With Earth Day hot on our heels, I thought I'd post an article I wrote a few years ago.
It contains Great Biblical Figures.
It involves a bit of drinking.
And it got completely bypassed on Medium when I first posted it.
But I do believe it is tame enough for general consumption. Heck, it even includes David Brower and Aldo Leopold!
Enjoy...
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The rustling startled me. I was sitting at my kitchen table enjoying the morning solitude over coffee.
“Hello, Jim. My name is David Brower.”
I’m not often haunted, but this was no ordinary ghost. It was the Archdruid, and the encounter left a permanent impression.
“I know who you are, Dave. I’ve read your book “Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run” a couple of times, both to my delight and agitation.” Also, my journalism professor had us read John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid” and through his yarns I felt like I got to know you. Your heart, I mean. You saved so many wild places through your ads, your coffee table books, and your charisma.”
He laughed.
“Small potatoes.” He said, becoming somber.
“No. You were the voice of a generation, and to my mind the greatest environmentalist. Hell, you were the first environmentalist. Everyone before you were conservationists. The entire movement bears your imprint.”
Brower shook his head no vehemently. “It’s all for naught if you guys don’t start paying attention. That’s why I came here today. I have to tell you a story.
I sat up straight. A one-on-one audience with the Archdruid? I’d finally get to feel first hand what it was like to hear him live and in person. Er, well…disembodied and in person.
“I just learned something shocking, and I had to tell someone. It’s earth shattering news. So, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and I had just gotten back from a little traipse in the higher hills, and we ran into Moses. (He still has a soft spot for mountains and deserts). So we invited him to sit with us at a delightful little watering hole we discovered up there, and after we’d gotten a few glasses of Tanqueray in him, he made a confession: It turns out there were initially Fifteen Commandments.
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Photo by Fr. Barry Braum on Unsplash
The Lost Commandments
“I was bringing the tablets back down the mountain,” Moses told us. “They were so heavy! So I stashed one of them in the shrubs near this switchback on the trail.
‘I’ll come back and get it once I’ve gotten back to the camp and have a bite to eat,’ I told myself. But when I got down there, that whole Golden Calf affair was in full swing, and I completely forgot about the other tablet!”
We commiserated with him, explaining that we’ve all made blunders before, some of them pretty bad, like when I failed to save Glen Canyon. But this oversight seemed perilous for the future of humanity. He was genuinely embarrassed and repentant. Then John Muir blurted out,
“What were the rest of the Commandments?”
Moses put his hand over his mouth, and his eyes got the thousand-yard stare that Great Biblical Figures often get, and then he poked three fingers up in the air.
“There were three tablets: First, the Commandments about God. No other gods before Him, no swearing, rest on the sabbath, you know about those. Second, the Commandments about people…no lying, cheating, stealing, and so on. But the third tablet had the Commandments about the Earth.”
We all jerked straight up.
“Well, that sure explains a lot,” Aldo said.
Moses rattled the missing Commandments off like a whiz kid in a spelling bee:
You shall not defile the water.
You shall not pollute the air.
You shall not poison the soil.
You shall not desecrate the wild places.
When he finished, I said, “that’s only fourteen, Mo. I thought you said there were fifteen.”
“Oh, yes,” he continued. “This last one is the hardest to follow:”
You shall not take yourself too seriously.
“I knew it!” I said, slapping my palm against the table. The Fifteenth Commandment was none other than my own Rule #6. I have to admit, it made me feel a little self-righteous, but also vindicated.
As we all got up to leave, Aldo put his hand on Moses’ shoulder and said, “we were taught as children that if we broke the Ten Commandments and didn’t repent, we risked going to hell. Tell me, what happens if we break the other five?”
He paused and sighed. “Hell will come for you.”
Brower’s ghost began to fade, but he was mouthing the words:
Tell them…
