Late-K Lunacy Page 4

  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 fr
om 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?”