Scavenger

by David Morrell

  Had we but world enough, and time…

  But at my back I always hear

  Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.

  Maybe it’s not the future that prompts us to create time capsules. Maybe it’s the pressure of time itself, the speed with which it passes, the awareness of our mortality. Prior to 1939, time capsules were called boxes and caskets: funereal metaphors. That same metaphor is in the title of the Crypt of Civilization. Could it be that the emotion implied in time capsules isn’t hope, optimism, or even fear, but rather sorrow that everyone dies? Again, I’m reminded of Marvell’s poem.

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace.

  A community buries what it sees as the ingredients for a golden moment, a distillation of their world. Many years later, another community digs up the capsule, if the capsule can be located. People gather eagerly around. “What’s the secret?” they want to know. “What important message did the past want to send us?” They open the casket or the crypt or, if you prefer, the capsule, and find that the contents have decayed or that the objects are so quaint that they’re meaningless. “It’s hard to believe they thought this stuff was important,” someone murmurs. In the end, that might be the message of every time capsule. From the long-dead past, they warn us that the here-and-now doesn’t endure, that the objects around us aren’t as important as we think, that what matters isn’t the promise of the future but the value of each passing moment. As the Game Master notes in this novel, “Time is the true scavenger.”

  My stacks of file folders are time capsules, I suppose, representing the interests of the person I no longer am. So are my novels, preserving how I felt and thought in the past, just as novels by my favorite authors are time capsules, taking me back to Dickens’s fog-enshrouded London or Edith Wharton’s old New York or Ernest Hemingway’s Paris in the 1920s. Those books not only transport me to the past that those authors experienced but also to my past and what it was like to experience those books for the first time.

  Researching Scavenger, I walked through its Manhattan locations to verify physical details. When I reached Washington Square, I was certain I’d come to the wrong place. The last time I visited there was the mid-1980s. In those days, Washington Square’s arch was covered with graffiti while junkies bought drugs in a park so treeless that the buildings on the neighboring streets were clearly visible. But now those buildings are obscured by massive, sheltering trees beneath which parents play with their children while, in a park of their own, dogs scamper with their owners. Impressed by the gleam of the spotless arch, I was suddenly reminded that twenty whole years had passed, that I’d gotten older. But instead of depressing me, the moment felt alive with the fullness of my memories. Nothing passes as long as we remember it. Each of us is a time capsule.

  RESOURCES

  Except for the Sepulcher of World Desires, every time-capsule reference in Scavenger is factual. The most thoughtful essay on the subject is “Capsule History,” by Lester A. Reingold (November, 1999). It can be found at www.americanheritage.com. Type the essay’s title into the browser section and click on the link.

  Another important source of time-capsule information is “Tales of Future Past,” by David S. Zondy. Click the link to this essay at www.davidszondy.com, where you’ll find photographs of the Westinghouse time capsule along with a list of its contents. But there’s so much more at this site that you’ll be dazzled by this trip to the future past.

  As I indicate in my author’s note, the Crypt of Civilization is real. Go to www.oglethorpe.edu/about_us/crypt_of_civilization. You’ll find links to photographs of the Crypt and its contents. You’ll also find information about the International Time Capsule Society, the Most Wanted Time Capsules (including the M*A*S*H capsule), Time Capsule Secrets, and other eye-opening topics.

  The hidden chamber under Mount Rushmore is also real. Go to “Black Hills Secrets” at www.rosyinn.com/5100bl9.htm. Click the MORE link to see a photograph.

  For information about geocaching and letterboxing, go to www.geocaching.com and www.letterboxing.org. These activities have become so popular that many resorts specializing in outdoor recreation now emphasize geocaching and letterboxing as much as they do horseback riding and swimming. The sites devoted to these games have information about caches in your neighborhood. I was amused to learn about a cache hidden a mile from my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Scavenger is also about virtual reality and the metaphysics of video games. In The Medium of the Video Game, Mark J. P. Wolf’s essays about space, time, and narrative in video games were especially helpful. Steven L. Kent, Rochelle Slovin, Charles Bernstein, Rebecca R. Tews, and Ralph H. Baer (designer of the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey home video game system) also contributed fascinating essays. In addition, Kent wrote The Ultimate History of Video Games, the title of which says everything about it.

  Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin & Aaron Ruby is a groundbreaking, insider’s look at the video-gaming world. Among other things, it provides a fascinating analysis of God games and first-person shooter games. I thank my friend Janet Elder for telling me about that book and Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You. Johnson’s analysis of video games makes me believe the book’s subtitle: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

  While many video games have pointless violent content that possibly desensitizes players to violence in their lives, there have been few violent events with proven links to video games. The most documented example occurred in 1999 at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where two students shot a teacher and twelve fellow students to death, then wounded twenty-four others before committing suicide. The shooters were obsessed with the violent video game, Doom. But they were also reportedly the victims of relentless bullying that resulted in uncontrolled fury. Did the game fuel the rage, or was the game an outlet for the rage and a postponement of the violence? Because the boys shot themselves, there aren’t any answers, but the issue is not as simple as some social commentators make it appear.

  In Scavenger, Professor Graham notes that half the people in the United States play video games. Although not all those games are violent, many are, and yet we haven’t seen massive outbreaks of violence that seem caused by those games. Rather than fixate on the topic of violence, I think it’s worth considering games from another perspective—in terms of their form instead of their content. The levels of difficulty along with the countless decisions and movements that cram each second of an action game arguably make a player’s mind more agile and reflexes more responsive. The mental focus a game requires is a survival skill in a complex society. But it’s a special kind of focus because it means concentrating on a lot of things in such rapid succession that they seem almost to occur simultaneously. A parallel with multitasking comes to mind. Some social critics disparage this as a form of channel surfing that leads to shallow understanding and limited attention span. But I agree with Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: that it’s possible for games to train our minds to concentrate on many things at once and perform multiple tasks well. In short, video games might help us experience a new way for our brains to function. If time capsules teach us that things are never what they used to be, video games show us that we keep changing, often in ways that we don’t realize.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

  In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at th
e Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

  That “father” of all modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries). Eventually wearying of two professions, he gave up his tenure in order to write full time.

  Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character has lost a son.

  “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of twenty-nine books, including such high-action thrillers as The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he now lives with his wife, Donna). His Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing analyzes what he has learned during his more than thirty years as a writer. His previous novel, Creepers, appeared on several year’s-best lists and received the distinguished Bram Stoker Award.

  Morrell is the co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and offensive-defensive driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Visit his website www.davidmorrell.net.