Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  For information on a potential oil crash, I am indebted to Richard Heinberg, particularly his books The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, 2003, and Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, 2009. See also the 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia to the CIA, U.S. Treasury, and U.S. Department of Energy that says “A series of major project delays and accidents… over the last couple of years is evidence that Saudi Aramco [the Saudi national oil company] is having to run harder to stay in place—to replace the decline in existing production.”* For more on government subsidies to oil companies see, for example, “As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Subsidies,” by David Kocieniewski, the New York Times, 3 July 2010.

  The idea that the melting of the methane hydrate shelf, by which is generally meant the East Siberian Shelf, might cause an irreversible climate change loop is to my knowledge most closely associated with the work of Natalia Shakhova, PhD, of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. See, for example, “Methane Hydrate Feedbacks,” by NE Shakhova and IP Semiletov, in Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications, Sommerkorn and Hassol, eds., 2009.

  For a counter-argument (granted, pre-Fukushima) saying nuclear power will become a viable replacement for oil, see Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, by Gwyneth Cravens, 2007. For a counter-counter argument I recommend the chapter on Three Mile Island in Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, by James R. Chiles, 2002, which is a great book anyway and introduced me to Karl Weick and “cosmology episodes.” For moral support and ongoing updates I am thankful to the weekly feature on nuclear power on Harry Shearer’s radio broadcast, Le Show.

  For the parts of catastrophic paleontology that are actually paleontology, I owe thanks to T. Rex and the Crater of Doom: The story that waited 65 million years to be told—how a giant impact killed the dinosaurs, and how the crater was discovered, by Walter Alvarez, 2008, which is readable and authoritative and also an unfortunate example of the modern tendency to put Internet search words into the titles of books. Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, discovered that the climate changes that killed the dinosaurs came from a six-mile-wide asteroid plowing into the ground in Chicxulub, Mexico. Also helpful was Bones Rock!: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Paleontologist, by Peter Larson and Kristin Donnan, 2004.

  The pictograph of a serpentlike creature menacing a moose exists in the Boundary Waters exactly as I have described it, but the location given for it in chapter 12 is fictional. Its actual location is Darky Lake.*

  “It’s a cold hard world, love, and these are cold hard times” is, obviously, a quote from “Cold Hard Times,” by Lee Hazlewood.

  The 100,000 golf balls on the bottom of Loch Ness figure is from “The Burden and Boon of Lost Golf Balls,” by Bill Pennington, the New York Times, 2 May 2010. The golf balls were located in a 2009 submersible sonar search for the monster.

  For insight into American small towns plagued by meth, including that meth gangsters sometimes take low-level factory jobs as cover, I am particularly indebted to Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding, 2009. Methland is excellent and makes a particularly compelling argument about how meth appeals to the working poor by initially allowing them to work longer hours.

  Sensei Dragonfire is of course Wendi Dragonfire of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, 9th Dan Shuri-Ryu Karate, 2nd Dan Modern Arnis.

  Successful replacement of avulsed (knocked-out) teeth, with regeneration of nerves, vasculature, and even periodontal ligaments, is indeed possible.* The difficulty of doing controlled experiments on tooth replacement in humans makes statistics hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s worth a shot, and numerous-but-too-revolting-to-cite experiments on animals have demonstrated the validity of the principle. In “Milk as an interim storage medium for avulsed teeth,” by Frank Courts, William Mueller, and Henry Tabeling, Pediatric Dentistry 5:3, 183, 1983, the authors show the superiority of milk as a transport medium over air, water, and the patient’s saliva.

  I don’t remember where I read or heard that gynecologists used to operate blind and don’t know whether it’s true.

  The statistics on cranial bleeding that Dr. McQuillen cites are from Neurology Secrets, by Loren A. Rolak, MD, 4th ed., or at least from my understanding of that book. Also consulted for the discussion were “Factors Associated with Cervical Spine Injury in Children After Blunt Trauma,” by Julie C. Leonard et al., online version of Annals of Emergency Medicine, 1 Nov 2010, and “Low-risk criteria for cervical-spine radiography in blunt trauma: A prospective study,” by Jerome R. Hoffman et al., Annals of Emergency Medicine, Volume 21, Issue 12, Dec 1992. As always, if you take any part of this or any other novel as medical advice, you are a dumb fucking idiot.

  According to The Manga Guide to Calculus, by H. Kojima and S. Togami, 2009, the formula relating temperature to the frequency of cricket chirps is Fc = 7(Tc) - 30, with Fc being the frequency of chirping and Tc the temperature in centigrade. Note that the same equation in Fahrenheit (Tf) looks unwieldy at first (Tf = 9/5[(Fc + 30)/7] + 32)) but reduces to Fc/0.26 + 39.71, which is usably close (particularly if crickets are less than perfectly accurate) to Tf = 4(Fc) + 40, or Tf = 4(Fc + 10). The metric system still rules, though. As Judith Stone says, “If God wanted us to use the metric system, he would have given us ten fingers and ten toes.”*

  The author of the “Funny how it’s ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love…’ ” pickup line has given permission for its use here but has requested to remain anonymous. He (I’ll give you that much) is thanked.

  Americans clearly have a strong interest in preventative medicine, since they spend $34 billion on unproven and unregulated health “supplements” annually,* just not in preventative medicine that actually works. American doctors, meanwhile, technically can bill for discussing preventative medicine with their patients, but can’t actually make a living that way. The way to get paid as a doctor in the U.S. is to do as many “procedures” as possible to repair or diagnose already-existing conditions.* Since the doctor getting paid to do the procedure is usually the doctor deciding whether the procedure is necessary, there’s an obvious potential conflict of interest. The healthcare industry (hospitals and so on) and the pharmaceutical and medical-equipment industries encourage excessive procedures as well. Opposing this, in principle, are government programs (which have odd quirks designed to lower the costs of procedures, like only paying full price for one procedure per visit*) and the private insurance industry, which profits by refusing payment for anything they can, regardless of necessity.* However, the federal government is limited in encouraging preventative medicine because of the above industries (as well as the food industry) and political opposition to any sane improvement of the healthcare system. Meanwhile private insurance companies tend to operate on profit cycles (and, more important, CEO bonus cycles) shorter than things like diet and exercise are able to affect.* The role of patients in all this is complicated. On one hand, they’re expected to make informed decisions to turn down unnecessary (or worse) interventions. On the other hand, they’re often accused of trying to coerce doctors into prescribing and performing expensive treatments that are unlikely to work—something pretty much anyone with the life of someone they cared about on the line would do.

  For information about the Soudan Mine and the twenty-three-story-deep High Energy Physics Lab of the University of Minnesota (which because of its isolation from cosmic rays is currently conducting the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and the High Energy Main Injector Neutrino Search) I am grateful to my volunteer guides to both.

  For information about law enforcement in Lake County I am grateful to the City of Ely Police Department, particularly Barbara A. Matthews and Chief of Police John Manning, both of whom were exceptionally kind and generous. This book is not in any way meant to be a depiction of that department or its personnel, or of actual events in or around Ely. Nor is it an
accurate depiction of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, about which I know nothing except that it exists.

  The chapter on the origin of the canoe from the perspective of Sheriff Albin is, to quote Sam Purcell, “drawn without reference material.”* However, the name Two Persons is an obvious reference to the work of the great Wayne Johnson, whose series of novels taking place in northern Minnesota began with Don’t Think Twice, 2000.

  The preference of (at least some) mobsters for Canoe by Dana cologne and aftershave is mentioned in The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, by Philip Carlo, 2007. It’s one of the confessions.

  Regarding whether the medical records of dead people are confidential information, note that the Supreme Court decision in Office of Independent Counsel v. Favish, 2003, was to disallow public access to photographs of the dead body of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, whose suicide ten years earlier continues to be a point of fascination for right-wing conspiracy nuts. (For more on the decision see “In Vincent Foster case, court upholds privacy,” by Warren Richey, the Christian Science Monitor, 31 Mar 2004.) One reason the issue is less than clear is that Medicare pays for some autopsies, but only indirectly, as part of general hospital fees. Which kind of half-defines autopsies as healthcare procedures.

  The term “spandrel” as a biological (vs. architectural) entity was coined in “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” by Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 205, No. 1161, 21 Sept 1979. The overall argument is that since biological traits develop within complex organisms rather than independently, they are always subject to conditions beyond that of the strict Darwinian imperative. The literal spandrels of San Marco are decorative-appearing details that are in fact (the authors say) “necessary architectural by-products of mounting a dome on rounded arches.” (There’s even a body of literature questioning whether the metaphor is valid, i.e., whether architectural spandrels are really decorative or not.) The quote from Ronald Pies, MD, is from a citation in “The Evolutionary Calculus of Depression,” by Jerry A. Coyne, PhD, Psychiatric Times, 26 May 2010.* Both Pies and Coyne are refuting claims that depression is, on its own, an evolutionary adaptation.

  I attended a seminar called “Is Female Orgasm Adaptive?” at the University of California, Berkeley, in, I believe, 1987. As I recall, it was led by a woman and there was some arguing. I could be wrong about the date or the place, though. Or any other part of that story.

  Physiologist Loren G. Martin states in a brief article in Scientific American (“What is the function of the human appendix? Did it once have a purpose that has since been lost?,” 21 Oct 1999) that “We now know… that the appendix serves an important [endocrine] role in the fetus and in young adults [while a]mong adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions.” However, others (e.g., in passing, Ahmed Alzaraa and Sunil Chaudhry in “An unusually long appendix in a child: a case report,” Cases Journal 2009, 2: 7398) feel that the case for the immunological and endocrinological function of the appendix, though strong, remains circumstantial.

  The Smurfs (originally Les Schtroumpfs) is a multiformat marketing and entertainment franchise created by Pierre Culliford in Belgium in the late 1950s that, bizarrely, reimagines the 1953 Josef von Sternberg film Anatahan (about a woman stuck on an island with twelve men)* as a children’s story, the primary difference being that where Sternberg treats aggression as innate, The Smurfs externalizes it onto the figures of a giant (named after Gargamelle, the giantess in Rabelais) and his pet cat Azrael (named after the Islamic and Sikh angel of death).

  The principle behind carbon dating is that plants and animals take in but don’t produce radioactive isotopes of carbon that, over time, degrade, so the amount of those isotopes still in the body shows how long it’s been since a particular plant or animal interacted with its environment. It can be used on objects less than 60,000 years old (at which point the amount of radioactive carbon declines to the same as the background) and is generally accurate to +/- 40 years. Accuracy goes way up, however, for plants and animals (including humans) that have been alive since the hydrogen bomb tests of the 1950s, because of the large increase in the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. See “The Mushroom Cloud’s Silver Lining,” by David Grimm, Science, 321, 12 Sept 2008.

  The verses of Matthew in which Jesus says the world will end within a generation are 16:28 and 24:34. Mark 9:1 and Luke 9:27 and 21:32 (“Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all things take place”) are similar.

  For information about the hit John Gotti tried to commission from the Aryan Brotherhood, see “Former Aryan Brother Testifies That Gang Kingpin Ordered Killings,” Associated Press, 14 Apr 2006, etc.

  Information about the burn cycle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is from The Boundary Waters Wilderness Ecosystem, by Miron Heinselman, 1996, which is by far the best book I’ve read on BWCA (Boundary Waters Canoe Area) history and ecology.

  The use of alpha-blockers to treat PTSD symptoms is predicated on the theory that the psychological symptoms of PTSD, such as panic and nightmares, are the result rather than the cause of the physical ones, such as increased heart rate and sweating. Their efficacy continues to be debated: see, e.g., “Prazosin for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder sleep disturbances,” by LJ Miller, Pharmacotherapy 28(5), May 2008 vs. “Flawed Studies Underscore Need for More Rigorous PTSD Research,” by Aaron Levin, Psychiatric News 42(23), 7 Dec 2007. In any case it should not be confused with the use of beta-blockers to prevent PTSD by disrupting memory formation immediately after a trauma occurs, which looked good in rat studies but is now itself controversial. (See, e.g., “The efficacy of early propanolol administration at reducing PTSD symptoms in pediatric injury patients: a pilot study,” by NR Nugent et al., Journal of Traumatic Stress 2010 Apr; 23(2): 282–7, and “Limited efficacy of propranolol on the reconsolidation of fear memories,” by EV Muravieva and CM Alberini, Learning Memory 1;17(6), Jun 2010.) “Alpha” and “beta” refer to two different kinds of neuronal receptors for adrenaline and adrenaline-like substances. Though many neurons have both alpha- and beta-receptors, the two types send signals with opposite effects: for example, alpha-receptors activated by adrenaline cause blood vessels to contract, while beta-receptors activated by adrenaline cause blood vessels to dilate. This seems contradictory, but factors like the overall blood level of adrenaline favor the dominance of one type at a time.

  My primary sources on the Vietnam War know who they are and that they have my admiration and thanks. Given how few Americans served in so-called riverine combat in Vietnam, there are surprisingly good secondary sources on the service, possibly because of interest brought about by the 2004 presidential candidacy of John Kerry (and its sabotaging), and possibly because the casualty rate was so horrendously high. My favorite and the most useful to me on the subject has been Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam, by Thomas J. Cutler, 2000. (Cutler is an instructor at the Naval Academy and himself a Vietnam veteran, although the book, which is excellent, is not about his personal experiences.) For a more general look at the experience of Americans serving in the South Vietnamese armed forces, I particularly like In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, by Tobias Wolff, 1995.

  Note that for Reggie to be a chief radioman and an E-4 so soon after arriving in Vietnam would not have been unusual given the hierarchy and level of incident of his posting,* and that at the time he enlisted he would have been unlikely to be drafted, since in 1967 the draft was still based on seniority, with twenty-five-year-olds going first and seventeen-year-olds last. The birthday lottery, which sent over teenagers, wasn’t instituted until 1969. Ultimately 61 percent of American fatalities in Vietnam were under the age of twenty-one.*

  Robert Mason says he was posted in an area of Vietnam where thirty-one
of thirty-three species of snake were poisonous in his memoir Chickenhawk, 1984. Unfortunate title / great book. Mason was a helicopter pilot who quickly became disillusioned with the war.

  Reggie’s CPO uses the French word “antivenin” rather than “antivenom” because until 1981 that was standard usage (and World Health Organization policy) on the grounds that snake antivenins were invented, in 1895, by Albert Calmette, a French scientist at the Pasteur Institute. Calmette was trying to cure cobra bites occurring in what is now Vietnam.*

  For information about the abilities of various animals to survive very low temperatures (even including freezing) I am indebted to Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, by Bernd Heinrich, 2003, which is a beautiful book, along the lines of Konrad Lorenz’s best work, that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in nature.

  The history of human cryogenics in the U.S. runs from the Chatsworth scandal of 1979 to the Alcor scandal of 2003 and beyond, with defrosting and rotting the least of your worries.*

  The mammalian diving reflex occurs when the participating mammal gets hit in the face with water 21 degrees C (70 degrees F) or colder. Even on a leopard seal, it has to be the face. (See: “Cardiovascular effects of face immersion and factors affecting diving reflex,” by Y. Kawakami, B. Natelson, and A. DuBois, Journal of Applied Physiology, Vol. 23, No. 6, Dec 1967.)

  Incidentally, according to the film version of Goldfinger, 1964, humans not only can breathe through their skin like reptiles and amphibians, but need to and die if they don’t. Also according to Goldfinger, “Drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above 38 degrees Fahrenheit is like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”