steady hum and whoosh of a windmill at work, the sounds of our cities being powered, our air being relieved.
My contributions to the fight against global warming are small. I reduce, I reuse, I recycle. But I also talk. Sitting in the cooling cab of one of those guzzling pickup trucks last summer, I found myself able, for the first time in my life, to connect with my farm-raised father on issues about the environment. We stopped in the shade of a grain elevator to marvel at the massive bulk of a load of windmill stalks sitting on a still train, and we talked honestly about the ways that energy use in our country has contributed to the carbon crisis. We talked about the need for these windmills, for more of these windmills, and he expressed real dismay that he wasn’t able to put any on his farm because of recently passed state legislation.
The shadows of the windmills loom large in the prairie states. They are changing minds and attitudes simply by standing up, by working slowly and gently and steadily toward a goal. They are symbols that the farmers understand, and they are machines that give me hope. To talk about them is my best contribution; to encourage their spread is my greatest goal.
Jennifer Peters Kepka was raised in the center of Kansas but now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she is completing a master’s degree in creative writing. Her hobbies include yelling at the TV news, forgetting to read the newspaper, and sending postcards.
At the Sign of the Heron, Turn Left
Sarah Wolpow
IF MY HUSBAND COOKED DINNER EVERY NIGHT, I
would be delighted. Should Danish house elves visit in the wee hours and run the laundry, no problem. But offer me a car instead of my bike? Forget it.
I was twenty-three years old when necessity introduced me to my bicycle. No amount of time studying Boston’s public transit maps yielded a solution that would take me between school and home and four different part-time jobs. Having access to a car wouldn’t help, because parking was either nonexistent or so costly as to make working pointless. However, for a bookworm-and-glasses type like me, becoming a Boston bike commuter was a bit of a stretch.
On that first experimental day of my new biking life, I plotted a nervous course through the muggy morning to a path along the Charles River. And there, within minutes, I received a sign that I was on the right track—in more ways than one: a black-crowned night heron sat tucked into a clump of reeds facing the river. I’d never seen one before. As Boston’s traffic sped by in its roller-coaster lanes, this exotic creature sat serenely in another world, looking for breakfast.
Later, heading home, I stopped to watch workers pulling up spent spring tulip bulbs. “Would you like a few?” they asked. A few turned out to be almost thirty, which they stuffed into every available pocket and which bloomed riotously in my garden for years. By the time I carried my bike down the basement stairs that night, I was hooked.
Tens of thousands of miles later, I’m still enchanted. Oh, the sights you can see from your bike that you miss from a car! Oh, the good food you can eat after all that exercise! Oh, the ease with which you can park! Oh, the money you can save! Oh, the flocks of turkeys you can scatter as you coast down hills in the fall!
But putting aside the boundless passion of the converted, I recall myself to the theme of this book: the climate crisis. Transportation is responsible for more than a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions in this country. To solve global warming, we must solve transportation. A Canadian task force on sustainability summed it up like this: our transportation system must meet people’s needs, allow future generations to meet their needs, support a high quality of life, and be affordable, nonpolluting, technically possible, and powered by renewable energy.
The bicycle, the amazing bicycle, is all these things. A person on a bicycle is more efficient (in
My contributions to the fight against global warming are small. I reduce, I reuse, I recycle. But I also talk. Sitting in the cooling cab of one of those guzzling pickup trucks last summer, I found myself able, for the first time in my life, to connect with my farm-raised father on issues about the environment. We stopped in the shade of a grain elevator to marvel at the massive bulk of a load of windmill stalks sitting on a still train, and we talked honestly about the ways that energy use in our country has contributed to the carbon crisis. We talked about the need for these windmills, for more of these windmills, and he expressed real dismay that he wasn’t able to put any on his farm because of recently passed state legislation.
The shadows of the windmills loom large in the prairie states. They are changing minds and attitudes simply by standing up, by working slowly and gently and steadily toward a goal. They are symbols that the farmers understand, and they are machines that give me hope. To talk about them is my best contribution; to encourage their spread is my greatest goal.
Jennifer Peters Kepka was raised in the center of Kansas but now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she is completing a master’s degree in creative writing. Her hobbies include yelling at the TV news, forgetting to read the newspaper, and sending postcards.
At the Sign of the Heron, Turn Left
Sarah Wolpow
IF MY HUSBAND COOKED DINNER EVERY NIGHT, I
would be delighted. Should Danish house elves visit in the wee hours and run the laundry, no problem. But offer me a car instead of my bike? Forget it.
I was twenty-three years old when necessity introduced me to my bicycle. No amount of time studying Boston’s public transit maps yielded a solution that would take me between school and home and four different part-time jobs. Having access to a car wouldn’t help, because parking was either nonexistent or so costly as to make working pointless. However, for a bookworm-and-glasses type like me, becoming a Boston bike commuter was a bit of a stretch.
On that first experimental day of my new biking life, I plotted a nervous course through the muggy morning to a path along the Charles River. And there, within minutes, I received a sign that I was on the right track—in more ways than one: a black-crowned night heron sat tucked into a clump of reeds facing the river. I’d never seen one before. As Boston’s traffic sped by in its roller-coaster lanes, this exotic creature sat serenely in another world, looking for breakfast.
Later, heading home, I stopped to watch workers pulling up spent spring tulip bulbs. “Would you like a few?” they asked. A few turned out to be almost thirty, which they stuffed into every available pocket and which bloomed riotously in my garden for years. By the time I carried my bike down the basement stairs that night, I was hooked.
Tens of thousands of miles later, I’m still enchanted. Oh, the sights you can see from your bike that you miss from a car! Oh, the good food you can eat after all that exercise! Oh, the ease with which you can park! Oh, the money you can save! Oh, the flocks of turkeys you can scatter as you coast down hills in the fall!
But putting aside the boundless passion of the converted, I recall myself to the theme of this book: the climate crisis. Transportation is responsible for more than a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions in this country. To solve global warming, we must solve transportation. A Canadian task force on sustainability summed it up like this: our transportation system must meet people’s needs, allow future generations to meet their needs, support a high quality of life, and be affordable, nonpolluting, technically possible, and powered by renewable energy.
The bicycle, the amazing bicycle, is all these things. A person on a bicycle is more efficient (in
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