Spring Seeding
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union SPRING SEEDING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS T\ S. Eliot thought April was the crudest month because ^ it bred "Lilacs out of dead land" while stirring "Dull roots with spring rain."...
...We have been dissecting and sowing those primal kernels for nearly half a century...
...Besides, our nuclear experts seem to be learning while on the job, which is all right in most professions but not in this one...
...I think,"said the Norwegian, staring up at the blade, "that just a tiny drop of oil in the hinge can fix it...
...Her essay, titled "How We Got Ourselves," is spring-green throughout...
...Surely there is a creative energy shortage in the White House...
...another technician misread a crucial guage...
...said God...
...A year later): "Mother Nature, or may I call you Pinellape...
...A friend has been kind enough to send me an essay about the origins of mankind, written by one Lynn Pollard, who is eight years old and lives in New York...
...The NRC apparently finds solace in its discovery that the errors were merely human...
...Oh God...
...Eight o'clock...
...He said, "We are the only humans on earth...
...pregnant women and their children are returning to Middletown...
...Eggs are percolating...
...That hydrogen bubble that suddenly materialized in the Three Mile Island reactor core astonished everyone, laymen and technocrats alike...
...A whole year passed by...
...Sunday: "Joy of Easter and Passover Lifts Away Winter Woes," announces the New York Times on its front page...
...Two male mallards splash down in the pond and quack for their mates...
...This went on and oh for a long time...
...This morning two Canadian geese, looking plump, well-plumed and unaccountably omniscient, set down upon our pond, climbed ashore and waddled to the edge of our patio, there to await largesse...
...Matzoh is not manna for goose necks...
...yelled God...
...Who can blame them...
...said God...
...Our habit of pillaging the planet's seedbed—the tribute we earthlings have exacted in oceans of oil and whole Himalayas of coal—may have finally backfired, debauching our own soul-seeds and robbing us of springtime...
...A worker in the plant shut down two valves he should have left open...
...In the end they may well drop, but the battle itself will educate people and it may scare the hell out of the oil lobbyists...
...I spent the first part of April sitting home brooding about dust, rain and other varieties of fallout...
...If Congress doesn't stand in its way, Amtrak will cancel 12,000 miles of passenger service by October 1. That's 43 per cent of its present schedule...
...tonight I shall pass out cigars...
...What...
...Nobody who was appointed represents the nuclear or utility industry...
...The reason it happened in Middle-town, we are told, was "human error...
...Well, it's hard to credit temporal opinions when the stakes are eternal...
...This baby had children and the baby had children, so now there are millions of people all over the world...
...Finally, it was the Norwegian's turn...
...The paper today says nobody trusts nuclear experts any more...
...Judge Owl married them...
...Through the rain and mist I try to focus on the large, mysterious world that exists beyond my small, familiar pond...
...But now, Bonni McKeown has told me, the Department of Transportation wants to derail the Cardinal, along with dozens of other passenger trains...
...The visitors chomped delicately, honked noisily, then flew away—probably forever...
...This is the story of the first baby...
...Oh God, thank you so much for the ring...
...Soon after they got married...
...he acts as chilled as the rest of us...
...For years the nuclear clan has been pegging disaster odds at better than a billion to one...
...Thursday: Sunshine at last...
...Monday: I have been standing at our livingroom window, keeping a lookout for omniscient geese...
...their predictions are even less reliable than are Jimmy the Greek's...
...The Englishman shouted, "God save the King"—and was himself saved when the guillotine failed to work...
...I'm so thankful that we're married," said Pinellape...
...But Carter is no sun king...
...To this day no one completely understands why it appeared, or why, mercifully, it went away...
...Blessed solar heat...
...Smarter computers...
...All of us, Jimmy Carter included, could use a few days of sunshine, a little solar encouragement...
...Here are some of my notes...
...It may have happened once but it could never happen again, right...
...Will you go out to dinner tonight with me...
...Where...
...we watch Walter Cronkite for news of our demise...
...It is taking place not in the ground but in our bones...
...You are right, I'm lonely," said Mother Nature...
...The tulip and crocus bulbs Diane and I buried along the walkway last fall were born again, right on schedule, only to be instantly bludgeoned to death by the cold, persistent rain...
...It is a brave try, but most of the other stories in today's Times?tales of dwindling oil reserves and of burgeoning nuclear hazards—suggest that we are still bogged down in the winter of our discontent...
...That reminds me of a story I was told recently by a friend of Norwegian descent...
...Wednesday: Maybe the roots of our malaise lie deeper still...
...This morning's mail is sunny, too...
...Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy and some of his colleagues in the Senate have vowed to fight for a windfall profits tax till they drop...
...rejoiced Pinellape...
...What is the meaning of this odd malaise, this sense of dull roots unrenewed...
...The Racoon Inn," God answered...
...Spring will be a little late this year...
...It's an ethnic joke about a rusty guillotine...
...It's the Passover week, but we fed them English muffins just the same...
...Surely the system can be perfected to overcome flesh-and-blood fallibility...
...Bonni says, "The government wants to move coal but it won't move people...
...They could be linked to the very seeds of our universe, the atoms and their assorted nuclei, the stuff of all beginnings and all endings...
...Yes, he did...
...We have grown slack jaw and forlorn...
...For people in places like Beckley, Crab Orchard and Shady Spring, the Cardinal must do in a pinch...
...In this story you learn why women are usually scared to tell their husbands about it if a woman is having a baby, how we have us, and why men give out cigars when they find out about a baby...
...Slicker lubricants...
...Saturday: It's been a raw, unpleasant spring here in Connecticut, with survival time often upstaging arrival time...
...she whispered...
...now we are reaping...
...Oh boy...
...Tuesday: This morning I got a phone call from Bonni McKeown, a woman in Beckley, West Virginia, who is leading a group of locals opposed to reductions in Amtrak service...
...Money," noted Rousseau, "is the seed of money...
...Yes," said she...
...It occurs to me that the real energy crisis has nothing to do with fossil fuels...
...Perhaps, after all, it's just a petroleum problem...
...Even if it's not raining, it's a good day for ducks...
...One member is a housewife who lives near Middle-town...
...and a third person, without bothering to consult the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), took it upon himself to let off steam, thereby filling Pennsylvania's spring with radioactive isotopes, i.e., nuclear seeds...
...So residents brave the predawn chill, the shoddy service and the frequent rock slides along the Cardinal's right-of-way...
...One day God bumped into Mother Nature...
...It seems an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Norwegian were brought one by one to their beheadings, and each was allowed to make a pronouncement before the blade dropped...
...He promised to show us something even worse: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust...
...Here is the engagement ring I promised you," said God...
...Carter has appointed a commission to look into the whole nuclear mess...
...And after the Pennsylvania tragedy they didn't switch or cover their bets...
...Carter has taken the lid off gas prices without first compelling Congress to impose a windfall profits tax on the big oil companies...
...Friday: A post-Passover miracle?our geese have returned...
...Trains, of course, are remarkably energy-efficient, so it makes no sense for the Carter Administration to preach conservation on the one hand and cut rail service on the other...
...Probably nothing will come of it, but it's a good commission...
...The news was spread and so were cigars...
...For West Virginians, on whom Carter is relying to pry loose millions of extra tons of coal, the contradiction is all the more striking...
...Did he have anything to say before he was beheaded...
...Another false spring...
...They have parked themselves beside our budding euonymus bush (which in October will be a burning scarlet) and are honking happily at Diane, who comes bearing stale bread...
...I am cheered by these unexpected arrivals...
...Louder sirens...
...it constitutes the region's entire public transportation system...
...Diane and I raced to the breadbox, hoping to convert our guests into spring tenants...
...I'm going to have a baby...
...energies are starting to flow...
...Things are stirring again...
...I would not want a nuclear scientist for my bookie...
...Yes," said Mother Nature...
...Who knows why...
...Astronomically improbable" is the way they keep putting it...
...The group calls itself "Retain the Train," and the train they have in mind is the Cardinal, which runs sulkily each day between Chicago and Washington, D.C., passing through scenic West Virginia in the dead of night...
...Then the Frenchman shouted, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—and he, too, was spared by a mechanical malfunction of the guillotine...
...They have no alternative...
...Yet if, by some odd chance, Congress should approve such a tax anyway, the dollars would probably go right back to the corporations in the form of energy research funds...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 10
