I just returned from the memorial event for Larry Gibson, who began his fight against mountaintop removal a quarter century ago and is considered the father of the movement. He died of a heart attack in September while working atop his beloved Kayford Mountain, at the age of 66. (See my previous post for more info.)

Even though I didn't know  him well, I felt compelled to go and pay my respects. I flew down this time and my friend Genny (whom I met last year during the March on Blair Mountain) picked me up and brought me to stay at her house in South Charleston. Through Danny Chiotos, who works with Larry's Keeper of the Mountain Foundation, I was able to get a ride to Kayford with Rory, and his adorable little dog, who sat on my lap for most of the hour-plus ride.

It was a perfect fall day, sunny, warm and breezy, and the sign over Larry's cabin -- "Larry's Place, Almost Heaven" rang true. I walked under an amazing variety of trees, and on one trail I found hundreds of golf ball-sized green fruits with black walnuts inside. I bagged up a bunch to give to Rory, who already had a big bag of them in his car.

There was music on the mountain, including some beautiful a capella sounds from a trio who came up from Asheville, N.C.  I got a ride back to Charleston just after sunset, wishing I could have camped out on the mountain (as many others were), but it didn't make sense to schlep all my gear for one night. I recorded lots of tearful and funny tributes to Larry, which continued the next day at the four-hour memorial, where the story-telling was interspersed with music, prayers and video clips of Larry in action. That was followed by a candlelight vigil at the Capitol so even more of his friends could speak.

The "400 pounds of ugly" is a catchy phrase that Larry's daughter, Victoria, recounted her dad using, about the need to be true to yourself. Click here to listen to a 4-minute vox pop (collection of voices) I put together for Free Speech Radio News. (Scroll down to the last feature on the newscast and click on Download Audio.) It begins with
Victoria and ends with a young man who worked with indigenous people in Ecuador, fighting oil pollution, who took Larry down to meet with some of the locals to share stories about fighting extractive industries.  Another of the voices belongs to Debbie Graff, who was on the speakers' bureau of Keeper of the Mountains Foundation and is pictured at the top of this post.  As Larry's friend Bill DePaulo said in his eulogy, his death is a sad occasion, but not a tragedy.  "It's a not a tragedy to die where you want to be, doing what you want to do with the people that love you and surrounded by the people you love."

Larry expected to die in the struggle, and had been the subject of innumerable threats and violence. He told friends he was concerned about that, but not scared. He had a bad heart, and the stress of those confrontations could have worsened his condition, but he believed in his mission. He was probably the closest thing to a Happy Warrior since Hubert Humphrey. Amen to that.

We have a sugar maple tree in our front yard. It's not the most gorgeous specimen in the world (not like the century-old giant that sprawled over the entire big yard behind our previous home when it was brought down by a tornado in 1989), but it turns uniformly gold in the fall and is quite lovely.

One evening while having dinner on our deck, I happened to look up over the roof of the house at the maple, and noticed all the leaves had fallen from the middle of its crown, while all the rest of the leaves are still green. We called our tree guy, whose verdict after inspection was -- climate change.

I've heard for a long time that one of the expected impacts of climate change in New England is that the maple sugar industry will be decimated as the sunny days and cold nights of late winter/early spring will no longer be predictable. I've heard that the trees will migrate north. I always had a picture in my mind of the trees pulling up their roots and marching north, but the way it really happens is that trees in the southern range will just die.

Once I started really looking at the tree, I noticed that it looks sickly overall, not just at the bare spot on top. The tree guy recommended a few hundred dollars worth of treatment, which will at best just delay its demise. Then I looked down the street and saw two more maples that seem to have the same bare-on-top problem as ours. (The photo at top is of our neighbor's tree, since I couldn't shoot our own tree from a good angle.)

Several studies point to Connecticut having a climate more like North Carolina's in the next several decades, and given that climate change is happening much faster than scientists predicted less than a decade ago, I fear we'll be at that warmer place even sooner. I sure as hell will miss my maple trees.