By Bob Sommer
“… if we’re looking around for someone else to get on the job we might
just look over our shoulders and find we’re looking into a mirror at our own
sorry selves.”
So it’s a bunch of tree-huggers all squeezed
into my then thirteen-year-old Jeep. It’s a year ago and we’re headed west on
I-70 for a Sierra Club meeting in Topeka on a cool Saturday morning. Outside
Kansas rolls by with the sun behind us, still low on the horizon, throwing
splintery shadows across fields of corn stubble. In back one tree-hugger reads
the newspaper. Up front sit me and Craig Wolfe, who wanted to sit up front
because he’s a big guy and the seats in back are tight and our friend didn’t
care who sat up front or in back, so Craig’s up front.
We’re talking. I’m asking about his music. Back
in THE DAY—which for both of us is the sixties and seventies, THE DAY, that is,
before the music died for a decade while machine-generated pop insanity called
disco throbbed and shook most of our brains into all manner of weirdness, like
believing “greed is good,” solar panels on the White House are bad, and big
hair is beautiful, so forth, so THE DAY was the metonymic day before all that—and, to
complete the sentence, back then Wolfe was a rock ’n roller. He played in a
band called Amdahl Wolfe, doing gigs four-five nights a week all over Kansas
City and beyond. It was THE DAY.
But THE DAY passed and then came life, and Wolfe got into the construction business, building passive solar houses and doing other tree-hugger stuff, including plunging into the Sierra Club in Kansas in a big way. I’ve known him for seven-eight years now. I do tree-hugger stuff too. We’re all about averting mankind from his/her/our collective manic suicidal race into annihilation as we gobble up every square foot of land, spew the black goo that used be dinosaurs and 250-million-year-old trees into the air and water, and basically torture ourselves with rage for more and more and more STUFF.
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But THE DAY passed and then came life, and Wolfe got into the construction business, building passive solar houses and doing other tree-hugger stuff, including plunging into the Sierra Club in Kansas in a big way. I’ve known him for seven-eight years now. I do tree-hugger stuff too. We’re all about averting mankind from his/her/our collective manic suicidal race into annihilation as we gobble up every square foot of land, spew the black goo that used be dinosaurs and 250-million-year-old trees into the air and water, and basically torture ourselves with rage for more and more and more STUFF.
