Late-K Lunacy
Page 46
As the people of our beloved community began to file into the circle, Stefan bowed his head, as if to pray, though he had never prayed nor even aspired to pray. He pressed and rubbed his skull with both hands. I plunked down next to him. He told me he was summoning hope for the kgotla and musing on the irony of having to deal with the obverse of overpopulation. He opened his eyes and swept them around the circle. He nodded and smiled as people spread their blankets, engaging with each other in easy conversation, the hum of community on a summer morning beneath a cirrus-laced silky blue sky, a breeze from the east, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and milkweed, redolent and intoxicating.
Here now on Stefan’s other side, Em, offering us a tender hug; Nick, still a force of nature, a bear hug; their lanky children, Jason, 18, and Adrienne Tafani, 14. On his woman Melissa’s arm, Boss Hays, 79, swaggered across the courtyard to this day oozing copious measures of piss and vinegar. “Got yer bible?” he asked. Stefan waved his copy of Over the Cliff. Astrid and José, the odd couple whose sharp minds we had cherished since classroom days, settled to his left. “Yo Stefan,” José said with a subtle shift of his hips, a balletic move. “Yo,” he called back. Astrid, trim, bright-eyed, grey strands in a single long braid brushing her backside, savoring non-conformity against all odds. She waved and blew him a kiss. Astrid taught the people permaculture. She was the single reason we knew how to grow enough healthy food, year after year. José insured that all of us engaged in drama and dance, though we so far have not performed “Hair”.
Other families followed: Greg Pappas, the student of Greek extraction, and his partner Linh, a Vietnamese American, and their son, Danh, 8; Manuel Diaz, ‘my man’ and our daughter, Samantha Maria, 6. “Hola!” said Stefan. Manuel, 36, came to Gilligan Island seven years after the collapse. He claimed to have been the last soul in Pomerance, having landed there at sixteen an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. In the old days, he served up enchiladas and tacos at El Grande Restaurant on the Big River. Alone and lonely, having seen no traffic on the river for several years, one day Manuel herded his flock of goats and sheep up the Shawnee valley. He believed he was the last human on Earth. I brushed up my Spanish. We fell in love. After one miscarriage, we were granted the gift of Sam, obviously named for my dear sister who died in Fargo in 2018.
Sean Ralston and Todd Avery strolled into the circle with Zach Grayson and Mikaela Santos and their son, Esteban, 12. Todd was village doctor, his clinic in the front room of their home. Sean looked after the water system, assuring ample supplies of clean household water (bearing no unfriendly microbes). He came over to Stefan, squatted down, placed his hands on Stefan’s shoulders and whispered, “Good luck herding these cats.” And finally, Weston Churchill, Abby Weaver and their son, Running Bear, 6, the most recently born surviving child. They were accompanied by David Hedlund-Holmes, 16, with his mom, Lara, just a bit unsteady, grasping his arm. Abby announced that the two missing community members, might not make it. It depended on Portia, a nanny goat working on the birth of twins. We applauded.
I swept my gaze around the circle, noting the lovely blends of these adults and their children, all off-white in some sense. They were the future, if there was one. A tribe of cinnamon people. Their parents, including Manuel and me, sturdy survivors of the pandemic and multiple other hazards, were entering middle age. Yikes, I just celebrated 41! Boss at 79, Melissa, 63, and Stefan, 53, constituted the elder generation. So cherished, this “family”. I celebrated daily these people bonded by circumstances in this the harshest of human times with many scarcities but no shortage of love.
Stefan called the kgotla to order. Boss pulled his flute from its pouch to call the owls and birds and wood spirits in resonating tones across the valley and into the sun-dappled forest on the ridge towering above the river. Melissa followed with an invocation. “Oh, universal spirit, help us seek your wisdom and guidance and with each other speak truth and listen carefully and reverently. And may we come to choices that will serve us and our children in these times of resurrection and for all times to come.” Stefan then spoke words of remembrance for community members no longer with us: people like Burt Zielinski, Sophie Knowles, Marilyn Shesky, Mitchell Redlaw and Beth Samuels, Julianna, Jason, Frank, and others as he read from a tattered memorial journal. Some minutes of silence followed before he passed the talking stick to Abby, sitting to his right.
The kgotla began. About an hour into deliberations, I noticed something startling. Light seemed to have returned to Lara’s eyes. She seemed more erect, more animated. When it was her turn to speak, she found her voice. She formed hesitant but coherent arguments, uttering more words in a few minutes than we had heard from her in years. She sought assurance that she could be a participant in the resolution of their plight. People wondered whether she would be strong enough. She would hear none of our doubts. David, her son, smiling through tears, wrapped his arm around her. “Mom is back,” he proclaimed.
Just before noon, Stefan declared that he believed we had arrived at consensus. He asked Astrid to put into words her sense of the kgotla.
Consulting her scribbled notes, Astrid reported:
“The kgotla on this twenty-first day of the sixth month of the year 2034, the summer solstice, gathered to consider the question of whether and how the people of Gilligan Island might find other human communities and entice some of their young to join our people and become mated with our rising generation. While passing the talking stick around the circle, our people, from our senior-most, Boss, to our youngest, Running Bear, spoke their minds and hearts. Running Bear stated that he wanted more kids to play with.”
“We agree that a party of six, comprising Jason, David, and Macy, and led by Nick, Em, and Hannah shall travel northward in the coach drawn by Henrique and Benoit. Their mission shall be to seek other human settlements. Although it may be a dangerous trek, they will proceed in peace unarmed but for hunting bows. A family on a flatboat on the Big River two years ago told Hannah, Linh, and myself, who were picking blackberries by the river with Samantha and Danh, that there were people on the shores of Lake Erie. That shall be the destination. The people assent to the provisioning of this expedition which shall set forth no later than the fourteenth day of the seventh month.”
3
The streets were empty and still. Stefan circled the weedy uptown district and strolled around the edges of Centennial Quad, now a tangle of undergrowth and downed trees — way too depressing a scene for me. I had not ventured into the Argolis ruins for at least a decade. Denis Pádraig Gilligan, ghost-white in pigeon shit, stood tall nonetheless. Stiggins, its roof trusses exposed, windows gaping, was open to the outdoors. Its twin, Gilligan Hall, looked like a great green dragon enveloped by kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle. The university had achieved its goal of carbon neutrality by the mid-2030s. Some solace there, Stefan mused. Brownlow Library loomed staunchly in the background, a bastion of a civilization now lost. I remembered our incursions, through broken windows, to pilfer books. How ironic. Yet how rich the rewards: a patina of enlightenment to our rough-hewn days. After dinner readings of Dickens under the stars. Our chance to dream as we sophomores once had dreamed.
He descended Harrison Hill and veered away from campus into the near east neighborhoods. He peered at collapsing front porches and into darkened houses and apartments, vines and vermin invading, shells of home and hearth. He stepped over tangled brambles crawling across sidewalks and streets, into abandoned vehicles, a rusted baby carriage, a Cub Cadet: a maple sapling up through it. He felt a need to be alone. But this was a larger dose of abandonment than he could swallow: a ghostly place bereft of human life. He found himself on Spruce Street and came upon her place. He had not been here in two decades. Could he bear it? Doors hung open on rusty hinges, tilted at opposite angles, creaking in the searing summer breeze. He climbed the stairs, strewn with leaves, the droppings of small mammals, accumulations of black dust. He wandered through the rooms, resonant with her memory. Her s
hadow hovered across a moonlit wall. He could imagine being with her, here.
He stood in silence facing the kitchen. He heard Todd urgently calling for more boiling water. He heard her screams, moments of silence, the wail of a baby. He rushed into the room. Todd, blood to his elbows, cradled a squealing red being. Take her, he begged. She’s bleeding out, he stuttered. Breathing shallow. Stefan, the child.
Cracked faux leather furniture, covered in dust, the heat of the subtropical eve, the ghastly memories, seized his throat. He could barely breathe. Frayed curtains blew inward. Indecipherable knick-knacks and books, candles, framed photos with broken glass, stacks of mouse-riddled papers and files mute on shelves. Broken windows invited all manner of life. Indiana bats hung from the ceiling. Something skittered across the floor. A pair of swifts flew from their nest on a bookshelf. The scent of love once hovered. Now, the air, dank of dust and molds, mildews and rat feces.
Standing there, an intruder from another age, he tried to reduce his life to its essentials, to force from it the pain and bleakness. Omega. It was like repeatedly passing his thoughts through a distiller, evaporating and condensing components from the past, their disorder and loss, leaving numbness and oblivion, heart-rending dread. He worried of days ahead, the inevitable unwinding of minutes and hours, the expedition north, the disquieting needs of the people. Water seeping through ceilings and wallboard, the press of decades, the decrepitude of civilization’s failed experiment. In the solitude of this unholy scene, he found a tortured peace.
He descended into the sultry night. Across the hills and hollows and through the empty streets, he heard barred owls calling. He watched July clouds scudding past a waning moon. An hour later, he plodded past Manuel’s and my place toward his cabin tucked away at the end of a side street. He came over the rise. In the moonlight, he beheld a gauzy figure swaying gracefully across the porch, a tall being in bare feet, dancing sensuously. Her tawny hair swished freely across her bare shoulders, her wide cinnamon eyes alight, her sculpted face aglow, palpable across and through the deep shadows.
She called his name.
“Dad?”
“I’m home, Kate.”
DEDICATED to Stefan Friemanis,
my mentor, lifelong friend,
purveyor of hope,
and font of the wisdom
I cherish and hunger for.
I present you, Stefan,
this accounting of those momentous
months so many hard years past.
Hannah McGibbon
July 5, 2034
Notes
1. Joseph A. Schumpeter. Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Floyd, Virginia: Impact Books, 1942.
Return
2. Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, p. 9.
Return
3. F. Westley. “Mercury Contamination in Grassy Narrows, Ontario, Canada.” In Panarchy: Understanding Transformation in Human and Natural Systems. Lance H. Gunderson & C.S. Holling Ed. Covelo: Island Press, 2002, p. 109.
Return
4. Complexity Science and Public Policy. John L. Manion Lecture. www.homerdixon.com
Return
5. Complexity Science and Public Policy
Return
6. Silent Spring, p. 6.
Return
7. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, p. 245.
Return
8. Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Ingenuity Gap. New York: Vintage Books, 2002.
Return
9. Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2002.
Return
10. http://sustainablescale.org
Return
11. Holling, Gunderson, & Ludwig, 49.
Return
12. Ibid., 50.
Return
13. Complexity Science and Public Policy, John L. Manion Lecture, www.homerdixon.com.
Return
14. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/30/wildlife-population-decline_n_5905834.html
Return
15. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Viking, 2007.
Return
16. Carson, op cit., 265.
Return
17. For example: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin, 2005; John Michael Greer. The Long Descent: A Users Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. New Society, 2008; Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Island Press, 2008; James Howard Kuntsler, The Long Emergency. Atlantic Monthly, 2005; Martin Reese, Our Final Hour. Basic Books, 2003; Michael C. Ruppert, Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money and a Post Peak Oil World. Chelsea Green, 2009; Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, 1988.
Return
18. www.homerdixon.com
Return
19. The Fate of the Species. New York: Bloomsbury, 164.
Return
20. Carson, op cit., 171.
Return
21. Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies. University of Washington Press, 1964, 235.
Return
22. Burton P. Zielinski. Climate Nightmares: The Coming Catastrophe. Redwood City: Cyclotron, 2011.
Return
23. The Fate of the Species. New York: Bloomsbury, 56.
Return
24. Guterl, op cit., 27.
Return
25. Guterl, op cit., 90.
Return
26. Codi Yeager-Kozacek, Global Grain Reserves are Low; Legacy of US Drought. Circle of Blue. http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2013/world/global-grain-reserves-are-low-legacy-of-u-s-drought/
Return
27. Thomas Verra, Elyana Sanchez and Katja Nickleby. “Brazilian Vulnerability to Shocks to its Food System.” Annals of South American Food Security (forthcoming).
Return
28. Guterl, op cit., 26; Reference: John Kelly, The Great Mortality, HarperCollins, 2005, xiv.
Return
29. Bloomsbury, 269.
Return
30. Thomas Homer-Dixon. Our Panarchic Future. Worldwatch Magazine (March 2009). http://rs.resalliance.org/2009/02/13/our-panarchic-future-worldwatch-institute/.
Return
31. Sigrid Hazeltine Grossman, The Dystopia of Hope, Lieberman, 1999, 229.
Return
32. Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Island Press, 2008, 22.
Return
33. Lisl Mueller, “Hope.” Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Louisiana State University Press, 1996, 103.
Return
34. Historian Eric Hobsbawm’s term. Quoted in Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down, 13.
Return
35. The Dream of the Earth. Sierra Club Books, 1988, 2.
Return
36. Holling, Gunderson, & Ludwig, ibid., 14.
Return
37. Silent Spring, With an Introduction by Vice-President Al Gore. Houghton Mifflin, 1994, 296-297
Return
i. Terry Tempest Williams: Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape. Pantheon Books, 1995, 11
Return
ii. David Orr: Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Island Press, 1994, 101
Return
iii. Virtually all Rumi couplets, quotes, and lines are drawn from Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition. Harper One, 2004
Return
iv. Mark Edmundson: Why Teach: In Defense of a Real Education. Bloomsbury, 2013, 45
Return
v. Adrian Parr: Hijacking Sustainability. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009
Return
vi. Joshua Lederberg, biologist. This quote frames the 1995 Warner Brothers film, Outbreak, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, and Morgan Freeman
Return
&
nbsp; vii. Rumi: The Illuminated Rumi. Translations by Coleman Barks, Illustrations by Michael Green. Broadway Books, 1997, 33
Return
viii. Edward Abbey and David Peterson: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast. Milkweed Editions, 2007, 287
Return
ix. Bill Hayward and Dave Foreman: Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Abbzug Press, 1993
Return
x. Hays: Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hays, Nineteenth President of the United States. Kessinger Publishing, 2010
Return
xi. Robin Burcell: The Bone Chamber. Harper, 2010
Return
xii. Grateful thanks again, to that grandfatherly man at the helm of GUO who gave unselfishly of his time to my chronicling, then gave feedback on drafts of this and the following two chapters, which, I am sad to admit, collected two decades of dust and now come to light long after that dear man departed this troubled land
Return
xiii. Would that we had known then what I am about to divulge! Of course, the hindsight of decades is usually crystalline compared to the fog of the moment
Return
xiv. Ranier Maria Rilke: “The Man Watching” Selected Poems of Ranier Maria Rilke. Translated with commentary by Robert Bly, Perennial Editions, 1981
Return
xv. William Stafford: Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems. Kim Stafford, editor. Graywolf Press, 2014, 87
Return
xvi. The idea of a "civil disobedience test" is put forth in: Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001
Return
xvii. My principle source is Henry Carton’s testimony during impeachment hearings in Columbus late that year
Return
xviii. “Age of Aquarius” song written for the 1967 musical Hair, lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni; later recorded by the band 5th Dimension in 1969