LABOR TROUBLES REDUX … It was interesting to see the labor troubles of the 1900s mirrored in the recent Ski Patrol strike in Telluride…
Back then, in 1901, Vincent St. John succeeded in getting an 8-hour day for the Western Federation of Miners, championed by Italian, Cornish and Finnish immigrant labor, and an end to a contract labor system that led to uneven wages for the miners. Just like the Ski Patrol union got a substantial raise in wages this first time around with their strike (now settled)…
But in 1903, a couple years later, when the miner’s union local struck to get the same 8-hour day for the mill workers as the miners had, mine-owners and the local Citizens Alliance led by businessman Charles Painter came down heavy. Union members and sympathizers were rounded up and sent packing on the Rio Grande Southern out of town. Republican Governor James Peabody ordered the National Guard into town, with Gen. Sherman Bell declaring martial law, setting up a Gatling gun in town and border posts up on Imogene…
Local merchant Harry Floaten, who’d been deported for sympathizing with the union, penned this parody:
Colorado, it is of thee,
Dark land of tyranny,
Of thee I sing;
Land wherein labor’s bled,
Land from which law has fled,
Bow down thy mournful head,
Capital is king
Now that the ski patrol has struck and won higher wages, one has to wonder if their union will support other workers, waitrons, maids, etc. who also need a living wage to live in an expensive ski resort like Telluride.
COINCIDENCES … Coyote runs across the road in front of me coming back from our No Kings – Freeze ICE rally and demo January in Telluride — where I learned a new Lib trickster slogan “Grab ‘em by the Midterms”…
A winged black-and-white magpie darts across the highway on the way to Montrose just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day…
Then it’s on to Delta to go dancing to the Mixed Bag jazz band at the Egyptian Theater with Dea. Listening up & down Dallas Divide to KVNF-FM blasting the evening’s coincidental anthem on the car radio, “Let’s Go Dancing.”
SPEAKING OF DEMOS … We had all the elements for a successful parade this time around. One American flag leading the group (take back our symbols). One drum (to speak without words and keep the beat). And maybe 50 or so folks in protest (turning upset into action)…
Yes, and even more important, most important, a speech by Lauren Norton emphasizing building a strong local community to face whatever twisted policies the Trump administration throws at us, immigrant and citizen alike.
As one tender poet offers:
“Sing like a gentle breeze
among the leaves”
& McRedeye roars:
“Or rant like a gust on fire
headed for the trees”
UNHOUSED … Calling people “homeless” contains hidden bias. Something that, as a poet, I am very attuned to recognizing…
As though those unable to secure a roof over their heads in this increasingly tight housing market lacked a place in our society. Not so. Although indeed a number of people are in exactly that situation. Left out in the cold in the richest country in the world by an unjust economic system…
It reminds me of the old vagrancy laws that criminalized being poor, idle, or without a permanent home or visible means of support. This originated in English law to control laborers but evolved in the U.S. to target the unemployed, minorities, and nonconformists through vague prohibitions on behaviors like loitering or wandering with no lawful purpose. Many such laws are now unconstitutional due to their vagueness and disproportionate impact on marginalized groups…
But for some, what in India might be called sadhus – Hindu, Buddhist and Jain holy ones who often live simply as wanderers and beggars – life without dug foundations and fixed locations may be a choice. Even a blessing.
Sky my ceiling
Earth my floor
Mountains for walls
& no front door
LYNN MARGULIS … A recent article in Science News speaking of Asgard archaea seems to confirm Margulis’ championing of symbiogenesis, showing that the cells of our bodies – and those of all plants, animals and fungi – come from the mergers of primitive life-forms…
The article reminded us of Margulis’s appearance with her son Dorion Sagan at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in 13002 [2002 AD] where she gave a lecture: “The Secret Life of the Fungal Underground”…
As explained in Psymposia magazine in an interview with Sagan in August of 13016 [2016 AD]: “Symbiosis is when two organisms of different species live together for most of their life cycles in intimate contact. Endosymbiosis refers to organisms living their lives within one another – it is like sex, but permanent. Well, it turns out that such matings, though between beings from different species, can have fertile offspring. The offspring, however, are not a recombined organism so much as a merged one. The evolution of a new species from two species coming together like this is called ‘symbiogenesis.”
Sagan goes on, “Lynn’s contributions to our understanding of life on Earth, especially the eighty percent of life’s history before plants or animals [or fungi] evolved, offers a very rich legacy to our changing understanding of who we are – think of the growing talk of the microbiome – the role of microbes in our gut to our health and mood.”
All earth’s creatures named,
nicks in the stock
of a thousand narrow tongues.
Specimens in drawers pinned to green velvet.
Bugs bottled. Pickled. Squashed & dissected.
All those species relegated to the lower rungs
on the spiraling staircase of DNA.
All those we ignore.
All our relations.
DESOLATION WILDERNESS… End of July. Hiking the familiar interior of the Sierra Nevadas with my buddy Clark…
Up canyon we see pockets of ice glistening. Ground still frozen…
Here snow dissolves slowly. Leaps downed cedars, hopping one-legged past scree chutes & mica-flecked outcrops. Gathering strength, pebbles & poise…
Until, tumbling, itki pools at last into the cupped blue palms of a tarn. Granite banks studded with talus & a stand of yellow-leg pine.
At the water’s edge
we camp for the night
as the cold burrows in
& dusk’s embers dim
amid the dark’s sudden gusts
Long shadows uproot the last of the light. Hoot of owl & scurry of rodent feet beside this lake whose upturned eye mirrors all the bruised illogical shapes alpine mind takes. Craggy ridges. Cairns. Sheer cliffs of what began as molten rock erupting into air. Fiery gladiolus blossoms fossilized & buried for aeons. Eroded & then upthrust & iced. Mutant stone deformed like krummholz spruce, dwarfed & supplicant before the great mountains’ pyroclastic breath…
Landscape brimming with the transcendence implicit in transformations. Geology’s transient dance of natural intent & chance. Mooning us with their wild beauty…
When glaciers roll back
they leave
magnificent scars
