Green Is Good

Front page story in today's Santa Barbara Daily Sound trumpets "City finalist for climate award." Apparently we here in SB qualify to be listed amongst the meccas of Fayetteville, AR, and Northbrook, IL, to name a couple of other finalists. That's great news. Our city has long been a major innovator in the attempt to keep things nice, that's for sure.

For instance, the trash guy that picks up at my house: he's always there bright and early in the morning. Okay, maybe not bright but early. I'm talking before 6:30 A.M. I want to kill this guy. He pulls in, the Dude starts barking his head off, the eight week old starts wailing; lights start popping on up and down the row and now everyone's dog is barking; it's a freaking nightmare. But hey he's just doing his job.

So climate protection is like a mandate here. I can get with that. I can see that we're definitely putting forth the resources in the studies and the time spent discussing what we can do better, etc. Keeping the sand clean on East and West beach has always been a priority. We certainly can't have those guys outside the post office on Milpas Street approaching with the muddied appearance that would suggest that the sand that they slept on the night before was anything but the purest Pacific pebble.

How about when you walk down Hendry's beach? My wife and I have special shoes we use when we decide to stroll that oil slick. If you don't use them you can end up back at the house with your feet covered in tar. You need to scrub them with vegetable oil to get the tar off; if you don't act quick the black gets over everything. There's a creek that runs behind my house that goes straight into the ocean at Hendry's. Recently they've redeveloped the area at the end of Las Positas where this creek hits the lagoon that turns into the slough that runs into the ocean. It looks really pretty as you're driving by. It smells the same, though, and that's not a good thing. I won't swim there. Maybe it has to do with the half dozen or so dead animals that the Dude has happened upon on that beach and decided to roll in. Picture me sprinting in from 50 yards out while the Dude is simply giddy to root in the stink of carcass, the "Noooooooooooooo!" hanging in the morbid sea air that the offshore wind cannot blow out of that place.

Been up to Elings Park lately? It's a beautiful spot, especially at the end of the day as the sun goes down behind the hill opposite. It's a great dog park too. The Dude loves to run up there with his pals, and we're up there all the time. Maybe you didn't know that Elings Park is built on the site of the old city landfill. It used to be a dump! It's an excellent testament to the efforts of local citizens to green up their city. You would never know it used to be a dump if you walked it and didn't know its history. That is, unless you were the Dude. He was rooting around up there in the gully behind one of the softball fields, and when he came out of the woods his whole head and neck were covered in this brackish blackness the consistency of meconium. It smelled worse than death. It smelled worse than poop. I know the Dude, so I know those smells, and this was different. It was an old trash toxic battery acid rancidness that I am really struggling to explain here; just know it was bad. I went over to check out what he had been rolling in, and it looked like the La Brea tar pits: oozing blackness coming up from the ground that I could only imagine was fifty year old toxic waste rising from the dead. It was kind of scary. I later read that during rains, a yellow ooze seeps down the street from the park on it's Northeast side. Not green, mind you, yellow.

The moral of my post, I guess, is that it's nice to be recognized for trying to do the right thing. Stir fry that with a little don't judge a book by its cover and we're good. And Mayor Blum, if you want to know what issues to tackle next on the green front, come on over to my house and meet the Dude. He's got a handle on all of the hotspots.