Baseball Backwards

Painting the Black: Throwing pitches that catch the very perimeter of the strike zone over the edge of home plate, which is made of black rubber.

            What is the shape of a life?  Is it a straight line, where all events are laid out one after another, with no weight given to one over the next, other than chronology?  Is it an analog signal like sound with crests and troughs, and different story lines running alongside one another at different wavelengths? 

Perhaps it’s a baseball park.

            I don’t mean a baseball diamond but the whole park, from the plate spreading out along the baselines to the outfield wall, from foul pole to foul pole.  Perhaps if our lives are in this shape, we start not at home plate but instead out in the bleachers - baseball backwards - where our futures are as wide as the entire wall from the first base to the third base line, open and full of potential. We climb over the wall and drop down onto the warning track, an ominous beginning. 

            Ominous maybe, but the early part is easy, free, and forgiving.  These are warm days and cool summer evenings with nothing but open, grassy fields on which to run and play.  Experiment is the word of the day, every day.  Try something and if it doesn’t work try it again or try something else.  We get comfortable in the saddle, we work the clutch, and we learn where all the roads go and where the shortcuts are, both good and bad.

            Those who grow to love us and care about us root from the dugout.  The home team.  They cheer at our successes and groan at our losses, where we are obviously the victim of bad calls.  Those cheering from the stands want us to succeed but don’t love us as much as love the game.

            But when we reach the infield, the diamond, it’s all business.  There it’s warriors…um warring.  Mistakes are not often forgiven, the penalties for taking chances are harsher, but so are the rewards.  You might get caught off second, skittering back and forth in a rundown, a pickle, desperate to avoid being called out, bargaining, “I don’t really want third, hell, I’ll even go all the way back to first if you just let me keep playing.”  You might be standing on third with less than two outs, watching a lazy fly ball drop into the outfielder’s glove against the centerfield wall, allowing you to all but meander home.

            Somewhere along the base paths is where we supposedly peak.  But does everyone have a peak?  Does everyone have a point in their life where they reach the “Be All You Can Be” moment?  What if you peak out there in the outfield, just this side of the 325 foot marker on the short porch that is the right field wall? (Your son is very intelligent Mrs. Wright, he just needs to apply himself).  What if you peak over there at third, stranded?  Can you have more that one peak, an apogee cluster perhaps, go three for four in an MVP performance, jog down the baseline, toss your helmet and hop on the plate like you’re stomping the last piece of a perfect puzzle into place?

            Are there those of us who don’t peak, or have low foothill-sized peaks?  Humble successes like good parking spots or two yokes in an egg?  Can a life be a success if that life never reaches a point where it’s on anyone radar, where it’s just day after day of showing up and keeping the waters still?

            Does it matter?  After all every game ends.  And every game ends in the same place; home plate.  The vanishing point of the baseball field, the smallest dot of measurable ground rule, a tiny black corner of worn and abused rubber; dirt smattered, cleat chafed, umpire brushed, and clay stained.  A warrior’s shield discarded and as forgotten as the man upon whose arm it once hung.

Silent Rolling

"Well, that's pitiful. Pitiful! That's exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to be."

Bruce Dern's character from Silent Running commenting on a poorly maintained tree.

            A long time ago, right here in this galaxy I saw a move called Silent Running.  I know that by the title it sounds like one of those submarine vs. the enemy surface ship, war movies, full of depth charge attacks and holes sprung in hulls, but it’s not.  It’s about a future when all plant life on Earth is gone and the only specimens left are in giant greenhouses attached to spaceships floating out by Saturn, for some reason.  The conflict comes in the movie when orders are given to destroy the greenhouses and return the ships to Earth.  One caretaker kind of goes bonkers, refuses the order, kills his co-workers, and makes a run for it, in order to save the last plant life in the known universe.  At least that’s how I remember it.  Oh and the “unstable” caretaker is played by Bruce Dern so you know they got the crazy right.

            The movie came out in the early seventies, between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, and because of that is a child of the ecology movement.  At that time in my life, as a Boy Scout who was taught to respect and protect the outdoors that I enjoyed, to take only pictures and leave only footprints, I had aspirations of becoming a forest ranger.  I imagined that future science would find a way to protect the great forests, jungles, and deserts of our planet to insure they would be there for future generations, and that they would need rangers, maybe even space rangers (Buzz Lightyear anyone?).

 

            It has been announced that a real spaceship, the Space Shuttle Endeavour will spend its out-to-pasture years permanently housed at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.  The shuttle will make the majority of her trip on the back of a 747 where there will be low level flyovers of cities like Houston and San Francisco for photo ops before the final landing in LA.  Once there, the spaceship will travel the final leg by rolling along surface streets on a two day trip at a scant few miles per hour. 

            The shuttle is too tall to take on freeways because she won’t fit under the overpasses, cannot be taken apart for some reason, and she is too heavy to lift by helicopter, so thus the surface streets option.  Probably still making better time than most freeway traffic during commute times.  One gloomy consequence of moving something like the space shuttle in this manner is that anything too tall to fit under her wings will have to be removed.  So power lines are going to be rerouted, streetlights are going to be temporarily taken down, and hundreds of trees are going to be cut down.  Over 400 trees by the estimate of the people doing the cutting. As you can see from the LA Times photo above, it's already started.

What American city needs trees more than Los Angeles?  The California Science Center has promised to replace every tree with two more, but those will be saplings.  Most of the people who will lose the trees on their streets have agreed that it’s a decent trade off to get something the quality of a space shuttle in their town, but lament that during their lifetimes, the new trees will likely never reach the maturity of the ones they are losing.

            I guess no one involved in this process saw Silent Running or else they might have found a place to store these mature trees until they could be replanted back in those Los Angeles neighborhoods.  There are companies that move large trees.  Seems like an idea that could work, if it’s not on space greenhouses out by Saturn.  They could even get Hollywood icon Bruce Dern as a sort of spokesman and re-release Silent Running to drum up support.