Our Story

by

Lawrence Abbe Gauthier

Ace Reporter

The Westphalia News

THE BACKYARD

After all, this is a newspaper (if only online with no advertising support… yet) and I’m a reporter, but a personal column is, traditionally, personal.

Personally, I’m aware of the news of the day. Not a junkie, but aware.

I’m aware of Ukraine and the changing role of the dollar as the world’s principle reserve currency. I’m aware of well-funded, mostly well intentioned groups here in Colorado passionately against cracking deep layers of shale for oil.

I’m aware of my monthly energy bill.

I’m aware of water.

I live in a desert – the treeless High Plains of America, or, where the plains come up against the Rockies. On the maps carried by pioneers in wagon trains, the area was labeled “The Great American Desert.” There were more shallow graves along this stretch of the Oregon Trail than anywhere else along the old path to the rains of the Pacific Northwest before Lincoln built the railroad. Since geological times, the Plains only real source of water is the spring runoff from the mountains. The Platte and Arkansas would flood for a few months and then turn bone dry.

The most important thing about water is that it’s like an enzyme, which facilitates molecular reactions without being changed in the process. Like a car key. The metallic key starts the engine, but does not become a different key after doing its job, over and over again. When I shower, the water that comes out of the shower head is molecularly the same as the water going down the drain, just dirtier.

It takes energy to clean water and to reuse it over and over. The Denver metropolitan area spends billions of dollars annually for the energy and infrastructure to store, clean and move water around. It’s a hot political issue here. If we were to run low on energy, or (under the current system), the money to pay for it, there would be a great migration out of here, like a nomadic tribe searching for better watering grounds, living hand to mouth, dressed in animal skins. So, the water issue is big news here and I try to keep up, although my local daily, the Denver Post, seems more interested in shootings.

But, of course, the biggest news in most everybody’s lives is continually being made in the homes of people up and down the streets. I make an effort to meet as many of them as possible. If I’m determined to be a reporter who also writes a personal column, it’s my job. Kerouac said the essence of Zen is meeting as many, and as many different kinds of people as possible. Young reporters should be taught that.

When I’m not keeping up with the news or working on my Great American Novel or talking about the day with my wife over dinner, I like to spend time in our backyard.

We live in a suburb, but we have a big backyard where I have lots of stuff going on – splitting and stacking firewood, the gardens (plural), the lawn, construction projects using secondhand wood and a hammer and nails and a hand saw from a pawn shop across town.

Especially at night, in the backyard, looking up at stars in the sky, I’m often filled with an awareness of our perilous existence clinging to the surface of a planet in space. Clinging to a glass surface by fingernails and teeth.

Maybe the quantum theorists are correct and the only reason there are trillions of galaxies out there is because intergalactic plasma clouds organized themselves into points of conscious observers called us. Maybe without us it would be something different. But I don’t think nothing at all. Leibniz said there’s no such thing as empty space.

Those are the sorts of things I often think about in our backyard at night.

Back in my day they always said I had an “instinct for the news.” Hanging by a thread in space seems like a big story to me.