“Hylo . . .”
“. . . zoism. It’s the ancient and certainly correct view that there is no moral division between humans and the rest of life.”
“Thanks. Like I need yet another ism to contend with. But it does sound more sensible than most. Do you have any Mormons or Witnesses among your fifty-seven varieties?”
“Only fallen ones. We admire the Latter-Days’ sense of community, and the Witnesses’ rejection of racism. And the Seventh-Days run some fine small hospitals. But none of them have found their way to us as yet. Of course, any flavor of fundamentalism, let alone proselytizing, would be incompatible with Pan-Pacific’s essential approach.”
“Actually, I subscribe to Genesis,” said Catherine.
“Really,” said Oberon, taken aback. “And I thought I knew you!”
“Sure. God created man; then she stood back and said, ‘I’m sure I can do better than that!’ ” Her gag got a better laugh than it deserved. “So why Pan-Pacific?” she asked. “Do you have imperial plans to link the East and the West? What about Atlantis?”
“Nothing so grand; it’s just a pun, really.”
“Oh, I see . . . Pan, peace, the whole deal.”
“Pretty much.”
“So, if no dogma or doctrine, do you have any central . . . idea?”
“Just that nature is the whole show—body, spirit, and beyond—and should be treated accordingly. And that warfare is an unacceptable way to die, for anyone.”
“But your names,” Catherine persisted. “Ajax, from the Trojan wars, and Xerxes, wasn’t he an old Persian warmonger?”
“The biggest. But even moldy old soldiers are educable. Each of our names is also associated with nature somehow. Xerxes defeated the Hebrews, but he also introduced land stewardship reforms that were way ahead of their time. Ajax, Polyxenes, and other names from Troy were given by Linnaeus to various swallowtails in his Systemae Naturae in 1758. War has been the way, and we know that our own primate lineage grew out of that. But we believe, as I know you do, or you wouldn’t be camped at Rocky Flats, that peace must be the new way. Otherwise—oblivion for all.”
Catherine asked, “And does Pan care about oblivion?”
“Touché. I assume not. He never comes to meetings, nor does his girlfriend, Gaia, though they have a standing invitation, so I haven’t had a chance to ask. But nature bats last—it will survive all our insults. Nuclear wipeout or eco-collapse would be but a fly bite on Pan’s ass, right? It might be the end of us, but he’d just set up shop elsewhere—some other planet or back home, without us.”
“But, Oberon,” Catherine objected, “I’m not entirely happy with that. I can’t believe that Pan wouldn’t bat an eyelash. Surely he’d shed more than one tear, and the Goddess would weep for the loss of beauty and life on earth. And anyway, do you really personify them like that?” A humanist, she was a little alarmed meeting a pagan in person.
“Some do, some don’t,” Oberon said. “Me, no. What is Pan? Our Great Old Horny God, Master of Ceremonies for Mother Earth, Puck and Robin Goodfellow, pansexual good-times elf, pipe-playing satyr of Grahame’s willow island, bread, and Everything—all that, and more. One thing for sure: Pan is us, we are Mother Nature and Mother Earth. As Steinbeck and Ricketts put it in their Log from the Sea of Cortez, ‘all things are one thing and one thing is all things.’ Or in Robinson Jeffers’s essential phrase, we are ‘not man apart.’ ”
Catherine smiled at that.
Oberon went on. “I don’t mean to preach to a captive choir, but you asked. So when I say that Pan would relocate, I mean that nature will outlive the span of earth and its creatures whether we reach the end with the sun’s big chill or hasten it by making things hot for ourselves. To think otherwise would be as arrogant as to set ourselves apart, and above, and to ‘have dominion’ over all the rest. So . . . tragedy in our extinction? Sure—but mostly for us. Existence will go on. If we’re to persist, we need to worry less about Pan’s sad face than our own thin ice.”
The highway unrolled before them, past the hippie enclave of Ward down in its hollow, tucked among the Vs of old mining tailings. Oberon shifted down. Catherine said, “So we’d better be looking after nature if we want to save our own sweet asses.”
“I think so. And looking after nature means getting to know our fellow creatures as much as getting along with our fellow humans.”
Catherine said, “Heavens.” Then, “I guess we humanists had better start reading our Roger Tory Peterson along with our Norman Vincent Peale, huh?”
“Can’t hurt.” Oberon laughed. “Aldo Leopold and Ed Abbey too, while you’re at it. Anyway, now you’ll have a little better idea of what we’re all about, before we go into the meeting—which begins in twenty minutes, by the way.”
The old truck sped past the mouth of Wild Basin, curled around the face of Magdalena Mountain, echoed off the log front of Magdalena Park Lodge, and came in sight of the stone Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene. “Why all the Magdalenes around here?” Catherine asked. “Was there once a nunnery here too, in the Shakespearean sense?”
“Some say that Gunnison Whetstone, the founder of the old order, ran something of the sort as a sideline,” said Oberon. “But I have no real knowledge of it, in the biblical sense.” Gravel scrunched as the tires turned off the long drive onto a sidetrack into the ponderosa woods, then came to a halt beside a big pink bubblegum of a boulder.
“From here it’s on foot,” Oberon announced, stepping out and stretching his road-bent frame. “But it’s not far. Just back there where the grove grows thick. Where you can see a tall snag, that’s the place. I’ve got to go—I’ve just got time. Come when you’re ready.”
“Speaking of having to go, it’s been a long drive,” said Catherine.
“We’re blessed with bushes,” said Oberon. “But, surprise—there is actually indoor plumbing in the monastery.”
“Shall I roll up my sleeves?” asked Catherine. “It sounds like a rumble coming.”
“I’ll tell you this,” said Oberon. “I won’t live another night in this drafty bachelor’s pad without change in sight. Think they’ve got any room in that jail cell?” He wheeled and crunched off across the granite Grape-Nuts that passed for soil in the Grove.
26
Mead slept against Noni’s shoulder. When he awoke and tried to catch the dream, she was still there. He really was with Noni. She’d met his bus in Gunnison and driven him to Crested Butte for lunch. Now they were bouncing up the East River Road to Gothic. Noni braked hard for a herd of Herefords crossing the one-lane track, jolting him awake. Then he remembered what she’d told him and wished he were back on the bus. His first words, following their embrace, had been, “Noni, how about a midnight mountain mating in your cabin tonight?”
“I’d love to, James—but maybe not.”
“No?” Mead’s beard dropped as his mouth threw a pout.
“No. Look, your telegram was such a surprise! The thing is, O’Leary and I have been working together, and we’ve become pretty good friends.”
“What?”
“Not that good, but I’d just as soon keep things cool with everybody right now.”
“With everybody?”
“James, how was I to know you were going to show up on my doorstep?”
He groaned, remembering their last conversation before she left New Haven, trying not to remember the night before that. Noni gave him a one-armed hug as she jockeyed the lab’s pickup with her other hand. The sun sank into the West Elks as they climbed the dusty washboard road. They reached Gothic in the twilight, where a small sign read WELCOME TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY—FOUNDED IN 1928. Noni dropped him off at the tumbledown cabin she’d rustled up for him. “It’s not much,” she said, “but it has the advantage of being unoccupied. They weren’t going to use it until it had a new roof. But it’ll keep the mountain dew off your fevered brow. And don’t miss breakfast, James—six to eight in the
dining hall, over there. Bathhouse is the other way.” Then, before she could change her mind, she kissed him as lightly as a butterfly tapping a leaf and said “Good night.” Then she was gone as fast as she’d appeared at the station.
Alone, Mead sank into a funk. Now he wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t have stayed in New Haven with his illusions, and his roaches, who at least were faithful. “Damned O’Leary!” he cursed to any listening deer mice. Exhausted and grubby from the highway caravan, crushed by Noni’s news, troubled by Carson’s vagrant shade, and bugged by the deer mice dancing across his mustache, Mead fell into a sort of sleep.
Even so, he awoke refreshed when the breakfast gong clanged at six. As he opened the door of East River Cabin, the panorama of the eastern sun illuminating Gothic Mountain erased the misgivings of the night before. Here stood a monolith to shame Kline Tower. Here were morning skies to make the hazed ones of the Eastern Seaboard fade into vague memory. Here were flowered mountain meadows to make even the long dog-ride all worth it.
At his feet, beyond a rickety board deck and across a ragged hem of willows and cow parsnip, flowed the East River. A dipper darted past, alighted on a slippery stone, bobbed in place, then dived for caddis larvae in their little pebble houses on the riverbed. Aspen groves rolled up the flanks of Gothic Mountain to shaggy meadows of yellow and light green interrupted by towers of corn lilies and green gentians, then into dark spruce swales. Then the rock began: a granite massif falling away upward for some thousands of feet into a craggy face and a long, bald crown. The front and flanks of the mountain, cut by early winters, tardy springs, and their diamond-bit frosts, stood out in ramparts of turrets, crags, castellations, and crocketed spires—hence “Gothic,” recalling the towers of Kings College he knew so well in Cambridge.
Mead didn’t fail to notice the rockslides tumbling down from every slope and snowfield. Not the most accessible, maybe, but surely here was habitat for the Magdalena alpine, “Granite Gobbler” and “black flag of the mountain domain,” two of Carson’s nicknames for it. He hoped there would soon be a chance to see it for himself.
He saw neither Noni nor O’Leary at breakfast, and he imagined the worst until he overheard someone mention that they were already in the field. Trying to get them out of his mind, Mead chowed down on pancakes and eggs with slabs of bacon, butter, and syrup. Then he strolled around the laboratory grounds to get the measure of the place.
He beheld a valley with mountains on four sides, bisected by the dusty road and trisected by the East River and Copper Creek, which met at the bottom of the townsite. These, along with an irregular warren of smaller drives, footpaths, and rills, tied together a willowy bottomland that rose gently into aspens, then conifers, and, finally, rocks and snow. Scattered about, a loose handful of wooden buildings. A few, including a ramshackle but handsome false-fronted former bordello, dated from the ghost town’s silver-boom days of the 1880s. The rest, including more cabins, dorms, and labs, evidenced Gothic’s resurrection as a twentieth-century biology boomtown. Their pleasing clutter seemed to have grown out of the thin mountain soil with the wildflowers that painted the valley. Delft larkspurs and grapy monkshoods lined the boardwalks among the pungent willow bogs. Many plants had red flags on wires stuck in the ground beside them to indicate “I’m an experiment: don’t you dare tread on me!”
The hillsides all around were dappled with lavender and yellow daisies. Clumps of Colorado blue columbines decked the doorsteps of cabins and outhouses. A thunderstorm the previous afternoon had rained blue flax petals on the ground and damped down the dust of the road. It left the air so fresh it almost hurt Mead’s lungs, though the lab’s nine-thousand-foot elevation helped to take his breath away as well. He could see how one might become entranced by the place and return year after year, as Winchester, Freulich, and others did. Mead was not even there in his own right, but he was there. Fortunately for him, George was not, having flown to California for some research in the Channel Islands before settling into Gothic for the summer.
Mead’s second enchantment came that afternoon. At someone’s suggestion at breakfast he climbed the forest trail heading out of the townsite to the east. It led steeply past Judd Falls, with its rumors of love-struck suicide, farther up the long incline of Copper Creek, all the way to the turquoise bowl of Copper Lake in the arctic-alpine zone. From months in the Atlantic lowlands, Mead felt the altitude acutely, but his long, young body soon found its mountain legs and proper pace. Titania’s fritillaries gave way to Freya’s fritillaries as he stepped above treeline. A steep talus slope broke off to the southeast, hanging above the tarn. The trail continued in broken fashion across the rockslide, vanishing over boggy East Maroon Pass at the upper end of the lake, where it dived into the receding wilderness. “Imagine wagons taking silver and mail from Gothic to Aspen by this route!” Mead told the marmots, to whom it was all old hat. These days, the track across the talus was barely passable even on foot.
Mead cast his eyes over the stones below. At first he saw nothing but boulders. Then a black speck resolved, zigzagging up the rockslide toward him. “Magdalena!” he whispered. He knew it at once. Exercising its sooty semaphore as it came nearer, the butterfly captured Mead’s total devotion at first sight. He stood openmouthed, seduced, fully hooked by the black beauty of the rocks: a confirmed Erebia freak for life.
That night, footsore but happy, Mead found himself sitting with Noni awaiting a public lecture by Peter Freulich. The dining hall had metamorphosed from grubhouse to auditorium. Noni pointed out this and that well-known biologist, several of them working on butterflies, such as Freulich’s Stanford colleagues Vern Volte and Carolyn Marsh. But in addition to the RMBL regulars, local ranchers, campers, and residents of Crested Butte, Paonia, and Gunnison had turned out too. Many of them had seen Freulich on Johnny Carson’s show and were eager to hear this controversial public scold in person. Anticipation crackled like the air before a lightning storm over Mount Gothic. Mead intended to clear out of Gothic before he wore out his unmatriculated welcome, but he didn’t want to miss a chance to hear George’s famous friend.
Freulich always drew a good audience, whether he appeared on television coast-to-coast or in the Crested Butte town hall. With his wife and colleague, Amy, he had written major books on the human population crisis, the nuclear threat, and the importance of biodiversity, as well as popular textbooks on evolutionary biology. Taller even than Mead, lean, and salt-and-pepper pelted, Freulich wore the khaki field clothes that were the uniform of his generation of biologists. He commanded a deep and sonorous voice that drew in even naysayers. The most sought-after environmental speaker in the country, he came to Gothic every summer for a little peace and quiet and research among the butterflies and scholars. But he always contributed one talk to the summer lecture series, and tonight’s was entitled “Fusion and the Megazoo.”
As he warmed up, Freulich’s now-confiding, now-sarcastic words penetrated the room like drive-in movie speakers hooked up to every seat. A constant wry smile hung on his thin, expressive mouth as he blasted those who, in their ignorance and cupidity, would shred the living fabric of the land to tatters. “Anyone with enough sense to count to twenty without using his toes,” Freulich inveighed, “should be able to see that the death of the ecosystem means the death of ourselves.” He was hot, and the audience—most of whom could presumably see that point—loved it. Mead only wished it were the toe counters who were hearing it, instead of a roomful of ecologists and ranchers, most of them already convinced.
As his students and colleagues knew he would, Freulich managed to bring in his research on his favorite butterflies, fritillaries, to illustrate his points. He was able to draw parables for all kinds of social comment from the biology of butterflies. “When any little thing goes wrong in a colony of these insects,” he said, “they may flicker into extinction in a season. Then, if there is another population nearby to recolonize, fine. But if the intervening habitat is gone—the extinction s
ticks! Now what do you suppose we’re doing to ensure our ability to bounce back from failure of our habitat base? Damn little!”
After cruising all the major global issues, he brought it all back home to Gothic before he finished. “Lest you think that all the threats to the megazoo lie outside this charmed valley,” he said, “just look around you. Amax, not satisfied with decades of devastation over by Leadville, want to remove Mount Emmons for molybdenum. And for what? Money and munitions. Mount Crested Butte, meanwhile, plans to expand the ski area onto the very flanks of Mount Gothic, right below the lab. And those thirsty ’burbs on the Eastern Slope, Aurora, Colorado Springs, and their mother ship, Denver, have designs on the water in little old Copper Creek and the East River—they’ll grab the rights, then divert them, if they get their way, to irrigate their own metastasis at the expense of these watersheds. To paraphrase Thomas Malthus: when there are too many toilets to flush for the available water, the world becomes a toilet—and a struggle for survival will ultimately follow. Darwin and Wallace both got the message. Why can’t we see it now?”
A resort executive and a summer émigré or two from the megalopolis were squirming in their seats. But not content to leave anyone comfortable with his or her own complicity or complacency, Freulich went on to describe the way Gothicites were fouling their own nest with their growing numbers and effluents, endangering research, soil, and health. “Whether it’s two hundred people here, two million in Denver’s brown cloud, or twenty million gasping in the fecal snow of Mexico City, it’s too damn many.” He concluded with a crescendo of doomsday death rattle mixed with a hint of hope and an ain’t-it-crazy chuckle that left his listeners buzzed and tingling, Mead as much as any other.
“I can see why you’re excited to work with him, Noni,” he said after the applause.
“Would you like to meet him?”
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