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Mono Lake Watchby David GainesEditor's note: Ten years ago, Mono Lake Committee founder David Gaines wrote of his unabashed enthusiasm for the "real world" of nature. In a Newsletter article, reprinted in part below, Dave took hope from the land and rejoiced in the abundant life of the Mono Basin, of which he made himself an active, observant part. Tragically, his words here describe his last summer at Mono Lake; on a snowy day that winter Dave died in an auto accident. His writing endures, and here, from the Mono Lake Newsletter ten years ago, is what he had to say. The summer solstice marks the height of Mono Lake's spring: flowers in colorful bloom, islands covered with gull eggs, sagebrush brimming with bird song... The swell of life is contagious, and we, too, delight in the land and lake's rebirth. It works in our blood. It tears us away from desks, papers and telephones, and propels us into the real world of sprouts, buds and singing birds. The office can't contain us. We move our weekly staff meeting down to the lake, where we can include desert peach blossoms, spadefoot toads, yellow-headed blackbirds and brine shrimp. Outside my window, house wrens are singing incessantly. They can't sit still and neither can I. Yesterday I bicycled to lower Rush Creek, where one of the tufa-nesting ospreys was fishing for trout. The day before I joined avocets, phalaropes and winnowing snipe on Mono's north shore. Piles of papers wait impatiently while I count the clouds, take Mono's pulse and align myself with the changing seasons. I'm a newsletter refugee. Today, instead of writing about lawsuits, I ambled to the summit of the ridge behind Lee Vining. From a small patch of tundra where horned larks nest, the world drops into water and space. Mono Lake sprawls across the landscape like a giant ameba. These ramblings connect my work to the land. They bring me face-to-face with what the poet Wallace Stevens called "point blank reality." Sometimes I'm led to epiphanies, but more often to questions and insights which are not always simple or comfortable. But, after all, that's why I'm trying to save this place: because it can teach us and put us in our place. Looking down on Mono's cerulean waters, I think of burgeoning cities at the other end of the aqueduct. I think of a civilization estranged from the earth that sustains it. I think of the waste and pollution that, as Harold Gilliam warns ... threatens us all. I think of the fate of birds, flowers and children when the ozone layer is gone, the rains stop falling, and the bombs do. I think of my life. I have not lived lightly on this earth, but have consumed, directly or indirectly, more than my share or need of water, topsoil, oil and other resources. I have fathered two children who also will burden this overcrowded planet. But as long as the birds return and the flowers bloom, I will dream of a time when we value blue skies more than new automobiles, count our wealth in joy rather than possessions, and dwell in peace and balance with the earth. I am not without hope ...
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