Justice - XI
Section of a Novella from Tarot Blanco
Justice – XI
Succulent in length entwine not tethered
Spring prances round itself not grown.
There was once a town in the heart of America where a young girl wished she could be someplace else even though the roads were lined with laurel and viburnum and alder that collated the visitor's eye. She remembered that girl now that she was on the Rocky Coast with salt in the air and the cries of gulls overhead. It was a balance with scales to either side. On one side was the fullness of nature with the sites of birds, and the smell of conifers and grass. On the other was what seemed to be called the progress of man. It seemed, to her, that the pillars which supported the edification were often overwhelmed by the profit of the prophet.
On the sand of the beach, she looked up words at the cliffs and hills that were rooted and took the winds off the open ocean and swirled them in the nooks and crannies of the pine trees which occasionally sprouted up from the sparse patches of dirt. It was cold, but then it seemed to be always cold. She looked from the hills with the patches of moss and out towards the harrowing scene which was forming a storm like a sword pointing directly at her. The was caution in her heart but not in her eyes.
It was a silent spring for the Hawks did not roam the earth and the few who had come left no eggs or the peeping sound of babies asking for the fresh meat that they craved. She had known the hatching when she first came to Maine with its bubbling up of new life resplendent. But each year there was a tiny bit less and less and less. This conundrum that so pure a beach would be lifeless just as the waves grew softer. What was the elixir of death that came silently though surely to the surface waters and underground seas running quietly rampant from the realms of the soil to the rivers of death? Where were the seven that each year gorged out into the ocean only to come back to spawn again? These and other tidings fought within her brain and her memories of that once before that was no longer in the now.
And she wandered wondering why there were no Falcons, or eaglets, or hawks at all. She looked up ahead and saw a man with a distinctive brown jacket which said he was from the park service, and that meant to her that she had wandered extremely far and not noticed it. She watched him taking measurements and notes and wondered what he was doing. This meant of course she had to speed up our walk but since he was often stopping and taking measurements it would not be hard.
“Hello!” She had called him at the very limits of propriety. He did not notice at first but with the second “hello” he looked up. Obviously, he recognized her but she did not recognize him very well.
But then in a graph voice that matched his puffy exterior: “Greetings, I remember you from the meeting six months ago. How has the outdoors treated you?”
She fixed her spectacles and made a sour face. “I used to have friends in the birds and salmon, and now I find myself alone with the flies and mosquitoes.”
“Well, the midges and blackflies come back every year. And that is what I am here to investigate, actually.”
“I see the planes both spring and fall.”
“They are dropping the most deadly pesticide we have. And it still does not help.”
“What pesticide is this?”
“Its acronym is DDT.”
“What does DDT stand for?”
“I remember you had the memory for it so I will tell you Dichloro – diphenyl – trichloroethane. Hence the acronym DDT. It was named by the military sort mind which one did to reduce things to TBA. It laid waste to malaria and tetanus in the war.” It was a time when the war meant World War II.
They continued the conversation but her mind was racing about the possibility that this TBA called DDT was the PIMA that connected all of her thoughts. Because she had not noticed the reduction in the little midge and black flies but she had certainly noticed the drop in salmon and in the raptors that kept down the population of mice, voles, and assorted other Rodentia.
It was a month later when her other half showed up it was at a pizza joint that she began to unload what she felt:
“I don’t know where to begin, originally I was just taking notes and I saw the decline of the Hawks and their young. I collected the shells that broke beneath the weight of the mother. And at the same time, I noticed the drying up of all sorts of fish and fowl. And yet, I knew that they were spraying all kinds of chemicals, and yet with every passing year the insects that feasted upon me were growing more numerous.”
On the other end of the table sat Dorothy with a kind of look in her eyes that most people would say they don’t recognize when they actually do. “You have some notes I can feel it.”
She looked down into a brown bag. And then fished over and pulled out three heavy notebooks, each of them filled with not just notes but maps as well. “I started over a year ago with doodling but then I became serious when I spoke to the gentleman from the forest service. He was here doing the same thing I was: tracking down which species were up and which species were down.”
Dorothy proceeded to look at the notebooks and the sketches of the maps both in Maine and other places that she had been to. “I assume there is a pattern here or you would not have disgorge these.” A Theory of Justice in a Rawlsing way.
“It is as if a war were being fought with herbicides and pesticides as our weapons against the blood-sucking mosquitoes and others. But they do not work against the enemy, but they work against other creatures.” And then she saw the chemicals which surround a carbon atom and all its bonds whether hydrogen or chlorine, the chlorine which kills but not what it intends to.
“How?” Dorothy blinked her eyes under her classes in a rhythm that she felt.
“In mosquito consumes only a little bit of the pesticide, the most frequent of which is called DDT. But as one goes up the chain more and more is consumed and the mosquito only lives for a brief time, whereas the falcon or the hawk lives for many years and is therefore consumed by the DDT.”
She began to show her crafts and maps but then dropped her hands. Their eyes touched but nothing else did.
“You know you need to write this. You have three books already so your publisher will take it because I know that your words are sharp conciseness and also the voluminous in their love for the balance of nature.”
“But is this enough? The dogma is that by marshaling forces and deploying the right ingredients any natural force can be stopped.”
“Once you told me of going up to a mountaintop, with binoculars and a notepad, and it was the wonder that took you far beyond the walls of a town. I think that this phenomenon is not just limited to you, me, and the man from the Department of Wildlife.”
This plea confirmed in her that mankind, no humanity, lived as part of nature. And if nature could speak many people would listen.
Then some years later, when she was dying of the radiation therapy that was meant to save her, these conversations entreated him to her dying consciousness and she hoped that the pain would make her free of the shame of not realizing that the balance occurred in all things. There had been screaming and arguments that she was crazy for wanting nature to have its say, and mocking the effectiveness of the chemicals which had saved so many from malaria. There was innuendo and even outuendo with the harshest curl of the lips of her enemies and crowned by the victory over the Japanese and typhus - which were one and the same to the people who rewarded success. They smell controversy and underneath - hysteria. The bold pungent odor that hid something untoward and unnatural.
But she brushed this aside even though it took her away from the sea that she loved. And then in a bed in a hospital, she looked out hoping that the hawks would be able to return to the pines on the cliffs though she would not see that day.