My Green Manifesto. David Gessner
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banks to the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, searching the branches for birds. I see a tanager blaze by, its chest the color of blood, and add it to an already impressive list of species I’ve noted over the previous twenty-four hours. This is no accident: The river is a magnet for both residential and migrating birds. As suburbs cover more and more previously undeveloped space, the few remaining islands of undisturbed land, like the Broadmoor with its lands patched together by Massachusetts Audubon from purchases of private land beginning in 1962, become even more vital—not just as year-round habitat but also as reliable pit stops during migrations.
After a while, I double back to the launch site but there is still no sign of Dan. I pull the kayak and listen to commuters bomb down the little road, kicking up dirt. After another half hour, an old station wagon with a canoe lashed to the top careens off the road and into the parking lot and the entire Driscoll family tumbles out. The family mood can best be described as frazzled, if not agitated. Something tense is passing between Dan and Donna. (It isn’t hard to imagine that waking the whole family at six so that Dad can go canoeing might not be the most popular idea.) They apologize for their tardiness and I excitedly describe the death of my cell phone. I am completely ignored as a minor marital skirmish ensues about whether or not Dylan should be allowed to wade in the water (which he is already doing). While that is going on, I peek, with dying hope, in the car’s windows to see if there are any cups in the cup-holders. Just then Donna walks up behind.
“I’m sorry we were running late,” she says flatly. “We didn’t have time to get coffee.”
“That’s fine,” I say with a big smile.
I want to kill her.
While I contemplate the gloomy prospect of a decaffeinated morning, Dan inspects the banged up bottom of the kayak, slowly shaking his head. But neither of us is in the mood to dwell on the negative, not when it’s morning and we have a day on the river in front of us. Soon the bustling momentum of preparation takes over: getting the canoe down off the car rack, throwing the kayak back up, packing the canoe, looking at the map to plan out our next meeting point with Donna. She rejects our first suggested rendezvous, which confirms what I already suspect: She will be a decidedly un-Sherpa-like Sherpa. I think of my friend Ian, who was my first choice for the job. He is a childhood pal, an outdoorsman, as devoted as a puppy, and, had nepotism not reared its ugly head, he would have embraced being part of the adventure with the sort of goofy enthusiasm the job requires.
Lack of caffeine, no doubt, is darkening my thoughts, and as we push out onto the river I wonder if an early beer might alleviate the inevitable headache.
It turns out that I don’t need the beer, or the coffee, at least not right away, since the river itself, and the exercise of paddling on it, will soon enough serve to lift my mood.
Dan has a different avenue toward transcendence: No sooner have we paddled around the first bend and, in Thoureauvian fashion, left family behind, when he announces that it’s “time for a little eye opener.” With that he whips out something that smells of skunk, and lights a bowl. This is where Dan parts ways with Thoreau, who preferred “the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven.”
“You can thank Ronald Reagan for this,” he says. “Thanks to his drug laws we started growing the best bud in the world right at home.”
He offers the bowl. I have plenty of friends like Dan—doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, competent professionals all—who seem capable of using pot as mild relaxant. That’s great for them, I suppose, but my system is a little different. One puff for me and our idyllic paddle would transform into a Conrad-like journey into the heart of paranoia. I politely decline.
We paddle quietly for a while on the green shadowy river, and then, as if on cue, a young deer, tawny and hesitant, emerges from the woods, freezing when it sees us. It is a stunning sight there by the bank, and we lift our paddles and let the current carry us, trying to stay as still as the animal. Once we round the next bend we laugh and hoot at our good luck.
“You see, that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t attuned with the river,” Dan says.
I nod, though I’m not so sure. The deer was pretty easy to see. But I’m not about to argue. I listen as Dan launches into the first of the morning’s monologues.
“Nature is my religion,” he begins. “Pantheism is my religion!”
He talks in this vein for a while, and then his sentences take what I will begin to recognize as a characteristic turn. He can’t really talk about his love of nature without spouting a lot of semi-mystical mumbo jumbo. I know how it is. But when his words start snaking their way to the topics of activism and politics they become bold and original.
“We nature lovers are hypocrites, of course,” he says. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say, ‘But you drive a car,’ or, ‘You fly a lot,’ or, ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that they are hypocrites lets people off the hook.”
I pull my paddle out of the water to listen.
“What we need are more hypocrites,” he said. “We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”
I think of Edward Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck. I think of my own environmental Achilles heel, a dainty preference for hot baths over showers—not nearly as cool as Abbey’s boozing, but possibly as wasteful. And then I think of everyone I know and know of and can’t come up with anyone who has an entirely clean eco-slate. Which seems to mean that, logically, Dan is right: If only nonhypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none.
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