3D--0 Interactive and MTV and Beavis and Butthead and Malls and designer Nika and Walkmans and Watchmans and videos and 99 channels of cable TV and bicycla that cost mare than our '59 Chevy (brand new) and Sega Gamegear and Virtual Reality and Gang Warfare and Driveby Shootings and Armed Students.-befo- re all that, sitting on the sewer grate in the shade of a brilliant summer morning and planning a sprint across the wheat field is the way we passed our days. It didn't take much to make us happy then. My family, like most families, lived in a modest home. We had one car, one TV that picked up two channels, a hi--fi far my parents' music, and a transistor radio to listen to ball games and rock 'n roll music on WAKY. That was the extent of technology in the Stiles home. And it occurred to me that just about everything any living soul needs to survive on this planet and be happy, healthy, and safe was invented by I960. Everything that has come along since then, all those items mentioned above, are what we have created in order to remain a "productive" society with an ever increasing populationwork force. Technology continues to produce amazing gizmos which make our lives simpler, but they are, for file most part, toys, even if we now think they're indispensable. They entertain us, that's for sure. But as a result, we've forgotten how to entertain ourselves. How much creative energy has been lost to technotoys over the last couple of decades? One thing is certain, it was a lot easier to be entertained then, and a lot cheaper too. Over the afternoon, I located most of my old pals, except for Timmy Kremer, who I'm convinced didn't show for fear we'd call him Sugar-coate- d Monkey," a nickname for which none of us could recall the origin. However we decided to give credit to Michael Pot finger, since he usually got the blame for everything. We'd all aged to the point where some of us no longer resembled our former selva at all. Except for Jayne Novicki, who honatly appeared to be getting better, not older. As a duster of boys of all ages surrounded the former Miss Seneca High School, David Mark Yarborough was heard to observe, "Some dreams die real hard." While the Boys of Glen Meade acted like they were still 16, The street itself had changed a lot. Trees I remember as saplings now stood a hundred feet tall. But the wheat field behind our street was gone, paved over. The Swamp had been filled in years ago...I guess it wasn't bottomless after all. And the Woods had been thinned down to a single row of aging trees. Late in the afternoon, my brother and David Kotheimer and I strolled along the edge of what used to be our favorite place in the world. As we passed beneath the canopy of leaves, my brother glanced up and saw something out of place on one of the giant oaks. It was a weathered piece of wood, crudely nailed to the trunk. A remnant of another time. A gnarled piece of history. "That Michael Pottinger," my brother smiled sadly. "When he built a tree ladder, he built it to last" Correction: Last month's Centerpiece included the lyrics to a song entitled, "The Telling Takes Me Home." I identified the author as Ed Trickett. I was wrong and I should have known better. Trickett performed the song but it was written by one of my favorite poets, Utah Phillips, a man who truly understnds what we've lost in the Great American Wat. KEEP RADIO FREEDOM ALIVE Make a difference and pledge your support. FALL RADIOTHON KZA1U MOAB Amc PUBLIC RADIO "vlPL OCTOBER 89.7 FA 259-48- 97 Remember when Moab had no radio? 1-- 10 |