Sara Lacy Bernard

When I returned to San Francisco about a month ago from ten days trekking in the eastern Sierras, usually between 9 and 12 thousand feet, sucking in air and water so icy fresh that I felt scrubbed inside and out, with trepidation I turned on a computer.

High-class urban things like hot showers and cold beer become unspeakably luxurious when you're fresh off a trail, but technology? It's a bane. The hyper-speed info-mania runs counter to everything I imbibe in the wilderness. And so, on virtual tiptoes, I scanned the email mountain, looking for good news.

Naturally, one more plea from MoveOn.org hit me in the gut: yup, Obama's siding with the Republicans on shaving down the laws of the EPA. Why? Because, of course, environmental protection is "job-destroying."

Wait wait wait. Have we come this far? Are we this far gone? Even Bill McKibben has changed his tune, now writing about "what the future will feel like once we don't prevent global warming."

A federal judge just officially sided with the coal industry against the EPA's Clean Water Act. A recent study reports the air quality in the very parks I felt so clean to be at record-breaking lows. California, like many, many states, is closing 70 of its parks, in lockstep with the downward-spiraling of social services, health care, public education, public libraries, rain forests, polar ice caps, you name it. Unless, that is, if you're talking about the upsurging of corporate greed, Wall Street manipulations, right-wing privatization, needless incarceration, hurricanes, and sea levels.

Coming from a childhood of playing in the north woods and a lifetime of wilderness-seeking across the globe -- from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees to the Andes to the Adirondacks -- let's just say, THIS STUFF IS CRAZY. To me, the idea that the wilderness isn't by a long shot the priority for anyone in power, especially in the U.S., is kind of unthinkable. Not that it's surprising, per se, but it feels ironic that green's the new black, but the green space I've always taken for granted is consistently at higher and higher risk of annihilation. I'm hardly an activist, besides signing a few MoveOn.org or Change.org petitions or throwing a few dollars at the ACLU and Greenpeace or attending the occasional stampede at San Francisco's Civic Center (woot! by the way, to everyone occupying Wall Street), but the carelessness still makes me furious, the brutal realities make me cry (like Chief Raoni when Brazil approved the Bel Monte Dam project, which would have flooded a million acres of rain forest; luckily, someone cares and maybe it won't happen, yet...).

Because when I say wilderness, I mean WILD. I mean open space, wide space, loose and tangled and untouched space, cycle-of-life-affirming flora and fauna, not just replanted stands of red pine for sustainable paper consumption. I mean WILD. I mean you and me. The forests, mountains, the jungles, the pounding oceans that are us, that give to us and become us as we give to and become them. Their immortality and their silence.

I'm only quarter-hippie (she doth protest too much!), but let's face it, I've felt it, so strongly, so irrevocably, that sometimes what makes me saddest is that there are so many millions upon millions of people on this planet who have no relationship with that. People who grow up in west Oakland or inner Richmond often don't get the chance or the encouragement to leave their concrete blocks. People who eke out a living in exhaust-clogged Chennai, India, may never know what a river in the Himalayas is like, surrounded by snow-capped peaks and green hills and shepherds.

Sure, there are a lot of people who don't and won't go "camping," for whom that sounds dirty and masochistic... and cool, whatever. But it still makes me pensive and urges me to think naively sometimes that if more people had access to sustained journeys outside of all this hubbub and bullshit and Metropolis-esque mechanization and mediation, they'd feel it, too, and things would change.

If you knew me, you'd love me, sing the mountains and valleys of the eastern Sierra. The snowmelt rivers and the bristlecone pines, gnarled and writhing like dryads, like braids of rippled rope. The miniature chipmunks, the blinding-blue lakes, the tiny fuchsia flower-clusters that poke themselves out of rock crevices even at 12,000 feet where there is no other vegetation.

Rockscapes, seascapes, sandscapes, I'm a landscape pornographer: Nothing is sexier than this world. If you knew it, you'd love it. Please, to the 1% who control everything for everyone else, please:

Tú no puedes comprar al viento.
Tú no puedes comprar al sol.
Tú no puedes comprar la lluvia.
Tú no puedes comprar el calor.
Tú no puedes comprar las nubes.
Tú no puedes comprar los colores.
Tú no puedes comprar mi alegría.
Tú no puedes comprar mis dolores.

Mineral-rich lakes and lily pad carpets and thick balsam forests so fragrant you swoon: I'm back, and it's a classic Adirondack August.

Sometimes, though, the camera gets too heavy to tote along. And I mean that figuratively. It's a relief once in a while to let a sunset splash and fade on its own, a waterfall just fall. It takes a lot of bad photographs to get a good one, and then... was I there? Or was I taking pictures?

But after sifting through a few salvageable images from three packed weeks of wilderness bliss, of course I'm regretful. Of course there's a sense of loss. To document or not to document? The grass is always greener...

Here 'tis, my first story on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco: http://www.kalwnews.org/audio/2011/06/16/the-cries-san-francisco-artists-celebrate-the-call-the-street-peddler_1041921.html.

More to come very soon...

Photo credit: Erick Padilla, http://www.erickpadillaphotography.com/.

FINALLY, I put together the audio slide show about the Dreamtime Circus in Peru that I intended to produce, oh, a year ago...? All images and audio shot and recorded by yours truly.

Thank you, circus folk, for all you do!

I don't really think of myself as much of a "fan" in the celebrity-fanatical sense of the word. Yet, through the allure of "Write 100 Words" (gets me every time), I won the Rogue Wave Ultimate Fan Contest, a Verizon-sponsored gambit that got me 4 VIP tickets to see Rogue Wave at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, an interview and photo shoot with the band, all of their CDs signed, a Samsung Fascinate Smart Phone, a $125 Verizon gift card, AND a shiny red electric guitar signed by the band members.

Renter's insurance, anyone?

The whole thing was so random, so bizarre, and let's face it, SO much fun (it felt like my birthday -- all these gifts and all this attention!), that I wrote up a few words for the Verizon site about the experience.

Check out the post here. It should be live at least through Dec 31, 2010, they say...