Love in the Time of Climate Change (13 page)

Given my involvement, I had been asked by the dean to give a short speech at the dedication of the solar array.

Which is where we were on that sparkling “let the sun shine” October day.

Quick joke: What do you call it when there is a massive spill of solar energy?

A nice day!

It was noon on a Wednesday, the only time at the college that offered a possibility of getting people out for an event. On one level, I was really pleased. There were quite a few faculty and staff present, including all of my colleagues in the science department, the dean and even the college president. There was a local state representative and an aide to our U.S. congressman, both of whom had helped secure funding. A reporter and a photographer from the
Glenfield Recorder
were there.

And for all his bitching, Jesse, in a great show of support, was also there. I knew he would be. And I was pleased to see he had Sarah the nurse with him.

A date or another outing? Hmm …

The bulk of the crowd seemed to consist of the entire extended Sendak family, from the patriarch in a wheelchair to the great grandkids in strollers, pleased as punch to be the celebrities of the day.

Try as I might to get pumped for my speech, I was bumming.

There were no students there. None.

I couldn't believe it. I had talked it up in all my classes. The Climate Changers had put up flyers and assured me they'd be good to go. We had done reasonable Web and e-mail publicity. I had even fantasized about you-know-who showing up on her lunch break.

But there were no students.

I was pissed. Pissed and disappointed. If not even a single member of the undergrad set could even bother to show up on a beautiful day to welcome in the solar age, we were totally screwed.

Damn!

Well, I thought, what are you going to do? Even without students it was a decent crowd.

I took a last glance at my notes as the dean droned on and on about philanthropy and civic engagement and community support and what an inspiration the Sendaks were to all of us, blah, blah, blah.

There was, of course, the speech I was going to give and the speech the Roommate had written for me to give.

Frankly, his was much better. I smiled as I thought about it. That speech went something like this:

Hey—Sendaks. Yeah, I mean you! Wipe those shit-eating grins off your faces, assholes. Now! You've had years making obscene profits at the expense of the entire planet and you want to be thanked for this piddly shit? Are you fucking kidding me? Let me tell you Sendaks, if you think this one act of hypocritical generosity is going to get you a special place in heaven, think again. You're going down, bro. All of you. You're going to be the ones Down Under rolling this stinky, gooey ball of oil up the flaming hill of hell only to have it explode in a fiery mass and roll back down again. And again, and again. For eternity. Eternity! That's almost as long as it's taken to build this damn solar array! Even Sisyphus had more laughs than you're going to have! I can just see it now, bro—the damn Devil hootin' and hollerin', laughing his fool head off with his pitchfork up your ass. Burn, baby, burn!

This was to be immediately followed by a rush of the crowd at the mini–oil barons who would then be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. Not that I was quite sure what any of that actually meant, but I figured that whatever it was they had it coming.

Jesse had nailed it. Short, to the point, totally capturing the essence of my feelings. Also, unfortunately, quite certain to get me fired on the spot.

And, to top it off, they'd probably want their solar array back.

I opted for a different tactic.

The dean finally shut up and sat down to a smattering of polite applause, so now it was my turn. Hiding my disappointment over the MIA students, I cleared my throat and stepped to the mike.

“Thank you, Sendaks [blah, blah, blah]; thank you, Development Office [blah blah blah]; thank you, State and feds and dean and everyone else involved [blah blah blah].”

Boring, but safe.

I did manage to get an impassioned paragraph or two in about The Issue and the imperative to
move
and that this was a
first step along the path to a carbon-free campus
and how
solar was the way to go
and that the
time to act was NOW!

I was almost done, just wrapping up my last
This is our moment!
when, lo and behold, from behind the East Building came a rumbling, ragtag mob of students. Dressed in solar yellow, holding signs that said “YES!!!!!,” they came racing up the hill singing, dancing, tumbling, somersaulting! They circled the crowd, grabbed the mike from me, and, who else but Hannah and Trevor, led us all in a chant:

“What do we want?”

“Solar!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

“What do we want?”

“Solar!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

They were out in full force—the Climate Changers, students from my classes, ex-students, students I had never seen before. There must have been a hundred or more of them including—gasp!—
her
!

They'd been there all along, hidden behind the East
Building, timing their arrival for maximum effect. And it had worked. Really worked!

The crowd loved it. Most of all the Sendaks. The old one lifted himself up out of his chair, grabbed his cane and began dancing with the little ones.

“Yes!” we all shouted. “Yes!”

I had tears in my eyes. It was absolutely beautiful!

“Great to see you!” Samantha smiled, as the festivities wound down. “Great speech. And congratulations! I gotta run, got someone to cover for me during lunch. See you tomorrow!”

She gave a wave and waltzed away, sunshine in a woman's body.

It was, as I said, absolutely beautiful.

T
UESDAY WAS TRAVELING DAY
, and just our luck, the weather was absolutely perfect. Blue sky, sunshine, the nip of fall newly in the air. How many days in a row could it be like this? There was no better time than fall in New England.

A fabulous day for a solar home tour.

Each semester I take my students to two solar houses.

The first is a modest, newly constructed home in Montague Center—three bedrooms, two baths, walk to town. It has all the efficiency features and renewable technology so essential for conscientious new construction: extreme insulation, passive solar, photovoltaics, a heater the size of a hair dryer. The owners are passionate and gracious.

The second house on the tour is Bramble Hill Farm, a renovated farmhouse, a stereotypical back-to-the-land, down-home, funky kind of place, dripping with old New England grace and charm. Not old-and-in-the-way but completely renovated, with the latest in high-efficiency retrofits and solar installations.

No solar McMansions on this tour. No millionaire estates, no houses priced obscenely out of the realm of anything but my students' wildest financial fantasies. Just two wonderful homes that emphatically demonstrate how the future of renewable energy is now.

My students liked the first house. They learned a lot. They got how it all fit in. They clearly witnessed the profound relationship between how we live and The Issue.

They liked the first house but they absolutely loved Bramble Hill Farm.

Bramble Hill Farm is the home of the garlic lady and her hippie husband from the farmer's market. I first met Lonnie and Jacob, Bramble Hill's farmers, at a climate change conference in Worcester three years ago. Lonnie's the one the Roommate says I have a thing for. They came loaded with a basket of newly picked greens to share—lettuce and arugula and radicchio and spinach—plus a few garlic cloves to chew on, and words of practical, down-to-earth wit and wisdom that absolutely blew me away.

I've taken my students to their farm every semester since.

The two worked in the health care field in Boston for almost thirty years, he as a medical researcher, she as a nurse practitioner. Then, about five years ago, they up and fled the big city for the dinky hill-town hamlet of Conway, population 1,800. There they bought an old, run-down, dirt-cheap farm, planted a market garden and an orchard, got a few hives of bees, twenty chickens, and three geese, and hand-built an enormous, 3,000-square-foot commercial passive-solar greenhouse. They have a little Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) setup and sell at two farmer's markets and Glenfield's Market, the local food coop. While garlic is their main gig, they grow and sell all sorts of wonderful organic produce. Lonnie and Jacob are just about as happy and content as two people can possibly be. The move fulfilled a lifelong dream for them, a
welcome goodbye to all those sick people back east, and a happy hello to a new life and a healthy earth.

Their homestead is a showpiece of energy efficiency and renewable energy. A testimonial to possibility. You can't walk off their property without a fervent belief in the power of good people to do good work in the world. You leave brimming with hope. Inspired.

My class drove to the two sites. I was desperately hoping to carpool with Samantha, the thought of which had kept me tossing and turning, sleepless, the previous night.

I had rehearsed witty, off-the-cuff remarks I would make to her that would reveal the depth and breadth of my knowledge on an incredibly wide range of fascinating non-Issue-related topics. I had planned to lead with a fascinating tidbit or two on European classical architecture, deftly move into a non-pretentious commentary concerning the ongoing crisis in Syria, and then close with women's sports trivia. With help from Jesse, I had spent two and a half hours googling in preparation.

As always, reality reared its ugly head, and I was stuck transporting the usual assortment of social outcasts: those carless, odd-duck misfits too shy or socially awkward to ask for rides, their only recourse being to bite the bullet and tag along with their professor.

And by now Samantha had developed quite a fan club and her posse of young fellow women students had insisted that she ride with them.

This trip in my car I had an interesting mix: an autism-spectrum genius with no social graces, an underage dual-enrollment student (high school and college) whose youthful know-it-all-ness and naïveté had alienated all of his classmates, and a first-year overeager brownnoser who laid on the crap thick and fast at the drop of a hat.

“I just love this class, Professor,” she began.

I turned my head and rolled my eyes. I had figured
out years ago that anyone who called me “Professor” had motives to be scrutinized very carefully.

“I can't believe how much I've learned already. I mean, who knew, you know, about the environment and stuff? You have such a gift for teaching.”

I cracked open the car window to let out the stifling stench of bullshit.

We were greeted at the farmhouse by Lonnie and Jacob, baskets on their arms, offering us, you guessed it, choice greens and cloves of garlic to munch on during our visit.

It was hard to imagine these two ever having lived anywhere else. It was if they were born on this very farm, an image straight out of Grant Wood's American Gothic, he with overalls and a pitchfork, she with black boots up to her knees, a checkered flannel shirt, and a feather in her cowgirl hat.

My students took to them instantly.

We got a tour of the 17 kilowatts of photovoltaic ground-mount arrays producing enough solar electricity to power not only their house but their greenhouse as well. Anyone who squawked that solar was ugly had never been to Bramble Hill Farm. The glistening arrays, set against a backdrop of family, farm, and field, were hypnotizing. One student had a fly buzz right into her mouth, it was open so wide.

“This place rocks!” Brownnoser gasped, seriously meaning it this time.

We strolled through the passive solar greenhouse and stared in awe at the twelve-foot-high tomato plants bursting with blazing balls of plump, juicy red deliciosities. The greenhouse used no outside imported sources of energy. Nothing was burned, nothing went up in smoke. But solar energy kept it toasty warm even on those chilly February days. And when the sun got really cranking on sunny winter afternoons, warm air was blown from the top of the greenhouse to a rock-filled bed below, where heat was stored and then fanned out during the night. Against
the north wall were 150 or so 55-gallon drums, filled with water, that would absorb heat during the day and slowly release it at night. No wild temperature fluctuations here.

In the summer, the pitched height of the greenhouse made for a chimney effect that allowed warm air to rise up and out the top north-facing ventilation windows.

Amazing!

It was like a living thing, the greenhouse. Breathing on its own. An endotherm, able to control its own temperature and keep itself in equilibrium, in harmony, in balance.

Lonnie and Jacob had even given it a name.

Alice. Alice the Greenhouse.

“Named after Alice in Wonderland, of course,” Lonnie explained. “Precocious little girl that she was. Alice, meet the class.”