Sixty Days and Counting (37 page)

He had understood entirely. Put such a box in a tree, and you had your treetop view as well. Put the box in a book and you had
Walden
. Put the box on wheels and you had your VW van. Frank printed the passage out and stuck it on the wall the next time he was at the fregan potluck. They too had found the key. He ate with them about three nights a week, all over Northwest, in house after house. There were feral subcultures: there was a farmers’ market wing, and a hunters’ crowd, and dumpster purists, and many other ways of going feral in the city.

At work Frank was making wonderful strides with the guy from OMB who was administering the Fix-it program that Anna had rediscovered. His name too was Henry, and he worked with Roy and Andrea and the rest of the White House brain trust. Right now, he and Frank were teaming up on the clean-energy part of the mission architecture. The Navy had made an agreement with the Navajo nation to build and run a prototype nuclear power plant that would reuse fuel rods and was overengineered for safety. Meanwhile Southern California Edison had agreed to build a dozen more Stirling heat engine solar-power generators, for themselves and other energy companies around the American West, and for some federal plants that were going to be built on BLM land, using a federal grant program. SCE had also won the contract to build the first big generation of fully clean coal plants, which would capture both the particulates and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on firing, so that all they would be releasing from the pipe was steam. The first plants were to be built in Oklahoma, and the CO
₂
collected in the process was to be injected into nearby depleted oil wells. Oil wells nearby that were still working would look to see if they got any uptick in pressure differentials, making for a complete systems test.

“Sweet,” the OMB Henry commented. He was about thirty, it seemed to Frank, utterly fresh and determined. He was unfazed by the past, even unaware of it. The defeats and obstructions, the nightmarish beginning to the century, so balked and stupidified; none of that meant a thing to him. And Washington had hundreds of these kids ready to rip. The world was full of them. He said, “That’s a good big subunit of the whole mission architecture, up and running.”

“True,” Frank said. “I think the question now is how quick we can ramp production up to what we need.”

“I wonder how much investment capital is out there. Or whether trained labor will be the real shortage.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“That’s a good thought.” And young Henry grinned.

Evening in the park, and Frank buzzed Spencer and joined him and Robin and Robert at a new fregan house. East, into a neighborhood he had never been in before, a kind of border between gentrification and urban decay, in which burned or boarded-up buildings stood mutely between renovated towers guarded by private security people. An awkward mix it seemed, and yet once inside the boarded-up shell of a brownstone, it proved to be as sheltered from the public life of the city as any other place. Home was where the food was.

Same crowd as always, a mix of young and old. Neo-hippie and postpunk. Some new thing that Frank couldn’t name with a media label. The fregan way. Mix of races, ethnicities, modes of operation. A potluck indeed. It was like this every night in so many different places around Northwest. What was happening in Washington, D.C.? What was happening anywhere else, everywhere else? No one could be sure. The media was a concocted product, reporting only a small fraction of the culture. What would they do for a sense of the zeitgeist when the culture had fractalized and the media become not a mirror, but one artifact among many? Had it ever been any different? Was this somehow new? If people walked away from the old mass culture of mass consumption, and everybody did something homegrown, what would that look like?

“How many fregan houses are there altogether, do you suppose?” Frank asked Spencer as they sat on the floor over their plates.

Spencer shrugged. “Lots I guess.”

“How do you choose which to go to?”

“Friends spread the word. I generally know by five, or Robert.”

“Not Robin?”

“Robin usually just goes where we go. You know Robin. He barely knows what city we’re in.”

“What
planet
is this?” Robin asked from behind them.

“See? He doesn’t want to be distracted with irrelevancies. Anyway, you can always call me.”

“I only have my FOG phone now,” Frank said. “And even that I’m trying not to use too much. I want to stay off the grid when I’m not at work.”

“I know,” Spencer said as he chewed, glancing at Frank speculatively. He swallowed. “I should tell you, no one can guarantee this group doesn’t have all the various kinds of informants in it. You know. It’s loose at the edges, and law enforcement is kind of nervous about the feral concept. I’ve heard there are people taking money from the FBI just to make some bucks, and they tell them all sorts of things.”

“Of course.” Frank looked around. No one looked like an informant.

Spencer went back to wolfing down his meal. There was a big crowd tonight and there wasn’t going to be quite enough food. At the start of every potluck they had all started to say a little thanksgiving. In most houses, they all said together, “Enough is as good as a feast,” sometimes repeating it three or four times. Maybe that was the third great correlation, enough and happiness. Or maybe it was science and Buddhism. Or compassion and action. No, these were too general. It was still out there.

Some of Spencer’s friends sat down, and he introduced them to Frank, and Frank leaned forward squinting, repeating their names. He joined their chat about the windy autumn, the park, the cops, feral gossip. Apparently this group was going back over west of Connecticut the next night.

“Do you ever see the jaguar?” Frank asked them.

“Yeah, I saw it once I think, but it was at night you know.”

The young women were happy to have Spencer’s attention. Frank was regarded by them in the same way they regarded the other older single males in the room, meaning a bit distantly if at all.

Eventually Frank left. His treehouse had been nearby. Long walk down Piney Branch Parkway to his VW van, sleep on that nice mattress, cold breeze flowing down the window at the back of the pop-up.

Thus the feral life, the most extreme set of habits Frank had lived so far. A life on foot, hand to mouth, among friends and strangers. Maybe this was how people lived, no matter what. He googled to see if any studies had been done to determine how quickly new habits were internalized as a norm. Every Wednesday he went by the dead drop and found his note from the week before. It was disturbing, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to remember what Edgardo had said about that, and trust that he had been conveying to him the actual facts of the situation, rather than merely speculating. He had made it clear enough. Time to refocus on the moment. Ride the wave.

CUT TO THE CHASE

Response to response 4:

Yes, I suppose it was hard to talk about, because it seemed like it broke down in one of two ways, because people were asking: Is it too late or not? And it seemed like this:

If it isn’t too late, we don’t have to do anything.

On the other hand, if it is too late, we don’t have to do anything.

So either way, don’t do anything. That was the problem with that way of putting the question. What we came to realize was that it was a false problem or a question put the wrong way, because there was never going to be a too late. It was always going to stay a question of better or worse. It was more a question of, okay, how fast can we act? How much can we save? Those are the questions we should be asking.

Response to Response 5,692:

Because there was no liberal media bias, that’s why! That was all a myth. The rules of capitalism favor size and the economies of scale, and so the big corporations, following all relevant legal opportunities, bought up all the mainstream media. Then the message went out coordinated by constant feedback and dialogue using only a certain limited vocabulary and logic, all within a kind of groupthink, until all the media said the same thing: buy things! This moment in history is a good one and will last forever! Nothing can change, so buy things.

But then this weather thing came along. It put the lie to the reality we believed in. So that all began to look a little fishy.

Response to Response 1 to Response to Response 5,692:

Lots of reporters are young, and so they’re locked into an Oedipal hatred of the baby-boomer generation. They hated the boomers for what we were given when we were young, the world gone for just the briefest moment out of its mind into a realm of sex drugs and rock and roll, of revolution and war and history right there in our hands, a time of excess and joy, a feeling that things could still change—a freedom that was so extreme no one who was there can even remember it properly, and no one who wasn’t there can imagine it, because it was before AIDS and crack and meth and terrorism had returned everything to something like the weird and violent Victorian repression/transgression state of fear that we’ve all been living in these past years. So I see a fair bit of resentment. You old Vietnam vet, I see their eyes saying, you old hippie, you got lucky and were born in the right little window and got to grab all the surplus of happiness that history ever produced, and you blew it, you stood around and did nothing while the right reaganed back into power and shut down all possibility of change for an entire generation, you blew it in a ten-year party and staggered off stoned and complicit. You neither learned to do machine politics nor dismantled the machine. Not one of you imagined what had to be done. And so the backlash came down, the reactionary power structure, stronger than ever. And now we’re the ones who have to pay the price for that. You can see why there might be a little resentment.

Okay—say we did. Well, no wonder. We didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have the slightest idea. There was no model to follow, we were out in the vacuum of a new reality, blowing it and then crashing back to Earth—it was a crazy time. It went by too fast. We didn’t really get it until later, what we needed to do. Where the power was, and how we could use it, and why it was important to spread it around better.

So. No more blaming the past. Be here now. Now we know better, so let’s see if we can do better. After all, if we boomers try to get it right now, it could be better than ever. We could make it right for the grandkids and get a late redemption call. That’s my plan anyway.

O
NE DAY SPENCER CALLED FRANK
on his FOG phone.

“Hey Frank, did you check out your Emerson for the day?”

Frank had everyone reading it now: Diane, Spencer, Robin; even Edgardo, who only rolled his eyes and questioned the intelligence of any optimist. “No,” he said now to Spencer.

“Well here, listen to it. ‘I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious maneuver for hours.” Well, human life is made up of such transits.’—Did you hear that, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, saying that
life
is like
surfing
? Is that great or
what
?”

“Yes, that’s pretty great. That’s our man.”

“Who was this guy? Do you think somebody’s making all these quotes up?”

“No, I think Emerson made them up.”

“It’s so perfect. He’s like your Dalai Lama.”

“That’s very true.”

“The Waldo Lama. He’s like the great shaman of the forest.”

“It’s true, he is. Although even more so his buddy Thoreau, when it comes to the actual forest.”

“Yeah that’s right. Your treehouse guru. The man in the box. They are
teaching you,
baby!”

“You’re teaching me.”

“Yes I am. Well okay then, bro, surf your way up here and we’ll tee off at around five.”

“Okay, I’ll try to be there.”

In all the wandering, work was his anchor, his norming function. The only thing that was the same every day. These days he put in his hours focusing on the many problems cropping up as they tried to convince all the relevant agencies and institutions to act on their various parts of the mission architecture. They were also obtaining UN and national approvals for the sea water relocation projects. Holland was taking the lead here, also England, and really most countries wanted the stabilization, so the will was there, but problems were endless. The war of the agencies had gone incandescent in certain zones, and was coming to a kind of climax of the moment, as resistance to Diane’s mission architecture and the Fix-it coordinating efforts flared up in the Treasury Department and Interior and Commerce, big agencies all.

The technical issues in powering a massive relocation of sea water were becoming more and more naked to them. They mostly involved matters of scale or sheer number. Floating platforms like giant rafts could be anchored next to a coastline, and they could move about, they did not have to have a fixed location. Pumps were straightforward, although they had never wanted pumps so large and powerful before. Pipelines could be adapted from the oil and gas industry, although they wanted much bigger pipes if they could power them. Power remained the biggest concern, but if the rafts held an array of solar panels big enough, then they could be autonomous units, floating wherever they wanted them. Pipelines in the northern hemisphere had to be run overland to the playas they wanted to fill. China and Morocco and Mauritania had been the first to agree to run prototype systems, and other countries in central Asia had jumped on board.

Down in Antarctica, they could set them anywhere around the big eastern half of the continent, and run heated pipelines up to the polar plateau, where several depressions would serve as catchment basins. Cold made things more complicated down there technologically, but politically it was infinitely easier. SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, had approved the idea of the project, and they were as close to a government as Antarctica had, as the Antarctic Treaty signatory nations never met, and never kept to the treaty’s rules whether they met or not. In many senses NSF was the true government of Antarctica, and the relevant people at NSF were good to go. They saw the need. Saving the world so science could proceed: the Frank Principle was standard operating procedure at NSF. It went without saying.