The academy, in short, is a safer haven than it ought to be for the professionally comfortable, cool, and upwardly mobile. It is far less often than it should be a place for passionate and thoughtful critics. Professionalization has rendered knowledge safe for power, thereby making it more dangerous than ever to the larger human prospect.
— David Orrii
1
IN THOSE DAYS, as in the mythical Brights Grove, many were the tales of the world’s unraveling. But few explained why a mighty progression had ensnarled a whole civilization and how a tiny cluster of people whimpered, yes, but also arose to defy the odds. This is a tale that begs to be told if only to salve the souls of dear survivors.
Our story begins in Argolis, a college town nestled in a valley in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio. One autumn morning at the onset of an academic year, a tall, young professor strolls out of a quiet neighborhood replete with restored early twentieth century homes shaded by spreading hundred-year-old maples and oaks. On this resplendent morning he walks briskly toward campus. Along the way, he passes by the Victorian buildings converted to small businesses and professional offices; the ramshackle clap–board cottages and seedy buildings converted to student apartments; leaves of orange, red, and saffron gathering on the pavement.
Would it be coffee from Jurassic Perk (bold brews to awaken your reptilian brain) or Progressive Perc (cutting-edge socially responsible and sustainable coffee)? This morning he chooses Jurassic and nods at vaguely familiar faces in a back booth. At the counter, a sleepy barista, a coed with a come-hither glint. Smiling, he orders a dark roast, thanks her profusely, hustles out.
Aiming toward a spacious green quadrangle, he passes two so-called book stores. In 2013, instead of books, they hawk dazzling arrays of university paraphernalia and electronics. In the windows of University Book Store, for example, apropos of the season, hang bright orange football jerseys, tees, fleeces, and hats. Like the Oregon Ducks, the Gilligan University of Ohio Geese are perpetually derided by fans of universities whose falcons, red hawks, bison, and cougars could and usually did turn them into piles of feathers.
The main business district of Argolis, Ohio, referred to as “uptown” because it perches atop a flattened bluff overlooking the emerald valley of the Shawnee River, is adjacent to and partly surrounded by campus. This has led to perpetual town-gown clashes, especially during Halloween weekend. One business, whose windows were shattered in the ruckus, carried on its website the slogan, “just a stone’s throw from campus”. But the risks of entrepreneurship here are more than offset by ready access to twenty thousand consumers walking by every day.
Argolis was settled by New Englanders heading west on flatboats after the Revolutionary War. Days of boredom on the wide, lazy river drifting from Pittsburgh toward Cincinnati and Louisville prompted some families to hop off where the Shawnee poured into the Big River. Here they began their new life. The town’s name was either a corruption of “people from Argyle”, the region in western Scotland from which many hailed two generations earlier, or a classical Greek place mentioned in the Iliad. Settlers tilled the rich alluvial soils and built mills to grind their corn and oats. They planted apples, pears, peaches, plums. They made bricks, cut timber, mined salt and coal. Soon the small village grew into a vibrant riverboat stopover with saloons, an opera house, schools, brothels, rival churches, and a large plot ordained in 1787 to be a university. It opened in 1800 as the Territorial Institute. In 1835, the State of Ohio renamed it in honor of Denis Pádraig Gilligan, its first professor, an Irish-American philosopher who reputedly failed to make the cut at Harvard.
The northwest corner of campus is bounded by the two original main streets: Clayborne, named for Revolutionary War hero Rufus Edmund Clayborne, and Federal, reflecting Ohio’s pride as the seventeenth state admitted to the union in 1803. These became the locus of the city’s central business district and, over the generations, the launch pad for student protests and confrontations with constabularies of the times. In 1971 folk singer Jude Hawkins, who attended but did not graduate from Gilligan, sang “There’s blood on these bricks” — the year his song, Gilligan’s Graveyard, made it into the top twenty.
At the light where West Clayborne meets Federal, the professor turns toward campus. He crosses Centennial Quad with its iconic twins, Gilligan and Stiggins Halls (dating to 1814) and several other Georgian and Federal brick buildings, their deep-set, tall multi-paned windows with classic triangular pediments and their bell towers and clocks. Centennial Quad is one of five campus districts, each centered on a rectangle, each with architecturally coherent resident halls, academic buildings, and recreation and dining facilities. Each Quad is named for a prominent alumnus who by no quirk of fate had surnames that suggested points on the compass. How this happened was never clear. Nonetheless, South of Centennial Quad was Southwell Quad; East, Eastman; West, Westbrooke; north, Northam.
He departs Centennial Quad, dodges a cyclist, and slips into a shortcut to Southwell Quad, where engineering, sciences, the med school, and agriculture are clustered. Crossing Windham Street, he comes to McWhorter Hall, an uncharacteristically graceless building clearly out of the Federal-Georgian mold. McWhorter conforms to no architectural genre anyone could pin down. It was built in the 1960s, an era when brutalism seemed to capture the state architect’s imagination (or lack of it). McWhorter is an eyesore and a risky place, its foundation failing, its windows agape, its heating and cooling systems wasteful and unreliable. But it is the academic home of the professor, known in those days as one great teacher.
2
On the third floor of McWhorter, on the bench between his office and hers, lounged Sophie Knowles. She wore hip-hugging jeans to her ankles, no socks, a blaze-orange shirt, the kind hunters wear in deer season, atop a lime-green tank top, and pink and blue plaid sneakers. Her hipster-hunting ensemble was a notch or two more inventive and far more colorful than his academic grunge: a tropical parrot flashing pheromones at a lackluster backwoodsman.
“Curriculum Committee, next Tuesday at four,” she chirped.
He smiled back. “Okay, can’t wait.”
Sophie was one of three women in a school of more than twenty faculty. As a hydro-geo-climatologist, with credentials from the Universities of Michigan and South Australia, she had earned an honors degree in geology and civil engineering at Michigan by age 20. Then she flitted off to Adelaide for her PhD. After post-docs in Australia and Indonesia, she was the top candidate of more than fifty applicants for a new position at Gilligan. The tall professor wondered how somebody five years his junior managed such an appealing hybrid of accomplishment and humility. Though her brain seethed with algorithms and she could rip through screens to compile maps in minutes, deep down she had more than a dash of girlhood, especially when speaking of her dogs, a pig, goats, geese, ponies, who knows what, back in the hills someplace. She was the millennial version of somebody you might have read about in Mother Earth News.
“I’ll plug that meeting into your calendar, if you like,” Sophie offered.
What to do with this caged bird? He opened his palm, gave her a pen, and nodded toward his hand, “Jot it down here. I never open that QuickCal thing.”
The professor was certainly not a Luddite. But digital intrusions like QuickCal, the university calendar that enabled anybody to impose their will on his life, made him cringe. He preferred to cruise through his days serenely, as he once had in Africa where he never wore a watch and was content if people were a couple of hours late or never arrived because the bus broke down. To that extent, especially compared to Sophie, he was seriously out-of-step with the digital age of incessant drivel glutting up face-to-face communication. Instead of filling his calendar, he commanded an insurgency to sabotage calendar saturation, to sanctify his days.
After writing on his palm, Sophie, giggling in the act, tilted her head toward him and turned her mouth southward as though she’d swallowed something rancid. “What are you thinking, Stefan? It’s just stupid to take a stand on QuickCal. If you want to attract attention to yourself and your vulnerability around here, why not stage a sit-in at the provost’s office? Face it, buddy. You work in a cut-throat place driven by administrators and legislators with small minds, big backsides, and harsh bottom lines. They want to see you punching the QuickCal time clock; they want to lock you into their tracking systems.”
He only half listened, his mind someplace distant. Sophie’s scold had arrived on the same frequency as the football coach’s press conferences. Ducking into his office, he failed to notice a ruffled waif of a student sneaking past on her way to work. He called back to Sophie. “QuickCal is a sad commentary on these times, a bleeping misfortune, a smear on the academy’s storied history.”
“A trifle over the top there,” she rejoined.
In times like these, the man often baffled folks, especially his students, by reciting verses of his muse, thirteenth century Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi. For example:
This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.
This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread and gentleness,
more manifest than saying can say.iii
But now he decided Sophie could not abide Rumi. Instead, he said, “It’s okay, Sophie. I’m harmless.”
~
To know the serene professor, to understand his calm brilliance, sincerity, and compassion, is to delve briefly into his early life as a first generation American from Maine — stories not widely known in the autumn of 2013.
Growing up in small town Maine, Stefan Friemanis was taught, as were most middle class kids of his time, to be maximally productive. “Loafing gets you nowhere,” his dad would shout back over his shoulder as he and Stefan hauled firewood. “Get your ēzelis (his Gluteus maximus) going.” If you were sixteen and college-bound in America in 1997, you were supposed to eagerly fill your space and time with evidence of a work ethic, cross-cutting brilliance, stellar athleticism, and indefatigable community spirit, measurable in brag lines for college applications. Stefan had little to claim of this sort but neither had he Ivy League ambitions.
At South Bow High School, teachers wondered about the self-assured, innately tranquil kid, dreaming instead of doing, coming at homework assignments obtusely, circling things like a buzzard. “I think Stefan is smart and creative,” Benjamin Boulet, his junior English teacher (one of Stefan’s favorites), told his parents one evening at a parent-teacher conference. “But I just don’t get him. He could be a dynamite journalist. Although I have tried, I can’t get him interested in the SBHS Bugle.” His parents nodded, holding back their broken English. They were un-comfortable in the stuffy classroom. Mr. Boulet was twenty-five years their junior with a degree from Colby, a pink bow tie, and what seemed to them a condescending manner.
Stefan’s dad was an auto mechanic with a hopelessly cluttered work bench and a basement full of inventions. His mother, a reticent woman with boundless affection for her only child, cleaned other people's houses. At home, she engaged her considerable domestic acumen to stretch the family budget. She cooked pea soup and other hearty one-pot meals robust enough to sustain her family in lean weeks. She stretched a Sunday roast through the week. She baked her own bread, collected eggs stooping low in the chicken coop, milked the family goat. She and Stefan’s father reared him in the warmth of an old-world household. They were delighted and mystified in equal measure as their son matured into a tall amiable boy adept in the brassy American culture in ways they would never fully understand or achieve.
Despite Stefan’s alleged lethargy, he managed to keep his grades up while spending “more time in the Maine woods than Thoreau ever had” (his line, uttered in class that very fall). At school kids were drawn to him, the lanky, good-humored boy they called Lama (as in teacher of the Dharma; not llama, the Andean animal). He was the guy with exotic parents with a mysterious past. He palled around with a half-dozen like-minded boys, a band of “outdoorsmen” who made jokes about cheerleaders and athletes with feigned envy. At the South Bow Union Hall, they played pool, illegally drank watery draft beer, and planned elaborate adventures in the mountains and fishing trips to the coves around Penobscot Bay. Midway through his senior year Stefan was admitted to the regional state university and four years later graduated cum laude. He went straight to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and persevered to a PhD.
His doctoral research, inspired and greatly influenced by Kate Nickleby, was about the resilience of mountain peoples in Kenya. His degree was awarded forty years after anti-Vietnam war protestors bombed the building of his department, killing one researcher and injuring three others. Stefan knew of that history. He embraced the pacifism of his dad whose own father had been cannon fodder for the Russians in the early 1940s. His dad called the Russians jãšanãs sãtans, fucking devils. He often quoted the proverb, If you give the middle finger to the devil, he will take the whole hand. Though his dad knew little about American wars, he knew about war and he hated the weapons of war. When speaking of war, he resorted to curses his son could not translate. Stefan came by his pacifism and his fear of arms honestly.
After Wisconsin, he returned to East Africa to work for Teach Across the Planet (TAP), an NGO that delivered university courses to students in remote parts of Kenya. His base station and living quarters was a converted delivery truck. He drove from secondary school to secondary school, where he taught aside local staff. He told his students at Gilligan about his role as a circuit rider in Kenya: about his courteous, poorly paid, ever exuberant Kenyan colleagues; the words and cadence of their Bantu tongues; dusty roads and frangipani fragrance; his Kinyati students, so guileless, so eager for what he could give; dazzling night skies; savanna grasslands stretching timelessly; mountaintops shrouded by evergreen forests.
In the middle of his third year with TAP, the program director revealed that funding for the project was tenuous. A big foundation in Seattle threatened to pull the plug. Five months later the project was shuttered, and Stefan and the director were suddenly without jobs. Worse, his students’ progression toward their degrees had been senselessly severed: another of many disasters, he later said, brought to them by so-called sustainable development. In the rear-view mirror, the only thing sustainable about the project, he realized, was heartbreak. And (another of his classroom insights), “sustainable heartbreak is as fallacious a construction as sustainable development”. The startling clarity of his memories of those abandoned students, whenever he recalled them, ripped open wounds in his own tender heart.
The professor had a hard time leaving Kenya. When his visa expired, he wandered across the border to Tanzania and Mozambique accompanied by Gathoni Njema, a former student and companion with absolutely no means of her own. Gathoni returned Stefan’s generosity to his delight: her mocha skin stretched over a lithesome body was ever at his side, her smile and good humor shone like sunrises over the Indian Ocean, and her caresses at sundown redeemed his investment many times over. They traveled on country buses and minibuses called matatus and chapas. They laughed and lived simply in flip flops, tank tops, and shorts. They drank pineapple juice by day, beer by night. They moved southward at an unhurried pace. When they got to Maputo, Stefan’s money almost gone, they parted, making promises, he admitted, that neither could keep. Gathoni flew to Nairobi to join the throngs seeking employment. Stefan returned to Maine with no hint of what would come next.
His parents rejoiced. His mother coddled him as if her little boy had been abducted, then unexpectedly released. He reveled in her home cooking and pampering. He got back into shape jogging Maine country roads. He fished often with his dad and his old pals. After a few months of re-entry and a raft of job rejections, he scored a teaching position. It was August 2013.
Traveling to southern Ohio by Greyhound, sometimes the only white person on the bus, Stefan brooded over Kate Nickleby’s final email to him, the one she wrote just before she died. For the hundredth time, he wondered why she had never hinted her ill health. Surely, she was not suicidal. It was a heart attack pure and simple, just as the coroner concluded. But how could he explain what else was in that email?
Putting aside these imponderables, he watched Pennsylvania and Ohio whoosh by and realized his heart was soaring too — the thought of joining an academic community where he might inspire and prepare this rising generation of innocent millennials. They needed him to figure out how to be, what to do, how to navigate the world of wounds. He reread a passage in the preface of Kate Nickleby’s seminal book:
The journey away from the tragedy that is this battered, oil-engulfed world cannot happen until the foundation we’ve built since the eighteenth-century crumbles. Beyond that time of collapse, the future will be in the hands of your children and grandchildren. It will demand profound change in the way they think about themselves and what will be left of the natural world on which their lives will depend. Those tasked with preparing young minds to make this transition have inherited a mission so important that I cannot imagine a pathway to a brighter future that does not pass through them.
The certitude of collapse and the emergence of a new order were clear to the students in Kate’s circle and to countless other scientists and writers whom the media, in labeling them doomsday prophets, dismissed. Stefan and his classmates believed otherwise. Inspired by their late mentor, they left their studies like so many Jesuits departing seminary, not as soldiers of God, but as a cadre of scholar-teachers driven to prepare a generation that would be faced with navigating their way through an unprecedented and rocky transition. Upon their success rode the very survival of at least fragments of the natural world Stefan so loved.
3
On the lovely Gilligan campus, once cynically referred to as Swarthmore on the Shawnee, arrived a newly appointed professor with a passion and a mission, a crafty knack for inducing critical thinking and dialogue, a strategic thinker willing to advise pitifully amateur rebels — a bunch of ordinary middle class students and some internationals in love with this man, his smarts, his good looks, his wry humor, his whatever; a boss who distrusted this self-assured upstart; a testy battle bubbling just beneath the surface over, of all things, fuels to heat and cool the place. And me, Hannah McGibbon, in the thick of it.
For all my insecurities that fall, I brimmed with sophomoric glee as a student of Stefan Friemanis and a work-study assistant in an office a couple of doors down from him. From those vantage points, as an obsessive diarist and reluctant activist, I began keeping track of things. I began finding time to shoot the shit with Stefan. I began seeing myself with fresh eyes. I became a ludicrous version of Mata Hari, a courtesan creepily upsetting the applecart and my own sense of the future. Like a 400-horsepower bumper car, I careened through my coming of age face-to-face with terror and loss, among other things. Hence, when the time came to pulling together the frayed and musty notes from that epochal semester, now almost three decades later, I was the absolutely perfect choice, if I do say so myself. As if to ordain my role, Stefan loaned me his ageing typewriter and two oft-inked ribbons.
~
On the way to class with my dear friend, Samantha Ostrom, I strolled across Gilligan University’s Centennial Quad. We probably stopped once or twice to chatter with passing girlfriends whose names, let alone personalities, I have long forgotten — paper dolls beneath dusty floorboards in the attic of my memory. It was a bright September morning in the second week of the semester. Samantha and I were quite the annoying duo. We strutted across a campus that we somehow believed owed us something. We knew all there was to know about being college chicks, a virus of the mind in those days. We assumed that passing freshmen were thinking: Wow! Those two must be seniors if not grad students. We traveled as one. We scheduled our classes together. We lived in the same sorority house. We even dressed alike. We were of roughly equal intelligence. The year before, Samantha observed, “Sweet! Our SAT’s and GPAs are almost the same!” True. Yet I absolutely felt inferior right then.
For reasons I cannot fathom, I, a skinny, apologetic wallflower from Ashtabula, Ohio, befriended Samantha, a stunning, extroverted, robust, six-foot blonde from North Dakota, and demurred even in matters of dress and selections at the salad bar. Oh yeah, I had known the pain of invisibility in high school, trailing in the shadows of prima donnas. I was a five-four waif of a thing, flat-chested, thin-lipped, brown hair hanging limply, perpetually bearing a look somewhere between cowering embarrassment and revulsion at the thought of having to pay attention to more fully developed and popular classmates. Samantha, on the other hand, by fifteen, was as statuesque, busty, confident, and strikingly beautiful as she was that sophomore year at Gilligan.
I realize that those male-derived traits had little to do with who we really were. Unfortunately, for a spell, they did hideously affect my own self-image. I understood that Samantha was not like those twits at Lake Erie High School. Samantha was inherently more balanced, more nuanced than those shallow Ashtabula girls. Still, I’ll have to admit I was not comfortable with the way our friendship had panned out. I wasn’t sure how it had happened or how and why I continued to let Samantha make the calls. But I also believed that I would become my own woman soon enough, whatever that meant.
That September morning we hustled through an alley and emerged across the street from McWhorter Hall where our nine o’clock class met. Samantha was keen to arrive early and sit in the front row. She said she wanted a closer look at the young professor who had introduced himself last week and had gone through the usual first-week-of-class rituals.
“Are you trying to hit on him?” I inquired.
Samantha, hardly ever inscrutable, raised her right eyebrow. “No way. I just want to see whether those eyes are as blue today as they were last week. Maybe he’s wearing colored contacts.”
“Why would you care?” My mood soured. At that time, I neither shared nor understood Samantha’s “boy craziness”. Not that our prof was a boy.
When we got to the classroom, we saw it had been rearranged in two concentric semi-circles. We went to the foremost and sat near the center in two of those classroom desk-chairs with their ungainly piano-shaped arms. The other students stumbled in making comments about the seating and jostling for places with their friends. This was a crowd of confident undergraduates and a few grad students in a class called Natural Resources and Sustainability.
Stefan strolled into the classroom toward the center of the two semicircles. “Today”, he said brightly as the class quieted, “today, is unlike any day before it or any day to follow. The nineteenth century writer, environmental activist, and father of our national parks, John Muir, awakened one morning in 1869 in the Sierra Nevada in California. He wrote this: I’m exhilarated to be alive in this mountain air. I feel like shouting this morning with an excess of wild animal joy!”
He had spoken the words with a brogue of some sort.
“How many of you are exhilarated on this day unlike any other day?” he asked and paused, turning toward an imagined companion. “Ha, not a soul stirs. No wild animal joy to be alive here, John. What shall we do?”
He stepped twice to the left. Back in the brogue, he responded, “Flog the bastards!”
A ripple of cautious laughter washed across the room. Some classmates looked anxiously around undoubtedly thinking it was uncool to laugh or that it was way too early for joviality.
I chuckled. Samantha was poker faced. She later admitted she had cringed at the bastard word (she was a PK, a pastor’s kid), and she worried that the class might turn out to be tedious, what with quotations from long dead men she’d never heard of. Then she said, “I’m willing to take a risk — cut Mr. or Dr. Friemanis or Stefan or whatever he’s called a bit of slack. He is, after all, quite hot.”
I ignored her assessment because at the mention of the Sierras, I remember thinking about a postcard my dad sent me when I was seven. On a business trip to San Francisco, my dad went to Yosemite and sent me this beautiful postcard. I pinned the card to my wall. I can still see the picture clearly: an evergreen forest at the front, bare steep rocky cliffs rising high above it with a grand waterfall tumbling down. Blue sky. When dad got home, he said, “We’ll all go there together, honey. You’ve gotta see the Sierra Nevada. We’ve got nothing like them in Ohio.” In the wake of that memory, darker recollections rolled-through of my father’s long battle with the bottle, his quirky instability, his loss of jobs and all the other broken promises, including the “to-have-and-to-hold” one. I now sit here with my eyes tightly shut trying to picture my dad. I cannot bring up his face. Still, I surely did love that dad of mine. And I did seriously want to hike in those California mountains with him.
Stefan went on to tell about John Muir and his dream of creating a mountain park to refresh the weary workers and city folk deprived of wilderness. That dream ultimately became Yosemite National Park, thanks largely to Muir. He then reverted to character, speaking Muir’s words from memory: “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
A lily-white dreadlocked girl in an Indian or Arabian costume clapped. What a strange looking chick, I thought at the time. Her name was Astrid. She was Canadian and wicked smart. She soon adopted me.
“Well, today”, Stefan said, “we’ll ask the question Muir may himself have been thinking 140 years ago. Will these mountain parks still be here to refresh us when our children and grandchildren are alive?”
In a twist of logic, typical of Stefan’s classes, rather than discussing how to save Yosemite and such treasures, we spent the morning debating what elements in our lives could tarnish or obliterate Muir’s legacy. We paired up, made lists, then reported out to the class. Our personal lists included things like bottled water, driving everywhere, space heaters, disposable drink containers, throwaways in general, tooth floss, fast food, excess consumption of all sorts — especially by fashionistas, at least half of what Walmart sells, flat screen televisions, and digital devices. At the macro end, we included the internal combustion engine; fracking for oil and gas; petroleum-based agriculture; wetland draining; overharvesting of fish, timber, soils, and other renewable resources; loss of biodiversity; mining; military spending; large scale irrigated agriculture; GMOs; too many people in national parks like Yosemite; and more.
He put up a slide showing Oberlin professor David Orr’s choices of what he believed we could not sustain. Orr’s list included: militarization of the planet — the greed and hatred it feeds; a world with large numbers of desperately poor people; unrestrained development of technology; continued economic, technological, and financial complexity; divisions by ideology and ethnicity; hedonism; individualism; conspicuous consumption; spiritual impoverishment and accompanying anomie, meaninglessness, and despair. This seriously destabilized my nineteen-year-old sensibility. Discussion veered in many directions, with several students I could not now name, noting the apocalyptic undertones; what would happen twenty-five years from now if we continued to overfish the oceans, waste the farmlands, devastate the rainforests, start new wars, widen the gaps between the rich and poor? I for one was unaccustomed to thinking about a time when I would be the older woman I am now. It freaked me out, especially if things turned out as gloomy as some in the class were predicting. The room was alive with clashing opinions. A stocky, menacing man with black rimmed glasses, a cream-colored western shirt, bolo tie, and wrinkled trousers stuck his head in the door. He looked like a dark version of the actor Nathan Lane. Was I the only one who noticed him? Classmates seemed oblivious. I watched the man slip silently back into the hallway.
At that point, Michelle, a varsity soccer player, shouted. “Look at Orr’s list. I mean these points are at the scale of the whole world. Every one of them looks to me like a choke point or a flash point, or whatever — ethnic strife, individualism, despair, poverty, wars. And he doesn’t even mention terrorism or climate change. This is the world we live in, the one we’re going into after college. I mean, pardon my language, WE ARE FUCKED!” That brought back Nathan Lane. Out in the corridor, he cruised back and forth, his mouth twisted into a swizzle.
Our prof locked onto Michelle’s eyes. He folded his arms across his chest, pursed his lips, and simply nodded. The classroom, just moments ago brimming with heated discussion, was eerily still. Finally, he spoke, “What my friend here has said, as bluntly as one can, leaves us speechless. Why is this?”
Slowly came the admission that the f-word is rarely heard in classes, though it’s often uttered just outside. “No harm in spewing the word occasionally,” Stefan told us. “Swearing is cathartic. Look, I think we can all agree that we cannot continue doing these unsustainable things forever and hope to preserve parks like Yosemite, let alone good places to live and breathe. Muir, were he here, would totally concur.”
After class, Samantha and I walked down the stairs with José, a lithe Puerto Rican dance and theatre major we were coming to know. He said, “Man, I didn’t think a class on sustainability would trend toward the apocalypse.” Samantha agreed. “Yeah, and that woman who launched the f-bomb is one brassy chick.” José replied, “Uh huh, she’s a butt kicker for sure — one who will take names. But she spoke my mind.” Samantha got huffy. “Not mine”, she said with finality. “I’m hopeful. I think humans will adapt. But I hate thinking of myself as 40-something.” José told her it was better than the alternative.
Life began to get more and more crazy. I was being forced out of my chrysalis, obliged to put away my shyness and fear. I was on the verge of breaking out. My friends that semester, and the cascade of improbable happenings are as inseparable as Stefan and his sparkling blue eyes (no contacts, ever).
4
I clearly recall Dr. Truman Tulkinghorn, Director of the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development (CNRD) — his faculty and students often referred to as “C-Nerds” — not because his presence or actions changed the course of history but because, like a gnat buzzing your ear, his obstinacy and greed forced us to expend more energy on him than we should have.
There he was, slumped over some documents in his corner office on the third floor of McWhorter, a spacious room with a posh carpet and curtains on the windows, four times the size of the faculty offices in the school. As the errand girl, I was in and out of his office almost every day. He was pouring over a proposed budget. Cuts laid on the school by Payne Orlick, the Dean of Natural and Social Sciences, whose name means nothing to me now, had put him in a bad mood. We called Dr. Tulkinghorn “Dr. T.”, meant to be a term of endearment, though at that point, there was little endearing about him. He had been director almost five years. When spring rolled around, if it did, he would lobby to extend another five. While he was a full-blown professor, he was not by experience or inclination comfortable in the university culture. He was a hard-headed petroleum geologist with degrees from South Dakota and Houston, and three decades working for oil companies. Twice monthly, he flew off on consulting gigs for the industry. From Gilligan’s perch, he had become nationally known for stridently advocating more exploration and drilling for domestic oil and gas.
Around campus, Dr. T. flaunted his industry connections and disparaged the haughty faculty culture. He was neither interested in conservation history nor theories of ecology, sustainability, and the future. The environmental movement and all this ecological theorizing, he told his faculty, were off the point. Sufficient energy was the solution to all economic and environmental quandaries. At CNRD, Tulkinghorn daily blustered forth. He hailed from a hierarchical male-dominant industry and he brought this boorish experience into our school. The university’s transition to business-driven models of budgeting and performance, and the stealthy privatization of public education were music to his ears. How bizarre it is to write this sentence now, how trivial in the grand sweep of things. Dr. T. apparently believed the university was a service provider, no different than the cable company or his insurance agent. Its mission was to credential the consumers (us) who sat glassy-eyed in vast lecture halls. He had little time or patience for faculty who saw things differently. His job was to see that what went on in the classrooms of McWhorter aligned with his sense of the university as a neoliberal project.
On the afternoon in question he intended to set straight his new adjunct professor of environmental studies. He had been stalking Stefan for days, covertly listening to him teach from the adjacent faculty lounge, peeking into his classroom, taking notes. Dr. T. did not like what he was seeing and hearing. Two weeks earlier he had asked whether Stefan even had a syllabus. Stefan returned in a few minutes with one for each of his classes. Tulkinghorn was unimpressed. What was all this mish-mash about sustainability, adaptive systems, the post-carbon era, and collapse? It was time for a correction.
At Tulkinghorn’s door, Stefan observed that the man seemed to have left his manners at home. He greeted Stefan with barely a grunt. The thought running through Stefan’s head, he explained to me, was that his boss was utterly graceless. Stefan stood there measuring Dr. T. up close for the first time. He was sixtyish, a remarkably short man, a head shorter than Stefan, and somehow ill-proportioned, troll-like. His pumpkin-shaped head covered with possibly dyed slicked-down brown hair was attached to a stubby neck. His concave chest and outsized belly accentuated narrow shoulders. He wore a wrinkled brownish shirt and shiny, creaseless olive slacks. He shuffled to the front of his desk, hands clenched into fists at his waist, knees flexed and feet set apart, a disgruntled man about to do what? Without speaking, Tulkinghorn stared into Stefan’s eyes for what seemed like an eternity. Standing just inside the door, Stefan said his first inclination was to run for cover. He restrained himself. Without warning and with considerable ferocity, Tulkinghorn launched into a spectacular tirade. Low grade anger worked its way toward full blown fury. He advised Stefan to change his demeanor, to make his courses more rigorous, to get serious.
“Teach natural resource management. That’s what you were hired to do. Cut the homey crap, stop making light of these hallowed halls, stop wasting time in idle conversation with the customers, cease your swearing.” Tulkinghorn’s twangy cowboy accent grated on Stefan, but after a beer or two, so I’m told, he learned to parody it to great effect.
“You’re dealing here with millennials”, the man sputtered, “a crafty generation of entitled little twits. They are the self-absorbed and coddled kids of pathetic hovering parents. With their irony and meanness, these kids will outwit you. You won’t know what hit you. Then they will proceed to attack the next gullible professor who lets them bullshit in class.” How insulting this portrayal of our generation, at that time the largest in the country.
Tulkinghorn’s face reddened as he extolled past examples of deferential, rigorous colleagues who graced these classrooms. “None wasted time in chitter-chatter. The school would become a laughing stock. And what was this garbage about a post-carbon world? There’s no such thing! Carbon will be with us until the end of the Earth.”
Stefan, still standing, listened in perfect stillness, stoically unreadable. At this point he wasn’t going to buy into Tulkinghorn’s bombast any more than he was going to rebut it. So, he stared beyond Dr. T. to the window overlooking the Ag School. The fall day had chilled and a mist settled across campus. It was the kind of afternoon that prompted a rural Ohio boy to think of deer hunting. Out in the gauze, students walked briskly in couples and small groups. At the far edge of an outdoor amphitheater between McWhorter and Jarred P. Block Hall, Stefan envisioned a procession of scholars, spectral beings in academic regalia, slowly marching toward the woods. As they faded from sight, he felt the world dimming as though the moon had blotted out daylight. He told me later that, at that moment, Eric Hoffer, the twentieth century philosopher, came to mind. Of all the people I have known, only Stefan could snap off insights like this. Hoffer said that rudeness is a weak man’s definition of strength. Tulkinghorn, surely Hoffer’s prototype, in the guise of stern master, had lost his bearings, bared his cynical heart, darkened Stefan’s day. Before anger, before vilification, Stefan felt pity for this shell of a man.
Tulkinghorn apparently expected a comeback. With softness and without rancor, Stefan said, “I can understand why you would think my teaching style unusual, sir. In its defense, I have two small points. First, I can assure you my students will emerge from this class with a deep understanding of the material that will serve them well. And second, I wonder what would happen if everyone in this school, this university, engaged their students in open dialogue every day? Suppose that was the model.”
Tulkinghorn was momentarily lost for words. He seemed to shrink into his shabby clothes, becoming more dwarf-like. He had no idea that this mild-mannered, self-effacing young professor had a solid sense of himself and the ancient soul of a master with the patience and sagacity to match. Dr. T. would come to know these things later, but now all he could muster was a brilliant, “Bullshit. If that happened, we might as well be called Gilligan Community College.”
Standing still and drawn into himself, Stefan would not engage his boss further. After another moment of pause, he quietly thanked the man for his counsel. And, half-backing out the door, he beat a retreat. Just as Kate Nickleby had warned, most big universities dump on students and teachers who thrive on classroom engagement. Kate said, and I quote, “The guardians at the gate — directors and deans, provosts and vice-presidents, lost in their pretentions, power struggles, incessant squabbles and resentments, their business-driven bottom-line thinking, and long gone from the classroom, the whole ball of shit, obstruct good teaching and learning. And the sad reality is, we are the ones inside that fecal ball and they’re the dung beetles rolling over us.”
Stefan turned and walked toward his office. As usual in times of personal trauma, he called on Rumi:
The hurt you embrace becomes joy.
Call it to your arms where it can change.
5
LATE THAT AFTERNOON, I knocked on Stefan’s open door.
“Hello Hannah,” he said without glee. I wondered where his boyish ebullience had gone.
“Can you spare a minute?”
“Sure, but every minute you hang out here is another minute of impoverishment of your next class. You and your mates will suffer incalculable losses on your investment. But for you …”
I cannot remember how I replied to his satire, repartee being a highly uncomfortable conversational form for me at the time. I must have said something that seemed like a non-sequitur. “Um, I have something kind of confidential to speak to you about. It won’t take long.”
“Confidential, eh? Intriguing. Have a seat.”
“You remember that conversation I told you about the other day — the one I inadvertently eavesdropped on between Professor Shesky and her grad assistant, Lara, down the hall?”
“About Blackwood Forest.”
“Yeah. Well, yesterday at the PCSA meeting what I heard that day was confirmed. Apparently, Blackwood Forest is going to become a fracking drill site.”
“PCSA?”
“Post-Carbon Student Action. A student organization to wean the university off fossil fuels, among other things. I am a member of the group.”
“There’s a noble purpose. So, Hannah, why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. I guess I had to get it off my mind. It’s been hugely distracting. I’ve found myself rereading paragraphs I’d just read two or three times. I can’t stay focused. I’ve never been to Blackwood Forest but it seems so heinous to trash the last old growth forest in the state. I thought that maybe you could do something about it.” Here, I admit to flashing my better-than-average vocabulary.
“Heinous, huh?” He told me that he had never heard a student use the word. “Okay Hannah, it’s in Stefan’s hopper. No worries. Stefan, the adjunct prof with a three-year contract, will come to the rescue.”
Wait. Did Stefan have a sarcastic side I’d yet to experience? “Oh, that’s reassuring,” I said.
“Look, Hannah I’ve got absolutely no agency either in this school or the university at large. I am a total greenhorn. I don’t mean to be impertinent. But truth is truth. I’m sorry if what I said was hurtful.”
He melted my heart right there and not for the last time. I did not know what to feel about Blackwood Forest but I did know right then that we were beginning to form a lifelong bond. I popped up out of my chair, feeling lighter than helium, my twiggy form bounding gaily toward the door. Over my shoulder, I grinned like a silly schoolgirl. “I think you have the chops for this struggle,” I told him. Chops? Struggle? Where did that come from?
He stared back at me, incredulous. Years later, he remembered the incident. As I walked out, he said he was thinking: Hold it! I am a pacifist. How could this little wisp believe I might have the wherewithal to engage in some kind of hare-brained struggle to save a forest?
6
By the time I got around to writing this memoir, Lara Hedlund had been through the mill. If you believe, as I do, that poor Lara’s life is worthy, then you must also believe that tragedy is at the core of storytelling. Lara’s story will convey something not only about life in those days, but also about the forest we were trying to protect.
Lara pushed her rust-pocked Jeep along a narrow unpaved road. She drove full-blooded, the way she lived life. On the left, the Barstow farmhouse. Malcolm Barstow, a weathered grandfather in a straw hat, was pulling weeds in his pumpkin patch. They exchanged friendly waves. In the shimmering distance, Barstow’s fields looked like burned pie crust, the corn wilted, the soil riven with fissures. Poverty grass swayed across an overgrazed pasture. Malcolm’s cattle formed a tight cluster in the shade of an open oak. Their calves stood motionless. Southern Ohio blistered, thirsty for rain.
Lara drove on without thinking. She had done this dozens of times, the ninety minutes from the university to her research site in Blackwood Forest, a place she knew as intimately as the streets and playgrounds of her childhood neighborhood near Minneapolis. She rattled over washboard ripples, leaving a dust cloud in her wake. Two groundhogs, unfazed, squatted in the chicory at the edge of the road. At the next rise, she pulled into a gravel parking lot, unloaded her gear, took measure of the hot afternoon. She removed her cotton shirt, a tank top being sufficient. She swigged a few gulps of water, heisted her pack, and headed down the trail into the labyrinth of deep hollows that harbored the cherished forest and enabled a microclimate for “her birds”.
Each time she worked in the forest, Lara told me that she performed a little celebration of the miracle of its survival. Despite all the rapacious years of farming, logging, mining, subdivision, and neglect, Blackwood Forest’s 100 acres were as native as the long-gone Delaware Indians. It was the largest block of untouched forest in the state. That it remained intact was thanks to a single family. Over seven generations, the Barstow family refused to cut it. Twenty years earlier, they willed it to Gilligan University to protect in perpetuity. Towering above Lara were trees the age and size and species of the forest that must have awed the Barstow’s first Ohio relatives in the 1820s. She had studied the multitude of ecological elements here and she understood what a genetic trove this good family had preserved, the very ligaments of the forest primeval.
Looking up through hemlocks and black walnuts, black oaks, and black cherries, she caught herself in a rare existential moment. As a pragmatic science-brained woman raised by her dad, a physician without religious history or inclination, she rarely had such moments. If God exists, Lara mused, God must be here. Then again, if she doesn’t, the forest’s secrets could keep a coven of Wiccans occupied for centuries. On balance, she admitted to siding with the Wiccans.
Along the trail, Lara paused to listen for black-throated green warblers. At this time of year, the birds chirp occasionally, having ceased their full-throated territorial songs a couple of months earlier. Before the first frost, they would head south. But instead of hearing bird sounds, Lara’s Wiccan moment was disrupted by a faint hum, the hum of an engine. The sound triggered anxieties about the tiny and increasingly rare birds she studied. Slicing off the trail to the northeast, she pressed toward the sound. Within ten minutes the machine and male voices seemed to be just over a ridge. She clamored to the top. Below, in filtered sunlight, she saw three men in hardhats, bib overalls, and butt-kicking boots. They clustered around a small rig. They appeared to be drilling a long bit into the soft earth. From the top of the ridge, without thinking, Lara trotted downslope toward the men.
Not fully aware where her words came from, she screamed, “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”
The men whirled round. They cut off the drill and sized up the young woman staring at them, a refined beauty, well-outfitted and neatly coiffed, uttering words they hadn’t expected but fully understood. All three sported scruffy facial stubble. Beneath their hardhats, Lara noted smirks baring gaps, plenty of sweat, eyes revealing both fatigue and what could have been lust. Here’s a brotherhood more than a trifle foreboding, she realized. The biggest guy was a bear of a man with wide shoulders, a thick neck, a round face centered on an oft-broken nose. Incongruously, Lara noticed that his eyelashes were almost girlish. The smallest man, a baby bear, looked to be a shifty fellow with boney hands. He removed his hardhat to wipe a dappled hairless dome with a grimy rag. The third man, a pirate listing toward portside as if one leg were pegged, hobbled across a shingle bank into the shade. He removed his hat to reveal a red bandanna. To the papa bear, he asked, “What do you think, Jerry?”
Jerry replied, “I ain’t gettin’ paid ta think.” As an afterthought, for he actually could think, he turned to Lara, looking mildly amused. “Hey there!” He spoke the choppy Appalachian dialect that she was slow to decipher. For such a hulk, his voice was an octave higher than she would have expected and surprisingly soft with a slight lisp. “Now cool down and quit your dirty talk. We ain’t doin’ no harm. Just puttin’ in an honest day’s work.”
Lara moved further downslope, stopping short of what she sensed was his personal space. She understood what these guys were up to. As I had heard at the PCSA meeting, rumors about big deposits of shale gas and oil under the forest had long been circulating. Jerry seemed puzzled to see her so close. His eyes hardened. She stared back: her sea-green eyes lasering his coal black ones. Soon enough, she gazed away. Acting like the ditsy broad they assumed her to be, she asked a dumb question. “So, Jerry, what in fact is your work?”
“We’re drilling, cain’t ya see, ma’am? Drilling.” It was the creepy short guy, his voice prickly as late summer thistles. He had cut off the big man. Chagrined, he looked up at him like a brash child realizing he’s overstepped his bounds.
Lara pressed on, “What do you expect to find here? Who do you work for? Who granted you permission to drill?”
“Oil and gas is what we’re drilling for,” said Jerry, regaining center stage. “There’s millions of dollars of that stuff under here, worth way more than this whole county. We’re drilling for Morse and we don’t need no one’s permission. He owns the mineral rights to this here property.”
“I don’t know where your Morse got the idea he could drill here but let me make something clear. You are on a protected nature preserve. Nobody’s allowed here but faculty, students, and local hikers with permission from the university. Didn’t you read the sign? The forest, by law, must not be disturbed. So, my advice to you, sir, would be to pick up and get the hell out before I call the sheriff.”
Lara halted and came to her senses. I’m out of my mind. These cretins could jump on me before I could hum the first bar of Dueling Banjos. (A decrepit reference to the 1972 movie, Deliverance. Lara told me that she and her dad watched it in 1997. To say the least, it was inappropriate for a ten-year-old girl, and it scared the shit out of her. But she would never forget the movie’s soundtrack.)
“Now ain’t you something when yer mad,” the pirate observed. He was older than the others with gray flecks in his beard and a bulging belly. She noted his tanned biceps, took in Jerry’s reddening face, and decided a retreat was in order.
“Best you make tracks now little lady. Cool down before you really test our patience.” Jerry had taken a step her way and was speaking for the group. “And now let me be clear. The sheriff ain’t gonna bother us. He and the university know what Morse Valley Energy’s aimin’ to do. It’s what we call job creation in these parts. So, if it’s okay with you, we’ll get back to work.”
End of confrontation. But not end of story. Lara backed upslope and argued no more. As she hiked into the deep shade, she heard guttural laughter. Then the drill fired up. “Shit!” she yelled at the top of her lungs as she raised her right hand, middle finger extended toward the whir of industrial greed. Her curse dissolved into the drone of the drill. The three hard hats paid no attention.
Lara’s research day had been shattered. She did not hear or see the warblers. Even if she had found them, she had lost herself in the fury of the encounter. In thinking about it, she said that her anger was founded on anxiety about the depleted state of the world and especially of passerine songbirds that migrate back and forth to Central and South America. Here, in this pitifully small forest fragment, the plight of the planet came into focus. “I’m devoting my life to a fucking lost cause. Why? What’s the use of studying the behavior of these birds? Their chances of dodging extinction are about the same as mine of stopping this madness.” Poor woman, she was at the point of breakdown.
Early the next morning Lara found Dr. Marilyn Shesky, her mentor and friend, at work in her campus office. Among students, Marilyn had the reputation of a no-nonsense, hard-marking ecologist, a rascally irreverent woman with a fondness for vintage cusswords. She had twice earned professor-of-the-year accolades and recently had been nominated for the Distinguished Professor Award for her path-breaking research on the genetics and ecological adaptation of raptors to disruptions caused by mining.
Lara flopped down on the only chair not covered with fast food containers and stacks of papers. After coffee and what Marilyn referred to as pleasantries, in fact a synopsis of who’s in bed with whom in McWhorter Hall, Lara told about the drilling crew. She leaned across Marilyn’s desk, forcing eye contact.
“We’ve got to find a way to make the university stop these guys, this Jasper Morse.”
A decade-and-a-half older and considerably more jaded than she perceived Lara to be, Marilyn could see the conversation heading south. “Hey, a doctoral student needs to finish her research. Everything else is secondary, especially granola-headed behavior. Yesterday you could have had much bigger problems on your hands than the worst dissertation committee might throw your way. Chill Lara. And get back to your warblers.”
“Warblers? If they frack that area, the warblers will be toast. Then what? Tell me, does the university not own the mineral rights at Blackwood?”
“The university does not own mineral rights. And, to be honest Lara, the university is unlikely to do squat in deterring Morse and company.”
“Why not?”
Marilyn got up from her desk, turned her back to Lara, looked out her window across a campus dappled in late summer sunshine. The fog had quickly burned away. It would be another steamy day. Marilyn tried to control herself. She hated detaching from her star graduate student but Lara would not relent. “Why not?” She almost screamed.
Turning around, Marilyn fired back fiercely. “Goldammit, Lara! Here are the cold facts. First, the university has convinced itself that deep drilling for oil and gas will do no harm to the forest. Second, Jasper Morse, sole proprietor of Morse Valley Energy Limited, is one of the most powerful men in this region, a man who usually gets his way.”
“Malcolm told me that Morse Valley holdings surround the forest,” Lara interjected.
“True,” Marilyn replied. “He mined the coal beneath those lands back in the nineties. Now he can use that property to deploy his fracking operation without felling one tree. Beyond that, the man donated tens of thousands of dollars to Governor Winthrop’s reelection campaign last year. Winthrop, as you know, since you hold a fellowship in his name, is an alumnus of this storied institution and so, as it happens, is Morse. Governor Winthrop is fully on board with Morse’s fracking foray.”
“So, is this chickenshit university just rolling over and saying, ‘Okay, frack your brains out, Jasper? We’re good with that’.”
“Not exactly. As recently as a year ago, the university believed it could successfully challenge Morse’s fracking plans, which, I admit, don’t bode well for Blackwood Forest. In addition to fracking for oil and gas, Morse proposes to withdraw millions of gallons of water from the aquifer that extends beneath the forest and to develop deep injection wells to dispose of waste. When the university threatened to take the case to court, just as you students left campus last spring, Governor Winthrop quietly intervened and all talk of the university’s legal action vanished.”
“So much for justice,” concluded Lara. “All the more reason for a fucking revolution.”
“Hold your water, sister …”. It was time for some serious mentoring. Lara was on her feet pacing, the pheromones of a cornered beast splashing across the floorboards.
“Dagnabit! Sit down,” Marilyn commanded.
Lara slumped back into the chair. She had never seen Marilyn this steamed.
“Lara, you’re the best student I’ve worked with here. Macalester and your dad prepared you well for graduate school. I’d hate to let anything derail you. Don’t even think of contacting Morse. And being pissed at the university gets you nowhere. Face it, the university is caught up in fossil fuel politics; it has little latitude. You realize that your research would be impossible without carbon-based fuel. Not to dwell on the obvious or to scold, I would just say that if you want to keep your funding, if you want to finish your degree and have great recommendations for a post-doc, don’t meddle. That’s it. Don’t meddle.”
“Meddling is not what I had in mind,” Lara spat back and was headed toward a full blown green rage, a real possibility given her upbringing. But she felt too diminished and pathetic to piss off her advisor further. She slowly rose to her feet. She mumbled some words she could not recall. She shuffled out, feeling betrayed. Hopeless. A hurricane of emotions wind-milled her guts. She lost balance, gaining purchase on a hallway bulletin board, ripping flyers and notices to the floor. Still queasy, she rushed toward the women’s room. Inside, she barfed her breakfast. She wiped her chin and staggered out into a newly tarnished world.
She said it took days to recover. She had plunged into a godforsaken abyss she recognized as the prospect of a sixth great extinction — a mass die-off worldwide, including all the warblers. In her darkest days, she closed her eyes and tried to think of something to look forward to. Nothing came to mind. Days of such bleakness deepened her depression. “I sat there alone in my apartment accompanied only by rustling leaves and the whirring fridge and drank too many six-packs, night after night, alone.” Shocking. She had never struck me as the type to wallow in self-pity and despondency.
As summer waned and mornings became crisp with fog across the valley and as fall colors began to glow on warm September evenings, she envisioned some possibilities. By early October, Lara emerged from the doldrums. Blackwood Forest called her back. She stopped at the farmhouse. They sat in the yellow kitchen with avocado appliances and Farmer Brown wallpaper: she, the troubled field biologist, he, the wizened caretaker, both quietly sipping Maxwell House coffee. She told Malcolm Barstow what happened last month. As she unfurled the story, she threw her doubt and inhibitions to the wind and spewed forth the unvarnished version. Malcolm listened in his quiet way with no more animation than his big tomcat curled up on the windowsill. As a Winthrop Scholar, Lara declared that she felt like a prostitute.
That got Malcolm’s attention. A seventy-three year old widower, he spoke in short plain sentences as is the way of people who live alone. He thought of himself a grandfather first, a farmer second, and a forest caretaker, for which the university paid him a small salary, a distant third. Counselor to a troubled graduate student had never been part of his skill set. He also understood himself to be a short-timer, his life fast flickering, the last of a long line of Barstows on this land. His one granddaughter lived with her mom, his only child, in San Diego. Neither of them would ever move back to Ohio. The university would take over the farmhouse and they would allow the farm to revert to sumac and hawthorns. Day-to-day management of Blackwood would become their problem.
Looking across the kitchen table at Lara, he said: “A prostitute? That seems extreme to me, Lara.”
“Just letting you know how I’m processing this, Malcolm — this weird convergence of my fellowship, the warblers, Jasper Morse, and Governor Winthrop. Wouldn’t that freak you out?”
“Lara, that’s like asking my Holsteins to write an essay about our conversation here. I don’t even know what freak-out means. But, simply put, my neighbors all love this little gem of a forest. Just as I do. We wander those woods and hunt and fish there, you know. That’s why my family saved it. But we stand to benefit far more from Morse’s oil and gas than by the few research projects like yours that happen over the years. We hear talk of millions of dollars-worth of oil and gas in the shale beneath this forest. This means tax revenues and jobs. Jobs mean better security for families. Morse says he can extract these resources without damaging the forest. I don’t care for the man personally. He’s not a nice person. But I want to believe him.”
He stopped for a moment to pull a few more words together. Lara bit her tongue.
“Where do you think our electricity comes from? This gas will keep the power flowing and it will pollute much less than the coal it is replacing. So, if you were to ask around, you’d find most families favor drilling. That’s how we are here.”
Getting up from the table, she said, “Jobs versus the environment! Jeez, I thought that was an eighties and nineties battle, long gone.”
“Not long gone,” Malcolm countered. “As long as we keep driving vehicles, lighting and warming our homes with electricity, and getting on the Internet to write scientific papers.”
Lara did not respond. She quietly appraised this good man, wondering whether Morse and company would leave a forest for him and his neighbors, for the common good. Probably not. Game over: ten thousand years of post-glacial evolution down the tubes, thanks to our gluttony and our inability to switch to green energy. Someone, anyone, thinking seriously about this could rapidly swirl into mournful abjection. Suppressing these thoughts, Lara headed toward the door. She thanked Malcolm for the coffee and for hearing her out. After she climbed into the jeep, she looked back. He was leaning against the porch wall.
“Let me know if you need anything Lara.”
“Thanks again, Malcolm.” She smiled and waved, her hand limp as a dead warbler.
Walking down the trail into the forest, Lara’s emotions cycled faster than the centrifuge in her lab. She stopped to listen. She checked her churning heart. She heard no machinery, breathed deeply of the fragrant forest that had fed her soul all summer, moved on. She needed to make certain the warblers had flown south. One by one, she checked each of their nesting trees. Assured they were gone, she retrieved her field sensors and folded her forest plats. She spent the afternoon focused and calm.
She was happier than she had been for weeks. She joined friends for dinner, then other grad students at Meroni’s Tavern for rounds of beer (and shots). Arm-in-arm, she and Adrienne Foster, her sometime partner, melted toward home more than a little buzzed. Still, at the midnight hour, the demon drillers returned to Lara’s unconscious. She tossed and turned and dreamed of arm-wrestling Jerry, the titan driller. They were in the forest. It was late in the day. The last sun rays cast long shadows across the table. She could smell Jerry’s beery breath. Local beer, not Becks. He spat in his hands, then grabbed hers. Oh! On his side of the table, the other drillers hooted. On her side were Marilyn and Malcolm. When the contest began, she heard them whispering. They were betting on the driller.
7
As Lara’s fortunes began to falter, those of Katherine Bridgeston rose in almost equal proportion. Katherine was born on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, a peninsula lapped by waters of the Chesapeake Bay on one shore and the Atlantic on the other. Katherine free-ranged through childhood with her white and African American playmates, surrounded by salt marshes, seawater, piney woods, and truck farms. She grew into a willowy girl with deep caramel eyes, a pointed chin, a ready smile. Thanks to her parents, both with roots here, she came to sense that this peninsula was her very own. In her drawl, she could crack me up when she rhythmically recited the names of Eastern Shore places, each of which had childhood resonance: Wachapreague, Pongoteague, Machipongo, Chincoteague, and Nassawodox.
She excelled in school and in everything she tried: gymnastics, ballet, swimming, foreign languages, flirtations with the smartest and hottest boys. She said it saddened her that she was only partly aware of advantages given her by wealth, privilege, quick intelligence, and skin color. She chose the University of Virginia, reasoning that Thomas Jefferson’s university would widen her horizons. She majored in English with a minor in biological and natural sciences, believing she would become a science writer. She pursued Italian to an advanced level, a gift, she admitted, that “fed her romantic soul”. Ah, Katherine!
By the time she graduated, the dot-com bubble had burst, the country was reeling after the attacks on New York and Washington, and George W. Bush continued to fight two wars. Job prospects were bleak. She looked abroad and succeeded in landing a job in Italy. In the summer of 2006, she flew to Florence to work for a science publishing house. One weekend late in the spring of her third year in Florence, when life seemed in full and fragrant bloom, a tall Italian man about her age asked if he could share her table in the café at the University of Florence Museum. Katherine did not provide details of this tryst, and to be honest, I filled in a few blanks.
“Certamente,” Katherine replied. While he crossed the room to order food, she beheld his intriguing angularity, his handsome face and smooth olive skin. His coal black hair trimmed short suggested he was a stock broker or futures trader. He returned. She smiled and demurely buried her nose in her book. He nibbled pasta and sipped wine. She looked across the table. He tilted his head, his gaze affixed to the pools behind her eyes. He coaxed her into conversation. She warmed to the unexpected guest. She was moved by his eye contact which never drifted from her face. He was drawn to her poise. He wondered about her strangely inflected Italian.
Two hours later, Katherine from Virginia and Fabiano from Perugia wandered in friendly animation in the balmy sunshine through the neighborhoods and gardens around the university. Over the following weeks, they fell head over heels in love. They hurdled through infatuation and enrapture to talk of marriage. When able, Fabiano, a helicopter pilot in the 83rd Combat Search and Rescue Squadron in nearby Cervia, traveled by train for weekends in Florence. In summer, he took her to meet his mother and family in Perugia. Katherine began to dream of a future in Italy.
Late in 2008, her dreams of an ordered and ordained world were sideswiped. In August, Fabiano told her that his wing was being readied for deployment to Afghanistan. By late September, the global financial system, teetering on collapse, began to gravely impact Italy. In October, Fabiano departed. Katherine felt as empty and dark as the approaching winter. In November, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 49. Worse still, as Italy’s economy began to falter, Katherine was laid off. Her savings dwindled. In December, she packed her belongings and flew home. As she walked through the security checkpoint at Dulles, her dad hugged her tenderly. Tearfully, they separated. He had tragic news: Fabiano and five other Italian military personnel had been maimed by an IED in Herat Province. Fabiano died while being treated in the field. She collapsed again into her father’s arms unable to speak, “weeping without cease”, she said.
Surrounded by family and busied in her mother’s recovery, Katherine moved from one day to the next. In the quiet of her bedroom, she was rendered helpless by panic attacks. She felt as if she were living in “a fortress of despair”. She detached from all but her mother and father and her nearby sister. For months, she could neither speak Fabiano’s name nor call up a clear image of him. She could not find words, in English or Italian, to respond to condolences from Fabiano’s mother. She could not imagine his mother’s grief. It was winter of 2009, coincidentally also the winter of Kate Nickleby’s death. As winter eased toward spring, Katherine began to emerge from her dark existence. Her mother was in remission. The teal, ducks, and geese, restless in the marshes, harkened her to life. She could feel her strength returning for a future she could not envision.
Katherine came to reflect on her few months with Fabiano and her still grieving heart as gifts she might someday cherish rather than a life sentence without release. She was twenty-five. She understood, at least intellectually, that good years, good times, and perhaps loving relationships might still happen. She moved to Washington, secured two part-time jobs and slowly healed. Three years later, she moved to Argolis, Ohio, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student rubbing shoulders and testing wits with much younger students like me, who surely must have seemed like juveniles, so young and innocent were we. Later in the semester, in the thick of crisis, she told me that most of us hadn’t a clue about the vulnerability of lives lived open-heartedly, the cruelty of war, or the pathos of suffering love lost. She was right. On the other hand, as she led us through troubled times, Katherine became a rock for us.
8
Without the tycoon Jasper Morse, this whole tale might merely recount a memorable semester at a blissful bubble called Gilligan during which a beloved professor with sky-blue eyes taught us to prepare for the worst, a fate of which we were but dimly aware and at least initially dubious. But every thriller needs a villain and every story based on a university campus inevitably must revert to the trope of inept administrators pitted against pathetically under-resourced faculty and clueless students. That piece saw first light with Dr. T. but of course, there’s more. Now. Imagine … a closed-door scenario, recounted to me late that semester; it takes place in the week after Lara butted heads with the drillers.
Truman Tulkinghorn headed toward Centennial Quad. Like a stag in rut, he strode at full speed, head heaving. He wore his only suit, a coffee colored worsted, baggy clump he’d picked up in the nineties. Just as the chimes atop Stiggins Hall began to peal “Alma Mater, Oh Gilligan,” he bolted through the front entrance, rushing past, without notice or eye contact, a gaggle of work-study students brewing coffee, sending Tweets, swapping stories.
It was 8:05. He was late for a meeting with the provost, Helen Flintwinch, a woman who suffered no fools, and who, by Dr. T.’s lights, was particularly disdainful of him, lateness or not. He could not fathom why her lip curled whenever he tried to make a point. But he refused to dwell on it. What did she know about petroleum geology? When it came to oil and gas he was the man; indeed he was the one and only petroleum geologist at Gilligan. And oil and gas were the subjects of this early morning meeting.
Dr. T. thundered past check-point Charlotte, the outer office of the provost, with nary a nod to Charlotte Brunton, the diminutive executive assistant who colluded with the provost to make life miserable for those like him in the trenches — those who must deal daily with faculty and students. With Charlotte on his tail, he entered the provost’s space cautiously, as if Flintwinch might pounce from behind her door. Instead, from her seat, she waved off Charlotte and forced a tight smile aimed at the wall. Her thin lips then turned down and her red-rimmed eyes flashed something close to contempt, as if Countess Bathory and Lizzie Borden had morphed into one.
She said, “Dr. Tulkinghorn, this is Jasper Morse, one of Gilligan’s most loyal alumni.” Omitting that he was also one of the wealthiest.
To the left of the provost’s desk, a love seat, an upholstered club chair, and a captain’s chair bearing the Gilligan seal encircled an oak coffee table. Provost Flintwinch, round-faced with a weak chin or two and unkempt mouse-gray hair, on that day wore a pink tent-like garment. She had already spread her ample self on the love seat, leaving enough room perhaps for a ballet dancer or supermodel, neither of whom could be found in these parts. Her guest, the mogul Morse, himself broad of beam and great of gut, occupied the comfy chair. Cautiously stepping past the provost, Dr. T. mouthed muffled apologies for lateness, shook Morse’s hand, and sat in the hot seat. Sizing up Jasper Morse, he quickly recalled what he had heard and read about the man and realized why, of all people, he had been summoned to meet him.
After his father’s sudden death at fifty-five, Morse, President and CEO of Morse Valley Energy, risked the family’s wildcat oil and gas fortune in the late sixties by investing in strip mining for coal. Using gargantuan drag lines, Morse laid waste to portions of five counties east of the university mostly before a federal law, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, kicked into gear. Morse made millions. When most of the Ohio coal had been depleted, he moved his operations to Wyoming, Utah, and Montana. There he continued to reap vast harvests, stripping and deep mining low sulfur coal for export and to meet new clean air standards in the U.S. Morse, 66, was back in southern Ohio to explore for oil and natural gas locked in the Marcellus and Utica shales a mile beneath the surface.
Dr. T. had seen television news stories on the man. In these he looked to be straight out of the nineteenth century, a rough-edged John D. Rockefeller. Morse spoke Appalachian English, which to Tulkinghorn’s ears, seemed raw and uncultured. Here, in this stuffy office, bursting out of his western fancy-yoked plaid shirt with its buckled pockets and flashing Bandera cowboy boots, Morse seemed out of his depths, a bucko who’d drifted too far from the watering trough. But with twenty years as an exploration geologist, Dr. T. knew these types. No absurdities here. What he recognized instead was a rattlesnake to be handled with caution. On the other hand, were it ever to come down to Truman Tulkinghorn versus Jasper Morse, Tulkinghorn felt certain he could match Morse, move for move, especially given the trove of information on Morse a student assistant had recently unearthed. Though Morse knew nothing of Tulkinghorn, he, of course, believed the contrary.
“Dr. Tulkinghorn!” The provost tugged Dr. T. back to the present. “Coffee?”
“Er, no … thanks.”
“Alright, let’s get down to the matter at hand,” Flintwinch said. “Mr. Morse, as you know, will likely begin to drill soon for oil and natural gas to which he has legal rights under our Blackwood property in Bartholomew County. He assures us he can accomplish it without impacting the surface vegetation, soils, or water resources.”
Tulkinghorn interrupted her. Flintwinch flashed a warning, her mouth drawn tightly. “Deploying horizontal drilling and hydrologic fracturing?” he inquired.
She was about to respond when Morse rasped, “Yep. We’ve already got permission for exploration drilling at the north edge of the woods. We have rights to any oil and gas in the shale and we will extract ground water too. Gotta deal with all them regulations. The scare tactics about water pollution and earthquakes are a bunch of bullshit. Thank God I’ve got friends in DNR and adjacent land to inject the brine.”
“Yes, it’s true you have rights to these minerals,” the provost responded in a smarmy tone. “Dr. Tulkinghorn, President Redlaw and I have requested, and Mr. Morse has agreed, to share copies of his application and the Environmental Impact Statement the state requires before it issues permits. These will be in our hands soon. Dr. Tulkinghorn, we seek your help with two matters: first, we ask that you evaluate the EIS carefully, and, in strict confidence, provide your assessment of this project.”
Flintwinch paused. Dr. T. strategically withheld a response. This tactic slightly jangled the provost. A small victory, he told himself. She pressed on, “Can you do that Dr. Tulkinghorn?”
“Yes. What’s the second matter?”
She reached for some papers on the coffee table. “This one may be more difficult, Truman.”
He noticed she had used his first name for the first time in more than four years of battling this disagreeable woman. In his mind, he saw the other shoe on its way toward the carpet and he could imagine nothing good coming from it.
She handed him a document bound in valencia-colored vinyl. Tulkinghorn noted that the Gilligan school colors figured prominently in the design of the document’s cover as were a flock of geese in an upward trending V. No surprise there. Gilligan, the only university in the country with an orange goose as its mascot, never failed to use the ungainly bird to brand itself. Whoever came up with this?, he wondered.
The provost explained, “Assuming Mr. Morse gains approval for exploiting the resources under blackwood, this document will cast the project in the context of Gilligan’s long-term energy plan. It was prepared for us by JBPR, the firm that conceived and facilitated the highly successful Sustainable YOU campaign, which has generated many students for your school, I believe.”
Tulkinghorn cleared his throat, ignoring the word “sustainable”, which he detested, and the hook of new students, which as yet had garnered no tangible rewards and dozens of headaches. “And what am I to do with this?” he asked the provost.
She picked up her own copy, using it to fan her reddening face. In clipped tones, she responded, “Once the state permits the projects we will need someone of your stature to help us sell the plan and our source of gas across campus — to your school, to the faculty council, the non-academic employees’ council, civil servants — all the important constituencies.” She wafted her face again. “You, sir, are my choice.”
He paused again, drawing his hand over his mouth toward his own multiple chins. “As you know, I am a big fan of fracking for oil and gas. But based on my own faculty, who would split something like sixty-forty opposed to drilling beneath the forest and probably no better than fifty-fifty on the energy plan, I can tell you this isn’t going to be an easy sell.” Dr. T. shifted to the back of his chair. He felt compelled to lay these cautions on the table. No way would he be set up for failure.
“True,” she conceded to his surprise, “but there are many worthy talking points here to help you make the case. Look here on page six.”
Tulkinghorn turned to the page with a brightly colored flow chart accompanied by explanatory text boxes and clip art depictions of wind mills, solar arrays, mirrors, biofuels coming out of former gasoline pumps, Priuses in all the parking lots — the whole schmear.
“As you can see,” Flintwinch continued, “after coal, which we’ll continue to use in the next one to three years, the university will commit itself to natural gas from Blackwood, a fuel with a much lower carbon footprint. Another decade or so further on, page seven, we tell the world that we shall make a transition to renewable sources of energy — wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and such.”
“Uh huh,” he muttered and proceeded guardedly in what he hoped would be a neutral informative tone. “The students are calling for a transition much sooner. They want us to get off coal and go straight to renewables, especially now that the boilers must be replaced and Ohio’s flagship up the road is already making the change. The students know about Blackwood and are actively discussing a campaign of their own. “
“How do you know this?” Flintwinch asked.
“The Post-Carbon Student Action group has been blabbing all over The Press. One just needs to keep up with the student paper or its website.”
The provost was about to respond to Dr. T.’s reproof, but Morse had had enough. He lip-farted. Then, in rising tones, while pounding his left index finger three times on his right palm, he growled, “One, I don’t give a shit about faculty and student preferences. Why worry about students in post-carbon whatever? To hell with ‘em! Two, these are my resources to extract. And I will do so no matter what a few socialist neo-hippy faculty and tree-hugging vegetarian students think, say, or do. And three”, looking directly at the provost, “you and Dr. Redlaw better think carefully about which side your bread is buttered on.”
The provost, anything but a skilled diplomat, was rattled. And what was he implying about buttered bread? She saw the need to steer the conversation toward reconciliation. Clearing her throat, in mawkish tones Dr. T. had never heard, she apologized, “Of course, Mr. Morse, we understand that the oil, gas, and water under Blackwood are indeed yours legally, assuming the state permits their extraction. We are also grateful for your generous offer of below-market rates for the gas. On the other hand, we are responsible for the peace, security, and well-being of the university community, so we cannot take the opinion of our various publics lightly. But, not to worry. This is our job, and we can deal with it.”
Dr. T. remained silent. He choked on the act of inclusion in Flintwinch’s ‘we’. But the irony of Flintwinch, who had often backed him into corners, being nailed to the wall before his eyes, induced inner joy reminiscent of a romp with a young maiden upstairs in the Wild Horse Tavern back in Brookings.
Morse abruptly stood up and made for the door. He turned to the provost demanding to hear from her as soon as the documents had been reviewed. She thanked him for coming to campus. As he left the office, the provost breathed deeply, chewing on her lip and shaking her head slowly. Dr. T., for his part, said no more than the minimum.
9
A related story was conveyed to me by the very horse’s mouth. I won’t say exactly when but do recall that as an inveterate journalist, I had wily ways. I had unwittingly wandered into the magnetic field of a handsome older gentleman who I never expected to respect and admire, let alone become fond of.
Mitchell Horvath Redlaw, the president of Gilligan University of Ohio, drummed his long fingers on the mahogany arm of his tufted black leather executive chair. He reached for his Gilligan mug to savor an afternoon coffee discretely laced with heavy cream and Bailey’s Irish whiskey from a bottle carefully stashed in the credenza. Across his desk in a Gilligan University Boston rocker sat Provost Helen Flintwinch similarly sipping what appeared to be coffee. Through the President’s bay window, the low rays of sun cast a citrusy glow upon the room. Shadows had begun to swallow the amber light. It was the last day of September in the seventh year of the Redlaw administration. Redlaw, once a professor of chemistry here, had returned to Gilligan after a successful run as provost of a large eastern public university. His first act was to fire Stephen Gridley, the Gilligan provost. Flintwinch, who also hailed from that renowned DC-area institution, with Redlaw’s help, rose to the top of the candidate pool to replace Gridley.
Helen Flintwinch, with a twinkle in her eye, lifted her mug. “Lovely coffee”, she said. “Just what I needed this afternoon.”
Redlaw, lost in thought, belatedly replied, “Yes, me too”. His mind had been on the fund-raising trip he’d just completed; how damned difficult it had become to squeeze donations from well-healed alumni. The country’s unemployed masses, the mortgage and credit crunches, and the sluggish economic recovery accounted for the ambiguous responses. But he worried also that he was losing his touch. He had next to nothing to tell the press. It was a different climate than that of 2006 when he had deftly pumped up the endowment with record-setting donations. At their recent quarterly meeting, some members of the Board of Trustees were notably short-tempered.
The president stood up to stretch his six-six frame. Back in the day as a Gilligan power forward, he set scoring and rebounding records for the Geese. But now his crotchety knees spoke painfully to the realization that hoop fantasies were as preposterous as reliving his sex life in those heady times in the early seventies. He came round to the arm-chair facing the provost, his legs extending back toward his desk.
Flintwinch twisted a strand of her hair, pulled an ear, put down her mug, and stopped rocking. She briefly flashed back to a meeting eerily similar about a decade earlier. She was forty pounds lighter, still married to that philosopher who later cuckolded Redlaw’s wife, still striving as an always elegantly dressed young administrator poised to break out of her associate provost’s role and make an impression on then Provost Redlaw.
Back then, it seemed, sitting in the office of the chief academic officer of the university of her dreams was as close to the pinnacle as she could get, save cracking into the Ivy League, which was never going to happen. All this was behind her now as was the svelte young administrator who once turned heads. She had come to terms with her diminished ambitions and expanded girth. She reckoned that Gilligan was as good place as any to shamble through middle age. She liked working as Mitchell Redlaw’s consigliere . They had enough shared history to sustain a sturdy friendship and the problems of the moment seemed small compared to the pressures of the DC fish bowl.
Here in this historic building on a lovely autumn afternoon, she said, “Mitch, I know you’re aware of the situation at Blackwood Forest with Morse and the connection to our energy plan. I think I’m going to need some help here.”
Redlaw needed no preamble. Morse was one uncouth and familiar son-of-a-bitch. He pulled too much weight with Governor Winthrop and, for reasons Redlaw could not fathom, seemed intent on strangle-holding the Redlaw administration. Student groups had made their wishes known about Blackwood Forest and the energy future of Gilligan. At a “town hall” in Morgan Hall the night before his trip, in a packed rec room with about one hundred agitated undergraduates smelling blood, he received an earful from one articulate member of some group focusing on the post-carbon future. This girl — what was her name? — had laid out an argument so nuanced and brilliant that he had found himself tongue-tied trying to craft a response. He was well aware of this brewing issue.
“Morse stormed out on me the other morning,” Flintwinch confessed, “and I had no words to bring him back.”
“Un-mannered as usual.”
“To put it mildly. He said he didn’t give a shit about the students and the neo-hippy faculty and that we — you and I — ought ‘to think about which side our bread is buttered on’. I’m quite sure Ohio DNR will issue him the permits for the oil and gas under Blackwood and the injection wells. I’m worried my Tulkinghorn strategy will backfire. I don’t trust the man. Without a word of support in that meeting, he let Morse draw and quarter me.”
The president slugged the last of his Irish coffee, ran his index finger across his mouth, and gently placed his mug back on the desk. “This Tulkinghorn, do I know him?”
“Not sure. He’s been Director of the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development a few years. A geologist. Came here from the oil industry. His dean tells me he’s on thin ice in his school. Faculty revolted last year.”
“And the strategy involving him is what? Pardon me for drawing a blank.”
“He was my choice as an experienced and credentialed guy to sell the energy plan to the university.”
“Uh huh.”
“Meanwhile, the students — and not just the granola heads — are seriously pissed about how little we seem to care about their ecological preserve, as if most of them have ever been there. The way this whole thing is shaping up reminds me of those riots at Maryland in '03. Remember?”
“How could I not?” Dark shadows crossed the furrows of the president’s face. “Look, Helen,” he said, “the students are the least of my worries. There is a bottom line argument to be made with them. They march around and rabble rouse about rising tuition; now they demand us to take an extravagantly expensive energy path that would break the budget and may require increasing their fees. Switching from coal to natural gas will be a small fraction the cost of solar, wind, geothermal, whatever. They can’t have it both ways. Besides, the sooner we can get to gas, the sooner we’ll be able to achieve the carbon emission target we, including lots of students, set last year in the climate plan. Good PR value in this too. Even if Tulkinghorn can’t do it, I can carry that argument to the students.”
The provost nodded in agreement. “Tulkinghorn is not the one to send out to the students. He was tapped to appeal to the other constituencies and he has pledged to do this. When speaking of faculty, he predicted that his own school would likely be opposed to both drilling in Blackwood and the energy plan. That school houses our best known environmental scientists and economists. Can we afford to have them go to the press with a finely tailored set of arguments? I mean, do we want Burt Zielinski being interviewed by NPR about this?”
“Now that’s a goose of a different color.” The president enjoyed summoning the school mascot. “I can see why Tulkinghorn, if he’s shaky with his faculty, might not be our best ambassador.”
“The guy’s a shifty bastard.”
“Okay, let’s get back to the source of the problem. Blackwater Forest?
“Blackwater Forest. Yes, Morse has us by the short hairs. Those are his mineral rights.”
“I know. Let me give the Governor’s Office a call. We’ll both be at a Southern Ohio Chamber of Commerce meeting in Portsmouth tomorrow. Maybe I could arrange a face-to-face with him there.”
“And your plan would be?”
“To ask if he could help me lure Morse away from Blackwood. We do have a couple of hundred acres of hayfields around the Northeastern Regional Campus underneath which is the Marcellus Shale, just like Blackwood. We have mineral rights. Oil and gas galore, presumably. A trade-off may work.”
“Kicking the can down the road?”
“It’s what I do.” He yawned. “I’m sixty-three. Two or three more years: that’s all the road I need.”
Yawning back, she asked, “What about Tulkinghorn?”
“That, my dear, is your problem.”
10
A hitch in his step, Burt Zielinski limped a crooked path to a corner table at the Trattoria Restaurant. Stefan rose to greet him. On the advice of one of his Wisconsin professors, Stefan had introduced himself to Burt as soon as he arrived at Gilligan. To his delight, he found him a warm and intellectually-alive man, gentle as the favorite uncle he’d never had. Stefan confessed to me that Burt had become “a kind of replacement mentor”. Not since Kate’s death had he found someone so able to awaken truths within him, to add value to the identity he sought as an adult. Burt, a professor of climatology, arrived at Gilligan in the mid-1970s. Students knew him as one of Gilligan’s rock stars. His climate classes were oversubscribed semester after semester. I can attest to his theatricality. In the second semester of my freshman year, I remember him rambling around, regaling us with stories of what climate science foretells, what it’s like chasing tornadoes, taking ice cores in Antarctica, the fast moving and dynamic atmosphere five miles above us. It was a fabulous class.
“Dudes and dudettes!” he would boom after we settled down. “We are in deep horse poop! We’re approaching tipping points. Climate change is our most terrifying problem because it is sneaking up on us like a malevolent feral cat. When folks finally realize their plight — searing summers, failing crops, tropical human diseases in Cleveland, urban-wrecking storms like Sandy — the system will have so much momentum that no action humans could imagine or implement will stave off catastrophe. It will be as if a feral house cat had transmogrified into Smilodon populator.”
“What?” somebody asked.
“Look it up, my friend!” A search in the Holmes Mills library recently informed me that a Smilodon is a saber-toothed cat, a monster Pleistocene predator with canine teeth you cannot forget.
Stefan, the mellow Mainer with few theatrics to bring to his classroom considered himself no match for this man. But there at the Trattoria sat Burt, humble and soft spoken, a good listener, a man with nary a hint of braggadocio. Burt was an internationally known scholar having sounded warnings about the consequences of global warming back in the eighties and, like many of his colleagues, had suffered character assassination from fossil fuel magnates and their Washington toadies. Burt and the others who had thrown their bodies on the line were finally gaining respect. In 2005, he was invited to join the UN’s influential and panicky International Panel on Climate Change. Though he was in constant demand and traveled widely, in Stefan‘s company, Burt steered away from shop talk. Following his lead, Stefan basked in their conversations about teaching, families, life transitions, and of the natural wonders and scars in this forgotten corner of Ohio.
Over pasta, salads, and a carafe of house wine, they drifted into conversation about their experience with organized religion. Stefan proceeded cautiously. The last thing he wanted was to get tangled in religious thickets that might despoil what he cherished, a deepening friendship with this elder statesman. Was there an underlying evangelical agenda? Stefan wasn’t sure. In time, Burt asked whether Stefan’s parents were Jewish. When Stefan answered that his dad once was, Burt asked whether Stefan had been raised a Jew.
Looking at Burt’s square Slavic face, its broad nose, prominent ears, lively eyes, bushy grey eyebrows, Stefan told Burt that after his parents left Brooklyn for Maine, they seemed intent on abandoning their old-world habits, including his dad’s Jewish identity, under the eaves of their little apartment in Flatbush. In his childhood, they never talked about religion and they never attended services of any kind. He said: “As I look back, I assume that our secular family evolved because in Europe my dad had been a closet Jew at most. My mom’s religious roots are still unknown to me. I think the Russians crushed whatever faith either of them may have inherited.”
When Burt heard this explanation, he scratched his head of thinning grey hair. “Interesting,” he said reticently, as if awaiting a clue of what direction to take next. After a moment he said, “So we are similar in a way.”
Stefan looked across the table inquiringly.
Burt hesitated as people often do when speaking of sequestered matters. Finally, he said, “My dad, a closet first-generation Polish-American Jew himself, married a country club Protestant, my mother. Neither he nor my mother ever explicitly told me and my sisters about his roots. So, I was deprived, or was it relieved, of his Old Testament heritage. My mother dragged us kids to a Unitarian Church in suburban DC at Christmas and Easter, but she never required that we go to Sunday School. She wasn’t wired to be a prim, you know, puritanical church lady. In fact, she was a wild woman. At twenty-six, she totally defied her father, a circuit court judge in Maryland, and eloped with a dashing Jew a few years her senior. So, neither she nor our dad had any spiritual prescriptions for me and my siblings. Thank God for that, or thank somebody.”
Stefan asked, “So, no formal religion through life for you?”
“Nope, not really. My late wife was, like me, a non-theist. We attended a Quaker meeting for a few months in Vietnam War days, but that played itself out so quickly that I cannot even claim I’m a lapsed Quaker.” With that he erupted in raucous laughter that soon engaged his lungs. He coughed happily and shook his head.
They poured some more wine and silently touched their glasses.
“Lord love ‘em, those Quakers are well-meaning peaceniks,” Burt continued. “But their archaic practices border on the absurd. Takes them decades to make up their minds. ‘Give us time. We’re getting clearness,’ they would say. And I could not bear up under their goodness and piety. “Get real, I used to think. How could anybody ever meet their standards?”
Stefan smiled broadly at this. “Yeah, I understand. I hung out with a couple of Mennonite guys at Wisconsin. They never swore, never drank. We became friends working at the Madison Peace Center. They invited me to one of their services. I went along and concluded within a few minutes that it was doing nothing for me. They were cool about it.”
“Same again,” Burt chuckled. “You also cannot claim to be a lapsed Mennonite.” Stefan admitted he was not a lapsed anything. “Maybe I’m an ‘Earthiest’ to use Edward Abbey’s construction. These days my heart takes guidance from seers like Rumi, Mary Oliver, Whitman, Muir, Leopold, Annie Dillard, none of whom, to my knowledge, spent much time inside religious structures or strictures.”
“An Earthiest! You are indeed a wise man.”
It was time for Burt to go home. They polished off their wine, paid the check, and walked to the door amiably. Outside, the September skies were turning toward night. To the west, remnants of a scarlet sunset silhouetted uptown Argolis and washed burnt sienna over the people. Reddish humans rushing toward a cataclysm they could not possibly foresee. Or so I imagined that tranquil evening, two profs heading homeward.
11
Awa Khadija Émilie “Em” Diallo, a Senegalese graduate student, lounged near a bright bay window on the second floor of the Carsey Student Union. Alone in a sitting area with three modernist chairs and a small coffee table, she flicked her iPad, oblivious to the noisy flow of students up and down the building’s escalators. Em displayed unblemished skin the color of burnished tropical ebony, short-cropped hair held upward by a West African woven band, slinky tight-fitting jeans, sandals with sequins, and an embroidered magenta top. She had an erect bearing with long limbs and graceful ankles and wrists, lovely hands. In all, she was a presence to rival any supermodel on the planet and one to outdistance all such competitors intellectually. In my cloistered Ohio experience I had never encountered a woman as cosmopolitan and breathtakingly beautiful and humorously self-deprecating as Em. Michelle Obama may have been a twin but I never got closer to her than a back seat in our 2000-seat auditorium.
Em unexpectedly found herself in the company of her classmate Nick.
“Bon soir, belle femme,” he said and plopped into an adjacent chair.
“Flattery, mon ami, might get you someplace,” she replied, smiling. Perfect teeth too.
Nick Marzetti was pursuing a masters degree in outdoor leadership and recreation, a bizarre confabulation and on the surface ill-suited to his intellect. By his girlfriend’s reckoning, Gilligan ought to be a cakewalk for someone of Nick’s brilliance and education. He ignored her prediction and dove into his studies full force. He hadn’t expected to like southern Ohio. So far, he was pleasantly surprised. Scaling cliffs, hiking, trail biking, and running fed his insatiable outdoor energies and without the aggravation of the crowded outdoors of his hometown Montreal. His classes had been challenging enough. He liked his teaching assistantship. He had found a job tending bar in his spare time. Argolis was his kind of laid back town with plenty of adventure sport geeks like himself. Amid his life as a student was the ever sensuous and comical Émilie.
“What will you bring to Stefan’s class?” she asked.
“My case study is about budworms and spruce forests.”
“Worms?”
“Actually larvae and moths.”
“Oh. I must learn these new words. I love forests!” Without shame, Em would readily fib. Turns out, she was a city girl with zero experience in forests. Nonetheless, she continued: “ … especially their darkness and, how you say, mystère.” Her smile returned, playful, inviting.
Nick was amused, maybe even intrigued by her flirtations. He slouched awkwardly in the undersized chair and stretched his hamhocks toward the table. His shins bashed the table’s edge.
“Whoever designed these freaking chairs?”
“Simplicité, géométrie, colorée. Élégant, n’est-ce pas?”
“Élégant peut-être. Confortable? Non!”
He leaned forward over the table, his beefy shoulders and thick neck scrunching downward to reveal a head of coffee brown hair, the crown hinting early baldness. She studied him, this bearded Canadian behemoth hairier than the average hound from Newfoundland. He passed a hand over his shaggy head and rubbed his neck rhythmically. Finally, he straightened up, stretching his arms outward, moaning through an extended grumbly yawn while shaking his head vigorously.
“You must get more sleep,” she said, submitting to a dainty yawn herself.
“Thing is, I worked at Hanigan’s last night. At 12:30, I rode my bike home the long way, brewed café, then worked until almost 3:00 preparing for class today. Then I had to get up at 7 to take my trail biking class out to the Argolis trails.”
Em cast a blank look. She could not imagine that a graduate student would have enough time for optional cycling and a job, and what was this about a class on the trails? In her experience, the life of the mind, that seductive concept that had lifted her above and carried her far beyond the streets of Guédiawaye, the fetid slum of Dakar, bore no space for recreation or part-time work or classes in cycling. It’s not that she disrespected Nick’s intellect or interests or need for income. She just had not yet wrapped her mind around the culture and curriculum of a residential university in America.
Keeping that thought to herself, she pronounced, “Ah, Nick! Getting by on so little sleep will make you — How you say? A grumchy bastard.”
“I’ll be fine,” he assured her. “You might have just put together two words there: grouchy and grumpy. Glad you didn’t say ‘nasty’.”
“Non, not nasty. Ah ha,” she realized giddily. “I make up new English word — Em’s English!” She rose and stretched as sensuously as a ballerina. She collected her iPad and handbag and they walked toward the only escalator in Argolis County.
“A nice word you invented,” Nick said. “Maybe ‘grumchy’ will go viral and you’ll be famous. Let’s stop at Progressive. I’ll buy you a café on the way to class.”
“D’accord.”