SISYPHUS

SISYPHUS is an online magazine that values original thinkers and honest inquiry.

We Want Another Planet

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In my wildest dreams, I cannot imagine a more strange and beautiful world than the one we once had. So, that is the one I imagine.

 

Blue like ours, and green
Full of islands and mountains
Many trees, and also grass
Even, in places, deserts
And as for animals
Our imagination can do no better
Than elephants and giraffes
Owls and tigers and snakes
Squid, sharks, and whales
What we want, I am trying to say
Is this planet, just this
But without us, simply to see
What was, what could have been
If our hands never grasped
If our voices never drowned the wind

Lessons from a Texas Bat Cave

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Come walk with me.

Past rattlesnakes resting under shaded arms of prickly pear.

Past roadrunners hunting, dashing, searching.

Over hardpan ground to a place where a gaping hole in the land lies hidden, a portal into a shadowy, winged world.

*******

The cave opening sits sunken into the hillside like a large, obsidian eye. It is a particularly important cave, protected by a small nature preserve where I worked as a young wildlife biologist many years ago. Every summer, it transforms into a sweltering, ill-smelling incubator, its wide mouth sloping down into a chasmal belly that meets the exacting needs of its summer inhabitants: nearly four million Mexican free-tailed and cave myotis bats. All are expectant mothers who, like so many other mothers in summer, are looking for a safe place to give birth.

Several nights a week, visitors ramble down dirt roads and trek through rivers and washes to reach the preserve. Their adventure continues on foot along a trail lined with beebrush and tasajillo, a less-showy, but equally lively, relative of the prickly pear. When they round the last bend in the trail, they look up and finally get their first glimpse of the cave. Struck silent, they stare. Nature has commanded their full attention. Their trance is broken when the first acrid whiff of urine and ammonia billows up from the cave, and they cough and cover their noses, amazement replaced with repulsion.

Along the top of the entrance, western coachwhip snakes search the cracks between the layers of thick gray limestone. Their noses poke in and out of crevices as they hunt for a lone bat, one who huddles sick or hurt or who has simply strayed too far from his mother. Sometimes, only the coachwhip’s dusty yellow head is visible, the rest of her body hidden deep inside a crack. Her vacant stare makes it hard to tell if she is asleep or awake until her glossy tongue slides out, flicking up, then down, then back up again, tasting the air.

The seating area above the entrance is now filled with expectant faces. We all stare at the cavern below.

We wait. And wait.

Some evenings, a portly raccoon ambles out from the far corner of the entrance, stops at the edge of the darkness, and looks up at us as we look down at him. He climbs onto a rock ledge, reaches a prying hand back into the black hole, and plucks a bat off the cave wall. Completely engrossed, we almost miss the first bat as she circles out, then back in. She circles out once more before disappearing back into the cave.

Not quite time yet.

The raccoon now holds his meal by the wings, bites off her head and consumes the rest of her furry body before dropping her wings to the ground.

Minutes later, another bat emerges, this time followed by two more bats, then ten, then fifty, then hundreds. A tornadic explosion of orderly chaos, they pour out. Blurred brown bodies flapping and clicking and swirling. Wind spawned from hundreds of wings brushes our bare skin. The unlucky ones, crowded to the outermost spirals crash into shrubs and low-lying branches, their wings impaled on twigs. But torn skin is not their plight; that will grow back. It is the hungry raccoons, coachwhips, and whipsnakes hoping for full-bellied sleep.

Up higher, the spiral unwraps itself, casting ascending ribbons into the horizon. Like the snakes below, hawks survey from above, perching on the tops of the tallest oak trees. One hawk, perhaps a mother herself, leaves her branch and flies to the ribbons. Steadying her wings, she glances right and left. Then, with no warning, she swings her feet forward, smooth talons leading the way. Panicked bats scatter. The fortunate ones reunite further downstream as the ribbons continue drifting upwards.

As twilight dims our vision, visitors trickle back up the trail. Repulsion replaced once again with amazement, they express gratitude for the bats; occasionally, even the snakes receive compliments. With most free-tailed bats gone, mother myotis bats now have room to leave their roosting area further back in the cave. Their emergence is less dramatic; they simply fly out and immediately commence hunting, swooping low through the trees. As the night world awakens, I think about the millions of battles waging on over the land; many lives lost so many others might live.

Some nights, walking back to my car, that wondrous celestial companion rises up over the trees and walks with me. At her fullest, she drapes the air in silver and stillness. When she stays hidden, the land transforms into a sanctuary of darkness. Deep quiet settles over the hills; every faint footstep, low growl, and falling leaf pierces the air. A poorwill repeats his soft serenade, poor-wilip, poor-wilip, poor-wilip. I imagine him sitting on the bare ground alone, his black saucer eyes watchful, wary.  

Sitting on the hood of my car, not yet ready to leave, I listen to the poorwill a few more minutes until he falls silent, perhaps moving to another hill. Without him, the drones and trills of insects drift into awareness. This unhurried world makes sense to me. Life and death, hunger and need, raw survival are real and constant. There are no guarantees of safety, no false security behind pretense and walls and white picket fences. Everything is as it seems: a hawk perched high waiting for a ribbon of bats is exactly as it appears, no more, no less.

We are a part of this, too. But our heated houses and sunless lights deceive us. No longer must we walk to the creek to satisfy our thirst or kill our food with our own hands. By damming our rivers and subduing our animals and their lands, we believe it all to be limitless. We believe we can take as much as we want. We believe our survival is guaranteed.

We have fallen prey to The Great Delusion.

Nature offers an antidote. Nature reminds us we belong. We drink from the same waters and share the same air. And we are guided by the same natural laws as every fungi, insect, mouse, and marten. In between our birth and death, we all scramble to survive. In this mighty endeavor, we harm and are harmed, help and are helped, heal and are healed. We still have much to learn.

But we must listen.

We must listen deeply and often.

We must listen with humility, with curiosity, and with appreciation.

Come with me.

 

War Voice: Project Construction

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Through this maze of skeletal, slapped-up houses
runs a ribbon of sidewalk laid out this morning,
a gleaming wetness, a smell still bakery fresh,
an orphic door just now shut, reverberating, wrong.
Red wing blackbirds skim a field
where already the blocks have been surveyed,
where next week the bulldozers begin,
where next month the wives of soldiers will move in.
I smell the quick, vanishing protest of broken stalks,
I watch the look of a newly formed “O,”
the one round lip whitening with sap.
Giving way and giving way to man’s designs
the green world survives by horrible acquiescence,
and with elegant vanishing ink
each blackbird’s low flight inscribes the tangled manuscript.
Because there is no sound in this, the hammering
drone of cargo planes does not exist.
How can you fight this thistle and milkweed, soldier,
this stuff which fucks the very air around you,
which opens for the wind
and flaunts it in your face,
sends guards on duty into spasms of sneezing?
Bulldoze the whole patch out,
burn the dried-up piles of spindly dead
and watch your new sidewalks, how soon the first
                                                          cracks come.

The Catbird Seat

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It doesn’t matter where we were,
where we were going or
who we even are. It only matters that 
 
we rode inside on heated seats with safety
features reminding us to wear seatbelts,
airbags ready to deploy
should the call come for protection.
 
Windows kept clean 
so I can I look to my right
at forsythia frothing in yellow,
lupine shading violets.
 
Crepe myrtles drape ditches of daylilies,
demarcation between farmhouse and field.
Not enslaved to a radio DJ, playing what I choose
from my mortgage payment smartphone.
 
Advantaged eyes wander left, witness a murder
of crows, a battle, beak-sharpened formation
attacking with ferocity and fear
tangible in the chaos. The one in center
 
with a garter snake dangling  
from his mouth, seven others determined
to take it still alive and or kill, to conquer.
Look away is all it takes
 
to make it not so, an easy drift
back to Lucinda Williams’ Abandoned
and lilacs busting into bloom.

Give a Snake a Fish

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Navigating the Complicated Realities of Natural Resource Sustainability

Fishing has a long history in my family. Tracings of fish adorn the termite-eaten walls of our summer cottage and my grandpa—as passed down in familial lore—even managed to catch a fish in his swimsuit (unintentionally, he claimed).  My dad, never one to be outdone, managed one evening to wrap his line around a bat while fishing off the dock.  So it’s perhaps of little surprise that I’ve lately found myself troubled by a fishy proverb that has spawned more offspring than an overripe shad.  Give a man a fish, the saying goes, and you’ll feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, however, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime. 

At face value, it’s a feel-good quip that cautions against charity and prioritizes the importance of empowerment and process necessary for long-term well-being.  As a professor teaching classes about community development, such virtues are easy to cite.  That’s the problem.  Sometimes, they’re too easy and cliched.  Like a bass that has been caught a few times, I’m increasingly reluctant to reach for shiny axioms that tend to oversimplify irreducible realities.  

My most memorable encounter with unexpected complexity occurred at the tender age of eleven when, not surprisingly, I had a pole in my hands.  Feeling a tug, I reeled in my line only to find a three-inch sunfish on my hook.  Frustrated by the endless parade of dinky fish I’d pulled in, this last one having stolen the last of my now extinguished supply of worms, I impulsively cast again, hoping the fish would fly off the hook saving me the time of cutting it loose myself.  But the fish held fast and the added weight it leant to my line caused my cast to soar skyward, looping over a branch as it did so.  Gravity then brought the fish back down until my spool caught, suspending the startled sunfish just above the surface and only a foot or two from shore.  It dangled abstractly for not more than a second when a northern water snake exploded from the shore and latched onto it, thinking perhaps it had caught the first flying fish in Pennsylvania.

Despite my youth I instantly realized I was witnessing something extraordinary.  Unsure what to do, I did what came naturally; I reeled in my line.  But because the line was looped on an overhanging branch, the fish—and the snake—went straight up into the tree.  About midway, with the full four-foot length of the handsome splotchy brown snake now vertically on display, I paused.  Unable to let go and with nothing to brace against, the snake was as physically stuck as I was mentally.  And even though I was elated to have fulfilled my legacy by being the most recent to snag an unusual catch, I was befuddled as to my next move.  The problem was that nothing up to this point had prepared me for this.

In the same way, nothing has prepared our current generation to face the current ecological dilemma.  Human population is at an all-time high and still soaring skyward.  Over-consumption by western countries shows no sign of abating.  Climate change is happening.  And resources, be they trout streams or timber stands, are stretched more thinly by the hour.  Wes Jackson, author and founder of The Land Institute, wrote that the world follows production at the expense of conservation.  He’s absolutely right.  And until we reverse this and practice conservation at the expense of production, our natural resources will continue to plummet. 

I battle these dystopian thoughts.  Like most people, I suspect, I often deal with them by ignoring them.  But this rarely works for long.  The latest source to sour my day was a recent book by New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree.  In a chapter that discusses how globalization can be used for good, Friedman quotes French banker Jacques Attali.  Attali, who opted to combat global poverty through micro-finance banking, remarked: “Well, we have millions of poor people who know how to fish.  They just don’t have a pole.  Through [this banking system], we might be able to get poles for a lot more of them.” 

I closed the book and stared out the window, watching chickadees compete at my feeder for the quickly disappearing seeds.  According to Attali, the world’s people have learned how to fish.  So now it’s simply about getting the right equipment for them.  Here was my proverb yet again, this time apparently updated to fit Attali’s thesis.  Except the solution failed to address the conservation versus production conundrum. Frustrated anew by this twist, I grabbed my laptop and punched in the original proverb. 

Unsurprisingly, the internet was no stranger to the saying, some sources attributing it to Confucius while others argued it emerged much more recently.  Whomever the source, and whatever the date, most agreed that if health and independence are the stated goals, then the axiom’s message of enabling people with technical assistance is sage advice indeed.  Except that the simplicity of the proverb ignores aspects of resource management, complex agribusiness, and waste management. A few more clicks even got me to my favorite of the saying’s many mutations: “Teach a man to fish and he’ll be dead of mercury poisoning within three years.”

I chuckled, jotted it down, and closed my laptop.  The source of my frustration had emerged: goals!  The goals of former centuries, with far fewer people and far more disease, were justifiably centered upon attaining better health and more independence.  Resources then were diverse and abundant.  But today our goals—our singular goal, rather—should be crystallized around sustaining the dwindling resources we have.  According to economists, natural resources are the foundation of the world economy. They are critical not only for wealth, but for sustaining life itself.  Due to our dependence on clean air, water, and the myriad ecosystem services our resources freely supply, sustaining them must be the goal.  And this goal should trump all others.  

Whatever you give to the proverbial man, therefore—a fish, a pole, a stick of dynamite, anything—you’ll only feed him for a day if you don’t prioritize the resource.  Jacques Attali was right.  The world does know how to fish.  Fishing isn’t the problem; over-fishing is.  Sustaining the resource, rather than independence, health, or modernization, has to be the goal.  We may even have to sustain the resource at the expense of other goals. 

Sustainably using our resources is more than science; it’s an art, it’s by design.  It’s also overtly complicated as each resource is context-dependent, beholden to scads of stakeholders, and often requires a healthy dose of local indigenous knowledge.  While general principles may apply, following simple recipes, or proverbs for that matter, won’t work.  This, I’m convinced, is the great ecological challenge of our day: how to convey complex sustainability challenges to an audience—the general public, the media, or even my academic classrooms—that have grown up in a culture of sound bites and simplistic sayings.  

It was in the midst of standing in front of my stony-eyed students one afternoon this past fall when I edged closer to figuring this out.  After class, a taciturn student unexpectedly became my teacher.  I had just finished a harangue about Aldo Leopold’s resource conservation ethic, “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,” (A Sand County Almanac, 1949) and was feeling decidedly like Chicken Little as I dismissed everybody.  All the students filed out except Tyler, an avid outdoorsman who was usually soft-spoken and reserved.  Today, however, he approached me with a contagious grin.

“I’ve got to show you these!” Tyler said, thrusting his phone in front of my face.  “Just scroll,” he instructed. For the next minute, I ogled photo after photo of some of the most gorgeous brook trout I’ve ever seen. 

“Where did you catch these?!” I implored. 

“Not far from here, on the upper Wiscoy,” Tyler responded.  “It’s incredible!  I’ll take you if you want.” 

“These were in the Wiscoy?” I asked incredulously.  Smack in the middle of a large agricultural region in western New York, I had long assumed the Wiscoy was as fouled up as the river it emptied into, the Genesee, one of America’s few rivers that flows north. 

“Oh yeah, they’re in there!  It’s chock full of ‘em.  

“Did you keep any?” I asked. 

“Oh, no,” Tyler replied.  “Just photos.  These fish need to last!”  With that, he pocketed his phone and hustled off to another class.

I haven’t yet made it out to verify Tyler’s claims of a rejuvenated Wiscoy.  But through just a few photos and some well-timed words, Tyler rejuvenated me.  Yes, I was surprised.  But I shouldn’t have been.  My grandpa had caught a fish in his swimsuit.  My dad had reeled in a bat.  And I had suspended a snake.  Nature is resilient and always full of surprises.  Surprises that should give us hope as we tackle complex questions about sustainability. 

Tyler’s hope fed me for the day.  Once I get out to the Wiscoy, and see those trout myself, perhaps that hope will take root.  It’s only the fish themselves that can feed me—and the rest of the world—for a lifetime. 

Mi Patria: My Country ‘Tis of Thee

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He came home from work, hungry and tired, covered in grime and smut. Sometimes his sons and daughters would run outside to give him bear hugs as he climbed out of his truck before he had the opportunity to shake off the feathery flakes covering his work clothes. The asbestos dust would trail him like a galaxy in the evening light as he walked in to sit at the kitchen table with his family. He had worked in the vermiculite mines for decades, and his cough grew worse even after they closed them down.

How have common men fallen prey to corporate interests so consistently when the GOP is in power? Probably it is because Americans inadvertently voted against our own interests, supported the destruction of the environment, strengthened the elevation of corporate interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, and pulled the rug out from underneath the struggling underclass. One corporate CEO puppet after another has been placed into the current cabinet. Many congressmen in both parties have allowed the corporate marketplace to influence their decision-making.

Some current politicians claim that regulations cost jobs and insist that they are helping the working class, but they are putting corporate interests above the working class, as well as threatening public health. Some Republicans believe in a market-based economy for environmental protection.

  • Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors and said the E.P.A. should be called the “job-killing organization of America.”
  • Former Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. (R-Utah) believes environmental regulation should be shelved until the economy improves.
  • Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has called the E.P.A. “radical” and believes they have imposed “illegal” limits on greenhouse gases from power plants.
  • Marco Rubio said the E.P.A.’s plan to curb emissions would have a “devastating impact” on jobs. He also vowed to scale back the Clean Water Act.
  • Ronald Reagan in 1981 said, “Trees [author’s italics] cause more pollution than automobiles do.” He also said, “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?”

Senior Democrat Henry Waxman, on the Energy and Commerce Committee, calls this “the most anti-environmental Congress in history.”

“Not only are these positions irresponsible, they’re politically problematic,” said David Jenkins of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that believes conservation should be a core value of the party.

The looting and plundering of the land underneath us all in the name of progress is not a vision that has “we the people” in mind first and foremost.

America is distinctly a nation of laws, a system of checks and balances. America does not have a king who can rule by fiat. When you join the government, you do not swear loyalty to an individual, but to the Constitution and to the people. Corporations do not pledge allegiance to the Constitution, but rather to their the shareholders. Corporations are driven solely by the profit motive.

We the people—the workers and the children of the workers—seem to have few true representatives for our interests, our public servants having failed to serve public over corporate interests. The “us vs. them” argument sweeping this great land should not be about splitting up the people into patriots and non-patriots, which is what politicians and the media are doing. We the people is “us,” all citizens (conservative and liberal) because we are all in this together, striving to give our families a decent life of health, happiness, and freedom. For the corporate elite (them), everything is for sale, including a man’s lungs and a person’s patriotic feeling, if it can be used for a vote or a buck.

In my opinion, when a select few corporations come in and want to take public land for short-term profit, not the welfare of the country and people, this creates a boom-and-bust economy. Modern carpetbaggers come in and extract as much of the natural resources as they can; during this time the economy and surrounding cities grow. Once the resources are extracted, the economy and surrounding towns collapse. The people at the corporate top—of the vermiculite manufacturing plant, for instance—make a bunch of money and then leave poverty, illness, and a caved-in economy in their wake.  The corporate interests are unconcerned with the welfare of resource-rich towns full of working class patriots, who often voted for a representative whose campaign was funded by lobbyist/corporate interests, with hopes of jobs and “the good ol’ days and ways.” Alternately, the corporations, governmental agents, and lobbyists come for profits.

“They” came for one thing in Libby, Montana, where the local plant spewed asbestos from vermiculite mining over the small town for decades, sickening thousands of people and killing 200.

They came for one thing in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where silicosis from lack of proper health protection (masks) at the Hawks’ Nest Tunnel Disaster caused the death toll to rise to 764.

They came for one thing along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio that caught fire in 1969 due to industrial wastes.

They came for one thing in Pennsylvania where an explosion inside the Darr Mine caused 239 men and boys to lose their lives.

They came for one thing in Picher, Oklahoma, a once-booming lead and zinc mining town that is now a ghost town. This link is to a news story about the “superfund” site, so polluted that it tops  the E.P.A.s National Priorities List.

They came for one thing along the Tug Fork River in Kentucky, where 306 million gallons of mining waste contaminated water for 27,000 people, killing countless creatures.

Many of these places are among the top-ten worst environmental disasters in the history of this great country.

In witnessing the GOP and the new president beginning their assault on America’s public lands since their first days in office, I find their moves counter-patriotic. Since the November 2016 election, I have been grappling with what it means to be a patriot. Why isn’t caring for the environment or the land equated with being a patriot?

Is a patriot only one who supports a given president and congressional decisions? No, of course not. Many disgruntled, patriotic citizens didn’t like the last eight years of Obama. Yet going against the president has a distinct feel of being against the flag and counter to patriotism. Does being a patriot mean loyalty to a political party, to a given figurehead, to policy, or to something that transcends each of those? Perhaps the Constitution?

As Edward R. Murrow said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must not walk in fear of one another. We must not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”

The root word of patriotism is patris, or native land. Merriam-Webster defines patriotism as “devotion, love and support for one’s country” with a willingness to defend it.

George Orwell creates a distinction between “patriotism” and “nationalism”:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Patriotism should include the bedrock of democracy which is “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” By protecting open spaces, clean air, and clean water, we are preserving a future we can hand off to our children with a clear conscience, and we are living in a present where our land, air, and water are ours to protect from profit for a few.

Our nation and the world are at a crossroads. We can either continue down this destructive path of short-term gain called personal profit, or we can choose alternative energies and start thinking of the long-term and a future to believe in that is ours, we the people, and not theirs, they the corporations.

I once heard someone say a new kind of patriotism needs to emerge that is land-based with a focus on ecological knowledge, moral consideration, ethical principles, spiritual belief, and a profound affinity for the earth underfoot that includes us all. The world’s scientists overwhelmingly agree that our planet faces an environmental crisis of epic proportions.

 A debate continues: we can have either a reverence for life or an allegiance to industry or we can figure out a way to mesh the two together in our public’s best interests. It doesn’t have to be an either/or argument. It is not a jobs vs. environment argument as the GOP and uninformed prez would have many believe. Plenty of jobs, if not more, can be created from cleaner energy than from fossil fuels that leave our workers sick and their communities dirty and undesirable places to raise a family. In fact, clean energy is currently cheaper than fossil fuels.

As Terry Tempest Williams writes, “The natural world is dying, poisoned by the hands tied to corporate greed.” The natural world is not dying by the hands of the patriots.

Conservationists are patriots of the land, the American land. There are congressmen and even presidents who are conservationists. Theodore Roosevelt, during his presidency, protected approximately 230 million acres of public land, six national parks.

“The Clean Air Act passed in 1970 without a single nay vote. When Nixon passed it, he said this puts us way down the road that Theodore Roosevelt spoke so eloquently about and meets the goals of clean air, clean water, and open spaces for the future of American citizens,” says the Washington Post in a 2014 article. “In 1988 George. H.W. Bush ran on the environmental ticket and updated the Clean Air Act. The Senate passed the measure with an 89-11 vote. Mitch McConnell agreed with it by saying, ‘I had to choose between cleaner air and the status quo; I chose cleaner air.’”

The land, water, and air do not tiptoe along partisan lines, so why do we as a people allow ourselves to be badgered and divided this way? In 1997, several Republicans from the Northeast promoted the Environmental Protection Agency, which was birthed during the Nixon years.

  • Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-New York) compared smog to terrorism. “We are sponsoring a form of pollution terrorism by allowing this to take place.”
  • Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) supports climate change legislation and curbs on carbon emissions.
  • John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, defied his own party by standing up for clean energy. He says clean air and clean energy is good for business and homeowners.  
  • New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking and set strict renewable energy standards.
  • The state of Nevada had fewer than 67,000 acres of protected wilderness when Democratic Senator Harry Reid took office. When he left there were 3.4 million acres.  
  • Former Governor Mitt Romney (R-Massachusetts) went in opposition to his party when he said, “I believe we should keep our air and our water clean.”

Part of the reason why Americans aren’t as vocal about the environment as they were 48 years ago is because the effects of pollution aren’t as visible and so closely tied to human activity as they were before the Clean Air Act was passed. Back then, Americans could see smog and people were newly aware of scientist/poet Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “Silent Spring, a landlubber, is no slouch of a book: it launched the environmental movement; provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (both 1972); and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970.” The non-partisan Clean Air Act act eliminated the smog from the sky and ameliorated acid rain but didn’t manage to allay the greed that we see taking over the environmental and climate policies these last several months.

What is the cost of progress? Does progress equate with more coal miners dying of black lung disease again? Does progress equate with no E.P.A. to monitor dumping mining debris in streams, no researchers or federal workers monitoring the changing chemistry of those streams as they become inhospitable to aquatic life? The current administration’s view of progress will be rough on our America, to say the least.

Would a patriot outright reject internationally negotiated treaties like the Paris Climate Treaty and the Clean Power Plan that reduce the threat of global warming for our children and their children in favor of aggressive plans to increase domestic drilling for fossil fuels?

Would a patriot transfer our federally protected public lands to the state without time or money for states to create extensive new management plans? Would a patriot sell that land to the highest bidder if the state failed to manage efficiently? Would a patriot implement a broad array of actions to open up previously protected public lands like national forests, national monuments, national parks, wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, and wildlife refuges to oil and natural gas drilling, fracking, coal and other mining?

Is patriotism exhibited by gutting the Endangered Species Act, by rolling back the protections against pollutants in our air and water, by cutting funding for clean-ups of polluted sites? I say it isn’t. In my opinion, while some patriotic citizens will back whatever Trump and the GOP push through, their public interests are equally being debased by these carpetbaggers and wealthy elite. The aims of these few figureheads over the many in 2017 was to make a buck off the public lands, wildlife, and wilderness areas that belong to us all. Corporate coffers are already lined with gold, but our pockets, across party lines—working class, middle class, immigrants, and migrant workers—are not.

American’s public land belongs to all of us. We need to care for it responsibly, patriotically. People think public land belongs to the government, but it is essential to realize that the government is us. If we protect our land, our water, and our air, then we are protecting ourselves, our children, our communities and our nation.

I live in the great state of Montana, Big Sky Country, a land rich in beauty that brings people from all walks of life together, regardless of political party; a land filled with amber waves of grain and mountain’s majesty, where crystal clear rivers run through it, and where an abundance of wild things roam.  

Every outdoorsman I know who truly loves this land called America, needs to take responsibility for the land, air and water, and defend it from moneyed interests who don’t care for it beyond their personal profit. They’ve forgotten who the we is in “we the people.”  Let us come together and remind them.

As a country, what do we want? As fellow citizens, what kind of patriots do we want to be? Do we want a faux patriotism—nationalism—that rewards the corporations, elite, and wealthy, or do we want a citizen-oriented patriotism that cares for the land, the air, the water, and the health of our people from sea to shining sea? Defending and taking care of the environment and public lands is not a Democratic or Republican issue. It is a patriotic, human issue. Pledge allegiance to that.

Mark Twain was once questioned about his loyalty. He responded, “My loyalty is to one’s country not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, the thing to watch over and care for. The institutions are extraneous. There it is mere clothing. Clothing can wear out, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease or death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to die for rags is the loyalty of unreason.”

 

 

 

 

 

Minimalism, Re-Urbanization, and Smart Cities

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In the last decade, the idea of sustainability has been thrust into the collective American worldview. In response to growing awareness of climate change and its increasingly obvious effects, many environmentally-conscious individuals began applying sustainable principles to their daily lives: composting, water conservation, buying locally, greener transportation alternatives, recycling.  The Inconvenient Truth-inspired thought is that if everyone were to adopt greener practices, the cumulative effect would sufficiently offset the global climate trend, with each person’s actions contributing in small part to reducing the overall negative impact on the world while reducing the individual carbon footprint. It gives power to the movement if individuals can have an impact. To further bolster greener choices, there is a monetary incentive associated with climate-consciousness: minimizing electrical/water usage decreases utility bills, driving less reduces the cost of fuel and car maintenance, and converting to a minimalistic lifestyle allows one to reduce the reliance on objects with a resultant savings. Some conservationists are more radical than others—as individuals, we have the ability to pick and choose to what degree we want to be sustainably active—but the belief is that collective consciousness is moving in the right direction.

According to worldofmeter.info, as of 3:00 pm PTZ on August 29, 2017, the global population is 7.53 billion. This year alone has brought 97.8 million births and 38.3 million deaths, creating a growth rate of 2.5:1. If we are to use the term “sustain” literally, this is an unsustainable growth rate (watch the number grow at www.worldofmeters.info/world-population). Globally, the United States is ranked third in growth with a fertility rate of 1.89, a rate it has maintained since 2015, but this means we add approximately 2.3 million people to our national population annually.

In 1931, James Truslow Adams popularized the idea of the American Dream in his book The Epic of America, in which he described “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” In 1987’s Our Common Future by the Brundtland Commission, sustainability was defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” These two ideals seem to work towards a similar goal.

However, somewhere along the line, America morphed from an agrarian society to an industrial society to a technological one. The American Dream became contorted into a fantasy that is inherently unsustainable. Families vie for ever-larger homes, expansive lawns, three or more children, and several vehicles to cart them around ever-expanding suburban sprawl. The demand for labor following World War II and the introduction of the credit card in the 1950s-60s has led to the rampant consumerism of American culture. Americans are encouraged by advertisers to clamor for more: more cars, more houses, more children, more vacations. Without limits. To the detriment of common areas: parks, pathways, and the common morality that emphasizes the community over the individual. And to the detriment of so many other things.

The gradual adaptations we are making towards being more sustainable individuals are being undermined by the sheer quantity of resources required to sustain such a personalized and partitioned way of living. Annie Leonard’s twenty-minute video, “Story of Stuff,” (http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/) talks about planned obsolescence, a profit-driven lifestyle to market to consumers: to continually buy and consume more than we need. This custom of disposable items and quick consumables is what has driven the small-scale solutions used to address the global climate crisis. And although these individuals’ choices and small changes do accumulate and add to the solution, there is a systemic problem with the isolated lifestyles we have adopted over the last hundred years. The small changes we make on individual bases are hugely offset by our societal susceptibility to the marketing that drives consumerism and capitalism’s need for unlimited growth in a finite world, to support Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Waste.

How then can we rethink the American Dream and the way we live so that we can continue to sustain and support the growing population? The solution is not simple, but some cities around the world are paving the way. To make a difference takes equal effort from citizens and government to make major reformations of our national values. It is important to remember that the Industrial Age is over and we live in the Information Age now.

By refocusing our efforts from generalized expansion and reorienting that drive into creating a higher quality of life, both mentally and physically, as well as improving our communal cohesion, we may begin to live truly sustainable lives that give back and restore the global environment.

In David Owen’s 2004 article “Green Manhattan,” he makes several claims. Although traditional high-density urban cities as a whole are a major drain of resources and, designed as they are now, create urban heat islands, compared to a suburban home, a city apartment is incredibly efficient. He argues that each suburban home needs an immense amount of infrastructure (water, power, gas lines), municipal amenities (trash and sewage removal), and personal vehicles to transport its dwellers to any nearby necessities. A city dwelling is much more efficient, as the density of units concentrates infrastructural and municipal requirements, decreases the need for heating and cooling as the building has better temperature retention and, due to the density of the city, there is a decreased need for personal transportation.

Friends of the Highline in Brooklyn revitalized the community and raised the property values in the neighborhood by creating a sustainable park on the old railway (http://www.thehighline.org/about).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, 10% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, that worldwide number has risen to 50%. The trend is called re-urbanization and it is worldwide. As a technological innovator, America has the responsibility to offer solutions to the challenges of architecture, agriculture, city planning, transportation, pollution, and infrastructure.

There are some companies that are taking this a step further and bringing agriculture back into the urban environment. Freight Farms (www.freightfarms.com) retrofits old shipping containers into vertical gardens that can grow year-round vegetables anywhere a shipping container can be stored. Buildings can also be wrapped in vegetation with living walls and roof gardens to reduce the Urban Heat Island effect and increase carbon dioxide conversion into oxygen. It has also been studied that robust urban forests can improve mental wellbeing as well as increase overall biodiversity.

Friends of the Urban Forest’s website lists more sourced benefits to increased vegetation in the urban environment (https://www.fuf.net/about-us/).

Colleges are leading the way in environmental experimentation. Tiny House in My Backyard (THIMBY) is “an interdisciplinary team of UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students that worked together to design and build an affordable, off-grid, 100% solar-powered “tiny” house at the Richmond Field Station in Richmond, CA. The house generates its own electricity, and is small enough to fit in the unused portions of urban lots. Cities around the world face the challenge of housing a growing population while the size, cost and carbon footprint of homes continue to rise. THIMBY is a 170 square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom home that is designed to serve two residents and aims to demonstrate the compatibility of affordability and sustainability. This project represented an opportunity for students from diverse departments to learn about sustainable design principles through hands-on experience in all phases of development, from design to construction to performance evaluation. The house is compact, but provides a comfortable and inviting home environment, with a focus on energy and water efficiency.” See article below.

In the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, steps are being taken for the society when the oil is gone. In the city of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi, the Sheikh Zayed Desert Learning Center, a museum and research facility was designed by two Austrian architects. The vestibule is cool, even in the desert heat, due to thermal design. In an area with no rainfall the potable water is recycled onsite. Some of the building is subterranean and uses geothermal heat exchangers to pre-cool the ventilated air. The topography and culture of Al Ain was studied as a first step in developing a megacity comprised of “little villages.”  It is 10-20 degrees cooler in this prototype—urban heat islands are unable to form. (Smart Cities Paul K. Kreska).

Yet these are only steps. We, as a global community, need to foster an increased sense of community involvement, governance, and stewardship. We need to both hold each other accountable and support one another. Yet with the current political discord and radical racial discrimination, we are divided more than ever. If the emphasis remains on individual consumption the worldview cannot shift to a community oriented lifestyle that perpetuates change. Our personal over-indulgences have muddled and distracted America from the fact that humanity is ever encroaching the point of no return for environmental collapse.

Sustainability will never have an end-game, a solution. Environmental consciousness is an ongoing path. Like the rest of the world, sustainable practices in the United States must be constantly adapting and evolving and they require people actively pursuing new frontiers in social sciences, environmental studies, public policy, and technological revolutions to sustain it.

Volunteer Opportunities:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/

https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/05/14/21-places-look-green-volunteering-opportunities

http://www.unitedplanet.org/volunteer-abroad/environmental-sustainability-projects

http://sierraclub.org/

https://www.gridalternatives.org/

https://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps

http://calthimby.org/

A Secret of Ecological Planning: River of Silence

by

by Eva Sage Gordon

This essay is based closely on the original version, first published in BAILE ’98, the Journal of the Geographic Society at University College Dublin. It reports on an adventure Luke had as part of a Regional Planning team working to protect the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. The story is reprinted in High Horse!, Fleur de Lis Press, Fall 2004, an anthology of work by the faculty of the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program, and in Luke’s 2006 book Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture.

The version here is updated in 2017 for Sisyphus. There are a few corrections added to the text. All the paintings are by Luke Wallin. Following the essay, there is a section of links and updates on some of the participants in the project, and on what has happened to the river over the past 30 years. The news is mostly good.

Landscape of the Connecticut River and Mount Sugarloaf. Photo by flarp9. All free photos on this site are public domain. Credit hyperlink at https://www.goodfreephotos.com if you use the photos on this site using the attribution code in the below box. It is not required but it’d be much appreciated. Photo via Good Free Photos
Our section of the river for this project was Reach II, which runs from the Vermont-Massachusetts line down to the town of Northampton. Thanks to the Connecticut River Conservancy for use of this map. Visit their site at https://www.ctriver.org.

 

We slip our canoes into the Connecticut as clouds of spirit-mist rise from its cool surface. We’re just below Turners Falls dam, near the Massachusetts-Vermont line, and this surface fog seems strangely alive. The Indians once saw in these whitish movements the ghostly residents of a place, and this morning as we slide past sandbar willows out into the current and breeze, that vision feels true.

Spirits rise from the silvery surface.

This site — Peskeompscut, to the local Potumtucks — was the scene of a terrible massacre in 1676. English colonials surprised sleeping villagers and destroyed 100 people: children and “many old men and women.” Another 140 died leaping over the falls, or when their attackers followed along the shore and shot them as they swam. I wonder whether these souls are among the spirits rising from the river’s silvery surface on this perfect fall morning.

There are ten of us in four canoes. Nine are members of a University of Massachusetts Amherst team charged with preservation strategy and tactics. The tenth is our leader, Terry Blunt, a trim, quiet intense man of about 35. Terry is a senior planner for the Commonwealth, and his first lesson to us was about language. 

“Don’t use the word ‘preservation’,” he said. “It makes people mad. More than mad, furious. ‘Conservation’ is all right, but the best word is ‘protection’.”

We have taken this deeply to heart. We are to formulate a plan for our study area, Reach II of the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, stretching from the Vermont line down to of the town of Northampton. It is the last free-flowing section of the river within the Commonwealth, and Terry wants to safeguard its quiet values before the region’s development craze overwhelms them.

We make good speed over the water, and our bowman, John Bennett, maneuvers us closer to Terry’s canoe to hear his soft commentary. Terry is pointing high above us, upriver in the sunlight. Just a few years ago the river was terribly polluted and all the osprey had vanished. But new laws have brought better waste treatment plants to the river and the osprey have heard the news; they’ve returned in healthy numbers and become a symbol of valley pride.

Terry indicates a pipe protruding from a high bank, streaming liquid down into the current. “That’s why I’m here,” John Bennett says to me as we paddle past. John is a powerful young man in his mid-twenties; he is handsome, self-contained and practical. “I was working for the state as an inspector. I’d visit all these plants and they’d show me how they’d sealed off their pipes. They’d claim they were doing proper disposal, not dumping anymore. But you could look at the valves and tell they were lying. You could look in their eyes and tell. I knew it and they knew I knew.”

Terry motions us over to the east bank, where we hold all four canoes together, bobbing, as he shows us a deposit of thick blue clay. “The old Indians liked this,” he says, “it works beautifully in pots.” And then he gives us another warning: “Please don’t anybody tell where this vein lies. We don’t need people digging out the side of the bank, undercutting the ledge.”

I look up to tall maples and oaks in fall colors, and at the steep eroded slope laced with poison ivy. It is amazing that people would destroy this bank, that we must hold the secret of the blue clay.

For the past few years I’ve researched and written books involving endangered species and Native American culture. The aim of my books has been art, not action. Joining this project has given me a sense of how people can combine skills in conservation work and make things happen. But the first lessons, it seems, are restraint, study, care, and silence.

The man in the middle of my canoe is Chris Ryan. He learned to make maps in the army, and now produces limited editions for conservation groups. His work is first-rate, and I have proposed to him that we collaborate on a book which would identify all the ancient tribal territories in Massachusetts, and provide maps and directions to each. When the traveler arrives, there will be a local path to a special place — an overlook, a grove, a waterfall. We would choose each spot by our sense of sacred place, and give the visitor a chance to experience what the old tribes might have most appreciated.

Toward this end, as well as the Reach II project, I’ve been visiting with Bob Paynter, archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s been considering my request for site information.

But he has given me second thoughts with a story. There’s a man in Greenfield, Massachusetts, who specializes in looting Indian graves and middens. He absorbs the rumors of a new discovery, and he’ll bore like a coal miner, like a human mole. Once he went underground from a neighbor’s property, and tunneled all the way into an incredible site. He looted it, broke pots, took the bones of the dead. This man is the link between an international artifact-trading network, and the places we want to protect.

The Human Mole.

And especially since Lady Bird Johnson, first lady to President Lyndon Johnson, held a White House conference on Scenic Beauty back in 1969, planners have been able to articulate vistas like this one as common property “visual resources,” in Emerson’s sense. There are systems of comparison, rank-ordering, quantification. 

As the canoes bob in the current and Terry reminds us of our vow of silence about the vein of blue clay, I wonder whether the sacred-places book would only invite the least spiritual among us. For that matter, will our efforts at a protection plan only draw more visitors to this fragile river?

But when we slide into the current again, and the wind picks up, clean fresh air drives some of my doubts away. Whether it’s negative ions or benevolent spirits, I believe in our mission.

We paddle in a long, lazy curve and the banks are timbered with thick beeches and maples. Straight, impressive hemlocks rise in a shadow-dark wall atop the bluff. There is no clear sign of humanity, of farming or building, though we have learned this wildness is an illusion.

“Illusions can be good.”

 

The entire valley has been intensely farmed for centuries, and now only a narrow band of forest graces the banks. But these enclosing trees and bluffs give a sense of timeless peace.

It is a quality we will claim in our report as a rare cultural memory: we are experiencing what New England river valleys were like five hundred years ago.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1835, declared that Smith and Jones may own their farms, but the view encompassing each of them belongs to everyone. And since Lyndon Johnson held a White House conference on Scenic Beauty back in 1969, planners have been able to articulate vistas like this one as common property “visual resources,” in Emerson’s sense. There are systems of comparison, rank-ordering, quantification.

We come into sight of a pair of black cormorants, and watch them dive deep. The Dutch and Chinese trained these birds to retrieve fish from the sea, and ensured their return by placing brass rings around their necks. Only by returning could they earn an occasional fish, and be allowed to swallow. Such an old interaction between humans and birds brings to mind our mission. Our team is not outside the ecosystem of the river, far from it.

“You are not outside.”

 
What we accomplish may determine the fate of these birds, certainly of the ospreys and bald eagles. This winding, riverine landscape is both a centuries-old, humanized site, a kind of grand public garden, and also a bit of wild nature in the midst of intense farming. I dip my fingers into the cold water as we shoot past the cormorants. A cluster of gray and white gulls bobs close to shore.

After an hour Terry motions for us to beach our canoes on a big sandbar up ahead, and soon we walk and stretch our backs. He instructs us to pull driftwood and stones into a rough circle. Once we are settled on these dry seats over the damp sand he shows us silver maples and a tall cottonwood on the bank. Here beside us grow limber saplings of sandbar cherry.

“Since the river cleanup, fish populations have become more stable,” Terry says. “All year you have walleye, channel cat, northern pike, small and largemouth bass, rainbow trout, pickerel, and anadromous (migrating) Atlantic salmon and short-nosed sturgeon. That last one’s on the federally endangered list, and there’s a $20,000 fine for possession.”

“Did you get that?” asked the sturgeon.

 

“Now the water flow is a big factor for all these fish, especially herring and shad, and especially during spawning. Large fluctuations can sweep away larvae and kill them through lack of oxygen. To keep things even, the Cabot Station hydro plant is required to release 1,430 cubic feet of water per second at all times.”

[I have learned that this is a tiny amount for a river the size of the Connecticut, and that the numbers of herring are way down.]

This information stuns me. It brings home how utterly dependent all this river life is upon constant human monitoring and care. We literally have the fate of Connecticut in our hands, and I hope some dial-watcher won’t nod off some lonely midnight.

 

“Do not nod off,” said the river otter.

 

Terry wants to limit powerboats to 10 miles per hour. This would give the shad better protection, and it’s the sort of regulation the six river towns might agree to. He says common sense would tell us this is a sound idea, yet he can’t get a biologist to testify seriously: there aren’t data, no way to get any.

The biologists, who met with us a few days ago, were chagrined by their professional codes. They didn’t want motors in the reach at all. They said they know oil and gas spills, and props, churn up the shallow bottom.  What they don’t know is how to close the gap between their concern and their science.

“What do you mean, ‘cowboy hatbands’?”

 

It is time for another secret. “Right up there,” Terry says, “is an endangered-species habitat. Whatever you do, don’t talk about this.” We are alert. “Crotalus horridus,” he says, “the timber rattlesnake.”

There are cries of, “Eeeww.”

“It seems strange,” he says, “but some folks would hunt them down, if they knew where to find them.”

“The old males turn almost black. They’re in demand in carnivals, and even for cowboy hatbands.”

We talk a while longer, then fall silent and listen to the river. It speaks strongly and softly, flowing within its frame of banks and timber, carrying its strange mixture of wildlife and culture. It seems a long time before Terry rises and says, “Well.” And I am beginning to feel a belonging here, even to these recent strangers. Our task together feels less important than our canoe trip, at least right now. This feeling, called the “river effect,” this sense of the possibility for quiet transit and learning, is precisely what we must protect.

Downstream we approach a site where Terry is on the brink of closing a deal to buy development rights. This is one of his — and our — most valuable preservation tools. Farmers who want to protect the scenic or wildlife or cultural values of their land, but who need cash and must face exaggerated land prices, can sell development rights but retain ownership. Many don’t know how this works, so publicizing the process is one of our tasks.

But we mustn’t tell anyone about the farm up ahead. Terry has been discussing the sale of development rights, and the farmer is most uncertain. Not only are negotiations at a delicate stage, but this river’s edge is a small, fragile ecotone of rare plants. And again, there are those who, if they knew, would steal and market them.

The more I learn of the threats, the more amazed I am at the river’s surviving richness, its wealth of life and history, its unspoiled timber and sandbars and long thin islands. Hedged in by the development boom in the valley, assaulted by looters, the river itself is coming to seem an island of sacred space.

I think of my friend Barry Greenbie, a professor of planning at the University who has an intriguing theory of cultural space. Barry canvassed decades of research on brain physiology, wondering whether this work could illuminate the human need for safe, comforting spaces. The ancient limbic system seems to require secure borders, nest sites, and memories. But the outer cortex, a later phenomenon, gives us abstract thought and projects our concepts, grids and schemes, onto global, impersonal space. Some cultures, such as the Japanese, recognize this and provide for dual spatial experience. They allow stability and comfort within the home and walled gardens, preserving tradition in this sphere, while encouraging innovation and change in the professional realm of global trade. Because the Japanese are so traditional, Barry contends, they are able to excel at the modern.

But when a culture represses this duality, the result is psychological disturbance; for example, densely crowded apartment buildings in the “international” style fail to give residents a clear inner/outer experience. As a result, there is no peace of mind for renewal, planning and creative struggle in the outside world.

It seems to me that Reach II of the Connecticut River is precisely a safe, bounded home territory for those valley residents whose working lives are spent amid increasing traffic, development, and competition. Perhaps an argument of this kind can be constructed within our project, perhaps not. But either way, this experience of the quiet river is a blessing. It may be natural habitat as well, for the ancient limbic brain.

 

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

 

We pass the spectacular Sunderland Cascades, huge water-worn boulders on the river’s east bank, across which thin, glassy sheets of spring water pour. This is another site targeted for special protection, another in-process deal of which we team members must not speak. We glide past in admiration, and soon come into sight of our landing beneath the Sunderland bridge.

Our trip is over. There are good feelings as we drag the canoes up the muddy bank, and carry them to car top racks and pickup beds. I am tired as I wave goodbye to my new colleagues. My house is only one mile away, and in a few minutes I am home with my family, filled with images and sounds from the river.

My little boy, three-and-a-half, asks, “Did you save the river, Dad?”

I smile and meet his mother’s eyes. His question reminds me that conservation is a daily effort.

“We made a start.”

“Good,” he says.

I drive them back down the road to the water’s edge in the falling light, and we stand beside the empty landing. A bat skims narrowly past my head.

My responsibility is to write the section of our report on Native American “cultural resources.” And although Bob Paynter seems close to showing me the site files, he has almost begged me not to reveal where the arrowheads, pottery, and human bones lie.

I began this assignment eagerly, thinking the best argument for protection would be a clear designation of the values at risk, of what could be lost without strong action. But I know now that I’ll be writing for the looters of graves and rare plants, of blue clay and rattlesnakes, as well as for those with the will to preserve.

I must convey a sense of Reach II’s worth without compromising the choice locations, especially tribal sites. We must protect the graves; everywhere there is a storm of Indian demand for the return of ancestral remains. Many Native Americans say their ancestors’ ghosts will walk the landscape, restless and weary, until their bones are finally consecrated in the proper ground.

Standing by the dark, gurgling river with my family, I believe I hear what the mist-spirits were telling me this morning. It is something to know the ancient riverside camps and middens and graves. These, Bob Paynter will tell me in time. He will unlock a dusty, unused room and show me the eyes-only site files. Some will indeed reveal sacred places, and if I visited them I would feel those spirits, even now. But such secrets have no place in my report, nor in a guidebook of maps. I must take up, this time, the path of silence.

[The six river towns voted our protection plan into their zoning codes, giving it the status of law.]

 

 

River of Silence Updates, September 2017

John Bennett, who was in my canoe that day, works for the Windham Regional Commission in Brattleboro VT.  He is still active in the issue of erosion along the Connecticut River above the Turners Falls Dam as a member of the Franklin Conservation District.

The entire watershed became the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge in 1997.  I’m pretty sure it’s the only Refuge that contains an entire watershed, complete with all the people living in it. You can read more about it at https://www.fws.gov/refuge/silvio_o_conte/

The Connecticut River was named an “American Heritage River” in 1998 by the Bill Clinton administration.

The Connecticut River was named the first, and then only, American Blueway, under the Obama administration in 2012.  See https://www.fws.gov/northeast/ctblueway.html.

The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant closed down at the end of 2014.  The plant heated huge volumes of the river, and so the closing greatly affected the river all the way down to Holyoke.  That winter, the river in the northern stretch of Massachusetts reached 32 degrees F and froze over for the first time in decades.

The Connecticut River Conservancy has been conducting bacteria testing in the river and can see that the river mostly meets water quality standards for swimming, except after large storm events.  Results are posted at www.connecticutriver.us  under the “Is it Clean?” page.

In general, thanks to the Clean Water Act, the river has been gradually getting cleaner.  Still, there are problems and threats.

The Turners Falls Dam and Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage plant is currently in the process of being relicensed through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  The new license will cover all operational and mitigation requirements that will be in place for the next 30-50 years.  Stakeholders are actively involved in getting a better deal for the river, one that improves fish passage, flows in the river, improves water quality, reduces erosion, and provides for new and improved recreational amenities.

Numbers of migratory fish have been counted at Holyoke Dam every year.  See numbers online at https://www.fws.gov/r5crc/migratory_fish_counts.html

A good source of information for Native American interests in the Turners Falls area is the Nolumbeka Project.  See https://nolumbekaproject.org/

Many thanks, for information and perspective, to Andrea Donlon, River Steward with the Connecticut River Conservancy, formerly Connecticut River Watershed Council, 15 Bank Row | Greenfield, MA 01301 | www.ctriver.org

I was saddened to learn of team leader Terry Blunt’s passing. He was ideal for our mission—patient, kind, and with a will of iron. He went on to protect land in the valley throughout his career. Terry Blunt’s obituary contains this:

Blunt said in 2006, “Land is like a child, it really can’t defend itself.” He said that if land was not protected, “it could otherwise turn into housing lots or cell towers.”

Robert D. Yaro (President Emeritus and Senior Advisor, Regional Plan Association) was the UMass Amherst professor of planning who supervised our project. He was wonderful to work with.

For more than 40 years, Bob Yaro has been a practitioner and thought leader in urban, transportation and environmental planning in the U.S. and around the world. Yaro served as president of RPA from 2001-2014 and has been part of the organization’s leadership for more than a quarter century.

He led development of and co-wrote RPA’s third regional plan, “A Region at Risk,” and initiated the organization’s fourth regional plan in 2013. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he convened the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a broad coalition of civic groups that helped plan the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan.

 

Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley: A Design Manual for Conservation and Development by Robert D. Yaro, Randall G. Arendt, Harry L. Dodson, Elizabeth A. Brabec (Authors)

This document, for sale on Amazon, contains our report on the river.

 

Wallin’s book Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature was published by The Center for Policy Analysis, at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. It is available from lulu.com.

 

Luke’s young adult novels about Native Americans are In the Shadow of the Wind and Ceremony of the Panther. They were published by Bradbury Press and today are available from iUniverse.com.

 

Thanks to Charles Entrekin, old friend and publisher of Sisyphus, for suggesting this update and visuals.

 

 

Fox Hills

by

This piece started with a casual conversation with a loquacious ex-military colleague who waxed about the ability to hunt for foxes on certain golf courses in certain states at night. He’s a hunter and relishes any exotic opportunity to do so. From there, the idea grew into a larger notion of wildness, ambition, habitat destruction and the free market dreams of “fixing the environment.”  The rest just happens along the way. 

 

 

These are my official Progress Notes as outlined in the continuity protocols. I have taken care to capture as many of the specifics as seemed germane for the project as a whole. While I have not yet been able to corroborate this account with a witness, and it may not be possible to do so, I have made every effort to maintain a high standard of accuracy. There is video footage available as well. If I have erred in this account, it will have been to add a measure of personal observation which seemed instructive to a full understanding of the project as it stands today. Please share the red-lined version of this with me before filing.

* * *

The Transformation Engineer had walked off the job. No one knew where he went but they knew he wasn’t there anymore. Within an hour, the company decided to fly me out to take over his post. It’s an opportunity, a plum of a project, a chance to take that next step, the Regional District Manager explained it to me over the phone. The RDM had been with the company from the start, and he was the best we had. I knew that he wanted me to succeed with the company. With one additional uniform that was clean, I left the next afternoon with enough underwear and socks to last five days.

The small plane bounced once and then landed just after ten PM onto a dark, sweaty little airstrip. It was nearing the end of May and the summer heat was creeping up. Even at night, the air pressed up against you. There was no terminal to speak of, just a sagging, run-down bungalow that was locked. Directly above the crooked structure, the light from a yellow lamp was diminished by a swarm of creatures of various sizes and shapes, their wings buzzing like tiny engines. Some vague distance beyond the light was a wall of living darkness. The rising chorus of insects from the black stand of trees was almost overwhelming. Something thick and hairy grazed my forehead and spun away like it was delirious, or perhaps dazed from the single electric light.

I was the only passenger on the puddle jumper, and the RDM had prearranged for a ride to the hotel. I was to be picked up by the site security guard, Warren Wingate. The lone airplane whined in the darkness, lifted off and it’s two red wingtip lights disappeared behind the black tree line. After Warren woke up, he drove me to the Super 8 Motel in Fox Hills. The cab smelled like fresh cigar smoke, and I experienced a sudden memory of driving to the zoo with my grandfather in his black Lincoln Continental. He smoked two cigars every day, one before breakfast and one after dinner.

The town was 20 miles from the airport. Warren explained that there was only one taxi service in the area so I made sure to get a business card. It was his card. He informed me that the taxi business was his other business. After a wordless ride on lightless winding roads, a green sign said Welcome to Fox Hills and reported the size of the one-street town as Pop 1,281. My home town was almost exactly 10,000 times larger than Fox Hills. When we pulled up, a tall woman with graying brown hair stepped outside and walked up to the driver’s window to have a private chat with Warren. They clearly knew each other well.

The Super 8 had a total of six rooms that were in working order, and five of them were empty. The woman was the hotel manager and she revealed a toothy smile as I took room number seven. I didn’t really know for certain why they picked me for this job but the TE had bailed. His three-word note said, “Find someone else.” That someone was now me and I needed to get out here and get things back on track.

I couldn’t really complain all that much. It was good to get away from the office building and get into the field. I was relieved to be doing something other than tracking and charting expense reports and trends therein. Besides, I was fairly sure that no one looked at them. And if I could get the project back on track, then that would lead to bigger things. Outside room number seven, the bugs roared as if something large and urgent was coming their way. I went to bed early, and even though the mattress was lumpy and smelled like moldy cheese and cigarettes, I closed my eyes and was gone.

In the morning I called Warren using the number that was on his business card. The taxi company was called Red Fox Taxi and it had a picture of a red fox on it. The fox looked back over its shoulder as if it were being chased by a pack of dogs. When the car arrived, all the windows were down and the smell of cigars had been blown around and mixed up with cool morning air. He took me straight to the field trailer without speaking a word.

When we got to the site, Warren parked and went back and opened the trunk of the taxi. He changed shirts and put on black work boots.

“My other job,” he said. “I do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Small town stuff. You have to fill in the cracks in a town like this.”

“Are you also the sheriff?” I asked. He grinned. I guess I thought it was funnier than he did. I had read Warren’s personnel summary at the Wendy’s over breakfast. Warren was a retired elementary school administrator and had served in the army reserves. He had passed the drug test and the personality test. A thick multi-colored mustache grew beneath his crooked nose and his cheeks were shaved smooth. He had a tendency to lean back on his heels with both hands on his hips. When he looked at you, he squinted as if the glare was too bright.

“I try to stay away from legal matters,” he smiled as if someone had just whispered a joke in his ear that wasn’t quite funny enough to get a laugh. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

“That would be terrific,” I said. He smiled again and walked away, his boots crunching on the gravel. He got into the truck and drove off. On the tail of the truck was the company logo, a shining image of a green diamond.

The trailer was cool inside from the AC blowing in a window, and I quickly found the project files left behind by my predecessor. They were arranged by last modified date in a metal box under the metal desk. In one of the files was the list of Transformation Initiatives that he had been running. This was where I had to start.

Luckily for me, he had been following the standard communication protocol for project management and file management. The company prided itself on consistent, effective, efficient communication systems. At that moment, I was happy for it. The forms made it easy for me to pick up where he left off.

When I located the Transformation Schedule, I discovered that there was an extermination expert flying in from Virginia that morning. It wasn’t clear what he was there to do, so I was hoping he would be able to tell me when he arrived. I checked to make sure that all the other projects were in order and discovered quickly that almost nothing had actually been done on any one of them. That included electrical work, plumbing, road work and rebuilding the grounds keeping crew. At some point the whole thing had ground to a halt, maybe two or three weeks prior to his departure. I noticed it first when the expense reports stopped coming in.

In the box was a copy of the company business plan. I have read it cover-to-cover several times. There is a keynote video available to the public of our CEO lighting up a room when he spoke about the greater mission of the business. It remains a bold, new vision for rural economic revival. Small towns are dying. Remote communities require injections of revenue and a sense of purpose. Service to others is a driving theme. To date the company has raised 250 million dollars from private equity and has been able to secure matching public monies to fund a vision for a new kind of resort getaway. You could turn an entire state into one glorious putting green with that much money.

The first phase of the plan was to purchase small, underperforming golf courses. These were what the plan called Mom & Pop facilities. Then the next phase was to transform the MAPs into luxury properties, and provide bespoke getaway vacations to high wealth individuals from places like Chicago, Boston, New York and DC.

In the second phase, the company would create new recreation facilities from the ground up. There would be year-round youth programs such as golf camps and remote schooling. Recruiting would source local colleges and universities for fresh talent and energy. This was the path to revitalization and elevating the rural middle classes. Fox Hills had just such a golf course, and we had been able to acquire it for a song. It was only a nine-hole course, but that’s where the TE and the TS come in. Each rural course has a tailor made Transformation Schedule with local sponsors, architectural plans, community-based messaging platforms, the whole nine yards. The USGA had put their name behind it. This was the real deal.

Warren came back with a cup of coffee from the Wendy’s. He drove me out to the airport to meet with the extermination specialist.

“Who are you now?” I asked him.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Are you the taxi driver or site security?” I asked.

“You’re in the front seat,” he said. He grinned.

On the way to the airstrip Warren continued to make small, private laughing noises and I finally asked him what was so funny.

“Funny?” he asked. “Not sure what you mean.”

“Something seems to strike you as humorous,” I said.

“Oh that,” he said after a pause. “It’s just an old habit. I trained myself a long time ago. You get to a certain age and it’s hard to change.”

He didn’t say anything more than that. I let it go. I noticed for the first time that Warren was armed. He carried a pistol on his right hip.

“That thing loaded?” I asked looking down at the weapon.

“Wouldn’t be much use otherwise,” he said and then seemed to find that funny too.

As we arrived at the airport, a plane appeared just above the tree line. It may very well have been the same plane that dropped me off the night before. As it banked around to line up its nose with the short runway, I stepped out of the truck and looked around at the airstrip. I hadn’t been able to see it in the darkness the night before. The landing strip was placed within a narrow rectangle of dense green trees that had been cut back and shaped for the purpose. There was one, narrow gravel road that cut through the trees, the only way in and out that wasn’t in the air. The trees were so thick that you wouldn’t be able to get more than a few feet without some serious equipment to cut back the vines. On one end of the rectangle, Kudzu vines had completely swallowed a copse of trees to form a closed green wall.

The plane landed, turned around and came back toward the road. The door opened and out jumped a black haired man wearing jeans and a t-shirt and carrying two black duffel bags. He strode over to the truck as if he owned the entire county. He seemed like someone who had jumped out of small airplanes in small airports many times before. As he approached, he smiled broadly and everything felt right with the world. Behind me, Warren made a sound that sounded like a giggle.

“Hello there!,” he positively boomed as he walked up.

“Hello there yourself,” I returned. I could feel myself standing straighter and bigger. It was impossible to resist his energy.

“My name’s Taylor Goodwin.” I introduced myself and Warren, who nodded with a grin that made his cheeks wrinkle.

“Where’s Evan?” I asked. That was the name of the contractor on the TS.

“Couldn’t make it. You are stuck with me,” he said. As he had walked over from the plane, he looked large and formidable, but now that he was standing in front of me, I could see that he was about five-foot-six in his combat boots. He smiled as easily as he breathed, and his white teeth were straight. His short, black hair was parted on the side and held in place with a modest helping of semi-gloss gel.

“You’re with the same outfit I assume,” I said. He put his bags down and fished out a bent, warm business card from his wallet. The company was called Granite Rock Controls, and in smaller letters the tagline was Specialty Pest Control Services. He stood there with his hands on his hips and looked around at the airstrip. “This is one fine shithole of an airport,” he said jovially. The way he said it suggested that he wouldn’t have it any other way. He reveled in shitholes from what I could see.

“That all you got?” I asked.

He looked down at his two bags, smiled and said, “Yessir. Those and these,” and he held up his two hands as if he might pick up a small child. “If there’s anything else I need, I’m sure I can find it. This is the USA man. The NRA is more popular than the Boy Scouts.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I sensed that Taylor was the kind of guy who said whatever popped into his head, and he had learned over time that it had amused both himself and others so he kept doing it.

As Warren drove us back to the trailer, I explained the situation by reading the project status report from the RDM. “The property has been overrun with foxes. The population is so high, in fact, that we cannot proceed with the development of the site until the situation is corrected. This species, also known by its Latin name Vulpes vulpes, has demonstrated unprecedented reproductive success in the last decade, especially in rural areas. There are theories as to why, but that’s neither here nor there. We are prohibited by law from hunting for fox in this state for personal or commercial reasons. Foxes are protected by law and the company has strict rules for following local regulations on a property by property basis. There is, however, an exception in the state for hunting foxes on golf courses during non-operational hours. Since golf sites are usually open from dawn until sunset, this form of control is usually performed at night. Because the property backs up against an area of open territory, the foxes will move freely back and forth from the property to the wilderness. Etc. etc. etc.”

Taylor was gazing out the windows and smiling.

“I could go on but I think that just about covers the situation. Does this fit with your understanding?” I asked.

“It does indeed. It’s even better than I’d hoped. A night hunt. There’s nothing I love more than hunting at night.”

On the way back to the trailer, we stopped at Wendy’s for Spicy Chicken Sandwiches for lunch, which seemed like the safest thing on the menu to consume. There are no other public eateries in Fox Hills.

While Taylor set himself up in the tool shed, I got caught up on the rest of the items in the TS. I put calls into the electrician, the architect, the engineer and the transportation firms. I wasn’t able to get ahold of anyone, but I left messages for them all. As I reviewed and organized the papers from the file box, I got call backs from the architect and the electrician. The electrician confirmed that there was no point in coming out until there was an approved plan, and the engineer pointed out that there was no point in coming out until there was an approved design. Since there were only five standard architectural plans to choose from, I was now waiting to hear from the architect. The five plans were called English Cottage, Spanish Coast, Navaho Hills, Costa Playa, and Wine Country.

While I waited, I did some research on the red fox. Several facts jumped out at me, such as the fact that the fox had learned to thrive on the fringes of human civilization. In some more remote locations, the fox had been classified as one of the world’s worst invasive species. Much like humans, they will eat just about anything. Furthermore, it seems that the fox has been multiplying at increasing rates, especially in areas where there are few predators. Finally, and most strangely, it seems as if the fox tends to operate in small groups based on family. If there was an infestation of foxes here, why were they all here at the same time? What was happening?

It was still hot outside but I decided to walk around for a bit. Taylor was still busy in the shed and Warren was gone off somewhere. I walked from the first hole to the third hole and then crossed over to the seventh and made my way back to the ninth. It was well into the afternoon, and while the bugs were raucous, there was not much else to notice. The fairways and the greens were in disrepair, which was to be expected. The previous owners had run out of money at least a year before selling and the place went downhill. When we made our first offer, the owner accepted that day. There were small trees sprouting up in the middle of the fairways. The bushes were creeping out into the rough. The greens were a mess, and there were no sand traps that I could find.

I wasn’t much of a golfer but I knew enough about the game. Plus, the company provided each new employee with a manual that explained everything there was to know about the technical aspects of golf courses. They couldn’t have their representatives running around out there ignorant of the basics. I scored a 100 on the compulsory test we all took after the first week of training.

Most of all, the place was quiet. An abandoned golf course is like a stage with no actors, and so the story takes on a different shape. There was a bench in the shade at the beginning of the ninth hole and I sat down, sweat pouring down my neck and back. There was the occasional twitter from a blue bird, and there were wood peckers banging out their hollow knocks throughout the property. Aside from a few day camps as a young kid, I had spent the entirety of my life in the city. I was at peace with the human sounds of trucks, dozers, blowers, horns, sirens. Here there were none of those sounds. The grass and the trees thirsted on the open space. They drank up the course and claimed it. Green vines like wild power cables climbed up into branches and reached out for something else to take hold of. It was like a time machine where I was moving from place to place at breakneck speed and everything else, every single living thing, was moving in all directions at a different but unstoppable pace.

After some time passed, I got up and headed back to the trailer. The sun had fallen below the trees but it was still hot out. Taylor had finished his preparation and was waiting for me outside the trailer.

“We need to walk the grounds,” he said.

“I just did that,” I replied. “All quiet on the Western front.”

“I am going to set up some observation equipment along the outer perimeter of the course. It will be easier if you do it with me. And faster,” he smiled.

I looked at the backpack at his feet.

“Motion activated cameras with night vision,” he said. “We will be able to capture what happens throughout the night. These things turn on when the sensors detect motion within 100 feet. I’ve looked at the layout. We will cover holes four through seven, the ones that back up against the undeveloped areas. In the morning, we can collect the cameras and see what there is to see.”

“Works for me,” I said. I grabbed two water bottles from the fridge in the camper and then we set off toward the first hole.

“You know this place is probably called Fox Hills for a reason,” he commented.

“Yeah – kinda hard to miss that one.”

Taylor seemed to have only one gear when it came to walking. It was more like a forced march than a walk. But I was almost six inches taller than he was so it wasn’t all that difficult to keep up with him. But by the time we got to the fourth hole, I was missing the air-conditioned trailer. I drank my bottle of water in one long swallow. Taylor stuck his hand in his back pocket. His body was relaxed, as if he owned the place.

He set up a camera on a small black tripod at the edge of the green facing into the fairway. To the left, dense trees barked and breathed. Holes four through seven followed one after the other in a slow arcing right curve in order to return back and finish at hole one. In the middle of the curved section was a dried-up pond surrounded by clusters of outgrown bushes and vines. The nine-hole course was the shape of an upside-down drop of water. The first three holes were mostly cleared of growth on the left side, but at hole four, the undeveloped land edged up against the tee box. The tops of the trees leaned forward and into the fairways in their reach for the sun.

Taylor and I proceeded to cover the four holes with cameras around the outer edge of the course, two cameras for each hole. One pointed toward the green and the other pointed back from the green. He was dialed in and utterly focused on his task. We didn’t talk other than to estimate distances. I pointed out how stones marked the 150 yard distance from the center of the green.

It was clear as we walked the course together that we saw two radically different places. I saw a two-year project to transform this run-down Mom & Pop into a bright, clean and vibrant place. I saw bright young kids learning to drive balls straight and long into the middle of the fairway. I saw an opening. Taylor saw it as a stakeout and a chance to hunt freely with orchestrated abandon. He saw it as the front line in an outpost skirmish. Without Taylor, my project was stalled. Without me, Taylor would have to get in line and follow hunting restrictions that limited his kills.

When we got back to the trailer, it was growing dark. Warren had set up a table and folding chairs outside the trailer with homemade fried chicken, boiled green beans, black-eyed peas, watermelon and a twelve-pack of Coors Light. The three of us ate and drank from paper plates and plastic cups, mostly in silence, until dark. The bug zapper popped regularly, and the scent of the citronella candles added a peculiar taste to the food.

“There’s not much we can do tonight,” said Taylor. “We’ll know in the morning what we’re dealing with.”

“What if they don’t come out tonight?” I asked. Warren eyed us and seemed to giggle silently with his long, gray eyebrows.

“If they’re here, if this is their terrain, then they will come out. It’s not like they take the night off from time to time. They are hunters and they come out to hunt. That’s how they survive. That’s how wild predators survive. They hunt and kill and eat what they kill.”

I felt like an idiot from the city at that point and decided it was best to say nothing after that. Warren drove us back to the Super 8 and we went to our rooms. Room seven was starting to feel like my home away from home, with its one overstuffed green chair by the door and the painting above the bed of a large buck standing in an open field, it’s huge, glassy eyes surveying the room as if it were looking in through a window. Warren was coming by to pick us up at 5 AM. Not long after I got into bed, there was a rain storm with some thunder and lightning. It lasted only about 30 minutes and then it was gone. Then the sound of the insects replaced the sound of rainfall. It grew louder and louder until it seemed like a wall of bugs was approaching the motel in unison.

There was banging on the door and I jumped. It was Taylor and he was ready to go. I wiped my face with cold water and opened the door. “Let’s go City Boy.” He seemed like he had already run five miles and was lathered up. Wearing fatigue pants and black boots, he was a happy man. Warren was in the lot and the car was running.

We collected the cameras as the sky grew brighter and brighter, and we headed back to the trailer. While Taylor assembled his gear, I prepared two cups of instant coffee. Within 15 minutes, we were watching footage on Taylor’s computer of the first hole in a split screen with each camera playing on its own side. Since the playback was accelerated and the cameras were motion activated, we were able to go through each hole in a matter of 20 minutes or so. After we had watched them all, we sat back and looked at each other. The trailer went silent.

“Well,” Taylor said. “It looks as though we will have plenty to do tonight.”

“No kidding,” was all I could say. What we had seen on each hole was hard to believe, except it was there on the screen. On every one of holes that was filmed, we saw small groups of foxes crossing the fairways at an easy trot. But it wasn’t just one or two groups. It was six or seven groups for every hole. The place was crawling with them. And because the film was sped up, the animals seemed to have an unnatural kind of determination. It was impossible to tell if they were some of the same groups, but since they all came from the same direction, which was the undeveloped area that bordered the course, it appeared as if each group was different. And even more importantly, they started coming onto the course long before the darkness had fully set. If this had been an active facility, golfers would have been playing all the way up to the final daylight. Was this some kind of regional freeway for foxes? Where did they all come from and where were they going? I wanted to ask Taylor these questions but decided to keep my mouth shut.

Taylor, meanwhile, had developed a sort of a calm, thirsty look in his eye, and it made me think of the look of the buck in the painting in my room. His usual upbeat, jovial demeanor hardened into a fixed and determined gaze.

“I have some work to do. I’ll see you later,” he said.

He spent the rest of the day preparing and setting traps throughout the course. He erected a tree stand and ladder at the outer edge of the sixth hole using the tools and supplies from the shed, and he stashed hundreds of rounds of ammunition in boxes on the platform. I marveled at what he could do with his hands with no help from me or from Warren. The tone of the project had turned toward intense focus. From time to time throughout the day, Warren walked the course to watch Taylor set up. Warren had lost his demeanor of silly, private humor. He was openly curious now, almost serious.

“How many do you think he’ll get?” Warren asked me in a moment of unguarded comradery. We were standing out front of the trailer and Warren was looking out to the course. You could hear Taylor’s hammering in the distance.

“All of them,” I said. I didn’t know where that belief came from, but Taylor’s confidence in himself had bled into my confidence in him, in his skill and determination.

Warren sat down next to me. We were at the picnic table next to the trailer.

“Do you know the other guy, the guy before you?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you know why he quit?” Warren had come out of his private amusement. His voice had changed.

“Not really,” I said. “I figured he just wasn’t up to it. It’s a lot of work, and it takes energy and organization. You have to want it.”

“You know after all this is over, there will still be fight in the world,” he said. “We can’t kill it. Not all of it. It will come back. It always comes back.”

“All what is over? This project?” I asked. I was beginning to think Warren was a crackpot, or even worse, an addict.

“All of this. This project. You. Me. All of us,” he said. “We’ve tried to kill it but we can’t kill it. We can only beat it back for a short time. We can burn it, cut it down, bury it at the bottom of the ocean. It comes back. We don’t look at the right clock. We have no comprehension of time, no knowledge of space. And You? You think in years, in months and days, in seconds. You worry about your next project, your next promotion. Have you ever tried to conceive of a million years? A hundred million years?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Warren?”

“You know how big that wilderness is back there, how far back it goes?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve looked at a map. It’s pretty big.”

“It’s big but it’s not big enough,” he said. “We can push it back, we can draw a line on a map and call it a National Park, but we can’t contain it.”

“Warren, have you been drinking?”

“I don’t drink. Not anymore.”

“Well, maybe you should start again. You’re not making much sense.”

“The other guy quit after he hiked up into the wilderness. He stayed for two days. When he came back, he packed up and left.”

“So what? So what, Warren?”

“You ask me ‘so what?’ I’ll tell you. You say that Taylor will be able to kill all of them. I’m here to tell you that he is one man trying to hold back the water from a broken dam.” Warren stood up slowly, looked around the place, and left. I wrote a note to myself to send a report on Warren to the HR department.

The heat seemed to peak at about three in the afternoon. The sun was still above the tree line and the ground seemed to crackle. Warren had gone off someplace, and I worked in the trailer which had been set back under three pine trees so it was in the shade. I made follow-up phone calls to all of the service providers to confirm the agreed-upon scheduling. There were minor adjustments that had to be made to the start dates, and in every case they had to be pushed back several days. There were no material changes to the budgets, which meant that I didn’t have to reach out to HQ for approvals. As long as I stayed on top of the vendors, the company would let me run the show. It wasn’t magic. It was vigilance and persistence. My RDM said to me just before I left, “get on top of them so they don’t get on top of you.” I was following his direction to a T.

Warren came back with a bag of burgers and fries from Wendy’s, and the three of us ate at the table outside the trailer. Warren was quiet and withdrawn. There was nothing left to prepare. It was Taylor’s show now. His rifle, a menacing black piece of equipment, leaned up against a tree. He had set up his computer screen for me to watch from a remote camera that covered the sixth hole. Warren had brought a 12-pack of Coors Light and left it in a cooler. I cracked open a beer but Taylor stuck with water.

At seven o’clock, Taylor stood up and smiled. “Enjoy the show, City Boy.”

“I’ll save you a beer,” I said.

“You do that,” he said.

“How will you know what to shoot at?”

“Night vision binoculars,” he said with a grin. “I’ll be able to see them better than they will be able to see me.”

Warren had become sullen and withdrawn. His humor had evaporated. He finished his food, got in his truck and left without a word.

Taylor picked up his rifle and headed toward his tree stand. I sat back and drank a beer. I watched the computer screen and waited. Taylor climbed into his tree and seemed to disappear as the darkness grew. I had three or four beers by the time the first flash of blue light flew out of the tree stand. I didn’t hear any bang, so I assumed he was using some kind of noise suppressor. The flashes of light became more and more frequent, and I heard what sounded like cries out in the trees.

I hear cries from several directions, which must have been the traps. The camera was pointed toward the stand, so I could only see what was transpiring around his tree. The flashes went on for several minutes. There must have been 15 shots before I saw something happening behind the tree stand. The bushes behind Taylor were shaking in strange ways and I got up and started moving in Taylor’s direction. I’m not sure why I did this, but I can only attribute my reaction to some kind of instinct.

I shouted Taylor’s name and then I heard a crashing sound. A voice, Taylor’s voice, cried out once and then went brutally silent, as if the life had been ripped from his body. I stopped at the edge of the first hole and stood still and listened. The world seemed to stop breathing for a moment. Then there were barking sounds and fox cries coming from the far ends of the dark course. I turned and ran back, grabbing the computer as I jumped into the trailer.

The screen showed nothing but a cluster of dark trees. I rewound the video and watched as Taylor stood up on the small platform, turned around and the slender branches started jerking wildly up and down. Flashes of blue-green light fired down in wild succession but with no clear direction. The tree was dancing crazily and what seemed like hundreds of foxes converged on the tree from all directions. They were everywhere. It was madness. They appeared to be trying to climb the tree. Then I saw what must have been Taylor fall from the tree stand. There was no audio in the footage, and so there was only silence after that. The lights had stopped flashing. Within a few seconds, the tree stopped shaking. Then, through the open window of the trailer I heard the rising pitch of their calls, the sounds of barking and yelping and what sounded like thousands of voices wailing.  I didn’t leave the trailer all night and Warren didn’t come back until the morning.

In summary, I am including here the report from the County Sheriff’s department. This details the  current status as well as anything:

“Local authorities have identified the body of a man, one Taylor Goodwin, who was hired by Green Diamond Corp. to perform pest extermination services on the grounds of the Fox Hills Golf Course. Due to the injuries to Mr. Goodwin’s face, head, and neck, as well as the marks left on the ground at the scene, local officials have determined that he fell from a tree and hit a rock. His fall occurred while he was performing extermination services at night. At this time, the local park services have determined that Mr. Taylor’s death is consistent with a hunting accident. Taylor, a graduate of the Naval Academy, was part of the local team assigned to golf course restoration and renovation. He leaves behind a wife and two children.”