GRAFTON — Scene: Checkout line at Fresh Market, Pinehurst, N.C., 2004. Three shoppers in front of me, mountains of groceries in their carts. I'm silently reciting the mantra once bestowed upon me by a passionate chef. “Patience,” he said, “is the secret to a good clam dip.” It's the secret to good roux, good bread, and many things unrelated to culinary skills.
When I finally plop my canvas bags and assorted fruits and vegetables on the conveyor belt, the man behind me says, “I see you brought your own bags. I left mine in the car again.”
“It takes a while to change a habit, doesn't it?”
“I'll say. I'm going to run out and get mine. Will you save my place?”
“Sure.”
When he returns, he asks, “Did you know Ireland now taxes plastic shopping bags? In six months, they dropped their consumption by 90 percent.”
“I read that. Good on the Irish, eh?”
“We could learn a lot from Europeans.”
“If we were paying attention, yes.”
The kid at the counter picks up my bags with a look of disgust, as if he's being forced to swallow fresh dog poop. He's wearing a stars-and-stripes t-shirt. A snarling bald eagle is tattooed on his left forearm.
“Well, I like America!” he barks.
Taken aback by the this goofy nonsequitur, I stammer, “Me, too, but that doesn't mean we can't learn anything from other countries.”
“Huh!” he grunts.
A cheery young woman appears at the counter and takes over the bagging.
“Thanks for bringing your own bags,” she says. “I wish more customers did.”
Another grunt from The Patriot. Amazing that a simple act of conservation has triggered such hostility.
I turn my head and smile at my co-conspirator in un-American activity. He shrugs and smiles back.
* * *
Segue to Grafton, Vt., Memorial Day weekend, 2010. The Nature Museum at Grafton hosts The Pale Blue Dot: Voices for a Small Planet. Plastic shopping bags collected by the fifth graders at the elementary school - 2,663 bags in all -are hung on a line around the perimeter of the 10-acre meadow behind the museum.
From a distance, they might be mistaken for prayer flags. It's a graphic visual illustrating the number of bags Americans consume in one second: 2,663 bags = 60 gallons of oil.
In the Gulf of Mexico, oil is hemorrhaging from a BP well. In a way, the bags are prayer flags. My prayer is “Please wake up.”
I try to avoid declaring what other people need because I often have enough trouble figuring out what I need. But one thing I'm sure of: we don't need plastic shopping bags.
I've traveled all over this country to tell stories: Omaha, Little Rock, Philadelphia, Green Bay, Denver, Atlanta. In spite of different topography and climate there's an eerie sameness about these places.
It's not only the box stores, fast-food joints, and “executive estates” strangling the landscape - it's the bags. I've seen them skittering along city streets and country roads, floating in streams, flapping in trees, and tumbling across vast acres of agri-biz fields of corn and soybeans in Lancaster County, Pa.
They're floating in the Pacific, too, part of the continent-sized jumble of plastic that is killing marine life and has caused a change in shipping routes. It's a long way around the new continent. The extra mileage burns still more oil.
I look at the prayer flags and feel overwhelmed by grief.
* * *
Cut to Grafton Grocery, June 2010. I wait at the counter as a box of crackers and a bottle of aspirin are packed in a plastic bag for the customer in front of me.
Grief induces other emotions - anger, despair, impatience, and general peevishness.
I come untethered from my mantra. I shape-shift into a snarling eagle. Talons unfurl from my fingertips. My mind spins with words that will - for the sake of harmony - remain unspoken.
“Do you like America? Then don't make a mess. Conservation – it's the new patriotism!”
I lived in Boston when Vermont banned billboards in 1968. Although there was significant opposition from business owners and struggling farmers who leased their land to billboard companies, Republican Ted Riehle's bill passed and was signed into law.
This news aroused in me a romantic notion of Vermont. I thought Vermonters must be sensible, practical people. I made my first pilgrimage to the Green Mountains and dreamed that someday I'd live here amongst neighbors who had reverence for the beauty of unsullied vistas and the bounty of a clean earth.
Now, when I talk with small retailers about curbing the use of plastic bags, they mumble about “convenience” and the “bottom line” and keeping customers happy.
If we persist in trashing our small planet, happiness and the bottom line will be moot.
* * *
Camera pans to my kitchen, September 2010.
I'm on the phone with my friend Donald, talking about the exhibit at The Pale Blue Dot. Donald lives in Pennsylvania on the 30-acre farm where he grew up.
Twenty miles to the west, the big tractors roll in those Lancaster County fields. The air smells of diesel, fertilizers, and the stench of thousands of chickens, turkeys, and pigs crammed face to face in long, low barns.
Birds without beaks. Pigs without tails. The amputations prevent the distressed birds from pecking each other, the depressed pigs from gnawing on the tails of their barn mates.
I tell Donald that the schoolchildren collected the 2,663 bags.
“How long did that take them? About two days?” he replies, his quiet voice carrying his customary trace of cynicism.
“I don't know. I'd like to believe Vermonters use fewer plastic bags per capita than the rest of the country, but I haven't seen much evidence.”
When Donald and I were young and prone to heated discussions about almost everything, I once stamped my foot and snapped, “Why must you be such a chronic cynic?”
“A cynic is just a broken-hearted romantic,” he replied.
I stopped arguing and pondered his words.
It took a while to grasp his concept. Many moons later, I understand exactly what he meant.