Going nowhere, going backwards, standing still

A few years ago I came upon the delicate corpse of a mourning dove while out for a jog along a farm road. It was no longer a bird, but a thing—smooth and still and grey like a faded, misshapen aluminum can. I could not bring myself to touch its smallness, its cavernous deadness, but for some reason, I had to take it with me. Perhaps I could understand its odd power by drawing it, preserving it in the flash of iris and pencil. So I trotted the rest of the way home and drove back to the place in my van as the sun set.

I scooped up the bird the way people scoop dog-doo, my hand swathed in a triple layer of plastic grocery bags. Then a tidy knot, another, and into the freezer it went, right next to the peas.

For some reason I think of this as I drive the massive bridge over the Missouri River, somewhere in the scrolling flatness of South Dakota. My boyfriend sits beside me—we are taking a road trip to say goodbye before a winter of separation. Looking out at the water’s pewter surface—swirled looping and lazy past massive sandbars, rubbing through the comb of bridge supports—I feel the sad tug of impermanence. I have been reading about the force of glaciers, the persistent action of water, and it seems I can feel the river tearing the earth, the bridge—everything—seaward.

From where does this vast river flow? I picture slabby, mountainous places with clinging aspens, brief brilliant gold leaves that fade to black and fall in the wind, rot and disintegrate in the water. All the bones of things wearing down—smooth and white like riverstone, or pulpy like forest mulch—and then nothing but a whisper of powder, a spindrift on the ocean floor. Morbid thoughts, maybe.

But I feel a sweetness in this—the evening light on our faces, the preciousness of small things. His knuckles on the gearshift, the bugspatter on the windshield, peanuts. We are a quick, hot breath, a leaf flicker, a bird. And so we spin east, away from the setting sun, so fast we are going nowhere, going backwards, standing still. The night will bury us and the morning will greet us.

Marginally valuing the tolling bell

At work, I am playing with Google Earth. Doodling geographically. I am looking down on Los Angeles from what the software tells me is a mile up. I decide to leave, and shoot up from one point on this digitally quilted globe, catapulting towards another. It strikes me that traveling along this mathematically beautiful arc, I might be a ballistic missile.

Below me as I fly, I can see thousands of little icons, most of them a lower-case i, that represent all of the points of interest indicated by other digital explorers in their wanderings. One visitor has marked the locations of every important battle in French history. Another, presumably a pilot, has marked every airport on the globe—mostly in obscure places like Kamchatka—where he has touched down. A surprising number mark green circles of center-pivot irrigation and ask, “What are these??????”

I reach the apogee of my arc and begin to descend, when over the Arab peninsula, amid a sea of little i’s, I see another icon. It is an ant marking the approximate center of a sea of dunes in the United Arab Emirates to the southwest of Abu Dhabi. I click, and up pops a photo of a small, brown ant identified as a specimen of Leptothorax liviae, collected in the area on December 3, 1994.

Zooming out and spinning the globe, I notice that it is covered with these ants, every one noting a different ant. In the ignorant static of “What is this????”, each is a bell-clear signal, a ringing thread tying this virtual earth with our own.

***

After my Natural Resource Economics class Monday evening, I am with Saqib in the stairwell. He stands half a flight above me and we talk across the banisters. He describes to me a game:

“Imagine you are in a concert hall with 1,000 other people,” he says. “A man comes out onto the stage and announces, matter-of-factly, that in 15 minutes, a low level of toxic gas in the room will kill one of you. Death will be quick and painless, he says, and begins to take bids on the right to exit.”

“How much are you willing to pay to leave the concert hall?” he asks.

The bell, as they say, is tolling.

“Not very much—maybe the change in my pocket,” I say. For me, one in a thousand, it is only tolling very dimly. Saqib doesn’t hear the bell. He wouldn’t pay anything.

“But if the auctioneer were to ask the man sitting next to you, or the woman across the aisle, he might get a very different answer. One of those people might offer one thousand dollars, the other, one million,” Saqib says.

I wonder. Why do these people value their lives so highly against such seemingly infinitesimal risk? If they were to buy a lottery ticket and read off the back that the winning odds were one in a thousand, would they feel so sure of their payday that they’d head straight to the Ferrari dealer?

On the other hand, why do I value my own so little? While one in a thousand doesn’t seem like much, it’s also roughly the chance of my being injured or killed in a car accident this year, and it’s something I’m aware of as I drive.

I alter the calculus of Saqib's question. “What if you were in the theater with your seven year old son?” I ask Saqib. “How does that change your answer?”

Saqib says he’ll think about it, and heads up the stairs. I head out of the building.

Economists play these sorts of games with people all the time, in an effort to put some value on the invaluable, to quantify and render manageable those things we normally think of as priceless.

Or valueless. I remember the ants marked on the globe. How should or can we value them, on these thin margins where our small, individual movements, the seemingly meaningless actions that when aggregated across our billions—another thousand miles of road layed, another 50 oil wells sunk, another ton of carbon dioxide emitted—can tip the balance between their existence and their extinction? In dollars? In human lives?

this is a test. this is only a test.