Midnight Mutterings | The first Earth Day

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

April 22, 1970. Where were you? Oh, not born yet? Then it‘s understandable why you don’t remember it. You can do what your couldn’t do on that first Earth Day. You can read all about it on the Internet. How it started. Who is the single person who gets the most credit for starting it. That’s Gaylord Nelson, the junior senator from Wisconsin who gets that credit. I just read that on the internet. You can read a lot about Earth Day on the internet, and I admit I didn’t know most of it. But here’s what I do remember.

I was already officially an adult, at least theoretically. Of course there was no internet and what I remember is from my own limited personal experience.

I was in Chapel Hill, fresh from my first aborted experience living in the far West, and I was missing the west coast, though it was also nice to be back with my family and friends. And bugs. Lots of them. Mosquitoes, flies, ticks, midges, roaches, horse flies. Sure, I know they are insects, which live all over the world in every climate except in the very coldest areas of the Arctic and Antarctic. And in the very hottest and driest
places on the Earth. It’s just that it seems like there are more in the humid Southeast part of North America. And more importantly, most of them considered me a major food source. Here on Orcas Island, I live very comfortably in a house with few screens. And I get chewed on sometimes, but not so often as in the Southeast. At least it seems that way. And I never, never run under a small plane spraying DDT on my bare skin, which I did frequently as a child. I know exactly how it smells and how it feels, cool and damp on all my skin not covered by a bathing suit.

On the first Earth Day, I was not sprayed with DDT, partly because it was spring and mostly because I was in the middle of the state of North Carolina and not on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. On that day, I was the teacher of a small class of four year olds in a Quaker School. And we were celebrating Earth Day for the first time. I don’t remember exactly what we did, but most celebrations involved food. Not the organic food I had come to appreciate on the West Coast, but good food. Good sugary food made by overworked mothers doing their very best to take care of their children in a polluted world. Driving cars with lots of leaded gasoline, eating pesticides with every meal, even if the food came from the family garden. I do remember that on that first Earth Day we started a compost pile at the school and learned a bit about what will rot and what will not and what good friends earthworms were to us and to Mother Earth. We didn’t learn much about other soil life and its importance. Baby steps.

We used a lot of green paint that day. The kids painted big pictures on the easel, made trees and other things with green playdough and we drank something green. I’m not sure what it was, but possibly Kool-Aid.

Here’s a frightening quote from Wikipedia:

‘Kool-Aid was invented by Edwin Perkins in Hastings, Nebraska. All of his experiments took place in his mother’s kitchen. Its predecessor was a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack. To reduce shipping costs, in 1927, Perkins discovered a way to remove the liquid from Fruit Smack, leaving only a powder; this powder was named Kool-Aid. Perkins moved his production to Chicago in 1931 and Kool-Aid was sold to General Foods in 1953. Hastings still celebrates a yearly summer festival called Kool-Aid Days on the second weekend in August in honor of their city’s claim to fame. Kool-Aid is known as Nebraska‘s official soft drink.’

(Look, I don’t know how to make those blue words that lead you to an article and I don’t know how to get rid of the ones here, if they show up unwanted. Maybe if I hadn’t been born so long before the first Earth Day, I’d be better at tech and wouldn’t be making such a fool of myself here. Or maybe I’d still be in tech hell no matter when I was born.)

Fruit Smack seems like an ominous thing to feed anyone, especially a small child at school or for Jim Jones to feed to his followers in the Jamestown Massacre almost 50 years after its invention, but only eight years after the First Earth Day.

So I am going to return to green paint. By the first Earth Day in 1970, I had two children. My son was in kindergarten in another little school in Chapel Hill. His baby sister was with me in the Quaker School. My babysitter plan must have failed that day and there was no real day care for children under school age. One of the perks of my job was that I could bring the baby to work with me in an emergency and that day she
was in a small playpen too near the easel. I didn’t see it happen, but some child must have handed her a paintbrush loaded with green paint and she had pretty much covered herself with the paint she hadn’t eaten. (It was probably less toxic than the Kool-Aid.) Anyway, the older children seemed to think she had a good idea and began to paint themselves and each other green. While I didn’t stop them, I did not personally participate, but turned my thoughts to a career change in case the worst possibilities arising from sending children home green were to come true.

Then we went outside to dry off (literally). One small boy lost a sneaker when he was on the swing. Before he could stop himself and retrieve it, a middle-sized dog appeared from nowhere and grabbed the shoe and ran away.

Well that was Earth Day I, and when I got home with the green baby, her brother was waiting for us with the kind mother who had delivered him there. He was oddly dressed in only his underwear and was painted green. It seems like not just the Quakers know how to celebrate a new concept: Saving the Earth with Green Paint and Kool-Aid. And, no, I didn’t get fired. And no, we never saw the little shoe or even the dog again. And yes, we did get my son’s clothes back with the explanation that he had wanted to BE green, not just have green clothes. Green paint washes off if it’s water based. You don’t have to drink Kool-Aid your whole life and saving the Earth is a good idea. Let’s get busy with that.

And no doubt I’ll think about that small shoe next year at this time and years to come. Even if the dog will still be the only one of us who knew what happened to it.

One other thing: It’s probably a bad idea to try to kill all the insects. I understand now that without the pollinators, we wouldn’t have much to eat. And most of the pollinators don’t bite anyway. Some of them do sting. It’s a small price to pay to have food to eat. Happy Earth Day! Paint yourself green.