Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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He knew he was on the prairie, what had once been part of the enormous North American grassland extending from Canada to Mexico, showing its thousand faces to successions of travelers who described it in contradictory ways: under gritty spring wind the grass blew sideways, figured with bluets and anemones and pussytoes and Johnny-jump-ups, alive with birds and antelope; in midsummer, away from the overgrazed trail margins, they traveled through groin-high grass rolling in waves; those on the trail saw dry, useless desert studded with horse-crippling cactus. Few, expected working cowboys, ventured onto the plains in winter when stringing northers swept snow across it. Where once the howling of wolves was heard, now sounded the howl of tires.
Bob Dollar had no idea he was driving into a region of immeasurable natural complexity that some believed abused beyond saving. He saw only what others had seen – the bigness, pump jacks nodding pterodactyl heads, road alligators cast off from the big semi tires. Every few miles a red-tailed hawk marked its hunting boundary. The edges of the road were misty with purple-flowered wild mustard whose rank scent embittered the air. He said to the rearview mirror, “some flat-ass place.” Though it seemed he was not so much in a place as confronting the raw material of human use.
A white van turned out of a side road in front of him and he narrowed his eyes; he knew white vans were favored by the criminally insane and escaped convicts, that the bad drivers of the world gravitated to them. There appeared, far ahead, on the other side of the road, a wambling black dot that resolved into a bicyclist. A trick of the heated air magnified the bicycle, which appeared thirty feet high and shivered as though constructed of aspic. He passed another hawk on a telephone pole.
The great prairie dog cities of the short-grass plains which once covered hundreds of square miles were gone, but some old-fashioned red-tails continued to hunt as their ancestors in flat-shouldered soar, turning methodically in the air above the prairie, yellow eyes watching for the shiver of grass. Many more had taken up modern ways and sat atop convenient poles and posts waiting for vehicles to clip rabbits and prairie dogs. They retrieved the carrion with the insolent matter-of-factness of a housewife carelessly slinging a package of chops into her shopping cart. Such a hawk, a bit of fur stuck to the side of its beak, watched the bicyclist pump along west. As the machine moved slowly through the focus of those amber eyes, the bird lost interest; the bicycle had no future in the hawk’s world; more rewarding were trucks on the paved highways, grilles spattered with blood, weaving pickups that aimed for jacks and snakes as though directed by the superior will on a telephone pole.
The bicyclist, reduced to human size, and Bob Dollar, in his sedan, drew abreast; the bicyclist saw a red-flushed face, Bob had a glimpse of a stringy leg and a gold chain, then the bicycle descended a dip in the road. Alone on the highways again Bob squinted at a wadded quilt of clouds crawling over the sky. There unrolled beside the Saturn the level land, every inch put to use for crops, oil, gas, cattle, service towns. The ranches were set far back from the main road, and now and then he passed an abandoned house, weather-burned, surrounded by broken cottonwoods. In the fallen wind mills and collapsed out buildings, he saw the country’s fractured past scattered about like the pencils on the desk of a draughtsman who has gone to lunch. The ancestors of the place hovered over the bits and pieces of their finished lives. He did not notice the prairie dog that raced out of the roadside weeds into his path and the tires bumped slightly as if he hit it. A female red-tail lifted into the air. It was the break she had been waiting for.
My world then – silent, soft, and vegetable-like in its vulnerability, subject to the powerful whims of others, diurnal, beginning with the pale opening of light on the horizon each morning and ending with the sudden onset of dark at the beginning of each night – was both a mystery to me and the source of much pleasure: I loved the face of a gray sky, porous, grainy, wet, following me to school for mornings on end, sending down on me soft arrows of water; the face of that same sky when it was a hard, unsheltering blue, a backdrop for a cruel sun; the harsh heat that eventually became a part of me, like my blood; the overbearing trees (the stems of some of them the size of small trunks) that grew without restraint, as if beauty were only size, and I could tell them all apart by closing my eyes and listening to the sound the leaves made when they rubbed together; and I loved that moment when the white flowers from the cedar tree started to fall to the ground with a silence that I could hear, their petals at first still fresh, a soft kiss of pink and white, then a day later, crushed, wilted, and brown, a nuisance to the eye; and the river that had become a small lagoon when one day on its own it had changed course, on whose bank I would sit and watch families of birds, and frogs lay their eggs, and the sky turning from black to blue and blue to black, and rain falling on the sea beyond the lagoon but not on the mountain that was beyond the sea. It was while sitting in this place that I first began to dream about my mother; I had fallen asleep on the stones that covered the ground around me, my small body sinking into this surface as if it were feathers. I saw my mother come down a ladder. She wore a long white gown, the hem of it falling just above her heels, and that was all of her that was exposed, just her heels; she came down and down, but no more of her was ever revealed. Only her heels, and the hem of her gown. At first I longed to see more, and then I became satisfied just to see her heels coming down toward me. When I awoke, I was not the same child I had been before I fell asleep. I longed to see my father and to be in his presence constantly.
[…]
I could not see the look on my father’s face as he rode, I did not know what he was thinking. I did not know him well enough to guess. He set off down the road in the opposite direction from the schoolhouse. The stretch of road was new to me, and yet it had a familiarity that made me sad. Around each bend was the familiar dark green of the trees that grew with ferociousness that no hand had yet attempted to restrain, a green so unrelenting that it attained great beauty and great ugliness and yet great humility all at once; it was itself: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be taken away from it. Each precipice along the road was steep and dangerous, and a fall down one of them would have resulted in death or a lasting injury. And each climb up was followed by a slope down, at the bottom of which was the same choke of flowering plants, each with a purpose not yet known to me. And each curve that ran left would soon give way to a curve that ran right.
The day began to have the colors of an ending, the colors of a funeral, gray, mauve, black; my sadness inside became manifest to me. I was a part of a procession of sadness, which was moving away from my old life, a life I had lived for only seven years. I did not become overwhelmed, though. The dark of the night came on with its usual suddenness, without warning. Again, I did not become overwhelmed. My father placed an arm around me, as if to ward off something – a danger I could not see in the cool air, an evil spirit, a fall. His clasp was at first gentle; then it grew until it had the strength of an iron band; but even then, I did not become overwhelmed.
[…]
I came to my father’s house in the blanket of voluptuous blackness that was the night; a morning naturally followed. I awoke in the false paradise into which I was born, the false paradise in which I will die, the same landscape that I had always known, each aspect of it beyond reproach, at once beautiful, ugly, humble, and proud; full of life, full of death, able to sustain the one, inevitably to claim the other.
There was a law against Luke.
Not him personally – everyone like him, kids who were born after their parents had already had two babies.
Actually, Luke didn’t know if there was anyone else like him. He wasn’t supposed to exist. Maybe he was the only one. They did things to women after they had their second baby, so they wouldn’t have anymore. And if there was a mistake, and a woman got pregnant anyways, she was supposed to get rid of it.
That was how Mother had explained it, years ago, the first time Luke had asked why he had to hide.
He had been six years old.
Before that, he had thought only very little kids had to stay out of sight. He had thought, as soon as he was as old as Mathew and Mark, he would get to go around like they did, riding to the back fields and even into town with dad, hanging their heads and arms out of the pickup window. He had thought, as soon as he got as old as Mathew and Mark, he could play in the front yard and kick the ball out in the road if he wanted. He had thought, as soon as he got as old as Mathew and Mark, he could go to school. They complained about it, whining, “Jeez, we gotta do homework!” and, “Who cares about spelling?” But they also talked about games at recess, and friends who shared candy at lunchtime or loaned them pocketknives to carve with.
Somehow, Luke never got as old as Mathew and Mark.
The day of his sixth birthday, Mother baked a cake, a special one with raspberry jam dripping down the sides. At supper that night, she put six candles on the top and placed it in front of Luke and said “Make a wish.”
Staring into the ring of candles – proud that the number of his years finally made a ring, all around the cake – Luke suddenly remembered another cake, another ring of six candled. Mark’s. He remembered it because, even with the cake in front of him, Mark had been whining, “But I wanna have a party. Robert Joe had a party on his birthday. He got to have three friends over.” Mother had said “Shh,” and looked from Mark to Luke, saying something with her eyes that Luke didn’t understand.
Startled by the memory, Luke let out his breath. Two of his candles flickered, and one went out. Mathew and Mark laughed.
“You ain’t getting that wish,” Mark said. “Baby. Can’t even blow out candles.”
Luke wanted to cry. He’d forgotten even to make a wish, and if he hadn’t been surprised he would have been able to blow out all six candles. He knew he could have. And then he would have gotten – oh, he didn’t know. A chance to ride to town in the pickup truck. A chance to play in the front yard. A chance to go to school. Instead, all he had was a strange memory that couldn’t be right. Surely Luke was thinking about Mark’s seventh birthday, or maybe his eighth. Mark couldn’t have known Robert Joe when he was six, because he would have been hiding then, like Luke.
Luke thought about it for three days. He trailed along behind his mother as she hung wash out on the line, made strawberry preserves, scrubbed the bathroom floor. Several times he started to ask, “How old do I have to be before people can see me?” But something stopped him everytime.
There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.
In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which (so I’m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of it. Black smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness factories and hung over the city like bad news.
And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, who’s cheerfulness was famous throughout the metropolis, and who’s never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years, Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father’s ready laughter and his mother’s sweet voice raised in song.
Then something went wrong. (Maybe the sadness of the city finally crept in through their windows.)
The day Soraya stopped singing, in the middle of a line, as if something had thrown a switch, Haroun guessed there was trouble brewing. But he never suspected how much.
~ ~ ~
Rashid Khalifa was so busy making up and telling stories that he didn’t notice that Soraya no longer sang; which probably made things worse. But then Rashid was a busy man, in constant demand, he was the Ocean of Notions, the famous Shah of Blah. And what with all his rehearsals and performances, Rashid was so often on stage that he lost track of what was going on in his own home. He sped around the city and the country telling stories, while Soraya stayed home, turning cloudy and even a little thunderous and brewing up quite a storm.
Haroun went with his father whenever he could, because the man was a magician, it couldn’t be denied. He would climb up onto some little makeshift stage in a dead-end alley packed with raggedy children and toothless old-timers, all squatting in the dust; and once he got going, even the city’s many wandering cows would stop and cock their ears, and monkeys would jabber approvingly from rooftops and the parrots in the trees would imitate his voice.
Haroun often thought of his father as a Juggler, because his stories were really lots of different tales juggled together, and Rashid kept them going in a story of dizzy whirl, and never made a mistake.
Where did all the stories come from? It seemed all Rashid had to do was to put his lips in a plump red smile and out would pop some brand-new saga, complete with sorcery, love-interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, mustachioed gangsters in yellow checked pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy, hummable tunes. “Everything comes from somewhere,” Haroun reasoned, “so these stories can’t simply come out of thin air…?”
But whenever he asked his father this most important of questions, the Shah of Blah would narrow his (to tell the truth) slightly bulging eyes, and pat his wobbly stomach, and stick his thumb between his lips while he made ridiculous drinking noises, glug, glug, glug. Haroun hated it when his father acted this way. “No, come on, where do they come from really?” he’d insist, and Rashid would wiggle his eyebrows mysteriously and make witchy fingers in the air.
~ ~ ~
In the sad city, people mostly had big families; but the poor children got sick and starved, while the rich kids overate and quarreled over their parent’s money. Still Haroun wanted to know why his parents hadn’t had more children, but the only answer he ever got from Rashid was no answer at all:
“There’s more to you, young Haroun Khalifa, than meets the blinking eye.”
Well, what was that supposed to mean? “We used up our full quota of child-stuff just in making you.” Rashid explained. “It’s all packed in there, enough for maybe four-five kiddies. Yes, sir, more to you than the blinking eye can see.”
Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured – and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.
When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of goods, and goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every forth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.
He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather.
The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lovely spot of the Taggert estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree’s presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightening struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside – just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.
Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal – the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.
Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a rusty mechanism changing a traffic light sopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness – and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.
He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment’s glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence.
He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once “Whatever is right,” and added, “You ought to do something great … I mean, the two of us together.” “What?” she asked. He said, “I don’t know. That’s what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains.” “What for?” she asked. He said, “The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?” “I don’t know.” “We’ll have to find out.” She did not answer, she was looking away, up the railroad track.
