Trek. Getting here was a miracle. Here is what we decided as a group to call The Wordsmiths Keep. We’ve all decided that anything goes here so here goes. I’m twenty six and despite Meltdown, and because I lost both parents to a lethal variant of a Dengue virus and because I inherited a small fortune, was able to buy a good used camper and go hike some beautiful places beginning in 2027, though during some really rough weather, and a dream of mine since little. After the third trek, it became my nickname. Making near fatal mistakes, my learning curve was steep so I was able to eliminate most of the guess work, improving the odds of a safer trip. I could write a book about that learning curve! But I start here for my love of nature and the most powerful experience of my short life that completely blew my mind, reoriented my path and put me dead center in a worldwide revolution. Because of it, I gave up my backpack and bedroll and joined Occupy Earth with Arwen.
My mom was a climate change ecologist who studied the effects of a warming planet on a few species shifting their geographical ranges in response to climate change, moving toward the poles and higher elevations. Cool! My dad was a landscaper who specialized in wilding lawns and property, replacing grass with something that grew indigenously, with the purpose of increasing terrestrial zones and of course for carbon capture. When I became a conscious HB, I realized that I had won the Lottery for parents. They both died within weeks of each other.
I was half way up Mount Washington when I heard crying. The beautiful morning had changed from a rare near cloudless sky with the perfect hiking temperature of 63 to a temperature drop of twenty degrees and a misty fog, something not uncommon. A large fast moving stream cut across the well-worn path, large boulders in and along its course. On top of one was a young woman in shorts and a white shirt. Thinking that she might need help, I moved close enough so she’d hear my voice over the rushing water.
In another entrée, I’ll get back to the whole experience of this, half of which I knew in every way you could that I was in love with her. She turned, looked over at me, slid off the rock, splashed across the stream in her hiking sneakers and came right up to me, her tears still rolling down her face. We sat on the bank for a while not saying anything.
Finally, wiping her tears off, she began what I slowly understood to be a love song that at times sounded like a lullaby for her mother, the Earth that she had written. After, she was completely done in. Slowly she described that after so many years of being an influencer in the art field, creatively doing everything possible to get artists to focus on the Earth and its exponential threat, it had finally come with an announcement of a total world wide revolution begun by the scientists and quickly becoming what looked like an historic world event with every slice of culture adding their endorsement. She had to get to one of her favorite spots and just unleash all the anxiety that had built up over the years. The tears weren’t for the idea that she had been at all responsible but for the Earth and its species. She looked directly into my eyes and laid down the gauntlet. As with the revolutions of past, it would be the time for heroic acts by any standard laid down by those past besieged by their own insurmountable threats, many killed to became martyrs for generations to come.
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We hiked down together, stopping when she needed to express a feeling until we got to the parking lot and visitors center where we had smoothies at the little café and toasted to revolution. We stayed at a cheap motel and the next day after phone calls and inquiries, we hooked up with a small splinter group from Occupy Earth in Vermont that had taken the movement onto the streets. She knew a few of the founders who held her in high regard and made arrangements to meet and plan our strategy around the scientists calling for occupation of all corporations that would put profits before the planet.
The next four months were some of the happiest days of my life becoming overwhelmed in not just connecting with other movements and planning it all out but helplessly falling in love with a woman! One of the command centers we visited blew my mind. I thought it was like a ground swell thing being cobbled together as the movement grew but when I walked into the main room of a made over factory building, I suddenly was in a high tech sci-fi movie. It was a monitor net control room with stations every twenty feet of metallic curved desks beneath a bank of screens buzzing with people dressed like they were at home. Some were watching screens full of data, others to others on Zoom, others walking others around explain what everything was. Arwen and I looked at each other in wonder, never in our wildest imaginations believing the movement, any movement could be this sophisticated this fast. Arwen whispered that this was the beginning. Of what, I asked. New Earth, she said. This wasn’t just a world wide protest, this was the what would replace the old sick world order. But all the tech, I said. The paradox, Trek, of using the old to get to the new. Do it on there playing field then shift.
From all that we ended up in this city together with thirty others in a slightly beat high rise with other groups, a few miles from ground zero. The organization that was putting this together had their own Intra Web from a private firms satellite company so the rooms all had portals to the facilitators and daily briefs before we went outside. And stocked with food and water. I’ll let others get more into this if they want to because I’m reaching my quota of allotted space.
Just one more thing. The building had a cafeteria so if you wanted breakfast you had to be there by six. And you could pretty much have anything including coffee or Jolt. What we really liked was sharing in this historic takeover of our planet with the awesome responsibility of restoration in time. We were all ready to accept hardship if that’s what it took. This lasted until they began bombing raids on safe buildings. That was when things went downhill fast. Ciao
