2008 Woodie Awards
Open your window and see
Lynne Zummo '06
Issue date: 3/9/06 Section: Opinions
- Page 1 of 2 next >
Two years ago, I cursed my wet jeans. The rolled up cuffs were soaked, dripping with water, cutting into my calves and filling me with a hate for life so strong that focusing on physics Professor Rich Wolfson's mad chalkboard scribblings was hardly an option. It was December of my sophomore year, and thick sheets of rain were pummeling every building, sidewalk and wormhole in the state of Vermont. It was December, 45 degrees and torrential downpour, and Professor Wolfson was spewing out parts per million, constants, equations, climate models, ice cores and everything else that we have to tell us that what we have been doing to our planet has forever changed its atmospheric system. There I was, abhorring every sopping cotton fiber on my body and aching to ring the necks of all disciples of the SUV faith, every oil kingpin and every nay-sayer who deemed global warming a myth of the liberal conspiracy, all while scratching away at a soggy notebook. They should climb down from their earth-eating vehicles, I thought, and try trudging across campus in this alleged winter. They should sit through an hour of physics chaffed by rain-soaked denim.
I first learned about global climate change in eighth grade science class. Mr. Sonne, a middle-aged man consumed in a battle against male pattern baldness, mentioned something of greenhouses and oil and cows, but I was 13 and preoccupied with surviving junior high. It was not until four years ago, when I first saw the Tetons in late November, bald and dry, that I first understood global climate change. The year before I came to Middlebury I had flown west with new tele-skis and a fantasized notion of jagged Rocky Mountains peaks frosted with snow, but found the mountains wearing nothing more than a sere crust of mud for the first sickly weeks of winter. When I returned home in January, Connecticut's snow had already melted into spring. Every trek through the backyard was a muddy battle that reinforced the idiocy of my ski purchase.
I first learned about global climate change in eighth grade science class. Mr. Sonne, a middle-aged man consumed in a battle against male pattern baldness, mentioned something of greenhouses and oil and cows, but I was 13 and preoccupied with surviving junior high. It was not until four years ago, when I first saw the Tetons in late November, bald and dry, that I first understood global climate change. The year before I came to Middlebury I had flown west with new tele-skis and a fantasized notion of jagged Rocky Mountains peaks frosted with snow, but found the mountains wearing nothing more than a sere crust of mud for the first sickly weeks of winter. When I returned home in January, Connecticut's snow had already melted into spring. Every trek through the backyard was a muddy battle that reinforced the idiocy of my ski purchase.