My second trip to White Clay felt more like a chore than my first one.  It was colder, the air was crisp, and I had just over an hour before my next class.  There was an agitated warmth in my legs from pedaling my bike, but the freezing temperatures numbed the rest of my body.  I was uncomfortable and impatient as I settled onto my mossy patch, but determined to write a thorough journal.

The lakes that held just a few stubborn ice cubes last weekend were now covered by a thin frosty wafer.  Mud along the banks had frozen into kernels that crunched under my feet and bike tires.  The warmth from last weekend was gone, but its effects were still noticeable.  Several small brown birds flitted around me, clearly annoyed by my intrusion.  The earth had a chill to it, but green was forcing its way through, pushing back against the frost encroachment.  Stems were sprouting from the ground, buds were forming on thorn bushes, and the sheet of ice framed the pond’s algae in a pane of emerald glass.  Spring had decided to stay.  Every small observation was further proof that the frozen earth was starting to yield life, as if the plants of the ground were in an argument with the temperature that they were determined to win.  It all breathed together and shivered against the frigid breeze.

The longer I sat and contemplated the growth around me, the more my irritation subsided.  I was now more focused on the task at hand.  After I made those initial observations and comparisons to the previous week, I started trying to pick out and identify individual plants and animals.  Japanese honeysuckle had coiled its way around nearby trees and was contributing its greenery to the scenery.  I also realized that the grasses around me were indeed Japanese stilt grass.  I was already familiar with its prolific summer verdancy, but I never realized that they reverted to old brooms in the winter.

Underneath the dense hay I found another plant stubbornly refusing to submit to the elements or its invasive competition.  The tall green stalks of wild onions rose in opposition to the mass of brown that surrounded them.   Here was a wild, native food that was being swallowed up by an alien plant.  I couldn’t have made up a better connection to Food Fight if I had tried.  The odds were certainly against the onions, but root vegetables are hardy and strong.  It already had the advantage of being able to grow in the winter.  It was insistent that it belonged there, and that, despite its sheer quantity, it was the stilt grass that was the outsider.  In Food Fight, the Hawaiian citizens faced an uphill battle against Monsanto’s agricultural testing, but their stubborness and tenacity paid off in the form of local pesticide restrictions.  As my hour wore on and the ground slowly leached the heat from my body, I resolved to have the same endurance as that onion, solemnly sitting and waiting until the task at hand was complete