How many miles to babylon?
Three score miles and ten
Can I get there by lantern light?
Aye, and back again.
I was thinking of this nursery rhyme today in terms of where we in the process of getting the city to accept/embrace the beavers. It’s been a year and a half. This is almost my 500th column. We’ve had the top watershed minds in the county working on this problem, and the top beaver experts in the world finding solutions. We have vast public interest, an active volunteer group, constant outpourings of good will. All these things should have fitted together and convinced even the most waivering of minds that these beavers belong in this city.
We should be in Babylon, and back again, already.
Instead we are still arguing with public works about the right to plant trees, explaining how our drought has nothing to do with the fact that the beavers haven’t made it flood yet, and getting snapped at by council members who would rather not have to deal with us.
Every time I think we have earned the last necessary support or found a “game changer” so compelling that the city will not be able to ignore the valueable role that these beavers have in this community, things snap back into tension state with elastic zeal. It seemed like the beaver festival changed everything, but it is clear that isn’t true when the city manager tells me over breakfast that the habitat shouldn’t be replaced so that the beavers will just move on. It seemed like my being on the board of directors for the JMA would cement the beavers respectibility for the city, but of course that isn’t what happened at all.
At first night this year, when we were officially “on” the city schedule, Linda asked me happily “did you ever think this day would come?” And I answered without hesitation. Honestly? I thought it would come ages ago.
Babylon isn’t any closer it seems. It has greatly saddened me to think that we might never get there, but this morning I thought, maybe that’s the point. Maybe its the journey, and not the destination, that matters. For the city, and for myself personally.
Maybe we’re not talking about Babylon, but Ithaka.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
C.P. Cavafy
