100 Futures: Tales of Possibility

.03

X.

      So I wasn't doing well in school. They make it like a prison and they are surprised that inmates keep trying to escape. My parents were ready to leave the city anyway. I don't mean New York or any other big city, I mean Denver, Colorado. Perhaps the best place in the United States to ever be a teenager. Couldn't be farther away from the real problems and dangers of the world, and they just legalized the Buddha. That's what I thought too, but the legals keep a damn tight lid on their shtuff. They must really care about their access because they are being damned responsible with it. Either way we moved to the western slope, the other side of the mountain. I feel like I'm going to turn into a tumble weed and blow away in the sand.

X.

I never really liked school for so many reason, but the school out here is different. On my first day, the teacher was waiting for me holding the sharpest axe in the world. He pulled out his iPhone Plus and showed me a video on the finer points of wood choppin', he placed a piece of wood on the stump and demonstrated how to cut it summarizing the steps from the video, handed me a brand new axe that wasn't nearly as sharp, and then left me to chop a pile of wood, full of centipedes, and big enough that could have swallowed me up. If I lifted the wrong piece and it collapsed on me they wouldn't have gotten to my body until all the centipedes and spiders had their way with me. It was a cloudy day and the wind was good. The game was on, I could practically hear the stadium, but I had nothing but the crisp autumn breeze and the wood. So I chopped. Within ten minutes my chest was pumped and I was hooked. I worked my way through the entire pile of wood by the end of the school year. The wood handle broke in my hands as much as it was seasoned with my blood.

X.

When I wasn't building calluses on my hands, I was also working on passing my GED test. This was great because it was very simple and in the mean time my parents were paying me ten dollar an hour to work on their new homestead. They didn't give me any crap when I started smoking black and milds, more concerned that if I didn't properly extinguish them our farm would burn. My dad was like, "Seriously that kind of shit happened to people out here so be careful."  My parents changed when we moved out here and I clocked 20 hours a week on the stead but I was putting much more  time in than that. Funny thing was that I was getting paid in relief. I was so angry, and I think part of the reason was that they had me all cooped up in a school cell, and out on the damned plains there's room to find your balance. You can test your limits without running into laws. By this I meant I could chop as hard as I could without making it to those bottom of that wood pile. I could rage and the wood could withstand everything I could give it. Before anyone finished the pile they always brought in the next year's load. When I became a teacher at that school I was clued into that fact. Eventually I even got to be the one standing there with my axe with a "how to chop wood lesson", and a brand new axe for a dark and angry boy to use for whaling on the endless pile of wood.

X.

We sold the wood when I was a student. As my time there passed one of the programs I organized was the wood cycle. Since we needed the wood chopping we also needed to have a closed system, so we planted a few acres of trees for lumber. A Denver area biochemist and botanist, helped use find the best line of tress for the purpose. As our school pieced together its organization it was also able to achieve charter school status, which gave us access to the school construction fund, thank you legalize weed. They sent people to give us money because our school was such a good example of what they were hoping to see. Thanks to the redirection of money flows, a school was being built that would draw kids away from the negative influences of drugs and violence toward economic development on the western mountain side of Colorado.  The good side.

X.

We designed the building to be half library, half school, and extra half green house. We were also able to use some of those funds to develop our school farm. Given the water scarcity this meant coming up with some important water use models. We teamed up with greenhouse designers from around the state, and we able to put three 1000 sq/ft green houses together. We got solar systems to power everything. Accordingly two of our most sought after programs are agriculture and solar electrics. They spend most of their day learning only about gardening or solar energy systems. The interesting thing is that these subjects include everything there is. Our students write, do math, consume mountains of science, and get their hands in the dirt. Our curriculum is life, in all its variants, and it helps our students live.

X.

As the world heats up, the dirt that our school was built on continues to turn to dust. Even our best greenhouse materials can not stand up to the sun's bleaching. The school dried up, and holding my old axe in the dry autumn sunset I turned into a tumble weed and blew away.