Two notes today. First, I’m very excited to be launching a new series, Walden Weekly on September 10th. Together, we’ll read excerpts from Thoreau’s 1854 classic and consider how his themes and observations hold up in our era of climate crisis—and all the other crises. Like Moby Dick Summer, you’ll receive a weekly dose of Walden each Sunday, along with a question or two to consider. I’m planning some fun surprises, too.
Second, today’s post was inspired by Elle Griffin’s July prompt to write a utopian story. The author’s note at the end gives some context. Enjoy!
It's been about a month since Grace expanded her research to include testing Dragonfly Farm’s water. The farm’s co-owner Caroline pressured her to stop by the co-op’s annual “Envisioning Utopia” session. Though it’s not her thing, Grace stops by after calibrating her instruments at Warbird, one of the nearby fracking sites she studies. She walks uphill from the parking area to the front door, thinking it’s a shame that nobody comes and goes that way anymore. It’s the best view of the place.
Looks like a kid’s drawing of a house. Windows flank the front door. The steps curve into a smile. The half-drawn shade in one of the windows is like a winking eye.
“Hey there, Missy.” A sassy voice to go with the wink.
Grace looks around.
“Hello?” the voice says.
She’s seen guys talk to their houses with smart speakers to dim the lights or whatever, but they only talk back to say they didn’t understand. Which happens a lot.
“Don’t be a drag, I know you can hear me.”
Caroline must be putting her on, watching her confusion through a smart doorbell. Grace mounts the steps.
“What are you looking for?”
“One of those View doorbells.”
“A what now?”
There’s no doorbell. Maybe a hidden camera? She studies the robin’s egg blue ceiling and shakes her head. Get a grip.
“Um, this knocker has been hanging on my door since 1848,” the voice says. “Everyone else knows how to use it.”
Grace fingers the fierce lion’s face in gray-green metal with a mane styled like a rock star, round eyes staring beneath deep brows, a ring clamped in its toothy mouth. The nose shines brassy bright.
“What, not a dragonfly?” she asks, then shakes her head. “Never mind. I’m not talking to a house.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Missy,” the house says. “Charles and Caroline talk to me all the time. They ask me where their keys are. Or if the roof can hold on for one more year. Last week, Caroline asked me if Charles is having an affair.”
“Woah. Is he?” She doesn’t know either of them well, but Charles seems like a good guy.
“None of my business. But if so, he’s not doing the dirty here. Believe me, I’ve seen some things—”
What is happening? She knew that third Red Bull was a terrible idea. But those grant proposals aren’t going to write themselves.
The dean insisted it would be career suicide to take money from the very industry she studies. But Grace is two steps ahead of everyone. She lets United Energy use her for their pathetic greenwashing. Meanwhile, she amasses proof—from the exhaust of thousands of trucks and the methane leaking from dozens of valves and joints and drill rigs—that this natural gas frenzy is worse for the climate than mining and burning coal. Her research is critical to helping the industry clean up their act. She glances at her watch and reaches for the lion’s ring.
“Hold your horses,” the house says. “I have something for you. For the game.”
“The what?”
“The game they’re playing in there.”
“How do you know about that?”
The house rolls its window-shade eyes. “You’re not too bright, are you?”
Grace looks again for a hidden camera, convinced Caroline must be laughing her ass off right now.
“When you go in there, kindly draw windmills all around me instead of gas wells.”
“I can’t draw.”
“Of course you can. Everyone can draw. I’ve lost count of all the little kids who’ve scribbled on my walls over the years.”
“I got spanked for drawing a horse on the wall over my desk,” Grace says. It was the only time her father hit her, but even he had to admit it was a damn good horse.
“That must’ve been upsetting. I’m very sorry.”
Spoken like a true children’s picture-book house.
“My best friend in elementary school painted a whole mural in her bedroom,” Grace says. “It was the most beautiful thing in the world. Jungle plants, birds, a waterfall—”
“Focus, Missy,” the house says.
“Why are you even talking to me?”
“You’re in with them, right? The drillers? You have to stop them.”
Grace laughs. “I’m not in with them. I measure fugitive methane to pinpoint where they need to improve operations.”
“Improve? Improve? What they’re doing is dreadful, no question. And you have all the evidence to stop them.”
Grace wishes she had that kind of power. “How do you know so much?”
“I hear Charles and Caroline talking. You scared them about our water, you know. And insulted me. My showers would never give someone a nosebleed. Not ever. For you to suggest otherwise, well, it’s offensive.”
“All I did was show them some nearby cases. Families have had their wells fouled by methane and all manner of fracking chemicals, carcinogens, endocrine disruptors—"
“Our well has been loyal from the beginning. She would never betray us. The very idea!”
She? “It’s not like you—or Charles and Caroline—have a say in the matter. They can drill horizontally right under this land and there’s nothing—”
“Oh! Oh! Oh! I knew something was wrong. I’ve been feeling weird, what are they, vibrations? Tremors? The ground rumbles and jumps. My foundation is suffering. Those devoted old stones have held firm all this time and now: cracks everywhere. Water’s bullying in wherever it can, the wily bugger. It seeps in and, when the cold comes, it’ll expand and break me apart—wood, stone, copper, brick, mischief everywhere.”
“That’s from the fracking. They send explosive charges down the drill shaft to open the rock so the gas can flow.”
“Right below me? Why do they do such an ornery thing? I wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, I mean, if a fly gets caught inside me and beats himself to death on a windowpane, that’s not my fault.”
“My data will help them improve—”
“There’s that word again. Improvement can’t solve every problem. I admit, I wouldn’t be here today but for sistered joists, fresh caulk and paint, new chimney flashings, tuckpointing. Have you seen the spiffy new tile in my kitchen? But you can’t improve on something that makes people’s noses bleed. I mean, the earth shoved all that crap deep down to protect you dopes.”
“What do you care? You’re a house.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“No, not at all. But you’re inanimate. Fracking chemicals can’t hurt you. Methane can’t—”
“Are you serious? Those vapors kill houses! I lost my best friend that way. One quiet night while everyone slept . . . KABLOWEE!”
“Sorry for your loss.” Grace takes a flustered glance at her watch. She’s now ten minutes late. “Gotta go, sorry.” She hurries through the door, annoyed at herself for apologizing to a house.
Thanks for reading. If you like what you see here, please keep in touch.
From the doorway of the front room, Grace takes in flaking plaster, mercurial crown molding and thrift-store furniture pushed under the tall windows. She counts three cracked panes of glass and a fourth missing altogether. So much for home improvement.
On the long opposite wall, strips of butcher paper hang from blue painter’s tape. A woman collages magazine pictures together with a glue stick. “I’ve got vertical farms, apiaries and bike lanes.” The buildings drip with so much greenery they might be a new kind of forest.
An old guy steadies bruised, tremorous hands to add a picture of a greenhouse to the paper next to a high-rise with solar panels on every balcony. “This here’s a wastewater treatment plant for all those shitters.” He pulls a red knit cap off his bald head to scratch it.
“Let’s attach it to the neighborhood florist,” Caroline says with a grin. She tapes up a storefront overflowing with flowers and plants, a riot of color on a quiet city block. “Great compost.”
“Tagline: our flowers from your feces,” another woman says.
“Poo Blooms,” the old guy says.
Everyone laughs.
“Ask Charles for a picture of me,” the house says.
Oh, in here, too? Grace thinks, a little panicked. But she crosses the room to ask Charles. She can’t believe she’s taking orders from a house. He hands her a stack of last year’s co-op annual report. There’s the house on the cover, perched on its hillside surrounded by farm fields and pastures, sunflowers waving in the foreground. Nice shot.
“I do look good, don’t I?” the house says. “My best side.”
No sense of personal boundaries. Not my thoughts, if you don’t mind.
“Oh, sorry, bad habit.”
A guy in a black AC/DC shirt, ripped biceps inked with mushrooms and ivy, scribbles away at the far end of the butcher paper. Looks like a row of rockets ready for takeoff.
“So your plan is to escape,” Grace says. “You should know: Mars isn’t friendly to Earthlings.”
He scowls with incomprehension and removes the blue marker from his between his teeth. “Nonsense. These are gas wells.”
“Oh, I see that now.” The towers they assemble for the drill rigs do have that rocket-launchpad vibe. With an orange crayon, she shoots flames from the top of one. “This one’s flaring. If we make this an infrared view, we could show the methane gushing from everywhere.”
He adds a row of flatbed and tanker trucks bullying cars on a winding country road. Grace scrawls billowing gray crayon smoke from each.
“Why are we drawing trucks and wells?” she asks. “It’s the opposite of utopian.” The brainstorm is still in full swing at the other end, with much laughter and delight. A light rail train rolls down a greenway between thatched-roof strawbale houses.
“I like his eyes,” the house says. “You could do worse. From what I hear, you have done worse.”
What did I say? Butt out. Grace slaps the wall in frustration. “Sorry, that wasn’t meant for you,” she says to the guy.
Grace’s dating history is a climate science career-day panel. There was Larry, the astrophysicist who would only make love in the dark. The fling with the rising star paleoclimatologist Gary during a fellowship at NOAA. He was a gaunt, serious man most at home trekking on frozen tundra to core into climate history. His paper on Eocene polar warmth caused a sensation, but in bed he was as cold as one of his ice cores. After Gary, she dated a forester and a biogeochemist, then had a brief thing with a theoretical physicist who kept forgetting her name. Hang-gliding with the meteorologist at Penn State was a thrill, but lately he’s been ghosting her.
The guy is still drawing. Is that a dead deer lying in a ditch? “It’s all I can think of,” he says. “We’re under siege with this shit.” He uncaps a silver marker and sketches an elaborate swing set. “I thought maybe, get it out of my system, clear my head, make room for better ideas.” In surprisingly few colorful moves, he’s got kids playing on the swings, hanging from monkey bars and swarming around a soccer ball. She can practically hear the shouts and laughter.
“What’s with the kids?” she asks.
“It’s the elementary school down the road. These new wells loom over the playground like a pedophile who escaped house arrest.”
Grace tapes up the picture of the house from the annual report cover.
“Now we’re talking,” the house says. “Go you.”
“Draw windmills,” she says to the guy. “Here. Here. And here. And slather that roof with solar panels.”
“Ooooo! Really?” The floor and wall vibrate with excitement. “I’ve dreamed of solar panels since the Carter Administration! I have perfect orientation.”
Ted’s windmills are amazing. He moves on to chickens and sheep roaming freely in the yard and pastures. He draws more solar panels in the fields. “When it’s hot, the sheep can lie in the shade.”
“They’ll appreciate that,” Grace says.
Caroline comes near to tape up a magazine picture of a complex of interconnected translucent domes that looks like a beehive crossed with giant insect eyes. “Here’s a regional power plant channeling unlimited energy from the quantum vacuum field,” she says. “The Zero Point Energy Cooperative. Zepco for short.”
“Okayyyyy,” the guy says.
To Grace, she says, “Ted insists on squandering his talent to mirror the world as it is, when he could be illuminating grand visions.”
“I don’t even know what that means, Caroline,” he says, sounding hurt.
“His windmills are amazing,” Grace says.
“They’re fine, but LOOK AT THESE SOLAR PANELS, WILL YOU PLEASE?” The house is beside itself.
Grace smiles. Must be at least ten kilowatts.
“That’s good, isn’t it? I would love lighting and heating my rooms with sunlight.”
At the other end, the vertical farms woman says, “While we’re at it, how about returning this land to the descendants of the people our ancestors stole it from?”
“Starting with the National Parks,” the old red-capped guy says. “Indigenous stewardship beats federal bureaucracy any day.”
“Your ancestors maybe,” Charles says. “Mine weren’t here until 1957.”
When they first met, Caroline told Grace his parents were from Ghana, or maybe it was Nigeria. Or Liberia? Her geography is terrible in that part of the world.
“We all benefit from that theft, directly or indirectly,” the feces-florist woman says.
“Speak for yourself, sister,” Charles says in a soft voice. “I’ve had to work hard for everything.”
“She’s right, yo,” says Ted. “We should throw in reparations and a truth and reconciliation process.” He faces a blank part of the paper, markers poised. Grace wonders how he’s going to draw such abstract concepts.
“That’s not our fight,” Charles says. “We’re building a new reality right here, not wasting precious energy railing against the old one.”
“Remember the first rule of brainstorming,” the house says. “No bad ideas.”
Grace stands back to consider the utopian visions of Dragonfly Farm. “I don’t think they can hear you,” she says.
“Oh, they hear me. They all hear me. You’re not as special as you think.”
Notes
For ten years, I worked on a novel, the premise of which was: if people knew, really knew, that we are interconnected with every living being here on Earth, as our kin, what would that look like? How would we live, work, learn, and play? What would our communities feel like, smell like, sound like, and how would they taste? I threw in an additional premise: the protagonist, Grace, is a time-traveling climate scientist from fifty years in the future. Why fifty years? Okay, here’s where it gets esoteric. Towards the end of his life, Sir Isaac Newton did a whole series of mad calculations where he “proved” that the world would end in 2060. According to this Wikipedia page:
“The date 2060 did not represent for Newton the annihilation of the globe and its inhabitants, but a dramatic transition to a millennium of peace. In other words: the end of the secular world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. Summarizing and paraphrasing Revelation 21 and 22, Newton outlines some of the events subsequent to the date 2060 (or thereabouts) in one of the apocalyptic charts now housed in Jerusalem. . . . Although for Newton the apocalypse would be accompanied by plagues and war, it would be the storm before the calm.”
Combine that with predictions of climate science around 2011 when I started, and you don’t need a wild imagination to picture that world of 2060. I thought, what if the environmental activists and visionaries I so admire are really time travelers, come to talk some sense into us before it’s too late? That’s how my protagonist came from 2060 to the world of 2009, via sketchy, experimental time travel, and stumbled on the fracking apocalypse in northeastern PA.1
Let’s recap. We have Newton’s apocalypse, the climate crisis, fracking, time travel, oh, and a cooperatively owned permaculture farm. Can you tell I love to research? Even if all this could work as a novel, what was I thinking? There’s no need to project the climate crisis fifty years into the future. It’s here. Now.
Why not write about our current moment of tension between how it could be and how it is? We know we are one part of the vast web of life: not the pinnacle lords and masters, but the little sisters and brothers of Creation. We know that this exploitative attitude is causing irreparable harm to our one beloved home—our Mother. We know there are better ways to live, because they exist, in practice, in many places. And the kicker: we’re complicit in the oppressive, damaging systems that we so abhor. One person’s utopia is another’s apocalypse, now, today.
Give all that, what can we possibly do?
We can tap into our imagination and remember that all is not what it seems. Help will come from unexpected places. My stories explore the both/and tension between vision and reality. Yes, we’re trapped and yes, we can still envision better ways to live.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Much has been said about this on activist websites and in documentaries like Josh Fox’s “Gasland” and “Gasland 2.”
This was great, Julie. I loved the tension between reality and the fantasy of the house talking as much as the both/and tension between vision and reality.
I've been working on a novel for about 5-6 years that grapples with a similar tension between what we know as real and what we don't.
Thoreau, along with Scott and Helen Nearing, Wendell Berry, and Wes Jackson were my Polaris as a kid that helped me find my direction in life.
I read Walden on my own during my last year in high school and discovered I was so I’ll-educated that I had to buy a dictionary of mythology to help me understand some of his passages. But I did have the perseverance I needed to finish it, and still find new things in Walden after 6 or 7 readings.
I also taught it to my daughter when we lived in Central Asia and homeschooled. She got it and still gets it, especially about the tonic of wildness.