Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life. It was taught from experience.
No grades were given, but there were oral exams each week. You were expected to respond to questions, and you were expected to pose questions of your own. You were also required to perform physical tasks now and then, such as lifting the professor's head to a comfortable spot on the pillow or placing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Kissing him good-bye earned you extra credit.
No books were required, yet many topics were covered, including love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and, finally, death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words.
A funeral was held in lieu of graduation.
Although no final exam was given, you were expected to produce one long paper on what was learned. That paper is presented here.
The last class of my old professor's life had only one student.
I was the student.
The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study...
Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaska dawn. He didn't appear to be very old: eighteen, maybe nineteen at most. A rifle protruded from the young man's backpack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn't the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the forty-ninth state. Gallien steered his truck onto the shoulder and told the kid to climb in.
The hitchhiker swung his pack into the bed of the Ford and introduced himself as Alex. "Alex?" Gallien responded, fishing for a last name.
"Just Alex," the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. Five feet seven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be twenty-four years old and said he was from South Dakota. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and "live off the land for a few months."
Gallien, a union electrician, was on his way to Anchorage, 240 miles beyond Denali on the George Parks Highway; he told Alex he'd drop him off wherever he wanted. Alex's backpack looked as though it weighed only twenty-five or thirty pounds, which struck Gallien--an accomplished hunter and woodsman--as an improbably light load for a stay of several months in the backcountry, especially so early in the spring. "He wasn't carrying anywhere near as much food and gear as you'd expect a guy to be carrying for that kind of trip," Gallien recalls.
The sun came up. As they rolled down from the forested ridges above the Tanana River, Alex gazed across the expanse of windswept muskeg stretching to the south. Gallien wondered whether he'd picked up one of those crackpots from the lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack London fantasies. Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.
"People from Outside," reports Gallien in a slow, sonorous drawl, "they'll pick up a copy of Alaska magazine, thumb through it, get to thinkin' 'Hey, I'm goin' to get on up there, live off the land, go claim me a piece of the good life.' But when they get here and actually head out into the bush--well, it isn't like the magazines make it out to be. The rivers are big and fast. The mosquitoes eat you alive. Most places, there aren't a lot of animals to hunt. Livin' in the bush isn't no picnic."
Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on cellular phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get his insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable. Kurtz, sick as he is, attempts to escape from Marlow’s riverboat, crawling on all fours like an animal, trying to flee into the jungle. I understood that.
I was going to Africa for the best reason — in a spirit of discovery; and for the pettiest — simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of I dare you to try and find me.
Home had become a routine, and routines make time pass quickly. I was a sitting duck in my predictable routine: people knew when to call me; they knew when I would be at my desk. I was in such regular touch it was like having a job, a mode of life I hated. I was sick of being called up and importuned, asked for favors, hit up for money. You stick around too long and people begin to impose their own deadlines on you. "I need this by the twenty-fifth" or "Please read this by Friday" or "Try to finish this over the weekend" or "Let’s have a conference call on Wednesday." Call me, fax me, e-mail me. You can get me anytime on my cell phone, here’s the number.
Being available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all: no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch. In other words, gone away.
All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission, and in fact in my domestic life things had begun to get a little predictable, too — Mr. Paul at home every evening when Mrs. Paul came home from work. "I made spaghetti sauce . . . I seared some tuna . . . I’m scrubbing some potatoes . . ."The writer in his apron, perspiring over his béchamel sauce, always within earshot of the telephone. You have to pick it up because it is ringing in your ear.
I wanted to drop out. People said, "Get a cell phone, use FedEx, sign up for Hotmail, stop in at Internet cafés, visit my Web site . . ."
I said no thanks. The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff, to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel is not self- improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.
Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many times for far too long.
I am outta here, I told myself. The next Web site I visit will be that of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.
I became aware of it for
the first time when I inhaled and felt my lungs being scratched by nails from
the inside, like someone had thrown red chili powder into my nose. I took another
breath and it didn't change. I clasped my throat and closed my eyes as they started
to burn and water. Something was wrong, my mind screamed wildly as I, along with
the others, tried to seek a reason for the tainted air we were breathing.
Sardarji, who was standing nearby, looked at me, our eyes matching the panic that
was spreading through the railway station. The homeless had started gathering
their meager belongings, while others were standing up, moving, looking around,
asking questions, trying to find out what could be done. Soon it became unbearable
and the exodus began. People started to clamor to get out of the station. The
entrance was jam-packed; heaving bodies slammed against each other as they tried
to squeeze past the small entrance to save their lives. Some people jumped across
the tracks to get to the other platform and look for an exit from there. People
were everywhere, like scrounging ants looking for food.
"Taxi, Memsaab," Sardarji cried out as he came toward me.
I didn't question his generosity and picked up my suitcase and started to run
along with him to the entrance. Our bodies joined the others as we looked for
a small hole, a pathway, out of the railway station. People were running helter-skelter,
trying to breathe. Something is wrong, I thought again, this time in complete
panic, something about the air in the railway station is very wrong.
The struggle to get out of the station became harder because no one could breathe.
My lungs felt like they would implode and even though I tried to suck in as much
air as I could, it was not really air that I was breathing. It was something toxic,
something acrid, something that was burning my insides and scratching my eyes.
Each breath I took made me dizzy and the burning sensation, that terrible burning
sensation, wouldn't go away.
My suitcase and purse got lost somewhere in the crowd, but I was half-crazed with
the need to breathe and forgot about them.
Sardarji was having trouble breathing as well. His voice was high-pitched and
shaky and I could hear him hiss as he tried to breathe. He pointed in the direction
of his taxi and we started running, pushing past people who just like us were
trying to find a way out. It looked like every automobile in the city was out
on the streets. The sound of honking vehicles mingled with the cries for help,
while the city stood bright, lit up with car, scooter, and auto rickshaw headlights,
like a bride covered in gold and diamonds just before her wedding.
"What's happening?" someone screamed.
"Run, out of the city, out of the city!" someone else cried out.
We reached the taxi and as soon as we got inside, people clamored and banged at
the car windows.
For once, compassion failed me. "Drive," I said through my misery, and the engine
mercifully started.
Navigating the taxi out of the crowded parking lot, where cars lay haphazardly
like dead and wounded soldiers in a battlefield, proved to be difficult. Sardarji
tried his best. The honking of his taxi joined the sounds of other impatient cars.
It was getting increasingly difficult to drive. The crowds were blocking the way
and our inability to breathe was not helping either.
I held the edge of my sari to my nose, hoping to dissipate some of the spice in
the air, but nothing would make the air clean.
A few cars moved and we managed to get to the road, which could just as well have
been a parking lot itself because the cars were not moving. As I struggled to
stay alive, a new fear gripped me. Was my husband caught in this? I shuddered
at the thought and prayed he had indeed forgotten to pick me up. But if he had
come and picked me up when my train arrived two hours ago, we would have been
safe. I would have been safe, my mind cried out.
"Memsaab, we will never get out of here," Sardarji said, stumbling over the words.
"Maybe we should get out of the car and run."
"Run where?" I asked, hysteria sprinkled over my voice. "Where would we go?"
When he didn't answer, I turned to him and saw him lying on the steering wheel.
I shook him hard, screaming for him to wake up and drive us out of there.
He managed to straighten himself, but before he could step on the accelerator
or drive into the space the car ahead of us had made, he collapsed on the steering
wheel again, and this time I couldn't wake him up.
My heart felt like it had stopped beating for an instant. I didn't know how to
drive; I had never learned. My husband and I didn't even have a car. I wanted
to help Sardarji, check on him, but I couldn't, I couldn't even breathe, and suddenly
nothing seemed more important than breathing. I had taken it for granted all my
life and now I couldn't breathe without feeling my insides rip open against the
onslaught of the spice in the air.
The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday,
early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with
three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high
to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper
whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop."
They were farmers, hardworking men who embraced pessimism only when discussing
the weather and the crops. There was too much sun, or too much rain, or the threat
of floods in the lowlands, or the rising prices of seed and fertilizer, or the
uncertainties of the markets. On the most perfect of days, my mother would quietly
say to me, "Don't worry. The men will find something to worry about."
Pappy, my grandfather, was worried about the price for labor when we went searching
for the hill people. They were paid for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked.
The previous year, according to him, it was $1.50 per hundred. He'd already heard
rumors that a farmer over in Lake City was offering $1.60.
This played heavily on his mind as we rode to town. He never talked when he drove,
and this was because, according to my mother, not much of a driver herself, he
was afraid of motorized vehicles. His truck was a 1939 Ford, and with the exception
of our old John Deere tractor, it was our sole means of transportation. This was
no particular problem except when we drove to church and my mother and grandmother
were forced to sit snugly together up front in their Sunday best while my father
and I rode in the back, engulfed in dust. Modern sedans were scarce in rural Arkansas.
