“Find something. Make something,” my aunt said to us in an email. “Times are tough and we may as well put thought and meaning into our gifts.”
Vaguely in my mind I imagined myself knitting in my room bracelets for everyone. But when Xmas music played at the café where I went to write and put it off another day, I felt the holiday creeping up on me. I listed names of people in order of priority: parents first and cousins later, and a second list for maybes. I meditated on the image of giving bracelets to people. I imagined compiling my recent art for family, but it wasn’t for them.
That was the paragraph that I wrote in the café a week before Christmas and it followed the beginning of a story that I would finish the day after Christmas. I didn’t have writers block at all when I started but I didn’t know what I was writing. Then a progressive guy I knew from school walked in and we talked a while. I told him about our family’s Christmas pursuit and he said his family acknowledged tough times too on Christmas. He also said he did some writing and song writing too. I asked if it was political, and he said it just dealt with emotions, and then it struck me that I had the challenge of doing just that.
Food, Life and Good Stories
My family expected me to show up on their snowy doormat on December 24th. This was back in 2009, and they hadn’t known it but my job in New York didn’t work out and I’d been sleeping on my friend’s couch for a year. It was my chance to get out of Wisconsin and be somewhere new. My friend had the job all waiting for me, Phil Aranok who had been in the paper with me at school. It was February 2009 when I moved out, six months after graduating and mowing the occasional lawn as a fill-in.
It was a small, independent newspaper office with their funniest articles on the walls: “Bearded Five Year Old Roams Streets,” “Teachers Strike Until Students Do Homework,” “Bottled Water Companies Forced to Put ‘Tap’ in Ingredients,” “Mayor Takes Apology Back and Declares Cheating Not Our Business.”
The scariest thing of my first day -of two days- was when the Editor and Chief, Megan Shoe asked me where I was from.
“Wisconsin,” I said.
“Wow. And you’ve been living in New York?”
“Since yesterday.”
“Oh yea?”
“Did Andrew not tell you that?”
Andrew looked over from his computer and gulped.
“No,” she said, “but he told you how the test week goes, yea?”
“No,” I said, staring Andrew down until he slowly turned back to his computer.
“Yea,” she said. “Hopefully we could hire you. We’re going to find out tomorrow if we’re getting our annual donation from Maryanne Lewis Frank.”
“Who’s Maryanne Lewis Frank?”
“She’s a real interesting person. She owns a sustainable farm in New Jersey and the largest self-supplied restaurant in Queens. She also owns 81.4FM and hosts a show at one on weekdays. She practically bases her show on our paper.”
“How old is she?”
“She’s in her eighties. She has two autobiographies.”
“Cool.”
“Yea. So this week you can take your time on one article and pitch at least one idea tomorrow.”
At one that afternoon I turned on Andrew’s clock radio, sitting on his window ledge, looking out at the Brooklyn Street.
“Hello world! It’s one p.m. and this is Maryanne Lewis Frank and Pete Logran! Despite all the problems in the world and in New York City it’s a beautiful gray day. I love gray. Don’t you love gray Pete?”
“Yes. You need shades of gray.”
“Right. It’s not all black and white.”
“It’s not always blue.”
“That’s right. Everyone wants blue all the time. How about some gray?”
“No discrimination.”
“Right. Speaking of discrimination, the New York Footprint ran an article today on a discrimination issue.”
“Is segregation back?”
“No! Well, let’s not go there, but a new poll reveals that most New Yorkers prefer banks where no one greets you when you walk in.”
“Tellers?”
“No. Sometimes a manager-type tries to get you to come to his desk and offer you deals so the smile business seems like just a ploy.”
“So they don’t trust smiling managers.”
“They discriminate because they’re okay with Kristoffs greeters.”
“Well the old Kristoffs greeter has no agenda.”
“Exactly. It’s safe to smile back at that greeter. And we happen to have a Kristoffs greeter with us.”
“Hello,” said an old woman.
“Mrs. Stallworth. Hello,” said Maryanne.
“Hello,” she said again.
“Ms. Stallworth. How is it being a greeter?”
“Oh. I’m no longer a greeter.”
“Since when?”
“This morning. I was let go with advanced notice.”
“Oh no! Why, may I ask?”
“Oh. I’ve been forgetting where I am recently. So sometimes I have to sit down and close my eyes.”
“Oh. Okay. Well that’s normal.”
“Maryanne,” said Pete. “Is she okay?”
“Mrs. Stallworth? Okay. Let’s hear from our sponsor.”
I said to the cabdriver, “Please. Put on 81.4!”
As we rode over the Brooklyn Bridge Maryanne said, “We have to cancel today’s show. Enjoy a recording.”
After I asked the security guard at the desk, “Could I talk to someone for an article?” police officers rushed past me to the elevator.
“Did they let you up?” asked Megan Shoe in the office.
“No but when I spoke to a janitor outside, later, Maryanne herself was being carried out on a stretcher.”
“Why?”
“Someone killed her.”
“Who?”
“Some guy who ran in alongside the paramedics for Mrs. Stallworth, shot her, and ran out.”
“Do you know why?
“No. But I’m thinking the guy thought she purposely had someone on the show that was let go from Kristoffs. This could be the focus of my article.”
“Wow. So we can’t hire you just yet now that Maryanne Lewis Frank is dead but go ahead and write it but just this once
because we need a new source of fundraising now.”
“What do you think?” asked Andrew at his small table that night in his kitchen.
“About?”
“Maryanne Lewis Frank. Think she asked for it?”
“All I know is she likes gray and has a sustainable farm. You haven’t read her autobiographies have you?”
“No but we have copies at the office, a boxful if you want to investigate.”
“Yea. Maybe I’ll take my time and explore this.”
Megan Shoe gave me the books directly and said, “Great idea. I can probably get you some access if you need it.”
I opened her second book on the bus, thinking a connection to Kristoffs might be in there.
By 1967 I had been living in New York City for twenty years and for nineteen years I lived in Harlem where I ran what was known as a healthy bakery. I had written an autobiography because people thought I was very peculiar and wanted to know my story. It was also just to have a relevant book in the place, but I didn’t realize that at the time of printing it, a much more compelling story was about to unfold.
“Authorities still don’t know who took the life of the late Maryanne Lewis Frank,” said a reporter on the TV screen in a green room where 81.4 was painted on the wall. A man in his sixties with a long, white ponytail came to the entrance and said,
“Clarence?”
“Yea.”
“I’m Pete. Come in.”
His office had flags from every country on the walls. He sat in a chair in the middle of the room with me.
“So Megan Shoe says you want the scoop on Maryanne and Kristoffs?”
“Not necessarily. This could be a long term project so I’m just finding out what I’m looking for.”
“Well this is what I think. Ready?”
I took out my recorder and turned it on. He said, “She let ideas come out from between the lines. She didn’t make
statements. She asked questions. Nothing was right or wrong to her, but everything was peculiar. She met that woman at Kristoffs and invited her, knowing nothing about her see? That’s all.”
I shut it off. “Why do you have these flags?”
“I try to provoke curiosity for other places. I feel I’m with everyone in the world with all these flags.”
“Wow. Can I maybe follow you up on an email?”
“Sure. Hey. Read her first book first.”
In 1947 I worked at the local bakery in my New England town at the register. I was twenty-two years old and was back home after graduating from a university. It was a small town and we had regular customers. There was a little boy that came in all the time named Billy Norton. The boy was rather large for his age and always by himself. One day he came in with a black eye. I said, “Now Billy. What happened?”
He shrugged nervously.
“Did someone start a fight with you?”
“It’s no big deal,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not big deal. It’s probably just kids that do so bad on their tests at school that they try to prove their toughness by hitting my great friend.”
He laughed, which I had never seen before. In fact, I had never seen him smile.
On my last week there, my third week, Mr. Hancock who I’d known my whole life taught me how to make some sort of
pastry. He poured massive amounts of sugar on the dough. The first treat I made came out rather funny looking; it was skinny
on one side and fat on the other. Then I poured sugar on it. “More,” said Mr. Hancock. “Don’t be afraid.”
Just before I left that day I sold that awkward pastry to Billy, who wasn’t smiling. When he left Mr. Hancock said, “He comes in more than ever. I think he likes you.”
Six months after quitting that job and reading books in what felt for the first time like “my parents’ house,” and not “our
home,” I moved in with a friend in New York City.
“Find anything about Kristoffs greeters?” said Andrew walking by me behind the couch.
“I’m in the forties right now.” That Pete guy suggested I start in the beginning.”
“What if all you get out of this is a good read?”
“I’m sure I’ll get something out of it.”
“I just mean as far as writing something.”
“Hey are you nervous about me laying on the couch all day?”
“No! I feel bad enough having made the mistake with The Footprint. Please, read two volumes of Maryanne Lewis Frank on
my- on the couch as long as you want. But maybe you should visit her farm.”
There were a hundred people on the endless farm when I got there from the bus stop by the elementary school. A thirty-year old woman in a bandana greeted me. “Clarence?”
“Yep.”
“Heidi. Thanks for calling and not just showing up like some radio fans do.”
“Oh yea?”
“Walk the farm with me.”
“Okay so why are there so many people here?” I asked as we headed down a path.
“Because we’ve got child labor. We’ve got a volunteer educational program going on which accounts for half the people
here. Then you have a class of people that want to be sustainable farmers, which accounts for another forty people. Then you have regular people.”
“Okay. Do you have any idea of why the tragedy may have happened?”
“I have a few ideas. What do you think?”
“I’m just reading her books now.”
“Did you read the second one?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay. Well you’ll get an idea in the second one.”
“Really? Can you tell me what you think anyway?”
“Sure. But you should read all of it before writing anything. Maryanne pissed a lot of people off in the sixties when she took
over this land.”
“Is that it?”
“Well. It seems outlandish that someone would kill her because of it decades later. Some people are crazy.”
“Why would it bother people to take over the land? Was it supposed to be for something else?”
“Yes. Big time retailers were trying to develop it.”
“Oh okay. Probably the same owners as Kristoffs right?”
She chuckled and thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. Listen babe. I wasn’t around back then but I don’t want to say your investigation isn’t interesting. If it turns out it has something to do Kristoffs then my guess is that’s interesting but Maryanne Lewis Frank is interesting in her own right.”
Suzie was some sort of secretary in the publishing world but on the weekends she served tables at Lorkinvalle’s, the most disgusting place you’ve ever seen. She told me not to go and distract her but I went anyway and saw that she was just embarrassed by the place. It was dark and heavy with loathsome old men. I pulled her behind a curtain where we accidentally stumbled into something ridiculous and so I pulled her another way and asked her, “What are you thinking working here?”
“I told you not to come here,” she said.
“Well maybe I wanted to see if it was a place I could pick up something for the meantime too.”
“Maryanne. If you want a job I could get you it like that.”
“Really?”
She inflated her gum and popped it.
I liked working there. I could mess up people’s orders and it didn’t make a difference to them. Winking always earned me a
bigger tip. And the best thing about the place was Joanne. Joanne Current, from Harlem who said to me when she first saw me in the trashy uniform, “Hey Nancy. You aught to not eat before working if you want to not get sick in this place.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“But if you do get sick, there’s an ally out the back door.”
Because Suzie actually worked in an office during the week and Joanne only worked at night, I asked Joanne to show me around during the day.
“I hate it,” she said in the frosty weather at the bottom of Central Park. “I want to get out of there as soon as possible.”
“If you had a special magic, I don’t know…”
“Bowling pin.”
“If you had a special magic bowling pin, and you could leave that place right now, what would you do?”
“Go bowling.”
“I mean if you had to chose a work option.”
“Oh. I like cooking. I wish I could take Lorkinvalle’s and make it a nice place with really good food. Actually you should
come over and have some of our food.”
The meal was the second best food I ever had at the table with her sister and her brother-in-law and their little boy and
little girl.
“Where are you going next?” said the brother-in-law to me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked while Joanne got up from the table.
“Well you’re not going to stay at Lorkinvalle’s. You have some New England degree of some kind. I’m sure you’ve got
something in mind.”
I sighed. “My only interest is to experience whatever is here in life and to try to help if I can.”
“Joanne says you’re a bowler.”
I laughed real hard.
The children fought with each other and Joanne’s sister whispered in their ears to calm them.
“I actually want to open up a place with Joanne,” I said.
“A bowling alley?”
“I don’t know.”
Joanne returned and put a tray with a pile of circular pastries on the table that were black on the bottom and blue on the top and the kids and everyone were suddenly silent. Her sister clamped her hands together and said, “Magadols.”
“Yes!” said the little boy.
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” said the brother-in-law to me. “Have a magadol.”
“What in the world is that?”
Joanne laughed and sat down. “I can’t eat sugar,” she said. “So when I was a kid I experimented with my mother to cook stuff I could eat when everyone else had some sugar thing and well this is just one of my famous, healthy desserts.”
“I love them already,” I said and ate one.
“Best food you’ve ever had,” said her sister.
I nodded. “This is beyond food. This is the next life.”
The next stop on my journey was Lorkinvalle’s sleazy restaurant, which was in Queens, but it wasn’t Lorkinvalle’s anymore. It was actually called The Next Life. It was all very wooden inside and there were plants everywhere. There were probably fifty tables but only ten full because it was three p.m.
Someone my age with red hair pulled back tight and a plead shirt tucked into her black pants greeted me by the entrance with a menu. “Hi. Would you like a table?”
“I don’t think so. I was hoping to maybe speak to a manager or someone that knows a lot about Maryanne Lewis Frank.”
“I do.”
“Oh yea? Are you her daughter or something?”
“No. I’m just a big fan. I listen to her radio shows when they repeat at one a.m. because of my shift. Why? You’re not the killer are you?”
“No. I’m just interested in her. It started as an investigative article but now I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“What are you from Wisconsin?”
“Yes?”
“Wait a minute. What’s your name?”
“Clarence.”
“Clarence. I’m Robin. Don’t go anywhere. I will help you.”
She gripped her black coat tight as we walked up an avenue in Harlem.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Have you ever had a magadol?”
“Of course!”
“Are they going to have magadols there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll see why.”
“Oh maybe this will connect to Kristoffs.”
“No. It has nothing to with that. Or maybe it does” she chuckled. “Here it is.”
It was a fast food place with bright signage, bright interior and prices all over the window.
“What?” I said. “This isn’t Mary-Jo-Anne’s.”
“It was. Ok, it’s freezing, let’s go.”
As soon as we sat down on the subway I pressed her. “When did that happen?”
“Decades ago man. She sold it. Read faster.”
“I read the whole first book.”
“The first book sucks. Read the second one.”
“What sort of fan are you? You just like her magadols and radio show.”
“I’m just kidding. But you have to try a magadol.”
“When do you work?”
“No. Come in when I don’t work.”
“You wouldn’t want the awkwardness of me tipping you. I get it.”
“No. That way I can go eat magadols with you and figure out what you’re figuring out!”
Mary-Jo-Anne’s was often investigated by the police because it was known as a hip place believe it or not. I don’t know why that warranted so much suspicion. Even in 1967 it had the same black and white checkered floor. The music and our looks changed with the times a bit and we hung beads over the front door and one day splashed various paints all over the walls but other than a slightly new ambience it was still just a healthy bakery.
It was a Saturday morning when three boys and a girl walked in. Only one of them I knew quite well, His name was Joel.
They took one of the two tables and I said, “Joel, right?”
“That’s me. Mary right?”
“Where did you get all these people from?”
“What does that mean?” said a boy with fuzzy sideburns and a long brown coat.
“Just curious. Do you go to school together?”
“These are my stepbrothers from New Jersey. My father lives in New Jersey with my twelve other siblings.”
“He’s just joking around said the one in the coat.”
“Would ya’all like anything?”
The girl next to Joel said, “Are we aloud to not get anything?”
“It’s encouraged here.”
The one in the coat rubbed his chin and nodded.
“We’ll have a plate of mi-kis,” said Joel.
While I made the plate I listened to them talk.
“Can you get people to come to this auction next Sunday?” said Joel’s other brother.
“What are my friends going to do? You thinking of actually raising money?”
“You’re friends,” said the one in the coat, “can help us stop the auction all together.”
They were quiet and I set the plate down. “If ya’ll need anything, even ideas, just let me know.”
“What kind of ideas do you have Mary?” said the one in the coat.
“This place was my idea. Not a bad idea right considering my friend Joanne’s amazing cooking and my name’s Maryanne.”
“We all used to go to a grade school in New Jersey,” said Joel. “There was a farm next to our school. Part of it was sectioned
off for the kids so we actually grew food in there when we were little kids.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“Just around the time I moved well, so did the farmer. He went bankrupt but we kept the garden anyway, even though the
guy couldn’t help anymore.”
“Now the whole thing’s going to be parking lot,” said the one in the coat.
“For what?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet,” said the one in the coat. ”But all those kids are going to see is stores and parking lot. It’s the only
space left.”
“It’s a problem for the kids,” said Joel’s other brother. “But it’s also a problem for everyone that has to move out of the
town because it’s an expensive place now.”
“I have an idea,” I said.
It was May when Robin, Heidi, Andrew, Megan and I had dinner together at The Next Life. It was the next life. The food was ecstatic, I couldn’t stop laughing, and I finally felt planted in where I was.
“So are you going to do anymore writings on Maryanne Lewis Frank?” said Heidi to me.
“I might have to move on with life,” I said.
“No!” she Robin across the table from me. “You’ve been keeping her alive for us.”
“You don’t listen to reruns?” said Andrew? “You’re not a real fan.”
“I admit I stopped listening to it. I needed to start sleeping before midnight.”
“You know what?” I said. “I’m pretty ready to just work anywhere now or go home.”
Robin threw a string bean at me. “Don’t go home.”
“I want you to stay,” said Andrew.
“Do you know anything about organizing a giant concert?” said Megan. “Pete thinks we should have a giant concert on the farm to fundraise.”
“Where would the food go?” said Robin. “Does Pete know what a farm is?”
“”Robin,” said Megan. “I think you should take over Maryanne’s show. You’re it.”
“Oh my God you’re right!” she said. “What the hell would I talk about?”
“Why don’t you say to Pete you want to do a show for a week to see if it works out?”
“Okay.”
“Hello. It’s one a.m. and you’re wondering who the hell am I? Well you probably heard that Maryanne Lewis Frank was shot
right here and as a result is not a living person anymore.”
“And I’m Clarence.”
“I’m Robin Cherry Gile. We’re more interested in you than us so we’ll be taking calls of Maryanne fans to see how people are
feeling about the end of this woman. We’re at 917, 789, 5124. That’s 917, 789, 5124.”
We waited a second and it rung. “Speak to us,” said Robin.”
“Wow. Hi.” It was a woman’s voice.
“Hi,” said Robin. “What’s your name?”
“Michelle. I just want to say that I’ve been listening to this for the full fifteen years since it’s been on.”
“What made you tune in?” Were you an eater at The Next Life?”
“Well. When her second book came out in 1990, I read it and it just had a big affect on me.”
“How so?”
“The woman stuttered and sounded like she might have been crying. “She made me feel good about food. Food had always
been the worst thing I could think of. My father died from a heart attack because of how he ate and I never felt good around it.
But it became a beautiful thing.”
“Thank you Michelle.”
“Okay. Thanks for doing this. I’ve been frustrated for this whole month listening to her recordings. I’ve never called before.”
“Thank you.”
“Hello?” It sounded like a middle-aged man with a rough voice.
“Hi there,” said Robin. “What’s your name?”
“Hi. I’m Steve. I eat at The Next Life all the time. I’ve always been inspired by the story about the farm. The same thing happened to my neighborhood growing up. It was beautiful when I was a kid and we watched all the grass disappear and food became worse and worse. In fact, I got sick with food poisoning ten years ago. It was frightening. I thought I was going to die. I started listening to this show because I heard Maryanne knew something about safe food and cared about hot it was grown and made.”
“Great. This is going good.”
“Okay now,” he said.
“This is awesome,” said Robin. “Who’s this?”
“My name’s Tina.” Her age was ambiguous. She sounded very subtle.
“Hey Tina!” we both said.
“Hi. Well. I read those books both the first and the second. The first was given to me in the hospital in 1988 because I had been battling anorexia since I was thirteen a few years sooner. It definitely celebrated food and helped a little bit. But the second one absolutely cured me.” She cried.
“Take your time,” said Robin.
“Thank you. The woman broke the law and lied at an auction so that children could learn how to grow food and appreciate healthy food. When I grew up, food was just this horrible thing that if you actually enjoyed it made you fat. I felt like it was some sort of trap. You know what? In the nineties, I joined the community garden in my neighborhood and made friends that used to have similar problems! We would eat stuff out of the ground! So now every meal is a sacred activity and I try to make my kids love it too and they grow it too.”
“Thank you. We’ll take on more before The New York Footprint. Who is this?”
“This is Carl.”
“Hey Carl,” she said.
“Yea. I miss Maryanne. Are you taking over?”
“We’ll see.”
“I like you guys already. I liked Maryanne. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe it was because she promoted healthy food?”
“Lots of people do.”
“But she promoted that every ingredient and source be healthy and natural and she served it.”
“Okay. But I think she was also interesting because she always acted like everything was okay. She was cool. She liked the
funny newspaper.”
“Yep.”
“”Yea. But she wasn’t obsessed with food. She just did that stuff because of the people she met. She happened to meet that boy and that baker, Joanne and the kids from New Jersey. Food had nothing to do with her.”
“So why did you listen Carl, or read her books?”
“I love food. I don’t watch the food channel or go to chic restaurants. I just love food and I could never admit it. I never felt secure about being a very large person, or comfortable eating around other people, but when this strange woman came around, I felt comfortable talking about food and I came out of the closet as a person that loves food and life and good stories.”
The next day I printed the front-page story of The Footprint, “The Next Maryanne Hit by Car.” Robin was hit after the show and wound up in a coma for several months. She came to in September. The station had lost funding and was taken over by a Spanish radio company. Since the accident I spent the rest of the year taking some register jobs here and there. My family expected me to show up on their snowy doormat on December 24th in Wisconsin but a few days sooner I didn’t get on the bus. Instead I volunteered at The Next Life with Robin and Megan, serving healthy food for free to people who needed it the most. Robin played her acoustic guitar and sung too. We did it for five full days. Soon The New York Footprint couldn’t operate anymore except voluntarily and without regularity online. Things picked up for me later. I decided to just go with the current and see what stories awaited for me, paying attention for whenever something peculiar seemed to suggest an opportunity.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The CJ Seven
(10 pages)
The Middle of Nowhere. It’s a place where I met some people to build the movement. I think I was expecting a plan to develop, like something peaceful but explosive that would stir the country and Canada. On the train I struggled to write my own agenda, each one spilling into ethical dilemmas. Should I invite two people to the meeting or did I have to tell Maggie about everything or does that mean it then will have to wait three weeks and include the whole world and that will disempower key people? Secrets! Was it a problem that I’m not catching a glimpse of the natural whatever outside the window? Do you know how maddening it is that I’m going into the “Middle of Nowhere” at a time like this? These were my journal writings because I also suffered from terrible spiritual questions that one time had a room dull of Radical people practically throwing cans at me for wasting time. Or maybe that didn’t happen but I remember it that way. It was August in the Northeast, which is somewhere very voluminous in trees. The sky was blue.
The station was bleak. The platform was old, creaky wood. Beyond the platform was a stretch of concrete, an abandoned parking lot with grass protruding in various places to wild heights. There were some small buildings with large truck yards. There were no people. Then there was barren farmland until distant forests. There was a crazy stillness until the train moved on
“Hey there.” It was a guy. There were two of us. We were college-age people. I was white and he was black.
“Are you looking for Middle of Nowhere?” I asked.
“Is someone picking us up?”
“If not, this has been a prank.”
“Yea. I cam all the way from Texas, so to speak.”
“You don’t sound like a Texan.”
“Because I was born with an ambiguous accent. Where are you from?”
“New York City. Are you from anywhere else?”
On the other side of the track there was some field and a slope that fell into woods. Great mountains perched over the woods beyond.
“The ‘Middle of Nowhere,’” he said, also taking a panoramic view. “That’s kind of like where I’m from, because I’m not really from anywhere.”
I stepped down from the platform, dropping my backpack and sleeping bag on the ground. I was tired. I’d been traveling for a whole day. He climbed up on the wooden railing and perched like a pelican, looking over the wasteland.
“Think it was a prank?” I asked.
“Maybe. This place is interesting. I’d camp out here a night.”
“Did you really come from Texas?”
“Well, I’ve honestly just been going places since I graduated school.”
I was then a little fascinated with him. “The summer?” I asked.
He nodded.
“You don’t belong to any organization?” I asked.
“No. I don’t belong to anyone.”
“Well. You belong to the movement.”
“Do I belong to the movement?”
A small truck emerged far in the distance, speeding towards the town, dirt blowing behind it. “Here they come to kill us,” he said.
They were two women roughly our age. The driver was Annette. She was wearing black boots, jeans rolled up at the
bottom, a plaid, turquoise shirt and a red bandana around her neck, long black hair. She was from California but had been living in the Middle of Nowhere for a month she said. The other girl sat in the back with me. Her name was Mina. She was originally from Bangladesh. I think she was really living in Massachusetts at the time but was hoping to move back to Bangladesh if she could get some scholarship. She had been in the States for like six years or something. She asked me a million questions in the back seat so I missed something up front. “What’s your middle name?” she asked.
“Don’t have one.”
“Have you ever swum in the Pacific Ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever check under your bed to see it a monster is there?”
“No. Do you?”
“Yes. And once there was one. Are you anxious to get out of Manhattan?”
“I don’t know. Are you anxious?”
“No. I think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
We were going down the slope I noticed. The mountains opened up like a hand. There was more green and the road had become dirt. Soon we were in the forest and the road turned. Annette slowed down on the bumpy road. She let Pilot, my new friend, smoke a hand rolled cigarette out the window.
We arrived at a gigantic hole in the ground. It was like a big swimming pool with these metallic cubes like a close-up of a
micro-chop except there was dirt on the bottom. This might sound weird but we drove into the hole, slowly and then into this cave, which had a string of lights like in a mine or something. I was expecting various tunnels and then a big room where people had charts with figures on the wall and equipment for climbing and computers everywhere. But the truck stopped. Annette turned the truck off and said, “All right!”
We emerged up to the surface. The cubes appeared to me to be old tin construction pieces but with solar panels lying on top. We walked down a path through the woods as the sound of voices grew.
Then there was another similar hole except a little bit larger and much deeper. It was much more shaded by trees. We climbed down a rope latter to get in. There were broken cars and all sorts of machine parts. Annette opened a big door on some trapezoid-like pile of iron. Light shone from inside. It was a deeper underground room the size of the upper hole. The ground was covered with sheets, the walls with scrap metal. There were three people sitting at two connected folding tables, smiling at us, a man and two other women. Against one wall were additional folded tables. On the ground were duffle bags and several cardboard boxes.
Quickly, they arranged food from the boxes, much produce and bread. It was delicious. There were seven of us. There was a bearded man, some years older than I with a beret, Thompson. Thompson was from Africa. Really. He had an accent. He was from Uganda. He seemed to glow with a determination that the world would revolutionize, according to his definition, in his lifetime.
And there was Charlotte, who was from Kentucky and might have been a year younger than I. She was just a bit enthusiastic and wore a yellow rain coat, I don’t know why. She had lots of stories about sitting in trees on targeted Coal mountains and lying in the road.
Luna was from Alaska but had lived in Mexico to get a PhD. I think she just didn’t accept scholarly recognition from the United States. She maybe had the best story, but it was a sad story. Her tribe was suing one of the Energy companies for the protective ice around their village that had melted extremely suddenly. Luna also loved food. She said, “If we didn’t have all these problems I would dedicate myself to Food arts and culture. You know what? The sounds kind of, I don’t know, boring compared to what I’m doing instead.”
“What are you a doctor of?” I asked.
“Indigenous philosophy. I almost wrote my thesis mainly on Food but I couldn’t ignore more general problems.”
“So Indigenous people and the environment?” asked Charlotte.
“Basically. Probably you know about the Seventh Generation.”
“That’s a brand of toilet paper,” Charlotte said.
“The Indigenous were into a generation of youth that would fight for the Earth, and recognize it within themselves.”
“Do you think,” I asked, “that they could make that connection in a city?”
“I can’t wait,” said Thompson, “for tomorrow.”
The next day we drove back up where the farms were and we drove the opposite way from the train station and the town, through the deserted farmland. At the end of the first two farms we turned down another empty, concrete road. It seemed the clouds weren’t moving, the wind was waiting and everything was dead. Soon, after the road slumped, an interesting sight appeared. There was immense barbed wire fence with a little house and acres of concrete broken up on the land within. As we got closer I saw there was caution tape wrapped up in the fence. Within the maybe twenty square acres of fence, the concrete was randomly broken up all throughout and some sort of clay. Annette stopped the car on the grass and we all poured out. We walked alongside it on the road. In the distance I could see the little house was boarded up. In the middle of the fence we stopped at a door.
“Are we going to break in?” asked Charlotte.
Annette pushed open the door. “We took the lock off some time ago.”
Everybody walked in. “Don’t step on the dirt,” said Thompson. “Stay on the thicker concrete.”
It felt as though even if we were in the middle of nowhere, we were being watched by the space outside of the fence. Of
course I wanted to ask questions and probably so did everybody else, but the sky seemed to impose a silence on us. Soon we were walking towards the house and I was certain we were going to go inside but I couldn’t imagine why we would go in there. I had the feeling that everyone but Thompson, Annette and Luna were thinking that there was a dead Mrs. Bates in there and she was magical. But we went around the side of the house to the back. There were caution and do-not-pass signs in the ground. But we passed. We stopped at the edge of a large pit. It was covered in tarp. It was like half or more of a football field.
Thompson, Luna, Annette, Mina, Pilot, Charlotte and I. It was August.
It was the following spring when I would really find out what happened to everyone. Thompson told me in our prison cell. When the door closed on us he smiled at me. “We’re in a concrete room,” he said.
“I can see your body,” I said, “and that’s a biological sight.”
“It’s somewhat in its primary sate besides my clothes and the culture of my cut hair and brushed teeth. What about my language?”
“How long do you think we’ll be here?”
“I don’t know. Good job though.”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
“They’ll give it back.”
“I could memorize your number. I might need to find you if I get left alone somewhere in this city.”
“Only when we split up I’ll tell you. Don’t say bye. Just repeat the number to yourself.”
“What’s happened to the rest of The Seven? Do you know?”
“Mina went to Bangladesh. She did it without the scholarship. She met everyone she needed to, someone documenting the
flooding fields and the flood and water problems, and all the Climate organizer people. So her project for months was to organize a cultural collective. She dropped all these other ideas when she found the documentarian. So she’s trying to make the film more interesting so it’s not just seen by a few thousand people on Houston Street, but more importantly, other young people. Because she’s not trying to persuade the UNFCCC. She’s trying to build the movement.”
“God. I want to go! Why aren’t we all doing that?”
“Well, we are in some ways but direct actions are obviously more important in the North.”
“But Pilot- didn’t he go to Puerto Rico or something?”
“He actually applied for school in Texas and has been trying to build a campaign to stop the pipeline from the other end,
so obviously he’s coordinating with Luna.”
“No,” I said. “Isn’t she in Mexico?”
“She’s on one end doing the same thing where the damage is really bad.”
“Is she in Canada or South Dakota?”
“Canada. Her situation is more serious so she not only has to get the workers on her side, which they have to some extent
done I think, but-“
“Shouldn’t she be in Alaska?”
“She went to Canada to the Indigenous organizations. She’s going about like she’s writing a sequel to her dissertation so
when she asks everyone questions she’s really trying to provoke this ancient wisdom stuff about how to easily win because
they’re obviously right. I wish I was there.”
“Me too.”
“But I don’t really know about their progress too much. Charlotte organized a strike at her school. They occupied it for a
whole week. Now she’s meeting with other schools to do it all throughout Appalachia for more than a week.”
“Was she arrested?”
“Of course, but she was bailed out by hundreds of people.”
In front of the pit, Annette closed her eyes and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” We all joined her.
“Can’t we get poisoned by breathing the air?” said Charlotte when the song was over. That made everyone laugh, but also
made me paranoid because laughing of course makes you inhale more deeply and I have a record of being extremely vulnerable
to the placebo effect, or at least I think I think I’m sick all the time. The trees appeared green to me, but when I mentioned it, Annette said they’re supposed to be green.
“You’re safe,” she said. “There’s probably nothing under the tarp anymore anyway. I mean a massive flood is why the company put concrete down. The fluid completely overwhelmed the land. Everyone’s plants and animals were dying right away, in this town. The mutation that happened to people, that was more gradual.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Why are we here?”
Luna lifted her palms upwards, like Jesus Christ. “This is the holy land,” she said. “This was my idea by the way. Annette, Thompson and I all decided to come here to film it. But when we got here, we found that it was all too beautiful to just document. Instead of showing how bad it was we saw a potential positive in it. So we decided to invite people to organize the Revolution with us, based on ancient concepts, but even more so, our own concepts, of our own time, of our own surroundings. Because my thesis was the surroundings were the roots of ideas, language, attitude. If our surroundings were so different than our ancestors, why should we look in books for answers that would have a high percentage of abstractedness to us anyway?”
“There’s no plan,” said Annette. “We just want to believe and believe that even a few open minded people could take part in it with us, and believe that it could do something, but not care if it doesn’t.”
“So no one lives in this whole town?” asked Mina.
“The buildings in town are mainly storage?” said Anette.
“What happened to the people?” I asked. “Did they all get sick?”
“Let’s walk back and talk,” said Thompson. “We don’t want out truck seen.” We walked back. “Not everyone got sick but
animals died. Some people experienced skin diseases or their hair fell out. There’s this one family called the Waxners. They lived here. Oh man. First the father had Vietnam War flashbacks, only he wasn’t in the Vietnam War. The mother suffered the most because her husband was diving on the ground when someone made popcorn; her daughter suddenly had these wild mood swings and outbreaks or rebellion but she was only seven years old; and the boy lost his appetite all together and his sense of taste. It was when the mother saw the boy eating the wrapper of his burrito that she scheduled herself a doctor’s
appointment.”
“Why would she schedule herself a doctor’s appointment?” I asked.
“She figured she had to have it too, plus she was the only one over due for a checkup, which was all they could afford with their insurance. The story is that the doctor turned off the lights for an x-ray, turned them back on and said, ‘You don’t spend time in pitch blackness do you?’ And she said, ‘No not really.’ And he said, ‘You glow in the dark.’”
“I don’t think we should be here,” said Mina.
“It was years ago, before more famous cases happened,” said Thompson.
When we passed by the house I looked at the boarded windows, spooked. “Where did you guys get all the food, the solar panel stuff and how did you make the whole hole thing?”
“I’ve had those panels a long time,” said Thompson. “They were on my house but I was evicted so I went to Canada for a conference about the Tar Sands and met Annette and Luna.”
“And you all sent out emails to every Green organization everywhere,” I said. “And four people showed up.”
“From New York,” said Luna, “Appalachia, Florida or Bangladesh, Texas or Caribbean Islands, and that’s it. Then I’m from Mexico or Alaska, Annete’s from California, and Thompson is from Uganda or New York.”
“What are you trying to figure out?” said Thompson.
“Maybe it makes a shape,” said Charlotte, “on a map.”
“So are we not going to come up with a strategy,” interrupted Mina, who, like Pilot, had hardly said a word since we got to the dead zone.
“I agree, “ I said. “I like the deep stuff, but when I get back to the city, I’m probably going to be even more conflicted. Now I have to meet all of these new ideals in everything I do. How am I supposed to get through a day? And does everything have to mean something more now? I mean like, can I never do something strategically the same ever again or am I Gandhi now because I came to Toxic Neverland?”
“Dude,” said Luna.
Pilot gave me a funny smile. It occurred to me that if he lit a cigarette he might blow up. I went over some of it in my head. Thompson was a Ugandan immigrant that lived on a farm upstate but got evicted and put his solar panels in a truck and eventually squatted in a hole. “Wait a second!” I yelled. “Why did you live on a farm, and how did you know there was a hole?”
“There are lots of holes out there that were never filled,” he said.
“They were supposed to be filled with liquid carbon,” said Annette. “But the environmental agencies said the companies had to cease all radical changes to the land.”
“So they can stop them from doing something,” said Pilot.
Thompson had come to New York City to study Sustainability with a scholarship. He worked part time and after he
graduated, moved onto an organic, off-the-grid farm. After their eviction, the farm-mates gave him all the truck, food and solar panels as a trade off as they got to WHOOF somewhere, which is worldwide organic farm hopping. He first went to the abandoned town to sleep there in his truck, being one of the few people that knew about it, but also just to see it. He left half of his stuff in one of the caves so he could get to Canada with a lighter truck and less gas, so he had to go back anyway.
We went to the town and parked in front of the storage places. There was an abandoned café. It still had a little picnic table out front so we sat at it. A truck left one of the yards going the way of the tracks. We finally discoursed our plan of action.
“What about Annette,” I asked in the cell.
“Remember, she talked about water?”
“Yea.”
“She got all the Climate Justice organizations together, local farmers, student groups including Education Rights activists to some extent, and Water Justice groups and organized a mass thirst strike and lobby with the governner. Actually they fasted for two days but didn’t drink on the second when they crammed in this conference room with reporters in there and activists in the hallways talking to media about the water situation. And they got the Education people involved because they called for loan forgiveness for students that were going to farm for at least four years in the more northern part of the state. I think they’re making it and they made a story.”
“I’m sorry I dropped out,” I said. “Everyone has been doing such awesome work and I just got caught up with school and tuition and medicine and my family had problems, and-”
“Shut up,” he said. “Big deal. You made it to this. Obviously, a crack in your life opened and you fell back into the movement.”
“But I wasn’t prepared to get arrested.”
“Listen. We have more serious charges than everyone else, obviously. I’m not sure they’re even going to let us go but if they do we can possibly fundraise our charges or refuse to pay.”
“I have school. I have finals.”
“Right, well. I’m probably not going to pay any charge but we can fundraise for you.” The officer appeared at the door and asked for Thompson. He told me his number, which I repeated as he left.
I felt bizarre without a pen to write with. It had been a year since we met in the Middle of Nowhere. When I came back to
the city after our gathering there, my uncle who I lived with was in the hospital because of an alcohol related incident. As I was
trying to articulate these ideas with Maggie, my uncle checked into a clinic. I thereafter spent time with my teenage cousin, Alice, who lived with us and was also moderately mentally retarded. I had to make sure she could still focus on her schoolwork, et cetera. But the most difficult thing that happened was two weeks into the fall semester Maggie fired me from our organization. I had gone to a hearing and spoke out at the microphone before the Environmental Protection Agency. I said I was from our organization, and that I hoped the spirit of Nature would get into them. Instead of testifying I sung “This Little Light of Mine.” People joined me and while I still had twenty seconds on the clock I said, “I sung this at the site of the Frack-flooding of a whole town on the property of the Waxners, a family with terrible problems from being exploited.”
Then the moderator asked me if I trespassed.
“Yes,” I said. “To see the truth.”
Then my time was up and I said, because it was really a hearing about Carbon Sequestration, “Putting Carbon under the
Earth where no one will care is the equivalent of poisoning poor people for profit, as if no one would care, all over the world.”
She said she had to fire me to maintain their reputation as law abiding because she had already been trying to hide our affiliation with Anarchists and we were on an eco-terrorist watch list. It wasn’t so bad personally at first but I became totally isolated from the group. I couldn’t go to meetings. Soon I had a reputation for being fired and my opinions and strategies didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t stay at the environmental happenings at school because of my cousin and I had to work more hours at the bakery. At times I collapsed, overwhelmed by being rejected by Maggie, an organizer whom I respected, and for feeling like the rotten activist, the one that ruins things.
Over the winter I got myself back into spiritual study. I needed to make sense of my unexpected disappointment overall. It had felt as through Luna’s destiny didn’t have me in mind.
In January, I called Thompson, and he told me about the action, so I felt better with it on my calendar, only I didn’t know I was going to take it so far.
There was a whole two-day gathering before the action, but I didn’t go to that part. It was way upstate. I was able to
connect to this guy who also left last minute. He was balding. His car was messy. He smoked manufactured cigarettes. “I’m a cartoonist,” he said as we drove up the West Side Highway.
“That’s you- what cartoon?”
“It’s a space cartoon. It’s about a turtle that floats through space.”
“Does he meet anyone out there?”
“He meets all sorts of characters. He meets the presidents, he meets Ray Charles, he meets General Petraeus.”
“Oh, okay. Where could I find this cartoon?”
“Oh, I don’t publish it.”
“Oh, okay. So, do you work in the city?”
“No, I illustrate at home.”
“The space turtle.”
He looked confused. “Yes. Mr. Hardshell.”
“So why are you going to this?”
“Save the water. We’re from the water, you know? We evolved from the water and this stuff is ancient sea creature fossils.
Probably it’s us prior to reincarnation. So we’re sucking our ancient, ancestral bodies from the rock, and putting it in our generators. And Coal was plants originally. It goes from plant, to Coal, to zoom-down-the-road.”
His car was hybrid, I noticed. “Well what the heck is idle, black goo and carbon-potent rock for?” I asked, playing devil’s advocate.
“What’s your dead body going to be for? He said.
“Maybe it’s like the apple on the Tree of Knowledge.”
“Except we don’t learn anything,” he said. “And they suck out the gas and put carbon liquid in there and call it “Climate
ground zero,” God forbid it comes up. Want a cigarette?”
“No thanks.”
There were fifteen hundred people standing as a ring around a massive gas rig. Maggie and her organization weren’t there.
Thompson had tied himself to the top of the rig, about two hundred feet up, alone. The first day of drilling was suspended and eventually police and activists left. Only about two hundred people stayed over night. Supporters returned with food. I called my cousin Alice on the phone and told her I wasn’t going to be home because, “I’m taking a stand.” It began on a Monday. I gave up worrying about school by the Wednesday. There were massive cheers every time people left. I ate some food throughout but mostly didn’t eat. By Friday there were only fifteen people, the police returned and everybody was arrested. At the time of the arrests I climbed to the top of the tower and Thompson shared rope with me. The police eventually used a cherry picker to safely but forcibly remove us.
Later, in my cell, I thought about tuition, since it was the only perceptible obstacle, since making up a semester didn’t otherwise matter to me. Resolving my relationship with Maggie seemed suddenly dire. Why had I been letting life push me around? Maybe though, I had to be able to take the sort of action that I wanted to on my own. Maggie wouldn’t have let me tie myself to the rig! Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, if the tactic was at all profound in any way.
The next day I was released with a court summons. They gave my phone back but Thompson hadn’t been released yet. I called Maggie, who came to get me while I waited in a diner.
“What the hell is CJ Seven?” she asked as we sped through the night highway.
“Where did you hear about that?”
“Someone in California said to the press that all of these recent actions, including ones not widely known, were connected
through a group called the CJ Seven.”
“Oh, yea. That was Pilot’s idea. It was when we were leaving the Middle of Nowhere. There were seven of us and this girl Luna wanted it to mean something, like related to the Seven Generation and so on. Mina, who was planning an action for Bangladesh wanted our actions to draw attention to hers, so she said we needed a symbol or a name. Pilot, this guy from Texas said, The CJ Seven and we all wrote it on our hands.”
“Well now you’ve all made number one on the eco-terrorist list.”
That seemed pretty cool to me, but I wasn’t sure what to say. It brought every thing awkward between us to my mind. There was too much to calculate. I didn’t know where to start but I knew it was going to be a long drive. “I got a chance to think in jail,” I said.
“About what?”
“My uncle’s going to be back home from rehab soon. I feel I have to figure out how to get active again. What if no one had time to save the water? We’d all be poisoned!”
“I think the universe works it out so that people could be involved and there’s a reason other people can’t be.”
“Yea, I tried believing that for some seven months.” Suddenly I wondered if that seven meant anything. It seemed like a clear sign that I couldn’t be inactive for longer than seven months.”
“I love you but we have to maintain a reputation of our goals,” she said. “We don’t climb onto equipment.”
“So maybe I’ll join a different group, or start a local one.”
When I got home at two a.m. my uncle flicked on a light, in his underwear and with messy hair and a long face.
I froze.
“I was going to get you,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“I read a paper on the train ride down. You left your cousin home alone for a week. Can you even graduate school now?”
“I think I’ll just graduate in the winter.”
“Can you get reimbursed for this semester?”
“No.”
“Well Alice didn’t burn herself or miss any homework. Also I’m not drinking.”
“Do you feel okay?”
“No. Maybe you should finish the semester anyway, or work more hours.”
“I could help Alice with her school work.”
“Just tell me the story when you have time.” He turned off the light.
I finished the semester and nobody knew about the CJ Seven or no one knew I was involved. The Middle of Nowhere was completely locked up and had major trespassing fines attached to it, the whole town beyond the storage buildings and road that went alongside the tracks. The CJ Seven had another gathering anyway in an old church. About three hundred people showed up. It was wild. There were so many instruments. There was so much interesting food. The walls were covered in charts with figures.
When school started the following fall, I waited alone at meeting I had organized. A freshman showed up, a girl with pigtails and a striped shirt. She said, “You were in the CJ Seven, right?”
“Yup.”
“I’m going to bring all my friends and tell everyone I know to get involved. I heard about the Seven because my father said it was stupid, some stupid thing people did in the news. So I read it and then I started reading the news every day. My name’s Luna Waxner.”
The Middle of Nowhere. It’s a place where I met some people to build the movement. I think I was expecting a plan to develop, like something peaceful but explosive that would stir the country and Canada. On the train I struggled to write my own agenda, each one spilling into ethical dilemmas. Should I invite two people to the meeting or did I have to tell Maggie about everything or does that mean it then will have to wait three weeks and include the whole world and that will disempower key people? Secrets! Was it a problem that I’m not catching a glimpse of the natural whatever outside the window? Do you know how maddening it is that I’m going into the “Middle of Nowhere” at a time like this? These were my journal writings because I also suffered from terrible spiritual questions that one time had a room dull of Radical people practically throwing cans at me for wasting time. Or maybe that didn’t happen but I remember it that way. It was August in the Northeast, which is somewhere very voluminous in trees. The sky was blue.
The station was bleak. The platform was old, creaky wood. Beyond the platform was a stretch of concrete, an abandoned parking lot with grass protruding in various places to wild heights. There were some small buildings with large truck yards. There were no people. Then there was barren farmland until distant forests. There was a crazy stillness until the train moved on
“Hey there.” It was a guy. There were two of us. We were college-age people. I was white and he was black.
“Are you looking for Middle of Nowhere?” I asked.
“Is someone picking us up?”
“If not, this has been a prank.”
“Yea. I cam all the way from Texas, so to speak.”
“You don’t sound like a Texan.”
“Because I was born with an ambiguous accent. Where are you from?”
“New York City. Are you from anywhere else?”
On the other side of the track there was some field and a slope that fell into woods. Great mountains perched over the woods beyond.
“The ‘Middle of Nowhere,’” he said, also taking a panoramic view. “That’s kind of like where I’m from, because I’m not really from anywhere.”
I stepped down from the platform, dropping my backpack and sleeping bag on the ground. I was tired. I’d been traveling for a whole day. He climbed up on the wooden railing and perched like a pelican, looking over the wasteland.
“Think it was a prank?” I asked.
“Maybe. This place is interesting. I’d camp out here a night.”
“Did you really come from Texas?”
“Well, I’ve honestly just been going places since I graduated school.”
I was then a little fascinated with him. “The summer?” I asked.
He nodded.
“You don’t belong to any organization?” I asked.
“No. I don’t belong to anyone.”
“Well. You belong to the movement.”
“Do I belong to the movement?”
A small truck emerged far in the distance, speeding towards the town, dirt blowing behind it. “Here they come to kill us,” he said.
They were two women roughly our age. The driver was Annette. She was wearing black boots, jeans rolled up at the
bottom, a plaid, turquoise shirt and a red bandana around her neck, long black hair. She was from California but had been living in the Middle of Nowhere for a month she said. The other girl sat in the back with me. Her name was Mina. She was originally from Bangladesh. I think she was really living in Massachusetts at the time but was hoping to move back to Bangladesh if she could get some scholarship. She had been in the States for like six years or something. She asked me a million questions in the back seat so I missed something up front. “What’s your middle name?” she asked.
“Don’t have one.”
“Have you ever swum in the Pacific Ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever check under your bed to see it a monster is there?”
“No. Do you?”
“Yes. And once there was one. Are you anxious to get out of Manhattan?”
“I don’t know. Are you anxious?”
“No. I think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
We were going down the slope I noticed. The mountains opened up like a hand. There was more green and the road had become dirt. Soon we were in the forest and the road turned. Annette slowed down on the bumpy road. She let Pilot, my new friend, smoke a hand rolled cigarette out the window.
We arrived at a gigantic hole in the ground. It was like a big swimming pool with these metallic cubes like a close-up of a
micro-chop except there was dirt on the bottom. This might sound weird but we drove into the hole, slowly and then into this cave, which had a string of lights like in a mine or something. I was expecting various tunnels and then a big room where people had charts with figures on the wall and equipment for climbing and computers everywhere. But the truck stopped. Annette turned the truck off and said, “All right!”
We emerged up to the surface. The cubes appeared to me to be old tin construction pieces but with solar panels lying on top. We walked down a path through the woods as the sound of voices grew.
Then there was another similar hole except a little bit larger and much deeper. It was much more shaded by trees. We climbed down a rope latter to get in. There were broken cars and all sorts of machine parts. Annette opened a big door on some trapezoid-like pile of iron. Light shone from inside. It was a deeper underground room the size of the upper hole. The ground was covered with sheets, the walls with scrap metal. There were three people sitting at two connected folding tables, smiling at us, a man and two other women. Against one wall were additional folded tables. On the ground were duffle bags and several cardboard boxes.
Quickly, they arranged food from the boxes, much produce and bread. It was delicious. There were seven of us. There was a bearded man, some years older than I with a beret, Thompson. Thompson was from Africa. Really. He had an accent. He was from Uganda. He seemed to glow with a determination that the world would revolutionize, according to his definition, in his lifetime.
And there was Charlotte, who was from Kentucky and might have been a year younger than I. She was just a bit enthusiastic and wore a yellow rain coat, I don’t know why. She had lots of stories about sitting in trees on targeted Coal mountains and lying in the road.
Luna was from Alaska but had lived in Mexico to get a PhD. I think she just didn’t accept scholarly recognition from the United States. She maybe had the best story, but it was a sad story. Her tribe was suing one of the Energy companies for the protective ice around their village that had melted extremely suddenly. Luna also loved food. She said, “If we didn’t have all these problems I would dedicate myself to Food arts and culture. You know what? The sounds kind of, I don’t know, boring compared to what I’m doing instead.”
“What are you a doctor of?” I asked.
“Indigenous philosophy. I almost wrote my thesis mainly on Food but I couldn’t ignore more general problems.”
“So Indigenous people and the environment?” asked Charlotte.
“Basically. Probably you know about the Seventh Generation.”
“That’s a brand of toilet paper,” Charlotte said.
“The Indigenous were into a generation of youth that would fight for the Earth, and recognize it within themselves.”
“Do you think,” I asked, “that they could make that connection in a city?”
“I can’t wait,” said Thompson, “for tomorrow.”
The next day we drove back up where the farms were and we drove the opposite way from the train station and the town, through the deserted farmland. At the end of the first two farms we turned down another empty, concrete road. It seemed the clouds weren’t moving, the wind was waiting and everything was dead. Soon, after the road slumped, an interesting sight appeared. There was immense barbed wire fence with a little house and acres of concrete broken up on the land within. As we got closer I saw there was caution tape wrapped up in the fence. Within the maybe twenty square acres of fence, the concrete was randomly broken up all throughout and some sort of clay. Annette stopped the car on the grass and we all poured out. We walked alongside it on the road. In the distance I could see the little house was boarded up. In the middle of the fence we stopped at a door.
“Are we going to break in?” asked Charlotte.
Annette pushed open the door. “We took the lock off some time ago.”
Everybody walked in. “Don’t step on the dirt,” said Thompson. “Stay on the thicker concrete.”
It felt as though even if we were in the middle of nowhere, we were being watched by the space outside of the fence. Of
course I wanted to ask questions and probably so did everybody else, but the sky seemed to impose a silence on us. Soon we were walking towards the house and I was certain we were going to go inside but I couldn’t imagine why we would go in there. I had the feeling that everyone but Thompson, Annette and Luna were thinking that there was a dead Mrs. Bates in there and she was magical. But we went around the side of the house to the back. There were caution and do-not-pass signs in the ground. But we passed. We stopped at the edge of a large pit. It was covered in tarp. It was like half or more of a football field.
Thompson, Luna, Annette, Mina, Pilot, Charlotte and I. It was August.
It was the following spring when I would really find out what happened to everyone. Thompson told me in our prison cell. When the door closed on us he smiled at me. “We’re in a concrete room,” he said.
“I can see your body,” I said, “and that’s a biological sight.”
“It’s somewhat in its primary sate besides my clothes and the culture of my cut hair and brushed teeth. What about my language?”
“How long do you think we’ll be here?”
“I don’t know. Good job though.”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
“They’ll give it back.”
“I could memorize your number. I might need to find you if I get left alone somewhere in this city.”
“Only when we split up I’ll tell you. Don’t say bye. Just repeat the number to yourself.”
“What’s happened to the rest of The Seven? Do you know?”
“Mina went to Bangladesh. She did it without the scholarship. She met everyone she needed to, someone documenting the
flooding fields and the flood and water problems, and all the Climate organizer people. So her project for months was to organize a cultural collective. She dropped all these other ideas when she found the documentarian. So she’s trying to make the film more interesting so it’s not just seen by a few thousand people on Houston Street, but more importantly, other young people. Because she’s not trying to persuade the UNFCCC. She’s trying to build the movement.”
“God. I want to go! Why aren’t we all doing that?”
“Well, we are in some ways but direct actions are obviously more important in the North.”
“But Pilot- didn’t he go to Puerto Rico or something?”
“He actually applied for school in Texas and has been trying to build a campaign to stop the pipeline from the other end,
so obviously he’s coordinating with Luna.”
“No,” I said. “Isn’t she in Mexico?”
“She’s on one end doing the same thing where the damage is really bad.”
“Is she in Canada or South Dakota?”
“Canada. Her situation is more serious so she not only has to get the workers on her side, which they have to some extent
done I think, but-“
“Shouldn’t she be in Alaska?”
“She went to Canada to the Indigenous organizations. She’s going about like she’s writing a sequel to her dissertation so
when she asks everyone questions she’s really trying to provoke this ancient wisdom stuff about how to easily win because
they’re obviously right. I wish I was there.”
“Me too.”
“But I don’t really know about their progress too much. Charlotte organized a strike at her school. They occupied it for a
whole week. Now she’s meeting with other schools to do it all throughout Appalachia for more than a week.”
“Was she arrested?”
“Of course, but she was bailed out by hundreds of people.”
In front of the pit, Annette closed her eyes and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” We all joined her.
“Can’t we get poisoned by breathing the air?” said Charlotte when the song was over. That made everyone laugh, but also
made me paranoid because laughing of course makes you inhale more deeply and I have a record of being extremely vulnerable
to the placebo effect, or at least I think I think I’m sick all the time. The trees appeared green to me, but when I mentioned it, Annette said they’re supposed to be green.
“You’re safe,” she said. “There’s probably nothing under the tarp anymore anyway. I mean a massive flood is why the company put concrete down. The fluid completely overwhelmed the land. Everyone’s plants and animals were dying right away, in this town. The mutation that happened to people, that was more gradual.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Why are we here?”
Luna lifted her palms upwards, like Jesus Christ. “This is the holy land,” she said. “This was my idea by the way. Annette, Thompson and I all decided to come here to film it. But when we got here, we found that it was all too beautiful to just document. Instead of showing how bad it was we saw a potential positive in it. So we decided to invite people to organize the Revolution with us, based on ancient concepts, but even more so, our own concepts, of our own time, of our own surroundings. Because my thesis was the surroundings were the roots of ideas, language, attitude. If our surroundings were so different than our ancestors, why should we look in books for answers that would have a high percentage of abstractedness to us anyway?”
“There’s no plan,” said Annette. “We just want to believe and believe that even a few open minded people could take part in it with us, and believe that it could do something, but not care if it doesn’t.”
“So no one lives in this whole town?” asked Mina.
“The buildings in town are mainly storage?” said Anette.
“What happened to the people?” I asked. “Did they all get sick?”
“Let’s walk back and talk,” said Thompson. “We don’t want out truck seen.” We walked back. “Not everyone got sick but
animals died. Some people experienced skin diseases or their hair fell out. There’s this one family called the Waxners. They lived here. Oh man. First the father had Vietnam War flashbacks, only he wasn’t in the Vietnam War. The mother suffered the most because her husband was diving on the ground when someone made popcorn; her daughter suddenly had these wild mood swings and outbreaks or rebellion but she was only seven years old; and the boy lost his appetite all together and his sense of taste. It was when the mother saw the boy eating the wrapper of his burrito that she scheduled herself a doctor’s
appointment.”
“Why would she schedule herself a doctor’s appointment?” I asked.
“She figured she had to have it too, plus she was the only one over due for a checkup, which was all they could afford with their insurance. The story is that the doctor turned off the lights for an x-ray, turned them back on and said, ‘You don’t spend time in pitch blackness do you?’ And she said, ‘No not really.’ And he said, ‘You glow in the dark.’”
“I don’t think we should be here,” said Mina.
“It was years ago, before more famous cases happened,” said Thompson.
When we passed by the house I looked at the boarded windows, spooked. “Where did you guys get all the food, the solar panel stuff and how did you make the whole hole thing?”
“I’ve had those panels a long time,” said Thompson. “They were on my house but I was evicted so I went to Canada for a conference about the Tar Sands and met Annette and Luna.”
“And you all sent out emails to every Green organization everywhere,” I said. “And four people showed up.”
“From New York,” said Luna, “Appalachia, Florida or Bangladesh, Texas or Caribbean Islands, and that’s it. Then I’m from Mexico or Alaska, Annete’s from California, and Thompson is from Uganda or New York.”
“What are you trying to figure out?” said Thompson.
“Maybe it makes a shape,” said Charlotte, “on a map.”
“So are we not going to come up with a strategy,” interrupted Mina, who, like Pilot, had hardly said a word since we got to the dead zone.
“I agree, “ I said. “I like the deep stuff, but when I get back to the city, I’m probably going to be even more conflicted. Now I have to meet all of these new ideals in everything I do. How am I supposed to get through a day? And does everything have to mean something more now? I mean like, can I never do something strategically the same ever again or am I Gandhi now because I came to Toxic Neverland?”
“Dude,” said Luna.
Pilot gave me a funny smile. It occurred to me that if he lit a cigarette he might blow up. I went over some of it in my head. Thompson was a Ugandan immigrant that lived on a farm upstate but got evicted and put his solar panels in a truck and eventually squatted in a hole. “Wait a second!” I yelled. “Why did you live on a farm, and how did you know there was a hole?”
“There are lots of holes out there that were never filled,” he said.
“They were supposed to be filled with liquid carbon,” said Annette. “But the environmental agencies said the companies had to cease all radical changes to the land.”
“So they can stop them from doing something,” said Pilot.
Thompson had come to New York City to study Sustainability with a scholarship. He worked part time and after he
graduated, moved onto an organic, off-the-grid farm. After their eviction, the farm-mates gave him all the truck, food and solar panels as a trade off as they got to WHOOF somewhere, which is worldwide organic farm hopping. He first went to the abandoned town to sleep there in his truck, being one of the few people that knew about it, but also just to see it. He left half of his stuff in one of the caves so he could get to Canada with a lighter truck and less gas, so he had to go back anyway.
We went to the town and parked in front of the storage places. There was an abandoned café. It still had a little picnic table out front so we sat at it. A truck left one of the yards going the way of the tracks. We finally discoursed our plan of action.
“What about Annette,” I asked in the cell.
“Remember, she talked about water?”
“Yea.”
“She got all the Climate Justice organizations together, local farmers, student groups including Education Rights activists to some extent, and Water Justice groups and organized a mass thirst strike and lobby with the governner. Actually they fasted for two days but didn’t drink on the second when they crammed in this conference room with reporters in there and activists in the hallways talking to media about the water situation. And they got the Education people involved because they called for loan forgiveness for students that were going to farm for at least four years in the more northern part of the state. I think they’re making it and they made a story.”
“I’m sorry I dropped out,” I said. “Everyone has been doing such awesome work and I just got caught up with school and tuition and medicine and my family had problems, and-”
“Shut up,” he said. “Big deal. You made it to this. Obviously, a crack in your life opened and you fell back into the movement.”
“But I wasn’t prepared to get arrested.”
“Listen. We have more serious charges than everyone else, obviously. I’m not sure they’re even going to let us go but if they do we can possibly fundraise our charges or refuse to pay.”
“I have school. I have finals.”
“Right, well. I’m probably not going to pay any charge but we can fundraise for you.” The officer appeared at the door and asked for Thompson. He told me his number, which I repeated as he left.
I felt bizarre without a pen to write with. It had been a year since we met in the Middle of Nowhere. When I came back to
the city after our gathering there, my uncle who I lived with was in the hospital because of an alcohol related incident. As I was
trying to articulate these ideas with Maggie, my uncle checked into a clinic. I thereafter spent time with my teenage cousin, Alice, who lived with us and was also moderately mentally retarded. I had to make sure she could still focus on her schoolwork, et cetera. But the most difficult thing that happened was two weeks into the fall semester Maggie fired me from our organization. I had gone to a hearing and spoke out at the microphone before the Environmental Protection Agency. I said I was from our organization, and that I hoped the spirit of Nature would get into them. Instead of testifying I sung “This Little Light of Mine.” People joined me and while I still had twenty seconds on the clock I said, “I sung this at the site of the Frack-flooding of a whole town on the property of the Waxners, a family with terrible problems from being exploited.”
Then the moderator asked me if I trespassed.
“Yes,” I said. “To see the truth.”
Then my time was up and I said, because it was really a hearing about Carbon Sequestration, “Putting Carbon under the
Earth where no one will care is the equivalent of poisoning poor people for profit, as if no one would care, all over the world.”
She said she had to fire me to maintain their reputation as law abiding because she had already been trying to hide our affiliation with Anarchists and we were on an eco-terrorist watch list. It wasn’t so bad personally at first but I became totally isolated from the group. I couldn’t go to meetings. Soon I had a reputation for being fired and my opinions and strategies didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t stay at the environmental happenings at school because of my cousin and I had to work more hours at the bakery. At times I collapsed, overwhelmed by being rejected by Maggie, an organizer whom I respected, and for feeling like the rotten activist, the one that ruins things.
Over the winter I got myself back into spiritual study. I needed to make sense of my unexpected disappointment overall. It had felt as through Luna’s destiny didn’t have me in mind.
In January, I called Thompson, and he told me about the action, so I felt better with it on my calendar, only I didn’t know I was going to take it so far.
There was a whole two-day gathering before the action, but I didn’t go to that part. It was way upstate. I was able to
connect to this guy who also left last minute. He was balding. His car was messy. He smoked manufactured cigarettes. “I’m a cartoonist,” he said as we drove up the West Side Highway.
“That’s you- what cartoon?”
“It’s a space cartoon. It’s about a turtle that floats through space.”
“Does he meet anyone out there?”
“He meets all sorts of characters. He meets the presidents, he meets Ray Charles, he meets General Petraeus.”
“Oh, okay. Where could I find this cartoon?”
“Oh, I don’t publish it.”
“Oh, okay. So, do you work in the city?”
“No, I illustrate at home.”
“The space turtle.”
He looked confused. “Yes. Mr. Hardshell.”
“So why are you going to this?”
“Save the water. We’re from the water, you know? We evolved from the water and this stuff is ancient sea creature fossils.
Probably it’s us prior to reincarnation. So we’re sucking our ancient, ancestral bodies from the rock, and putting it in our generators. And Coal was plants originally. It goes from plant, to Coal, to zoom-down-the-road.”
His car was hybrid, I noticed. “Well what the heck is idle, black goo and carbon-potent rock for?” I asked, playing devil’s advocate.
“What’s your dead body going to be for? He said.
“Maybe it’s like the apple on the Tree of Knowledge.”
“Except we don’t learn anything,” he said. “And they suck out the gas and put carbon liquid in there and call it “Climate
ground zero,” God forbid it comes up. Want a cigarette?”
“No thanks.”
There were fifteen hundred people standing as a ring around a massive gas rig. Maggie and her organization weren’t there.
Thompson had tied himself to the top of the rig, about two hundred feet up, alone. The first day of drilling was suspended and eventually police and activists left. Only about two hundred people stayed over night. Supporters returned with food. I called my cousin Alice on the phone and told her I wasn’t going to be home because, “I’m taking a stand.” It began on a Monday. I gave up worrying about school by the Wednesday. There were massive cheers every time people left. I ate some food throughout but mostly didn’t eat. By Friday there were only fifteen people, the police returned and everybody was arrested. At the time of the arrests I climbed to the top of the tower and Thompson shared rope with me. The police eventually used a cherry picker to safely but forcibly remove us.
Later, in my cell, I thought about tuition, since it was the only perceptible obstacle, since making up a semester didn’t otherwise matter to me. Resolving my relationship with Maggie seemed suddenly dire. Why had I been letting life push me around? Maybe though, I had to be able to take the sort of action that I wanted to on my own. Maggie wouldn’t have let me tie myself to the rig! Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, if the tactic was at all profound in any way.
The next day I was released with a court summons. They gave my phone back but Thompson hadn’t been released yet. I called Maggie, who came to get me while I waited in a diner.
“What the hell is CJ Seven?” she asked as we sped through the night highway.
“Where did you hear about that?”
“Someone in California said to the press that all of these recent actions, including ones not widely known, were connected
through a group called the CJ Seven.”
“Oh, yea. That was Pilot’s idea. It was when we were leaving the Middle of Nowhere. There were seven of us and this girl Luna wanted it to mean something, like related to the Seven Generation and so on. Mina, who was planning an action for Bangladesh wanted our actions to draw attention to hers, so she said we needed a symbol or a name. Pilot, this guy from Texas said, The CJ Seven and we all wrote it on our hands.”
“Well now you’ve all made number one on the eco-terrorist list.”
That seemed pretty cool to me, but I wasn’t sure what to say. It brought every thing awkward between us to my mind. There was too much to calculate. I didn’t know where to start but I knew it was going to be a long drive. “I got a chance to think in jail,” I said.
“About what?”
“My uncle’s going to be back home from rehab soon. I feel I have to figure out how to get active again. What if no one had time to save the water? We’d all be poisoned!”
“I think the universe works it out so that people could be involved and there’s a reason other people can’t be.”
“Yea, I tried believing that for some seven months.” Suddenly I wondered if that seven meant anything. It seemed like a clear sign that I couldn’t be inactive for longer than seven months.”
“I love you but we have to maintain a reputation of our goals,” she said. “We don’t climb onto equipment.”
“So maybe I’ll join a different group, or start a local one.”
When I got home at two a.m. my uncle flicked on a light, in his underwear and with messy hair and a long face.
I froze.
“I was going to get you,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“I read a paper on the train ride down. You left your cousin home alone for a week. Can you even graduate school now?”
“I think I’ll just graduate in the winter.”
“Can you get reimbursed for this semester?”
“No.”
“Well Alice didn’t burn herself or miss any homework. Also I’m not drinking.”
“Do you feel okay?”
“No. Maybe you should finish the semester anyway, or work more hours.”
“I could help Alice with her school work.”
“Just tell me the story when you have time.” He turned off the light.
I finished the semester and nobody knew about the CJ Seven or no one knew I was involved. The Middle of Nowhere was completely locked up and had major trespassing fines attached to it, the whole town beyond the storage buildings and road that went alongside the tracks. The CJ Seven had another gathering anyway in an old church. About three hundred people showed up. It was wild. There were so many instruments. There was so much interesting food. The walls were covered in charts with figures.
When school started the following fall, I waited alone at meeting I had organized. A freshman showed up, a girl with pigtails and a striped shirt. She said, “You were in the CJ Seven, right?”
“Yup.”
“I’m going to bring all my friends and tell everyone I know to get involved. I heard about the Seven because my father said it was stupid, some stupid thing people did in the news. So I read it and then I started reading the news every day. My name’s Luna Waxner.”
Monday, October 4, 2010
In Contact
(This is 9 pages)
It started when the password for my email wouldn’t open. I tried my various other ones, including shared ones and my school account. Nothing opened. My Facebook account wouldn’t open. Interestingly, I could look at my page from the outside. My wall read, “Went on a trip. Will be out of contact.” Chills went through me. I looked around my room at the darkness behind open doors. I turned on the light and looked everywhere, even out the window. I had an idea of what might have happened. I called Andrea. She said, “Aran, where are you?”
“Home,” I said.
“Are you going on a trip?”
“I don’t know.”
“I read your blog.”
“Which one?”
“The one you just wrote.”
“What did I just write?”
“What do you mean? You said you need to take a break and think things over. You said you’re sorry if you've led people astray?”
“No. Someone hijacked my identity online. I can’t login to anything.”
“…”
“Andrea?”
“Be careful what you say Aran. Our phones are both bugged. They said you’re going on a trip. Think carefully about where you go. If I have any idea I’ll call you. Just get out of there.”
“Should I go there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not yet. If anything, we need to not contradict the message that you’re on a trip.”
She hung up. I put on my shoes and coat, put my water bottle and journal in my tote bag and left. It was past midnight. I got on the train to Manhattan, not sure if I should go to Andrea’s. I looked around and it didn’t look as though anyone were following me. I figured if I went to any friend or relative’s place, I could contradict the message, so someone had to be after me, unless they weren’t so serious.
Walking down 6th on 10th street, I saw a cop car and waved to it. The cop got out.
“Hi,” I said. “I think I’m being chased. I’m afraid to use my phone.”
“Get in.”
At the station I was brought to a detective’s desk. He hard curly, brown hair and spoke very unenthusiastically. “What’s your name?”
“Aran Davis.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-two.”
“You live alone?”
“With my sister.”
He jotted this down. “Who do you think’s chasing you?”
“The natural gas industry.”
“The whole industry?”
“I don’t know. Someone made my blog say I needed to rethink things and that I was sorry I led people astray.”
“You write about natural gas?”
“Yea. And they wrote I was going on a trip and would be out of contact.”
“So you ran.”
I nodded.
“Did you call anyone or tell anyone else besides us?”
“Yes. I told Andrea Lewis.”
“Who is that?”
“She’s an organizer for Water Fights Back.”
“Did she also experience suspicious activity?”
“She’s been talking about it for a while now. She’s convinced her phone is bugged. She might have frightened me into leaving my apartment.”
“Can you write her number here?”
I wrote it down. He said, “Do you mind if I call her right now?”
“No.”
He called and I watched him wait for an answer. He sighed. He looked at me. “Hi Ms. Lewis. This is Detective Solonger. I’m
with Aran Davis. Call me back at 212-999-4454.” He said to me, “Stay here.”
I looked around. No one looked familiar. Solonger was facing the other direction on the far side of the room. I leaned
forward and tilted his computer screen towards me a bit. It seemed like my picture was on it so I pulled my chair forward. It was my picture. The words, “Warrant for arrest,” were on the screen and “Eco-Terrorist.” I looked over at Solonger again who glanced back at me and then turned back to another person. I got up and walked to the door. I looked once more. He wasn’t looking. I went out the door and walked down the steps. I kept by the side of the wall and turned the first corner. There was a bar two buildings down so I ran to it and entered.
It was somewhat crowded with people. The music was loud. I waited on line for the bathroom. It occurred to me I could try to get a hat from someone. In my wallet was just twenty bucks. Could they have bugged or cancelled my ATM card? Could they track me if I used it? In the bathroom stall I wondered if I should stay there but no, of course escapees always went to that bar, so even leaving was going to be tough, even leaving the bathroom. Why did I go to the police! If I lied on my phone about where I was, would they track my location anyway? Then I figured, what do I have to lose? The only thing left in my mind was, “Be careful where you go.” All I needed to do was not contradict the message so I needed to be out of contact. I turned my phone off.
I walked out of the bar and went to China Town, bought a fifteen buck ticket to Boston. I figured, I’ve hardly seen Boston, and as far as I knew, there was no movement against hydraulic fracturing there, plus I didn’t know anyone there, except for the food justice activists I knew there. This occurred to me on the bus and I started to worry. I only needed to stay out of Dorchester, I figured.
On the bus I got a good amount of sleep. Feeling calm in Boston in the bright morning, I wondered if I had overreacted and maybe I should go back. Maybe it wasn’t even the gas industry. Maybe there was something wrong with the internet. No, someone was trying carefully to get rid of me. Otherwise they would have killed me, no? Did they come with me on the bus? Still, no one looked familiar around me. People were walking to work.
I went into a coffee place. Maybe I should go to Dorchester. The organization could send out a blast about the whole thing. But I would probably be putting them at risk as soon as I talked to them. So far, I had done as they wanted me to do. I only contradicted their story with Andrea and I wasn’t sure what the deal was with detective Solonger. Maybe I should try to get to the hearing in Binghamton that was a couple days later. At least I could speak out before they arrest me. I took a break from thinking and drank my coffee.
Then I figured I’d open a new email account at a computer in a library. It seemed I could have done this in New York, if I walked around until dawn. I asked the counter girl where it was but got lost anyway. I don’t know why but I tend to feel more comfortable asking directions from people who also seem lost so I asked a tourist family, middle aged folks and a thirteen-year-old girl.
“Where’s the library?”
The bearded man said, “Don’t ask us.”
The woman said, “Are you from New York?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m from New York.”
“We’re upstaters,” said the man.
Where had I heard that phrase before? Oh yes. It was in Union Square. I held a huge sign that said FRACK with a circle around it and line going through it while my friends gave out leaflets for a meeting. A man said to me, “We need that. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s all we’ve got to get off foreign fuel. I’m an upstater.”
“Good luck,” the woman said.
“Thanks.”
Finally, I sat down at a computer. I figured I’d try Hotmail because I’d never used it before. For a username I sat there thinking, for too long. GreenFist@hotmail.com. BlueFightBack@hotmail.com. Then I knew my username. TurquoiseSoldier@hotmail.com. I skipped down to enter a password. The computer turned off and the lights of the library went out. I looked around. Should I stay still? Should I run? Should I wait? I probably shouldn’t wait. The police might come. I remembered the stall in the bar, got up and walked out the front door. It was already time to get out of Boston.
There was no destination as I walked down the street. Probably it wasn’t good to be arrested for eco-terrorism but I couldn’t let the industry make me paranoid. Someone tapped my shoulder. I kept walking.
“Hey New Yorker!” said a woman. I turned. It was the tourist family. The woman said, “Did you find the library?”
I walked to them. “Are you all leaving Boston today?”
The man, putting his hands in his pockets, said, “We might be.”
I said, “You live in Upstate New York?”
The man nodded.
“I think I’m going to Binghamton. Are you driving by Binghamton?”
“We’re not going quite that far,” the man said.
“Are you going in the direction of Binghamton? Maybe you could just get me maybe halfway there and leave me at a bus station. I’m an environmentalist. I’m just trying to get to a hearing.”
The woman’s eyebrows went up and she elbowed the man. “You’re talking about the hydrofracking hearing.”
I smiled, “Yes. Yes!”
She smiled too while the man rubbed his chin and the young girl had a look of suspense. The woman stood in front of the
man with her back towards me. The man looked over at me a couple times while they spoke.
Outside their car window I watched the country go by, farms, mountains and forest. The young girl sat across from me in the back seat. The man drove while the woman jotted numbers on a pad. The man said, “Aran.”
“Yep?”
“How’d you end up in Boston?”
“Oh, it was just so spontaneous. I didn’t have a full plan. I’m not sure I can really tell you why I was in Boston.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
The woman said, who might not have been paying attention, said, “I take it you’re against fracking?”
“Why, because I’m an environmentalist?”
“Well, seems to fit the ratio.”
“Right. What about you all?”
“You mean what do we think?” said the man.
“Yea.”
“I’m for it,” said the man. He laughed, “This is honestly why I was hesitant to give you a ride.”
“Alan!” said the woman, turning in her seat. “Aran, I think what you’re doing is great. I was really on the fence when I first heard about it, even before it got controversial. I just didn’t trust the companies, but I could also understand how people can blow things out of proportion.”
“What do you think, Tina?” I asked the young girl.
Surprised, she said, “What?”
“What’s your stance on hydrofracking?”
She sighed. “It’s risky,” she said.
“Do you support it?” Alan pushed her to answer.
She said, “I think I support it if you support it.”
“Tina,” said the woman. “You’re allowed to not support it. Aran,” she said. “One of the reasons I did want to give you the ride was because you were a flashback to our son, Francis.”
“Beth,” said Alan, annoyed.
She laughed. “Look, Aran. Two years ago, Alan and I both had jobs. Mine went quick but that was no surprise. It was an internet thing, a news site just online. I edited and took some nature photos. But Alan worked for the state, in charge of certain infrastructure decisions.”
“Like fracking would have been,” he said.
“The point is, Aran. We’ve been downward spiraling financially. We were in Boston because I had a job interview. We didn’t want to live in a city.” She shrugged. “You understand if we allow this drilling we’ll be able to live in our town peacefully and be able to take care of our kids, and even reduce our footprint in the atmosphere.”
I was calm. I said, “Well.” I wanted to say something but it hurt me to say it. Every time I tried, my heart beat faster. “I guess we don’t have to talk about it.”
“Oh yea,” she said, recovering something. Alan turned his head to her for a moment, seeming to dread whatever story she was about to tell.
“Francis,” said Tina.
“Is it okay if I tell this?” Beth said.
“I want to hear it,” I said.
“Why don’t you tell him, Tina?” she said.
Tina said, “When we got the form about the drilling in the mail, there was something we could sign to say we wanted to do
it. So they showed it to us, Francis and I, and just let us know about it. Francis ended up the next day saying it was dangerous and we shouldn’t do it. Dad was still doing research on it too, so he didn’t send it in yet. So maybe five days later, dad said he couldn’t find the envelope. Francis admitted that he’d burnt it.”
It was twilight when we drove up to the bus station. “Are you going to be okay from here?” said Alan.
I didn’t answer right away, because I was afraid to use my debit card. “I think I should tell you something,” I said. No! I
remembered I couldn’t tell them. “Thank you so much for the ride. It’s really hard to express how much it meant to me that you all risked driving me. Will I see you at the hearing?”
Beth and Alan stared at each other, not saying anything. She lifted her eyebrows at him. He turned towards me. She smiled. “We’re going to the hearing Aran. You can stay over and come with us.”
A tear actually emerged in my eye. I wiped it and got in the car. “I promise I won’t talk about hydrofracking,” I said.
Beth set me up in their basement with some blankets on the couch. I took off my boots and looked around as she left. I looked at the glass eyes of stuffed animals on a rack. I looked at the wine bottles in the wall behind the bar. Then I found it. There was a smoke detector on the ceiling with the usual red light, but there was definitely a glass eye on the side of it. I waved at it. I made the gesture of zipping my lips.
Francis came home around five pm. He walked into the kitchen. He was tall, had short hair, and an angular face. I was
wearing a watermelon apron, slicing a carrot. Beth was stirring something. I looked up and saw him. “Hi,” I said.
His eyebrows went up.
“Francis,” said Beth. “This is Aran. He’s coming to the hearing with us. We’re eating outside in twenty minutes.”
The bowls of food were on a picnic table behind the house. Their house was small, close to the hilly road and near about five other houses, stretched apart. In the distance was the river below by rocky terrain.
“You know what’s across there?” Alan said, sitting down as everyone came outside.
“Pennsylvania?”
“That’s right.”
“I heard that the states were drawn by guys walking around with thirty foot chains, making marks every thirty feet.”
“Well the river helped,” he said.
“Yea. They were lazy.”
Everyone sat down. Francis came out last. When he sat down, Beth said, “Let’s give thanks to our guest, and to this food.”
“Amen,” I said by myself.
“So what’s going on?” said Francis. “Is he with the gas industry?”
I said, “No. I’m on the opposite side of your parents.”
He smiled. “That explains it.”
“We found him in Boston,” said Beth.
“Oh,” Francis said. “How was the interview?”
She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t want to leave here.”
Francis turned and looked at the river or the scenery and turned back. “Well, if I go away to school it will be one less person here.”
“And to pay for you to go anywhere,” said Alan, “we’ll have to probably move to Boston.”
“Why not Mexico?” Francis said. “Or Africa?”
“What do you want to major in?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said.
“Maybe you can be a land surveyor,” I said.
“He just looked at me with his eyebrows up.
“They draw the perimeters of states.”
“Aran,” said Beth. “Why don’t you tell Francis about your environmental work?”
I gulped and looked around, in the windows of the house, in the trees. Alan said, “Sometimes it seems you’re looking for something, like the answers to our questions.”
“It’s hard to explain my situations,” I said. “But I volunteer with some groups. One organization pays me to blog.”
“Really?” Francis said.
“Yea, so, the free one is about the fracking issue, like crazy activism and stuff but the other is about Climate Justice.”
“Don’t you have to go to Bangladesh to do that?” said Alan.
“Yea well, actions happen in New York and stuff, and sometimes it’s really about extraction. So I’ve gone to fracking towns in Pennsylvania and destroyed mountains in Virginia.”
“Have you ever strapped yourself to a rig?” asked Francis.
I laughed and Alan looked concerned. “Francis,” he said.
I ate my mashed potatoes. Tina stared at me waiting for an answer. I looked at Alan. “I assume you’ve thought about that. I’m not sure that’s what you would do,” I said to Francis. “You’ve got to put yourself, and like ten other people on the road, or make a barrier around it with linked arms.” I could see Beth looking at me disapprovingly.
“What have you done?” Francis asked.
“Hunger strike, blocked a conference room, crossed a police line.”
Tina laughed. Beth said, “I think you just crossed a different line, putting thoughts in his mind.”
We were laughing in the car on our way to Binghamton. Tina said, “No, it’s not an airplane!”
Beth said, “Is it of the spider kind?”
“It’s not arachnid!” she said.
“Does it roam with the deer?” asked Francis.
“It’s not antelope!”
I was laughing when I saw in the rear view mirror a big, white van.
“Do you receive frequency with it?” said Alan.
“It’s not an antenna,” she said, exhausted, looking out the window.
After we drove into the increasingly developed scenery, Beth said, “Aran, you haven’t been playing for twenty minutes. I thought this was your favorite car game.”
Staring at the white van in the rear view mirror, I said, “Is it a chemical that sets things on fire?”
Tina couldn’t figure it out.
“Contact,” said Francis.
We counted down from three and both said, “Arsenic.”
“Okay,” said Tina. “The next letter is I.”
“Is it dry?” I said.
“We’re here,” said Alan. The white van pulled in next to us. There was a big rally in front of the building. There were over a hundred people, some holding signs that said, “Safe Water Now!” and “Stop the Fracking Hysteria!”
People wearing matching yellow t-shirts that said, “Respect our land rights,” and hats that said, “I support Safe Drilling,” walked through the crowd like rocks falling through a river.
Fortunately, we were able to sit down with each other. I waved to friends of mine that were standing with signs. The moderator called up the first testifier, Andrea Lewis.
She went to the podium. She said, “My friends. I’ve testified so often on this that I only want to say that I’ve learned that certain people will not believe us, that this is a nightmare waiting to happen, even though it’s a nightmare across the river. So I say that there are real solutions to our economic issues. People say they’re idealistic, or unrealistic, but I don’t see why. A sustainable economy is only unrealistic if we put it after this, and then it will be too late anyway. If the industry were here for you, they’d change their product. Thank you.”
All the water people cheered and the landowners booed.
“Next we have Arnold Solonger,” said the moderator.
I gasped. The man with curly, brown hair, wearing a yellow t-shirt said, “I do social research for Clear Skies Energy. It’s amazing what I’ve found. There are eco-terrorists, occultists, and people just trying to start wind turbine companies -that kill birds and ruin sceneries by the way- these people are creating false information for environmentalists. This water scare is a hoax that has fooled countless numbers of people. I have endless documentation to prove it and we’re going to email it to everyone who signed in here and the board. Thank you.”
Many of the landowners clapped. Someone yelled, “Yea, bubbling river hoax!”
The moderator called for order and called up Alan, our Alan Catoon. He made his way to the aisle. Someone handed him a
microphone. He said, “I live here just over in Sullivan, right by the Delaware. We are here because we do care about the beauty around us, the quiet, the wildlife. When we heard about this, we did research, lots of research from all angles before deciding that the risks were big in certain people’s minds, but not in ours. We see it for what it is. I think risks can happen, and this isn’t perfect, but I remember the hype about nuclear energy when I was a kid. This technology got off to a bad start. When my kids mess up, I don’t get rid of them, because they don’t repeat serious mistakes and no one wants to contaminate water. I appreciate the concerns of the environmentalists. I also know that we love our environment and that’s why we accept the opportunity to let us stay here. Thanks.”
People clapped. Some landowners stood up and clapped. The moderator said, “Now we have Aran Davis."
As I made my way to the aisle, police officers walked down the aisle from both sides. There were two at first and then others emerging. One said to me, “Aran Davis. You are under arrest for organizing an eco-terrorist scheme." He handcuffed me. "You have the right to remain silent.”
A sergeant said at the podium, “We apologize. We found our suspect. We’ll have him out quickly. This person has been organizing a scheme to wreak havoc on drill rigs and natural gas company sites.”
Andrea shouted, “That’s not true! Let him speak!”
All the environmentalists chanted, “Let Him Speak! Let Him Speak!”
“He has spoken enough,” said the sergeant over their voices.
As they escorted me towards the doors, several environmentalists blocked the door, even putting their pickets through the handles. “Clear aside,” a cop said. “You will all be arrested if you don’t clear aside.” More environmentalists blocked the doors until half the room, over a hundred were between me and the doors and another fifty tried to get there but a line of almost twenty police blocked them. The landowners made a lot of disapproving noise while the environmentalists chanted, “Let Him Speak! Let Him Speak!”
I wasn’t even sure then, what I would say. Beth shouted, “Francis!” I turned my head and saw Francis pushing himself into the mob. People pulled him in while police held him back. Finally he broke into the mob and disappeared.
Over the noise, the sergeant said, “Everyone blocking the exit will be charged with safety violations, refusing to obey police orders and other charges. He will not speak because he is a prisoner.”
Police cuffed people one at a time while they changed their chant to, “Davis Speaks or We Don’t Move! Davis Speaks or We Don’t Move!”
After some dozen people were cuffed, Alan said into podium microphone, “Please, everyone. I am a landowner. You are arresting my son. Please be quiet everyone. They are arresting my son.” The room quieted down. “Let me save my son, please,” he said. The room became totally quiet. He said, “I just testified. I’m a supporter of Fracking. I came with Aran Davis, and my son who is getting caught up in this. He’s only seventeen. So please just let Aran speak so no one has to get arrested.”
Some people cheered and applauded. The sergeant nodded and a microphone was held up to my face. I said, “Thanks Alan. I came here with these great people. And a lot of people here know I’m not an eco-terrorist, whatever that is. I’d like actually, to give up my spot to someone else in the Catoon family that has a different point of view but was maybe too shy to sign up, Francis Catoon.”
There was applause while the microphone passed around the mob to Francis who emerged with his hand in the air. He said, “I’m Francis. I grew up by the river in a small town. I might leave it if I can go to school. We are getting increasingly poor. I know I’m the younger one. I don’t know what will happen to us. I could be wrong, even. But I’m not going to give up the river.”
It’s been a day in jail and no one told me what happened to Francis or at the hearing afterwards. There are no computers here, but I’m going to copy this by hand and pass it around. It’s like a prison-blog. My pen name could be Turquoise Soldier. Hopefully someone will visit me while I still have a copy and then they could type it up and tag it with: “Prison,” “Fracking,” “Hearing,” “Delaware River,” “Eco-Justice,” “Burnt Letter,” “Contact,” “Upstater,” and “Eco-Terrorist.”
It started when the password for my email wouldn’t open. I tried my various other ones, including shared ones and my school account. Nothing opened. My Facebook account wouldn’t open. Interestingly, I could look at my page from the outside. My wall read, “Went on a trip. Will be out of contact.” Chills went through me. I looked around my room at the darkness behind open doors. I turned on the light and looked everywhere, even out the window. I had an idea of what might have happened. I called Andrea. She said, “Aran, where are you?”
“Home,” I said.
“Are you going on a trip?”
“I don’t know.”
“I read your blog.”
“Which one?”
“The one you just wrote.”
“What did I just write?”
“What do you mean? You said you need to take a break and think things over. You said you’re sorry if you've led people astray?”
“No. Someone hijacked my identity online. I can’t login to anything.”
“…”
“Andrea?”
“Be careful what you say Aran. Our phones are both bugged. They said you’re going on a trip. Think carefully about where you go. If I have any idea I’ll call you. Just get out of there.”
“Should I go there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not yet. If anything, we need to not contradict the message that you’re on a trip.”
She hung up. I put on my shoes and coat, put my water bottle and journal in my tote bag and left. It was past midnight. I got on the train to Manhattan, not sure if I should go to Andrea’s. I looked around and it didn’t look as though anyone were following me. I figured if I went to any friend or relative’s place, I could contradict the message, so someone had to be after me, unless they weren’t so serious.
Walking down 6th on 10th street, I saw a cop car and waved to it. The cop got out.
“Hi,” I said. “I think I’m being chased. I’m afraid to use my phone.”
“Get in.”
At the station I was brought to a detective’s desk. He hard curly, brown hair and spoke very unenthusiastically. “What’s your name?”
“Aran Davis.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-two.”
“You live alone?”
“With my sister.”
He jotted this down. “Who do you think’s chasing you?”
“The natural gas industry.”
“The whole industry?”
“I don’t know. Someone made my blog say I needed to rethink things and that I was sorry I led people astray.”
“You write about natural gas?”
“Yea. And they wrote I was going on a trip and would be out of contact.”
“So you ran.”
I nodded.
“Did you call anyone or tell anyone else besides us?”
“Yes. I told Andrea Lewis.”
“Who is that?”
“She’s an organizer for Water Fights Back.”
“Did she also experience suspicious activity?”
“She’s been talking about it for a while now. She’s convinced her phone is bugged. She might have frightened me into leaving my apartment.”
“Can you write her number here?”
I wrote it down. He said, “Do you mind if I call her right now?”
“No.”
He called and I watched him wait for an answer. He sighed. He looked at me. “Hi Ms. Lewis. This is Detective Solonger. I’m
with Aran Davis. Call me back at 212-999-4454.” He said to me, “Stay here.”
I looked around. No one looked familiar. Solonger was facing the other direction on the far side of the room. I leaned
forward and tilted his computer screen towards me a bit. It seemed like my picture was on it so I pulled my chair forward. It was my picture. The words, “Warrant for arrest,” were on the screen and “Eco-Terrorist.” I looked over at Solonger again who glanced back at me and then turned back to another person. I got up and walked to the door. I looked once more. He wasn’t looking. I went out the door and walked down the steps. I kept by the side of the wall and turned the first corner. There was a bar two buildings down so I ran to it and entered.
It was somewhat crowded with people. The music was loud. I waited on line for the bathroom. It occurred to me I could try to get a hat from someone. In my wallet was just twenty bucks. Could they have bugged or cancelled my ATM card? Could they track me if I used it? In the bathroom stall I wondered if I should stay there but no, of course escapees always went to that bar, so even leaving was going to be tough, even leaving the bathroom. Why did I go to the police! If I lied on my phone about where I was, would they track my location anyway? Then I figured, what do I have to lose? The only thing left in my mind was, “Be careful where you go.” All I needed to do was not contradict the message so I needed to be out of contact. I turned my phone off.
I walked out of the bar and went to China Town, bought a fifteen buck ticket to Boston. I figured, I’ve hardly seen Boston, and as far as I knew, there was no movement against hydraulic fracturing there, plus I didn’t know anyone there, except for the food justice activists I knew there. This occurred to me on the bus and I started to worry. I only needed to stay out of Dorchester, I figured.
On the bus I got a good amount of sleep. Feeling calm in Boston in the bright morning, I wondered if I had overreacted and maybe I should go back. Maybe it wasn’t even the gas industry. Maybe there was something wrong with the internet. No, someone was trying carefully to get rid of me. Otherwise they would have killed me, no? Did they come with me on the bus? Still, no one looked familiar around me. People were walking to work.
I went into a coffee place. Maybe I should go to Dorchester. The organization could send out a blast about the whole thing. But I would probably be putting them at risk as soon as I talked to them. So far, I had done as they wanted me to do. I only contradicted their story with Andrea and I wasn’t sure what the deal was with detective Solonger. Maybe I should try to get to the hearing in Binghamton that was a couple days later. At least I could speak out before they arrest me. I took a break from thinking and drank my coffee.
Then I figured I’d open a new email account at a computer in a library. It seemed I could have done this in New York, if I walked around until dawn. I asked the counter girl where it was but got lost anyway. I don’t know why but I tend to feel more comfortable asking directions from people who also seem lost so I asked a tourist family, middle aged folks and a thirteen-year-old girl.
“Where’s the library?”
The bearded man said, “Don’t ask us.”
The woman said, “Are you from New York?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m from New York.”
“We’re upstaters,” said the man.
Where had I heard that phrase before? Oh yes. It was in Union Square. I held a huge sign that said FRACK with a circle around it and line going through it while my friends gave out leaflets for a meeting. A man said to me, “We need that. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s all we’ve got to get off foreign fuel. I’m an upstater.”
“Good luck,” the woman said.
“Thanks.”
Finally, I sat down at a computer. I figured I’d try Hotmail because I’d never used it before. For a username I sat there thinking, for too long. GreenFist@hotmail.com. BlueFightBack@hotmail.com. Then I knew my username. TurquoiseSoldier@hotmail.com. I skipped down to enter a password. The computer turned off and the lights of the library went out. I looked around. Should I stay still? Should I run? Should I wait? I probably shouldn’t wait. The police might come. I remembered the stall in the bar, got up and walked out the front door. It was already time to get out of Boston.
There was no destination as I walked down the street. Probably it wasn’t good to be arrested for eco-terrorism but I couldn’t let the industry make me paranoid. Someone tapped my shoulder. I kept walking.
“Hey New Yorker!” said a woman. I turned. It was the tourist family. The woman said, “Did you find the library?”
I walked to them. “Are you all leaving Boston today?”
The man, putting his hands in his pockets, said, “We might be.”
I said, “You live in Upstate New York?”
The man nodded.
“I think I’m going to Binghamton. Are you driving by Binghamton?”
“We’re not going quite that far,” the man said.
“Are you going in the direction of Binghamton? Maybe you could just get me maybe halfway there and leave me at a bus station. I’m an environmentalist. I’m just trying to get to a hearing.”
The woman’s eyebrows went up and she elbowed the man. “You’re talking about the hydrofracking hearing.”
I smiled, “Yes. Yes!”
She smiled too while the man rubbed his chin and the young girl had a look of suspense. The woman stood in front of the
man with her back towards me. The man looked over at me a couple times while they spoke.
Outside their car window I watched the country go by, farms, mountains and forest. The young girl sat across from me in the back seat. The man drove while the woman jotted numbers on a pad. The man said, “Aran.”
“Yep?”
“How’d you end up in Boston?”
“Oh, it was just so spontaneous. I didn’t have a full plan. I’m not sure I can really tell you why I was in Boston.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
The woman said, who might not have been paying attention, said, “I take it you’re against fracking?”
“Why, because I’m an environmentalist?”
“Well, seems to fit the ratio.”
“Right. What about you all?”
“You mean what do we think?” said the man.
“Yea.”
“I’m for it,” said the man. He laughed, “This is honestly why I was hesitant to give you a ride.”
“Alan!” said the woman, turning in her seat. “Aran, I think what you’re doing is great. I was really on the fence when I first heard about it, even before it got controversial. I just didn’t trust the companies, but I could also understand how people can blow things out of proportion.”
“What do you think, Tina?” I asked the young girl.
Surprised, she said, “What?”
“What’s your stance on hydrofracking?”
She sighed. “It’s risky,” she said.
“Do you support it?” Alan pushed her to answer.
She said, “I think I support it if you support it.”
“Tina,” said the woman. “You’re allowed to not support it. Aran,” she said. “One of the reasons I did want to give you the ride was because you were a flashback to our son, Francis.”
“Beth,” said Alan, annoyed.
She laughed. “Look, Aran. Two years ago, Alan and I both had jobs. Mine went quick but that was no surprise. It was an internet thing, a news site just online. I edited and took some nature photos. But Alan worked for the state, in charge of certain infrastructure decisions.”
“Like fracking would have been,” he said.
“The point is, Aran. We’ve been downward spiraling financially. We were in Boston because I had a job interview. We didn’t want to live in a city.” She shrugged. “You understand if we allow this drilling we’ll be able to live in our town peacefully and be able to take care of our kids, and even reduce our footprint in the atmosphere.”
I was calm. I said, “Well.” I wanted to say something but it hurt me to say it. Every time I tried, my heart beat faster. “I guess we don’t have to talk about it.”
“Oh yea,” she said, recovering something. Alan turned his head to her for a moment, seeming to dread whatever story she was about to tell.
“Francis,” said Tina.
“Is it okay if I tell this?” Beth said.
“I want to hear it,” I said.
“Why don’t you tell him, Tina?” she said.
Tina said, “When we got the form about the drilling in the mail, there was something we could sign to say we wanted to do
it. So they showed it to us, Francis and I, and just let us know about it. Francis ended up the next day saying it was dangerous and we shouldn’t do it. Dad was still doing research on it too, so he didn’t send it in yet. So maybe five days later, dad said he couldn’t find the envelope. Francis admitted that he’d burnt it.”
It was twilight when we drove up to the bus station. “Are you going to be okay from here?” said Alan.
I didn’t answer right away, because I was afraid to use my debit card. “I think I should tell you something,” I said. No! I
remembered I couldn’t tell them. “Thank you so much for the ride. It’s really hard to express how much it meant to me that you all risked driving me. Will I see you at the hearing?”
Beth and Alan stared at each other, not saying anything. She lifted her eyebrows at him. He turned towards me. She smiled. “We’re going to the hearing Aran. You can stay over and come with us.”
A tear actually emerged in my eye. I wiped it and got in the car. “I promise I won’t talk about hydrofracking,” I said.
Beth set me up in their basement with some blankets on the couch. I took off my boots and looked around as she left. I looked at the glass eyes of stuffed animals on a rack. I looked at the wine bottles in the wall behind the bar. Then I found it. There was a smoke detector on the ceiling with the usual red light, but there was definitely a glass eye on the side of it. I waved at it. I made the gesture of zipping my lips.
Francis came home around five pm. He walked into the kitchen. He was tall, had short hair, and an angular face. I was
wearing a watermelon apron, slicing a carrot. Beth was stirring something. I looked up and saw him. “Hi,” I said.
His eyebrows went up.
“Francis,” said Beth. “This is Aran. He’s coming to the hearing with us. We’re eating outside in twenty minutes.”
The bowls of food were on a picnic table behind the house. Their house was small, close to the hilly road and near about five other houses, stretched apart. In the distance was the river below by rocky terrain.
“You know what’s across there?” Alan said, sitting down as everyone came outside.
“Pennsylvania?”
“That’s right.”
“I heard that the states were drawn by guys walking around with thirty foot chains, making marks every thirty feet.”
“Well the river helped,” he said.
“Yea. They were lazy.”
Everyone sat down. Francis came out last. When he sat down, Beth said, “Let’s give thanks to our guest, and to this food.”
“Amen,” I said by myself.
“So what’s going on?” said Francis. “Is he with the gas industry?”
I said, “No. I’m on the opposite side of your parents.”
He smiled. “That explains it.”
“We found him in Boston,” said Beth.
“Oh,” Francis said. “How was the interview?”
She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t want to leave here.”
Francis turned and looked at the river or the scenery and turned back. “Well, if I go away to school it will be one less person here.”
“And to pay for you to go anywhere,” said Alan, “we’ll have to probably move to Boston.”
“Why not Mexico?” Francis said. “Or Africa?”
“What do you want to major in?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said.
“Maybe you can be a land surveyor,” I said.
“He just looked at me with his eyebrows up.
“They draw the perimeters of states.”
“Aran,” said Beth. “Why don’t you tell Francis about your environmental work?”
I gulped and looked around, in the windows of the house, in the trees. Alan said, “Sometimes it seems you’re looking for something, like the answers to our questions.”
“It’s hard to explain my situations,” I said. “But I volunteer with some groups. One organization pays me to blog.”
“Really?” Francis said.
“Yea, so, the free one is about the fracking issue, like crazy activism and stuff but the other is about Climate Justice.”
“Don’t you have to go to Bangladesh to do that?” said Alan.
“Yea well, actions happen in New York and stuff, and sometimes it’s really about extraction. So I’ve gone to fracking towns in Pennsylvania and destroyed mountains in Virginia.”
“Have you ever strapped yourself to a rig?” asked Francis.
I laughed and Alan looked concerned. “Francis,” he said.
I ate my mashed potatoes. Tina stared at me waiting for an answer. I looked at Alan. “I assume you’ve thought about that. I’m not sure that’s what you would do,” I said to Francis. “You’ve got to put yourself, and like ten other people on the road, or make a barrier around it with linked arms.” I could see Beth looking at me disapprovingly.
“What have you done?” Francis asked.
“Hunger strike, blocked a conference room, crossed a police line.”
Tina laughed. Beth said, “I think you just crossed a different line, putting thoughts in his mind.”
We were laughing in the car on our way to Binghamton. Tina said, “No, it’s not an airplane!”
Beth said, “Is it of the spider kind?”
“It’s not arachnid!” she said.
“Does it roam with the deer?” asked Francis.
“It’s not antelope!”
I was laughing when I saw in the rear view mirror a big, white van.
“Do you receive frequency with it?” said Alan.
“It’s not an antenna,” she said, exhausted, looking out the window.
After we drove into the increasingly developed scenery, Beth said, “Aran, you haven’t been playing for twenty minutes. I thought this was your favorite car game.”
Staring at the white van in the rear view mirror, I said, “Is it a chemical that sets things on fire?”
Tina couldn’t figure it out.
“Contact,” said Francis.
We counted down from three and both said, “Arsenic.”
“Okay,” said Tina. “The next letter is I.”
“Is it dry?” I said.
“We’re here,” said Alan. The white van pulled in next to us. There was a big rally in front of the building. There were over a hundred people, some holding signs that said, “Safe Water Now!” and “Stop the Fracking Hysteria!”
People wearing matching yellow t-shirts that said, “Respect our land rights,” and hats that said, “I support Safe Drilling,” walked through the crowd like rocks falling through a river.
Fortunately, we were able to sit down with each other. I waved to friends of mine that were standing with signs. The moderator called up the first testifier, Andrea Lewis.
She went to the podium. She said, “My friends. I’ve testified so often on this that I only want to say that I’ve learned that certain people will not believe us, that this is a nightmare waiting to happen, even though it’s a nightmare across the river. So I say that there are real solutions to our economic issues. People say they’re idealistic, or unrealistic, but I don’t see why. A sustainable economy is only unrealistic if we put it after this, and then it will be too late anyway. If the industry were here for you, they’d change their product. Thank you.”
All the water people cheered and the landowners booed.
“Next we have Arnold Solonger,” said the moderator.
I gasped. The man with curly, brown hair, wearing a yellow t-shirt said, “I do social research for Clear Skies Energy. It’s amazing what I’ve found. There are eco-terrorists, occultists, and people just trying to start wind turbine companies -that kill birds and ruin sceneries by the way- these people are creating false information for environmentalists. This water scare is a hoax that has fooled countless numbers of people. I have endless documentation to prove it and we’re going to email it to everyone who signed in here and the board. Thank you.”
Many of the landowners clapped. Someone yelled, “Yea, bubbling river hoax!”
The moderator called for order and called up Alan, our Alan Catoon. He made his way to the aisle. Someone handed him a
microphone. He said, “I live here just over in Sullivan, right by the Delaware. We are here because we do care about the beauty around us, the quiet, the wildlife. When we heard about this, we did research, lots of research from all angles before deciding that the risks were big in certain people’s minds, but not in ours. We see it for what it is. I think risks can happen, and this isn’t perfect, but I remember the hype about nuclear energy when I was a kid. This technology got off to a bad start. When my kids mess up, I don’t get rid of them, because they don’t repeat serious mistakes and no one wants to contaminate water. I appreciate the concerns of the environmentalists. I also know that we love our environment and that’s why we accept the opportunity to let us stay here. Thanks.”
People clapped. Some landowners stood up and clapped. The moderator said, “Now we have Aran Davis."
As I made my way to the aisle, police officers walked down the aisle from both sides. There were two at first and then others emerging. One said to me, “Aran Davis. You are under arrest for organizing an eco-terrorist scheme." He handcuffed me. "You have the right to remain silent.”
A sergeant said at the podium, “We apologize. We found our suspect. We’ll have him out quickly. This person has been organizing a scheme to wreak havoc on drill rigs and natural gas company sites.”
Andrea shouted, “That’s not true! Let him speak!”
All the environmentalists chanted, “Let Him Speak! Let Him Speak!”
“He has spoken enough,” said the sergeant over their voices.
As they escorted me towards the doors, several environmentalists blocked the door, even putting their pickets through the handles. “Clear aside,” a cop said. “You will all be arrested if you don’t clear aside.” More environmentalists blocked the doors until half the room, over a hundred were between me and the doors and another fifty tried to get there but a line of almost twenty police blocked them. The landowners made a lot of disapproving noise while the environmentalists chanted, “Let Him Speak! Let Him Speak!”
I wasn’t even sure then, what I would say. Beth shouted, “Francis!” I turned my head and saw Francis pushing himself into the mob. People pulled him in while police held him back. Finally he broke into the mob and disappeared.
Over the noise, the sergeant said, “Everyone blocking the exit will be charged with safety violations, refusing to obey police orders and other charges. He will not speak because he is a prisoner.”
Police cuffed people one at a time while they changed their chant to, “Davis Speaks or We Don’t Move! Davis Speaks or We Don’t Move!”
After some dozen people were cuffed, Alan said into podium microphone, “Please, everyone. I am a landowner. You are arresting my son. Please be quiet everyone. They are arresting my son.” The room quieted down. “Let me save my son, please,” he said. The room became totally quiet. He said, “I just testified. I’m a supporter of Fracking. I came with Aran Davis, and my son who is getting caught up in this. He’s only seventeen. So please just let Aran speak so no one has to get arrested.”
Some people cheered and applauded. The sergeant nodded and a microphone was held up to my face. I said, “Thanks Alan. I came here with these great people. And a lot of people here know I’m not an eco-terrorist, whatever that is. I’d like actually, to give up my spot to someone else in the Catoon family that has a different point of view but was maybe too shy to sign up, Francis Catoon.”
There was applause while the microphone passed around the mob to Francis who emerged with his hand in the air. He said, “I’m Francis. I grew up by the river in a small town. I might leave it if I can go to school. We are getting increasingly poor. I know I’m the younger one. I don’t know what will happen to us. I could be wrong, even. But I’m not going to give up the river.”
It’s been a day in jail and no one told me what happened to Francis or at the hearing afterwards. There are no computers here, but I’m going to copy this by hand and pass it around. It’s like a prison-blog. My pen name could be Turquoise Soldier. Hopefully someone will visit me while I still have a copy and then they could type it up and tag it with: “Prison,” “Fracking,” “Hearing,” “Delaware River,” “Eco-Justice,” “Burnt Letter,” “Contact,” “Upstater,” and “Eco-Terrorist.”
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Young and in Yoga
dug this one up for my portfolio...
Young and in Yoga
Shannon Ayala 07/2007
Intro to Creative Writing: Kazlotski
Harold puts a beanie cap over most of his wild, curly blonde hair and gives a thumbs up to the yellow smiley face painted onto the black painted mirror in his bedroom. He throws his corduroy bag over his shoulder and closes his door behind him. He walks through the living room to the front door and then turns around with his hand on the knob to say goodbye to his parents. The mother is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper and the father is playing with the dog on the carpet. “Mom and Dad, I’m leaving civilization.”
“When will you be home?” says his mother through the newspaper.
“I don’t know. When I’ve found enlightenment.”
“Do you have enough money?”
“I won’t need much money. Bye.” He opens the door.
“Where are you going exactly?”
“Montana.”
Her eyelashes flash up at him with her head still angled. “Montana is civilization Harold.”
“What are you doing?” asks the dad playfully.
“Montana is open and quiet. You haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been saying for years. I love you anyway, bye.”
“Don’t forget anything,” says the mother.
“I love you boy,” the father says to the dog.
Harold’s eyes turn and his body follows out the door.
His bike slows down at a house that has an open door, kids on the grass, Spanish music playing loudly, barbeque smoke rising behind it and voices mingling. He drops his bike on the lawn and walks into the open door. There is a banner: John’s Leaving Civilization! Harold laughs and a short Spanish man with a mustache and a friendly, round smiling face puts his hairy hand on his shoulder. “Harold, Harold boy, you kids are crazy,” he says cheerfully and then he drops his tone and narrows his face. “Escuche. I hope you find God out there. My boy has a lot of love in his heart. He doesn’t need to go anywhere. But he says, ‘Papa, the mystic did it, the mystic left his body.’ So I say okay if you want to leave your body, it’s yours to leave.” The father smiles again. “You go to the universe eh!” He grips his shoulder one more time and leaves.
A joyful looking young guy pops up with a bag over his shoulder and says, “Harold!” delivering a big hug.
“Hello.”
“Come on, let’s leave civilization. Bye everybody!”
They all yell things in Spanish at him and he rushes out the door with Harold. “Throw your bike in the garage. Sylvia is going to drive us to the subway.”
“Hello Harold,” Sylvia says and puts her cheek out to be kissed. She has big loop earrings and black hair pulled back tight.
They slam the car doors and take off. “When are you coming back?” she asks them in the rear view mirror.
John shrugs, “I don’t know. There’s life out there.”
“There’s nothing out there,” she says.
Harold Laughs. “It’s not for long. This is just for mastering our minds out in the Earth.”
“Is New York not the Earth?” Sylvia asks.
“No,” says Harold. Him and John look at each other in doubt and then look back and agree, “No,” They say. John says, “It’s another planet.”
“We’re planet hopping,” says Harold.
“John,” Says Sylvia, “I didn’t understand your father’s story. What happened to the gangster dude?”
John looks at Harold and says, “My father was telling that story about the gangster who turned to Jesus and left the gang.”
“Oh right of course.”
“It sort of inspired him to become a preacher.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So anyway Sylvia, the gangster wanted to stab the guy right? But he couldn’t because he was stuck in his seat.”
“Yeah I don’t understand, they glue him to his seat?”
Laughing, John said, “No, some mysterious force kept him in his seat.”
Sylvia’s jaw dropped in understanding. “Oh that’s some freaky shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why you’re going to Montana?”
“No. It’s just to untangle my mind but yea, sort of.”
“The purpose is to escape samsara.” Says Harold.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the illusory world of ignorance, suffering and rebirth.”
“It’s your mind,” John finishes.
“Your mind is samsara?”
“Most of the time.” John says.
“Oh yea?” She says with her eyes darting on the road. “Well when you finally untangle your mind, you know what you’re going to think?”
“What?”
“What the hell am I doing in Montana?”
She pulls up near the subway on a busy street and lets them go. Harold waits at the green railing while Sylvia holds John’s hands and tells him he’s stupid. He says, “I know. It’s not decision though, it’s destiny.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re stupid.” She puts her hand on her hip and says, “Well if you change your mind you can have this.”
“Wow.”
Harold shouts, “Change your mind dude!”
“Okay, bye Sylvia.” John says. He kisses her and leaves and she watches him go.
Harold hooks his arm with John’s and lifts his beanie cap to her as they go down the steps.
They sit across from each other in the moderately populated subway car. John looks at Harold with mild excitement. “I can feel it.” John says.
“What?”
“I can just feel it.”
“Okay.”
“The fresh air is already flowing through the mountains and up my nose into my brain.”
“Yeah me to,” Harold says flatly.
John pulls out a small, white, paperback book. He rips his bookmark in half and shoves it in another page. He says, “here, read 170,” as he tosses the book across to him. Harold catches it and looks at him the way his mother had that morning.
“Why’d you rip your bookmark?”
John laughs and Harold smiles. He reads the cover, Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger, and opens the marked page. The page starts in the middle of a sentence. Quotations end and start again. “My God!” says the book. “He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all!”
At that moment a black woman on the train in a leopard dress takes slow hesitant steps with a small, black, paperback book in her hand. She says, “Brothers and sisters! The lord is with us now.” Harold looks up at the woman who stands three feet away. “We know we need him now. The world… is apocalyptic. Look around! It’s never been such a mess. Who could believe how real this is?” Harold looks at John who is looking at the woman and then he goes back into the book.
The book continues, “Who besides Jesus really knew which way is up?”
“Why are we swimming in our emotion?” The woman distracts him. “Why do we let our little problems control us? This is 2007. This isn’t 2000 years ago! Isn’t it time? Isn’t it time we control our own minds, our feelings? Who cares if America is doomed? Who cares if our president is dumb? We can’t fix that. All we can do is find our light inside.” Harold looks around and sees that every person is paying attention. She isn’t your usual obnoxious, fanatical Christian he thinks. These are not the usual words that are shouted to people who ignore them. The woman wears a sweaty smile and speaks with her pointer finger. She moves slowly and gently like a reptile.
She says, “Sure feels like the end times,” and Harold dives into his book. The book picks up, “Jesus realized there is no separation from God… Oh my God, what a mind! Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don’t say Solomon.”
“Solomon couldn’t help you or anybody else,” the woman in the leopard dress disrupts once again. “Socrates can’t love you like Jesus.” He glances at the page and Socrates is in the next sentence. Now he has to surrender his attention to the lady in the leopard dress. “Jesus made it through all those obstacles that we have. He knows what it’s like to feel pain. He has gone through everything you have. He felt death. He tasted death for us.” When the car stops the lady maintains perfect balance while not holding onto anything. Harold and John look at each other telepathically.
“He’s working on me,” the lady says. “I’m still a little messed up but he’s trying to perfect me. I asked him to reveal himself to me and he did.” They look at each other again and then back at her. Her body moves as if it is carrying energy that she can hardly control. “I gave myself up. I surrendered my life to him. I said I’d do whatever I can. I don’t care how hard or terrifying. If I have to do it alone than that’s the only thing to do.”
The car stops and the woman stands completely still at the abruptness of the stop. John gestures to Harold to get up. They get up and wait for the lady in the leopard dress to slowly move through the door. They follow her out and stand in a spot watching her walk in seemingly no direction.
“Lets follow her,” John whispers excitedly.
Harold shrugs. “No I don’t think that’s the point of our… crossing paths with her.”
John looks at Harold suspiciously. “Aren’t you curious?”
“I feel paralyzed by that last thing she said.”
He reflects. “…Solomon?”
“No, that she surrendered to God and she works alone.”
“Right.”
“So are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We should take her with us.”
“What? Dude!” He stares off absently with a tear forming in his eye. “Obviously we have to split up.”
John stares at him speechlessly and confused. Harold finally looks at him. “We have to split up, man.”
“What makes you so sure? She probably lives with somebody that she sees when she goes home.”
“Oh I doubt it. I bet you everyone she knows is dead.”
“So let’s go follow her and find out. If it turns out she lives with someone or even has close friends besides church people than we stick together amigo.”
“C’mon it’s going to take forever to find out a thing like that. We’d have to spy on her for days and then we’re going to realize it was all in vain because we don’t want to split up.”
“Okay, so let’s just sleep at the loft as planned and we’ll see what you think in the morning.”
“Good idea.”
In one big empty room with open windows at the end, on a bed stripped to the springs next to the windows, John sleeps soundly in a sleeping bag next to the heavy downpour of rain. Thunder blasts and still he doesn’t stir.
On an adjacent couch against the wall Harold is sitting in the full lotus position on the couch meditating by a candle. He opens his eyes and looks at John to see if he is really sleeping. He looks over at the digital clock that reads 2:59 a.m. He reaches over for a pack of cigarettes and lights one while his legs are still crossed. He sinks back on the couch and closes his eyes. The first thing he sees is a swarm of maggots. He drags his hand across his eyes and looks down at his cigarette realizing that he is falling asleep. He drags it anyway. His eyelids fall down and he sees a fragile tree in the autumn night, wrapped in a leopard dress. He drags the cigarette with his eyes closed and hears murmuring in the hallway.
The voice, obscured as if with a cigar, like a man from a 1940s detective film, emerges into coherence, “She said the lord revealed his self to her…
“Samsara and maggots and trees with dresses.” The voice gets louder as it gets closer to the door. “’There’s a killer on the road’. He’s a killer, kills the self…” Harold puts out his cigarette and blows out the candle. He lies down and faces the cushions. The voice is at the door. “Knock, knock, I’m in your head, if I don’t talk than you are dead.”
“Fuck off Sammy.” Harold says but is not sure if he has spoken out loud or not. He hears the door open and close. He focuses on the sound of the rain but the voice, now in the room, penetrates through.
“She could have seen anything, that lady,” continues the voice. “Perhaps her path requires solitude but no, this one does too. It’s always the same. But friendship is good in the beginning. There is no beginning. You can die and why were you wasting your time?”
There is a gigantic blast of thunder. The voice disappears. There is a silence in his mind that strikes deep and obvious. In the sudden absence of his mind, the residue of thought is exposed as pure vanity.
In the sunny morning Harold wakes up and sees John sitting on the floor next to him, eating a sandwich and looking at him. John smiles and gives him a sandwich. “Got you an egg sandwich,” says John.
“I thought you didn’t eat eggs.”
“No mine is just cheese.”
“You don’t eat cheese either.”
“Oops. Anyway, have you decided?”
I still have no idea. I don’t think it matters though.
“I just decided when I was waiting for this sandwich that I’ll go to New Mexico and find a Shaman Guru.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Are you really okay with that?”
“What difference does it make if I am okay with that? Just write me letters.
"Have you not had this New Mexico idea before?” continued Harold.
“Well I had this dream last night. Sylvia was slowly unbuttoning her shirt. And then suddenly she lifted her hand up to me. There was an eye in her palm.”
“And then she bounced away like a rabbit into the desert.”
John laughed, shaking his head. “It seemed like the eye was studying me so I looked at myself and I was wearing a leopard dress. I started laughing and I kept asking, ‘where’s the lady? Where’s the lady?’ And then Sylvia said New Mexico.”
Harold nodded his tired head. “Are there thunder storms in Montana?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I’m going to take some comfort where I can find thunder storms. Maybe Washington.”
“Is thunder comforting?”
“You’re the one who slept like you were dead last night.”
“It thundered last night?”
Harold looks at him bitterly and then relaxes and says, “thank you for the sandwich man.”
John nods and says, “I can feel it already, the cool desert air rushing through the caverns and up my nose into my brain.”
Young and in Yoga
Shannon Ayala 07/2007
Intro to Creative Writing: Kazlotski
Harold puts a beanie cap over most of his wild, curly blonde hair and gives a thumbs up to the yellow smiley face painted onto the black painted mirror in his bedroom. He throws his corduroy bag over his shoulder and closes his door behind him. He walks through the living room to the front door and then turns around with his hand on the knob to say goodbye to his parents. The mother is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper and the father is playing with the dog on the carpet. “Mom and Dad, I’m leaving civilization.”
“When will you be home?” says his mother through the newspaper.
“I don’t know. When I’ve found enlightenment.”
“Do you have enough money?”
“I won’t need much money. Bye.” He opens the door.
“Where are you going exactly?”
“Montana.”
Her eyelashes flash up at him with her head still angled. “Montana is civilization Harold.”
“What are you doing?” asks the dad playfully.
“Montana is open and quiet. You haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been saying for years. I love you anyway, bye.”
“Don’t forget anything,” says the mother.
“I love you boy,” the father says to the dog.
Harold’s eyes turn and his body follows out the door.
His bike slows down at a house that has an open door, kids on the grass, Spanish music playing loudly, barbeque smoke rising behind it and voices mingling. He drops his bike on the lawn and walks into the open door. There is a banner: John’s Leaving Civilization! Harold laughs and a short Spanish man with a mustache and a friendly, round smiling face puts his hairy hand on his shoulder. “Harold, Harold boy, you kids are crazy,” he says cheerfully and then he drops his tone and narrows his face. “Escuche. I hope you find God out there. My boy has a lot of love in his heart. He doesn’t need to go anywhere. But he says, ‘Papa, the mystic did it, the mystic left his body.’ So I say okay if you want to leave your body, it’s yours to leave.” The father smiles again. “You go to the universe eh!” He grips his shoulder one more time and leaves.
A joyful looking young guy pops up with a bag over his shoulder and says, “Harold!” delivering a big hug.
“Hello.”
“Come on, let’s leave civilization. Bye everybody!”
They all yell things in Spanish at him and he rushes out the door with Harold. “Throw your bike in the garage. Sylvia is going to drive us to the subway.”
“Hello Harold,” Sylvia says and puts her cheek out to be kissed. She has big loop earrings and black hair pulled back tight.
They slam the car doors and take off. “When are you coming back?” she asks them in the rear view mirror.
John shrugs, “I don’t know. There’s life out there.”
“There’s nothing out there,” she says.
Harold Laughs. “It’s not for long. This is just for mastering our minds out in the Earth.”
“Is New York not the Earth?” Sylvia asks.
“No,” says Harold. Him and John look at each other in doubt and then look back and agree, “No,” They say. John says, “It’s another planet.”
“We’re planet hopping,” says Harold.
“John,” Says Sylvia, “I didn’t understand your father’s story. What happened to the gangster dude?”
John looks at Harold and says, “My father was telling that story about the gangster who turned to Jesus and left the gang.”
“Oh right of course.”
“It sort of inspired him to become a preacher.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So anyway Sylvia, the gangster wanted to stab the guy right? But he couldn’t because he was stuck in his seat.”
“Yeah I don’t understand, they glue him to his seat?”
Laughing, John said, “No, some mysterious force kept him in his seat.”
Sylvia’s jaw dropped in understanding. “Oh that’s some freaky shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why you’re going to Montana?”
“No. It’s just to untangle my mind but yea, sort of.”
“The purpose is to escape samsara.” Says Harold.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the illusory world of ignorance, suffering and rebirth.”
“It’s your mind,” John finishes.
“Your mind is samsara?”
“Most of the time.” John says.
“Oh yea?” She says with her eyes darting on the road. “Well when you finally untangle your mind, you know what you’re going to think?”
“What?”
“What the hell am I doing in Montana?”
She pulls up near the subway on a busy street and lets them go. Harold waits at the green railing while Sylvia holds John’s hands and tells him he’s stupid. He says, “I know. It’s not decision though, it’s destiny.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re stupid.” She puts her hand on her hip and says, “Well if you change your mind you can have this.”
“Wow.”
Harold shouts, “Change your mind dude!”
“Okay, bye Sylvia.” John says. He kisses her and leaves and she watches him go.
Harold hooks his arm with John’s and lifts his beanie cap to her as they go down the steps.
They sit across from each other in the moderately populated subway car. John looks at Harold with mild excitement. “I can feel it.” John says.
“What?”
“I can just feel it.”
“Okay.”
“The fresh air is already flowing through the mountains and up my nose into my brain.”
“Yeah me to,” Harold says flatly.
John pulls out a small, white, paperback book. He rips his bookmark in half and shoves it in another page. He says, “here, read 170,” as he tosses the book across to him. Harold catches it and looks at him the way his mother had that morning.
“Why’d you rip your bookmark?”
John laughs and Harold smiles. He reads the cover, Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger, and opens the marked page. The page starts in the middle of a sentence. Quotations end and start again. “My God!” says the book. “He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all!”
At that moment a black woman on the train in a leopard dress takes slow hesitant steps with a small, black, paperback book in her hand. She says, “Brothers and sisters! The lord is with us now.” Harold looks up at the woman who stands three feet away. “We know we need him now. The world… is apocalyptic. Look around! It’s never been such a mess. Who could believe how real this is?” Harold looks at John who is looking at the woman and then he goes back into the book.
The book continues, “Who besides Jesus really knew which way is up?”
“Why are we swimming in our emotion?” The woman distracts him. “Why do we let our little problems control us? This is 2007. This isn’t 2000 years ago! Isn’t it time? Isn’t it time we control our own minds, our feelings? Who cares if America is doomed? Who cares if our president is dumb? We can’t fix that. All we can do is find our light inside.” Harold looks around and sees that every person is paying attention. She isn’t your usual obnoxious, fanatical Christian he thinks. These are not the usual words that are shouted to people who ignore them. The woman wears a sweaty smile and speaks with her pointer finger. She moves slowly and gently like a reptile.
She says, “Sure feels like the end times,” and Harold dives into his book. The book picks up, “Jesus realized there is no separation from God… Oh my God, what a mind! Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don’t say Solomon.”
“Solomon couldn’t help you or anybody else,” the woman in the leopard dress disrupts once again. “Socrates can’t love you like Jesus.” He glances at the page and Socrates is in the next sentence. Now he has to surrender his attention to the lady in the leopard dress. “Jesus made it through all those obstacles that we have. He knows what it’s like to feel pain. He has gone through everything you have. He felt death. He tasted death for us.” When the car stops the lady maintains perfect balance while not holding onto anything. Harold and John look at each other telepathically.
“He’s working on me,” the lady says. “I’m still a little messed up but he’s trying to perfect me. I asked him to reveal himself to me and he did.” They look at each other again and then back at her. Her body moves as if it is carrying energy that she can hardly control. “I gave myself up. I surrendered my life to him. I said I’d do whatever I can. I don’t care how hard or terrifying. If I have to do it alone than that’s the only thing to do.”
The car stops and the woman stands completely still at the abruptness of the stop. John gestures to Harold to get up. They get up and wait for the lady in the leopard dress to slowly move through the door. They follow her out and stand in a spot watching her walk in seemingly no direction.
“Lets follow her,” John whispers excitedly.
Harold shrugs. “No I don’t think that’s the point of our… crossing paths with her.”
John looks at Harold suspiciously. “Aren’t you curious?”
“I feel paralyzed by that last thing she said.”
He reflects. “…Solomon?”
“No, that she surrendered to God and she works alone.”
“Right.”
“So are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We should take her with us.”
“What? Dude!” He stares off absently with a tear forming in his eye. “Obviously we have to split up.”
John stares at him speechlessly and confused. Harold finally looks at him. “We have to split up, man.”
“What makes you so sure? She probably lives with somebody that she sees when she goes home.”
“Oh I doubt it. I bet you everyone she knows is dead.”
“So let’s go follow her and find out. If it turns out she lives with someone or even has close friends besides church people than we stick together amigo.”
“C’mon it’s going to take forever to find out a thing like that. We’d have to spy on her for days and then we’re going to realize it was all in vain because we don’t want to split up.”
“Okay, so let’s just sleep at the loft as planned and we’ll see what you think in the morning.”
“Good idea.”
In one big empty room with open windows at the end, on a bed stripped to the springs next to the windows, John sleeps soundly in a sleeping bag next to the heavy downpour of rain. Thunder blasts and still he doesn’t stir.
On an adjacent couch against the wall Harold is sitting in the full lotus position on the couch meditating by a candle. He opens his eyes and looks at John to see if he is really sleeping. He looks over at the digital clock that reads 2:59 a.m. He reaches over for a pack of cigarettes and lights one while his legs are still crossed. He sinks back on the couch and closes his eyes. The first thing he sees is a swarm of maggots. He drags his hand across his eyes and looks down at his cigarette realizing that he is falling asleep. He drags it anyway. His eyelids fall down and he sees a fragile tree in the autumn night, wrapped in a leopard dress. He drags the cigarette with his eyes closed and hears murmuring in the hallway.
The voice, obscured as if with a cigar, like a man from a 1940s detective film, emerges into coherence, “She said the lord revealed his self to her…
“Samsara and maggots and trees with dresses.” The voice gets louder as it gets closer to the door. “’There’s a killer on the road’. He’s a killer, kills the self…” Harold puts out his cigarette and blows out the candle. He lies down and faces the cushions. The voice is at the door. “Knock, knock, I’m in your head, if I don’t talk than you are dead.”
“Fuck off Sammy.” Harold says but is not sure if he has spoken out loud or not. He hears the door open and close. He focuses on the sound of the rain but the voice, now in the room, penetrates through.
“She could have seen anything, that lady,” continues the voice. “Perhaps her path requires solitude but no, this one does too. It’s always the same. But friendship is good in the beginning. There is no beginning. You can die and why were you wasting your time?”
There is a gigantic blast of thunder. The voice disappears. There is a silence in his mind that strikes deep and obvious. In the sudden absence of his mind, the residue of thought is exposed as pure vanity.
In the sunny morning Harold wakes up and sees John sitting on the floor next to him, eating a sandwich and looking at him. John smiles and gives him a sandwich. “Got you an egg sandwich,” says John.
“I thought you didn’t eat eggs.”
“No mine is just cheese.”
“You don’t eat cheese either.”
“Oops. Anyway, have you decided?”
I still have no idea. I don’t think it matters though.
“I just decided when I was waiting for this sandwich that I’ll go to New Mexico and find a Shaman Guru.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Are you really okay with that?”
“What difference does it make if I am okay with that? Just write me letters.
"Have you not had this New Mexico idea before?” continued Harold.
“Well I had this dream last night. Sylvia was slowly unbuttoning her shirt. And then suddenly she lifted her hand up to me. There was an eye in her palm.”
“And then she bounced away like a rabbit into the desert.”
John laughed, shaking his head. “It seemed like the eye was studying me so I looked at myself and I was wearing a leopard dress. I started laughing and I kept asking, ‘where’s the lady? Where’s the lady?’ And then Sylvia said New Mexico.”
Harold nodded his tired head. “Are there thunder storms in Montana?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I’m going to take some comfort where I can find thunder storms. Maybe Washington.”
“Is thunder comforting?”
“You’re the one who slept like you were dead last night.”
“It thundered last night?”
Harold looks at him bitterly and then relaxes and says, “thank you for the sandwich man.”
John nods and says, “I can feel it already, the cool desert air rushing through the caverns and up my nose into my brain.”
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