Maw

Still more from the short story collection Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths

Back to Dickey:

“I would have him eat

The heart, and from it, have an idea

Stream into his gnarling head

That he no longer has a thing

To lose ...”1

That last, lonely beast, “crackling with feathers, in crownfire,” as he mates to the death with the New World's last eagle after dining on the horned heart of an elk. Strong stuff. Nothing left to lose, indeed.

Now, as you've come to expect—or certainly should have if you've been paying attention—that riveting excursion into poetry has little or nothing to do with the story you're about to read, but inserting some poesy, like including the occasional foreign word or phrase— particularly if it is French, oui?—is what elevates what might be thought of as a “fun house,” or, to some, “a complete waste of time,” into the realm of important literature.

Though, truth be told, it was in the naming of this tale that my thoughts were driven back to Dickey's poem. If any creature can be said to have a maw, certainly a wolverine qualifies.2 After all, its scientific name is Gulo gulo, meaning “glutton.”

In any event, the maw in this story involves a mega corporation into whose voracious gullet fell one Chester Luján.

As we can easily surmise, due to the diacritic floating above the “a,” Chester's father is of Hispanic extraction. The given name was bestowed at his mother's suggestion, her British maiden surname being Chesterfield. (I felt you should have a little background info before what will shortly befall poor Chester. Readers generally exhibit a bit more empathy for a person if they feel some connection, however thin.)

To further deepen your sense of connectedness I could interject here that I once had a lame rooster named Chester. He was hobbled when he walked into my life and was named for the limping supporting character on the TV western GunSmoke. Despite his infirmity he was a superb caretaker of his hens, leading them to the coop at night and sometimes taking them way up in a hemlock tree to roost. I don't choose names for protagonists lightly, and in naming Mr. Luján I was selecting what I deem to be an honorific. Based on my chicken thing.

“Luján” is a whole nuther ball of wax, as we shall see, though no aspersion is intended for Chester's Dad, who is a fine old gentleman. For one thing—and one “thing” can be telling—Dad retained the diacritic. Other Lujans have not. Have not.

Chess3 graduated with an M.B.A., went to work for a mid-size engineering firm right out of college, then, basically, grew with the business. One of those old-fashioned success stories from back in the day when many executive types were at one firm for a whole career. And hey, I'd be bored to tears, personally, but whatever floats one's boat is my theory, so let's decide right now that Chess loves his job and wants to go all the way down, all the way down, all the way down to the goal. Hey!

A few years in he married Ginger, with whom he has literally 2.5 children, given that she already had a son when they met, making Richard only half “theirs,” (If you see what I mean). Good kids, all.

Ginger works part time at a veterinary practice, held back, as is sadly normal in U.S. society, by the practical fact that women generally earn less money at what they do, making their time less important to a family's fiscal weal, and therefore at least suggesting, if not dictating, that parenting chores will fall harder on the “fair sex”—a phrase that obviously indicates the other is unfair. The way of the world, it seems.

I could go on about Ginger and the sprouts, but that wouldn't move the story along, so we'll just stop with that stuff.

Chess' trajectory was from Under-Assistant up and up and up to Department Head over a period of 18 years. He's paid reasonably well and he's good at his job. Moreover the people working under him like him a lot. He's easygoing as long as work is done on time and done right. Credit where due. Help when needed. Encouragement when deadlines loom. Thoughtful advice, particularly to new employees still a little wet behind the ears.

He is definitely not the sort of protagonist that I like to see sent into a maw, but there you go. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, even ones who pray, which he does not, being like all my thoughtful characters a non-theist.4

I could go into great detail about one or another of the jobs he's overseen through the years, to give you a sense of scope, but it would probably bore you to tears. Like the dam project Mercer & MacClaren® designed for that Canadian outfit. Hugo … something, something. On a river in the Yukon. That one required work by over half the engineering staff for something like two years. The assembled blueprints were too heavy for most of the worker bees to lift in one clump, so they were delivered in four parts, together with a separate set that came in from the turbine manufacturer, plus those from Yukon Energy®.5

Terry Greenfield, chief engineer in the prestressed concrete division, was often in the office until past midnight, purportedly struggling to get the design for the dam's parking garage out the door in timely fashion, though his close associates knew that he was playing internet poker and drinking heavily after hours. Why anyone would trust a vehicle to anything he cooked up is a deep mystery.

Birx Prendergast, over in “tunnels and turbines,” the insiders' name for the working group designing the conduits and the outlet gates, was having an affair with Greenfield's wife, Sharon, gamboling while the other gambled. Prendergast spent a good bit more time sexting with her than actually working on the project, but he covered for himself by speaking in “dam-ese” to the point that everyone thought he was some sort of genius, somewhat above the day to day drudge. He'd go on about the “impervious core and its relationship to the abutment,” or “who's in charge of development of the seepage collar anyway?” That sort of thing.

Think about it: If someone in your office went on and on about the “maximum angle of the tainter gate,” you'd be impressed too. Flabbergasted, really.

The Emergency Action Plan was actually the province of Yukon Energy® but a team of four on the M&M® staff were assigned to prepare a preliminary. Never having done this before, the work they did can only be described as sketchy, more pencil and eraser than CAD. Lots of erasures, and office basketball with wadded up drafts.

Bored yet?

Well then, consider the plight of anyone living down-stream of a dam. Anyone. Just consider it. You kind of want things to work. Right?

Thank you.

Chess had to coordinate with management from a total of about a dozen companies which in turn had subcontractors and sub-subs and so forth. It was going to be one of those massive projects you could see from space, creating a giant lake that would drown hundreds of thousands of acres of muskeg swamp, a place overburdened with drilling insects in the summer and snow the rest of the year. A place few even thought much about. But those few knew. Oh yes, they knew.

And two of them got through to Chess.

Bev6 Corrine and David Esterhazy are environmental activists of the first stripe, who studied muskeg ecology in their doctoral program at CalTech®. They share a profound understanding of what was going to be destroyed when the big lake filled up, and they were determined to stop the project before a 'dozer blade scraped the ground or the first load of rip rap tumbled out of a dump-truck.

They'd taken their case to the energy company without success and, not to cast overmuch blame in that direction, Yukon Energy® is tasked with providing sufficient power for the province. By some lights hydropower is more benign than coal or nukes, solar is highly seasonal that far north, and wind, iffy.

Anyway, they subsequently sought and obtained an audience with Chess, arriving with a National Geographic® video about muskeg life and detailed explanations of the importance of the habitat for the animal species found there. They include beaver, mink, short-tailed shrew, muskrat, meadow vole, masked shrew and bats, as well as woodland caribou, moose, gray wolf, bald eagle, osprey, and great blue herons. [Not wolverines.]

That night our protagonist had an anxiety dream. A humdinger.

At age three he had been given a stuffed toy that he has kept to this day, one of those dear “friends” we develop at a tender age that we keep around, if only in a drawer or closet, as a moth-eaten memento. “Moo-moo” is a plush version of Alces alces, the largest and heaviest extant member of the New World deer sub-family. Yes, a moose.

Although Chess is rational enough to entertain considerable skepticism about “woo-woo,” he did once read a discussion about Alces alces as a “spirit animal.” To wit:

Moose symbolism is letting you know that you – and only you – have the authority to make your choices in life. Therefore, the Moose meaning insists that you do not need to feel ashamed or pressured in any way by your friends and peers. It is safe for you to make choices that are different from theirs. This spirit animal teaches you to stand loud and proud and own who you are! In other words, your individuality is your strength.7

It's easy enough to reject an idea rationally, in the waking world, but still have it bubbling along like the witches' cauldron in, say, Macbeth®, in the back of your mind. “Toil and trouble,” etc.

Moo-moo came to Chess in a nightmare in which short tailed and masked shrews, along with the meadow voles, were drowning (the others could swim, walk away or fly, but still: habitat gone, poof!) Meanwhile the stuffed toy was intoning “you and only you” and “you do not need to feel ashamed” and so on and so forth.

Chess woke in a cold sweat. What did his boyhood buddy want him to do?

“Chess, honey, are you okay?”

“Bad dream, Ginj8. Very bad dream.”

Could he accept responsibility for what lay ahead?

Could he live with himself in the aftermath?

Would Moo-moo ever forgive him?

He wrestled with himself over the following week. He really did love his job. (Recall we decided this in the third graf on page 139, in the print version.) Further, there was a very practical issue at hand—the corporate golden parachute that awaited him if he stayed the course. (Though, as we recall from page 53, “Parachutes have been known not to open.” This can apply to the metaphorical as well as the physical kind.)

Finally, he pulled Moo-moo off the top shelf in his closet and had a heart-to-heart. “You've convinced me, old buddy. You're right. I've been, oh, I don't know. Too close to see the stunted little trees and peat moss for the dwarf forest?”

Ginger wasn't entirely happy with the news, but she couldn't disagree with his ethics, something she'd admired all those years ago. No project he'd worked on in all this time had ever had such a profound downside, or none that either was aware. They had ample investment savings to tide them over until he found another job. So she assented.

Chess swallowed very hard and quit.

But he didn't stop there. Oh, no.

He joined forces with Beverly and David and their organization, Muskeg Defenders®, and filed lawsuits against M&M® in the U.S, and several of the other contractors in Canada. The stateside case charged that M&M® was in violation of the Endangered Species Act because of the threat to the woodland caribou, a designated creature. The argument was that a U.S. company was proscribed under the law from doing business in a foreign country on a project that threatened such a designee.

Here we go.

“Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992), was a United States Supreme Court case decided on June 12, 1992, in which the court held that a group of American wildlife conservation and other environmental organizations lacked standing to challenge regulations jointly issued by the U.S. secretaries of the Interior and Commerce, regarding the geographic area to which a particular section of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 applied. The case arose over issues of U.S. funding of development projects in Aswan, Egypt, and Mahaweli, Sri Lanka, that could harm endangered species in the affected areas. The government declared that the act did not apply to projects outside of the United States, and Defenders of Wildlife sued.”9

Justice Antonin Scalia [RIP]10 wrote the majority opinion. The animals lost. As did Chess and friends, at least in U.S courts. What is in a name? A diacritic, for one.

The Canadian cases are still pending.11

1 “For the last wolverine,” James L. Dickey, The Selected Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1998

2 See page 22 per the importance of story and song titles.

3 Which is a? Come on now. You've got this!

4 In other words, all but the bad eggs, and even some of those.

5 I'm inserting the name of a real power company here to lend verisimilitude but I would like the company's attorneys to recall that this is a work of fiction. No harm, no foul.

6 Yep.

7 From spirit-animals.com.

8 Uh-huh.

9 Per Wikipedia®.

10 High irony. Very high.

11 Fictionally. Of course. But not very.

Hope your holidays are warm and wonderful and filled with happy memories!