Late-K Lunacy Page 5

  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 thi
nk 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 W
ashington, 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.