The following is a recent dispatch from the Climate Reality Tour, a movement-building cycling tour from the coalfields of West Virginia to the UN Climate Talks in Cancún.
10/28/10
We’re staying in the spare trailer of a climate denier. No, not John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. A far less prominent climate denier. Her name is Lynn. She invited us onto her porch, fed Jamie a beer, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. So here we are.
Clearly, it’s been a fascinating day.
We woke up and were underway by mid-morning. After about 15 miles we arrived at French Camp, MS – an idyllic little town with two churches and no stoplight, but with great little café where the local gentry seemed to congregate. We thought it was a summer language camp. Whoops.
Turns out that was founded by a French trader who married a Chickasaw princess and whose son became the last chief of the Chickasaw – before the tribe “moved” as the historical markers on the Trace disingenuously state. There’s a little museum and gift shop, and the Café had amazing broccoli salad in this thick sweet onion-pecan dressing. A-mazing!We got to talking and met a local reporter for the Plain Dealer. Turns out she’s been covering how a mine opened up nearby – a coal mine. There’s been a whole controversy because, like Larry Gibson some, landowners are holding out. And lots of others are mad because there’s no jobs around at all. She was very sympathetic with our mission and seemed to agree even that strip mining and global warming were big problems, but she said flat-out, “The paper is very conservative. It doesn’t believe in global warming.” And for a minute there we really thought she might write something too…
When we extracted ourselves from online chores, we trucked it another 16 miles down the trail and arrived at the Kosciusco welcome center, where two sweet old ladies directed us to the Wal-Mart for groceries, and didn’t really know how to get anywhere else. Seemed odd that the local government would set up a welcome center to direct you (and with none too much confidence) to the multinational businesses that put the local one under… They did inform us how to pronounce Kosciusko (leave your phonetic guess in the comments!) and that it was named after a Polish general.We finally found the local grocery store on what seemed to be the black part of town. Could that have been why the kindly old (w welcome ladies didn’t dispatch us there?
By the time we’d eaten, stretched, and packed back up, it was nearly sundown, and we’d only gone 33 of the 70 miles we needed to ride to stay on schedule – Halloween in New Orleans! So naturally, we rode like the wind. It was the longest time we did in saddle without stopping. We booked at about 18mph the rest of the next 37 miles and reached the campground/trailer park after a great ride (all flat!) of the breathtaking twilight of damp old growth southern forests scenery and SO many stars.
So here we come rolling in at 10pm or so and the welcome committee finds us. Lynn and her friend Janet. They invite us over sight unseen and provide beer and other beverage without thinking twice. While regaling us with tales of the drought – worst in a long time, so we pop our mission into the mix.
“Well I don’t believe in climate change. I just don’t think humans have that power”, she says. “But everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I wouldn’t want you to stop your tour or anything because of it. Do you want another beer?” Her friend says, “I think what we do has an effect”, but the conversation gets stifled and tense. This fundamental truth seemed important. Our actions affect the planet. Our collective actions can affect it greatly. If we gotta start there with some folks, then so be it.
Then Lynn pulls out her map and starts helping us navigate Jackson, her hometown. As she talking, Jamie gets cold enough sitting on the porch to need his sleeping bag. She hits us with the offer and we can’t refuse. And here we camping out in her spare trailer.
Even if she doesn’t quite have all the facts, or has a misleading version of them presented to her by the right-wing media machine, we were both amazed at the top-notch treatment. Sure everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Even so, it really teaches you how to treat people to see folks rolling out the welcome mat despite the large differences. And everyone here has been amazing to us. The guy we randomly met who kept us dry from the hailstorm, the evangelical Christian gals at French Camp who said “Keep on a pedaling – what you’re doing is important and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”, to the climate deniers near Carthage, MS.
It’s that southern hospitality. It’s not winning me over to climate denial point of view, but it sure creates grounds for a better conversation.Winning more flies with honey – oh yeah! Climate acceptors should take note.
This is terrific, Jamie et all. So glad you’re doing this. Our trip was filled with the same kind of stories, discovered because of the slow, cycling nature of the trip. These are important stories that need to be told.