Hot air: a gas rant

On my fourth evening as an Aspenite, I went to a film called “A Land Out of Time” about the West’s current oil and gas boom. As a newly initiated citizen of this rich, progressive place and a native of similarly Green and ritzy Boulder, Colorado, I sought solidarity with other liberal folk in booing the heavy impacts of the booming natural gas industry and the wretched, short-sighted management (read: exploitation) of public lands under the current administration.

The film’s images and interwoven storylines snag the heart—spectacular scenery webbed with roads and well pads, sloppy pits full of toxic drilling fluid, fifth generation ranchers with herds of poisoned cattle roaming a fractured range, High Country News founder Tom Bell walking at sunset through Wyoming’s Red Desert, his professed spiritual home since coming back from the war in 1944 that is now a hotbed for oil and gas development.

The audience was rapt, and so was I. 'Yes, yes, save the land! Fight the man!' cried a wee voice inside me, spurring my head to nod vigorously in agreement like a dashboard bobble head doll. The film felt right; it is right. You should fight for the places you love, Americans should fight for their birthright to healthy public lands. And, as the film points out, that’s just what’s happening—the oil and gas free-for-all has spurred an upwelling of grassroots and local government action from Montana to New Mexico. People from all walks of life are plain pissed off. Nobody wants a gas drill rig popping up in their backyard or beside their favorite hiking trail.

But there is a strangeness to seeing a film like this in a place renowned for its conspicuous consumption. Though local policies are remarkable for their environmental correctness and citizen groundswell is responsible for the spectacular designated wildernesses in the area, expensive impored designer labels prevail in local fashion, along with massive SUVs, Humvees, private jets, and a vast spread of personal holiday castles that Pitkin County commissioner Mike Owsley once called a “landscape of beached cruise ships.” After all, natural gas and other fossil fuels are booming because there’s a market for them.

About 15 minutes into the film, Dick Cheney appears onscreen, pontificating about the backward logic of politicians who, during the perceived energy shortage of the 1970s, asked Americans “to do more with less.” Naturally, many in the audience hissed, because everyone here knows that Cheney is really the arch villain skeletor, and unlike Cheney, most of my compatriots in the theatre probably believe in conservation. But Cheney made me wonder how much any of us here in fat-living Aspen and the West at large are willing to sacrifice to reverse the wholesale destruction of public and private lands for energy.

Sure, we can fight the natural gas well down the street or near that favorite fishing hole, and we ought to. But if we don’t decrease our own demand for fossil fuels and energy in general, from the foods we choose to eat to the ways we make a living to how we entertain ourselves, we’ll just transport the problem elsewhere. For example, our desire to travel quickly to harsh, rugged places like the Aspen area and stay or live there in luxury and comfort contribute to our immense, growing national appetite for these resources, no matter how dearly we love the land.

This contradiction is widespread wherever conflicts over energy development are hot. One of the film’s more (unintentionally) poignant moments occurs as narrator Tom Bell talks about the anti-drilling grassroots efforts of the “just plain folks” of Choteau, Montana on the Rocky Mountain Front: a spanking new maroon Humvee rolls across the screen on Choteau’s main street, presumably driven by “just plain folks.”

As the crowd poured out of the theater after the film, I overheard a woman ahead of me say to her friend, “now we just have to find a way to get the unbelievers to see this.” She clearly meant that showing the film in Aspen was like preaching to the choir. But looking out over the flood of down, fur, and fleece clad folk, I was not altogether sure this was the wrong audience.

Subsumed by the hive mind!

I walked into the Academic Affairs office the other day armed with an agenda--I would lay it clear that my program was not meeting my needs and that I needed to negotiate a change. But as I sat down in the institutional metal chair on the opposite side of the desk from the Associate Director of Academic Affairs (hereafter ADAA, pronounced as acronyms in the military, phonetically--Aydah--as opposed to spelled out) and she commenced our meeting, I changed. The hive mind demanded it.

Actually, I wilted some time before this. I did not tell ADAA that I had come to demand a change in situation. It was with all the independence that I could muster, in fact, that I wrote ADAA to ask if it were possible to perhaps to humbly inquire as to the prudence of maybe cross-registering for a course in the Environmental Management program.

After I sat down in that chair, palms sticky from the sweat of my repressed rebellion, she and I danced the kabuki that workers and queens do, she setting the bounds of our discussion, asking me to provide relevant information, and I obliging, she analyzing and I elaborating, both of us always the subjects of our relationship and not its choreographers. And the perfunctory end--with some further instructions in hand and a satisfied beating of wings, I buzzed off, as it were.

When I look at what I've done the past few months, this is the pattern. I have been agentless, performing within the strictures of the comb the role I am designed to play as a student. And I am amazed, because while I try to actively seek ways in which to remold my relationships with the hive, my body and mind are constantly drawn to dancing its dance and thinking its thoughts.

On mountains and volcanoes

I am looking for a job. Jobs, according to popular wisdom, are vital to independence, survival, and success. Each job is a step in a winding staircase off the landing of higher education, ascending, hopefully, to “career!” and ultimately, “fulfillment!” I have not arrived at either just yet, and find the staircase to be riddled with intriguing secret passage ways, booby traps, and cobwebbed chutes. Such mysteries draw me away from the sacred quest for Meaningful Employment to pursue esoteric crafts and short, seasonal commitments that give me over to the sky and the mountains for the day to get dirty and, as a happy bi-product, get paid. So this fall, with another sun-burnt summer of hard labor in Colorado’s Mount Massive Wilderness behind me, I find myself jobless and without prospect for the third or fourth time in two years. Panic!

It’s the well-meaning questions that bring on the cold sweats: “Sarah! What have you been up to? Really? Um, interesting. . .What’s next?” This last bit, delivered with a piercing laser stare and sharky grin, seems to say, “and when are you going to do something relevant that draws on your bachelor’s degree, hmm?” “Ah,” I’ll say, my heartbeat bursting into a staccato sprint, “I, uh, hey! Is that a hobo spider crawling out of your collar?! Gotta run!”

Once I’ve escaped the prying well-wishers, I hunker down for hours at the local coffee shop, surfing the internet for the Perfect Colorado Job, preferably something having to do with writing or conservation that is located in a quaint yet sophisticated mountain hamlet with affordable housing and no ski industry. Naturally, this job does not exist (nor does the cute hamlet), so I apply for close approximations in Aspen and Durango, thinking, “my progress in life depends on landing one of these writing jobs NOW and never working as a trail grunt again.”

Then, the wait begins. Unemployment seems to be about waiting, and this makes me long for the regimental routine of a job—my life structured into neat eight hour blocks of labor, each week punctuated by a 48-hour play time. How easy things would be then, I think, and how fulfilling. But for now, I settle for twiddling my thumbs and a hungry sense of purposelessness—I have no answers, it seems, not yet.

So when I go to meet my friend Elise, a successful producer for Colorado Public Radio, for her birthday, I prepare myself for the usual painful barrage of “what next?”s from her friends. Instead, I meet Alec. Alec is a thin fellow with sunken tubercular eyes and a stiff demeanor. He seems nice enough until he turns to me sympathetically and says “So, I hear you’re unemployed. Me too.” He smiles sadly and offers me his fist, as though there is some secret handshake for the pathetic, jobless masses. I smile back, and give his knuckles a cursory punch, hoping he won’t pursue the topic any further. Alas, he forges ahead with a 20 minute litany of self-pitying gripes: his talents are going to waste, teaching doesn’t allow enough space for personal accomplishment, there is no staff turnover at non-profits, he is finally (sigh) settling on restaurant work, bussing or waiting tables. “Hmm,” I say, my eyes glazing over as I fumble for an adequate response to provide him with the solidarity he seems to crave. But I can’t do it—I feel different from Alec somehow. Lighter, maybe, like this is something I’ve chosen rather than a yoke upon my shoulders.

As I drive home alone later, I crab along in traffic—the lock of cars pulsing forward then slowing to a crawl, then pulsing forward again in an irregular rhythm. I drive under complicated mouse trap overpasses, past prefabricated beige homes, me and my battered van caught in the ebb and flow of the city’s heartbeat. This is structure, this is routine, this is waiting, I think, this traffic, these jobs leading to these sprawling houses, these fabricated, packaged dreams of big screen TVs, powerful cars and 2.3 blond children. Is this what I want?

I mull the question as I arrive home, unlock the door, plop down on my parents’ couch and turn to the refuge of the unemployed everywhere: daytime television. There is a documentary on the History Channel about the Yellowstone super volcano. When the thing finally blows, the narrator intones ominously, everything within a hundred mile radius will be incinerated in a matter of minutes by pyroclastic gas and ash flows. The ash cloud, ascending tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere, will fill western airspace with tiny glass shards that shred your internal organs from the inside. Natural disasters are the ultimate benchmark: human endeavors shrink in the face of volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, tsunamis. What matters then? If I were to die with hundreds of thousands of others in a massive volcanic eruption, would I be glad for all the days spent plugging away in an office towards some abstract goal? Would my accomplishments weigh more than my animal contentment at scrambling up a mountainside at sunrise to snack on almonds and chat with friends? Given my history as an obsessive achiever and my recent, desperate drive for employment, the answer surprises me: No.

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.