October 18, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Opinion

Driving while aggitated

Over the course of the last 12 months, I have covered many stories that in some way or another relate to traffic issues. When Morris Arboretum wanted to turn its gardeners’ cottage into intern housing, residents from Hillcrest Avenue flocked to the community association meetings panicked over the impact it might have on their street where they said speeding and accidents are routine. As one resident put it, “I won’t even let my children help me put the trash out.” When a panel of local leaders met to discuss improving the retail corridor in Chestnut Hill, the first question residents asked was what can be done about the traffic on Germantown Avenue. And in one of the most memorable and tragic events, Dr. Jeffrey Weiss lost his life when overtaken by frustration and rage at the speeding on his block of Norwood Avenue he leapt onto a passing bus and fell under the wheel well.

Last week, a year after Weiss’ death, a group of neighbors gathered to find a solution to the unsafe driving conditions that led to his demise. By all accounts, Weiss’ death has not changed the traffic patterns on Norwood Avenue. Residents said they still cannot walk on their street when school is letting out. As one homeowner and father said, “When I ask people to slow down, they give me the finger.” And that is with their children in the back seat of the car on their way home from school.

With most of the attention focused on speeding cars, the mounting evidence of driver rage begs the question, why are we so angry when we get in our cars?

From the response to the Local’s coverage of Weiss’ death and reports from the road, a pervasive feeling of entitlement has swept over the driving population. Of course it’s not everyone, but more and more there are scenes of such irrational and erratic driving on a regular basis. Just today I witnessed a car making a u-turn in the intersection of Germantown Avenue and Hartwell Lane The days of simply going around the block to get back on track or change direction have been banished to the pile of “no-longer necessary,” of like paying attention while making a turn. The modern version is to use finger-crossed driving where someone talks on their cell phone and hopes other cars slow down or stop for them.

But the trend is really more serious. After the article on Weiss was published, an irate woman called me, screaming that I hadn’t done my job right because if I had I would have known that Weiss was drunk, cars don’t speed on Norwood Avenue and the police knew that he caused the accident. For the record, it is not common police practice to administer a breathalyzer test to an unconscious critically wounded man. Nor is it possible for this woman to know if there is a problem with speeding cars on Norwood Avenue because as she told me she does not live there. This woman’s rage was aimed at people who dared to insinuate that speeding is an issue.

There seems to be some validity to question whether or not speeding is the issue. An informal survey conducted by the Streets Department in preparation for Thursday meeting found that 85 percent of the traffic on Norwood Avenue did not speed. Granted it was an informal survey and on the first day the engineer was in plan sight of drivers. He moved to a nearby drive way for the second day’s study. But in anecdotal evidence, there seems to be a more disturbing pattern that has less to do with speed and everything to do with attitude. The mother of a NFA student has said that for as long as she has been driving her daughter to school (almost two years) she has been harassed by other impatient drivers on the road tailgating and driving into the oncoming lane to pass her.

The focus of the meeting was to find out how the Streets Department could help the residents of Norwood Avenue They cannot decrease the speed limit — there is a statewide statute that prevents it. City police officers cannot use radar in the city to ticket speeding cars. Again there is a statute that prevents it. And besides the traffic on Norwood Avenue might not be going too fast.

As one resident said at the meeting, “This is about changing behavior.” After all, there is no logic to speeding towards a school. There is no rationale for using a residential road that doesn’t even have sidewalk or intersect a major road as a cut-through. It is evidence of a larger cultural phenomenon reflective of our overly busy lives, where multi-tasking has invaded our cars and a profound lack of common courtesy has become the norm. The group assembled on Norwood Avenue last Thursday morning is understandably grateful to get better signage and to continue to work on solving the problem. Will the signs help? Probably. Do the state laws need to be changed to give the city more authority over its streets? Absolutely.

From the view on the Hill, it might be the only way to bring humanity back to the roads.

Jennifer Katz

Opinion: Are herbicides killing us, too?
by Natasha Kassell, VMD

I first wrote about the use of herbicides in the Wissahickon Valley section of Fairmount Park in the “Letters” section of the July 29, 2004 issue of the Chestnut Hill Local. In that letter, I noted that I was about to take two young children for a walk in the park, when a Faimount Park employee began to spray the weeds along the road to Valley Green. I found out through the Friends of the Wissahickon that the Fairmount Park Commission regularly sprays the herbicide, glyphosate isopropylamine salt, on weeds throughout Fairmount Park, including the Wissahickon Valley.

Following the publication of that letter, I called the director of Fairmount Park Commission several times and left messages. I was hoping to discuss alternate ways of dealing with invasive plants and weeds, or at least requesting that the Park Commission place signs to notify people when and where herbicides are sprayed. I did not hear back. I gave up trying to contact the Park Commission when, less than a month later, my husband was diagnosed with brain cancer.

My husband lost his struggle with cancer the following year, in August of 2005. During the time since he was diagnosed, two of our other friends in their 30s who live on our block in Mt. Airy were also diagnosed with cancer: one had breast cancer, the other had colon cancer. These friends underwent treatment. Both are in remission. This is good news. But there are so many more: my mother, who is being treated for a sarcoma at Fox Chase Cancer Center; the young girl I went camping with this summer, who was wasted, lethargic and hairless from the chemotherapy to treat her lymphoma, but happy to be with her friends and family, enjoying the beauty of rural Pennsylvania, loving being out of the hospital, thrilled to be alive.

We walk around wondering, “Why do so many people have cancer?” Gee. Could it be because we’re poisoning ourselves?

My neighbor, a 30-something-year-old guy who drives a Toyota Prius and thinks of himself as an enlightened environmentalist, recently sprinkled Weed-n-Feed all over his lawn. Since his lawn, like most or ours, was 95 percent crab grass, within a week, everything was dead except for a few scraggly tufts of grass. Another neighbor commented that it was proof that Weed-n-Feed is pretty toxic stuff. The Weed-n-Feed neighbor replied, “No. It’s from Home Depot. Everything they sell there is safe.”

Which brings up a point. How should we define “safe”? Home Depot also sells Stand ‘n Seal, a grout sealer that has killed two people and injured at least 80 by causing lung damage and respiratory failure.

In early September of this year, I was finishing up a run in the park, when I again came across a Fairmount Park employee spraying the plants along the paths directly adjacent to the stream leading into the Wissahickon Creek by Valley Green Inn. I stopped and asked, “Are you spraying glyphosate?” She said, “Yes. But it’s safe. The surfactant [carrying agent] in some products, such as Round-Up, is toxic. The glyphosate product we use does not have that surfactant. It is safe.”

Really? Is anything that kills plants dead really safe? Now instead of looking at lush, green foliage along the Wissahickon Creek and its tributaries, we look at shriveled, brown remains.

So, is glyphosate carcinogenic or not? As with thousands of other chemicals that we toss into our water, air and land, we don’t know. The EPA glyphosate fact sheet states: “Reseachers suggested glyphosate exposure possibly increases the risk for developing some types of cancer, but definitive conclusions could not be attained due to small sample size and confounding factors.”

Confounding indeed. What is not confounding is that glyphosate is toxic on some level. All we have to do is look at the dead plants to know that. Then go back to the EPA’s fact sheet, which states that glyphosate can cause kidney damage and reproductive problems in humans, among other health problems. If, as noted in The American Heritage Dictionary, “safe” is defined as “secure from danger or harm,” glyphosate is not safe.

I wish the Fairmount Park Commission would stop spraying the weeds, a) because glyphosate is not non-toxic, and b) because, in my opinion, shriveled, brown weeds are uglier than live, green weeds.

I wish we would all use chemicals judiciously and discriminately, when other techniques are not an option (such as leaving the weeds, cutting them, or employing other non-toxic methods of dealing with them).

I wish to be able to enjoy Fairmount Park for what it could be –– a clean, green oasis in the middle of our city.

I propose that we start taking action, or at very least, understand that many products that we are exposed to or use on a daily basis are potentially harmful in ways that may be immediate, or that may take years to discover. If we can treat our entire world as a treasured, fragile oasis, perhaps we will be able to continue to live — happily and healthily — together.

From Darby to the African Savannah, meeting Loren Eiseley, part 3
by HUGH GILMORE

Backstory: Parts 1 & 2 of this story can be found in the Sept. 20 and Oct. 4 issues of this newspaper and also at www.chestnuthilllocal.com.

In brief, I grew up near the small borough of Darby, PA, and first discovered Esquire magazine in the local barbershop, where it was the least risqué of the many girlie mags this barber stocked his waiting room with. As I grew up, I accidentally gained my first acquaintance with modern literature and current cultural thought by reading that magazine. By the time I left home, got married and settled down, my first subscription was to Esquire — the coolest magazine around, because of its wiseguy tone.  Thus the surprise I felt when I first encountered the mysterious Loren Eiseley, via a March 1967 article that said he was the “best prose writer in America today.”

I started by reading a second-hand copy of Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. The effect of his ideas on me was immediate and dramatic. The book filtered personal experience through the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet. Not a “daffodils” poet, but a lost, wandering youth who managed to survive by passing himself off as a serious gray-haired adult, a professor, a man of coat and tie, but one whose real home was as “a fox at the wood’s edge.” It was delightful for me at 27 to read the thoughts of an older man who still wondered what his vocation, his calling in life, would be.

Certainly I did not know my own. Having taught high school English for a few years by then, I dreaded the thought of being in this same occupation, same building, same office, same classroom for the next 40 years. Enter as a young man and leave as an old man, the world beyond that campus still unsampled.

By one of those occasional strokes of good luck that have shaped the course of my life, I was appointed Chairman of the Humanities department. I received approval to develop some new courses and introduce some new books into the curriculum. I was one of those enthusiastic young teachers who can’t wait to share his new discoveries with his students and see what they had to say. I was teaching ninth and tenth graders then. Just before school started, 60 buckram-bound copies of The Immense Journey arrived.

The students’ most immediate reaction was, “I liked the first few chapters and the last few, but the middle was too scientific.” Some wondered, “What’s this book doing in an English class?” Others, incredulous, asked, “Did he really talk to that catfish that was trapped in the ice?” Those who seemed to like it most were strangely silent.

As we discussed and argued, they seemed to like it more. Students not in my class began to come in and ask to borrow copies. Successful? I don’t know, for I was too intensely happy with the whole process, with seeing my students seem so alive.

However, as the fall and winter terms gave way to spring, students came in and told me they had been “re-reading Eiseley.” They liked him more, the more they thought about what he was saying. Some said they looked at life, at creatures, differently. Finally, they said, I should bring Eiseley here because, “We want to meet him.”

I mumbled and backed away. For two years now I’d been stumbling through life having “Loren Eiseley moments,” experiencing strange and unexpected insights every time I walked in the Wissahickon or looked up to watch a flock of birds swirl cross the sky. Did these young people not realize that Eiseley was an AUTHOR? That he lived far away on a mount called Olympus? Youth was wasted on them.

Over the next year I finished reading all of Eiseley’s writings and joyed to the publication of his new books. In my personal life I found consolation from the pain of my wife’s miscarriage from reading again Eiseley’s “The Bird and the Machine.” In response to a newspaper article claiming that machines will someday replace animals, he recounts the story of when he released a trapped sparrow hawk one afternoon and watched it soar up into the sky — where it was joined by … a waiting mate!

A machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty air in a torment of hope and despair, waiting to learn the fate of another machine.

On Long Beach Island, at Independence Pass, Colorado, along Sanibel Island, Florida I could feel Eiseley’s presence, his insights, his alienation. The new school year brought more “re-readers of Eiseley.”And again the pleas to have Eiseley come visit.

Once, I was quite tempted to contact him, had even begun a fan letter, but an excited student brought in a copy of the The Pennsylvania Gazette, the University of Pennsylvania’s Alumni magazine, to show me an article, with photographs, about Eiseley. I took it and immediately looked at the photos to search his austere face for some sign that he might welcome contact from a shadow he had cast. I saw none. I returned, like Saul Bellow’s Herzog, to corresponding with him only in my head.

And then, the following spring, three years after I’d first read about Eiseley in Esquire, an amazing piece of luck happened. Not to me, to one of my students, but the lightning had struck close enough to spark me too.

One fine afternoon a very bright young man named Steven Lawrence came into class and excitedly handed me a large envelope. The return address said University of Pennsylvania. I opened it and pulled out an 8 by 10 glossy photograph of Loren Eiseley — signed! What is this?

What is going on here?

“There’s a letter in there too,” Steve said.

My hand darted in. My goodness, there was a letter. It wished Steven Lawrence and his classmates good luck in their studies and said it was gratifying to know that young people were reading his books. With all good wishes, Loren Eiseley.

I was flabbergasted. How had this happened?

Steve was rather amazed himself. What happened was this: Steve’s mother saw a newspaper article in The Philadelphia Bulletin announcing that Eiseley had been nominated for a National Book Award for his book The Night Country. She showed it to Steve.

A few days later Steve decided to bring the article to class to show me. “Mom, where’s that newspaper article with Eiseley’s picture?”

“Oh, did you want that? I threw out the paper, son.”

“Grumble grumble,” said Steve, as only teenagers can do.

Steve’s mother said, “I’ll try to get another one.”

She called The Philadelphia Bulletin, asking how she could get a copy of the picture that had been in the paper. The Bulletin said Eiseley teaches at Penn, try there.

She called The University of Pennsylvania and started her story about how her son wanted Eiseley’s picture from the paper to show his teacher and … click … was forwarded to:

“Hello, Anthropology department.”

Steve’s mother started her story again. How could she get a copy of the picture of Eiseley that had run in the newspaper last week, you see, her son was taking a course and wanted to … click, forwarded to:

“Hello, Doctor Eiseley’s office.”

And so Mrs. Lawrence told her story once again, of how her son had been upset when she threw out the newspaper and how could she get a copy of that newspaper article, and so on.

Well, Mrs. Werkeley, Eiseley’s wonderful secretary, ombudsman, and gatekeeper was delighted to learn that high school students were reading Doctor Eiseley’s books and she was sure Doctor Eiseley himself would be so pleased to hear this news, he’d want to say so himself when he got back from his trip. She took Steve Lawrence’s name and address.

I listened to Steve’s story. I looked at the photo. I looked again at Steve, all 15-years-worth. I looked at the signed letter. I was so jealous. I sighed. And I realized, with chagrin, that I’d kept my own correspondence with Eiseley in my head all those years for no good reason. His signature on that photograph and at the bottom of that letter transformed him from an idea into a person, a creature who still needed to “reach out” beyond the confines, even, of his books.

I went home that afternoon and began pouring my heart and soul into the most important letter of my life.

As for my personal quest to read 100 books this year: I am pushing hard. I am just finishing #79 as you read this. If I can read five more before October ends, I’ll only have to read two a week for the last two months.

Hugh can be reached at gilmorebooks@yahoo.com