by Ted Bernard
Here in this historic building on a lovely autumn afternoon, she said, “Mitch, I know you’re aware of the situation at Blackwood Forest with Morse and the connection to our energy plan. I think I’m going to need some help here.”
Redlaw needed no preamble. Morse was one uncouth and familiar son-of-a-bitch. He pulled too much weight with Governor Winthrop and, for reasons Redlaw could not fathom, seemed intent on strangle-holding the Redlaw administration. Student groups had made their wishes known about Blackwood Forest and the energy future of Gilligan. At a “town hall” in Morgan Hall the night before his trip, in a packed rec room with about one hundred agitated undergraduates smelling blood, he received an earful from one articulate member of some group focusing on the post-carbon future. This girl — what was her name? — had laid out an argument so nuanced and brilliant that he had found himself tongue-tied trying to craft a response. He was well aware of this brewing issue.
“Morse stormed out on me the other morning,” Flintwinch confessed, “and I had no words to bring him back.”
“Un-mannered as usual.”
“To put it mildly. He said he didn’t give a shit about the students and the neo-hippy faculty and that we — you and I — ought ‘to think about which side our bread is buttered on’. I’m quite sure Ohio DNR will issue him the permits for the oil and gas under Blackwood and the injection wells. I’m worried my Tulkinghorn strategy will backfire. I don’t trust the man. Without a word of support in that meeting, he let Morse draw and quarter me.”
The president slugged the last of his Irish coffee, ran his index finger across his mouth, and gently placed his mug back on the desk. “This Tulkinghorn, do I know him?”
“Not sure. He’s been Director of the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development a few years. A geologist. Came here from the oil industry. His dean tells me he’s on thin ice in his school. Faculty revolted last year.”
“And the strategy involving him is what? Pardon me for drawing a blank.”
“He was my choice as an experienced and credentialed guy to sell the energy plan to the university.”
“Uh huh.”
“Meanwhile, the students — and not just the granola heads — are seriously pissed about how little we seem to care about their ecological preserve, as if most of them have ever been there. The way this whole thing is shaping up reminds me of those riots at Maryland in '03. Remember?”
“How could I not?” Dark shadows crossed the furrows of the president’s face. “Look, Helen,” he said, “the students are the least of my worries. There is a bottom line argument to be made with them. They march around and rabble rouse about rising tuition; now they demand us to take an extravagantly expensive energy path that would break the budget and may require increasing their fees. Switching from coal to natural gas will be a small fraction the cost of solar, wind, geothermal, whatever. They can’t have it both ways. Besides, the sooner we can get to gas, the sooner we’ll be able to achieve the carbon emission target we, including lots of students, set last year in the climate plan. Good PR value in this too. Even if Tulkinghorn can’t do it, I can carry that argument to the students.”
The provost nodded in agreement. “Tulkinghorn is not the one to send out to the students. He was tapped to appeal to the other constituencies and he has pledged to do this. When speaking of faculty, he predicted that his own school would likely be opposed to both drilling in Blackwood and the energy plan. That school houses our best known environmental scientists and economists. Can we afford to have them go to the press with a finely tailored set of arguments? I mean, do we want Burt Zielinski being interviewed by NPR about this?”
“Now that’s a goose of a different color.” The president enjoyed summoning the school mascot. “I can see why Tulkinghorn, if he’s shaky with his faculty, might not be our best ambassador.”
“The guy’s a shifty bastard.”
“Okay, let’s get back to the source of the problem. Blackwater Forest?
“Blackwater Forest. Yes, Morse has us by the short hairs. Those are his mineral rights.”
“I know. Let me give the Governor’s Office a call. We’ll both be at a Southern Ohio Chamber of Commerce meeting in Portsmouth tomorrow. Maybe I could arrange a face-to-face with him there.”
“And your plan would be?”
“To ask if he could help me lure Morse away from Blackwood. We do have a couple of hundred acres of hayfields around the Northeastern Regional Campus underneath which is the Marcellus Shale, just like Blackwood. We have mineral rights. Oil and gas galore, presumably. A trade-off may work.”
“Kicking the can down the road?”
“It’s what I do.” He yawned. “I’m sixty-three. Two or three more years: that’s all the road I need.”
Yawning back, she asked, “What about Tulkinghorn?”
“That, my dear, is your problem.”
10
A hitch in his step, Burt Zielinski limped a crooked path to a corner table at the Trattoria Restaurant. Stefan rose to greet him. On the advice of one of his Wisconsin professors, Stefan had introduced himself to Burt as soon as he arrived at Gilligan. To his delight, he found him a warm and intellectually-alive man, gentle as the favorite uncle he’d never had. Stefan confessed to me that Burt had become “a kind of replacement mentor”. Not since Kate’s death had he found someone so able to awaken truths within him, to add value to the identity he sought as an adult. Burt, a professor of climatology, arrived at Gilligan in the mid-1970s. Students knew him as one of Gilligan’s rock stars. His climate classes were oversubscribed semester after semester. I can attest to his theatricality. In the second semester of my freshman year, I remember him rambling around, regaling us with stories of what climate science foretells, what it’s like chasing tornadoes, taking ice cores in Antarctica, the fast moving and dynamic atmosphere five miles above us. It was a fabulous class.
“Dudes and dudettes!” he would boom after we settled down. “We are in deep horse poop! We’re approaching tipping points. Climate change is our most terrifying problem because it is sneaking up on us like a malevolent feral cat. When folks finally realize their plight — searing summers, failing crops, tropical human diseases in Cleveland, urban-wrecking storms like Sandy — the system will have so much momentum that no action humans could imagine or implement will stave off catastrophe. It will be as if a feral house cat had transmogrified into Smilodon populator.”
“What?” somebody asked.
“Look it up, my friend!” A search in the Holmes Mills library recently informed me that a Smilodon is a saber-toothed cat, a monster Pleistocene predator with canine teeth you cannot forget.
Stefan, the mellow Mainer with few theatrics to bring to his classroom considered himself no match for this man. But there at the Trattoria sat Burt, humble and soft spoken, a good listener, a man with nary a hint of braggadocio. Burt was an internationally known scholar having sounded warnings about the consequences of global warming back in the eighties and, like many of his colleagues, had suffered character assassination from fossil fuel magnates and their Washington toadies. Burt and the others who had thrown their bodies on the line were finally gaining respect. In 2005, he was invited to join the UN’s influential and panicky International Panel on Climate Change. Though he was in constant demand and traveled widely, in Stefan‘s company, Burt steered away from shop talk. Following his lead, Stefan basked in their conversations about teaching, families, life transitions, and of the natural wonders and scars in this forgotten corner of Ohio.
Over pasta, salads, and a carafe of house wine, they drifted into conversation about their experience with organized religion. Stefan proceeded cautiously. The last thing he wanted was to get tangled in religious thickets that might despoil what he cherished, a deepening friendship with this elder statesman. Was there an underlying evangelical agenda? Stefan wasn’t sure. In time, Burt asked whether Stefan’s parents were Jewish. When Stefan answered that his dad once was, Burt asked
whether Stefan had been raised a Jew.
Looking at Burt’s square Slavic face, its broad nose, prominent ears, lively eyes, bushy grey eyebrows, Stefan told Burt that after his parents left Brooklyn for Maine, they seemed intent on abandoning their old-world habits, including his dad’s Jewish identity, under the eaves of their little apartment in Flatbush. In his childhood, they never talked about religion and they never attended services of any kind. He said: “As I look back, I assume that our secular family evolved because in Europe my dad had been a closet Jew at most. My mom’s religious roots are still unknown to me. I think the Russians crushed whatever faith either of them may have inherited.”
When Burt heard this explanation, he scratched his head of thinning grey hair. “Interesting,” he said reticently, as if awaiting a clue of what direction to take next. After a moment he said, “So we are similar in a way.”
Stefan looked across the table inquiringly.
Burt hesitated as people often do when speaking of sequestered matters. Finally, he said, “My dad, a closet first-generation Polish-American Jew himself, married a country club Protestant, my mother. Neither he nor my mother ever explicitly told me and my sisters about his roots. So, I was deprived, or was it relieved, of his Old Testament heritage. My mother dragged us kids to a Unitarian Church in suburban DC at Christmas and Easter, but she never required that we go to Sunday School. She wasn’t wired to be a prim, you know, puritanical church lady. In fact, she was a wild woman. At twenty-six, she totally defied her father, a circuit court judge in Maryland, and eloped with a dashing Jew a few years her senior. So, neither she nor our dad had any spiritual prescriptions for me and my siblings. Thank God for that, or thank somebody.”
Stefan asked, “So, no formal religion through life for you?”
“Nope, not really. My late wife was, like me, a non-theist. We attended a Quaker meeting for a few months in Vietnam War days, but that played itself out so quickly that I cannot even claim I’m a lapsed Quaker.” With that he erupted in raucous laughter that soon engaged his lungs. He coughed happily and shook his head.
They poured some more wine and silently touched their glasses.
“Lord love ‘em, those Quakers are well-meaning peaceniks,” Burt continued. “But their archaic practices border on the absurd. Takes them decades to make up their minds. ‘Give us time. We’re getting clearness,’ they would say. And I could not bear up under their goodness and piety. “Get real, I used to think. How could anybody ever meet their standards?”
Stefan smiled broadly at this. “Yeah, I understand. I hung out with a couple of Mennonite guys at Wisconsin. They never swore, never drank. We became friends working at the Madison Peace Center. They invited me to one of their services. I went along and concluded within a few minutes that it was doing nothing for me. They were cool about it.”
“Same again,” Burt chuckled. “You also cannot claim to be a lapsed Mennonite.” Stefan admitted he was not a lapsed anything. “Maybe I’m an ‘Earthiest’ to use Edward Abbey’s construction. These days my heart takes guidance from seers like Rumi, Mary Oliver, Whitman, Muir, Leopold, Annie Dillard, none of whom, to my knowledge, spent much time inside religious structures or strictures.”
“An Earthiest! You are indeed a wise man.”
It was time for Burt to go home. They polished off their wine, paid the check, and walked to the door amiably. Outside, the September skies were turning toward night. To the west, remnants of a scarlet sunset silhouetted uptown Argolis and washed burnt sienna over the people. Reddish humans rushing toward a cataclysm they could not possibly foresee. Or so I imagined that tranquil evening, two profs heading homeward.
11
Awa Khadija Émilie “Em” Diallo, a Senegalese graduate student, lounged near a bright bay window on the second floor of the Carsey Student Union. Alone in a sitting area with three modernist chairs and a small coffee table, she flicked her iPad, oblivious to the noisy flow of students up and down the building’s escalators. Em displayed unblemished skin the color of burnished tropical ebony, short-cropped hair held upward by a West African woven band, slinky tight-fitting jeans, sandals with sequins, and an embroidered magenta top. She had an erect bearing with long limbs and graceful ankles and wrists, lovely hands. In all, she was a presence to rival any supermodel on the planet and one to outdistance all such competitors intellectually. In my cloistered Ohio experience I had never encountered a woman as cosmopolitan and breathtakingly beautiful and humorously self-deprecating as Em. Michelle Obama may have been a twin but I never got closer to her than a back seat in our 2000-seat auditorium.
Em unexpectedly found herself in the company of her classmate Nick.
“Bon soir, belle femme,” he said and plopped into an adjacent chair.
“Flattery, mon ami, might get you someplace,” she replied, smiling. Perfect teeth too.
Nick Marzetti was pursuing a masters degree in outdoor leadership and recreation, a bizarre confabulation and on the surface ill-suited to his intellect. By his girlfriend’s reckoning, Gilligan ought to be a cakewalk for someone of Nick’s brilliance and education. He ignored her prediction and dove into his studies full force. He hadn’t expected to like southern Ohio. So far, he was pleasantly surprised. Scaling cliffs, hiking, trail biking, and running fed his insatiable outdoor energies and without the aggravation of the crowded outdoors of his hometown Montreal. His classes had been challenging enough. He liked his teaching assistantship. He had found a job tending bar in his spare time. Argolis was his kind of laid back town with plenty of adventure sport geeks like himself. Amid his life as a student was the ever sensuous and comical Émilie.
“What will you bring to Stefan’s class?” she asked.
“My case study is about budworms and spruce forests.”
“Worms?”
“Actually larvae and moths.”
“Oh. I must learn these new words. I love forests!” Without shame, Em would readily fib. Turns out, she was a city girl with zero experience in forests. Nonetheless, she continued: “ … especially their darkness and, how you say, mystère.” Her smile returned, playful, inviting.
Nick was amused, maybe even intrigued by her flirtations. He slouched awkwardly in the undersized chair and stretched his hamhocks toward the table. His shins bashed the table’s edge.
“Whoever designed these freaking chairs?”
“Simplicité, géométrie, colorée. Élégant, n’est-ce pas?”
“Élégant peut-être. Confortable? Non!”
He leaned forward over the table, his beefy shoulders and thick neck scrunching downward to reveal a head of coffee brown hair, the crown hinting early baldness. She studied him, this bearded Canadian behemoth hairier than the average hound from Newfoundland. He passed a hand over his shaggy head and rubbed his neck rhythmically. Finally, he straightened up, stretching his arms outward, moaning through an extended grumbly yawn while shaking his head vigorously.
“You must get more sleep,” she said, submitting to a dainty yawn herself.
“Thing is, I worked at Hanigan’s last night. At 12:30, I rode my bike home the long way, brewed café, then worked until almost 3:00 preparing for class today. Then I had to get up at 7 to take my trail biking class out to the Argolis trails.”
Em cast a blank look. She could not imagine that a graduate student would have enough time for optional cycling and a job, and what was this about a class on the trails? In her experience, the life of the mind, that seductive concept that had lifted her above and carried her far beyond the streets of Guédiawaye, the fetid slum of Dakar, bore no space for recreation or part-time work or classes in cycling. It’s not that she disrespected Nick’s intellect or interests or need for income. She just had not yet wrapped her mind around the culture and curriculum of a residential university in America.
Keeping that thought to herself, she pronounced, “Ah, Nick! Getting by on so little sleep will make you — How you say? A grumchy bastard.”
“I’ll be fin
e,” he assured her. “You might have just put together two words there: grouchy and grumpy. Glad you didn’t say ‘nasty’.”
“Non, not nasty. Ah ha,” she realized giddily. “I make up new English word — Em’s English!” She rose and stretched as sensuously as a ballerina. She collected her iPad and handbag and they walked toward the only escalator in Argolis County.
“A nice word you invented,” Nick said. “Maybe ‘grumchy’ will go viral and you’ll be famous. Let’s stop at Progressive. I’ll buy you a café on the way to class.”
“D’accord.”
THREE
Panarchy
For a student to be educated,
she has to face brilliant antagonists:
she has to encounter thinkers
who see the world
in different terms than she does.
— Mark Edmundsoniv
1
ALONG WITH THE IMPENDING CIRCUMSTANCES that fall semester, my friends and I were coming to grips, week-by-week, with novel and admittedly frightening ways of understanding the world. At times, our brains became as jumbled as those random magnetic words I used to see on fridges, when people had fridges. This scrambling so deranged our nervous systems, so disrupted our brains that we began to lose sleep and to maniacally frame everything per ‘Stefan’s model’. To be fair, it was not actually Stefan’s model. It emerged in the late 1990s as the brainchild of an illustrious group of scholars who dubbed themselves ‘the Resilience Network’.
Life had taken on a new valence, and my challenge now is to convey this reality. Accordingly, I will preface the lessons we learned that semester with an abridged chapter from Kate Nickleby’s book, Over the Cliff. Whomever may discover this manuscript in the hazy future will find that it is leather bound with an intact copy of the sacred text that presaged our lives. What more can I do for posterity?
