Late-K Lunacy Read online

  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 extra
ct 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 r
esponses. 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.