Notes on the 9-Volt Nomadic Life

1. We begin and end our days embedded within the cosmic economy. Death is a part of the arrangement here. Without death there is no life, as the garden soil continually reminds us; for the soil is the sum of all that has gone before us and died, that we may live.
2. To die then, is to be in the position to give life to others. 
3. Now there are many ways to die, most of which do not involve physical death. To forgive a person is to die a little death. To put the needs of another person before your own is to die a little death. To say something like this--"the life of the earth demands that I give over thoughts of human convenience and speed, as well as power and my ambitions to control my surroundings"--this is also to die a death.
4. For the sake of the life of the earth as well as for the sake of reclaiming an honest straightforward human life tied to the life of the earth, it is time for us to die a certain difficult death. This death will require us to give up circumstances and machines that put us physically at ease. It will require us to share our wealth with others. It will require us to accept our dependence on the earth, as well as the consequences for poor decisions made in the past, many of them not by us.
5. There is no way to buy ourselves out of humanity's past errors. Additional consumption (enabled by the printing of money and the accumulation of debt) cannot lead to less consumption. More machines manufactured at the cost of more pollution cannot buy fewer machines and less pollution.
6. Our work must be more personal. It must treat the damage directly. It must substitute physical labor for financial fictions. It must replace fantasies of industrial control with a painstaking intelligent program to harmonize the human being with the landscape as well as with the indispensable life of the ocean. It must transform our wish to be the absolute rulers of nature into a desire to be its faithful servants and live according to its dictates.
7. The pleasures of consumption can no longer be our society's goal. We must not ask "what new thing should I buy?" but instead "what can I do without, or make myself, or repair?" Not "how much of my wealth should I give back to the world?" but instead "how much is it right for me, in the first place, to take?" 
8. From here on out, we should strive to acquire only what will unequivocally equip us to die this death into greater simplicity. Say a packet of seeds. A scythe. A pressure canner and glass jars. A book, the words of which are self-evidently magical and will entertain us with only the light of the sun to help us to read them.
9. It is true that none of us can die this death today, all at once. This is because the death in question amounts to a complicated universal labor and involves the regaining of many lost skills and competencies.
10. At the same time we do not say "one small step at a time," but instead "one big step at a time." Otherwise this dying will never happen; we will only play at it.
11. A few minutes of your time to sort your refuse into the proper bins is not the same as dying this death.
12. Turning off a light switch when you leave the room is not the same as dying this death. 
13. The purchase of gizmos that purport to save a bit of energy is not the same as dying this death.
14. However, "This year I will learn to cook." "This year I will plant and tend a garden." "This year I will walk everywhere I can." "This year we will give up the car..." Eventually these things add up to a respectable death, which is to say, one that truly, powerfully, imparts life. 
15. The household is the smallest meaningful human unit of the cosmic economy. Responsibility for the human portion of life of the cosmic economy begins there, in the nucleus of the household. This is where our dying must begin. 
16. Do not look to others elsewhere to do your dying for you. This is an abdication of responsibility and a culpable sleight of hand. 
17. Do not look to technology or science to obviate the need for this death. Technology and science have had their own obvious part in creating this all-too human mess of our home planet. At best they will help us discern between prospective methods of labor that tend toward reconstruction and renewal, for instance in the creation of nutritious perennial grains, or in guiding the renewal of marine ecosytems depleted by over-fishing and pollution. 
18. Do not look to government to solve the problem. The resources of governments the world over are materially and politically  in serious decline and in any case there can be no large scale solution to the problems we face without the involvement and commitment of individuals. We must all do our part. 
19. This death we must die will not be without its pain. All dying involves pain. We are not dying until we are feeling a certain amount of pain. 
20. Beyond the pain though, lie blessings implicit in this death--blessings that will unfold in surprising ways, as a new life for us takes shape from the fertile ruin of the old. Pleasure, for instance, in this new life will be simpler and quicker to come by, as well as far more certain for its being more elemental and basic and near at hand: the morning light, the sweet fuzzy heft of a peach in the hand, the joy of muscles and nerves that know precisely how to do a task... 
21. Remember our ambition is not control but to widen the circle of community and love and to find (in the earth beneath us) our common sustenance. 
22. Remember the future is slow. The future is perennial. The future is elemental. The future is hard work. 
23. This death I speak of is slow. This death I speak of is perennial. This death I speak of is elemental. This death I speak of is hard work.
24. Consumption is the emptiest goal.
25. "More, more, more," is the cry of a soul in error. Even "more with less!" is a mistake, if the "more" we speak of still involves the ambition to control and consume. How much better it would be simply to do nothing much at all with very little! To do a little fishing and catch no fish! To sail lazily around a lake in a sailboat with no other end or goal in mind than to enjoy the lap of the waves and the rippling of the sail and the warmth of the sun!
26. Once there was a boy with the initials HB who believed he could power a go-cart on a standard 9-volt battery, purchased with an advance on his weekly allowance from the corner store down the hill. 
27. Did he, in the material sense, fail to create such a go-cart, or even to procure adequate capital for the purchase of said battery? 
28. Yes. Alas.
29. But in a visionary sense did he fail? 
30. No not at all! 
31. How could this be?
32. Because to this day HB (sitting in his sun room in a wooden chair) by use of his imagination rides over the entire universe in a go-cart that is powered by a 9-volt, and there is no end to his adventures because of course the go-cart's battery is continually recharged by the twenty-three watt generator of his now middle-aged brain, which is fertile with the ruins of his youth. 
33. So far as he (HB) knows, he is the first world's first 9-volt nomad. But you too can be a 9-volt nomad if you wish to be and HB is certainly desirous of your joining him perhaps in a 9-volt go-cart race to Alpha Centauri. You will find him (as soon as he has completed this post) most likely in the vegetable garden saying vroom vroom.
34. In any case, seize the day! Seize it as a time to die, which is to say as a time to live joyfully, vividly, imaginatively, sympathetically, elementally. 
35. Who else can do either your living or your dying for you?

HB

The Last Steam Trains of India

When I was a boy, there were still steam trains in India, steam trains pulled by huge black locomotives, juggernauts of steel vitality. Everything is alive to the child, but these locomotives, multiplied into herds at the station, seemed more alive than anything I knew. The locomotive was horse, the locomotive was cow, the locomotive was elephant, the locomotive was tiger. And it pulled whole zoos of us people too: beggars, brahmins, holy men with dung in their hair, hippies on hash, street dentists, legume salesmen, factory workers, housewives, potters, snake charmers, cremationists, typists, accountants, little white boys (dirty cheeks) of missionary extraction. Even blue Krishna himself, I liked to think, would have enjoyed riding the train. Some passengers even spilled up onto the roof to ride in the open breeze and sun although if you did that better look out for bridges and tunnels and electrical lines and such and when you saw them coming better flatten yourself to the riveted metal like a fly to a windshield else risk decapitation or some other gory inglorious end!

And the smoke! We trailed smoke like banners of the apocalypse; we rode under all that was left of a mass incineration of coal, coal that had at one time been (my mother told me) living animals and plants that had died and that after millions of years under the earth were changed by weight and pressure into exactly the coal that now propelled us along. So the pressure of the earth that had forged the coal was now the pressure of steam hurtling us along toward, well...toward wherever we were headed now. Toward the cities of the plains: Bangalore. Madras. Tirichuripalli. Or Trivandrum by the sea. Or if back home, then toward Kodaikanal Road station. 

Shrouded in steam and concentrating on the fire in their bellies, the locomotives made no distinction between one carriage and another; they played no favorites with the allotment of their horsepower but simply pulled every car in the train equally and every car together. For us humans traveling the rails though, the view tended to be different. From our human perspective the train was divided into classes: first class, second, and third. My family always traveled second class. Had we traveled third, few would have credited us with being reasonable. Why after all would anyone without an absolute need to economize put up with all the crowding, all the standing room only, all the dirt and the bodily smells, and also (if you were a woman) all the groping that third class entailed? No, third class was no place for a family with means, even missionary means. But what about first class? I asked my mother. Would we ever be rich enough for that?

"We could afford it, at least sometimes."

"Then why don't we? We could have our own cushioned seats, and our own private compartments."

"Because there are more more important things."

Such as? I asked, and my mother answered without hesitation: "Well, just being with people, for instance. If we rode in a private compartment, your father and I wouldn't get to hear as much Tamil. And you and your brother wouldn't get to see as many interesting things happen."

"My seat is hard," I might say to my father.

"Do you want a blanket to sit on? We brought a blanket."

"I don't want a blanket."

"Then make do."

"With what?"

"With your inner resources."

"Which ones?"

"Try your patience. Try sitting on your patience."

It was good advice always on a train to keep your patience with you, especially your patience with people, because no matter the class or the carriage the train was going to give you an immersion in the human experience. It was a sort of city-in-a-line, an extract of India, a democratic container of life vibrantly spiced with elbow bumps. You couldn't escape or avoid, no it insisted on offering glimpse after glimpse into the lives of others, and therein lay its equalizing power as well as the power of every ride to enrage you or put you in despair, because of course not every human interaction is one that we want to repeat and there certainly are times when we're going to agree with Sartre that hell is other people. 

In general though my family looked on the bright side of the opportunity and the experience. We ate and drank and conversed with fellow passengers and looked out the window and stood up and walked around and eavesdropped. Even in the more idle periods of a trip while the tock tock of the rails lulled me and caused me to float on the waters of consciousness sweetly without direction--even then always there was the hum of humanity in my ears: of mothers humming to their children and the music of conversations in languages familiar and unfamiliar all mixing in a kind of lullaby glossolalia. I like to think that I carry all that conversation with me still, the way a seashell far from the shore is said to carry with it the sound of the waves of the sea.

Another force of democracy on the train was the WC. This was located generally next to the vestibule that connected one carriage to the next, and you opened the door to the WC and there (often right in the middle of the floor) as you entered the space was the toilet. And the toilet's design was minimalist perhaps to a fault. Simplicity itself.  Specifically it was just a hole in the floor, framed in metal, through which you could look directly down onto the tracks below. Come close and look down into it and there they were: the gravel and the ties down below repeating themselves: the gravel and the ties, the gravel and the ties. Depending on the speed, they might simply be a blur or they might resolve themselves into wooden timbers and individual stones. 

Sometimes, as I recall, the hole featured footprints off to the side (imprinted into the metal of the frame), and these were of course a guide for placing the feet encouraging toilet-goers to squat directly over the hole for best results. And I would say the diameter of the hole was on average large enough to drop say a good-sized cabbage through. Or a cannon ball. Or a genius brain. But then again, this is only recollection and everything seems bigger to a young boy than it probably really is. I can imagine that the size of holes is especially tempting for a boyhood memory to exaggerate. A boy wants to stuff through a hole whatever might possibly fit. And if that item won't fit in reality, then his imagination will generally accomplish the feat, and memory record it for a fact of experience.

Also in every car, without regard I think to class, was a safety feature fascinating to children. You looked for this toward the middle of each car, and up near the ceiling. Yes there it was:  a set of red letters proclaiming “EMERGENCY”, and above that hung a cord with a wooden handle. I inquired with my mother as to the uses of the cord. 

"When you pull on it," she said, "I think it activates the brakes of the car you're in, and then the engineer gets a jolt and knows to brake the whole locomotive."

"So you stop the train with it?"

"Yes. But listen to me. You don't just pull it willy-nilly, or at least no one had better do that. Stopping a train suddenly is always a dangerous business. The carriages can jackknife. People get hurt." 

"But so if there's a fire, or an explosion, or there's a cobra on the loose, someone can pull the emergency cord?"

"Yes. That's the purpose."

"What about jewels? What if someone stole some jewels?"

"Jewels might not be an adequate reason. I think there needs to be danger to human life, if you're going to pull the cord." 

"Anyway, I can't reach it."

"No you can't."

"You seem glad."

"I am."

And yet the unattainable nature of the cord as an object of physical manipulation also made it an object of desire. Dangling high up there like the star in the sonnet "whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken," it served as a goad to story making. In particular I pictured all sorts of occasions when under the pressure of a true emergency--an assassination attempt on the engineer by the caboose man, a tiger attack at Jollarpettai station, a rogue elephant on the loose in the carriage behind--I would discover some extraordinary ability that I had not until that time known existed in me, or had perhaps known it to exist, but been forced to keep a deep unflinching secret.

But you see in that moment, I would be transformed into the very hero I was destined to be! I would leap ten feet through the air, to pull an emergency cord. Or I would grow an extra limb long enough to reach the emergency cord. Or I would grasp the EMERGENCY cord simply by the power of my mind, and activate it by spelling out (with my eyes closed) the word EMERGENCY. Goodness, what superpowers! my fellow passengers would say, after they had been saved by me. We never knew! my parents would whisper. And all this time I thought he was just an ordinary brother! my older brother would say before falling on his knees in awe, and begging forgiveness for how often he had until that point treated me: namely as though I were just any old ordinary younger brother, whom he could banish anytime from looking at his stamp collection and keep from playing with his toy submarine!

Now as it happened, there WAS a story that featured an emergency cord, as well as a toilet, as well as a train that encompassed the two together, all in one mobile setting: a deeply satisfying package. The story was told to me by my good friend Deepak,  a classmate of mine at the boarding school in Kodaikanal, where both my mother and father worked as teachers.

"A certain woman," said Deepak, "boarded a train to Tirichurippali." 

"Steam train or diesel?"

"I do not know. But I suspect steam. However, the essential fact is that during the ride, this mother was feeling the natural need."

"For?"

"For the WC."

"So why didn't she just go?"

"She does go. She does. But she brings along her newborn infant baby (very small) as well. In her arms. I believe the baby was asleep."

"How old was it?"

"Perhaps a week. Maybe two. Maybe three. But very small. Very small still." Deepak held out his hands somewhat like a fisherman demonstrating the length of a fish, only in his case, the point seemed to be to de-emphasize rather than exaggerate its length. He went on: 

"Now in the WC, this mother proceeds to make use of the toilet. However the kingpin is this. The baby, I am saying, falls unmistakeably into the toilet hole. And then all the way through."

"Was it a boy or a girl?."

"I do not know. It is unimportant to the final moral of the tale."

"Did it fall feet or head first?"

"On this point as well, I am uninformed. However, I would consider it most likely to have been a feet first fall, considering the extraordinary outcome of the experience as reported to me. Now as the baby falls, certainly the train is still very much in motion. Quite fast. But the baby falls onto the tracks, you must understand. Onto the ties."

"Did it scream when it fell? Did the baby scream? What about the mother? Sid she pull the emergency cord?" 

"Accounts on this matter vary. Yes however the emergency cord was pulled, but as to who accomplished the pulling it is not known. It may have been the mother. Or perhaps a passenger who was able to hear the mother's painful hullabaloo. But in any case, yes the emergency cord was pulled. And the train comes to a full stop, period, and search parties are eminently dispatched to recover this baby. And this baby is found! Very much alive. Still on the tracks you see, but two miles behind the train. Two miles because you see a great deal of time is required in order to bring a train to a halt. But the baby is alive. The baby is alive!"

It was on the train that I learned to tell time. My mother taught me. We used a handmade clock cobbled together out of a sheet of cardboard (the back of a legal pad maybe) with hands of construction paper held in place by a brass brad poked in through the center of the clock, and the numbers inked on in marker. It was hard work telling the time, there being in the first place so many different ways to express this or that hour of the day. Quarter past seven could also be expressed seven-fifteen. Half past eight was also eight-thirty. Furthermore it could be nine o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the evening, which was odd though also not necessarily surprising. A great deal of life was complicated and unpredictable and not very amenable to immediate comprehension, and that was just the truth. You could complain, and of course you did complain but sadly this usually did not change the facts. No, you still had to live with the facts. Well I have learned a great number of facts since that time. Since those boyhood days. Since those last boyhood days of the glory of steam. Among them these:

1. That time runs on and does not stop for anyone. 
2. That death comes for everyone, even mothers. 
3. That landscapes are wounded and betrayed by those who say they own them, and the results are called progress.
4. That far too many people on this earth are liars.
5. That given these truths and under such circumstances sometimes the only thing you have left to lean on is a place called home. 
6. Home is where eventually you hope to get to. It's where people know you. Where they say yes you belong. It's a place you have a hand in making. A place where if you had a baby, you would bring it there to be.
7. Home is a place yes, but it doesn't have to be rooted like a tree. It is any space made magical by love. 

It always made me so wistful to be faced with that necessity of getting off at the station. It was bad enough seeing other passengers detrain at stations prior to our own end-of-the-line. But when it was my OWN family getting off, how much worse THAT was! First far ahead of our arrival my mother would take a census of our belongings to make sure that nothing had gone missing during the ride or was in danger of being left behind. Sometimes too if I was sleepy she would rub my shoulders between the shoulder blades as if to polish me there. Then depending on the time of day and the importance of the station the conductor might come through and announce the name of the stop. And finally the process of deceleration would begin and the train's shrill whistle would blow as a warning to anyone or any creature on the tracks ahead to move off.

When we pulled alongside the platform sometimes I would start to cry. 

"You want to go places," my mother said to me with a certain impatience, "but you don't want to get off the train!" As if rational metaphysics could wipe away my tears! 

And yet in retrospect I suppose I can thank her for identifying so precisely the source of my sorrow. It was the essence of my predicament as a child, and perhaps of my life, truly to be interested in new projects, travels, and in meeting people as yet un-introduced to me, and yet at the same time to wish to hold onto the full sum of my past. I wanted to be curious as well as loyal. Furthermore I wanted my sense of loyalty to be returned, reflected back to me, in this case by the train itself. But here the train was intent on betraying me; it was pushing me off, insisting I go. Was this how my love was rewarded? All my faithful service on board, to the tasks of perception and observation? What a cold uncaring creature this train really was, abandoning us here at the station like a snake leaving her eggs behind, to hatch on their own!

HB

Straight Talk on Oil, with a Coda on King Midas

It's time to talk about oil. The black stuff. The stuff that comes out of the ground and out of the floor of the sea when encouraged with a drill to do so. Goo redolent of dinosaurs and ancient ferns. Coagulate of carbon and pressure and geologic time. Oh what an astonishing material. It's almost ridiculous how much can be accomplished and created with the stuff. In the form of plastics, we build with it: everything from artificial hearts to park benches to bottles for shampoo. In the form of polyester, we wear it. Our solvents are oil. Our waxes are oil. Our house paints are oil, our pesticides are derived from oil, as are our explosives and our inks. We even medicate ourselves with oil; yes, almost every designed pharmaceutical is petroleum-based. In short, look around your home and you'd be hard-pressed to name an object that does not bear the fingerprint of oil. Just the transport alone, and any mechanical energy involved in harvesting or extracting the materials that make up any given product insures a hefty involvement of oil in almost every object's place in our lives.

So folks don't let anyone kid you. This is not the age of information, though there is a bit of that around. Not the age of networking, though there's a good deal of that happening too. Nor is it the space age, nor the atomic age. No, as boring and as twentieth-century-sounding as it is to say, we're still very much living in the age of oil, because let's face it without the black goop, material civilization as we know it with all its computers and satellites and UPS trucks and economists and farmers and marine ecologists would cough a few times, turn over, and expire. I say all this not to praise or even to damn but to point out the obvious. 

A few more observations, mostly by way of emphasis: 

1. Oil may not be your favorite thing. You may not even notice it much, and you may even wish it would just go away. Nevertheless you depend on it, as much as any apple depends on its tree. 

2. If civilization depends on oil, as it does, then if oil becomes more expensive, so does civilization. 

3. It's foolish to complain about oil and the environmental costs and downsides of its extraction unless you are ready and willing to do without many of its benefits. We will come back to this point many times in the course of our explorations as nine-volt citizens of the earth. 

There has been a great deal of talk (i.e. blather) in the past couple of years about the "promise" of shale oil. We're being told by all sorts of people that we in America still have a great deal of the good black stuff to burn--a hundred year's supply according to some, and some say much more. Never mind whether burning the stuff for another hundred years would be a good idea or not, and never mind the technical, geological, and economic facts, these prophets of plenty gush on and on, insisting that our supplies are so vast (vast is a favorite word of theirs) that even after we satisfy our own appetite we will have plenty left to export. Yes sir profits aplenty await Americans into perpetuity. Soda water fountains. Lemonade springs. Big Rock Candy mountains. 

A few relevant facts: 

Classical economics tells us that when the price of something rises, then supply (after a lag) tends to rise in response. Sensing the opportunity for profits, producers and manufacturers invest their capital, build the requisite infrastructure for an increase, and hire the necessary hands. Production ramps up until supply of the product matches demand and maybe even overshoots it. Eventually prices steady or come back down.

So far so good. Now, over the past decade the price of oil has steadily risen; a barrel of oil that, in 2003, cost thirty dollars, now costs one hundred and five. How have the producers responded? Well in fact over the past decade, right in line with economic theory, the number of drilling rigs has doubled, as has the investment that oil companies have made in exploration. But then here's the question: has the actual production of oil, in consonance with the laws of supply and demand, risen as well?

No it has not. The total production of crude worldwide since 2005 has remained more or less steady; it has plateaued, the shale oil "revolution" notwithstanding. Why? Why has the world not been flooded with oil, and why haven't prices declined as a result? Furthermore what, as time goes on, can we expect in terms of price and supply? Speak to us, Indubitable Oracle.

Ahem.

First of all, it's important to know that the exploration and the new wells cited here have in large part focused on shale oil, the fracked stuff. And yes, naturally with all that effort and money put into fracking, the supply of fracked oil has increased. But! Even as the supply of shale oil has risen, supplies of conventional oil (the kind that needs pretty much only the drill and no rock splitting or injection of fluid in order to extract it) are steadily, inexorably falling. The rise in the first category is only barely offsetting the fall in the second. This decline in conventional sources is one circumstance that militates against a rise in total supply as well as any possible decrease in price.

But there is a second reason, and one probably just as powerful: shale oil, though plentiful in supply, is expensive to produce. Far more capital per well goes into fracking than under the conventional routine. Plus what you get for all your work--in comparison again to conventional drilling--is relative peanuts. A good conventional well can produce thousands of barrels a day for decades. Out of a fracked well, you're lucky to get a hundred barrels a day for a few years. And that, folks, makes all the difference. It's enough to ensure that the cost of oil is going to stay high and go higher as the years march on. Of course monetary speculation, hurricanes, rig and refinery explosions, as well as world political and economic circumstances all play their part in the price of oil, and as these change, so will the price of oil. But again, given the decline of conventional drilling and the need to offset it with a much more expensive process of production--the basic direction of the price is up. The era of cheap oil is over. Finis. Kaput.

Q. What will be the limit? How long will it take before oil becomes expensive enough, so as to require us to really change our lives?

A. Nobody knows for sure. But given that right now we're barely managing to keep overall production flat, and given the overall decline in the cheaper conventional production amounts to something like 3 to 5 percent a year, it's probably not going to be all that long. A decade at the most will probably elapse before real shifts have to take place.

Q. What will we do?

A. Mostly make do. Live with the reality. Muddle through.

Q. How? 

A. By slowly, painfully coming up with a different model for civilization, which is to say, by returning to an old idea of civilization. Which is to say, a civilization that demands less power, less motion, less novelty, and fewer consumer goods.

Q. Won't that feel like poverty?

A. To many people yes, all this will feel like the universal onset of poverty. To others who are already poor, it will actually feel pretty normal.

Q. Given cheap oil's place in our civilization, can the downshift be made easier?

A. Changes that will make the most difference will be inner mental and spiritual ones: moderation of material expectations, joy in the present moment, an enthusiastic return to the household arts, and a re-estimation of the value of physical labor. In general a shift toward a nine volt perspective on life: one low in mechanically-gauged power, but high in imagination and community life. Just as electrical cells can be linked to provide brighter and more resilient illumination, so with the application of a little imagination and wisdom might we find a beautiful sufficiency in community life. Of course there is no reason why we cannot be seeking this now. Communal moderation and mutual fun is an infinitely more powerful means toward finding happiness, than this desperate grasping of ours to maintain our present lifestyle. This second way is vanity. A chasing after the wind.

Q. What about renewables?

A. Community life and the life of the human imagination are both infinitely renewable. 

Q. I was speaking of substitutes for oil.

A. Oh, renewable energy will help, but it cannot really substitute for oil. The necessary infrastructural transformations (at whatever level we undertake them) will be enormously costly, and the technologies themselves--wind solar hydro etc.--just don't carry the necessary oomph and variation of application. And let's add as well, that they all come with environmental impacts of their own, downsides that are often overlooked and downplayed, soft-pedaled and denied.

Q. So, probably no flying cars for me?

A. A donkey or mule may be more likely. Don't forget your own two legs. Bicycles work too.

Q. What do mules eat?

A. Try oats, various grains. 

Q. Speaking of asses and mules, what mythical king received the ears of an ass?

A. King Midas. Yes the same king whose touch had the power to transmute any and every object to gold, including (unfortunately) his very own food. A regrettable oversight on his part. A case of superpowers getting in the way of real living. Every time he tried to eat, the food would turn to gold. One version of the story even has him accidentally changing his daughter (oops) into gold.

It strikes me that we in the developed world have become the Midases of oil. To paraphrase the poet Hopkins, everything we touch "wears [oil's] smudge and bears [oil's] smell," so that what began as a gift (a little something to light a lantern) is now killing us by surfeit and overuse and over-consumption. Carbon emissions rise, and the climate shifts almost tectonically beneath us. The oceans acidify with absorption of carbon, and the reefs dissolve. Oil's miracle derivatives betray us with cancers. Wars are fought over access to oil and real people die in them. None of which of course even begins to account for the impact oil has had on the rest of the living planet: For a glimpse of which, if you dare, see here. 

Realizing that his gift was no gift at all, but a deadly burden and a curse, Midas prayed to be free of his powers. Oh to be fully human again. To be able to touch and not kill. And as it turned out the gods proved merciful. Midas was told to wash in a river, along with all the objects he had transformed to gold. He did, and the curse was lifted, and the objects returned to their original state (let's hope his daughter, blinking, forgave him). Then with a long grateful sigh of relief, this wiser king took a vow of poverty and began a second career as a music critic (well sort of). In this second capacity he had a second misadventure, and it was this one that got him pegged with the ears of an ass. But that's another story. For now I wonder why--surrounded as we are by the oil-charged emblems of our self-destruction--we have not, like Midas, ever really thought to pray for freedom from these billions and billions of barrels of oil. From this tide of toxins. From this slavery to goo.

How long will it be? 

HB

Faraway, but People Understood Me

We had touched down in the capital, in an Airbus painted not just with a bird of paradise, but as a bird of paradise and with the words “Niugini Airlines” splashed across the side. Another jet the following day flew us to Mt. Hagen up in the highlands where the weather thank God was permanently cooler and where at a dealer called Ela Motors we bought ourselves a truck: a vehicle painted a cheerful sunny yellow. And it was a few days later that my family of five took that truck westward ho into Enga Province where Dad and Mom would be working and where our home base would be. Enga was named for the people as well as for the language spoken there. In Enga, the Enga spoke Enga.

There was no hurry, it was decided. Dad didn’t have to start his job right away if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t. And I didn’t have to go to boarding school right away if I didn’t want to, and I didn’t. Instead our first job together as a family was really to get used to the province. Familiarize ourselves. Get the smells of Enga in our noses and the food of Enga in our guts and the rain and mist of Enga on our skin. And get a feel for the people too and what it might be like to be them. Otherwise what kind of missionaries would we be? 

Our orientation would happen at an outstation called Mulitaka. And you wouldn't call Mulitaka quite the real bush, because it was right off the highlands highway. Still, not many foreigners ventured out that far west; I myself, in the six weeks I was there, saw only one other whiteskin besides ourselves. That was a shoestring traveller from Israel, who stayed with us a day or two. I had learned and forgotten that Hebrew was written from right to left, and I can still see him writing in his journal at the table, and I can still hear me thinking to myself "oh that's right, in Hebrew it's right to left." It's a funny thing, how re-learning a fact like "Hebrew is written right to left" can feel so much more rewarding than learning that same fact new, especially when what you're relearning was known before only abstractly, but is now being learned from lived experience. Somehow the concrete verification of the fact renders the fact itself instantly brighter. You'll remember it better. You'll prize it more.

At Mulitaka every morning just after breakfast there'd be a knock at the door. Open it and there would be Pastor Kaipas, usually with the vicar Lulyakalwe in tow. Pastor Kaipas had a scraggly goatee and a laugh all his own, a laugh that I loved to make happen even when what made it happen had to be a Pidgin mistake of mine: “Aiieee!” he would say as he slapped himself on the thigh and revved up his megawatt smile, just about whenever I said something idiotic or nonsensical or just plain wrong. As for the vicar Lulyakulwe, he was a good ten years younger than Pastor Kaipas and much quieter. I loved his name, which to me sounded like what a quiet river does to you when you sit down next to it for an hour and just watch and listen to the water flow by. Lulyakulwe. Lulyakulwe.

Kaipas and Lulyakulwe never taught us inside the house; I think it would have made them too self-conscious, and after all, the whole area was their home, river, mountains, sky and all, so why would they want to crawl inside our little white shell? Instead every morning we all went outside and sat on metal folding chairs out on the lawn, each of us with a white paperback textbook called Untangled New Guinea Pidgin open on our laps. I still have the copy I used back then. It's pretty beat up, but it still makes me happy to take it off the shelf and look at it. Holding it open on my lap makes it all come back to me, how it was, the whole arrangement of the instruction time on the lawn: Pastor taking Mom and Dad and me in a circle of four, and Lulyakalwe and my younger brother and sister in another circle of three. The teaching method was simple: we just read through the exercises in the book and then talked about whatever the exercises brought to mind. It was the conversation, as Pastor said, and not the exercises per se that would get us to learn. 

It was just a fascinating invention, Pidgin was: a brand new language sprung up out of a nation of isolated language groups out of the need to communicate and mix and trade, but still not boringly pragmatic as you might imagine such a language might be, but instead full of color and character and imagination and fun. Every sentence was like a pile of fox cubs wrestling or say a school of dolphins zestfully beating up on a marauding shark, chasing him off to where he came from--some sharky elsewhere. Some of my favorite words:

mauswara: baloney, BS
bagarapim: to ruin, to destroy
raskelman: criminal, troublemaker
wantok: kin
asples: native place, home
papamama: parents
samtingnating: not much, no big deal
Longwe liklik: a bit of a long way

While we were being taught, people from the area would come up to the bamboo fence that surrounded the compound and lean on the fence and look on, talking in Enga. Once in awhile, a bit miffed, Pastor would stand up and try to shoo them off, and maybe for a time they would absent themselves. But then soon enough and maybe a bit self-consciously they'd trickle back laughing and smiling to the fence. Their time and again return to the fence made me think of water in the moat around a sandcastle, and how when the water is scooped from the moat it will always trickle back in, the source of it being something so much bigger than your hand. It also occurs to me today that the onlookers were probably amused not just at us, but also at Pastor. 

One part of me did want to go to the singsing, or celebration. Pastor Kaipas told us all about it and what it would be like: all the people from two villages, he said, would be gussied up in their best traditional bilas, or decoration: the men especially, they would wear their huge ceremonial wigs: collocations and assemblages of ancestral hair. Generations after generations of hair went into those wigs and most of that hair would have come from people who lived long before first contact. And there would be a feast. Pigs would be butchered and split and a pit dug and lined with heated stones and filled with greens and cooking bananas and breadfruit and sweet potato and large hunks of the pork. Then it would all be covered up and allowed to cook in its own steam. Finally when the time was right, the whole business would be pulled apart and all the food shared all around.

“It’s part of what this place is about,” Dad said. “And you’re withdrawing yourself from it.”

I knew. I knew. But I was like a tender new moon setting early–not able to take more than a short look at the earth that night. Maybe this was out of shyness, maybe just out of sadness. Maybe I just wanted to be alone. But anyway I didn't want to go. And I just told my folks that I didn't, and they let me stay, which I appreciated.

The other four left in the truck in the early afternoon. I read in my room for a long time--I was big into Dostoysevsky at the time and couldn't stop; those novels were like a existential drug to me, those novels by Mr. big FD. At five o’clock though, sated with Russian angst, I went out to the garage (just beyond the fence) to crank up the diesel generator. I was starting it up about an hour earlier than we usually did, but I figured that hey this was no big deal–just a little extra diesel. Back inside and with a bunch of lights on in the house I switched my boom box on to play a cassette of Schubert’s Unfinished to the beautiful end of the impossibly beautiful second movement and that's all folks, it's unfinished. I also recall tuning the shortwave to the BBC to everyone talking about Gorbachev freeing up the Soviet Union and thawing out relations with the West. I decided that even out in the bush of New Guinea I was happy about the East-West thaw, and it's a funny thing how your concerns and viewpoints follow you everywhere, like a moon along the highway or like discrimination through US history; there's just no such thing as blanking your slate. Something always stays indelibly you.  

At dusk it began to rain hard, which put an end to any listening, the reason being that the roof protecting me from the rain was nothing more than a sheet of galvanized tin, so that the white noise of the rain was just overwhelming. As for that though, I was satisfied; I'd had enough music and radio for now. More to the point it was time to eat. An ancient refrigerator in our kitchen ran on a kerosene flame. No electricity. Nothing but a flame! I couldn’t explain this, but it worked, and in any case, on the top shelf of this miracle appliance was a leftover rice casserole my mother had left for me, and I was just getting down to eating some of it bachelor style at the sink when there was a good hard knocking at the study door. Sighing, I went to answer it. 

“Husat i stap?" I called out from my side. 

“Mi tasol.” Oh Pastor Kaipas. I turned the skeleton key in its chamber. The door opened inward. 

“Yu laik i kam insait?” I asked.
“Nogat, mi stap orait.”
“Tasol yumi no ken toktok stret.” 

He hesitated, then stepped in. The previous night he had come and told us he would not be able to come to the sing-sing, though Lulyakulwe would. He, Kaipas, had some sick people way out in the bush to visit--members of his parish. So that's where he had been all this day and why he was just getting back: the ways muddy and the weather wet.

Just inside the door lay a large oval throw rug–one of those rugs made of multi-colored fabric-extras all tied together. Kaipas chose to stand on that rug–an island of sorts, in the way that New Guinea was an island. As I shut the door, he folded his black umbrella and shook it gently so the water drops fell onto the rug. By this time it was raining more gently on the roof, in a kind of pattery whisper--Lulyakulwe's acoustic cousin. Kaipas asked how I was doing. Fine, I answered, fine. What about the house, he asked. Was everything at the house okay, or had anything happened nearby while he was away? I told him no, no, everything was fine. 

"Olsem wanem na yu no go wantaim papamama bilong yu?"

Then why had I not gone with my parents? Well that was a question wasn't it? The sixty four thousand dollar question. And I was still considering how to answer it and what sort of excuse to give when I found myself under the full bemused and magnifying power of his gaze. Yes there in the study Kaipas studied me, cocking his head like a bird. It was as if he had noticed something on my chin: a bug maybe or a maybe the smear of something, or heck maybe the smear of a bug. The rice casserole, I thought. A grain of rice casserole was stuck to my face. I tried to brush it off with my hand.

“Nogat, nogat,” he said. Smiling unwaveringly, he reached out and touched my chin. The touch of a bird’s feather couldn’t have been lighter. 

“Mausgras bilong yu i kamap,” he said. Your beard is coming.

And that was the end of our conversation, the simple answer to everything: "mausgras bilong yu i kamap." My visitor wished me good night--

"Gunait."
"Gunait."

--opened the door, spread his umbrella, drew out his flashlight, and set off again out into the rain: O voyager, O shepherd of souls, O comforter of the sick and teacher of pidgin to me. His light-beam bobbed in the wet dark until it disappeared, and then I shut the door. Mausgras bilong mi i kamap. Good phrase. I was a lucky man: young, white, manly at the chin, with people who understood me.

HB