Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  What was it about Brights Grove?

  Award-winning public schools prepared students to uphold its vision of sustainability and to become self-reliant, productive citizens. Brights Grove parks were biologically diverse with seasonal blossoms and fragrances and green meadows to grace the imaginations of children who could safely walk and cycle and play there. Small plazas and pocket parks dotted the town center and the manicured neighborhoods. People gathered in these places to celebrate birthdays and holidays. Boulevards and lanes, shaded by stately native trees and an understory of shrubs that bloomed throughout spring and summer, harbored bike lanes and safe crossings.

  Brights Grove’s strong sense of place was reflected in the charming public buildings and well-kept offices, shops, and homes. Small businesses, locally owned banks, and a vibrant farmer’s market perpetuated local wealth and sustained good jobs. Foresighted town councils provided incentives for citizens to seek energy independence. Solar panels sparkled on many roofs; wind turbines could be seen on surrounding hills. There was a mini-hydro system in the river. About a third of Brights Grove’s electric power derived from renewable sources.

  Looking outward from the town’s central green, as far as the eye could see, were small farms with wood lots, grain fields, vineyards, orchards, livestock, and diverse landscapes protecting watersheds which, in turn, sustained the farms. Tributary streams and the Wisconsin River flowed beneath ribbons of riverine vegetation giving shelter to communities of mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish. Coyotes howled and whippoorwills called on moonlit summer nights as nocturnal animals scurried across the fields. In season, deer, wild turkeys, woodcocks, waterfowl, and black bear passed through the Brights Grove School Forest and Prairie Wetlands, a large acreage extending westward from the elementary school to Lake Amelia.

  Midwestern travelers came great distances to walk the cobbled streets of the quaint business district with its shops and galleries. They also came to see the great migrations of waterfowl in spring and fall and to fish the rivers and streams. In summer people spread picnics and sat in their lawn chairs at the Shakespeare Festival and weekly concerts on the green. A jazz and blues fest at the riverfront attracted performers and audiences from all over the country. Visitors relaxed in the town’s locally owned hotels and inns and sampled locally grown foods and wines and sipped craft brews in the pubs and restaurants.

  In all, Brights Grove was a rare place of enlightenment where people respected one another and determinedly worked to protect and sustain their slice of the natural world and their local economy. There was neither an elite upper class nor downtrodden poor. Unlike many communities in North America, Brights Grove had a prosperous middle class and had achieved some gold standards of sustainability. Brights Grove, its inhabitants were convinced, was a locally resilient community.

  Then the world turned upside down. Citizens of Brights Grove looked in horror beyond their beloved town to witness terrifying things which soon rippled into Brights Grove itself. Goods on the shelves at Miller’s supermarket dwindled until the Miller family could do nothing but shutter the store. Gasoline deliveries were intermittent before drying up for good. Vehicles ground to a halt. Even when rare deliveries of gasoline arrived, they were tainted. People found their trucks, tractors, and cars failing. Without replacement parts, lubricants, and tires, vehicles became useless. The banks closed when the dollar crashed. When the electric grid sputtered and died, and the Internet, mobile, and telephone services shut down, credit systems collapsed. Control systems to sustain power from solar panels, wind turbines, and the mini-hydro system soon also began to fail. As supply chains withered and tourism ceased, inns and restaurants trimmed their services and menus until nobody cared, or came.

  Those who survived the blistering summers and super storms of an increasingly capricious climate, intent as they were on growing food, had no time for community governance, churches, or the farmers market. Confronted by a climate that decimated orchards, vineyards, and grain fields, and killed chickens and livestock, many starved. Potholed roads encroached upon by weeds, autumn olive, and multiflora rose stood as grimly sculpted alleyways of browned and withered trees beyond which was no man’s land. Brights Grove School Forest and Prairie Wetlands, annually blackened by wild fires, became a sinkhole of erosion and death. Lifeless streams ceased to flow; the Wisconsin River ran dry in mid-summer. Barebones subsistence was the new normal for even the most accomplished gardeners and farmers. Survival came down to looking after one’s self and family. Community spirit had long been displaced by a mean-spirited lack of civility and lawlessness.

  Exacerbated by human vanity, ignorance, and hubris, Brights Grove had fallen victim to the recurring cycles in nature and commerce. Like phases of human life from birth to death, these cycles proceed predictably and operate at many scales and time frames. The little town’s three generation journey toward sustainability collapsed under the weight of a tragically changing climate, toppling structures, and far away disintegrating financial systems. As materials, energy resources, information systems, and indebtedness became more tightly interconnected, human institutions and natural systems became more and more rigid and less and less able to adapt. The political economies of nations and international corporations and cartels, the communications infrastructure and institutions they depended on, the rapidly changing global climate and associated disease vectors all failed simultaneously.

  Dependence on historic ways of doing things and reliance on inflexible institutions and structures made the world beyond Brights Grove and ultimately the town itself painfully vulnerable. Relatively small disturbances pushed everything — all the old ways and some new ones — over the cliff. The inevitable collapse had happened.

  Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter named this scenario “the creative gale of destruction”.1 Collapse, he believed, of capitalist enterprises is inevitable and good, for it releases new energies, resources, and creative potential for rebirth and reorganization. Ecologists have chronicled the same story in the collapse, rebirth, and evolution of species and ecosystems. Brights Grove may be a mythical town but the progression of human and ecological systems toward an abysmal future is anything but imagined. It may become the stark reality of our children and grandchildren. What does this cyclic progression portend? Why do we fail to understand its inevitability? Can we come to understand that beyond our almost certain fate, rebirth is possible? What will come next? These are the life and death questions I seek to answer in this book.

  2

  In the copse of Ohio birches, he lay aside the book, and fell deeply asleep, his soul at rest in big bluestem and Indian grass. When he opened his eyes, the shade had lengthened. Clouds had gathered on the southwestern horizon. Humidity had risen. Ozone. He heard thunder in the distance. As always, he awoke pondering their plight, or was it their wealth of opportunity? As though preparing ground for tillage, he tried to clear his troubled mind, to hear himself think; to envision Kate, her life, her final note; to recall the high purpose and chaos of that fateful semester in 2013 and what had since befallen the world; and now to embrace the obstacles that daily challenged survivors.

  In quiet repose, two decades after all hell broke loose, he reminded himself of the natural regeneration of this little valley. That times had been cruel for humans grabbed him by the throat every day: the losses incalculable, ineffable, his community down to a few dozen souls. He could write verses to rival Othello’s lamentation. Though the forests looked more like North Carolina than Ohio, the wild ones — the birds and soils and plants and animals, the river, and probably microorganisms and pathogens too, certainly the mosquitoes — were doing fine. Even as his heart grieved over all that was irreclaimable, it throbbed at the thought of reviving landscapes. But which of these two was more significant? Which yielded hope to abide another day? The resilience of nature, Stefan decided. If we make it, we are at best underlings in this picture.

  Across the river, mourning doves began their evening
coos, interrupting yet another aimless reverie and calling him to what he must do before he slept. A bald eagle flapped noisily out of an oak on the far bank as he rose and began to amble along the river toward the ones he loved.

  TWO

  Stefan’s World

  The academy, in short, is a safer haven than it ought to be for the professionally comfortable, cool, and upwardly mobile. It is far less often than it should be a place for passionate and thoughtful critics. Professionalization has rendered knowledge safe for power, thereby making it more dangerous than ever to the larger human prospect.

  — David Orrii

  1

  IN THOSE DAYS, as in the mythical Brights Grove, many were the tales of the world’s unraveling. But few explained why a mighty progression had ensnarled a whole civilization and how a tiny cluster of people whimpered, yes, but also arose to defy the odds. This is a tale that begs to be told if only to salve the souls of dear survivors.

  Our story begins in Argolis, a college town nestled in a valley in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio. One autumn morning at the onset of an academic year, a tall, young professor strolls out of a quiet neighborhood replete with restored early twentieth century homes shaded by spreading hundred-year-old maples and oaks. On this resplendent morning he walks briskly toward campus. Along the way, he passes by the Victorian buildings converted to small businesses and professional offices; the ramshackle clap–board cottages and seedy buildings converted to student apartments; leaves of orange, red, and saffron gathering on the pavement.

  Would it be coffee from Jurassic Perk (bold brews to awaken your reptilian brain) or Progressive Perc (cutting-edge socially responsible and sustainable coffee)? This morning he chooses Jurassic and nods at vaguely familiar faces in a back booth. At the counter, a sleepy barista, a coed with a come-hither glint. Smiling, he orders a dark roast, thanks her profusely, hustles out.

  Aiming toward a spacious green quadrangle, he passes two so-called book stores. In 2013, instead of books, they hawk dazzling arrays of university paraphernalia and electronics. In the windows of University Book Store, for example, apropos of the season, hang bright orange football jerseys, tees, fleeces, and hats. Like the Oregon Ducks, the Gilligan University of Ohio Geese are perpetually derided by fans of universities whose falcons, red hawks, bison, and cougars could and usually did turn them into piles of feathers.

  The main business district of Argolis, Ohio, referred to as “uptown” because it perches atop a flattened bluff overlooking the emerald valley of the Shawnee River, is adjacent to and partly surrounded by campus. This has led to perpetual town-gown clashes, especially during Halloween weekend. One business, whose windows were shattered in the ruckus, carried on its website the slogan, “just a stone’s throw from campus”. But the risks of entrepreneurship here are more than offset by ready access to twenty thousand consumers walking by every day.

  Argolis was settled by New Englanders heading west on flatboats after the Revolutionary War. Days of boredom on the wide, lazy river drifting from Pittsburgh toward Cincinnati and Louisville prompted some families to hop off where the Shawnee poured into the Big River. Here they began their new life. The town’s name was either a corruption of “people from Argyle”, the region in western Scotland from which many hailed two generations earlier, or a classical Greek place mentioned in the Iliad. Settlers tilled the rich alluvial soils and built mills to grind their corn and oats. They planted apples, pears, peaches, plums. They made bricks, cut timber, mined salt and coal. Soon the small village grew into a vibrant riverboat stopover with saloons, an opera house, schools, brothels, rival churches, and a large plot ordained in 1787 to be a university. It opened in 1800 as the Territorial Institute. In 1835, the State of Ohio renamed it in honor of Denis Pádraig Gilligan, its first professor, an Irish-American philosopher who reputedly failed to make the cut at Harvard.

  The northwest corner of campus is bounded by the two original main streets: Clayborne, named for Revolutionary War hero Rufus Edmund Clayborne, and Federal, reflecting Ohio’s pride as the seventeenth state admitted to the union in 1803. These became the locus of the city’s central business district and, over the generations, the launch pad for student protests and confrontations with constabularies of the times. In 1971 folk singer Jude Hawkins, who attended but did not graduate from Gilligan, sang “There’s blood on these bricks” — the year his song, Gilligan’s Graveyard, made it into the top twenty.

  At the light where West Clayborne meets Federal, the professor turns toward campus. He crosses Centennial Quad with its iconic twins, Gilligan and Stiggins Halls (dating to 1814) and several other Georgian and Federal brick buildings, their deep-set, tall multi-paned windows with classic triangular pediments and their bell towers and clocks. Centennial Quad is one of five campus districts, each centered on a rectangle, each with architecturally coherent resident halls, academic buildings, and recreation and dining facilities. Each Quad is named for a prominent alumnus who by no quirk of fate had surnames that suggested points on the compass. How this happened was never clear. Nonetheless, South of Centennial Quad was Southwell Quad; East, Eastman; West, Westbrooke; north, Northam.

  He departs Centennial Quad, dodges a cyclist, and slips into a shortcut to Southwell Quad, where engineering, sciences, the med school, and agriculture are clustered. Crossing Windham Street, he comes to McWhorter Hall, an uncharacteristically graceless building clearly out of the Federal-Georgian mold. McWhorter conforms to no architectural genre anyone could pin down. It was built in the 1960s, an era when brutalism seemed to capture the state architect’s imagination (or lack of it). McWhorter is an eyesore and a risky place, its foundation failing, its windows agape, its heating and cooling systems wasteful and unreliable. But it is the academic home of the professor, known in those days as one great teacher.

  2

  On the third floor of McWhorter, on the bench between his office and hers, lounged Sophie Knowles. She wore hip-hugging jeans to her ankles, no socks, a blaze-orange shirt, the kind hunters wear in deer season, atop a lime-green tank top, and pink and blue plaid sneakers. Her hipster-hunting ensemble was a notch or two more inventive and far more colorful than his academic grunge: a tropical parrot flashing pheromones at a lackluster backwoodsman.

  “Curriculum Committee, next Tuesday at four,” she chirped.

  He smiled back. “Okay, can’t wait.”

  Sophie was one of three women in a school of more than twenty faculty. As a hydro-geo-climatologist, with credentials from the Universities of Michigan and South Australia, she had earned an honors degree in geology and civil engineering at Michigan by age 20. Then she flitted off to Adelaide for her PhD. After post-docs in Australia and Indonesia, she was the top candidate of more than fifty applicants for a new position at Gilligan. The tall professor wondered how somebody five years his junior managed such an appealing hybrid of accomplishment and humility. Though her brain seethed with algorithms and she could rip through screens to compile maps in minutes, deep down she had more than a dash of girlhood, especially when speaking of her dogs, a pig, goats, geese, ponies, who knows what, back in the hills someplace. She was the millennial version of somebody you might have read about in Mother Earth News.

  “I’ll plug that meeting into your calendar, if you like,” Sophie offered.

  What to do with this caged bird? He opened his palm, gave her a pen, and nodded toward his hand, “Jot it down here. I never open that QuickCal thing.”

  The professor was certainly not a Luddite. But digital intrusions like QuickCal, the university calendar that enabled anybody to impose their will on his life, made him cringe. He preferred to cruise through his days serenely, as he once had in Africa where he never wore a watch and was content if people were a couple of hours late or never arrived because the bus broke down. To that extent, especially compared to Sophie, he was seriously out-of-step with the digital age of incessant drivel glutting up face-to-face communication. Instead of filling his calendar, he commande
d an insurgency to sabotage calendar saturation, to sanctify his days.

  After writing on his palm, Sophie, giggling in the act, tilted her head toward him and turned her mouth southward as though she’d swallowed something rancid. “What are you thinking, Stefan? It’s just stupid to take a stand on QuickCal. If you want to attract attention to yourself and your vulnerability around here, why not stage a sit-in at the provost’s office? Face it, buddy. You work in a cut-throat place driven by administrators and legislators with small minds, big backsides, and harsh bottom lines. They want to see you punching the QuickCal time clock; they want to lock you into their tracking systems.”

  He only half listened, his mind someplace distant. Sophie’s scold had arrived on the same frequency as the football coach’s press conferences. Ducking into his office, he failed to notice a ruffled waif of a student sneaking past on her way to work. He called back to Sophie. “QuickCal is a sad commentary on these times, a bleeping misfortune, a smear on the academy’s storied history.”

  “A trifle over the top there,” she rejoined.

  In times like these, the man often baffled folks, especially his students, by reciting verses of his muse, thirteenth century Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi. For example:

  This is not a day for asking questions,

  not a day on any calendar.

  This day is conscious of itself.

  This day is a lover, bread and gentleness,

  more manifest than saying can say.iii