http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?scp=3&sq=california%20prisoners&st=cse>.
In the great scheme of things, a park and a place that shows off the guiding
passion of the most popular novelist of his day are small potatoes, yes. Who
needs history and open space when a child may go hungry or a bridge may
collapse? But what is happening now, the death of American life by a
thousand cuts, is the collateral damage of our frozen politics. We don’t
have to commit suicide, as California is doing.
Eric Risberg/Associated PressThe writer’s cottage at Jack London State Park
in California.
These parks already charge user fees to enter. They are popular: the places
put on the executioner’s list draw nearly 6 million visitors a year. On the
recent Sunday I strolled through Jack London’s ranch, the park was packed
with picnickers, hikers, birders, history buffs, people “trying to get out
of nature that something which we all need,” as London said.
And, you can argue, people had their chance to save the parks. Last year,
Californians voted down a measure that would have slightly raised their auto
license fees to add $500 million for the parks. A majority felt — not
without good reason — that lawmakers who created an unsustainable pension
system could not be trusted to keep their hands out of a park fund.
The still-life of this political insanity includes not just reckless
big-spenders at the table, but mindless short-sighters who refuse to raise
taxes under any circumstances. So, in Sacramento, minority Republicans will
not allow the people to vote on basic tax extensions which could prevent
more parks from closing.
The above is reason to hate contemporary politicians, who show all the
creativity of Soviet-era dress designers. In the meantime, our heritage — in
the natural world and in preservation of the stories and people who came
before us — is being erased.
Jack London’s credo, as he told a reporter two weeks before his death of a
kidney-related failure in 1916, is worth repeating here, as a courage nudge.
“I would rather my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should
be stifled by dry-rot,” said London, who looked like a young Warren Beatty.
“The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days
trying to prolong them. I shall use my time!”
He wrote adventure stories, social tracts and one of the best short stories
ever, “To Build a Fire.” In his brief life, the illegitimate boy who was
raised by an ex-slave became an oyster pirate, a South Pacific sailor, a
dock worker, a prospector of gold mine stories in the Yukon and, in his
happiest mode, a country farmer in the Valley of the Moon.
“I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to
me,” he said once he’d moved to the Valhalla above Glen Ellen. On the ranch,
“I have everything to make me glad I am alive.”
Dry-rot is what awaits London’s home, with its glassed sleeping porch where
he took his last breath, with its views of the terraced hillside where he
learned to till the ground in a place of limited water. A few miles below is
a big old wooden water wheel, at a tourist spot called Jack London Village.
It churns away, without explanation.
A few years from now, people will stumble upon the overgrown remains of
London’s home and wonder, as I did looking at the water wheel: what was that
all about
