In Memoriam, Martha Ruhe
I will never forget the first time I met Martha. I was new at the National Park Service, in a bit of a tizzy over a document, another meeting, still figuring it all out, and a beautiful gentle-faced older woman appeared in front of my cubicle. We both looked at one another. She didn't say a word. When our eyes met, we burst out laughing.
Stop. Slow down. Look. Experience. Take it in. Understand it's all precious, and it's all absurd. Everything's important and nothing matters. Laugh.
She was delighted when I told her I was a botanist and so sealed our friendship even more. The hikes, walks, trips, visits were spent "dawdling", "ambling", "wandering", "goofing off", and always bent over something. Her sense of humor, sense of the absurd...We were always laughing about something, say a darkling beetle crossing the trail in front of us. As if there was something seriously awry in the universe, she touched my wrist and said, "Ginny. Ginny (I loved the way she said my name, with the accent on the "G"). Something's wrong. It's not sticking its rear in the air at us. Shouldn't it be?" Take it as a compliment, was my reply. Insert laughter for at least ten minutes. Soon we were bent over an evening primrose flower. "Ginny, have you ever seen a color of yellow like this?" So it was on a trail with Martha, in the moment, every one of them precious. Martha made sure you understood this. It was a gift.
Then there was the way she told me she won a very prestigious national award in Landscape Architecture, as if she had a doctor's appointment or the mail was late. "Oh and Ginny, I won that thing." What thing? Oh, that incredible design award in, gosh I don't know, Washington D.C. at the U.S. Botanic Garden? That "thing"? An outstanding (in her field, ar ar, sorry, Martha would want no less) achievement that left me in awe? Just that "thing"?
It's overused, the expression 'they broke the mold', but with Martha they really did break the mold. It is with great sadness I understand and must accept I will never meet another person like her again and no one like her will ever exist "in the system" again, to keep it honest, ethical, conscious. After she moved back home to Pennsylvania, we didn't stay in touch as much, in part because I knew I could always just pick up the phone and call her, hear that gentle voice, until one day, I couldn't, and I cried for a long time. Something has gone out of my life now.
If you had the honor of knowing Martha, you know just how extraordinary she was. Go for a walk, make sure you wander a little bit, bend down and look at something on the ground, or lean way, way back to look up at the sky, till you almost fall over backwards. Understand how precious and improbable this all is, you, our Earth, the universe, then laugh. Laugh and remember Martha. This is how she would want it.