IN THE SUMMER WE WENT TO THE MOUNTAINS.

In the summer we went to the mountains-Tahquitz, Tuolumne, or maybe Crane Flat Meadow during the time of the columbines. We showed our kids to the granite rocks and ponderosa trees, the chaparral and live oaks, the forests of lodgepole and fir-and the kids never got over it all, any more than we did or the forest by the rivers out of snow country.

In the summer we went up there and pretended completely, perfectly, that we were free from the streets of Long Beach and L.A. (We blamed it on the spirits up there, the perfume from the high dark forests, and the clear sweet waters of the snow.) We pretended we wouldn't have to come back to what everybody says is necessary-to the job, the school, to the struggle for mates and security-and in those days to the marches in the streets against the war. We pretended the mountains themselves were safe from the business-Americans, from us.

In the summer we became natives or hikers like John Muir or rock climbers. But always and always we pretended so well that we never for a minute doubted that the mountains would stay free from America. We never speculated or wondered about how soon it would all end and the mountains would get to look like our own homes and our own neighborhoods, with the color of hydrocarbons and the sound of screeching brakes.

In the summer we used the mountains.

In the summer we pretended that there weren't any oil companies or factories-we transcended all that. We breathed in the sky-full air for a while. We listened to the splashing waters-and got ready to go back and struggle for some kind of justice in the streets. We are still doing it. We are still going up there to get ready to try to save it, to try to wake up the people in the neighborhoods, to tell them once again how it is up there, how it really could be for everyone down here.

I don't know what to do about the mountains of California or the hills behind my beach house at Ca. 92677-chamise trees and manzanita and purple geraniums in redwood boxes. The radio is going. Some important man says we need a neutron bomb. The wet and holy fog blows in from off the sea bringing salt air and the smell of seaweed.

I am pretending all the time now that I really do know what to do that will make a difference to the President and his friends. I didn't know before, but now I pretend that I know what to do-about my own dying, about the dying biosphere and the managers who act like they own it all forever, old men with famous names who want to buy and sell my granite stones and my oak trees, even the ocean.

But I still don't know why I see all this and feel it and they don't, the managers, who don't care that the sea and all my trees are dying. Where do they live anyway? I am sending them messages now, all the time, on behalf of the wind and the seabugs in the wet sand, and for you and for me and for the mountains of California. I keep telling them. I keep telling them to quit messing with the steam beds and the sycamore flats and the redwoods up the coast. I keep telling everyone down here that we have to stop those nuclear businessmen and their helpers.

In the summer we still go to the mountains.

Peter Carr
1977