Midsummer thoughts

It is full summer now. Time sneaks up on me and I see the goldenrod is beginning to bloom. The hayfields are slow growing in the heat—the second cutting just finished. We turn towards late summer’s crackle and haze.

I am glad for my neighbor’s pond—“Nevin’s Pond”—where generations of kids have played and fished thanks to the generosity of the Nevin family. My children have been having a wonderful time swimming and kayaking and looking for snapping turtles. In the evenings the twilight mist lifts off the water and the kids fish for bullheads. This is the idyllic part of living here, the good part of staying here, as I have done; or of vacationing here; or buying homes and settling in.

Mostly my son just wants to go fishing. He is 12 and beginning to sleep in like a teenager. He’s getting that restless and scoffing teenage way about him. But he’s still an excited little kid when fishing. My daughter, at seven, wants to save some of the fish scales on a paper plate—admiring their silvery sheen.

When not at the pond, my daughter likes to make things like little porcupines from milkweed pods and toothpicks. Last week she made some paper wings to tape to her pink high top sneakers a la Percy Jackson—or rather Hermes, Greek god of travelers and messenger to the gods. And she and her brother still play the game of throwing stuffed animals down from the tree house. (This is called “Moo Drop.”) Sometimes I wonder if this will be the last summer they will play together in this way—before their interests drift apart.

Some evenings we come home and watch the TV news. Without a doubt one of the lasting images of the summer of 2010 will be the BP pipe gushing oil into the gulf waters in real time. You could see it every moment on the Internet. It seemed like a new reality show taking place deep underwater. Still, even now that the cap is on and seems to be holding, it is hard to ease the power of that image.

Locally, I will remember the controversy over gas drilling. We went to see the exploratory gas rig on PA Route 191—surrounded by grazing cows. We also just watched the polemic documentary “Gasland” with its repetitive images of flammable tap water which, of course, invites comparison to the BP disaster.

I ask myself what I have to offer to the complex gas drilling discussion. As a fourth-generation resident of this area with a 200-acre piece of beautiful, derelict farm land, I feel caught in the middle of understanding why some people leased their land and why others of us have not. Much of the division over gas drilling seems to reduce to age-old exaggerations and stereotypes that are splintering (or “fracking”) our community apart: “us” and “them,” “local” and “outsider,” even “stupid” and “smart.”

Maybe all I can offer is just this: we are all local. We all live here. We have stayed here or moved here for the enjoyment of the cool, light feeling of the pond water, the love of a slower pace of life. I encourage all to consider a moratorium on gas drilling until we can insure we can do it without causing irreparable harm. We need to slow down and listen to each other.