Page 10 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • August 7, 2013 The long-term turf solution Using sports as a metaphor for life is a good way to start an explanation of why things do not always work out. Sports are a great way to convince people to exercise if they are not imbued with the sort of self-discipline that inspires Olympic gymnasts and figure skaters and, con- versely, convinces soldiers to throw themselves under enemy tanks with satchel charges or on top of barbed wire attached to land mines. Olympic athletes go for the glory, but members of the military have been known to take risks for love of country rather than love of themselves. You do not go home at the end of the game if you do, so the stakes have to be high, such as saving your country from foreign invasion. If you make that foreign invasion plausible to the troops in the trenches, the best people on your side are willing to throw away their lives. As the foreign invasion becomes less and less plausible, the IQ scale of the human sacrifice victims plummets. Cowards and “individualists,” as the Soviets once called them, are not going to take the jump in any case. For those guys who actually want to live and are difficult to motivate, you have commissars and NKVD “battle police” who shoot anybody who turns tail. In America, anything drastic should also be voluntary. Public schools do not have hang-gliding teams, fencing teams with sharpened blades and no masks, or high-speed motorcycle racing teams. Glen Rock right now is polarized by a much saner and healthier controversy: How does the borough make Lower Faber Field off Doremus Avenue safer for young athletes whose games are troubled by poor natural turf and occa- sional rocks? A resident group called Game On Glen Rock offered to pay the full cost of refurbishing the field with artificial turf, which is loved by many sports parents, not much loved by young athletes, and utterly hated by environmentalists. The Glen Rock Borough Council told the Game On Glen Rock supporters -- repeatedly -- that they would consider a refur- bishing if the volunteer group raised every bit of the money themselves. The council members as individuals cautioned the volunteers that fundraising was not what it once had been and that they could have a tough time raising that kind of money. Now, just a few years later, the cost of the field work is an estimated $2.5 million, while donations on hand after much larger pledges are said to be about $60,000. Game On supporters are asking the borough council take advantage of low interest rates to bond the project. People who are not actively involved in the sports pro- gram are urging the council not to bond the project. As one resident said at a recent meeting,” My daughter is a great dancer, but I’m not asking you to pay for it...There’s no more free lunch.” I heartily concur. It would have been great if the school sent my kids to Paris and the Riviera so they could appreci- ate the influence these places had on Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I was not about to ask for the schools to fund the trip. That was a job for me if I wanted it. Somehow, I just did not have the cash on hand. I was already paying for my daughter’s piano lessons with the last living student of Jean Sibelius. Some of the environmentalists are convinced that the field should be refurbished -- but with real grass, not plastic turf. Other taxpayers with excellent credentials believe that bonding that kind of money is not a great idea. A third force emerged at the most recent meeting: People who urge that the money on hand, perhaps supplemented by a modicum of municipal money, but not anything vaguely resembling $2.5 million, be used with municipal and volunteer labor to recondition a natural turf field. Some people, of course, can be trusted to take the argu- ments to extremes. The present field was called “dan- gerous.” Last time I looked, the young athletes were not draftees. You can get hurt in any sport at any time. I vol- unteered for Airborne in 1967 but you have no idea how many football players used “football injuries” to either avoid the draft or leave the Army when they saw the food and the lists of casualties. I was injured in training, and one guy who left in the same medical discharge group as mine told me confidentially that he expected to go back to play- ing semi-pro football as soon as he got home after being declared unqualified for active service. I had X-rays of my training injury, so I placed myself at a slightly different level of patriotism. After I heard that 78 percent of American civilians, including Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, wanted William Calley pardoned for the My Lai massacre, I decided the semi-pro football guy had done the right thing after all. A couple of my high school buddies who were in combat and decorated for valor said they would never do it again unless the communists invaded Canada. That made me feel better. We are told that kids who cannot find fields for sports are at risk for drug abuse. Wake up, America! All kids are at risk for drug abuse. Athletes sometimes forgo smok- ing because it interferes with their wind, and I can vouch for the fact that the only reason I never smoked marijuana while I was in the service was because I never had smoked cigarettes. We used to drink turpin hydrate -- Army issue cough syrup -- for jags, and that stuff definitely had both alcohol and codeine in it: You could tell from the lurid dreams you had after taking more than a few sips. When the U.S. was losing 500 men a week and your des- ignation was “light infantryman” or “machine gunner,” the menace of getting hooked on cough syrup was the least of anybody’s worries. The guys who went to Europe or South Korea may not have had the same excuse, but a lot of them did it, too. I would say that athletics are a somewhat useful antidote to the menace of narcotics, but getting on the Advanced Placement and honors track or into serious classical music are even better. Calculus and Mozart are not made easier Generous gift by getting stoned while you do your homework or practice your lesson. Sadly enough, the idea of hardy and hearty pioneers and department of public works employees with free time fixing the field collides with the first and most expensive problem with Lower Faber Field: drainage. The field is so low and so close to Diamond Brook that it floods routinely during heavy rains or quick snow melts. There is a long-range solution that could do some good: People should give up the idea of any new local construc- tion that involves asphalt shingles or asphalt driveways, and they should plant these vast do-nothing mowed lawns with small trees and shrubs so more water is absorbed right on the residential property and less water flows into the drainage streams. Veterans Field in Ridgewood has turned into a lake a number of times during the autumn rains, and cars have drowned there. The ground floor of Ridgewood Village Hall has been written off for serious office space because the flood water is simply beyond anyone’s con- trol. The same problem falls on every community that has streams running through them. Those streams cannot handle the excess water that is no longer being absorbed by natural ground cover, and the resultant flooding covers lowlands. Turning the flooded grass into flooded plastic is not even a pass-along solution. The problem is exacerbated as the rain falls on the plastic turf, has nowhere to go but downhill, and floods the streams. The start of the effort should be with volunteers, includ- ing both the sports parents and the environmental support- ers. Eliminating runoff by planting space now covered by lawn grass with smaller trees and shrubs could reduce the overflow into the streams to the point where it might even- tually be worthwhile to send the DPW crews out to remove the rocks, and then revitalize the field with topsoil, organic fertilizer, and real grass. The real grass would be more fun and safer for the young athletes, and would help reduce flooding and even the carbon footprint. Plastic grass is not the answer. Neither is hitting up the weary taxpayers whose kids are done with amateur sports. Nature is cooperative. Human nature should be pointed that way. If the environmentalists, the sports parents, and the tax-watchers can all get on the same team they can work out an answer to this problem. But they all have to drop the sports stadium idea of winners and losers and go with a plan for winners and winners and winners -- the young ath- letes who prefer natural grass, the environmentalists who worry about runoff and global warming, and the taxpayers who have had more than enough of paying for stuff they do not personally want or need. Emmanuel Cancer Foundation Northern Regional Director Laura Savage (right) accepts a check for $5,000 from MSO ® , Inc., an insurance rating/service bureau located in Glen Rock. The check represents the proceeds from the 20 th Annual MSO Golf Outing. Attendees and companies had the opportunity to sponsor a hole, with proceeds going to Emmanuel Cancer Founda- tion. The check was delivered to ECF by Jan Scites, Megan Richards, and Pepper Treuvey. Richards and Treuvey are pictured here with Savage. For over 19 years, MSO has held a bi-weekly food collection for the Emmanuel Cancer Foundation (ECF) and their food pantry (www.emmanuelcancer.org). ECF provides much-needed support to New Jersey families of children who have been diagnosed with cancer. The foundation’s regional center is located at 174 Paterson Avenue in Midland Park.