KEYSTONES

 

When our son was very young, we would walk up our street after a rain, and I would pick up every earthworm I found wiggling on the wet pavement. I'd place them back on the yard on the other side of the curb. Our son was more interested in the trucks, graders, and backhoes that stood on empty lots that eventually filled with houses. No sign of earthworms on the packed, damp ground there.

Recently, Scientific American called earthworms keystone species that are necessary for human survival. They do the work of churning up the earth to allow something to grow. Taking the walks up our street made me more aware of what's beneath our feet. It was almost easy to miss the rattlesnake up against the curb. A car had run over it and left little life in it anyway, but I still jumped away when I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. 

I've been reading Walking, One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge. He describes walking as a way to slow down the passage of time. I agree. Traveling by car or plane makes us rush time. On a plane flight, we begin in the morning and quickly pass from morning to afternoon or night. Sitting in a small cafe in a small town on the other side of Mt. Diablo, I noticed a swarm of bees buzzing in and out of several flowering trees. Walking along the streets of San Francisco, I discovered brass plaques with snippets of poetry engraved on them embedded into the street. Who would have thought that poetry would be planted in our streets? In a car, I would have whizzed by the bee-filled tree or been the one to run over a snake. Instead, as I walked, I could take a moment to realize what else was around me.  I would not know what it feels like to walk on volcanic rock or wet sand or pebbly beaches either. 

During my childhood, my family took trips to Minnesota, San Diego, Northern California, Lake Tahoe, and the Sierra, all by car, but slowly. We didn't rush. We didn't have hotel/motel reservations. We would stop in a small town when my dad grew tired of driving or when we clambered to stop at a souvenir shop to buy postcards or found a storefront "museum" filled with pioneer treasures. We explored places we deemed "mother's shortcuts," ones that my mother discovered on a map or that my dad had read about in his many Western novels. 

My parents chose three different routes to Minnesota. They all started on Route 66, but took other highways to get through Arizona, Utah, or Colorado. On our most southern route on Highway 40, we passed through Hopi and Zuni reservations with towns named Tohatchi, Chinle, Fort Defiance, and Window Rock, which piqued my interest in our shared and bloody history during the great migration west in the 19th century. On our most northern route, we drove to Salt Lake City and turned to the northeast to cross the Rockies. We descended to the prairie, where the borders of reservations appear on maps as mere fractions of the land that was once all Native Tribes. We stopped in the Black Hills to see Mt. Rushmore, with its depiction of four of our best presidents. We also heard the stories of Sitting Bull and Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and of Red Cloud, whose alliance with other tribes resulted in the only defeat of the U.S. Army until modern times. We made a stopover in Pierre, South Dakota, to see one of our relatives, and then we traveled through the Badlands with its stark landscape. When we reached the border of Minnesota, the landscape changed again with cornfields lining the road. The earth in Minnesota is rich, dark brown, and fertile, and crumbles in our hands. In the mining areas in the north, the ground becomes deep iron-red, full of minerals and ore. We wouldn't have noticed any of these sights from a plane.

On recent trips to Minnesota, we've stayed on a lake in the middle of the state and listened in the early evenings to the loons' call and the wolves' howl. The wolves, making a resurgence in the Great Plains and keeping the herds of elk to a size that doesn't destroy other natural habitat, are another keystone species, just like the earthworms.

Summer flowers in Minnesota

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Don't miss the documentary, "Sunday Best, the Untold Story of Ed Sullivan," on Netflix. 

As a kid, I would watch the program with my family, but I never thought about what Ed Sullivan brought to TV. The leaders of CBS and Paramount of today should remember this show and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now as shows that represented the best of our culture and of standing up for principles of democracy.