The Pastor's Kids

The Pastor's Kids

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Photo Credit: OutpostUSA.org
As far back as 1902, efforts were made by Minnesota state officials to preserve the area along its northeast boundary from logging. The area was known for its beauty: the many lakes created by retreating glaciers, the exposed Pre-Cambrian rock and the thick forest which is habitat for many animals and birds. These officials also asked the Canadian province of Ontario just over the border to set aside its contiguous forests.

Throughout the 20th century, the struggle over the boundary waters continued. Though mining and logging operations in the area had already diminished, the new questions became what sort of recreational facilities should be provided. In the 1940s resorts were set up in the vast roadless areas to which people were flown in and provided with mechanized gear for sport fishing. In 1948, at least 25 private planes were based in Ely, Minnesota, traveling to the most popular lakes every day. Conservationists saw this as a serious threat to the wilderness character of the canoe country and began campaigns to limit this ease of entry.

Sigurd Olson wrote, directed and starred in a short film, narrated by Paul Harvey, called Wilderness Canoe Country showing himself and his son enjoying the canoe country until a small plane roars in, deafening the silence. This film was shown everywhere. By this time the government was buying up private homes and resorts in what was known as the Superior Roadless Primitive Area. President Truman signed an executive order against airplanes flying over the area below 4,000 ft. in 1949. But conservationist proposals met with bitter opposition as this part of the state was in need of income. Olson, who made his home in Ely, was vilified. A proposed documentary on his life is noted here.

In the late 1950s the battle for what became the Wilderness Act of 1964 began. It eventually included a simple definition of wilderness: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The Wilderness Act had a huge effect on what was now called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, greatly restricting motor use, lumber activity, and eliminating lodges and private residences in the park.

Wilderness Outfitters, for instance, had to cease its operation of the historic Basswood Lake Lodge, known for its exceptional log craftsmanship. The main lodge was dismantled and hauled across the ice to Snowbank Lake. In 1978 when Snowbank Lake was declared part of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the federal government bought the lodge again and it is now a visitor center in Wisconsin according to the Spring 2004 issue of Wilderness News from the Quetico Superior Foundation. All of this was painful, but Wilderness Outfitters successfully adapted to changes and is still one of the foremost providers of canoe and fishing trips out of Ely.

Including the million acres of the Boundary Waters, the two hundred thousand acres of Voyageurs National Park, the 1.2 million acres of the Quetico and La Verendrye Provincial Parks in Canada, I count two and a half million acres of contiguous area now preserved as non-mechanized wilderness through the efforts of 20th century conservationists, an incredible achievement.

But when you consider Edward O. Wilson’s current proposal that half of the earth be left to nature in order to stop species extinction, even our own, we have a long way to go. Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, published in March of 2016, “is not a bitter jeremiad. It is a brave expression of hope, a visionary blueprint for saving the planet,” says Stephen Greenblatt. Wilson points out that as a species we are way behind in adapting to the current age, that working piecemeal we think we are making progress but in fact we are slipping. He presents his idea as a goal, calculating that if humans retreated from half of the earth, it would enter the “safe zone.”

The series So Are You To My Thoughts goes unashamedly back and forth between Minnesota and California, the two places I know best. Of my three main characters, Line and Marty live along the California coast, while Paul lives in Minnesota. The whole family has a cultural base in a cabin in north central Minnesota, Mother and Dad’s legacy. My earliest memories (perhaps enhanced by a film made of it) involve a summer spent at Lake of the Woods, which sprawls over the tiny bit of Minnesota which is above the 49th parallel and into Canada. Stories of the Lake of the Woods and fishing trips the men of my Dad's church took on the Rainy River run through my earliest years. As animals ourselves, habitat is incredibly important to us. Surely we can reduce our dependence on mechanized and comfortable pleasures for our own, and the sake of other animals.

Monday, April 4, 2016

HIV/AIDS in San Francisco

Early in the 1980’s San Francisco hospitals, such as Children’s where my sister Solveig worked in an oncology ward, began to see patients with a rare skin cancer, Karposi’s sarcoma, sometimes in conjunction with pneumocystis pneumonia. These diseases occur in people with severely compromised immune systems. At first there was no name for it, but it did seem to particularly affect gay men and needle users. As the cases increased and were studied, it became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

In San Francisco, it became a plague. Everyone had friends who were HIV-positive, and thus likely to undergo the later stages of disease, AIDS, and die. There was no known cure, though it became clear that the disease was carried by certain bodily fluids and blood. Condoms were seen as the only way to prevent transmission from one person to another. Not until 1987 was the first drug, AZT, offered to combat HIV-related disease, and it was prohibitively expensive.

AIDS had, and still has, a huge impact on the culture. For the first time since the 1960’s, people became more wary about sex. People who were HIV-positive were stigmatized and politicians proposed proscriptions, such as quarantine, which compromised people’s human rights. The gay community in San Francisco responded with organizations and information, protests, care and dignity. But, every year, until the United States reached the highest number of deaths from AIDS in 1995 (48,371), mortality from AIDS increased. The hospice movement which was getting underway was pushed along by the need to care for so many people losing their lives to AIDS. A timeline of scientific, government and community response to AIDS can be seen here.

The stories of those who died from AIDS are kept alive by the Names Project Foundation and by an amazing quilt (Cleve Jones’ idea) which has grown to epic proportions and traveled all over the world. I worked in architectural firms and many of the architects and designers I knew in those years slipped quietly away. Larry Canega, who played the piano for the Pitschel Players and had been my sister’s great friend, died in the early 1990’s. One of my gay friends found that everywhere he looked, every place he went in San Francisco held memories of friends who were gone. “We are being compared to holocaust survivors,” he said to me in 1991. “It’s that bad.” I recall getting one of the “lavender letters” people sent out to friends when their gay partners died.

I remember doing tai chi push hands, in which two people work together, with a man who had very visible Karposi’s sarcoma on his arms and chest. One woman turned away in horror, but the rest of us worked with him. We knew we could not catch it from his skin. I also knew a woman who was married to a man who had been given an HIV-laced blood transfusion. When I again became single in 1989, I had several blood tests to make sure I wasn’t HIV-positive. This was still an emotion-soaked issue in 1995 when I worked on a documentary in which sexually-active students at a Danish film college took similar blood tests.

One of my tai chi teachers, Emilio Gonzalez, is a long-term survivor, doing daily tai chi and keeping close tabs on his health, including using some AIDS drugs. “When I first learned I was HIV-positive [more than 30 years ago], I wouldn’t even subscribe to a magazine!” he told me. He and George Wedemeyer developed Qigong classes which were particularly adapted for immune-compromised people. In 1996, I helped produce a video of these Qigong routines, and especially the Tiger Mountain Tai Chi Gong which Master Kai Ying Tung developed for our school. The best-selling video has been on television, sold as DVDs and is still available on youtube.com here.

The bitter story of AIDS is not mine to tell. But my fictional memoir of the late 1980’s, Nature's Stricter Lessons, would not be true to life without its presence.