Long ago, I read a great short story called Love Affair With A Truck. Some Russian Author. The guy has to feel and unload and deal with a river, etc. It does not end well, because it is Russian, but it was in a nutshell how I feel when I drive a tree rig. I know where it is, and it is more than a vehicle. It is a sense of place. Ownership. Identity.
I do not feel that petroleum products are worth driving on, yet, in this business, I use them a lot. To fuel the saws, sure, but also the truck, the chipper, the stump grinder. It is all very well to stand around a coffee shop and decry fossil fuels, and wish for something better. It is also only in about the last ninety years that we have come to rely on them.
They were novelties before that. As proof, I offer that there were still horses in cavalry before WWII.
Elizabeth Kolbert writes wonderfully about how terribly global warming is ripping our planet a new one (In this case, its the ozone hole). One can also find hard evidence on the Peak Oil site(s). We are not going to be gas-guzzlers for long; one way or the other.
I know we Americans get way too much oil, and produce little of what we consume. I know we do injustice to the developing nations who just want their chance at life. In some of those, we are rightfully called oppressors, because although we have a free market, there are some who never can. On this, I disagree with the Libertarians, but don't get me started on my disagreements with political parties. Its like disagreeing with Europe, first you have to define it. By the way, I do not disagree with Europe, I think it is a fine idea.
Like so many of my fellow Americans (why does that phrase always sound so cheesy and overused?) ( Maybe because it is cheesy and overused) I have come to depend on my vehicle. Unlike many of us, I know that drilling the Arctic is a fool's game, and would not change the price of oil in the least, much less change the moral imperative we face when driving to Wal- Mart to buy cheap crap that breaks in a few weeks and keeps other countries polluted, struggling, and effectively out of money. See www.thestoryofstuff. for details or a quick tutorial, in a fun and simple format. You'll laugh, you'll cry.
I also have this weird feeling, because a truck of mine recently broke down, and it should not have been this tough, but it was. It hurt to be without my identity, my sense of place (in the world and in the town). It shouldn't, I tell myself. I am bigger than this. It means so much. A Rig. Something inanimate that some of us still lovingly name, and wash, and spend a third of our waking lives in. I spend a lot of time in traffic, due to the ways business in America is set up, and my own proclivities. The layout of cities, and the market, have grown in to an economy where if you do not drive in service businesses, you do not survive in the service businesses. And I just ended up, like so many of us do, finding a sense of adventure in that. I see different places, and visit them for a day or less, and go home again.
Also, living in Portland, I am surrounded by clouds of suspended guilt particulates as bicyclists whiz around, demanding little from their third world neighbors. Bicycles have cuter fuel than trucks. They are quieter. We don't need to go abroad to steal the oil from under a country to use them. Sure, it pollutes to build one out of metals, alloys, plastic and paint. But only once, then it glides around being cool and a little chic and very responsible to the planet until we need to grow monocultures of Rubber trees (Ficus elastica? A tree man should know this) to re-tread it.
I guess I am saying, fine, take all the morbidly obese wal mart shoppers out of their cars, and the fat cats who waste more in a year than we do in a lifetime, and the war mongers, and the bad guys ( I think we can identify them by their masks and bandannas, right?) But leave me my truck.
Tree work is right livelihood, I whine. We need trees in our urban areas to survive, and to humanize and naturalize these awful spaces we have created to live in. Can't you just leave me a chainsaw? I am whining so hard I do not realize I just began whining in the second person until I am back in the first again. Is that known as being beside oneself? Ooh Third person.. I'm triply tense.
In a few years, no matter what, even if we are fighting wars all over the globe to keep gas prices elsewhere higher... a noble cause; I will be carrying a saw around in a different vehicle.
The oil bubble cannot last. Hydrogen power is a myth. We could extend petroleum stores with the mass creation of propane and like gasses, but we do not, except on a tiny scale.
Meanwhile most folks do not even remember how to stack firewood, much less cook on wood. And that will come when we are craven enough. Smoke will just keep accelerating the process of global warming, as the wars rage, and boats sink, and children die for nought. Oh, Doom, where is thy sting? And why do I resent what I know is inevitable? Because I am honest about it? Probably. The Bushies and the neocons look so happy. Maybe ignorance really is bliss.
Missing a truck you love; and know is killing the planet;and oppressing the four fifths of planetarians who do not drive; is not bliss. But it is a process that so many of us will go through in the near future, and I fear for our sanity. Maybe someone will begin building a better way. I just want my chainsaw.
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