First Light

(A Holga camera and some b&w film makes the world look old)

More people, fewer resources. Fewer resources, more competition. More competition, less moral constraint. Am I missing something?

I saw "Food Inc." last night. Well done, but when I watch one side present an argument, I can't help but produce the other. Monsanto Corp. could make a documentary of its own showing how populations would starve if not for their corporate methods. And it would be true, too. I eat and drink organic. It costs a lot of money. Not every one can afford to eat that way. Twenty years ago, a study commissioned by the World Health Organization offered that if all the world's food supply was divided equally between all the people in the world, they would all eventually starve or die of malnutrition. Too many people, not enough food. One of the most compelling arguments left out of "Food Inc." is that increased food production has led to population growth rather than better fed populations. Human reproduction will outrun our ability to produce food, it seems. Collectively, our passions are stronger than our intellect. That is what all the religions tell us. That is one of the common denominators.

Trust me. I'm a scientist almost.

* * * * *

My father had the idea that we should go to Ohio to see the relatives for Christmas. I was excited. We might see snow.

So the Friday night we were to leave, he did not show up at the house. I sat and waited as the sun went down, then as the darkness turned to blackness. I alternated between anger and worry. Where the hell was he?

When he came home, he was drunk. I'd only seen my father drunk one other time, and that was on a bet, a story for another time. But my father had gone out with his fellow workers on a little holiday celebration, their version of a Christmas party. First they had gone to the dog track and then to a go-go bar. And now my father was ready for bed. I was indignant, of course, and felt a great betrayal. We were going to Ohio. We were going to see the family. It was akin to something sacred.

We quarreled and for the first time in my life, my father got angry at me. It was the alcohol, of course. My father had almost been court marshaled in the navy on his first shore leave. It was the first time he'd gotten drunk and he had gotten in a fight and beaten someone up very badly. When the military police tried to arrest him, he had beaten them, too, and was thrown in the hoosegow. He was only let out when the ship came under attack by Japanese war planes, and after that, the charges were dropped. That is how he told the story, anyway.

But standing in front of him that night, the story was easy to believe. There was a glassy menace in his eye that was distant and wrong and which I could neither believe nor reconcile. I said something, though, that released a small part of that demon, and with a short, pulled punch, he clipped me on the chin, a glancing jab meant to serve a warning. My father had only spanked me once in my life, and the circumstances were wrong then, too. He had always been too strong and too powerful to have the need to hurt people.

I didn't move, but I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I simply stood and looked at him for a timeless moment, waiting. And then he turned away.

"Fuck you," I yelled, and I began throwing bags into the station wagon. "Get in the car." And so drunk and perhaps undone, he crawled into the back where he stretched out and fell asleep.

I drove through the night, state after state, picking up the mega-radio station out of Chicago, WGN. I had never heard of it before. It had come to me as though through magic, I thought, and stayed with me mile after mile, state after state. I listened and thought and drove through the blackness and into the returning light. At sunrise, we were climbing through the mountains of Tennessee where the interstate was still unfinished, around the winding curves of small mountain roads, turning and turning through the smokey fog and mist, looking across the valleys and wooden shacks emerging from the trees. My eyes were beginning to burn but there was too much to see.

Something had changed, I thought, as things always do. I had driven through the night while my father slept and now drove on into the coming day, and as hungry and as tired as I was, I didn't want my father to wake up. I only wanted to keep driving, to feel the miles pass beneath me, to see the world continue to emerge from the darkness and the mist. For the moment, that was all I knew.