Archive for May, 2010

Going, going...gone

I hadn’t planned another post quite this soon, but events compelled me. I live in Louisiana…most of you know that, and right now, gooey, nasty, toxic oil is slowly oozing ashore, destroying our wetlands, our hopes, our lives, and beauty nobody has a right to threaten.
We’ll survive; we’re tough, but I can’t help worrying about all those other weaker, infinitely more delicate non-human citizens in our world down here, not because they’re pretty or economically valuable or tasty, but because they’re part of our lives…and we love them. They provide joy, beauty, and happiness…and they’ve done nothing to deserve this. We Cajuns live close to the Earth, and we weep when harm is done…not just to us, but to our world, a world we feel anybody in his right mind should appreciate.
I know to a lot of you Louisiana means New Orleans, good food, an easy drunk, and Mardi Gras beads, but I feel sorry for you. You’ve missed the real Louisiana, the truth hiding where salt water flowing up from the gulf meets brackish water from bayous and marshes, miles of indescribable beauty…and magic.
It’s really our state’s beating heart, sensitive and vulnerable, and oil and goo are mercilessly eradicating it. You have only to watch fish gasping on the surface, a muskrat dying while it licks its toxic fur, or a desperate bird swimming to you begging for help to understand how intimate and personal this tragedy really is.
I watched a TV spot last night. A gannet covered with oil swam to a fishing boat seeking refuge, pleading to get aboard. Of course, the fishermen rescued it and took it to the wildlife people for cleaning and decontamination…but A GANNET? They hate human beings, fly away when we are anywhere nearby, but this one didn’t. It couldn’t.
Abandoning its prejudices, maybe its experience, knowing it was in mortal danger, it swam into the hands of the enemy…any port in a storm. It had run out of options in this new, unfamiliar world and chose hope, heedless of the fact that hope might contain more pain or even death. All across our shores creatures are seeking help and sanctuary like that gannet, but most of them aren’t finding it. They’re dying in masses of oily, orange muck. It’s heartbreaking.
I’ve seen the gulf go from enchanting and pristine to disgusting in only a few years. I remember going with my father and brother to the mouth of Southwest Pass outside Vermilion Bay where oyster beds lay just below the surface. Right there in the boat we shucked and ate them, our only condiment the sweet, salty water of the gulf. With the sea breeze at our backs, it was wonderful, but if you did that today, you’d probably get some sort of life-threatening disease.
After those beautiful days, viruses found their way into the oyster beds, and NOBODY’s been brave enough to do that again. Now we have toxic oil to drive the last nail home. Soon, those oysters will be dead, like the dolphins, the birds, the fish, and all the creepie-crawlies we never liked but didn’t know we really needed. Why does everybody want to kill the gulf? Maybe they don’t want to kill it…maybe they just don’t care.
I can picture myself wading in the surf outside Marsh Island, Grand Isle, or Isle Derniere and being hit by a blast of sea breeze laced with suffocating fumes. Even the air is part of our new world in which corporate greed trumps beauty, and hope, and culinary skill, and the essential goodness and wonder of the natural world. Of course, the plankton will die, then the small fish that eat it, then bigger fish, and ultimately marine mammals. They’re all interconnected. Anybody fancy a plate of sea worms? Like cockroaches, worms are survivors. That’s about all we’ll find after this…mud, worms, and dead water.
I think I feel worst about what’s going to happen to the dolphins. They’re SMART, but they’ll have no idea what’s happening. Dolphins live in the now. They don’t really understand consequences; they’re all about fun…relentlessly. I don’t know how many of you have actually seen dolphins in their natural habitat, but you should know they’re joyful, playful, happy creatures…more like children, really. And like children, their deaths are particularly painful. I don’t want to go out there and see their carcasses washing up on shore. They’re my friends; it would be too painful.
Nature is slow and deliberate. It takes millenia to create an ocean ecosystem, and oceans recover at the same pace…over other millenia. Man isn’t like that; he wants things done FAST, and like progress, damage can be fast, too, sometimes overwhelmingly fast, like the oil slick. Our government dutifully exresses concern in photo-op moments, but while they’re posturing, our world is slowly fading through gray to black…and we’re mourning.
You’ll eventually feel it too, wherever you are, but in a different way. When one single oyster costs you $15.00, you’ll wince, but you’ll probably arrange to get them from China or somewhere else and never really understand. It’s not about money; it’s about our failure to be good stewards.
When I wrote Dawn on Earth, I set it a hundred years in the future because I thought it would take that long for our world to disintegrate. I was wrong. Pretty soon, the waters will begin to climb…nobody’s really worried about that, either…and we’ll have to move to Arkansas or other points north while the place we love, the place we were born, our home slowly slips below waves of emulsified oil and dead shore and sea creatures.
You may not understand right away, but you will…in time. You can’t destroy beauty, hope, and love without destroying a part of yourself.

Since I got home, I’ve been going through the final draft of Kukulkan, the sequel to Dawn on Earth. I don’t plan to put it out until Dawn has been around for a while, but I thought it would be nice to have it in final form before I went on to other things. Working on the new novel took my mind back a few years because I used something in it I had actually seen…UFOs.
Yes, I’m afraid I’m one of THOSE people! I know it puts me way out there on the fringe, knew it at the time. I didn’t want to see them, wasn’t looking for them, just wanted to go out and get a burger, a cherry coke, and fries at the Dairy Den, but there they were up in the night sky doing their thing–two greenish-blue disks kind of dancing around each other…and they weren’t silent like they always say on the Sci-Fi channel. They emitted a clearly discernable hum. Cue spooky music.
“Corroboration!” I thought. “I gotta get corroboration,” so I ran into the nearest building (which turned out to be the small hospital in our town), telling people I found there to come out—NOW! I wasn’t about to be the only one to have seen those peculiar little things zipping around, ruining my appetite. Maybe twelve people followed me. At first, they thought there was a fire in the building, but when I showed them why I had dragged them out, they began to wish it had only been a fire. It was all so unexpected, so wierd, so intrusive on that beautiful late spring night.
Okay…at this point a lot of you are going to say, “That’s it…he’s a nut!” I know I would. Like a lot of us, I had heard about the Roswell thing and other “sightings”, and I considered the stories interesting, even fun…but never real, only creative fiction or imaginative witnesses. Now I was ONE of them, and you could be right. It’s not impossible that I’m nuts…but what about the other twelve? To impune their sanity is both statistically unlikely and spectacularly unfair, and you know, sometimes “You’re crazy!” really means, “Stop saying that; it scares me!”
And what about President Carter? He saw a UFO…said so himself. Is he nuts? I don’t think so. Actually, he’s been deservedly admired, respected, and honored despite the fact that he was intruded upon by whatever those things are…which brings me to two obvious questions. What the hell are they, and where do they come from?
At the time I didn’t think about aliens, I thought about the military, the often secretive Department of Defense, and I guess I could still be right. But if those things were produced on Earth, somebody’s been keeping one homungus secret at least since the nineteen-forties…and WHO had that kind of technology in those days? I guess we could always pin it on the Nazis, but wouldn’t they have used them if they had stuff like that? Makes sense to me. When they were losing, they threw everything they could at us, including jets.
That was then. Now, I’m a sci-fi writer, so quite naturally I’m more willing to explore the other option…extraterrestrials. In Kukulkan, I made the UFO’s robotic scout ships left by aliens to monitor the planet…and you know, thinking about it, that’s not really all that bad an idea. As you can tell, I STILL don’t buy those abduction stories, but aliens visiting here and saying “An interesting species…let’s keep and eye on them and see what they come up with” sounds plausible, even smart.
Anyway, it happened. I can’t erase it from my reality. I saw it, enlisted witnesses, and have wondered about it ever since. Turns out I was unnecessarily cautious. A lot of people saw those things that night. It was even reported in the news, but at the time I didn’t want to be the only voice in the wilderness…thirteen voices sounded much more comfortable. After that night I tended to watch the night sky more closely but finally gave up when I realized the odds of seeing them again. If I saw them tomorrow, it would be as big a shock as it was the first time.
You know, a lot of those sightings seem to happen in the south…and I wonder about that, too. Maybe it’s because the night sky up north is all lit up by huge cities. They could be up there but nobody can see them. Down south we have big cities, too…just not as many. I remember when I lived in New Orleans, straining to find even one star through the gloom, but in the country we have lovely dark places where the sky is black and clear, the stars bright, and things like my blue-green disks would stand out.
Maybe, in the south we’re more interesting to aliens. I mean…we’re fun people, true…but THAT INTERESTING? We do have a more laid-back lifestyle, but I can’t see how they’d find that such a big draw. Naw…if this is real, it’s gotta be the light pollution thing…unless they’re inordinately fond of grits…or Hoppin’ John…or gumbo. I hadn’t thought about that.

I’ve been on vacation, but my mind hasn’t. I’m just not wired that way. Sitting on the porch of a Tennessee cabin, watching the sun play across my legs and the demarcation line where my hiking boots ended, it struck me, I’m not white; I’m pink! Who the hell decided I was white? Aside from a few albinos, nobody is. Actually, the only albinos I’ve ever met were pink, too, only a whole lot lighter.
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a human being who was black either. From what I’ve seen, we seem to be a spectrum from brown through tan to pink. If we really want to go by color, we’re gonna need a whole bunch of categories. I can see it now, using some sort of instrument to decide which one we belong in. “He’s a pink.” “No, he’s darker than pink…I think he’s light red.” “PLEASE! I have a sunburn! I’ll go back to pink after a week or so at home!”
So where’d the black/white thing come from? It’s nice to have absolutes when you can, but in this case it’s both inaccurate and silly. I wonder about things like that from my undeniably reddish-pink side of the spectrum. Being over here on this end can be a real disadvantage. If we don’t slather sunblock all over, we regret it for days, like I’m doing right now. Romping about in the outdoors brings it home. We’re not all that well equipped for it. Any other color would do better, which brings me to another thought…maybe we’re on the thin end of evolutionary advantage, too.
I mean…think about it. Africans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, almost any other color would do just fine running around in blistering sun. Their cultures lived off the land and loved where they were. It’s sad. Everybody else is better at it than we. So, how did we prevail on this continent from the start?
I know somebody’s going to start talking about determination, but I have a simpler answer. We got here first, and the natives were few and far between. As lawyers constantly remind us, possession is nine-tenths of the law. We embedded ourselves in a new world and stayed. We POSSESSED ourselves into prevailing.
But I don’t like to think about gradations of color, categories, and subcategories. I prefer to think about all of us, HUMANITY, which has been blessed with incredible diversity and variety. Some of us are pink, some tan, some brown. Some of us sunburn easily–that’s painfully obvious at this point; some do not. Some of us have charming personalities and some are absolutely awful. Some of us are good at math, others good at poetry, but all of us face the idea of creating a life for ourselves with awe.
I know, I know, this website is about a book. Don’t worry; I’m getting there. I can’t help thinking about aliens who might visit someday. You know, the characters I write about? What are we going to do when we meet beings who are not just slightly, but SUPREMELY DIFFERENT? I hope to God we don’t shoot at them, but that’s what our history suggests…and they DID shoot Clatu when he landed in black and white. I’ve always felt bad about that.
We’re going to be scared as hell, I bet, and our leaders will assure us there’s nothing to fear…from their nuclear-proof shelters. We’ll watch Earth prepare and talking heads discuss what’s likely to happen next. Then, we’ll see them on TV–the aliens! God knows what they’ll look like, but I bet it will be a shocker…and that’s good. It gives writers like me a chance to go ya-ha.
I guess, in the end, the nature of our first encounter will be determined by the aliens themselves. If they’re smart, they’ll see us as the primitive, evolving beings we really are, and if we’re lucky, they might decide to help us out with a few thorny problems. That is, if they don’t see us the way we see a herd of cows…or a flight of birds…and we don’t shoot first and ask questions later.
Aliens, you should be forewarned. We’re unpredictable and we like to create categories down here. Whoever you are, whatever you look like, we’re going to put you even further out on the spectrum than anyone ever thought possible. We can’t get past our own superficial differences. How in heaven’s name could you expect us to appreciate or accept anybody so wildly beyond our imagination?
You know, I think my sunburn’s beginning to fade. Uniformly pink once again…what a comforting thought!