Written in Geneva, 15+/- yearsago...

Spring has come to Geneva, with the blazing yellow colza already giving way to the soft waving pale green of young wheat. The “jet d’eau”, the fountain which fires up from Lac Léman almost 300 feet into the air against a backdrop of a distant Mont Blanc, has been turned back on. To the North, the Jura are speckled with budding birch and maple, light between the dark evergreen hemlock below the tree line, the barren fields above still dotted with recalcitrant patches of white. The tulips in the Botanical garden were splendid, again, and passed. The banks with their neon headbands never changed.

In Tuzla, in Dushanbe and how many other places around the globe Spring may be unfolding different glories, different hopes and births and rebirths. What joy such renewal must bring, even if it is only to color the graveyards with fresh blooms. But is there joy and wonder left in those places which continue to bear winter’s scars long past the Spring thaw? Here in Geneva, the miracle is only noted with remarks of how early or how late, passing like a Spring storm.

Yet Geneva is often where great matters of state are cussed and discussed by concerned people who live their day to day in this splendid basin, where humanitarian concern takes shape and form, and where promises kept and unkept nudge the future of man along one path or another. Can bureaucratic council, nestled in comfort and ease, anesthetized in fog between Alps and Jura make such weighty choices? Who are the people entrusted with the play in the fields? What are their qualifications, their license, their duty, and how can they bear up and shoulder the weight? Do they have the mettle?

It’s a long way from Vern Ricker’s vending machines in the mills up and down the Androscoggin, or taking care of dave Berry’s pigs and roofin’ in the winter, or pullin’ traps with the Cooks or doin’ post-and-beam. The comfort and slack of Geneva may be part of the problem. It seems all too often decisions are made by those who have never had to go downstairs in the morning with a propane torch that won’t start until the umpteenth try in order to thaw the pipes at four a.m. so they won’t burst before before six and the first cup of morning coffee fresh from the woodstove in the early dark. Or, once the tongue burned and the house cozy, have to step outside into a biting north wind to try to start the reluctant hard-oiled buggy, and to scrape a patch for view on the inside of the windscreen. Or, even with the warm rush of May, to put up with Nature’s Airborne, small but mighty, unstoppable in their persistence and ability to inflict.

It seems in retrospect that there could have been no better preparation for the Diplomatic Corps than getting by in Maine for ten years in the seventies. Lessons of sharing, of pain and joy, living on the edge of have and nave-not, but always coming down on the positive side, pushed to learn new skills, to face hardship and change, always change, always the same. I said to a colleague the other day that I thought one winter in an old country house in Maine was worth two at a European University. He laughed, and so did I: he thought I was making a joke; I knew I was underestimating true value.

I haven’t run into too many Mainers in the course of the past few years. The stretch of international diplomacy seems to fall short of Portland for the most part. But there’s no doubt in my mind that extending that reach could bring a dite of uncommon sense to Geneva, and maybe even a touch of DownEast wisdom.