Treating The Bosun's Mate

(SAN DIEGO)-Jeanne and Walter Simons* retirement house is on a small hill overlooking San Diego. From the picture window that wraps around two walls of their living room, the Simons can look directly out on the Naval installation where Captain Simons was stationed until he retired; to the right is San Diego Bay and the destroyer he once commanded. The Navy, the institution that shaped the Simons' married life, surrounds them still, though in recent years they have lost the feeling of comfort they once derived from its structured environment.

Spoiling The Blueberry Patch

(SHUNGNAK, ALASKA) - The road to the new sewage lagoon runs through a blueberry patch. It's a small matter. An acre of blueberries was traded for easy access to the lagoon and, coincidentally, to the rest of the blueberries. On a windy day this summer, you could often find village women and children hiking out the new road to gather wild berries for the winter. When their baskets were full, the road carried them home again to Shungnak, past the new school, past the telephone and television satellite dish, past the water and sewer plant and finally home to a new plywood and frame house. Supper was soon readyfresh moose and pilot bread, hot tea and wild berries with seal oil and sugar.

Water Wars In Colorado

(DENVER) - In early August, shortly after President Carter proposed his dramatic shift in U.S. energy policy-the federally subsidized production of millions of barrels of synthetic fuel per day from coal and oil shale-I was in Denver talking with people about water and how its relative availability or scarcity will affect the future of the arid Rocky Mountain and High Plains states. It is toward this region, of course, that the President's new energy creation, in whatever form it appears after having been disassembled and rewired by Congress, will come lumbering, because most of the nation's coal and nearly all of its high-grade oil shale lie roughly within a 600-mile oval in the states of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah.

Impossible Dreams

(JERUSALEM) - The "melting pot" is an American concept, without bearing in the Holy Land. In the Old City of Jerusalem, where the great religions exalt their symbols of spirituality, Moslems, Christians and Jews rub shoulders in crowded streets, and barely stop to notice one another. None speak of brotherhood, or reach out to neighbors in love, and so it has been over the centuries. Rather, in alternating waves of righteousness, each has periodically risen up to smite the others. To imagine "integration" in the Holy Land, as Americans venerate it for their own society, would be naive. Tranquility depends on putting distance between the points of abrasion, so that each of the communities here can live as it chooses, in splendid indifference to what is around it.

(NEW YORK CITY) - "When I came to New York in 1931," recalls Honi Coles, "Harlem was completely different. You can't visualize it. You can't possibly visualize it. In the first place, there was little crime, I mean street crime. There was no thought of mugging… none of that existed. Seventh Avenue probably was the prettiest street in all of New York City. It was tree-lined on both sides, from 110th Street to 155th. The island in the middle was wider, and people utilized it - sitting out all hours of the night. Something was always going on. You could go up Seventh Avenue any time of night, especially above 125th Street, between 125th and 145th I'd say, and there must have been a thousand little after-hours spots, you know, and always with some entertainment.