pipe dreams
On the environmentally sensitive tree hugging South End, we’ve been exploring our many eco-options, everything from syntho-fuel to marital marijuana. Maybe it’s post-guilt syndrome, that remorse we all feel down here after decimating our old growth nettle stands. We can’t walk the woods without grim reminders every stump slowly rotting into swamp and history, the springboard marks still visible where our forbears stood above the impervious wood at ground level to fell the mighty beasts with crosscuts and grit. The very heart of our South End culture got loaded and shipped to markets on the east coast and Japan.
Nettle paper, vertical grain nettle boards, nettle veneers — all lost. As well as the nettle based civilization built around the mythic plants that cast their great shadows from the farms of Elger Bay to the forests of the Camano Head. Baskets were woven from the fibers, herbal remedies were made from the leaves, shacks were built from the lumber. Nothing was wasted. And, of course, now there is nothing. Just the stunted 8 foot third growth forests of stinging splinters, prickly reminders of another great civilization on the skid road.
Shaky Jake, once a fishing boat captain until the salmon too were decimated, has become practically an environmental evangelist, preaching the need to re-green the South End. For a time he ran Canadian Bud through the Border Patrol, but after 9-11 there were too many Coast Guard speedboats with bow mounted heavy machine guns for his profits to match the risk. Now that marital marijuana is about to be made legal, he has visions of hydroponic forests, hemp byproducts and the possibility of the South End rising from the blackberry covered ravines to take its rightful place on the forefront of the Green Technologies the President is advocating to take the place of carbon based fuels.
Nobody has the heart to tell him his dreams are pipe dreams. But worst case, the stuff might make great gasoline. High octane, anyway….
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