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- Good evening and welcome to the last
of this school year's Daniel J. Doyle
Technology and Society Colloquia Series Presentations.
I'm Mark Noe from the Communications Department
here at Penn College,
and I have the privilege to introduce our speaker
Rick Bass, a petroleum geologist
and environmental activist as well as author
of something upwards of 30 books.
Winners of Pen Awards, Best Book Awards,
Pushcart Awards, O.Henry Awards and others.
Normally an introducer continues in this vein,
reading to you information you've
already had access to, because they were
the materials that brought you here tonight.
Instead, I'd like to take a different tact
and I'd like to offer a couple thoughts
of what I hope
might be part of Rick's talk tonight,
or at least part of what comes across
to us in the Q & A afterwards.
For instance, I'm curious if he'll tell us
how it feels to have to explain to a boss
the damage to a company pick up truck,
that was caused by another pick up truck,
a truck that a glance in his rear view mirror,
right before it happened, told him was
being driven by a dog.
Or how he got the idea for his story
about a few high school kids who
skip classes and go play around with a crane
and then a diving bell in the estuary
of a river near Houston.
Or how long it takes for a representative
or senator who loves Montana enough
to go to Washington, D.C. to fight for that state
to give up those battles with bureaucracy
and go home to fish and hunt.
Or whether he senses, he might sometimes
be channeling a like minded business professional,
this one a government forester,
rather than, as in his own case,
an oil field geologist,
as he tilts against some of the same
windmills his predecessor did.
Of road builders and clear cutters.
A couple of years ago, two of our faculty
argued in an earlier presentation
in this series, that Aldo Leopold, alive
in the 19th and early 20th centuries is,
and I use the present tense intentionally,
a 21st century environmentalist,
judging by Rick's writings and his effort
to preserve some of nature for our descendants,
I'll make the argument,
that the 20th and 21st century writer
with us tonight, may well be viewed
as such a force in 22nd century environmentalism.
Ladies and gentlemen, Rick Bass.
(applause)
- Thank you.
Thanks so much Mark, for that lovely
and thoughtful introduction.
And somewhat troubling, I had forgotten
about the dog, I hadn't thought
about that in 30 years.
I hope he's well, but I guess not.
Thank you guys for coming in on this
beautiful spring evening.
Really happy to be here.
Thanks for having me on your beautiful campus
and in this beautiful auditorium
and in your beautiful state.
Can ya'll hear me in the back alright?
Thanks.
Thanks Randy for micing up.
It's a great honor to be the pen-ultimate speaker
in the Daniel Doyle Technology and Society lecture.
So, august an event that I assumed
it's benefactor had left us,
but I'm really thrilled that that is not the case.
It's a great honor to be here.
It's a cool, cool thing
and it's awesome to get to see
one's fruits and to wade into them.
Thanks Wendy and Mark and Paul
for putting this all together.
Shoot, six, eight months, nine months
ago to get me here.
And I enjoyed being in Dorothy and Rob's classes today.
I enjoyed meeting and visiting with the students.
I will say an exhausting, well that's a negative word,
well it was exhausting, an exhausting
breadth of classes, architectural history
and alternative energy.
Learned more about regulators
and step down converters and inverters
and batteries than, I want to say,
than I wanted to know, I didn't learn
1/10 of what I wanted to know,
but learned more than I thought I could learn
in an hour and of course,
Rob's environmental ethics class
was stimulating to the point that
a deep nap was needed immediately afterward.
I mean that in the best way.
Not during, but exhausted afterward,
in the best way.
I'm going to share three
things I've essentially lived three lives.
I well, more than three,
but the three that I'm most familiar with,
were my oil and gas days in the southeast,
which were magnificent, hunting for buried treasure
and then my environmental activist days,
wilderness advocacy up in northwest Montana,
which were and are magnificent
and then just the world of the short story,
of writing, of literature, which was an is magnificent.
And so, hitting middle age, you start trying
to process and weave the parts
of your life together to make sense out of it,
which I don't know why, but that's what we do.
I'm still working at that part.
I'll read just a short section here,
about what it was like in the oil and gas days.
I loved to chase and hunt the oil.
I absolutely loved finding it.
Pursuing it, mapping it, dreaming it, drilling for it,
was such an intense and passionate journey
that even the dry holes were exciting.
You weren't happy when you missed,
but even that was stimulating.
I guess you could say it was addictive.
You could say without a shadow of a doubt,
it was addictive.
I never worked on public lands,
sensitive lands, my work was in soy farmers
soy bean fields, drilling only
a few thousand feet down into old
Paleozoic sandstones with an eight and 7/8 inch bore hole.
A pin prick.
This won't hardly hurt at all.
But I saw some things, I learned some things,
and like any of us, I know the sound of a lie.
When the BP well blew out in the Gulf of Mexico,
something that wasn't reported in the press,
was how deep the blowing out formation was
or if BP even knew from what formation
the hydrocarbons were spewing
or how thick the formation was.
Typically, the larger reservoirs are deeper,
but the fact that this one blew black oil,
deeper horizons generally contain oil
that is greenish in color and at even greater depths
exist as natural gas rather than oil,
due to the pressure at those depths,
suggests the reservoir might have been
a shallower formation than BP was prepared for.
Shallower and yet larger.
Why did that formation, that reservoir,
behave so monstrously with enormous
and apparently increasing flow rates.
Was an immense salt dome,
plumes of salt 10,000 feet thick
swelling and bulging, flowing like a gel
and squeezing this reservoir?
Was this reservoir belching its gas
in erratic hiccups and burps?
We still don't know.
The earth is mysterious, the earth is alive,
even as we war against it.
Hunting fossil fuels of any sort,
has always been primitive,
as unsophisticated as whaling.
In every way it's seat of the pants work.
This is why pipelines always fail, always.
It's hasty and half-assed and done under
harsh conditions and on the cheap.
Their operators tell us they're in control
when nothing could be further from the truth.
The earth cannot be controlled.
Each year we know this more and more
and yet each year, we fail to overthrow
our fossil fuel imprisonment.
We always bail out oil corporations.
They get the oil, they poison the land,
we pay for the clean up, we pay for the oil.
The equation is monstrous,
and nowhere more so than in fracking.
Industry insists the formations
are sealed off by concrete.
This is a lie.
Formations are constructed of an infinite
number of vertical and horizontal fissures
and that's even before the underground
dynamite starts going off.
The earth's buried laminae are as porous,
as permeable as skin.
What goes into the ground will always
find its way to water, which then always
finds its way to us, until we have used
all the water, until all the water is gone.
When I remember my days in the oil field,
there's one image that comes to me most often,
I was in my late 20s, working 80 hour weeks,
burning the candle at both ends.
We were drilling a deep well,
down in the swamps of south Louisiana
in a location so far beyond the end of the road,
that we had to construct our own
floating road of lashed together boards,
broad planks of cypress, to go out
into the swamp another mile or two,
extending our reach.
It was a big project.
It was dark and I was driving through
the swamp and through the forest
in a heavy rain, going a little too fast.
The floating road was slightly
underwater in places, so often,
I was bluffing, aiming the company vehicle
from point A to point C, trusting
that my route would get me there
and that I would stay on the floating road.
As if my will or desire alone was enough to make it so.
I drifted off however, and the car nosed down
into the swamp.
I can barely recall the strength and nonchalance
of the young man I was.
The hunger I had for the world.
It didn't bother me at all that water
was now gushing into the car,
it wasn't my car, it was the company's.
I was on a mission.
I picked up the well logs, the priceless documents
I was trying to deliver, put them in my briefcase
climbed out through the window
and continued down the slick board road,
ankle deep in swamp.
I walked for a long time.
Finally, I saw a faint lone light in the woods,
an old shack with one lantern.
If the light had not been burning,
I would never have believed anyone
inhabited the leaning shanty.
I hated to do it, but I needed to see if they had a phone.
I paused, then rapped on the door.
I had assumed the inhabitants were sleeping soundly,
my approach had been soundless,
but so instantaneous came the reply
to my knock, that the two events,
my knock and the dweller's subsequent
inquiry seemed simultaneous.
The voice of an old woman rang like a shot,
"State your name!"
And was shouted with such authority,
that I didn't hesitate in the least,
but answered her right back, "Rick Bass",
as if the name of a 25 year old boy
from Hynes County meant anything.
Miraculously, as if I had uttered the one correct phrase
that would gain entrance, she opened the door
and welcomed me in.
for whatever reason she didn't have a phone.
I couldn't tell if it was a question of access,
or she simply scorned them.
I visited awhile, then went on up the muddy road,
toward the tiny backwoods village,
several miles distant, and the cinder block hotel,
where I could rent an old *** car
from the night clerk, a sled that would get me back
to Jackson before daylight,
so that the glowing lit world,
the world of myth, the world we did not
yet know enough not to believe in could continue.
Looking back, everything about my answer amazes me.
The unapologetic cheeriness of it,
neither arrogant nor insouciant.
I knew it explained nothing,
but that no explanation was needed.
I was on a mission.
Not quite a hero, but a messenger from the gods.
If she wanted to have my name,
if that was what was most important,
she could have it.
The night was young and I would
get out of this just fine.
I had made it out to the rig alright,
the glow of the tower, isolated
in that dark forest, looked like the glow
that might come from the landing
of extraterrestrial space craft
and steam rose from the pipe
that was being pulled from the hole,
the drill string streaming and smoking
like something being born.
The roar of diesel engines like that from an army,
if not a civilization, a town.
I had been there, gathered the treasure
and was headed back.
I had the treasure in hand
and drove the logs back to Jackson several hours north.
It seemed impossible that not so long ago
there were no cell phones or scanners
no computers or even faxes.
We had a crude portable instrument
called a telecopier that we carried in a briefcase
like a portable nuclear bomb,
but its transmission of the logs
was blurry and stuttery.
The preferred method was for me
to just ferry them to the bosses
as if by pony express, pulling up
in front of their mansions at three,
four in the morning, knocking on the door.
They answered in bathrobes.
We would spread the paper logs
out on the table like biblical documents.
The light seemed different back then
and at that hour, in the kitchen,
a gold light while we studied the logs
and saw for the first time the fruit of our labors,
the degree of their wealth with exhaustion
limning the edges of our vision.
Who would not want to live such a life.
We kept the world going.
We carried the world on our backs
while the world slept and we kept it going.
For as long as we kept going forward,
the world kept going forward.
I remember those days so well,
the power and heady feeling of being needed,
of possessing a valuable and honored skill.
Fracking has nothing to do with the hunt.
It's not geology anymore, it's just mining.
Playing with explosives.
Blow up a bunch of crap underground,
pump poison down the hole,
suck up the gas then move on.
Next explosion.
And so on and on, destroying every aquifer.
Don't look back, destroy it all.
I think many of you can imagine
what I will say this evening.
Something along the lines that
science and technology artists such as myself
and those long preceding me have argued
can be nurtured, strengthened by the humanities
and I believe this.
But having reach the island of middle age,
I want to share with you passages
from my journey and to suggest
that the reverse is also true,
that the arts and humanities benefit
from technology and the sciences,
but that the greatest lesson for both endeavours
is to remember always the hugeness of our unknowing.
I played football in the last pure era of ignorance,
back before we ever really thought about concussions.
We simply called it getting your bell rung.
It was only a game, not a diminishment.
I left Texas, went to Utah, studied wildlife science,
got a job as an intern for Warehouser,
then changed my major to geology
which is where things got really interesting.
I moved to Montana in the midst of the timber wars.
Car bombs, arson, pipe bombs, death threats, etc.
There I battled scientists who argued
with a straight face that clear cuts
mimicked the ecological process of wild fire.
Wild fire jumps through a forest
in a ferocious mosaic, in puffs and gusts,
with pulses of intensity.
Some trees survive.
Wild fire deposits, redeposits all it's nuturients
still on signs and architectures
of a long buried civilization of stone
through which the hydrocarbons moved
spreading laterally and then ascending,
seeking the highest point in a structure,
as if seeking escape.
This is I think exactly the architecture of a good story.
In learning geology, I learned to write.
In hiking and hunting the wilderness,
places where you can still, if lucky get lost.
I also learned how to write.
Technology, we know this, is no longer
iron ore and copper wire, coal and steam and steel.
Technology has always been largely,
idea, dream, need.
We seek comfort in numbers,
math is an idea designed to either assure and comfort us
or to terrify us.
But even math wobbles, shimmers with,
is ultimately constructed of unpredictability,
hostage always to the viscisitudes of variables
of externalities.
The wind ***, the temperature in an equation rises,
the cooling shadow of a passing bird,
falls briefly across the equation
and the outcome is slightly different,
without our understanding why.
The world is a closed system,
but the world is not a lab.
The world is not a closed system,
there is always something else.
Where am I going with this?
To remind us again of the old alarmist cry,
we don't know, what we don't know.
As both consumers and producers of technology,
practice caution.
Wilderness protects us against our hungers,
wilderness, vast landscapes of greater
ecological integrity serve as scientific
base line standards of the world we once lived in,
the world that made us and which we inhabit yet.
And short stories too, serve us well
in that they reinforce unknowingness
and why-ness, with the reader following
each next sentence, not knowing.
The repetition of this journey,
sentence by sentence, can,
like time spent in the wilderness,
build over time, can engineer a brain
resonant with humility.
There is always a cost.
If we think there is not one,
it is simply because we are not seeing it yet.
The best scientists and engineers
are the ones who are not afraid
to say I don't know.
One need look no further than the
phenomenon of fracking to be reminded of this,
there is always a cost.
It's said the brain cannot differentiate
in reading, viewing or imagining
the representation of the thing,
an antler or a stone, a wild fire or a blizzard
from the actual experience.
That the amplitudes or brainwaves
while perceiving the two experiences,
the real and the virtual
are indistinguishable, identical.
I don't believe that for a moment.
I believe this is yet another instance
of uncountedness.
The great danger of science and technology
is the myth that we know where we are going
that we have firm answers.
We forget over time to ask questions.
Take for instance the current debate
about the health of grizzly bears
in Yellowstone Park where they have been listed
as either an endangered or a threatened species,
depending often largely on whatever
political party and administration holds governance.
With the degree of protection varying
between those words, the less dire threatened
and the more dire endangered.
Words like math can be every bit as abstract.
It can be the trickiest business I know sometimes,
getting them words just right,
so that the thing lines up with the thing,
with no shadow, no lost energy,
no unaccounted beat or measure or meaning.
No loss of heat.
Just outside the Yellowstone Park boundaries,
rich sportsters for whatever messed up reasons
wish now to shoot at and kill, to hunt,
the very bears that we the people
have been protecting for decades.
There is no full equations suitable yet
for protecting a grizzly bear.
Industry tries to influence and shave the corners
off our intuitive as well as data driven knowledge.
One scientist will say a male grizzly
requires 350 square miles, another 500.
Females with young in a dry year, more.
In Colorado, more.
In parts of Montana, less.
375 miles, 800 square miles, yes, yes.
Every valley is different, every bear is different.
Every year is different.
There's is a maternal culture,
with learning passed on to their cubs.
They're one of the slowest reproducing
land mammals in the world.
And we can't begin to tell you
what we do not yet know about bears.
Which sleep four to five months per year
in suspended animation, their blood
nearly coagulating, their heart's lulled,
but thee to five beats per quiet slow minute.
Do they dream?
Sometimes they wake up
and go out into the snow and walk around.
Why?
We know nothing.
The snow falls on their tracks
and we never even know they did this.
We know nothing.
Yet our government and industry
has counted them up and lumped them together
and decided that their number is now enough.
Undifferentiating the males from the females,
undifferentiating the breeding age females,
undifferentiating connectivity values
and coefficients across and between
landscapes fragmented by, here's
that word again, fracking.
That last year there were not enough,
but that this year there are enough,
for a little while anyway and we can begin killing them.
How very messed up.
How very human.
Here's a little thing, a tiny thing.
The seed of the white bark pine,
which grows at the highest elevations,
away from roads and people,
is exceptionally nutritious.
Squirrels cache the cones,
as does a singular bird the clark's nutcracker.
The grizzlies find these rich cache's of protein
and eat them like full course meals.
Further, the bears who are fortunate,
excuse me.
Scientists have said that global warming
which is destroying white bark pine,
will not influence grizzly bear populations,
that grizzlies can eat dead bison instead,
the bears who are fortunate enough
to find and then claim any left over dead bison
beneath the thawing snow,
upon the bear's exit from hibernation,
are the larger more aggressive males.
The beauty of white bark pine,
is that it was the perfect food source
for the females with young,
who wish to stay out of harm's way.
Who wish not to tangle with big boars,
but to instead take care of their young cubs.
As well, these white bark pine cones
can be eaten just before hibernation,
when the mother grizzlies most need to be fattening up.
It should be clear then to anyone,
other than perhaps government biologists,
that a white bark pine cone is not a bison.
I know that art can help,
can expand, stretch, enflame the good scientist mind,
can nurture the sense of wonder and creativity,
can stimulate the ability to ask
that so important question, why?
And wilderness, the land we don't manage
or control with our machines contains
this same generative pulse of mystery.
Is in that regard, the wellspring we came from
and is therefore to a large degree, who we are.
To acknowledge that we will set aside,
some last places forever, beyond our consumption,
you could even call them churches.
Such generosity to the future
is a dynamic tension, a humble and wise gesture,
a nod toward mystery.
And the uncontrollable,
that perhaps scientists, ironically,
best understand and to be sure,
we can still study the heck out of wilderness and should.
And what will we find?
That it can not be replicated.
That it is made of the infinite investment
of centuries, millinia.
To see a dream made real and specific
to be able to hold in one's hand,
the friable drill cuttings of an old
Paleozoic beach, the brittle sand grains
soaked in green black oil.
Your idea, the electricity of the brain waves
of your awaking dream led you to this sandstone,
reinforced in me, the belief that stories
are powerful, that stories can become real.
That there can be a transcendence,
a skip and a jump from the imagined to the real.
It's one of our most powerful characteristics
and abilities as a species,
essentially, the ability to believe in dreams.
And art and the wilderness are at the heart of this.
We will always have technology,
the other two things, I am not so sure of.
In closing, I'd like to read a little piece of fiction,
a short story.
Call it a palate cleanser after the doom and gloom
of what my dear late friend Jim Harrison
called Eco-Bore.
You know, we'll get it, I hope address this
in questions and answers, how do you live,
when you know that the math is not
good in the favor of the things you love?
We talked about this in class some today,
about activism, the pluses and minuses of it.
The cost and benefits.
That's a variable that everybody has to address.
This story's called "Titan".
The summer that I witnessed,
breathed, lived the jubilee, I was 12 years old.
My brother, Auto, who is four years older
was already on what he was calling
the fast track to success, which he defined
and still does, as becoming rich.
He is an investment banker, and I suppose it is fair
to say that he has never known a moment's hardship.
Even he refers to himself as blessed.
I myself was never quite as comfortable
in the presence of excessive bounty as he was.
Our parents were born in the heart of the depression,
grew up under its shadow, cowed and spooked
I think, by the fear and memory of it.
Auto reacted by turning away from
the cautious austerity of our parents,
away from such fiscal and some would say,
emotional timidity and struck out
as soon as possible, in the opposite direction.
Swimming hard and strong and eager for the profligate.
Our parents had worked hard establishing
their own business as geologists.
But it must have rankled Auto,
as soon as he was old enough to notice such things.
The way our parents held onto and conserved,
and reinvested their savings, setting aside
safe and prudent amounts of it
as if against the coming storms of the world.
Storms that never came.
There was wealth almost everywhere
in Texas in those days
and the fact that I have not participated
in it since then or rather have chosen
other kinds of wealth does not mean
the moneyed type was unavailable to me.
I simply was pulled in another direction.
Even then I had my own hungers
and still do.
They say that traits in a family,
or even in a nation are prone to sometimes
skip generations, rising and falling
in crest and troughs like waves far out beyond the gulf.
And although Auto was only four years older,
I often felt as if I were an only child,
that he was from the generation before me
and that my parents were from the generation
before that generation, so that I was able to witness
and live between the two ways of being in the world.
And I do not mean to judge Auto,
but whenever my parents would attempt
to have a cautionary discussion with him
about his hungry consumptive ways,
he would brush them off.
There was nothing that he did not see as a commodity,
able to be bought or sold or traded
and leveraged, or even stolen from the future.
He was then and still is, simply a taker
and it is the only way he is comfortable in the world.
And though one day I suppose,
the world will run out of things to take
and to trade or rather will run out
of worthwhile things to take and trade,
that is not quite yet the case
and I'd have to say that all in all,
he's continuing to live a fairly comfortable
and satisfied life
and that he's more or less content,
even in the continued savagery of his hunger.
I think that he has found his own balance.
Though it did not occur to me when I was 12,
I came to realize later, that our elderly parents
they would have been in their mid-50s then,
might have been a little awed by Auto.
By the unquestioning force of his desire.
The crisp efficiency of his gluttony
and by the power of his steadfast commitment
almost as if to a religious philosophy
to seek out anything rare and valuable
and purchase it and count it and market it
to acquire and consume.
Listening to him talk about such things,
stocks and bonds, gold and silver,
treasury notes and soy beans, cattle and poultry,
coal and oil was like watching a great predator
gaze unblinkingly, it's jaws parted at a herd
of unknowing grazing creatures.
My parents were't frightened of their oldest son,
but they were awed.
And who were they besides his elders,
to speak to him, to tell him he was wrong,
when they themselves had known a similar hunger
but had simply grown up in a time
when it seemed there was nothing
available to acquire and no means for the acquisition.
My own hunger was for a closeness and a connection.
A reduction in the vast and irreducible space
I perceived to exist between all people,
even within a family.
It would have been fine with me,
if every morning, the four of us had
taken our breakfast together
and if the four of us had then
gone out into the day to labor
in the bright fields together in some
wholesome and ancient way, plowing
and tilling or harvesting and gathering
and to eat all our meals together
and to end the day with a family reading,
an hour or more of dramatic monologue
or to talk awhile.
Instead, we all sort of went our own ways,
day after day.
The closest we came to conventional
or traditional or mythical unity,
was every summer when we went on vacation
to a place in south Alabama on the coast,
called Point Clear.
The hotel and resort where we stayed,
the grand hotel was elegant,
even if the coast itself was hot and windy and muggy.
In the evenings we would eat
delicious seafood in the formal
candlelit dining room, surrounded by diners
possessing far greater wealth than my parents.
Men and women who were no less
than corporate titans.
And each night while I would sit there,
quietly, reflectively, dreaming a child's dreams,
Auto would be looking all around,
paying far more attention to the titans.
To their mannerisms and overheard conversations
than he did to the meal itself.
And even then I would sometimes
be aware of the manner in which
my parents beheld both of us
and of their unspoken thoughts
as they wondered how can two brothers,
or two of anything turn out so different?
And I could see also that they were
perturbed by this difference, this distance,
as if we were all moving away from one another,
as if our desire for space was the greatest gluttony.
At the hotel, each night was attended
by aimless opulence.
We would all dress up, titans and non-titans
and enter that grand formal dining hall
and be waited on hand and foot
with one delicacy after another
being brought to us, treats and treasures to be had,
merely for the asking while a band
played music at the other end of the hall.
And the next day after a breakfast
of bright fruit and fresh juice, Auto and my parents
would go off to play tennis or golf,
while I would be on my own,
free to wander the well kept grounds,
free to inhabit the reckless lands
of my imagination.
There was so much space.
I prowled the cattails and the water hazards
along the golf courses, catching fish and minnows
and snakes and turtles and frogs.
Particularly the sleek and elegant
spotted leopard frogs, which are already nearly extinct.
They were everywhere back then,
and no one could ever have imagined
they would simply, or not so simply vanish.
What other bright phenomenon
will vanish in our lifetimes becoming one day
merely memory and story, tale and legacy
and then fragments of story and legacy
and then nothing, only wind?
I spent the middle of the afternoon,
sitting in the air conditioned lobby,
playing chess with and against myself,
bare chested in my damp swimsuit,
sitting on a leather sofa with sand grains
crumbling from between my toes
onto the cool tile floor.
I order root beer and grilled cheese
sandwiches from the pool,
charging them to our room,
and in my concentration on the game,
I would spill potato chips into the folds
of the leather furniture.
I failed to notice the icy looks
that must have been coming from the desk clerks.
There's so many different types of gluttony.
Even now, just as when I was a child,
and without responsibility, I can lie
on my back in the tall grass in autumn
and stare at the clouds, an adult,
with not a thought in my head
and when I stand up, hours later,
I will still be ravenous for the sight
of those clouds, and for the whispering of that grass
and when I go to bed that night,
I will still be hungry for the memory
of the warmth of that late season sun,
even as in the moment I am enjoying
the scent and embrace of the darkness
and the cooling night.
At Point Clear, we'd meet up again for dinner.
Auto and my parents, tan from the extravagances
of their own day, and relaxed,
appearing not quite sated, never that.
But almost.
Even then I felt acutely that I was between two lands.
I wanted to take, but I also wanted to give.
Though what I wasn't sure?
Were there others like me?
I had no idea.
It was entirely possible I was alone in this regard,
that even amid bounty, too much space surrounded me.
The jubilee was a phenomenon that usually
happened only once every few summers in south Alabama.
Following afternoon thunderstorms
in the upland part of the state.
The storms would drop several inches
of rain into all the creeks and streams and rivers
in a short period of time.
That surge of fresh, cold rain water
would then come rushing down toward the Gulf
gaining speed and potency, doubling
at every confluence until finally a few hours later
almost always in the middle of the night,
the wall of fresh water would come rolling into the Gulf.
The moon was involved with the jubilee too.
Though I don't know exactly how.
Perhaps the moon had to be full
and pulling out a big rip tide,
just when all the extra fresh water
came gushing out.
Or maybe it was the other way around
and the moon had to be bringing
a high tide of seawater up river,
but anyway the bottom line,
or so said the brochure I had read,
at the front desk was that when the jubilee hit,
the flush of fresh water would stun
or kill all the salt water fish in the vicinity.
And the fresh water would also carry out
on its plume a swirling mix of
freshwater creatures, catfish, gar,
crawdads, bullfrogs, they would also be salt stunned.
It was a rare thing, almost a once in a lifetime thing,
to see it.
I made sure our family's name was on the list
for the wake up call.
The first year I signed us up I was seven years old.
I'd lie there in our cottage every night
watching the moon through the window,
waiting for the phone to ring.
The woman at the front desk told me
that whenever you answered the phone
and heard the one word, jubilee,
it meant the thing was on.
I would lie awake wondering if it had rained
in the uplands that day.
I would strain my ears to see if I could hear
the shouts of jubilee drifting
across the golf course and up and down the beach.
Summer after summer passed in this manner,
with me wandering solitary along
the edges of the bright and well kept lawns
and gardens of wealth in the day time
and lying there in the cottage each night,
trying to stay awake for as long as I could,
awaiting the call.
I imagined the jubilee was an event
of such significance, the hotel staff
kept someone down at the beach
each night, on permanent look out
like a lifeguard perched high in a chair,
waiting to report its arrival.
In the summer when I was 11,
finally the call did come, but I was asleep
and didn't find out about it until weeks later
when we were back home.
The phone had rung at two a.m
and when my father leaned over
and picked up the phone, a woman's voice
cried jubilee and then hung up.
Neither my father nor my mother
had a clue what a jubilee was,
much less that I'd signed us up for one.
The year I was 12, the year I finally saw the jubilee,
I slept by the phone.
It was very rare to have two jubilees in two years
and this time, I got to the phone
and got to hear the woman say it.
She uttered just that one word and then hung up.
I hurried outside and could see people
moving down toward the beach in the moonlight,
some in bathrobes, others in shorts and sandals.
Some had flashlights, though the moon
was so bright, you didn't really need one.
I went back inside and got my family up.
At first they didn't want to go,
but I kept haranguing them an finally they awakened.
By the time we made it down to the water,
people were already wading out into the ocean.
The first thing that hit me,
beyond the beauty of the moonlight on the water,
was the scent of fresh fish.
It wasn't quite as I had pictured it would be.
I had imagined, there might be a thousand people
or even 10,000, but instead there were only
about 40 of us moving slowly through the waves,
our heads down searching for the stunned fish
floating belly up.
I thought people would hear about it
on the radio stations and through word of mouth,
and that there would be cars parked
all up and down the beach.
That people would have come all the way from
Mobile and Pensacola and even farther,
Biloxi, Hattiesburg and the uplands.
Selma, Columbus and Tallahassee,
but instead it was just us,
the resort goers.
I thought you would be able to see the jubilee too,
that the plume of fresh water would be darker,
like spilled ink and you would be able
to discern precisely where it entered
and mixed with the bay, being diluted
and spread laterally by the long shore currents.
But it wasn't that way at all.
I couldn't tell any difference
between salt water and fresh.
The waters looked just as they always had.
Every now and then, I could catch the faintest
whiff of something fresh and dark,
organic like black dirt, forest, nutweed, rotting bark.
But always, just as soon as I became aware
of that dark, little thread of scent,
it would disappear, absorbed by the mass of the ocean.
I thought there would be more fish too.
I thought there would be millions.
Instead, there were only thousands.
Some of the smaller ones appeared dead,
but the larger ones were just stunned,
swimming sideways or upside down,
gasping and confused.
They were out there for as far as I could see,
white bellies shining in the moonlight.
And other fish were careening as if drunk
against my legs, fish panicked, fish drowning,
is what it looked and felt like
and people carried pillowcases
and plastic bags over their shoulders,
filling them as if they were gathering
squash or potatoes from a garden.
Everyone participated,
class distinctions fell away, and Auto and my mother
and father and I loaded our pillowcases
right alongside the rich and the super rich.
As well as alongside the hotel workers,
filling our sacks with our catches,
crabs, catfish, red snapper, flounder, shrimp,
bullfrogs. sheep's head, angel fish.
We didn't have to worry about sharks,
because they wouldn't come in
to where the fresh water was mixing.
It was all ours.
For that one night, or those few hours,
it was all ours.
Father and mother were very happy,
as were all of the people out on the beach
and it felt to me as if I'd been drawn
already into some other older world.
The land of adults.
Without having quite yet petitioned for
or desired such an entrance,
still pleased as I was by childhood.
In remembering the jubilee,
I recall how different the quality of sound was.
It wasn't extraordinarily loud,
it was just different.
A combination of sounds I had never heard before.
The waves were shushing and the confused fish
were slapping the waters they thrashed
and fought the poison of the fresh water.
There were a lot of birds overhead,
gulls mostly, squalling and squealing
and the ten piece band from the restaurant
had come down and set up along the water's edge
and they were playing.
The hotel staff had set up dining rooms,
dining tables, with linen table cloths
out on the beach and had lit torches and candles
all along the shore and around the dining tables.
The chef's had come down to the jubilee also
and were chopping off fish heads
and gutting the entrails, slicing off filets
and frying and boiling and grilling a dozen
different recipes at once.
Luminous in their bright white aprons,
knifes flashing in the candlelight.
There were cats everywhere,
cats coming from out of the sea oats
to take those fish heads
and run back off into the bushes with them.
There was a boy walking up and down the beach,
staying almost always just at the farthest
edge of the light from the candles
and lanterns and bonfires.
He was barefoot like all of us,
and shirtless and was wearing blue jeans
that had been cut off at the knees
and as he paced back and forth observing us,
I could tell he was agitated.
His agitation stood out even more,
surrounded as he was by the almost
somnolent contentedness of everyone else.
The rest of us sloshed around in the waves,
our heads tipped slightly downward like wading birds.
With all the fish in the world available to us it seemed,
just for the taking.
The boy was roughly my age,
and because he was hanging back at the edge
of firelight, back in the blue silver
light of the moon, that is how I thought of him,
as the blue boy.
I hadn't seen him around earlier in the week
and I had the feeling that rather than a hotel guest,
he was some feral wayfarer who had wandered
down our way from a distant ragged shack
back in the palmetto bushes.
He looked hungry too.
Like those cats that kept dragging away the fish heads.
And though I couldn't hear any voices
over the little lapping sounds of the surf,
I got the impression he would sometimes
call out to us, asking for something
and I avoided observing him too closely,
out of concern that he might somehow,
seek me out.
Once the chefs had most of the fish prepared,
they began ringing a series of large copper bells
mounted on heavy wrought iron stands
and tripods and as that gonging
rolled out across the waves, most of us turned
and waded back to shore,
to seat ourselves at the long dining tables
set up in the sand, though still,
a few people remained out in the water.
Some of them had borrowed tools
from the gardeners' shed
and were raking in the fish,
or shoveling them into baskets,
unwilling to stop, even when the feast
was ready and waiting and set before them.
We ate and ate.
The chef's mixed champagne and orange juice
in pitchers for us at sunrise,
and blew out the torches.
We could see the fish out in the ocean,
starting to recover when the sun came up.
The surface of the water was thrashing again
as fish spun and flopped and rolled back over,
right side up.
The blue boy had disappeared when
the 30 or so of us had turned and come
marching back in from out of the waves,
but now he reappeared,
came out into the soft grey light of dawn
and I could see my initial impression had been correct.
That he was scraggly and feral,
rough as a cob and that indeed he was agitated
for now, he waded out into the waves
and began scolding the dozen or so guests
who were still out there with pitchforks
and shovels and bushel baskets and trash cans
still raking in those stressed and wounded
and compromised fish.
He was hollering at them also
to leave the biggest and healthiest fish,
and was shouting at them to come on in,
that they had taken enough,
had taken more than enough.
With the boys attention focused elsewhere,
I was free to observe him without being noticed
and there was something about him
that made me think he was not from this country.
Though what other country he might have been from,
I could not have said.
A country I suppose where they had run out of fish.
The pitchforkers ignored the blue boy however,
and kept on reaching for more and more fish,
stabbing and spearing them,
scooping and netting them into their baskets,
until finally, all the fish were gone
and the sun was bright in the sky.
And the blue boy just stood there,
staring at them, nearly chest deep in the waves
and then he turned and made his way
back to shore and disappeared into the dunes.
The sun rose orange over the water
and the ocean turned foggy gray,
the same color as the sky.
The band stopped playing,
the waiters and waitresses cleared the tables
and we all went back to our rooms to sleep.
For two days afterward, we would all see
these rich people who would come to this place
for vacation, working on their fish instead.
They kept them cool in garbage cans
filled with ice and would be scaling
and fileting fish all day long.
These bankers and lawyers and doctors and titans.
Some of them used electric knives
and we'd hear that buzzing humming sound,
a sawing, going on all day.
They were slipping with the knives
and chopping up their hands
so that at dinner the next couple of nights,
we would see people trying to eat
with their hands wrapped in gauze bandages
with blood splotches soaking through them.
The rich people would have fish scales
all over them also, not a lot, just one or two,
stuck to a thumbnail or sometimes a cheekbone,
or in their hair.
And they wouldn't realize it,
so the scales would be glittering as they ate.
It made them look special,
as if they were wearing some new kind of jewelry
or as if they were on their way
to a party or had just come from one.
We ate fish for breakfast lunch and dinner.
They were far and away, the best fish
I've ever eaten.
The clerk in the lobby said she'd actually
been disappointed by the yield,
that it was one of the briefest
and smallest jubillee's she'd witnessed.
And when I asked about the blue boy,
who'd been so upset,
she said he lived just a mile or so up the beach
and was always there during a jubilee
and that in years past his father and grandfather
had been there also, shouting the same things.
She said his was a fishing family
and that his warnings were not to be taken seriously,
for they probably just wanted all the fish for themselves.
Still, she admitted, the jubilee's were getting
smaller by the year and less and less frequent.
She said the blue boy came from a large family.
She guessed he had at least a dozen
brothers and sisters and they were all
church goers, fundamentalists, and very close,
like some kind of old fashioned feudal clan.
She said if you crossed one of them,
you brought down the wrath of all of them.
And that it was best to steer clear of them.
She said they were all alike,
that there wasn't a hair's breadth of difference
between any of them.
For the next couple of days,
Auto and I got up early and went back
down to the beach just before daylight to see
if by some freak chance, the jubilee
might be happening again,
if even on a lesser scale.
Like a shadow of the jubilee.
We went down to the beach
and waded out into the ocean.
The water was dark and the sky was dark.
Once or twice, a mullet skipped across the surface.
But that was it.
Things were back to the way they had been before.
Big and empty
It was almost kind of restful,
standing there in the ocean without all the noise
and excitement or it was for me anyways.
How was I to know then,
that Auto standing right next to me,
was looking at the same ocean in an entirely different way?
That he wanted another jubilee right away,
and then another and another.
"That *** boy" he said, speaking of the blue boy,
"We weren't hurting anything.
"The ocean is filled with fish,
"overflowing with fish." Auto said.
"The whole world could eat that many fish
"everyday and the new fish being born
"into the ocean would be filling their places,
"faster than we could eat them.
"We could drag one giant net from here to China
"and by the time we crossed the ocean,
"the waters behind us would have filled back in with fish,
"so we could turn around and go back
"in the other direction, filling our nets again and again."
I saw that it was important for him to believe this,
so I said nothing.
But there was nothing in that ocean that day,
and neither I am told, was their ever another jubilee
at Point Clear.
We were witnesses to the last one.
We were participants in the last one.
I do not think we were to blame
for its being the last one, and neither do I think
that if people had listened to the blue boy,
things would have turned out differently.
I think there are too many other factors,
but I also think there was too much gluttony
and not enough humility.
I can understand the nature of gluttony.
I think it is the nature of the terrible truth these days,
that there is not quite enough
of almost everything, or anything
or maybe one thing, one gentle
unconnected thing.
Though what that thing might be,
or rather, the specificity of it,
I could not say.
We left for home on the third day following the jubilee.
We wrapped all our leftover fish
in plastic bags and newspapers and put them
in boxes with ice in the trunk
and drove through the night to stay
out of the day's heat.
The ice kept melting, so fish water
was trickling out the back the whole way home.
Every time we stopped for gas,
we'd buy new bags of ice,
but we got the fish home and into the deep freeze.
They lasted for about a year.
Auto's been living in New York City
for more than 30 years now.
I still live in Texas along the Gulfcoast
and miss him and it has been a long time now,
since we've been out in the woods
or the ocean together.
Our parents eventually died
without seeing another jubilee,
though we went back to that same
vacation spot again and again
for many years afterward.
All that remains of the jubilee
is my own and a few others dimming memories of it.
When I remember the jubilee and those days of childhood,
what I think about now, is not so much
the fish made so easily available to us
or the music of the big band,
or the candlelight feast, but rather the way
all of us converged on one place,
one time with one goal,
even if that goal was to serve ourselves,
rather than others.
Even if we were ferocious in our consumption,
we were connected that night,
and those next few days.
We were like a larger family
and there was bounty in the world
and the security of bounty
and no devisiveness or heirarchies
only the gift of bounty, all the bounty
that the land and the sea could deliver to us
and with us never even having to ask
or work for it.
It was like childhood.
Nothing and no one had yet been separated
from anything else, not for any reason.
I'm glad that I saw it and though this
in itself might seem a childlike wish,
I find myself imagining some days
that we might all yet see it again.
Thank you all for having me in this evening.
(applause)
Thank you.
(applause)
Thank you.
- Thank you.
(applause)
We have just a few minutes,
for some questions if anybody would
like to ask, we've got some microphones
on either side if anybody has a question,
for Rick, please come up
and say it for all to hear and..
before we adjourn,
come on up to...
- [Voiceover] Thanks for coming out.
I'm gonna assume you're familiar
with Wendell Barry.
The poet Wendell Barry?
- Yes, I'm sorry yeah.
Hard to hear you. - [Voiceover] Yeah, okay.
I believe he once said that we're
gonna look at, one day,
pollution the same way we look at slavery.
And you know, in the 18, like the 1800s
how it's pretty almost inhumane
to the point it's incomprehensible.
At what point do you think that's
gonna happen to us and pollution
and our how we treat the environment
and our consumption of fossil fuels?
- Well, I think we're at that point
and Wendell has always been
plain spoken visionary, not afraid
to talk about moral matters the way
I certainly get queasy you know,
being it just seems like bad manners,
you know, growing up the south,
well that's not nice to be telling somebody
what's right and wrong and what's moral and immoral,
and you know, it occurs to me there
are probably people as Wendell's intimating,
that felt that same way about other issues,
such as slavery and genocide
and as recently as the civil rights era,
which continues or resurrects unfortunately
in this country so
I think that that point is now
and I'm heartened to see, you know,
Wendell, foremost among them,
participating in civil disobedience.
We've talked about this in class,
you know, writing letters to the editor
is not getting the job done these days.
We spent 50 or 60 years as environmentalists
you know playing nice,
which is exactly what industry
had hoped we would do.
And the great thing about,
courteous civil disobedience is
it throws a wrench in the business plans
of corporations and industry.
The one thing that they don't like in their equations
is unpredictability, uncertainty.
They don't mind losing money,
they can build a business plan
around to recoup a weak quarter,
they just raise the prices on necessary goods
and we will pay for it
and their profits will go back up
and their shareholders will settle down,
but what they don't like, what gets CEOs fired
is unforeseen, unpredictable quarterly earnings
or lack of earnings and civil disobedience
can raise questions about viability of proposals
and projects, it can raise necessary questions
about previously streamlined permitting processes.
It's a great asset and a great tool,
a great American tradition and legacy
that I hope ya'll's generation will resurrect.
It's proved effective this last year with Keystone,
I think with again Wendell and Bill McKibben
and so many hundreds of thousands
of others participating in it.
One person's not such a difference,
but one idea is and we can all share one idea
and focus it and we can still get out
of this jackpot, maybe.
- [Voiceover] Question.
Thank you very much for your story,
it was beautiful.
Now, do you base all your stories
on your personal life,
or do you make up things
and my question is, is Auto your brother
and was that part of your childhood?
- Oh thanks, yeah it occurs to me,
can ya'll hear the questions in the back
with that microphone?
Great.
Where stories come from, I just don't know.
That's, I've found that my favorite stories,
are ones where I know almost nothing,
I just, like this story that I just read,
I knew that I'd heard about this phenomenon,
I'd never seen it.
I thought, well what would that look like
and just started imagining.
I don't have a brother like that,
I have a couple of brothers, but they're pretty
humanities based themselves,
not so much the, you know, I
this story's as close as I come to
for lack of better word, agenda
in fiction, I try to make a firewall
between my fiction and nonfiction,
certainly between my fiction and my advocacy work
and I thought that this should just be a story
about having so much that you don't
ever think about a thing running out
and that's a pretty basic idea
and I thought, well, what would that look like
in people's lives you know, no judgement,
just observation and try to learn
somethings about myself
from wondering what that looks like
and what the surprise to me in the story was,
oh, well, oh I was trying to come up
with this fairy tale of great bounty
and wealth and gosh that's kind of
what things look like right now.
If you call middle class wealth,
how do you define wealth?
I think that comes into play in this story,
but again, I'm not gonna state those things
explicitly, then it would become nonfiction.
But that the story really pushes
the envelope of what again, Jim Harrison called eco-bore.
Yeah.
- [Voiceover] Question.
(indiscernible question)
- Yeah well I think Yogi Bear,
or maybe Aristotle said that, yeah.
(audience member indiscernably)
That's a tough question.
Really tough question.
I mean I don't wanna preach unknowingness,
like we're smart men and women,
we know a lot and we're gonna know a lot more
and as we work, we're going to, through the workplace,
we're going to experience a lot,
we're going to accumulate a vast
body of experience and knowledge,
and that's to be honored and treasured
and to be proud of,
but what I have found as a scientist
and an artist, is inevitably, everytime
that I think I know the way something's going
or I hear experts beyond my pay grade
say they know what's up,
they've always been wrong.
I mean eggs!
You know, are they good for you or they bad for you?
It's like, the one thing that is constant
is that we're going to get it wrong.
We're going to just see one side of a story.
We're not, we can never quite keep up with
our, the faster we learn things,
the more that knowledge opens up unknowingness,
so you know it's not a very exciting
piece of counsel, but I guess I just
keep coming back to the word humility.
Don't believe yourself and don't believe other people.
Listen to them and then try and again,
ask the question why.
How to pressure test.
How to feel truth.
How to ground truth.
How to reverse engineer their answers
and probe them for fallacies and flaws
because the fallacies and flaws
are just about always there.
It's a brutal game out there.
Yeah, ask why and don't believe,
don't believe the conservative media
and don't believe the liberal media.
If somebody's selling you something,
don't believe it.
That's just kind of a,
that sounds like a really cynical thing to say.
(audience laughing)
- [Voiceover] I was just reading Winter
which was excellent by the way,
- Thanks.
- [Voiceover] Especially your descriptions
of snow and the joy you received from it.
I'm curious you were, you grew up
and were educated in an area that
kind of believed in fossil fuels.
You went to work in the fossil fuel
extractive industry, what inspired you
to break away from that and see the dangers of it?
- Well, thanks, great, great question.
It wasn't quite so noble of a transition
as you suggest.
I got really lucky, I fell in love with writing
at the late 70s early 80s when oil
went from forty bucks a barrel,
36 years ago, hear it is again,
went down to $9.89 a barrel,
but I had already jumped the ship by then,
I was saying I want to be a writer,
I didn't know anything about fracking
I had not read Bill McKibben's "End of Nature"
I didn't know a thing about global warming,
it was...
it was not a noble crisis of philosophy,
it was just falling in love with writing
and then asked in these last decades,
as I've been writing short stories,
and we've come to learn as society and culture
the unaccounted cost of releasing
carbon, ever more carbon into the atmosphere
I realized that I have a not just authority
as an industry, experienced industry geologist,
but I think a responsibility to talk about
when I hear a big fat lie,
to call it out.
But it was not a crisis of conscious
that led me into writing.
- We're gonna have to call it here I believe,
but let me make just a couple of comments
before we go.
First of all, the Colloquia Committee
is busy building next years schedule,
please be alert for that come August and September,
you'll see that we've got some great
speakers coming in again next year.
Second, we have another opportunity yet
to ask questions of Rick, and to not only that,
but buy some of his books,
get his signature in them,
and eat some good food,
down in the Rapture dining area
if you join us afterwards.
We'll be down there in just a few minutes.
If I could ask you to once more,
give a big thank you to Rick Bass.
(applause)
- [Rick] Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
(applause)