I grew up in a really tough town–the kids were as mean as New York kids, so when they got too much for me, I would ride my bike out into the country. I’d sit in the bushes, smoke, and watch the birds fly. I wrote a poem when I was 11 about a boy living on a farm who overhears his father saying he’s going take this bluff down, and the bluff is everything to the boy. I take it through all of the seasons: “Slapping a puck into an orange crate goal, applauded only by the wind that banged and clanged and shuttered in the greenery door.”
Joni Mitchell in an interview with Camille Paglia, talking about the point in her life when she became an environmentalist