"Well, what about all the churches? Don't they care about the environment?"
Robbins shook his head again. "Believe it or not, a lot of folks on the Christian hard right around here are dead set against nature reserves. They think saving the wild environment is just an all-around bad idea. Don't get me wrong. Most evangelicals I know are for conservation. They believe God means for us to save the Creation and God's good green earth in general. But a few extremists are absolutely convinced God means us to do the opposite. They're saying, 'Use it all up, the faster the better, because Jesus is coming. The End of Days is almost here. He'll show up as soon as the planet's messed up a little bit more. The devil wants to keep us all here on earth, and Jesus wants to take us on up to heaven, at least He wants to take the true believers up.' They say that's all written in the Book of Revelation."
"Yeah, that's scary. I've heard something like that on the radio. It's pretty bad."
"Yeah. Well, anyway, it's at least a potential complication. This part of Alabama and the Panhandle next door is about as far right in religion and politics as you're going to find anywhere. I think the extremists are a small minority, fortunately--you'll find them mostly in little churches out in the country--but some of those preaching on the radio are powerful way beyond their numbers. And they come close to promoting violence in the name of God. Like, they say Islam is an evil religion. Or the United States ought to kill Castro or somebody else they say is godless and don't like. It's best to stay clear of them. I'd say don't rile them up if you can avoid it. Don't even get in a conversation with any of them."
"Uncle Cyrus said he'd buy Nokobee if he could afford it."
"Yeah, I'm sure he would. But then--and don't get me wrong--what would he do with it? Anyway, buck up. We've probably got three or four years, maybe more, from what I've heard, before all the serious finagling begins. I hear some of the Jepsons want to hold off until they can get a higher price. Public opinion can change a lot in that period of time. If worse comes to worst, and if it looks like Nokobee goes to Sunderland or any other developer who'll bid higher, then the conservationists in this area will form a special coalition to challenge the development in the courts and in public opinion."
Robbins rose and offered his hand. "Meanwhile, the best you can do for Nokobee is to go on to law school. Your uncle is dead right there. Plan on coming back here. We can use you to help represent nature in the courts. Meanwhile, don't worry about this conversation. I'm not going to say anything to anybody about it. I don't want to cause a rift inside your family, and especially with your Uncle Cyrus."
Raff smiled, nodding his head. "Thank you. I really appreciate it. I feel a little better about things, I guess."
"Okay, good," Robbins said. "Anyway, stay in touch, will you, Raff? I promise to let you know of any really serious developments I hear about, and I hope you can get in on the action when you get back."
30
AFTER HIS CONVERSATIONS with Uncle Cyrus, and then Bill Robbins, Raff resolved not only to go to a law school, but if at all possible to one of the most demanding and best. He converted all of his remaining elective courses to those considered most suitable for prelaw students.
"To tell you the truth, Uncle Fred," he said one day, "it's been pretty easy here, once I got into it. I thought FSU would be some kind of boot camp, like MIT and Caltech were rumored to be. There are some hard courses, all right, but the students know all about those, and they only take them if they're really serious about the subject. I tell you one thing, you don't get a very good idea of what a university is like in a little place like Nokobee High. You've got everything here, if you look around a little. You can make it as hard or as easy as you choose. I suppose it depends on how ambitious you are. I've really liked it here. And now I think I'll do well in law school."
To those close to him, familiar with his indifferent record at the permissive Nokobee County Regional High School, Raff's performance at Florida State University had come as a surprise. He qualified for early election to Phi Beta Kappa. For that Uncle Cyrus sent him congratulations and an expensive Omega watch. His honors thesis on the Anthill Chronicles was widely talked about by those faculty who knew of it to be likely one of the best ever submitted by an undergraduate.
"You could get into any graduate program in the country," Needham told him. "That is, of course, if you decide to stay in biology. It's for sure that if you change your mind about law school, we'll find a place for you here. I don't doubt you'd have enough for your Ph.D. in three, maximum four years.
But Raff's mind could not be diverted now from law school and back into biology. That could be kept for another time. In the fall of his senior year, he applied to a dozen law schools, half in the South and half outside. He had the grades, and he had an unusual science background as an add-on. He'd taken some of the right prelaw courses. He expressed an intention to work on environmental issues, pro bono if need be. He was backed by strong recommendations from faculty members at Florida State University. It did not hurt that as a son of the central Gulf Coast, not known for scholarly achievers, he was a geographical minority.
By April Raff had been accepted by most of the schools. Those rejecting him included, to his surprise, Emory University. The positive responses did include, however, his first choice, Harvard Law School. On hearing the news from Cambridge, his friends and mentors threw a party to cheer him on. Most arrived wearing twin ant antennae made out of wire. Uncle Cyrus sent him a letter of congratulations, as close to ecstatic in tone as the good gray man could manage.
In midsummer, as he was planning to move north, he made one more pilgrimage to Lake Nokobee. He walked its whole perimeter. He halted where he knew one of the resident alligators lived, and caught a glimpse of it, all but eyes and dorsal surface of the head submerged beneath duckweeds. He made a mental note of the ground flora that was in bloom at this time of year, and scanned the big longleaf pines until he saw the flash of a red-cockaded woodpecker traveling from one treetop to another. Before leaving, he silently renewed his pledge to the beloved place.
One week after Labor Day, Ainesley and Marcia drove their son from Clayville to the Mobile Regional Airport for the first air trip of his life. The facility was nowhere close to the international hub envisioned by Cyrus Semmes and the Gulf Gateway Coalition, but busy enough to make the eastern approach to the terminal one of the most congested in the United States. He flew Delta over to Atlanta, was awestruck by the immensity of the airport, and then almost lost as he puzzled his way through to the departure gate for Boston. In order to travel between terminals there, he took his first train ride.
Emerging from Logan Airport in Boston, Raff confronted in the MBTA the first subway of his life. To his embarrassment, the FSU Phi Beta Kappa and Harvard Law School student had to ask three official-looking people in a row, each impatient and surly, to his way of thinking, how to get to Harvard Square. Hauling his heavy suitcase and bent beneath an overladen knapsack, he was humiliated again when he emerged from the exit kiosk and was forced to ask several more people to find his way to the graduate student dormitories on Oxford Street. One of his advisers spoke with a strong East Indian accent. Another, poorly dressed and seemingly frightened by his approach, could respond only in Spanish. Along the way he listened to passersby to see if he could hear the famous Harvard accent.
"There is no such thing as a Harvard accent," his roommate, a black minister's son from Gabon in Africa, said to him when he finally arrived at Richards Hall. "That's not what this place is all about. Welcome to Harvard."
31
HARVARD: THE WORLD'S greatest university, they called it up there. Certainly at least a global university, with a culture as different from that of Clayville, Alabama, as it was possible to get and still remain in the United States. The ambience of Harvard University comes not so much from its profusion of museums and libraries, or the rat's maze of its narrow streets, but from its compression of time and space that speak centuries of history.
Altogether a human anthill, a kaleidoscope of specialists, whose lives are molded to ensure their own well-being through service to the greater good. The most distracting concern to this son of the Gulf Coast was the length and cruelty of the winter. For as long as four months each year, while early darkness falls upon New England each evening, the region is regularly visited by cyclonic nor'easters. The storms spiral northward up the Atlantic Coast, afflicting New England for three days. Saturated with relatively warm moist air upon arrival, they unload heavy rain, sleet, and snow, whipped along by powerful winds. Boston, it turns out, is one of the three windiest cities in America. The nor'easters next pass on out into the North Atlantic, pulling down masses of arctic air upon the hapless citizens. The first day the streets and sidewalks of Cambridge are filled by rain pools and slush. The next day they are coated with black ice and walls of frozen slush. On through the third day and beyond, high winds, familiarly called the Montreal Express, drive the chill factor down while causing more pedestrians to slip and fall on the slick black ice of the strangled walkways.
There are almost no signs of life during this dreadful season, outside of humans in heavy clothing scurrying through the whistling arctic air amid desperate pigeons and house sparrows, aliens of European origin, their feathers fluffed out to keep warm, hopping about in search of rare scraps of food. Raff was reduced to asking, "Why do people stay here? Don't they know any better?"
The exhilaration Raff felt upon his arrival, in the deceptively cheery fall days, was soon darkly balanced by the hollowing sense of alienation. He would never lose it; he would always feel like an outsider. In time, he was to learn that everyone at Harvard is an outsider, or at least feels that way once in a while.
The torrent of Harvard's life spun like a vortex around the new center of Raff's life, the gray stone buildings of the Law School. To step outside his studies and sample it was like trying to sip water from a fire hose. The earnest battalions of smart people and the ideas they promoted were disorienting. Most of the students had achieved intellectual distinction before arriving. Valedictorians and National Merit Scholars were commonplace among the undergraduates. Phi Beta Kappa membership was the rule among the entering graduate students. Ideas were coin of the realm at Harvard, and competition among their champions to express them intimidating.
Before he made the trip north, Raff had comforted himself with the hope that Harvard, while quantitatively different from Florida State University, would prove to be basically the same. Harvard, he thought, might just be FSU on steroids. But he soon learned an important different truth. When any organized system, whether a university, a city, or any assembly of organisms themselves, reaches a large enough size and diverse enough a population, and has enough time to evolve, it also becomes qualitatively different. The reason is elementary: the greater the number of parts interacting with one another, the more the new phenomena that emerge within it, therefore the more surprises student and teacher alike encounter each day, and the stranger and more interesting the world as a whole becomes. Exactly the same is true of ant colonies among different species, as Bill Needham had explained to him at Florida State University. Large colonies, like those of the Nokobee anthills, have complicated division of labor, and the queens are much larger than and more physically different from the workers.
One such phenomenon true to the big and venerable principle, Raff soon discovered on campus, was the Gaia Force, a radical student environmental movement. An announcement in the Crimson announced its first meeting of the fall term.
GAIA FORCE
There will be a meeting at the Lowell House Common Room, Wednesday, September 25, at 8:00 P.M. The Gaia Force, a democratically organized group of concerned students, will discuss NATURE FIRST! FOR THE BENEFIT OF HUMANITY!
The boy from Alabama thought this might be just the group for him. He was after all an environmental radical--well, sort of; at least in Mobile he was.
An added and completely unexpected attraction within Gaia Force, for Raff upon his arrival at the Lowell House meeting, was one JoLane Simpson, a brilliant undergraduate major in social studies who hailed, of all places, from Fayetteville, Arkansas. JoLane's father was an Assembly of Jesus Christ minister, an evangelical locally famous for leading the crusade against atheism, homosexuality, evolution, abortion, socialism, and godless science. JoLane, brought to Harvard with a scholarship on a perfect-A high school record, had by the end of her freshman year rotated 180 degrees from Dad's beliefs. She had deserted her upbringing as a Fine Young Christian Woman and forged her magnolia steel into a spearpoint of socialist revolution. She settled as far to the political left as possible without seeming to be insane--even by the relaxed clinical standards of Harvard.
Yet while urging revolution against unjust regimes such as those in Fayetteville and Cambridge, JoLane Simpson nevertheless remained her father's daughter in fixity of moral outrage and in
rhetorical style. There was no problematic topic about which she did not have a passionate opinion. Her greatest zeal was reserved for destroyers of the environment, whom she had witnessed operating openly in her native state.
JoLane declared that she would never vote. She decreed that no national leader, including her fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, who had recently finished his presidency, and even the sainted Ralph Nader, was capable of launching the revolution necessary to save humanity. She tried to drop her Southern accent, which to her sounded ignorant and, worse, politically conservative. But she still embarrassed herself occasionally by an accidental "y'all," "much obliged," "fixin' to," and, equally stigmatic, "wont" for "want," "git" for "get," and "ast" for "ask."
When Raff showed up at the Gaia Force reception, JoLane went straight to him and introduced herself. It was the last thing a proper young lady from Arkansas would do, and the first thing expected of a completely liberated young woman from what was often called the People's Republic of Cambridge.
"Hi, I'm JoLane Simpson, and I'm very glad you've come to our meeting tonight."
"Well, thank you, ma'am," Raff replied, in a still-undiluted Alabama accent, "I'm interested in any organization that's working for the environment."
A Southerner, thought JoLane. She took hold of Raff's arm, got him a drink, led him to a corner of the room, and worked him quickly into a lively conversation. She had to admit to herself that although she was now a global citizen who embraced all peoples, she still suffered twinges of homesickness. And anyway, Raff was in Law School. This guy might be politically useful in future Gaia activities. Most of the other Gaians were majors in English and sociology.
JoLane kept Raff out of reach of the rest of the small crowd gathering, while together they excitedly explored their respective backgrounds and philosophies. JoLane sized up Raff's qualities quickly and favorably. He was not only a fellow environmentalist, but one with a well-defined mission. He was a real down-deep Southerner with a way of talking that, in spite of her un-Southern asseverations, comforted her no end. He was a somewhat older man too, not frivolously excitable, and he wore a jacket and tie. Raff kept his hair trimmed and, most importantly, openly expressed doubts about his own Episcopalian faith.
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