My thanks on a great many levels go to John and Brad for helping me to understand the training, experiences, and philosophies of Special Operations personnel, in particular Navy SEALs. My thanks also that you and your brethren are out there doing what you do.
Gastronomic and linguistic thanks go to Eileen Rodriguez for bugging me about my rotten Spanish, vetting all such that appears herein, and taking me to some great Hispanic restaurants.
Thanks for the wild delights of souped-up, hard-bottom inflatables go to Lewis Tanenbaum.
Special thanks go to Gus Batista of the Billie Swamp Safari, the Seminole tribe, the National Audubon Society, and the U.S. National Park Service for their assistance in teaching me about the Everglades and its creatures.
In preparing this book, I drew heavily upon published sources. They include: The Garden of Their Desires: Desertification and Culture in World History by Brian Griffith; The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin; Desert Dust: Origin, Characteristics, and Effect on Man, Geol. Soc. America Special Paper 186, edited by Troy L. Peéweé; Desertification: Its Causes and Consequences, compiled and edited by the Secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Desertification, Nairobi; Bank Margin Environment by Robert B. Halley in AAPG Memoir 33, Carbonate Depositional Environment; Dust in the Wind by Dale W. Griffith, Christina Kellogg, and Eugene A. Shinn; The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean; Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad; The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes; Hormone Deception by D. Lindsey Berkson; Geologic Map of the State of Florida by Thomas M. Scott, Kenneth M. Campbell, Frank R. Rupert, Jonathan D. Arthur, Thomas M. Missimer, Jaqueline M. Lloyd, J. William Yon, and Joel G. Duncan; Florida Atlas & Gazetteer (DeLorme); Florida’s Geological History and Geological Resources, Florida Geological Survey Spec. Pub. No. 35, edited by Ed Lane; and Terraces and Shorelines of Florida by Henry G. Healy.
The Golden Machete Critique Group (Mary Hallock, Thea Castleman, Ken Dalton, and Jon Howe) again did yeoman’s duty. Kelley Ragland was again a dream editor.
And, as always, my steadfastly patient husband, Damon Brown, and our bouyant and infinitely curious son, Duncan, came through with substantive comments, encouragement, and the love that makes it possible for me to create these books. Glad I could at least repay your kindnesses this time with warm surf and a space shuttle launch.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
I did not set out to write a book about terrorism. In fact, we have the mischievous genius of Gene Shinn to blame—or thank—for this book getting written.
I’ve noticed that geniuses have a few traits in common: First, their minds are agile enough to spot the simple pattern to puzzles that seem overwhelmingly complex to the rest of us. Second, they often take a complex course through life, for the simple reason that they find the pathways most of us follow too narrow, constraining, or just plain uninteresting. Third, they’re so far out ahead that we don’t even know that they’re leading us. Which, fourth, makes them impossible to manage. This is all true of Gene. He’s one of those wild children of the sciences who got so far out in front of us all with his research that the status quo finally got embarrassed and presented him with an honorary doctorate.
If required, I would deny that Miles Guffey was patterned after Gene, but I shall hereby state (with applause) that the hypothesis Miles expounds in this book is in fact Gene’s. Gene and microbiologists Dale Griffin and Chris Kellogg and marine ecologist Ginger Garrison, along with a host of colleagues, are the real people who are investigating the impact of African dust on coral reefs and human health. They are doing so on a pathetic shoestring budget for the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Florida.
In the 1950s, Gene was majoring in zoology while on a music scholarship at the University of Miami, and spearfishing on Caribbean reefs to feed his young family, when he began studying and photographing corals. By the mid-1960s, Gene was running a field station in Qatar, where he studied Persian Gulf coral reefs from a dhow. In the early 1970s, he opened a field station for the USGS in south Florida, where he observed the slow death of coral reefs. No one knew why the corals were dying. Gene put together his and various other peoples’ observations and conjured the idea that what was killing the reefs was disease-laden dust blowing off Africa. He said, “It’s so widespread it must be something in the air.”
What Gene had was an idea. It wasn’t even a hypothesis, let alone a theory. To move from an idea to a hypothesis, you need hard data, and to get data, you need funding. So Gene applied for funding. The USGS provided some funds to investigate the past record of dust in sediment and corals, but no funds to determine if the recent death of corals was caused by dust. He acknowledges that they pay his salary and only rein him in occasionally.
Gene widened his search to other government agencies. Each had a different reason for refusing him. As the list of refusals grew, so did Gene’s irritation. The ocean was not only a place of beauty and recreation for him, it was inspiration and dinner, and it did not seem reasonable that humanity should ignore its well-being.
Gene finally obtained enough funding from a new public health program in NASA to pay the salary of a new Ph.D., microbiologist Dale Griffin, who has to date identified over 130 live pathogens in samples of African dust. Gene’s idea was now a hypothesis. At the time of this writing, G
ene is still struggling for sufficient funding to fully test this hypothesis.
Gene first described the project to me in 1999. He asserted that the dust represents a bioterrorist threat. He reported that tons of anthrax manufactured during the Cold War cannot be accounted for. He was convinced that no security agency had considered the threat posed by the clandestine entrainment of such pathogens into intercontinental dust clouds.
I did not want to write about terrorism, but an important project having trouble getting funding did interest me. What worried (worries) me was (is) the growing trend of scientific research being increasingly predicated and directed by vested interests and the politicians who cater to them. When big money directs research, big money influences, and even dictates, findings. We live in the age of bean counters, people who confuse the bottom line with the moral line. Corporate culture is quickly becoming human culture, to our peril as a species.
I set out weaving a story about the funding of scientific research. Gene kept pushing the terrorist angle. I systematically resisted the idea until September 11, 2001. On that day, unthinkable terrorism came to America. In the weeks that followed the September 11 attacks, deadly weapons-grade anthrax began appearing in envelopes mailed to journalists and U.S. Senators. The first death occurred in Florida.
Confronting the shock of these attacks has been difficult for all of us. Living with the subject of terrorism to the depth it takes to write a book about it seemed beyond me. This is because I have been a victim of the “little” terrorism that is commonly called stalking.
Lucy’s experiences were based on mine, with an important difference: While Lucy kept her silence and was able to call in a white knight, I fought through police and judicial channels. While Lucy was able to realize her goals, I suffered the loss of my home, my community, and my livelihood. It seems that in our culture, it is easier to tell the target to duck and cover than to deal effectively with the attacker. And if that target is female, she is, in one way or another, blamed for being targeted.
During my efforts to hang on to what I could of my life, I discovered that three of the six women who worked in my office had suffered similar experiences, but none of them had prevailed. One woman had married a policeman in hopes of gaining security against her former husband, but the harassment and fear for her safety continued. Another suffered stalking at the hands of the policeman who had been her husband. With the glassy eyes of the traumatized, she described the night he tied her to a chair and repeatedly placed a bullet in his service revolver, spun the chamber, put the muzzle to her head, and pulled the trigger. When she later tried to escape, he used the police network to track her down.
Stalking is too vague a term. The crime is the extortion of power, and the weapon is terror. Women suffer terrorization at the hands of men who feel a sick need to control them. Women are beaten, raped, and harassed until their lives are reduced to bare survival, and sometimes they are indeed killed. If they use lethal force in self-defense, they are held to the standard of whether a man would have found self-defense necessary, and so are routinely jailed.
Victims of stalking are not usually weak women; ironically, sick men typically select strong women as the targets of their manias, just as terrorists attack strong nations. What stalkers and terrorists have in common, aside from sick minds, is cowardice. They are opportunistic. They exploit the vulnerable. They attack strength, not power.
We don’t condone terrorism from outside our country. Why, then, are women vulnerable to torment when it comes from within? The answer to this question runs as deep as all the other notions and rationalizations that suggest women are somehow less valuable than men. Why does the public hear so little about this astonishingly common problem? Because the stigma that is pushed on women who have been abused is so debilitating that we learn to keep our mouths shut. We are blamed for being caught “in the open.” If raped, we are considered “damaged goods.” This tells us that we are commodities, not fully empowered citizens, thus demoralizing its victims by the twin burdens of vulnerability to terror and shame for being victimized. The discounting and blaming of women sends its tendrils outward, eventually affecting every soul in human culture. We are one world.
As with all my sisters who’ve shared this experience, healing from this loss has become a central feature of my life. While I bear the cost of resurrecting myself, the man who stalked me persists in our society like an opportunistic virus, draining our cultural vitality one victim at a time, exploiting our ignorance and attitudes and the consequent inadequacies of our judicial and protective systems. I draw a crude parallel between those who stalk women in America and the terrorists who engineered the September 11 attacks. Both take advantage of our vulnerability as an open society. The engineers of the September 11 attacks thrive on their own systems of tribal obligation, international finance, and the unresolved rage that discounts our culture, just as stalkers within our culture exploit systems that discount the feminine half of its population. At the root of both situations—terrorism large and small—is the abuse and subjugation of women.
Marginalized women raise nasty sons, and thus the sickness is perpetuated.
So writing about the big terrorism—terrorism between whole peoples, ideologies, or nations—is a double-edged sword for me. It is horrifying in and of itself. It is also salt in an old wound, because when the “little” terrorism happened to me, no one sent troops to avenge me, and no one beefed up security measures around me. As an American in post-September 11 culture, I mourn the loss of our sense of safety even as I acknowledge that it never truly existed. Madness is as old as mankind. We must not only treat the disease, but also strengthen our societal organism so that it no longer gets sick.
The act of healing, while demanding everything of me, has given me in return a life more filled with meaning. And while I at first feared that experience had stolen my innocence (a confusion borne of that societal conditioning that teaches that the victim is damaged goods), I was to discover that what I had lost was, in fact, ignorance, and that deeper knowledge helps me to release the pain and anger of trauma, and brings a deeper capacity to give and receive love.
There remains the question of vengeance.
Given who I am (a woman living in a culture still based on men’s rights and values) and what I believe (that we are an evolving species with much to learn about our capacity for violence and the causes of it), I am still glad that I took the measures I did to avoid a lethal confrontation. But had he succeeded in cornering me before I was able to escape, I would have willingly used lethal force to stop the attack. And had I the mandate to do it, I would have sought him out and brought him to justice for his atrocities. But justice should not be confused with vengeance. Justice is ending the cause of suffering. The desire for vengeance is an urge felt by those who must heal.
Healing occurs one heart at a time, but one heart can inspire a multitude.
What of the “big” terrorism? Through writing this book, I have learned that there is a connection between African dust and terrorism: That which blights a people brings out the beast of rage and the opportunism that dines on it. We must open our eyes to opportunism at every level. We must empower all. Education is the key.
We live in a time of tall challenges, in which we have increased our numbers beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We live on the cusp of globalization of our economies, in which some profit beyond imagination while others sink into servitude. And we live in a time of great hope and discovery, in which humans enjoy unparalleled freedoms, up to and including escaping the planet that spawned us.
So much is up in the air, just like the dust that blows off Africa.
With great love and respect, I thank you for reading.
Sarah Andrews
September 11, 2002
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As I walked down Sheridan Avenue, I was feeling a mixture of nostalgia and dread. The nostalgia was there because I had spent the embryonic beginnings of my career in geology in the oilfields nearby. The dread was there because of the reasons I had returned.
The air was cold and dry, and the great backdrop of Rattlesnake Mountain loomed like a frozen wave on the western horizon. It was late March, too early for campers and the skiers didn’t come this way, so the wide streets of Cody, Wyoming, were dotted only by a smattering of local pickup trucks. The crush of summer tourism would not begin until May, when the snowplows opened the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park.
I shifted the backpack child carrier, redistributing the weight of the baby girl who was riding in it. “This town was named for Buffalo Bill Cody,” I said, as I continued along the sidewalk, trying to dispel the unpleasant mixture of feelings by chatting with the baby in the habit I had developed when I carried her along on my walks. “Buffalo Bill was a scout who became the first and last of the great Indian Show hucksters. He made a lot of money and built that hotel over there, and named it after his daughter.” We were passing The Irma, a classic Victorian-Western confection that fronted proudly on Sheridan Avenue, the main drag through town. “But when he died, he was flat-busted broke, and the story goes that his widow sold his corpse to pay the bills; true or not, his burial shrine down in Denver is something of a tourist trap. Imagine living your life as best you can only to have your grave become a roadside attraction. But of course, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center was named after him, and if he hadn’t already been dead, he could have certainly held his head up over that.”
Killer Dust Page 32
