I don't know why, but this story makes me glad I'm not a little boy in school:

The children first listened to a story about a pair of birds, the ill-fated Hector and his mate, Helen, residents of the Lake Merritt watershed. It was a classic Greek tragedy -- Hector got tangled up with carelessly discarded fishing line and perished.

The class then used felt-tip pens to write their thoughts on little shirts and dresses from the Goodwill Store.

And then the dancing began. Picking a cloth partner, the children fluttered four at a time as Bulitt recited their written words in a sing-song manner, which was repeated by the kids who were not dancing:

"Dear Hec-tor," sang Bulitt.

"Dear Hec-tor," echoed the class.

"I'm sor-ry."

"I'm sor-ry."

"That you got stuck in the fish-ing line."

"That you got stuck in the fish-ing line."

"When you died."

"When you died."

"From, Ja-cob."

"From, Ja-cob."

The class, initially shy, warmed up quickly and soon nearly everyone was vying for a chance to do a shirt dance.

Inspired by nature

Bulitt has been doing interpretive dance for 25 years, and has always been inspired by nature and birds in particular. She performed a dance called "Under the Wing" at Lake Merritt last September for Coastal Cleanup Day.

She received a civic arts grant from Berkeley in association with that city's Shoreline Bird Center, and has done the same performance she did at Montclair Elementary, called "Sharing the Watershed and Honoring Birds," at Fairmont Elementary in El Cerrito, Grant Elementary in Richmond and the preschool at Berkeley Montessori. The goal is to teach kids about the importance of the watershed and its inhabitants. All parts of the class have a meaning.

"To children, the notion of the shirt or dress is like feathers," Bulitt said. "Clothes hold memories, and they can write something down and leave it behind for the birds."

Anyway, in my local Berkeley Gazette, there's a picture of the artist flapping about in front of the kids -- and a boy in the picture does not appear terribly interested in "environmental performing art."

No wonder they have to resort to Ritalin!

I guess I should be glad I don't have kids. Otherwise, I might have to spend my time Googling for stories about "Hector" and "Helen" at Lake Merritt. I found an actual account of the tragedy:

....two white pelicans, Hector and Helen, and seven other half-growns, were brought to the refuge from Pyramid Lake courtesy of the Fish and Wildlife Department. The two were picked to remain at the lake through a partial pinioning that kept them from full flight. Although the others eventually flew away, H & H remained behind to delight thousands of people through the years with photographic beauty and comical antics...a noble sacrifice that they seemingly enjoyed. They were fed three pounds of smelt every day, plus scooping up some lake herring on the side, too! Hector became tangled in a rope and drowned in the mid-1980's, but Helen lived on alone for ten years, escorting wild visiting white pelicans around the lake, and she was often courted by a white mute swan that mysteriously appeared off and on.

So what's with the the "fish-ing line" line?

I don't know, but the artist also dances with trout. (The latter was a performance for "Culvert Action II" -- a precursor to an ongoing (if economically chaotic) program to "daylight" a creek which runs through downtown Berkeley.)

Daylighting creeks is a deadly serious business (and I don't think hunting and fishing is on the agenda).

According to U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, it's only a first step:

"We have to have in place an imagination based on intimate knowledge and love of the places where we live, so that we can push programs forward rather than just react to environmental despoiling for the rest of our days. It can begin in small and symbolic ways, like the day-lighting of Strawberry Creek in Berkeley. To open up the fact that we live on a watershed, that where we live is really a drainage from the Contra Costa Hills into the Bay -- and that we've lost that connection -- can be solved with imagination. Imagine our streams flowing freely again, with the egrets and the herons working their way up the creeks through the city, fishing for minnows and sticklebacks. With this imagination we can restore the ecological cycles of this place, reminding us daily of the larger issues involved in preservation and restoration, the healing of the planet.

"What the WATERSHED Festival offers the community is the opportunity to come together and begin to teach ourselves and our children to pay attention in fundamental and different ways with poetry and art."

But I'm not a little boy. As I've said before, boys prefer toy guns. And I think they'd rather go fishing for trout than dancing with them.

Under the circumstances, who wouldn't need Ritalin?