Tire Man understands something I forgot somewhere along the way. Something important that needs to be relearned and lived each and every day by me and a whole bunch of others just like me. Tire Man understands we are part of nature.
When did this world become ours? When did man claim the world and redefine it in our terms? When did nature become subordinate to us? A place we visit or see out the car window on the way to the mall or when we take the back roads because traffic is bad? When did the ecosystem become that place we use and nature become something we love like the cousin we tolerate but that gets in the way at times? When did we stop being a part of nature and create a world where we are the everything and all else follows?
Tire Man teaches me by example. He taught me in the doing as we headed to Ogden Nature Center to work on a project he volunteered to do there. Tire Man is a doer. He learned by doing. By putting in a pond, he learned about springs, fish, drainage, water fowl, deer, and more. A pond, by the way, for the community of Ogden. I am not sure when he “put” in the pond but it was sometime before the current project. It just surfaced in the conversation about a “tire” garden he, with me along as the unskilled laborer, will “put” in at the Ogden Nature Center.
It was late in May but felt like November. Utah does that at times. It snowed a bit, rained more than a bit, and made spring feel more memory than reality. Tire Man and I walked from his truck to the office for a meeting scheduled two months prior and the result of years of his work. It moved to reality over the weekend with the erection of a chain link fence. A twenty by twenty-four foot, five but should have been six feet high, enclosure of mud that Tire Man would turn into a garden showcase.
The meeting was about the specifics. What would the current mud pit have after Tire Man worked his magick? It would have edibles for the picking, greens to feed the turtles, herbs for the kids to smell, and would showcase companion planting. It would be wheel chair accessible and be a hands on, working, living garden. The first classes were scheduled for August. Tire Man did not bat an eye. He jotted down some notes, shared some ideas about what should go where, said he would have some preliminary plans in a week or so, and then asked about the fish in the tank on display in the foyer.
They were silver and had kinda black lines. Looked to be a few dozen of them and were small, as far as fish go. I noticed them earlier. At least, I thought I did. Tire Man and Nature Girl, the youthful and wise host of the meeting, noticed much more about those little fish.
Seemed they were one step off the endangered list. Utah worried about them disappearing from what was their home but the little fishies did not make the National Radar. In the hierarchy of official endangerment, the little fish swam just out of sight. Not important enough to matter…….not well enough to make it without somebody doing something. Tire Man recognized them from his youth. Nature Girl explained they were pushed out of the ecosystem by another fish. The ones in this tank were from a hatchery and some of the very first displayed so folks could hear the story of whatever the heck their name was.
As Tire Man and Nature Girl discussed the fish in the tank and the fish that pushed them from where they were, I witnessed something beautiful. A dance. The dance of two who knew the ecosystem. They each understood that fish mattered and why and what happened that moved them from the places they used to be to a tank full here and tank full there. Even more impressive was that Tire Man knew things about them that Nature Girl did not and vice versa. The exchange was a dance. A dance of intelligent interchange. A dance that improved both participants and any that saw them dance. There was argument in the exchange that was the argument of let’s learn more about this because there is something here that neither of us know for sure. It was beautiful. It inspired.
I saw some silver fish with kinda black lines. Tire Man and Nature Girl saw nature and how everything, included them, fits together. We met to discuss a “tire” garden. It was a meeting of kindred spirits that live in nature everyday. People who live to know it, respect it, honor it, improve it, and make a difference because of what they do every single moment of their existence. I was along for the ride and realized the world I was part of was something outside of nature. Something layered on top of nature as if nature was merely a road we traveled on to get from where we were to where we were going. My world is changing. Beginning with me. We are part of nature and need to live that…before we are not part of nature.
Incidentally, Tire Man went right from the meeting to the Tire Store. He will need about thirty tires for the project and knows the best way to begin a project is to actually do something. We picked up the first eight tires, plus the other two for my composter, and headed back home. Free used tires that will live on in a garden that will touch hundreds, maybe thousands, as example of what we can do when we actually do something. Took about three hours total…so far. A good Monday morning by any standard.
(If you want to roll up your sleeves and do something, get to tirecrafting.com and get the book/dvd that is actually so easy that it makes sense to me.)
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