blueprints

About River of Words | 89
(think the Narmada Dam in India, Three Gorges in China) displaced from
their indigenous cultural and economic lives by the floodwaters. In response
he had created International Rivers, a small crew of activists, hydrologists,
and financial analysts, to provide real-world support to local peoples whose
lives were threatened by big dam projects. International Rivers, I came to
see when I read about it, had situated itself at exactly the place in the world
where issues of social justice and environmental health were most deeply
intertwined.
The university had given me a small grant of a couple of thousand dollars—as
a reward, I suppose, for the honor accrued to them by my appointment
as poet laureate. (My children, a month into the job, had begun to call
me the poet laundromat). I used it to hire a graduate student at the university
to help me with the correspondence that was piling up and to keep
track of my schedule. Natalie Gerber was from New Jersey, new to California;
before coming to graduate school, she had worked for the Geraldine R.
Dodge Foundation, helping to organize their huge, biannual poetry festivals
in Waterloo, New Jersey, events that drew thousands of people and, through
the inventive PBS films that had been made at the festivals and broadcast
nationally, a television audience in the millions. I didn’t know this about
Natalie at the time, or I had not taken it in. I had mainly noticed that she
was cheerful and intelligent. I asked her to come with me to the meeting
with Poetry Flash and International Rivers.
The original object of the meeting had been to get help with fundraising,
but with the funds in place, there were other concerns. One was
how, if the thing was actually going to happen, to get the environmental
community involved. And the other—more troubling—was that after a
couple of months in Washington, certain things had become obvious to me.
One was that the main industry there was lobbying. Another was that, as a
result, the local media, in fact the local culture, was profoundly cynical. I
was riding weekly from San Francisco to Washington, DC, in the economy
sections of airplanes filled with guys—mostly guys—dressed in dark blue
suits, black shoes (gleaming), white shirts and red power ties, hair slicked
back and laptops on their tray tables, pounding away at arguments for why
the refrigeration industry should still be allowed to emit the chlorofluorocarbons
that were eating a hole in the ozone, why the protection of wetlands
and vernal pool protection were obstructions to a construction industry
of exquisite environmental sensitivity, and why unnecessary worries
about maritime environments had been solved by practically fail-safe, deep-