“COOP—I mean, Mr. Cooper?”
Ashley and I had stayed after school to help him clean up after a particularly messy water-quality lab.
“To what do I owe the distinguished honor and profound pleasure of the presence of my two star students on this beautiful Tuesday afternoon?” Mr. Cooper asked. “Clearly, cleaning up this hazardous-waste dump, this Superfund site, this orgy of scientific chaos is not, I imagine, high on your list of pleasurable activities. And I don’t quite recall giving you a detention.”
Mr. Cooper had never given detention to anyone. Ever. It was not in his repertoire.
And what he said about us being his star students was not exactly the truth.
I was doing well in his class. Really well. I enjoyed science, just like I enjoyed math. And, also like math, there was something comforting in the way the natural world worked. Comforting and beautiful. There were patterns and relationships, form and function that all made sense to me. Everything was connected to everything else and it all fit together like the squares on the old quilts my mother had inherited from her parents and her grandparents.
Unlike the rest of the world. If you looked at what went on in the rest of the world, it sucked. Totally sucked. If you paid attention to the news, the rest of the world seemed to be spiraling out of control, without direction or meaning.
I had never been one to pay attention to life outside Greenfield. I didn’t watch TV news. I didn’t read the paper. I didn’t even glance at the headlines as I scrolled down Yahoo. I went online for the latest in celebrity gossip, music videos, and fashion advice, but that was about it. The rest of the world seemed distant and irrelevant, nothing that had anything to do with me. So why bother?
But this last week Britt had become obsessed with the story of terrorists beheading an American hostage in the Middle East. She was making me watch the evening TV news with her night after night. It was tortuous. Terrifying. Drone strikes in Pakistan. Genocide in Syria. Starvation and poverty and climate change and endless war. And now, icing on the cake, terrorists go and behead this do-gooder aid worker. I mean, the dude goes all the way across the world to try to do the right thing and he gets his head lopped off. Down comes the sword. BAM! Off with his head. The entire thing was recorded on video for the whole world to watch.
We were learning about metaphors in English, and the hostage-beheading thing seemed to me a perfect one for the screwy state of the world. I wrote about it in English class for an assignment, leaving out the obvious connection to Mount Tom, and Diaper Lady had actually seemed to like it. She had written “Well done. Interesting,” on the top. Who would have thought?
Anyway, while I did well in class, Ashley . . . well . . . let’s just say Ashley struggled. While she could be thick sometimes, she sure wasn’t stupid. Far from it. She was absolutely the most brilliant person I knew. Let’s put it this way. She just didn’t see school as a high priority.
As feisty as she was, she seemed dangerously close to plummeting into the West Virginia sexist stereotype. The one that demoted us girls to second-class citizens, good for going up the stripper’s pole and down on guys, but not much else.
You didn’t need school for those things.
Ashley rarely handed in work. She never cracked a book. She just didn’t seem to think that school mattered. If it weren’t for me forcing her to occasionally study for an exam she’d still be languishing in the seventh grade.
Even if I had to become a coal miner, her sorry ass was going to pass, damn it. There was no effin way I was going to move up a grade without her.
“I don’t see the point!” Ashley would say, exasperated when I told her she had to memorize the chemical equation for photosynthesis.
“I mean, seriously, who really gives a crap? I’m not saying photosynthesis isn’t awesome. It’s totally awesome! If She does it then it must be way cool. But really, why bother regurgitating back the CO2 and the H2O and whatever comes next in the correct order? Isn’t it enough just to know that plants and trees do it? I mean, doesn’t it take away from the great mystery of life if you understand too many of the details? I don’t want to lose sight of the trees for the forest!”
“Think of all the advances civilization would have made with logic like that,” I said to Ashley, although, after watching the news for a week, advances and civilization did not exactly seem like words that fit together. It reminded me of the quote that we learned in history class from the great leader of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”
Anyway, you get the point. Mr. Cooper calling us his “two star students” was not exactly the God’s truth.
Of course, if you asked Ashley who Jay-Z was dating or what color Taylor Swift’s favorite panties were, her mouth would be stuck in overdrive for hours.
School smart or not, I did love my Ashley.
•
“We were wondering what you know about Mount Tom?” Ashley asked Mr. Cooper.
Mr. Cooper knew everything about the natural world. From A to Z, aardvarks to zooplankton, Mr. Cooper knew it all.
And he knew everything about Greenfield as well. He was born and bred here.
“Inbred,” he liked to say. “It’s what gives me my outstanding good looks and my peculiar sense of humor.”
He was not only our go-to science guy but the town historian as well. Unlike Mr. O’Shansky, our tenth-grade history teacher, who I seriously doubt even knew that West Virginia was actually a state.
“Mount Tom.” Mr. Cooper sat down on the top of his disaster of a desk and immediately knocked a random beaker onto the floor. He kicked the broken glass to the side with his shoe.
“Nice example of an igneous intrusion,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out one his disposable flossers and began flossing his teeth, that bizarre habit we had grown fondly accustomed to.
Mr. Cooper always looked like crap except for his teeth, which were impeccable.
“What about the forest there?” I asked.
“Oaks, oaks, and more oaks, as I recall,” he said.
“With a few beeches, maples, cherries, and ashes thrown in,” Ashley added.
Mr. Cooper stopped in mid-floss, his eyebrows arched, and he stared at Ashley.
“Very good, young lady. Very good.”
“So why would they flag the trees there?” I asked.
“Why would who flag the trees?”
“The mining company. American Mines.”
Mr. Cooper’s eyebrows arched again.
“What the hell!” he said, flossing furiously. “American Mining Company? Marking trees on Mount Tom?”
“Yup,” we said in unison.
“Bastards! Sons of bitches! I didn’t expect this for another year or two.”
“Expect what for another year?” Ashley asked.
Mr. Cooper scowled and extended the flosser into the depths of his cavernous mouth. We waited while he diligently worked on the bottom left row of teeth.
“Two years ago Ian McGreggor sold Mount Tom to American. He didn’t want to do it, but that man was deeper in debt than a one-legged miner. Mount Tom had been in his family since before Christ. He once told me that Tom was his great-great-granddaddy, though if you gave Ian McGreggor a drink or two he was liable to tell you just about anything. With that man it was hard to separate the beef from the bullshit.”
That was one thing we loved about Mr. Cooper. His inability to self-edit. Words would flow from behind his flosser that had no business in a high school classroom.
Once, on Mr. Cooper’s birthday, the principal had presented him with a roll of duct tape.
“What’s this for?” Mr. Cooper asked.
“To seal your lips,” the principal answered. “It will keep you employed and me off the phone with irate parents.”
“Shall I leave the flosser in or out?” Coop asked.
Everyone laughed.
“So what is American planning on doing with the mountain?” I asked. Ashley and I were holding our breaths.
“Blow the top off of it!” Coop said, practically spitting with rage.
“Seriously,” Ashley said. “What are they going to do?”
Mr. Cooper took his flosser out of his mouth and crossed his heart with it.
“I kid you not,” he said. “Believe me, I wish I was.”
“Blow its top off?” I asked, incredulous.
“Mountaintop removal!” Mr. Cooper scowled, once again flossing furiously. “Clear cut every oak, beech, ash, maple, and cherry. And then blow the top of that mountain to kingdom come! Coal is king and that mountain is a palace of it. And the cheapest way in is to blast through the gates!”