When we got home she vowed she would never camp again.
I clean up the fallen branches on the paths and in the garden beds. When it gets sunny I hang my clothes and sleeping bag to dry.
As daunting as it can be to be caught in a storm, I find it thrilling. When it ends, the elation is unlike any feeling I know, and I have a renewed faith that something is looking after me. Somehow I know it won’t be a storm that kills me.
The last few days have been gorgeous, and it’s easy to forget the discomfort when it’s sunny and warm. It’s as if the summer sky’s fire has licked the branches of the maples and birches, burning their leaves yellow, orange, red. The full moon last night brought the first fall frost. Today I am harvesting potatoes, carrots, and turnips. I loosen the soil along each row with a digging fork. Then I press my hands into the ground and pull them out. The potatoes, Century russets I planted in May, are my buried treasure. I lay the huge bakers in piles beside each row to dry in the sun. Once they are dry, I rub each potato between my palms to loosen the dirt. They fill a feed bag, more than fifty pounds. It turns out I have had less success with the carrots and turnips. The carrots are hairy and small, hardly worth saving. The turnips didn’t like the rocky, shallow soil and are the size of malformed baseballs. I take them all next door and put them in Martin and Jen’s root cellar anyway.
Deer season has opened and sporadic gunshots resound in the woods behind my tent. I walk along Lily Lake Road in the gloaming to find an apple for my dessert. There is an old wild tree growing in the ditch by the road, gnarled and twisty, but replete with large green apples. I shake a low branch and half a dozen apples thump to the ground around me. I stroll farther along to the stream that passes beneath the road, and there, not more than twenty feet into the woods in front of me, a coyote is huddled over a carcass. It crouches as if to pull another bite off the bones. Coyotes are usually shy, and they run if they see me. This one doesn’t budge. It is the size of Lucy, with short grey-brown fur and a menacing gaze. Its hackles are raised as it stares back at me, and mine, if I can call them hackles, are raised too. I jog home along the dirt road, looking over my shoulder as I go.
I light a fire in the evening light and cook my dinner in the outdoor kitchen. I sit down to eat rice and beans when something comes out of the woods toward me. I stand, heart pounding. A silhouette is holding a rifle by its barrel. It walks into the clearing and is lit by the glow of flames.
“Shit, don’t sneak up on me like that,” I say. Art rests his rifle against the big spruce to which my tent is tied. “You’re lucky I don’t have a gun of my own.”
“You should have one,” Art says, “living up here all by yourself.” He sits on a straw bale and stares into the light.
I tell him about the coyote. He nods toward the gun.
“Want me to go get it?”
“No. Any luck in the woods?”
“With this hip clicking I suspect they hear me coming from a mile away.”
“Tea?”
“You got anything stronger?”
I don’t. When your father’s an alcoholic you have to make a tough choice. You can either embrace the bottle or turn away. When your father is an alcoholic who kills himself, then you learn that if you want to survive there is really only one choice to make. After a couple of years, when it seemed like I might be willing to follow his lead, I made it. I have not had a drink since I left New York.
I walk beyond the light thrown by the fire into the shadows of the kitchen. My eyes adjust and I strike a match and turn on one of the gas burners. The propane hisses until I touch the match to it, when it pops blue into life. I move the full kettle on top of the flame and return to the fire.
“I’ve been thinking of you up here,” Art says, “by yourself. What you want is a good woman to keep you warm at night.”
“If you hadn’t scared Lina off so fast.”
When the kettle begins its high-pitched whistle I rise to get it. I pull two Earl Grey bags from the jar on the stove and drop them into the teapot. Its ceramic spout is chipped. I’m seeing my life through Art’s eyes now, imagining what he must think. There is food crusted on the stovetop, I make my meals standing under a spruce, and my dining-room furniture consists of two straw bales. I don’t see other people making life hard for themselves on purpose. I pour the boiling water over the tea bags. We let the tea steep, and then I pour some into his cup.
“You got any milk?”
“I don’t drink it.”
“I’ve been getting it fresh from Reagh’s Jerseys since they stopped selling bags at the SaveEasy. It ain’t convenient, but it tastes better, that’s for sure.”
Harold Reagh lives along the Shore Road not far from Art. He’s the one I bought lumber from to build my outhouse. It’s his equipment — manure spreader, tractors, a hay wagon — that is responsible for churning up the dust in front of my property as it rattles over the potholes and gullies of Lily Lake Road. Sticks in the fire crackle and burn, sending up sparks into the night air.
“How’d Louise fare in the hurricane?”
He shakes himself like a bear. “What? Oh. She did O.K. Their power was out for a few days like the rest of us.” Sparks explode up with the flames. “Sorry, I’m not much company tonight. I’ve got memories rattling around in my head like change in a can.”
“Tell me about it. Makes it hard to fall asleep, huh?”
“A young guy like you can’t have much to forget.” He pokes at the fire for a bit before he seems to realize something and stares at me. “What’re you doing up here all alone, anyway?”
“I’m not alone. I’ve got the coyotes.”
“I see how much you like having them around.”
Then it strikes me that tonight his rifle is a prop. “Why’d you come here tonight?”
He stares into the flames, saying nothing. Then: “You told me you had a story for me.”
7
New York City
Benny woke at six and prepared to head into the dark for her morning run. She laced her shoes and pulled her sweatshirt over her head. Once she was on the sidewalk, the cool morning air felt fresh. Underneath that, however, was a warmth that told her she’d be pulling off the sweatshirt once she got to the park. It was a straight run west, then down one block to the entrance at 69th Street, at which point her pace became steady. There were no cars on the park road. Some of the men she passed checked her out. If they smiled, she smiled in return, content, from the limber way her legs felt, that it was a good day. She increased her pace. Today she could run forever.
Back at her apartment she showered, and she was heading for the lab by 8:30. Her calf muscles were sore in that way that reminded her of her run with each step. She walked down York Avenue to the entrance of the art deco building that housed both the hospital and her school. Her breath flowed without effort, like pulling a silk ribbon gently through the palm of your hand. Her mind was clear. Time stopped and she thought she might never again feel as healthy, fit, and complete as she did in that golden moment.
The glass doors at the entrance were emblazoned with the university’s seal. She showed her ID and smiled at the security guards, two sullen men who had no doubt seen too many medical students with their white lab coats and their entitled airs, and refused, on principle or from ennui, to smile back. Her lab was on the third floor, and she took the stairs two at a time. The Department of Microbiology was adjacent to some pathology labs, and over the years the smell of formaldehyde had wafted throughout and soaked into the walls. She opened the doors to a corridor that was thirty feet long, lit with the sickly hue of fluorescent bulbs. On her left was a room housing caged mice. Beyond that was an equipment room filled with centrifuges the size of commercial washing machines, incubators, and scintillation counters. On the right was a lounge for the grad students and post-docs to eat lunch and drink coffee, as well as the offices belonging to the principal investigators of the two labs, Gabriel Nawthorn and Melvin Leach.
As B
enny walked down the corridor she was met by a fellow grad student who also worked in Leach’s lab, on his second pet project: the search for new antibiotics to fight staph infections. Jonathan Yovkov was an MD/PhD student, the son of a Bulgarian refugee who had slipped out from under the watchful eye of the USSR in 1971. Father and son had made their way to New York, leaving behind Jon’s mother and two sisters. Jonathan was serious about science, insofar as it was his stepping-stone to getting rich. He shared Leach’s assessment that, given the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of Staphylococcus, any new antibiotic would be exceptionably valuable to its discoverers. He and Leach had apprised what the other was worth to his career and interacted accordingly. What Leach offered was a lab that was creating commercial products and, with them, the opportunity to make a business out of science. Jon brought his intellect to the lab and, with it, a nascent business acumen. Jon’s book outlining the process of successfully applying to medical school was in its third printing. The royalties from that book financed the bulk of his education. His publisher was asking him to write a second guide, this time for young investors.
Jon moved as though he had a private stash of time, gaining interest as he strolled from bench to desk to library. When Benny had first joined the lab, she assumed he lacked ambition. She was wrong. She had wanted to befriend him, knowing they might be working together for the next four or five years, but they kept grinding against each other. Instead of wearing down to something smooth, the edges of their relationship became sharp and treacherous. This morning he grinned when he saw Benny, as if he was telling himself a joke at her expense.
Leach’s lab at the end of the corridor smelled of growing bacterial cultures — musty, earthy — and the complicated smell of organic compounds mingling in the air. She was alone in the room among the metal and glass, desktop centrifuges, microscopes, and bottles of reagents ranged on the open shelves above each black bench. The benches were covered in bottles and stacked petri plates, some of them new and sterile and ready to be inoculated with bacteria. Others had yellow agar medium and bacterial colonies growing on them. For her this was a room full of promise.
She had been led to this lab by a confluence of events. The first occurred while she was reading the text for her Intro to Plastics course, Plastics: Their Chemistry and Uses, at the library at the University of Massachusetts. The chapter on nylon held a brief section on plastic dissolution and degradation with the following reference.
Kinoshita, S., et al., 1975. Utilization of a cyclic dimer and linear oligomers of e-aminocapronoic acid by Pseudomonas sp. K172. Agric. Biol. Chem. 39(6): 1219-1223.
She closed the book and went looking for the article in the grey subterranean stacks. Marine bacteria had been discovered feeding off the effluent from a nylon manufacturing plant flushed into a Japanese river. Ridding the planet of plastic wasn’t a social problem, she knew that. But here was a technological fix. What they needed were efficient plastic-digesting bacteria. She pictured the recycling symbol, with its three arrows encircling the number 1, as a triad of snakes eating each other’s tails. The circle they made shrunk until it disappeared. Perhaps she could engineer them.
Until that point she had been assuming she was headed for an R&D job at one of the many plastics manufacturing companies in Lowell. Before she read that article, the only environmental solution to the problem of plastic pollution she had envisaged, other than recycling, was the creation of biodegradable plastics. The problem with these — plastics made of polylactic acid and cellulose acetate — was that nobody could afford to make them.
Then Melvin Leach came to her college to deliver a seminar, and her path was set. Leach gave his lecture early on a cold February morning in an auditorium. Benny’s class had been encouraged to attend by the prof who taught them a short course on the degradation of plastics. She had needed no other encouragement than the poster advertising the seminar:
The Potential Use of Micro-organisms in the Biodegradation of Xenobiotic Compounds:
Digestion of Waste Plastics
Melvin Leach, PhD
Cornell University Medical College, New York
Benny scanned the auditorium for her classmate Alicia. She wasn’t there. She sat in the aisle seat, planning to save the seat next to her for her friend if she turned up. Her notebook lay open on her left knee.
Leach was introduced, then went to the lectern, smiling to the audience of drowsy students. He wore a navy suit jacket, a maroon tie, and a white shirt. His thick hair was short, receding at the edges above his temples, and would have been curly if he let it grow. A slide of a landfill site, heaped with discarded plastic bottles, bags, and Styrofoam containers filled the screen.
“This is the heritage we appear willing to leave our children,” he began. The next slide showed what might be the same site, this time without any of the plastic visible. Corn and flowers grew on part of the site. “With bioremediation, this is the heritage we will leave them.”
He stood, erect, with confidence, making eye contact with the few students who were paying attention. Benny was rapt as, slide after slide, he explained the work he was doing in his lab. He had adapted soil and water bacteria to eat some of the building blocks of plastic. The newly evolved bacterial strains had genetic changes that altered enzyme activities, allowing catalysis of these xenobiotic compounds.
When Leach ended his lecture, Benny closed her notebook and rose from her seat to jog down the stairs to the front of the lecture hall. Behind her was the noise of restless students, leaving their seats, chatting, the heavy auditorium door repeatedly opening and clicking shut. She was by herself with Dr. Leach at the lectern.
“This is thrilling work. Have you got far with the practical applications?”
“We’ve thought about them, certainly.” He leaned with one elbow on the lectern and took off his glasses. “But the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms behind these adaptations has taken up most of our time. I hope to push the practical side of things soon.”
“Couldn’t you start with nylon digestion? You know, harnessing bacteria and fungi that metabolize amide bonds? Then manipulate their genomes to be more efficient?”
He arched an eyebrow. He told her there were only a few papers and that it was a wide-open field. The funding potential was limitless if they could tap into governments wanting to eliminate garbage and reduce their landfill footprints.
Benny asked if he had room for another graduate student. She told him she had a co-op placement coming up, then her final two semesters of course work. She would be graduating in a little over a year.
“Then you have plenty of time to apply.” He checked her out from head to toe. “Your youthful exuberance is appealing.”
She left the lecture hall as if she were flying among the treetops, seeing the landscape unfold beneath her on her way to the library. She found a copy of Leach’s most recent article in Science. In the Introduction he had written:
It may be possible, in the near future, to utilize such novel life forms as we intend to generate, to treat much of the plastic waste that ends its life in landfills. There are considerable deficits in any program aimed at the recycling of plastics. It is not possible to recycle many synthetic polymers. For others there is a limited number of times they can be recycled. For those that can be recycled, the array of materials into which they can be remoulded is also limited. These processes are energetically expensive and polluting. Finally, consumer compliance with recycling programs is abysmal.
Ideally, all plastic, including that which currently ends its life in the waste stream, could be refashioned into usable products. However, since this is not possible, those plastics that remain in landfills need to be eliminated in an environmentally sound fashion. Our work is aimed at making this possible in a clean, efficient, and economical manner using novel bacteria to digest the waste into carbon dioxide and water. Biological degradation is attractive because it is energetically neutral and non-toxic, it is self-perpetuating, and
it recycles nutrients into the ecosystem. We will design bacteria to break down even the most stable and noxious xenobiotic compounds into molecules that are easily utilized by a vast array of soil-borne micro-organisms. The key is to begin the process of nutrient release. Nature will take care of the rest.
She carried on her studies with renewed vigour. In the spring she began a four-month co-op work placement at a plastics manufacturing company in Lowell. Working at EcoPlast taught her what she needed to know about the industry. They made conventional plastics but were benefitting from environmental anxiety by creating and producing biodegradable plastics as well.
At EcoPlast she tested novel formulations for their biodegradability. They made polymers with bonds that were unstable and, unlike conventional plastics, could be digested by bacteria and fungi. Shopping bags tattered in trees because nothing could recycle them back to the soil. EcoPlast strove to make them attractive to microbes by inserting promoters throughout the polymer structure that made the bonds digestible. Benny knew that EcoPlast’s claim that they fully broke down was disingenuous. They broke wherever a promoter was eaten, leaving non-visible pieces of plastic that contaminated soil and water.
She came home from her job and studied textbooks from the library: Biology, Principles of Genetics, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Microbiology. Her knowledge of biology had been limited to introductory courses in her freshman year. She knew her physics and mathematics, the building blocks for a mechanistic view of the world, and applied them to the workings of the cell. She had studied organic chemistry, including that of long-chain polymers such as silk protein and its synthetic mimic, nylon. She took her GRE, then sent her transcript to Cornell.
While she waited, she studied the ways that enzymes act on natural long-chain polymers to break them down into their constituent parts so that these can be recycled within the cell. Because plastics are long-chain polymers whose structures are unrecognizable to enzymes found in nature, she would need to engineer enzymes capable of digesting the bonds in inert plastics.
The Rest is Silence Page 6