Lonely Planet Exercise #16

Present

A poet stands in the cold, her beret perched over graying black hair. She describes to our small group of travel-writing students that when she was young, the boys had “proto-gangs” that made their headquarters in the woods down the train tracks.
I relate, thinking of how the kids in my old coal-mining neighborhood liked to cross the pipe over the sulfur stream to where only deer, groundhogs and dirtbikes dared venture. We played over an abandoned coal mine. I suppose that’s not as bad as playing down the hill from where your father was manipulating plutonium.
This is Pittsburgh, the place that Judith Vollmer describes as “the old China,” with its cheap labor and rich natural resources. Children still play soccer in wide-open fields soaked in old radiation, swim in creeks reeking of sulfur or even sewage, and grow up to tell others of their fairy-tale childhoods.
Their parents didn’t know why the creek would turn different colors, but they knew the factories upstream were keeping their children fed and their homes warm.
Judith Vollmer does not have two thumbs on each hand or a green tint to her skin. The mark that growing up around environmental hazards is a deep concern for what those contaminants are doing to the place that fertilized her poetic imagination.





Past
A poet stood in the cold, her beret perched over graying black hair. She described to our small group of travel-writing students that when she was young, the boys had “proto-gangs” that made their headquarters in the woods down the train tracks.
I related and thought of how the kids in my old coal-mining neighborhood liked to cross the pipe over the sulfur stream to where only deer, groundhogs and dirtbikes dared venture. We played over an abandoned coal mine. I supposed that’s not as bad as playing down the hill from where your father was manipulating plutonium.
This was Pittsburgh, the place that Judith Vollmer described as “the Old China,” with its cheap labor and rich natural resources. Children played soccer in wide-open fields soaked in old radiation, swam in creeks reeking of sulfur or even sewage, and grew up to tell others of their fairy-tale childhoods.
Their parents didn’t know why the creek would turn different colors, but they knew the factories upstream were keeping their children fed and their homes warm.
Judith Vollmer does not have two thumbs on each hand or a green tint to her skin. The mark that growing up around environmental hazards left her is a deep concern for what those contaminants are doing to the place that fertilized her poetic imagination.


* I prefer the present tense—it keeps the scene alive and fits better as I am describing present- day Pittsburgh as well.