***This partial journal was discovered beneath the ribcage of a mummified corpse in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. The skeleton shows traumatic ***This partial journal was discovered beneath the ribcage of a mummified corpse in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. The skeleton shows traumatic indications of having been dropped from a great height, either from an airplane, hot air balloon (Agent Cobbledick’s theory), or a helicopter (My theory). Most of the journal had been eaten by desert creatures, and the limb bones of this unfortunate man were scattered across the desert floor for some distance. The corpse has been identified as Jeffrey D. Keeten. We must thank the Hibernaculum for providing the DNA that was instrumental in identifying the body. At first we thought the journal was an excerpt from the cult classic Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle, and when we shared some of the entries on the remaining pages with the writer over a secure phone line he was at first intrigued.
We wanted to meet with Doyle so he could examine the documents in person, but that proved to be impossible. Because of radical elements who find Doyle’s book to be an abomination, he has been forced into hiding in an undisclosed location. He emphatically denied that the writing was his or that he’d ever known anyone named Keeten. The deceased has proved to be an enigma with no discernible friends and a marginal social media presence. His wife is doing a 120 day stint in the Hibernaculum and is unavailable for comment.***
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY AUGUST 17TH, 2045, STARDATE -277374.2216197361
”I put it to her that studies reveal that happy people are less likely to hibernate. So it’s basically about escape? Respite for the unfulfilled? ‘Our research shows that the issue is a lot more complex than that. First off, nobody is happy forever, right? And yes, a lot of our Hibernators are in here because they don’t want to be out there. But others, as I’m sure you will find out for yourself today, come here on principle. Remember, the Hibernaculum’s main motivation is ecological. People see hibernation as a win-win way to reduce their environmental footprint. This cannot be overstated. Environ-mental concerns are paramount to our Hibernators. You see, time spent hibernating converts into liters of water, kilos of grain, heads of slaughter cattle, cubic inches of emissions, parts-per-million of toxins all spared. That’s very important to our Sleepers. That’s why we’re here: to take a load off the world.’” From Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle.
My wife has decided to be swallowed by the White Whale.
I swing my window open and peer out at the monstrosity, visible from my book-lined ivory tower. The glare off the white dome hurts my eyes. I put my sunglasses on. “So this is what’s going to eat my wife?” I mutter. I point my gnarled arm at the hump on the horizon. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying whale!”
I crack myself up.
While snooping, I found this treatise on Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle hidden, as if she were afraid I’d see her reading, between the cushions of her reading couch. This was shortly after she informs me at breakfast, sans toast, that she has signed up for the 120 day deluxe package. She was so nervous about revealing her plans to me that she forgot to toast my rye bread. I was distracted by the yellow swirls of egg yolk left on my plate, so it took me a few seconds to focus on what she was telling me. The dawning realization was terrifying.
“You’re leaving me?” I said petulantly. I was already calculating how her being gone was going to adversely affect my daily existence.
She patted my silver mane and kissed my prodigious forehead. “You’re getting an upgrade. I’ll come back to you as a new woman.”
When she left the room, I licked my plate, my mind swirling like a pinball machine on tilt.
As it turns out, the wife is having a few things “done” while she is sleeping in the dome. She is having some strategic Cryolipolysis performed, cataracts removed, toes straightened, wrinkles smoothed away, neck wattle discarded, and her ass lifted. Recovery time, instead of enduring pain while awake in the real world, will be spent…asleep.
I begrudgingly have to admit that it makes a lot of sense. But what about me and my needs!!! I suggested a Japanese nanny of the cock twitching inspiring variety, but the wife laughed so hard she started choking, and for a moment I thought she was going to kick the can before she could check herself into the oversized cannikin.
Okay, so Doyle makes some good points about why someone should donate four months of their life out of a year to help save the planet. Here is the elevator pitch: "Look, the time has come for drastic measures. Flash floods, warmed oceans, coral dieback, deforestation changing climate patterns, melting icecaps, rising seas, areas that were once tropical forest turned to scrubland, reefs bleached to hell, microplastics in absolutely every nook and cranny of every single biome. Pandemics one year, heatwaves the next. It’s no joke. All the shit they said would happen is now happening. Nearly 8 billion people on the planet, and almost 5 of those are living on the verge, or in the pit, of abject poverty. The insects are dying out, and without insects, there’s no pollination, and so no food. We're running out of water, and without water, guess what? There's no food. It takes up to five thousand liters of freshwater to produce one person's daily food intake. That’s 75 billion liters a day in this city alone. Two-thirds of the world's population is already affected by critical water shortages. We need to start cutting back, blah-blah-blah, which is why I am giving away 120 days of my life. By living off an IV drip and vitamins for 17 weeks, I'll save the world well over twelve thousand liters of safe freshwater.”
Sigh!!!
The thing is, I don’t like sleeping. I wouldn’t sleep at all except for the resulting fatigue and the fact that I know my brain needs time to shuffle through all the crap I stuff into it every day. Secondly, and maybe this should be firstly, I don’t trust governments, and I trust corporations even less. I’m feeling rather nauseous as I make my way through Doyle’s novel. Is this even a novel? Environmental manifesto? Scientific dissertation? Erotic piece of titillation? What the fuck is this, really? One moment I’m reading about someone’s experience in hibernation, the next paragraph I’m reading about the Marquis De Sade’s stimulating debauchery of some consenting lady’s orifices. Okay, so the asides, which are what we’ll call the moments when Doyle wanders away from the picnic basket into the tropical jungle, are, and I really hate to say this,…very interesting.
Let's leave the 18th century in the past and focus upon this horrifying present that threatens to turn my life upside down.
Here’s one of Doyle’s Kool-aid drinking characters giving the hard sell. “People see hibernation as a win-win way to reduce their environmental footprint. This cannot be overstated. Environ- mental concerns are paramount to our Hibernators. You see, time spent hibernating converts into liters of water, kilos of grain, heads of slaughter cattle, cubic inches of emissions, parts-per-million of toxins all spared. That’s very important to our Sleepers. That’s why we’re here: to take a load off the world.” And put a load in the bank? “We’re a company. We want our contribution to society to be profitable so that it can be sustainable. And yes, our share-holders expect returns. Look, they’d much rather make money saving the environment than destroying it.”
Yeah, yeah, my wife is a sucker for any environmental tear bath. She wept over the ratty specimen of the Oxford Dodo at the Ashmolean Museum. She stormed out of an exclusive restaurant in Tokyo that was serving a dolphin entree. Okay, so her empathy is part of why I love her, especially when her empathy extends to me. Not that I don’t recognize the colossal size of the world’s problems, but I’m old. I’ve climbed the ladder, and now I’m in the slippery-slide time of my life and imagine my surprise once I stumbled into my seventies to find out someone greased the glide.
The thing that keeps thundering through my paranoid brain is that, during the time I’m in the White Whale taking a snooze, some rich asshole is going to have a skiing accident that ruptures his kidneys, and the hibernaculum just happens to have a perfect match.
“Why do I have a scar that I didn’t have before?”
“Why, Mr. Keeten, we have no idea? Are you sure you didn’t have that scar from before? You are 78 years young, and haha, we all know the older we get that some sand starts to leak out of the hour glass.”
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY AUGUST 18TH, 2045, STARDATE -299371.3462709284
I take the wife to drop her off at the White Whale. As you may have noticed from the date of my Journal entry, she gave me very little notice of this momentous decision. She’s nearly giddy, and as a final indignity I have to listen to her flirt with the Ferryman, though I was pleasantly distracted by some of the recently “refreshed” women on the far shore who were wolf whistling at the boatman and liberating their boobs as enticements of future delights. I was a not-so-innocent bystander of their attention, but I must say I still enjoyed the show. I even felt a little flutter in my lackluster flag.
The wife had to bend my fingers back so she could pry the ancient coin from my hand to pay the Ferryman. I’ve never seen her so aggressive. At the insistence of my wife, I was being forced to part with one of my Philip II of Macedonia coins from about 340 BCE with Apollo on one side and a trident on the other. The Ferryman grinned as he bit the coin between his oversized, menacingly white teeth to make sure it was real gold. My blood pressure spiked, and my bowels spasmed. I was so distracted with dying that I barely had the wherewithal to enjoy the fat tongue my wife stuck in my mouth. If she’s this excited going in, what will I have to deal with when she comes back out?
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY October 24th, 2045, STARDATE -299187.7545027905
I’m being sent to a rehabilitation camp, i.e. jail. Maybe I’ll get cell block C.3.3. like Oscar Wilde. Hardy har har! It seems that mounting an assault on The White Whale to liberate my wife is against the law. I accused them of kidnapping. They accused me of disturbing the peace and plotting to blow up the Hibernaculum. I may have said in a moment of pique that I had a bomb, but really does that make any sense? I can’t blow up the White Whale as long as my wife is trapped within its confines. Maybe I might be tempted to launch a well-thrown harpoon. Sigh!! Queequeq I’m not. Though I am considering a few prison tattoos. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve become Ahab which would be simply unacceptable because I’ve always sided with The Whale.
I hope there are books at this place.
JEFFREY D. KEETEN JOURNAL ENTRY December 16th, 2045, STARDATE -299042.5490233383
So the powers-that-be release me mere minutes before my wife is due to be liberated. Despite hiring a phalanx of expensive lawyers, I am not able to extract myself any sooner. In an ironic moment after sentencing, I asked to be allowed to hibernate for the duration of my confinement, and my petition was denied. The long arm of hibernaculum kept me tucked away in a six by eight cell with only an illiterate, nose-pickin’, fog-fartin’ Appalachian ridgerunner for company. For the duration of my sentence, the trundling prison book trolley only disgorged ratty copies of Reader’s Digest condensed books to read. It was as bad for my brain chemistry as reading Young Adult books for four months. My brain has definitely atrophied.
Before disembarking back on Terra Firma and back to reality, my wife pets the Ferryman, and she’s not alone. Most of the females and even some of the males want to feel his bulging muscles before they return to their former lives. It made me want to hurl prison food all over his boat which, due to the high premium put on animal protein, would consist of masticated ants, grasshoppers, and crickets.
The wife chatters to me like some kind of reanimated version of herself from decades ago, which I guess for all intents and purposes she is. She looks younger, trimmer, and bounces around me like Scarlett Johansson in a Woody Allen movie. I could measure in minutes how long it will take me to drain the edge off of her wonderful mood.
I sulk all the way home. She doesn’t even notice. She is too busy exclaiming about how blue the sky is and how green the grass is and how the cauliflower shaped clouds are really unicorns, flying turtles, and adorable fornicating rabbits. She shakes my arm and while grinning from ear to ear asks me, “Are you still the same delightful, grumpy, old fusspot?”
Oh Zeus, explode me with a thunderbolt now!
She’s already talking about going back into the belly of the whale. She even has the date circled on her phone calendar. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. My stint of incarceration did nothing to dispel my feelings about the government or corporations, but it also showed to me in stark terms that they already have me under their thumb, so why not just go with the flow and sleep away my feelings of anxiety, depression, and addiction to tentacle porn.
Hibernaculum…here I come, well, if they’ll still have me.
I’ve read Anthony Doyle’s book a few times, sifting his words for wisdom or words of warning. Sure it was dystopia back in 2023, but in 2045 it's just a manual for the modern world. If I were able to speak to readers back in 2023, I’d say, be prepared, read this book, erect monuments to Anthony Doyle the oracle…the seer…the soothsayer…the prophet. Most importantly, buy his book so he’ll write more books.
Next month, the New Yorker is printing an article I wrote about my trials and tribulations with Hibernaculum. I’m really just waiting for that phone call from some executive offering me a pile of cabbage to forgo the article. Heehee I’ve become quite the entrepreneur in my twilight years.
I hear the whoop of a helicopter, and there has been a crash downstairs. I suppose I better go see if the cat has knocked the butter dish off the table again. By Odin’s Watery Eye; it sounds like jackboots on the stairs. Those fucking…....more
”To stop global warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change, humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
This sounds diffi”To stop global warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change, humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
This sounds difficult, because it will be. The world has never done anything quite this big. Every country will need to change its ways, because virtually every activity in modern life--growing things, making things, getting around from place to place--involves releasing greenhouse gases.
If nothing else changes, the world will keep producing greenhouse gases, climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”
The moment I became politically cognizant was about the same time I started to think about the ongoing health of the little blue planet I called home. President Jimmy Carter was the first president I actively supported; I was nine years old and soon discovered that nearly every person I knew, family, friends, and nodding acquaintances, were Republicans, so my support for Carter had to be kept a carefully guarded secret. I didn’t need to give people more reason to think I was...weird. They already had plenty of reasons to think there was something odd about me because of how much time I spent reading books. When Carter won the election, shocking the vast numbers of Republicans in my life, I realized that there were a lot of like-minded people out there, beyond the small pond I’d been spawned in.
There was hope.
But that is just backstory. When I first realized I was an environmentalist was when President Ronald Reagan had the solar panels, installed by Carter, removed from the White House. I was frankly shocked. It was, in retrospect, a relatively small thing, but it sent a message of disdain to those of us who cared about the future of clean air, clean water, and embracing our responsibility for being good stewards to our planet. Interestingly enough one of those thirty-two solar panels now resides in the Smithsonian and another is in a science museum in Dezhou, China.
The politicalized nature of our society became a much starker reality in recent years when an irresponsible president proceeded to do everything he could to destroy decades of progressive environmental policy. Bill Gates does his level best to keep this book nonpolitical, but he does mention how difficult it is to achieve progress when innovative research is greenlighted by one administration only to be defunded four or eight years later.
One step forward, two steps back.
The purpose of this book is to introduce the extent of our environmental problems and present a viable, flexible plan as to how to save our planet from climate disaster.
Gates is a fan of the book Weather for Dummies, which is actually a fantastic intro to those of us who are not weather experts, and that book may have been a model for the way he wanted to present the facts in this book. So, those people who are well versed with the issues of climate change will probably not find a lot of new information here, (although for me the section on geoengineering was fascinating), because you are not the target audience. You are already on board, or you decided a long time ago that climate change is fake news, and no mountain of evidence to the contrary will change your mind. To me, this book is directed towards our younger generations, millennials and zoomers. They are the generations who will bear the brunt of our evolving environmental disasters, and they are the ones who will ultimately have to flock in large numbers to the polls every two years, not just every four years, to make sure that environmentally progressive representatives are elected at all levels of our government.
That’s not to say that Mr./ Ms. Savvy Environmentalists will not enjoy the book or benefit from reading/listening to the way that Gates formulates his arguments. I’m always working on refining my presentation skills to those who are ambivalent and nonbelievers. I even still try, with bloodied forehead, to convince those who are willfully embracing ignorance because of their right of center political affiliation. Whenever I want to see my brother, who manages our family farm, start frothing at the mouth, I mention any public policy with Green in the title. He isn’t interested in any science that will force him to change his business practices. He wants the past to remain the present and continue into the future, regardless of whether it is irresponsible for the planet. So instead of embracing responsible innovation now, he would rather deny that climate change even exists. He considered wearing a mask during the pandemic an infringement of his riiaaghts, but I have a sneaking suspicion he might have been afraid of missing the pungent smell of cattle flatulence.
He loves the smell of methane in the morning.
It’s hard to believe that something like the future of our planet could be a political issue, but then who would have believed that a pandemic could become a political issue. Our country was nearly evenly divided down party lines on whether COVID was a real threat. The inability of our country to unite against a common enemy, a vicious virus, cost thousands of lives. This shows the size of the boulder that has to be moved uphill, and all of us must channel our inner Sisyphus to have any hopes of uniting our country, our world, in the fight for our planet. We have to keep talking. We have to keep convincing people that this threat is already changing our climate, and we ignore the science at our peril. By the time a majority of people start to feel the effects of severe cold (Hey Texas, you got a small taste just a few weeks ago), extreme heat, drought, flooding, and the devastation of superstorms, it will be too late. I say we keep all our post apocalyptic B movies on the SyFy Channel and start to make real changes for getting our emissions down to zero.
I’ve noticed there are a number of negative reviews on GR that seem to focus on Bill Gates the rich a$$hole instead of Bill Gates the climate expert and writer. I guess I’ve always been fairly neutral about Gates. I never was caught up in the whole Gates vs. Jobs rivalries. I am one of those philistines who used PCs and Macs in equal measure. I’ve never been a big fan of rich people in general because I don’t really believe in the concept of billionaires or even millionaires, and I would rather dissolve big corporations and allow small businesses to thrive again, but that is a discussion outside the scope of this review. So, I can dislike the concept of billionaires without despising the man behind the wealth. In the case of this book, any animosity that someone feels about Bill Gates the successful businessman is certainly misplaced against Bill Gates the environmentalist. The sincerity of his concern for climate change and his willingness to do everything he can to move the needle of public understanding regarding this critical issue is readily apparent throughout the book.
This book is about climate change issues, not about Bill Gates.
”As for the ideas you can’t support, you may feel compelled to speak out, and that’s understandable. But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing what you’re against.” This quote can be applied to any aspect of your life. I’m not sure when we became a nation of grumbling pessimists, but it’s no way to live. I encounter people all the time who are consumed about what they didn’t like about a book or a movie and give no consideration to what they liked about them. They are equally consumed about what has gone wrong with their lives and completely disregard what is right about their lives. They write one star reviews of books that they haven’t even read to display their caustic wit for the entertainment of the witless. *Sigh* I may have just revealed one of my pet peeves.
As I was writing this review, one of the things that became clear to me was how much climate change is entwined with every challenge we face.
Gates has no illusions about how hard it will be for the world to move from pumping 51 billion tons of global emissions into the atmosphere to pumping zero. We have to shoot for zero because that is the only way to ensure sustainability for human endeavor on this blue planet for eons to come. We have to be leaders on this important issue or we will be the losers. As Europe becomes more focused on green issues and even China with their electric bus fleets shows a willingness to hopefully take reducing future emissions seriously, we could find ourselves left behind. They will be the innovators while we will continue to crumble under the weight of our own irresponsible behavior.
I was sent a free copy of this book by the office of Bill Gates in exchange for an honest review.
”Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent homebound selves, from boredom or from too much to ”Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent homebound selves, from boredom or from too much to do, not enough quietude, from the mortal coil of who we’ve lately been.
’Where were you last night?’
‘Out.’
‘What were you running from?’
Mechanical civilization, I want to say, and its sources of discontent, the Stuck on the Wheel of Repetition Disorder, or Temporary Blindness, or what might be called the Yearning for Other points of View and Variety Anxiety.”
I recently read Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands, which is part of the National Geographic Directions series, and in the back of the book, there is a list of the other books in the series. I noticed William Kittredge writing about the Southwest and mused to myself...I haven’t read Kittredge since I left Tucson. He’s part of a group of writers who all seemed to gravitate to the states with, to the untrained eye, lots of miles of nothing. I met a lot of these guys and gals while living in Tucson. As they showed up in the pages of this book, I was able to flip through my rolodex of memories to when I first met them. I didn’t know them. Kittredge knew them, but I did have the pleasure of gravitating in their sphere for short periods of time.
There was Edward Abbey, who tried to pick up my girlfriend while I tried to focus him on signing the stack of books I’d brought with me. I could almost see a horse-trade percolating behind the old scalawag’s eyes and half expected him to offer to sign my books but he was leaving with the blonde. There was Charles Bowden, who every time I ran into him seemed to have booze oozing from his pores. He was one of the few chosen to bury Abbey in the desert and took the location to his grave. There was the grizzly bear man Doug Peacock, who always seemed as untamed as the bears he loved. There was the lovely Leslie Marmon Silko, who usually had Larry McMurtry with her. There was Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison, who loved Montana more than the Southwest, but who were just the Northern version of these Southwest writers. He does mention William Eastlake, and I’ve wracked my memories, but I don’t remember ever meeting him.
About four years ago, the wife and I took off for a trip through New Mexico. It was the first Christmas that we didn’t have any family obligations. The kids were out of the house, and my parents were enjoying the hospitality of my brother. The worst snowstorms I’ve ever been in have been in New Mexico, and this was no exception. When we could no longer see the road, we pulled off in Gallup and ended up having a wonderful, leisurely lunch. It’s so much more relaxing to watch it snow through the plate glass window of a restaurant than through an icy windshield. We had a fun time buzzing around New Mexico, recapturing some of that youthful, unfettered exuberance that becomes strangled by mortgages, children, and careers.
I do like to just go sometimes. ”Any sweet striking thing could happen.”
So Kittredge floats around the Southwest, usually with his wife, Annik Smith, in search of experiences, but also hoping to find some wisdom. He meets with Native Americans, many of them ancient, steeped in a lifetime of experiences that helped to hone their views of life. ”I couldn’t stop thinking about the man. He was deliberately seeking isolation. If I went, what would I find? Maybe silence, eternities, and myself among them, with no voices to listen to but the ones in my head. Was that a good idea? Maybe I’d emerge half-crazed and singing, ‘Why don’t you love me like you used to do’ in a loud way, having turned into one of those people who play the radio or CDs and talk on their cell phones and laugh constantly so as to fill the air with something besides what they’re thinking.”
I do sometimes drive my wife crazy when we are on a trip because she loves to blast the radio and I love to listen to the soft whirring sound of rubber on pavement. It’s relaxing to me to luxuriate in silence or as near to silence as we can get in this noisy world. Kansas is a good place for silence, and maybe that and those endless horizons is why I decided to come back here to live. We live in the southwest part of Kansas, and when I stumble upon cactus growing in the pastures, I’m reminded that we aren’t that far removed from the desert here. ”The world is alive to us if we can love it.” I might add...no matter where you live.
”[Doug Peacock] said something to the effect that we can’t remake the whole world in our own image or we won’t have a damned thing but a world made in our own image, and that would be unworkably simple and partways dead. He said humans have to learn humility, and make allowance for otherness. We can kill everything which threatens us, we can defoliate all the jungles, but then we’d be alone. We can’t kill every cat who might come to live in our night. Firepower won’t save us. Humility might.” It would be my guess that Kittredge was trying to remember something Peacock said after the table in front of them was already littered with dead soldiers to be joined by another squad or division of bottles before the night ended. Then there is the waking up the next morning, trying to remember the wisdom shared through the haze of a hangover. I’ve been thinking about humility a lot lately. The political climate has been so distorted by hubris and bluster that it makes me wonder if we can ever get past our own feelings of exceptionalism to find humility again.
This book brought up a lot of fine memories for me. I love the Southwest and worry about the growth of our desert communities that are totally reliant on water coming from elsewhere. I owe a lot to Tucson. I really found myself there. I met my wife there. I discovered how much larger the universe was there. I grew into more of the man I envisioned myself to be there. The desert is a magical place for me, but yours might be mountains or oceans or a cascade of fall trees. Do everything you can to be where you are supposed to be.
”Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapti”Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it. And I really can sympathize. Who doesn’t want to break from the herd? I get why you’d want to keep the comforts of city life while leaving the city behind. Crowds, crime, filth, noise. Even in the burbs. So many rules, neighbors all up in your business. It’s kind of a catch-22, especially in the United States, a society that values freedom, when society, by nature, forces you to compromise that freedom. I get how the hyper-connectivity of Greenloop gave the illusion of zero compromise.
But that's all it was, an illusion.”
Kate and Dan Holland have bought into the Greenloop concept. The beautiful view of Mount Rainier, the superb hiking trails, the clean air, and a house that can be almost completely controlled from their iPad. If something breaks, maintenance fixes it. Their food is one click away on a grocery website. Everything they could possibly want is delivered right to their door.
Paradise.?.?
Well, all is fantabulous until Rainier’s volcano erupts bringing chaos, ash, and flowing lava with it. When the road is overwhelmed by lava, the residents of Greenloop are cut off not only from civilisation but from help. They are a dark spot on a satellite map. Barely anyone even knows they are there; that’s the point of the small community. This natural disaster form of isolation goes well beyond their comfort zones. They still have power, but the internet is out, and there is no cell service. Welcome to homesteading, folks!
No one has a large stock of food on hand. Why would they when they can buy food whenever they want? They don’t own tools, not a hammer, not a screwdriver, not a pair of pliers. I use something from my toolbox nearly every day, so not owning tools is a very foreign concept for me. I’m sure there are many people who will read this review who will tell me they exist quite fine...toolless. The people of Greenloop are, in other words, once disconnected from the internet and their phone...completely helpless. Well, humans are never helpless. That is why we have that big oversized brain sitting on our shoulders.
Charles Darwin is always associated with the statement “survival of the fittest,” but the fittest in his estimation isn’t always the strongest or the wiliest, but the people who adapt and adjust. Max Brooks explores this concept with this small band of privileged people who are stripped of the protection of their money and are forced to set aside the individualism they have always cultivated and learn how to exist as a tribe. This becomes even more important when rather large animals, pushed down the mountainside, start to invade their space.
”It was so tall, the top of its head disappeared above the doorway. And broad. I can still picture those massive shoulders, those thick, long arms. Narrow waist, like an upside-down triangle. And no neck, or maybe the neck was bent as it ran away. Same as the head. Slightly conical, and big as a watermelon.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but seeing something like that would turn my backbone to jelly and my knees to water. And let's not forget they smell like sulfur and rotten eggs, bad enough to make your eyes water. Oh yes, we might also want to mention their gigantic feet. Max Brooks has provided a nice diagram on the cover of this book just to give the reader an idea of the difference in a human foot and a Bigfoot foot. Yes, we are talking about an infestation of Sasquatch.
As if our tiny band of Greenloop survivors don’t have enough issues, but they now have to contend with a hungry predator who is stronger and faster than they are and sees humans as just another animal to fill their bellies with. ”To be someone else’s food. You’re a person. You think, you feel. And then it’s all gone, and what used to be you is now a mushy mess in something else’s stomach.”
I’ve been trying to decide how to dispose of my body once I’m finished with it. I don’t want it shot full of toxic chemicals and stuck in the earth. Maybe I need to put on the list the possibility of leaving my body out for a Sasquatch to eat?
The people are annoyingly naive, and some adapt much faster than others. ”Denial is an irrational dismissal of danger. Phobia is an irrational fear of one.” Either side of the equation can get you killed. Being in denial too long can close the open window to escape the dire circumstances, but also being paralized by an irrational fear can leave you vulnerable to a very real threat. There are a myriad of differences in reactions by the different people, and you as the reader will have ample opportunity to explore your own reactions to the situation. Who am I most like? Would I survive? Or will I be instant bloody oatmeal for Bigfoot?
This is certainly a page turner, not as deep as his book World War Z, which could very well be the most literary book ever written about zombies, but this book certainly provided me with some chilling sequence of events that kept me entertained deep into an autumn night.
”Far away to the north-west, where the dried husks of the desert merged into the foothills of the night, an animal howled wearily. Its lost cries echo”Far away to the north-west, where the dried husks of the desert merged into the foothills of the night, an animal howled wearily. Its lost cries echoed among the steel pillars of the bridge, reverberating across the white river that lay beside them, as if trying to resurrect this long-dormant skeleton of the dead land.”
Dr. Charles Ransom is caught in a drought. He spends most of his time on his boat, navigating the last of the water on the lake as the river that feeds it slows to a trickle. His wife, Judith, has left him. His practice becomes smaller as people flee to the ocean, giving him more time to ponder and plan for a bleak future.
Water becomes the only form of currency.
There are rather strange people who have decided to stay. The Lomaxes, a wealthy brother and sister duo who are hoarding water, intending to wait out the drought for when the rains return. I actually shivered when I read this description of the sister: ”Ransom always felt a sharp sense of unease, although superficially she was attractive enough. Perhaps this physical appeal, the gilding of the lily, was what warned him away from her. Lomax’s eccentricities were predictable in their way, but Miranda was less self-immersed, casting her eye on the world like a witch waiting for the casual chance.” Many of us have at some point in time found ourselves strangely attracted to someone whom we find unlikeable, maybe even loathsome. Pondering these improbable desires one can wonder, Am I really so shallow to be fooled by the “gilding of the lily?”
There is also a strange boy named Quilter with a misshapen head. He is too bright to be considered special needs, but he is so odd and rambunctious that one must treat him with caution. He is Caliban, striding out of the pages of The Tempest. When Ransom meets back up with him later in the book, he has become a character from the world of Mad Max. He strode off on his stilts across the sand, the furs and dressing-gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.”
Ransom stays as long as he can, but when violence erupts over water, he too flees to the coast. Deciding to become a refugee is a difficult decision. It is hard to leave behind all that you have, the mementos of your life, the cosiness of the familiar. Violence or lack of food and water are really the only two things that will force most people to choose to be refugees. Even in our modern world, we are still seeing people forced to flee terrible circumstances. I always think about the book On the Beach, one of my favorite post-apocalyptic books, where the people in this part of Australia have elected to stoically stay instead of fleeing to try and keep one furlong ahead of the nuclear fallout. Most of us don’t know when we will die, but for these people, it is a matter of doing the math. Our sense of what is really important becomes sharply defined when we are faced with our unavoidable death.
There is no salvation at the coast. There is only more death. So what did we do to ourselves to create such a massive drought? ”A thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air-water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above.” Isn’t it too bad that every other living creature and fauna has to pay the price for our mismanagement of the planet?
Here is another evocative scene of this displaced world. ”They had been left there during the tremendous traffic jams the previous week. Stalled in motionless glaciers of metal that reached over the plains as far as the horizon, their occupants must have given up in despair and decided to walk the remaining miles.” I really like the word choice of “glaciers of metal.”
Can Ransom survive in this world long enough to feel the patter of rain once again?
I don’t think there is another writer who can compete with J. G. Ballard when it comes to describing post-apocalyptic worlds. His creative visions of man’s final destructive influence on the planet are harrowing and yet in some ways beautiful. He makes you want to see it, even as you fear that someday you will.
”The scope paused, and retraced slightly. And there it was. A man, laying out among the rocks of the gorge, blending in almost perfectly. This man als”The scope paused, and retraced slightly. And there it was. A man, laying out among the rocks of the gorge, blending in almost perfectly. This man also had a rifle, and it pointed directly at the deer in the meadow. Molly smiled again, but this time not as warmly, the crosshairs moving in to focus on the man’s face. There was nothing distinctive about him. He was just a man. His lips curled upwards slightly and began to twitch, and there was something eager and evil about them. As she watched, the man’s eyes widened and filled with a bloodlust as he visualized the kill. Her finger again found the trigger and began a slow, steady compression. One second later the valley reverberated with the sound of a blast and the man’s face imploded, his nose crushed inward by the force of a bullet smashing its way deeply into his brain. The body lay there quivering for a moment, then slipped into a niche among the rocks where it disappeared from sight. Molly rose, and stood there for a time. She glanced back at the meadow where the two deer had been. They were gone. ‘Run, my babies,’ she whispered.”
Wouldn’t hunting be more sporting if we gave the deers AR-15s, gave the pheasants napalm bombs to drop from the air, and wrapped the bears in kevlar? Let’s just look at the sport of deer hunting: “Wayne Van Zwoll on Long Range Shots. Mostly, whitetails are killed at 100 yards or less and mule deer at 200 and under, but every once in a while, you will want to take a shot at truly long range--300 and 400 yards.” So a typical hunter wearing camouflage (#cosplay) is hiding 100 yards or further away, and he drops a feeding, unaware deer. He then celebrates, while the deer twitches and bleeds out on the ground, like he just caught the Superbowl winning touchdown from Patrick Mahomes. He thinks of himself as a man among men. He doesn’t hunt to eat. He hunts for entertainment.
I think these types of men are pathetic and cowardly. (Remember the dentist, referred to as a recreational big game hunter, who killed Cecil the Lion for sport?) These men need an attitude adjustment and a new hobby.
Now Molly Bishop isn’t a coward. She gets right up and personal with her prey. Molly is the right gal to serve up some attitude adjustments. ”’Every now and then I like to find a man and just beat the shit out of him.’ She shook her head and frowned. ‘I can’t help it. It’s hard to explain, really. Some men get their rocks off torturing animals. I get mine off torturing men. It’s probably a matter of perspective,’ She laughed suddenly. ‘I’m gonna have to look into it. It’s quite possible I need therapy.’” Most serial killers kill women, usually women who are not much more than girls, but if they weren’t cowards, they’d be hunting the top of the food chain, no not lions, tigers, and bears, but...men.
Molly doesn’t just hunt random men. She hunts men who abuse animals. Men who take pleasure out of inflicting pain on animals. Men who like to use piglets as baseballs or men who consider the squeals of animals more soothing to their ears than listening to Bach’s Air on a G String. We are talking about broken men. Men who have quit seeing animals as living, breathing, feeling creatures. Men who have lost their souls.
Molly leaves a wobbling wake of weak-kneed admirers wherever she goes. She has that universal appeal of long legs, long blonde hair, and blue eyes that men, and a fair number of women, find irresistible. She knows how to handle men. She knows how to flirt with them just enough to make them tingle, and for some of these old men she might even create a movement in places that they left for dead decades ago. The author, Megan Allen, looks like one of those California girls that The Beach Boys were always crooning to me about on the radio. Is she Molly Bishop? Are animal abusers being found dead in mysterious circumstances all across the Midwest? Can we root for her like people did in the 1930s for John Dillinger?
Molly has two men chasing her. Special Agent Michael Lair is trying to figure out a series of murdered farmers. He believes that Molly is the murderer, but every time he gets around her, she acts like she wants to wrap her legs around him or bust his balls or maybe both at the same time. The other man is John Grimm, a stone cold killer, who believes, because Molly smiled at him, that she is the love of his life. The question is, can Molly escape the clutches of the law and the clutches of a serial killer and somehow ride off into the sunset to save more animals?
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. ”His primary purpose in describing the meat industry and its working conditions was to advance socialism in the United States. However, most readers were more concerned with several passages exposing health violations and unsanitary practices in the American meat packing industry during the early 20th century, which greatly contributed to a public outcry which led to reforms including the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair famously said of the public reaction, ‘I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’” --Wikipedia. It might seem odd to equate a classic of American literature with a hardboiled mystery novel, but just as Sinclair’s book was calling for reform, so is Megan Allen.
I’m a carnivore. I was raised on a farm, but our animals were raised free range. Our chickens had room to roam; our cattle were range fed, and our pigs were kept in large pens with plenty of room to root and frolic to their hearts’ content. Most of us are cellophane hunters. We go to a supermarket and pick up our meat in carefully wrapped packages that look nothing like something that once wore a face. People buy veal and have no idea the horrors that baby calves are subjected to so that their meat is like butter. (Don’t eat veal. Don’t support that industry.) The Europeans like their animals to be happy before they eat them. They believe that a happy pig makes for better tasting pork. We raise chickens and pigs in the United States in abominable conditions. They are raised in cramped, unhealthy environments by men who are desensitized and malicious. It is immoral. I understand that cattle, pigs, and chickens are now dependent on men for their survival. It is a hard bargain as most of them will be slaughtered for our food, but right now there are more cattle on the planet than have ever existed before, so as a survival tactic it has worked. As consumers, we can demand that laws are changed and that animals must be treated with respect and proper consideration before they land in our supermarket as tidy, unalarming, cellophane wrapped packages.
If you eat meat, but even if you don’t eat meat, you should read this book. It certainly will give everyone who reads it a different view of the food industry. We, as consumers, are part of the problem, and we need to start demanding that the animals who make the ultimate sacrifice for us have a reasonably enjoyable life for the short time they are allowed to live. We shouldn’t let profit override our morality. This book is as beguiling as it is chilling. It is gritty and unflinching. Molly will seduce you even as she sends a shiver of revulsion up your back. Don’t flinch away. Support this controversial and provocative novel because the more people who read a book like this the more likely our modern injustices will become a part of the past.
I want to thank Burn House Publishing for sending me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
”A world without rivers would be unrecognizable to us. Our continents would be rugged, high, cold, and small. Our settlement pattern would have evolve”A world without rivers would be unrecognizable to us. Our continents would be rugged, high, cold, and small. Our settlement pattern would have evolved in very different ways, with scattered farms and villages clinging to oases and coastlines. Wars would have proceeded differently, and the borders of nations would be unfamiliar. Our most famous cities would not exist. The global movements of people and trade that so define us today might never have happened.”
I grew up in North Central Kansas near the banks of a river; well, it was a creek, to be more precise. My ancestor who settled in Phillips County back in the 1880s could see the flowing water from his front porch. The family who built the house I grew up in camped by the creek while they cut chalk rock stones out of the ground to form the walls of their new home. A huge storm further upstream sent a wall of debris gnarled water coming at them with no warning. Several members of the family were swept downstream and drowned. Rivers are deadly, beautiful creatures.
I remember another time when I watched the creek jump its banks and swamp the rich bottomland where we grow alfalfa. To even calculate how deep the water must be to fill in all that lowland and climb the hill to lap at the doorstep of our neighbor was mind boggling. And then, one morning it started to recede, and just as quickly as it came, it flowed away leaving debris of dead trees and animals strewn across our land.
Whenever I look at this creek on a map, it is a squiggly line, following some nonsensical path across the terrain that makes the river much longer than the miles it stretches.
So when Little, Brown approached me about reading Rivers of Power by Laurence C. Smith, my first thought was not of the power of a river, but the power of a dappling creek that provided me with much pleasure and more than a few moments of fear.
I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, but soon discovered that Smith was leading me on a journey, not only up and down rivers, but also throughout history. He takes us to see a pair of Middle Bronze Age bridges in Greece that are over 3000 years old and still in use, to witness the power of the Nile that built one of the most amazing civilizations the world has ever seen, to experience the gut wrenching 1889 Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania that forever changed our laws on litigation, and flashed us backwards and forwards in time to the numerous river triggering points in history that turned out to be critical decisive moments.
There have been more than one Rubicon moment in history, more than one crossing of the Delaware, and too many moments like the commandeering of the Meuse River, heralding the invasion of France by the German Army in 1940.
The history of rivers is the history of the world.
Smith talks about the influence of dams as mankind attempts to harness the awesome power of rivers to create power. As America is slowly dismantling their smaller dams (yeah, let the rivers go!), Third World countries are beginning to build large dams to exert some control over their rivers. The most interesting case is the one being built in Ethiopia that, once finished, will require a long time for the massive reservoir to fill. Meanwhile, the Blue Nile will not be flowing at all up to Egypt. This will have devastating impacts on the economy of Egypt. The Egyptians managed to strangle any assistance for the dam from world banks. In response, the Ethiopian government went out to the people to ask for donations for building the dam, and it has been wildly successful. That part of this story is the feel good part of the tale.
The problem is, because there is no insisted oversight from a financial institute worried about protecting their investment, there have been questions about the structural integrity of the dam. Is it being built safely and with the best engineering science available? The government insists that the dam will be used to improve the lives of all Ethiopian, but there are doubts this will be the case. The enticements from neighboring countries to buy that power will be difficult for a cash strapped and often corrupt government to refuse. There are also worries that, as we close in on the date of the dam’s completion, the Egyptians will do more than just yell and threaten.
I’ve never really heard the term water tower except in reference to the steel towers that are in most cities across America with the name of the place emblazoned proudly on the round side of the water containment reservoir. ”Water tower, meaning a mountain range, typically surrounded by dry lowlands, that captures and funnels a very large amount of runoff into a major downstream river” helps to put the seizing of Tibet by China into better perspective for me. ”The grandest water tower of all is the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan Range, which form the headwaters of the mighty Indes, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, upon which nearly half of all living people depend.”
China understands the importance of water, not only now but forever, as overpopulation continues to strain the ability of rivers and reservoirs to sustain the people of this planet.
Smith talks about pollution and informs me that I’ve been drinking (yuck) microbeads. They are tiny, solid, plastic beads in rinse-off skin care products used to exfoliate the skin that are so small that they pass through our water filtration systems. Fortunately, they were banned in 2017 by the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, unless, of course, someone has rolled back that ban as they have with many other major EPA accomplishments by the Obama Administration. Smith also gives Richard Nixon (I know, don’t fall out of your chair) credit for being progressive on environmental standards. Nixon created the EPA, and someday the EPA will be returned to being a nonpolitical, save humankind organization, as it was intended.
There is much to learn and much to think about while reading Smith’s book. You will certainly have a greater appreciation for rivers and their impact on history. They are so much a part of our lives that they have almost become invisible, but they continue to shape our lives.
”There is a vast, arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road technology, or political leader. It has opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. It promotes life, forges peace, grants power, and capriciously destroys everything in its path. Increasingly domesticated, even manacled, it is an ancient power that rules us still.”
I want to thank Little, Brown for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”You really never know people, not fully. People are strange. They hold onto things, they have secrets. And trust me we do things we didn’t think we w”You really never know people, not fully. People are strange. They hold onto things, they have secrets. And trust me we do things we didn’t think we were capable of, good and bad. All of us. People can commit all sorts of atrocities, even normal people, good people. Think of wars. How else could such barbarities occur, if the deep capacity to do evil didn’t exist in every one of us?”
Secrets.
There are all kinds of different secrets. Some of them are merely embarrassing; some of them are compromising to other people, and some of them are secrets that, if revealed, would tear down our lives, timber by timber, brick by brick.
Everyone in Fallen Mountains has a secret, and some harbor whole card decks of secrets. I grew up in a town even smaller than Fallen Mountains, and one of the things I learned very quickly was that secrets are hard to keep in small towns. Everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing. They all have the prodigious memory of elephants, and they remember everything everyone has ever done. It is hard for someone to grow into a new person in a small town with no way to escape any part of his or her past. ”The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” --William Faulkner Secrets in small towns are handled as carefully as a crate of nitroglycerin. Once a secret is revealed, the blast tends to ripple through a community, flattening lives like a category five tornado.
Some people like the suffocating coziness of a small town, and others can’t leave fast enough. Possum, Red, Chase, Jack, Maggie, and Laney are people who have stayed in Fallen Mountains. It is home and will be home until the day people use the words “rest in peace” when they mention their names.
Now Transom Shultz, best friend of Chase Hardy, left Fallen Mountains, but he has come back. He is a polarizing figure. A man who can make people love him or hate him in equal measure. He takes what he wants and leaves behind what he is done with. Chase has a lifetime of memories shared with Transom, not that he isn’t aware of some of his fallacies, but he forgives him because he loves him like a brother.
He trusts him.
With the death of his Grandfather Jack, Chase has inherited the farm that has been in his family for over two hundred years. The Keeten family farm in Kansas has only been in our possession for 138 years, so I have to tip my hat to a family that can own a piece of land that long. It isn’t easy, as Chase is finding out. The farm is struggling. It was in trouble even before Chase inherited, and now things have become dire. Chase doesn’t want to be the one, in an unbroken string of ancestors, to lose the farm.
When Transom offers to buy the farm, it is like a rumble of thunder in the middle of a drought. Unfortunately, it isn’t until after the paperwork is signed that Chase discovers that their view of the land is different
”’It’s just land, Boss,’ Transom called.
Chase slipped into his boots and turned and looked back. ‘It was never just land to me.’”
Transom starts raping everything that can be sold off the land. Oil is pumped out of the ground by a fracking company. Old growth timber is chainsawed down and hauled off the hillsides with heavy machinery that leaves deep wounds in the earth. It would take up to three generations to regrow that timber that took mere days to destroy. By trying to save the land, Chase has destroyed it.
Transom disappears.
He has run off before. Things have gotten a little too real in the past, and he has vamoosed to somewhere far away from the trouble he is trying to duck. As Sheriff John “Red” Redifer begins to investigate, he starts to realize that this time might be different, and as much as he would like Transom’s disappearance to be connected to the oil or timber people, he has a suspicion that it might have something to do with one of his Fallen Mountains people.
It could all come back to some of those secrets. Red has his own secret, and this one particular secret is starting to eat him alive. Laney, best friends with Chase and Transom, has a secret that makes her as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof anytime someone mentions Transom. Possum has a secret that is “tied up” somehow with Red and Transom.
Red doesn’t want to know anymore secrets. The more secrets he discovers, the more exposed his own secret becomes.
Where is Transom Shultz?
I was nervous for everyone in this novel. I did not want anyone’s secrets revealed, and as the investigation proceeds, the pressure on everyone to tell what they know increases exponentially. I believe in carrying your own water, and these people have toted it through rivers and over dales. Everyone has motive, and everyone knows something that might have bearing on the case. The thing of it is, at the end of the day, does anyone in Fallen Mountains really want to know what happened to Transom Shultz? What will be the cost?
If I were to put my finger on one thing that Kimi Cunningham Grant is really good at, I’d say it has to be the psychological perceptions she brings to each of her characters. Their motivations, their decisions, their thought processes all ring true. If we cast Transom as the villain, I still can’t completely despise him because Grant gives me insight into the shards of his past that shaped him as a human being. The vulnerability of her characters is revealed to us, piece by piece until the mosaic of their individual puzzles start to resemble the soul of Fallen Mountains. By the end of the book, we know these people better than we know some of our friends, and we can’t help but root for every one of them to find some way to be happy.
I asked Kimi Cunningham Grant if she would answer a few questions, and she graciously said yes!
Jeffrey D. Keeten:I grew up in a small farming town in Kansas, so the small town feel of Fallen Mountains, Pennsylvania, felt very familiar to me. What motivated you to set your first novel in a small town?
Kimi Cunningham Grant:When the idea for this book first came to me, I was walking on public land, and I came across a sign stating that it was going to be developed. Chase was the first character that came to me. I knew I wanted to explore the issue of feeling deeply connected to land, and a small town farmer felt like the right place to start.
JDK:It felt to me like there were bits of Kimi Grant in most of the characters of this novel. Who did you identify with the most as you were writing this novel?
KCG:This is something I love thinking about! How our lives—who we know, what we read, where we go—shape a text. I think there are always parts of the author in everything she writes; it’s impossible to separate who I am from what I write. Related to that, of course, is my belief that readers shape the text, too. For instance, you’ll most likely have a different reading of this novel than say, a twenty-three year old British woman. You’ve read different things; you’ve experienced different things; you likely “read” the world (and texts) differently. (See T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” if you want to tumble deeper into the rabbit hole of questions of writing, reading, and meaning!)
But I digress. None of the characters in this novel are autobiographical. As a parent, I identified with Red’s desire to protect his family. As someone who loves the natural world, I identified with Chase. I sympathized with Possum and really enjoyed developing him. The bits of Kimi Grant in these characters are more things like… my husband is a biologist who has spent years researching the effects of fracking on Pennsylvania streams, and my sons have a red wagon, and I’ve always been curious about trapping.
JDK:The book is divided into Before and After chapters. Did you write the book following the linear time and then mix the chapters, or did you write the book in the way it is published, with the two timelines intermixed by writing a chapter on one time line and then the other?
KCG:Early drafts were written linearly, but I realized that if I wanted the central mystery to be “What happened to Transom Shultz?” I couldn’t have him disappear on page 200! It needed to happen much earlier. I eventually settled on the Before and After structure, but honestly, the structure was hands-down the hardest part of writing this novel. I kept reading books in this genre to learn how successful authors handled mysteries, but it took me a long time to get it right.
JDK:I read somewhere that you write before your family wakes up in the morning. The challenge for most writers is actually finding uninterrupted time to focus entirely on what they are writing. I frequently find myself suddenly struck by a brilliant little nugget when I'm trapped in a social circumstance and unable to break away to flush out the idea. Would you share how you have structured your time for writing and how you deal with inspiration at the most “inconvenient" times?
KCG:You’re right. I do write mostly in the morning, before my family wakes up. I’m a homeschooling mom, so my kids are with me all day, every day. They like to talk to me A LOT, which is great, but it also makes it almost impossible to concentrate during the twelve hours that I’m with them each day. As far as actual writing, early morning is what works for me. I do get quiet windows here and there, and I try to make the most of them. I think about my writing a lot when I’m in the woods, and as a family, we try to be there a lot. So, sometimes I’m envisioning a scene or tweaking aspects of a character while the kids are bouldering or running down the trail. I also drive in silence if I’m alone, and I get some good mental work done then, too.
JDK:This is a novel of secrets and their impacts on those that hold those secrets and those who would have benefited from or been adversely affected by them. I enjoyed the fact that, in the course of the novel, you showed all the various ways secrets impact those who hold them and those who reveal them. How do you personally feel about secrets? The saying is that honesty is always the best policy, but is it really?
KCG:The novel IS about secrets, isn’t it? I never intended for it to be so much about secrets as it is about the simple premise that people are complicated. “Good” people can do bad things, and “bad” people can do good things. When I first began writing this, I mostly wanted to explore whether even very “good” people can, under certain tensions and in certain situations, do things they swore they’d never do. The secrets tumbled in and ended up becoming central to the book.
JDK:Fallen Mountains is slated to be published in March 2019, but what else do you have in the hopper? Another novel, I hope? I once read that Stephen King always has three completed manuscripts in his vault, so when the publisher needs the next one, he just fetches one to send them. So how full is your vault? :-)
KCG:I DO have another novel in the hopper! I’ve sent it off to my agent, Amy Cloughley, who is wonderful, and who will help me iron out any lingering problems. I have two other ideas for novels that aren’t fully fleshed out yet. One is started; one isn’t.
I want to thank Kimi Cunningham Grant and Amberjack Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
”But it was Tucker who worried Darlene the most. Something was happening to him--something she could not identify. He was speeding up, growing more in”But it was Tucker who worried Darlene the most. Something was happening to him--something she could not identify. He was speeding up, growing more intense by the day. Their great loss had created a mechanism inside his person--buried in his chest or the core of his brain--and it was always humming. She could practically see the vibration of the engine beneath his skin.”
It all begins with a storm. The swirling finger of a vengeful god spins down out of the sky and destroys Mercy, Oklahoma. The McCloud family has already suffered loss with the death of their mother, but now they find themselves orphans and homeless. They are the unluckiest family in a county of unlucky people. ”I remembered Tucker telling me that luck was no lady; luck was a mean drunk who didn’t know when to stop punching.”
Tucker always sees things differently. After the storm, it is as if something tears loose in him that has been held together by slender tendrils of what we call normal. He was always high strung an emotional whirlwind who was cursed with feelings that ran too deeply. ”My Category Five Brother.”
Darlene is the oldest, and when this storm takes away the McCloud house and their father, it also blows away all of her dreams of what she has planned to become. She sells their story to every news organization that is willing to pay. This creates conflict with Tucker, who sees it as unseemly. All Darlene is trying to do is get enough money to buy a dilapidated trailer and keep the family together.
I grew up in a small town so I understand the inherent jealousies, the prideful assertions about what is right and wrong, the cliquishness of the church going crowd, and a misguided concept that they are the righteous and all those folks in the big cities are fools on a one way express train to Hell. Small town values, my ass. The town of Mercy might be split on whether Darlene is doing the right thing, but the ones that think it is shameful make sure to let her know how they feel.
Pride is a luxury most can’t afford to buy.
Darlene is stuck in the caldron, trying to keep her two sisters, Jane and Cora, fed and having some kind of normal life. Tucker takes off. The McCloud unit, already destabilized by the missing pieces, now has to adjust to yet another smaller orbit. It is as if a moon has disappeared from the sky.
If truth be known, Tucker wants to bring down the Age of Humans. He would have fit in fine with Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. He tries to team up with like minded individuals who ultimately disappoint him. Their commitment to saving the Earth is more of a hobby than based on a firm set of convictions. Tucker is untethered from the law. I keep thinking of the American-abolitionist John Brown, who was considered bat shit crazy, but who, through his actions, raised the awareness of the plight of slaves in the South. He forced people in the North, who may have been indifferent, to have to reconsider the issue. James McBride in his National Book Award winning book The Good Lord Bird really brought John Brown alive for me.
Maybe we just have to have a Tucker McCloud or a John Brown come along occasionally who will shake us out of our indifference and have us start to wonder, why is this cause so important to these seemingly insane men? Are they insane or are they the only people seeing clearly? Just by forcing people to ask WHY, the needle moves from indifference to an openness to wanting to understand.
When I lived in Arizona, I knew some people who were members of Earth First! This was an environmental awareness group started by Dave Foreman, who was inspired by Abbey’s book The Monkey Wrench Gang to become more involved in the fight to save the environment. They were considered terrorists (before that word took on even more meaning) by the FBI. I guess, if inspiring terror in the greedy capitalist pricks who were clear cutting timber in Arizona is considered terrorism, then yes, they were. It was a doomed organization, just like most environmental efforts have proven to be. The government squashed them.
Tucker, unable to find the properly motivated partner, finally decides that he needs someone who can be taught his vision of the world. He convinces his nine year old sister Cora to come on his quest to save the world. He can say he needs help, but what he really needs is a witness. He needs someone to observe and understand exactly what he is trying to do. ”Studies showed that 80% of people on the lam traveled west.” Well, Tucker is no exception. They are going to create havoc from Oklahoma to California.
This was a solid four star book for me until Abby Geni let me spend some significant time with Tucker McCloud. You can disagree with the young man, but you can not deny that he is committed to what he believes. He sees the end of days, but in some ways, just the fact that he chooses to fight back shows that he still thinks the tide can turn in favor of the Earth. He isn’t spouting rhetoric in some classroom in a university. He is creating the smoke and walking through the center of it, limping and grinning.
I also really enjoyed Abby Geni’s book The Lightkeepers, which is set on a small island off the coast of San Francisco. She is a storyteller who is shining a light on the plight of nature. She isn’t even crazy like John Brown or insane like Tucker McCloud, but maybe there is a part of her that wishes she were.
My thanks to Counterpoint Press and Megan Fishmann who sent me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
”There is a wonderful violence to the act of photography. The camera is a potent thing, slicing an image away from the landscape and pinning it to a s”There is a wonderful violence to the act of photography. The camera is a potent thing, slicing an image away from the landscape and pinning it to a sheet of film. When I choose a segment of horizon to capture, I might as well be an elephant seal hunting an octopus. The shutter clicks. Every boulder, wave, and curl of cloud included in the snapshot is severed irrevocably from what is not included. The frame is as sharp as a knife. The image is ripped from the surface of the world.”
Miranda has pulled every string available, applied for all the grants, and finally receives an invite to join the scientists already ensconced in the sanctuary on the Farallon Islands. These islands are so small and so close to sea level that if the ocean rises half an inch they will disappear forever. The scientists are there to study the birds, the whales, the seals, and the sharks that all use these islands to battle for mates, to feed, to reproduce, and raise their young.
The scientists are there to record and not interfere with the workings of nature. They adhere to a prime directive that reminds me of the same command that was regularly spouted by the crew of the Enterprise. ”Star Trek, the Prime Directive (also known as Starfleet General Order 1 or General Order 1) is a guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets prohibiting the protagonists from interfering with the internal development of alien civilizations.” If a baby seal is toddling off to certain death, all you can do is watch it die.
The scientists call her Melissa, Mel, Mouse Girl, really anything but her real name. She doesn’t correct them. Being someone else for a while is just fine with her. She writes letters to her dead mother. She gives her cameras names as if they were children or pets. She has been running from any permanence in her life. Mortgages, relationships, children, picket fences, car payments are foreign concepts to her. She wants to be able to leave anywhere at a moments notice and head for somewhere else that she can capture images she has never seen before with her camera.
”Your death made me into a nature photographer.
I was always going to be an artist. There was never any question about that. I need to take pictures of the world around me the way a whale needs to come up for air. For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by beauty. I am talented; I don’t mind saying it. Photography was a given. Nature was the wild card.”
It is not that Miranda is unfriendly. She just doesn’t put any work into developing friendships. Friends become weights that can potentially keep her anchored to the Earth. The constant presence of her mother’s ghost is, in many ways, all consuming. When one of the scientists tells her about the ghost that lives in her quarters, Miranda is not scared, nor is she skeptical. ”’I believe you,’ I said. ‘I believe in ghosts.’”
The ghost of her dead mother is like an ethereal talisman. Something she doesn’t have to hold anywhere but in her mind.
Everything is going great. She is fitting in well enough with everyone. She knows where she stands in the pecking order. Everyone helps everyone else with their projects. She is capturing some amazing images.
And then a late night assault is committed.
This leads to a suspicious death, which leads to an unravelling of the symbiotic relationships they have achieved. Trust has been breached. ”In truth, there were a hundred ways to die on the islands. It was amazing that we were not all six feet under--lost to the wind, the ocean, and the dreadful, human capacity for misadventure.” The island is trying to kill them, and now no one is sure whom they can trust among the people they must trust to survive.
The most dangerous part of the island are the kamikaze gulls. ”But the gulls are the worst. They kill for food. They kill for pleasure. They kill for no good reason. They are expert assassins. They soar around the islands with bloody beaks and a mad glint in their eyes.” When Miranda is first pecked in the head, I can’t help thinking about the lovely Tippi Hedren, sitting in that small boat on the water being dive bombed by gulls in the Hitchcock film The Birds.
No, thank you. I would not be able to adhere to the Prime Directive. I’d be carrying around a blood crusted bat, waiting for the next dive bombing gull assassin.
One of the things I became aware of while I was reading this book is the powerful thirst I have for nature writing. I read a lot of Edward Abbey, Charles Bowden, and others as I was going to college in Tucson, but I haven’t really pursued the genre of nature or nature fiction much since I left the desert. I recently read Bearskin, which is set in another nature preserve in Virginia, and enjoyed it immensely. Fortunately for me and for you, Abby Geni has a new book coming out September 4th, 2018, called The Wildlands . She also has a collection of short stories called The Last Animal, which I also intend to read. Geni describes nature in vivid detail. I was transported to this wind swept, bird shit splattered, rain battered, gorgeous island. I settled in...well...not with the gulls, *shiver*, but with this dedicated crew of people intent on doing everything they can to advance our knowledge of the mystical world of nature.
”Perhaps there were only two kinds of people in the world--the takers and the watchers--the plunderers and the protectors--the eggers and the lightkeepers.”
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