Halfway Over the Hill #6 (Earth & Air)

(Reading time - 5 book pages of text ~ 2300 words)

11th July - Morning has broken and you rise from your bed with a question. Indoors or outdoors? In the city it doesn't matter: the angry roar and choking stench of traffic or the dance of fury of hundreds of dissatisfied lives, pounding on the percussion walls of your appartment cell.

Here in Abruzzo, the open air beckons.
I step out at dawn and am immediately welcomed by the orchestral hum of teeming, unseen life and a caressing breeze of dew-drop freshness.
I raise my head to drink in the view and every time, without fail, I am arrested by the silent call of the ageless hills. Their eternal youth enveloping me in their warm embrace.
The still, inescapable hills are a reminder that Old Mother Earth is here beneath your feet and they put your half-century of worries into perspective.
And although we live in a time of doom-laden horizons and it feels like the beginning of the end of the world; the hills uplift me with their steady, ancient wisdom and leave me grounded.

Returning indoors there is the usual dawdling distraction over coffee, clothes and telecommunications but also the pressing need to get out and nourish myself on silence, space, life and light.
Finally, I climb the bank behind my house to my favourite spot. My eyes turned steadily left as I move forward and cup upheld in salute, I watch the sun-crowned hills ride by in quiet majesty.
And then just after the mass of great oak lies my dreaming vale - hiding, waiting and shimmering in the sun - I sink into my seat and my heart and mind soar into this living picture of simple wonder, painted by a master hand in ecstatic shades of green and blue; it's a secret view of heaven and my private communion with nature. I can almost believe in God so glad that I live am I.
How did I ever get through the day without these sacred moments?

But the green splendour of this rich, living earth is not unadulterated. And the blue sky is sometimes tainted too.

A few evenings ago, I was startled to see a thick, neon pink streak edging the thin clouds at sunset; a warning cordon suspended over the crests of the hills.
It's the first time I've noticed 'pink sky' here; a marker of stagnant pollution.
I remember Paris nights, the electric blue, red or turquoise green skies, as fascinating as the beauty and horror of pop art.
But a pink sky here in the hills! The following evening it had abated a little and I may not have even paid attention if I hadn't been on the alert.
Maybe the lingering drought and the lack of strong wind is causing pollution to hover.

Tractors, chainsaws and strimmers use a lot of gas oil - scythes, hoes and other old-fashioned farming implements are rarely used, although most people still have these. These gas oil motors put out more gunk  in the air than car traffic.
The newly tarmacked road (only some arbitrary stretches covered - this is Italy!) has increased traffic; this and more frequent empty buses (that refuse to be flagged down) may have added to the pollution. 

Single occupancy car use is almost a rule here. 

And when people go for 'walks', they mean with their cars.

Also wood burning remains the main source of fuel and many noble trees have disappeared since my arrival.
As for the poor earth, pesticide use is rife.
Flytipping is a real problem too.
And in order not to pay for refuse collection people will burn plastic. The toxic fumes are foul but eventually disperse. 

On these hot, hazy, dry evenings the fresh hill air seems transperced by a heavy miasma, not unlike city smog.

Sometimes I think the local people are on a mission to destroy their corner of paradise.


On one of the first perfectly sunny spring days (about 22 C) I found my neighbour texting in his cold, dark, dank dwelling rather than on his shady terrace with a view.
It's more than just being blasé, it's as if he and the other locals begrudge the beauty of the place and think it interferes with their thoughts and activities.
'Oh the views, the views' they exclaim in dismay as they work heads down and hold up their hands to shield themselves. At night they bang close the shutters 'oh those wretched views' they bewail.
Ok, I've exaggerated the indifference but my former friend Beata was mystified when I said that I considered it a day wasted if you hadn't looked at the hills.
My irrational fear is that a monstrous Mariott hotel will be erected in my splendid valley because the locals don't understand what an eyesore is.

And also that in their zeal for flattening the woods they'll somehow bulldozer the timeless hills to a flat patty as well.

Now my pet hate is strimmer string. When I say string I don't mean something innocuous like jute twine. I mean PLASTIC!

Beautiful, colourful, versatile Barbapapa man-made plastic but lethal when pulverised.
A strimmer mows the land and is essentially spinning blades at the bottom of a long pole. At the top is a hand-held gas oil or electric-powered engine. Metal blades are an option but can break easily on rocky terrain and circus spinning wheel, knife throwing horror could result.

Now the first time I saw the two bright yellow plastic strands attached to the hub, I thought 'how ingenious'. At 7000 rpm (revolutions per minute) this indestructible plastic slices through unwanted undergrowth. 

Bravo to the plastic engineers, I cried, they may be as dull and grey as the concrete scientists I knew at university but they have taken plastic to new heights.

But, alas no, it's not indestructible, even for my small piece of land, the strimmer must be fed 20m of plastic line. Where does it all go?
'It's wonderful', my gardener says, 'it disappears into the atmosphere'. 

I could feel that he wished to take a magician's bow at his marvellous conjuring trick.

Invisible microplastic was probably as harmless as cigarette smoke for him.
The strimmer is also known as a weed whacker or whip. Should it be called world whacker?
I immediately started searching for biodegradable strimmer string.

 I could use a scythe but in some ways I'm a true Ilbolese (resident of Ilboli- if you recall, Ilboli is pronounced 'hillybilly' in a mock-Italian accent - similarly Ilbolese is pronounced 'elbow lazy') 

 I don't have grease in my elbow and thus I am elbow lazy!
Eventually I found some bio string. The cost was huge - over 3 times the amount of plastic nylon string but I intended to use it sparingly.
My gardener was mightily offended. He would not pay for it; but nobody was asking him to. His fee usually includes string. I said I would pay him his usual fee and I would provide the string.
He came up with a sackful of kneejerk arguments against biodegradable string which can be summed up as 'not strong enough' for long grass but he doesn't come as often as I would like.
He was on an anti-ecological mission and he felt so strongly about it that he overcame his horror for the written word and presented me with bulleted points against biodegradable string, none of which addressed my concerns about microplastic pollution.
It was strange, it's as if I had offended the very fibre of his being. Was he half plastic? He was young enough. It has been shown recently that plastic microns are in human foetuses, in all the rainbow colours that they are dyed in.
From previous posts you will know that I do not rival Marie Konde for tidiness. There are plastic bottles scattered around my land. Mostly foraged from the woods by my dog who loves crunching the stuff. Once a week (or maybe two) I will go round and pick them up and the odd plastic bag blown in by the wind.
However, when my gardener mows in protective boiler suit and helmet he is in a Terminator trance of destruction - grass or plastic, it must be blasted to smithereens.
Because of the flying debris you cannot approach to warn him. The noise is horrendous and he won't hear your shouts.
Using a long cane as a lance and a cardboard box as armour I jabbed him on his behind but to no avail and received a shower of plastic
I call him a gardener but in fact he is a man that just mows. He must use hundreds of metres of string per day. On his WhatsApp status he posted a video of himself sweeping left and right with his loudest and longest strimmer, the caption read  'pure passion ❤'

I perfectly understand that most of his clients would not wish to pay more but I was willing to.
'Think of the microplastic everywhere' I urged, but he said he didn't give a... and that pollution was everywhere and what did it matter if you added to it. The logic isn't obviously fallible, it resembles my reasoning when it comes to dirt in the house but it's a question of quantity too.

I also accept his implied point that it's easy for the relatively comfortably off to go green but he actually has more money than me, given his huge collection of expensive noisy CO2 emitting engines in active service - and only a small subset are gas oil strimmers. 

I see him around often with his pollution-spewing machines, in a black halo of righteousness, vaunting his massive carbon footprint to the four winds. 

And if I call him Bigfoot, it is because it's his name. Well his surname actually translates as Bigfeet. And I believe his family shares his views so that's just as well.
As he stands proudly among his strimmers and loops of colourful plastic string in his cavernous garage I am browbeaten not so much by his words but by the force of unshakeable traditional male authority with which they are imbued. His fingers fidget on a pendant of the local female saint as if to strengthen his conviction.
'You can't SEE the microplastic' he kept repeating what he felt was his most irrefutable argument.

Yes, yes you can't see  carbon monoxide either but you still refrain from sticking your head in the oven' I wanted to retort but didn't.

And 'biodegradable material can take up to ten years to decompose' (but ten years is not forever, I murmur) and then 'you shouldn't always be so fussy like a woman'.
The mouth actually opened to protest but promptly snapped shut because the scolding eye of feminist epistemology will either cause your Ilbolese interlocutor to turn to stone or he will stare at you blankly like a bewildered dog who doesn't understand why you don't also want to roll in some random roadside shit.
'It's all back to front! was my unvoiced protest.

His most powerful argument, however, was the most common Italian gesture - hand held out and fingers and thumb all pressed together as if holding specks of microplastic...then the hand bounces up and down on a loose wrist a couple of times, teasing the mouth with the mouthwatering plastic powder.
It's sign language for What! How! Why! Unbelievable! Given its semantics you can understand why it's the most popular gesture here.

I'm bewitched by the admonition of that pyramid fist but try to stand firm. The gesture is oddly reminiscent of a wagging finger which in turn reminds me of angrily
washing my poo-encrusted, non-tail-wagging dog earlier that day (he hates baths as much as loves poo) and thinking inanely to myself, 'Isn't it funny, the word you get with 'dog' spelt backward and how inappropriate'.

Bigfoot's gesticulating and repetitive arguments continue, I know I will give in and start to hum mournfully, 'One man and his god went to mow a meadow'.

When it suits him he will rail against the ravages of pollution and climate change. He is very young and very fatalistic about the future but here he is in a 'pure passion' about nylon string being the best.
But with microplastic and particulate matter from engine oil (electric-powered strimmers are also out of the question, of course) he's shooting himself in his big foot.

I play my last 'quantity' card hopelessly. 
It was hard to find solid information on the strimmer string contribution to microplastic contamination. 
An article entitled Strung Out puts monthly production for a single company alone at 200 tons and there must be hundreds of such companies around the world.
Bigfoot then reasoned his output was 'nothing'. True, a drop in the ocean or the straw that breaks the camels back?

Wimpiness apart, I needed to hold back on making my case, it's hard to find someone to do regular work here and I needed him on my side. And I'm not a dedicated ecowarrior, and like he says, most of the microplastic is blown away somewhere else but SOME will be absorbed by my land and by my vegetables - it concerns me directly.

And not forgetting that what goes around comes around...
The cycles of the earth haven't stopped yet and the planet is still spinning on its axis, just like millions of strimmer discs around the world but what is flying off into the air? Some of my sanity, for sure.
My head is spinning too, it's time to stop, take stock, and think of another kind of revolution... the Industrial Revolution back to front. 

It's a grim prospect but the rusty scythe decorating the wall needs to see life again... through my elbow.

Biodegradable bag on tree for 3 years

Find: A pair of kitchen scissors and snip some weeds. Shears are better.