Rel B. Corbin, Guest

Peoples Climate March—my experience. I was #112, the last person to be accepted for the Arkansas buses to NYC. We left LR very early Friday morning, stopped at Oak Ridge, Tennessee for a program on Global Warming . Some of us had signed up too late for a security clearance to enter Oak Ridge so we had to spend that time on a nice beach on the Clinch River miles upstream from the ash dump at Kingston, TN.

We spent the night at the hamlet of Bulls Gap, TN, where we picked up the last to join us. We had folks from all over Arkansas and from Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. Ages ranged from early teens to around eighty. Families came.

Up early Saturday, to go the length of the Virginia's Shenendoah Valley, very briefly across West Virginia and Maryland and then half the length of Pennsylvania to arrive at Rochelle Park, NJ that night and up early Sunday morning to arrive beside Central Park in NYC to wait for our parade to start at 11:30. Many people were already there when we arrived about 7 AM. We had agreed to stay together, so we scattered. I was with a little core group but I would wander off among the people and out into Central Park occasionally (Central Park is huge with big overgrown areas. There were plenty of porta potties for 200,000 but not near enough for the 400,000+ who participated. I have found I was not the only one to water the bushes in wonderfully over grown areas.)

There were Vegans, Pacifists, Socialists, Communists, Lenin-Marxists, others strongly opposed to all these and then there were others. There were all colors of folks. I talked with a Pine Bluff, Arkansas native NAACPer who brought several teenagers from Milwaukee.

Sometimes New Englanders and New Yorkers would ask where I was from, I assumed because of my Arkansas twang, but I felt they were just curious. Folks were very nice. And interested to talk with someone from Arkansas.

I never felt pushed, physically or otherwise in New York.

There were cops everywhere. My seat mate for the trip, Guerlermina, was from Monterey, Mexico via Chicago and eastern Oklahoma, good Catholic, widowed in 1972 with 5 young children, who recently married a Republican Methodist. Mina got her photo taken twice with pairs of cops holding her arms from either side, all grinning.

This was an exhausting trip. I never heard a speech that moved me. But I felt the whole time (until the Monday night at 10:30 arrival back in Little Rock.) that this mass of people, many of whom probably sacrificed greatly to go, want to save God's Green Earth from the eminent disaster, (referred to as "Progress" by many) we are close to.

I am ready to go again.

By Rel B. Corbin, guest post.
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