We All Come Home to Our Roots, in the End
My brother Ian and my sister-in-law Lee love and nurture these wild creatures where they live in West Palm Beach, just adjacent to the venerable Hippocrates Centre natural nutrition and healing centre. (Lee is a Raw Foods master chef who used to work at the Hippocrates Centre, and somehow makes all manner of raw ingredients taste like heaven.) Egyptian Geese, a community of turtles, iguanas, tree frogs, squirrels, and other creatures are the beneficiaries of their care, feeding (organic native wild diets only when in short supply for whatever reason) and protection.
For this reason, my brother and sister-in-law have been invited to participate in the screenings of productions like WLRN’s ‘Troubled Waters: A Turtle’s Tale’ and the independent film, ‘SPY IN THE WILD.’ This is a long way indeed from Ian’s original entrance into scientific and technological fields at the tender age of 18, when he was recruited straight out of high school by his science teacher to go with him to staff a new semi-classified enterprise, Comsat Satellites, the first communications satellite company, responsible for the medium through which we are communicating right here, right now, coordinated out of Washington DC. in the CIA and FBI-infested Dupont Building, right off the Mall, with satellite launch centres in Texas and Cape Canaveral.
From there he went to NASA, working in ‘cargo logistics’ for the Challenger, until his final disillusionment over NASA’s failure to fulfill the potential (for all) entailed in the easily obtained production of orbit-mounted solar mirrors for the production of free or cheap illimitable, non-polluting energy for the planet, in favour of developing the malign and ill-advised program popularly named ‘Star Wars.’ Now he works in radio engineering, a low-tech alternative to his initial pioneering of communications technology and the requisite computing skills, and the medium by which, many times, we as a family survived, mid-sea, during our on-board years on the Rhode, our 45-foot ocean-going wooden-hull deep-sea sailing ketch — home for most of the years of our early childhood.
We all come home to our earliest roots in the end.
