Kenduskeag Canoe Race

A Blast from the Past

Hank Garfield

Kenduskeag Canoe Race today. Easter tomorrow. Earth Day on Tuesday. Seems like a good time to re-post this one from eight years ago.

It’s Earth Day All Over the World / April 22, 2017

In June 1989, five months after running aground and spilling its cargo all over Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez limped home to San Diego, still leaking a trail of oil.

I went down to see it at the shipyard, but the public wasn’t allowed in close and there wasn’t much to see. The costs of the American car culture are often hidden from view.

I’m reminded of this as Earth Day approaches, on the heels of Easter. The two celebrations of spring occur within a week of each other this year, thanks to the configuration of the Earth and Moon.

Though only 47 years old, Earth Day is now observed in more than 180 countries. Which makes sense when you think about it. Humanity has many religions, but, so far, only one planet.

The first Earth Day was a response to a massive oil spill near Santa Barbara, twenty years before the Exxon Valdez disaster. It was the brainchild of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat and early opponent of the Vietnam War. Nelson toured the California coastline in the aftermath of the spill and thought that the energy of the anti-war protests could be brought to bear on environmental issues.

From Nelson’s 2005 obituary in the New York Times:

More than 20 million Americans marked the first Earth Day in ways as varied as the dragging of tires and old appliances out of the Bronx River in White Plains and campus demonstrations in Oregon. Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York closed Fifth Avenue to vehicles. Congress shut its doors so lawmakers could participate in local events. Legislatures from 42 states passed Earth Day resolutions to commemorate the date.

Senator Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, who praised him as “the father of Earth Day.”

The Santa Barbara disaster occurred in the heart of America’s car culture, within view of the Pacific Highway. More than 3 million gallons of crude oil fouled some of the most popular beaches in the world, and killed untold thousands of birds, fish and sea mammals.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

The Jan. 28, 1969, blowout was caused by inadequate safety precautions taken by Unocal, which was known then as Union Oil. The company received a waiver from the U.S. Geological Survey that allowed it to build a protective casing around the drilling hole that was 61 feet short of the federal minimum requirements at the time.

The resulting explosion was so powerful it cracked the sea floor in five places, and crude oil spewed out of the rupture at a rate of 1,000 gallons an hour for a month before it could be slowed.

It was the worst oil spill in the nation’s history – until 20 years later, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of crude off the coast of Alaska.6

In those twenty years, California and the United States, with bipartisan support, passed reams of environmental legislation. There is little doubt that these laws have improved the lives of every American. Los Angeles still has smog, but not like it did in 1969, thanks to the requirement that all vehicles pass an emissions test before they can be registered. We still have bad oil spills, like the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but we also have an enhanced awareness of our impact on the planetary ecosystem.

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, Greenpeace ran an ad campaign with the slogan: “It wasn’t the tanker captain’s driving that caused the Alaska oil spill. It was yours.”

Even the car-happy cities of southern California are starting to take this to heart and invest in public transportation. If we are serious about the environment – and the expanding observance of Earth Day shows that we are – there is no mission more important than promoting alternatives to the private car.

Hopeful

Hank Garfield

This year Spring arrived all at once, over a weekend that rolled Good Friday and Easter, the Kenduskeag Canoe Race, four day games at Fenway Park, and the Boston Marathon all into one four-day package. The Red Sox are playing as I write this, and it’s not even noon. My bicycle has a new chain and fresh air in the tires. The sun is shining. Today is Try Transit Day in Bangor, and the already low fares for the Community Connector buses are halved, in an effort to attract new riders.

I’m having trouble finding the necessary focus to write about all this, so please forgive me if this entry seems to be about a lot of things. I usually write a baseball piece around Opening Day, but I’m sad that the inevitable has finally happened and the designated hitter will now be standard across both leagues. This follows the election of David Ortiz, the greatest DH the pro game has yet seen, into the Hall of Fame. Never mind that he was half a player – if you’re going to have a DH, it might as well be someone with an outsized personality who repeatedly rose to the occasion, and happened to play for your favorite team.

But if pitchers (except Shohei Ohtani) aren’t going to hit anymore, they should at least be allowed to pitch. Someone needs to tell this to Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’ll always love Roberts the player for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World. But Roberts the manager has pulled a rookie from a no-hitter in progress in his first major league start, and earlier this month he removed Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game. Insanity.

Baseball is no longer America’s game. We prefer the belligerence of our brand of football and its obvious military underpinnings. Television buries the World Series at night to accommodate the fall football schedule. The Super Bowl is our big annual sporting event, and it happens in February, the bleakest month of the year.

I’m old enough now to let most of this stuff go. Easter is a time to celebrate, not to whine. Baseball will survive. In the first inning I caught on TV this year, the Red Sox started a six-run rally with a walk, a single, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Three straight doubles followed, but small ball opened the door. It put a smile on my face when I went to pick up the bicycle from the shop, in preparation for cycling along the course of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race two days later.

This year I had friends in both the canoe race and the Boston Marathon. I’ll never run a marathon, but I’d like to do the canoe race before I run out of “one of these years.” I suppose what I like best about the canoe race is that it’s first time all year I see a bunch of boats on a body of water. My own boat has a mast and two sails, and requires a bit of preparation before it floats in the spring. But the canoe race tells me that it won’t be long.

Maine is the best place to live in the United States. Having lived in several other places, I’m convinced of this. Sure, our winters are long, but they’re not that stressful if you don’t have to drive in them. Spring, summer, and fall are magical. And Maine is mostly filled with friendly, reasonable people who care about their community and quality of life.

Try Transit Day is an example of this, as public transportation slowly bounces back from the pandemic. The skeleton of the new bus terminal is rising in Bangor’s Pickering Square. When it is completed later this year, it will be a centerpiece of the downtown. Everyone who visits Bangor for an event will see it, and will know that Bangor is committed to a future in which public transportation is a fixture, and not something to be “tried.” We did that, fellow Bangorians, and we should be proud.

More challenges lie ahead, as we navigate the Late Automobile Age in our mostly rural corner of the country. But after an Easter weekend filled with buses, bicycles, boats, and baseball, it’s hard not to be just a little hopeful.