Nowick
Gray, columnist for Alternative Culture Magazine, offers free
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Bananas in British Columbia
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My recurrent obsession: humans and nature. Today
the focus takes the form of a trip to town: Nelson, B.C., home
of some 10,000 relatively sane individuals, in a community growing
fast into a: "city"? It's already officially a city.
Anyhow, it's my first trip to town in a couple of months and I'm
not used to seeing all the types of humanity that live there.
Seeing the old and the crippled, I realize in an instant
how they are all doomed in the scenario of the END
TIMES!that shout from the grocery checkout line unheeded.
Certainly a large proportion of the urban population would be
unfit to survive any collapse of the civilized
support systems that have evolved on the back of beleaguered
Mother Earth. Yet I must also admit at the outset, that young
and strong and fit for survival as I personally feel relative
to most of these citizens--and despite my feelings of being as
a caged animal here in town--I too am one of them, whose only
solace is a coffee bar, pen and paper, a good book in out of the
rain.
True, the ice cream was nice. After that, I tried the Jacuzzi,
the pool and sauna. The whirlpool effect reminded me of what it
must have been like in the warm surf of early coastal India, watching
the surf dance like ephemeral life around my upraised toes. A
mini-revelation. But to what effect? I swam some laps--glorying
in the small miracle of water, immersion and flotation and propulsion
graceful and smooth. The clear, blue, depths...but a human-made
illusion, as outside the gray rain continued in the real world.
This manufactured utopia, chlorinated and concrete-bordered, was
like but was not the real thing.
Which would I choose if given the choice: the cold clear mountain
lake or this body-temperature zoo-pool? The question is moot:
I do choose, every moment. For now, no matter how far I milk the
town/zoo analogy, I choose somehow to stay within it. But not
long.
I quickly move to the sauna, stretch out and bake in the artificial
heat. I reflect on my earlier conversation with Sarah, fresh from
the chiropractor, praising the benefits of waiting for him there
on the sculptured, padded couch, enjoying the refuge from the
bustling street. "He should make it available to people,
charge them for ten minutes just as a way to relax." Now
the sauna seemed to fit the bill.
Again, ten minutes of it is enough--indeed is all that is allowed,
for cautionary reasons. So again I move on--red-eyed and only
temporarily refreshed--out into the gray afternoon of the city
street again, to the bookstore/coffee nook and my present pen.
Is this, then, my cave of refuge, my preferred vision of "nature"?
Why else am I not out there running
down deer?
A postscript: My pen ran out of ink on the last
sentence in the coffee nook. Where did that leave me? Reading
Wired. An hour later, I reveled in the taste of a banana
from the grocery store where the tabloids blared unheard. I loved
it. Hey, I was hungry, by then, and our food from home had become
old, dry, stale. What an effort it is even to look at these questions.
Where does our food come from? Where does money come from? What
would I do if...
Anyhow, a few hours after that, all the paradoxes had resolved.
I'd been playing drums, in a practice to get ready for the upcoming
trance dance. I felt unified,
part of nature, in touch with my inner spirit and connected with
those I had been playing with--and by extension, all of humanity.
We're in this together now, and we need to dig deep to find a
way to maintain connection with that buried earth, somewhere down
under our feet. The rhythm somehow
does it, brings it all home.
--N.G., May
1996
© Nowick Gray
Archive:
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Farouche
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NetGlut:
Notes from a cleansing fast (February 1998)
To
Unix and Back Alive (January 1997)
Webness
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Surfing
Again
(November 1996)
Bananas
in British Columbia (May 1996)
Confessions
of a computer addict (May 1996)
