I'm With the Bears (18 page)

––Why, if it was harmful?

It was here, in 2006, that a lorry driver shouted that he was wearing a belt packed with explosives, causing panic in the restaurant. He demanded that the police shoot him, otherwise he would blow the building up. He wanted to be killed. The Cantagallo was evacuated and the authorities closed the A1 between Casalecchio and Sasso Marconi. There was chaos everywhere. After an hour of negotiations, the police convinced the man to surrender. He had a cushion hidden under his coat and the detonator wire was a mobile phone charger. He said he had problems at work, he was being exploited and his family was falling apart.

Mine isn't. After the party, music is still playing in some of the rooms. A few people are wandering around, talking to each other, others are snoring, reassured, clinging to each other in their sleeping bags.

I go up onto the roof, where we have built a kind of telescope. It's a perfect night for looking at the stars. Nights like this are less rare than they once were; thanks to the Crisis, the vault of heaven is clear, you no longer feel as if you are at the bottom of a glass of fluorescent barley water.

I don't touch the telescope. With the naked eye you can see the mass of the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas and Pleione.

When you next lose yourself between water and land, stare up at the night sky, examine it, searching for secrets. Deepest space will be there to draw you in, a never-ending, tantalizing emptiness.

Afterwards, you will lower your gaze, your spirit cheered, aware of your center of gravity.

I have traveled through the womb of the earth, I have witnessed the breaking of its waters and I am reborn.

Back in the world, back in my place.

For me.

And for the others.

IV. The former motorway café, the Cantagallo,
Casalecchio sul Reno, December 1

Two hours from now it will be dawn. We are getting ready to welcome it.

From the roof of the motorway café, from a hundred mouths, the vapor from our breath rises up.

Venus, the light-giving morning star, the only planet with a woman's name, is visible in the east. I can see it out of the corner of my right eye.

Facing north, eyes closed, tongues pressing against our palates, we breathe through our noses. Teeth mustn't touch.

Hands relaxed over our abdomens, between the umbilical cord and the pubis.

Those who only have one hand use them both anyway.

We imagine that we are holding a sphere, a black sphere, we test its weight. Our lungs are full. Now we breathe out and the sphere starts to turn anticlockwise, caressing the palms of our hands and our fingertips. We feel its movement, we savor it, we sense the slight friction of its smooth surface. With every exhalation, the rotation quickens, and when we breathe in it begins to slow down. This is repeated eighteen times.

From now on, with every exhalation the sphere becomes bigger until it enters our abdomens, right up to where it can caress our kidneys. We breathe in, the sphere slows down and returns to the same size as before, contained within the bounds of our circle of hands.

This is repeated ninety, one hundred and eighty times. Our hands are on fire.

Now, while the sphere expands and contracts, we imagine that we too are getting bigger, with every exhalation we are taller and taller. Beside us, level with our eyes, we see the moon.

We fix our gaze on the North Star. Polaris, the last star in the Little Bear. Let's look at it: its light travels in the void for more than four hundred years before it reaches our eyes and activates our photoreceptors.

The light that we now see was emitted when the Inquisition was trying Galileo––the scholar who bequeathed us our telescope.

The light that we now see was emitted while building on the Taj Mahal––a distant palace, much older than the Cantagallo––was just beginning.

The light that we now see was emitted nearly thirteen billion seconds ago.

We hold our breath for thirteen seconds.

We multiply by one thousand the time we hold our breath.

We multiply the result by one thousand.

This is one thousandth of the time it takes for the light from Polaris to reach us.

We cannot see the light that it emits now. The people who come after us, in four centuries' time, will see it.

Now look at the North Star, look at it with new eyes.

One day, in twelve thousand years' time, Polaris will be replaced and at that point in the sky we shall see Vega.

Let's say goodbye to Polaris and thank it. It has done good work.

Let's welcome Vega.

Now we look down, towards the planet. Down, towards the planet, twelve thousand years hence.

Where once upon a time the city of Bologna rose up, everything is now one huge wood.

The sphere enters our abdomens for the last time. As it does, it becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears. We place our hands just below our abdomens and massage ourselves in an anticlockwise direction.

We imagine ourselves becoming smaller, too. With every exhalation we become shorter and shorter until we return to earth.

The Cantagallo is no longer there. In its place, just a grassy clearing. Around us only trees.

We are not alone. There are other humans around us. They move without bumping into us even though they don't see us.

We have advanced twelve thousand years minus two hours. Again it's two hours until dawn. These humans, our descendants, face north and get ready to welcome it. Their gaze seeks out and finds Vega, the North Star. In their hands the sphere expands and contracts. In their minds, their heads are already above our atmosphere. They can touch the moon.

One day, in thirteen thousand years' time, Vega will be replaced at that point in the sky and in its place humans will see Polaris again.

These descendants of ours say goodbye to Vega and thank it. It has done good work. They welcome back Polaris, and so do we.

Now, from on high they look down, towards the planet, towards us, but they do not see us.

They see what it will be like in thirteen thousand years' time.

Soon they will descend and by their side their descendants will look north.

And so on, along the chain of millennia, through ice ages and thaws, the rise and fall of civilizations, until they witness the night of the last ritual.

Now we turn back, we return here, to the Cantagallo. Each exhalation takes us back a thousand years.

The sun begins to rise. A day's work awaits us, our hands are full of energy.

Let's get to work.

A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.

Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back then, tamarisk shouldered up against every riverbank in the Colorado River Basin, along with cottonwoods, Russian olives, and elms. Ten years ago, towns like Grand Junction and Moab thought they could still squeeze life from a river.

Lolo stands on the edge of a canyon, Maggie the camel his only companion. He stares down into the deeps. It's an hour's scramble to the bottom. He ties Maggie to a juniper and starts down, boot-skiing a gully. A few blades of green grass sprout neon around him, piercing juniper-tagged snow clods. In the late winter, there is just a beginning surge of water down in the deeps; the ice is off the river edges. Up high, the mountains still wear their ragged snow mantles. Lolo smears through mud and hits a channel of scree, sliding and scattering rocks. His jugs of tamarisk poison gurgle and slosh on his back. His shovel and rockbar snag on occasional junipers as he skids by. It will be a long hike out. But then, that's what makes this patch so perfect. It's a long way down, and the riverbanks are largely hidden.

It's a living; where other people have dried out and blown away, he has remained: a tamarisk hunter, a water tick, a stubborn bit of weed. Everyone else has been blown off the land as surely as dandelion seeds, set free to fly south or east, or most of all north where watersheds sometimes still run deep and where even if there are no more lush ferns or deep cold fish runs, at least there is still water for people.

Eventually, Lolo reaches the canyon bottom. Down in the cold shadows, his breath steams.

He pulls out a digital camera and starts shooting his proof. The Bureau of Reclamation has gotten uptight about proof. They want different angles on the offending tamarisk, they want each one photographed before and after, the whole process documented, GPS'd, and uploaded directly by the camera. They want it done on-site. And then they still sometimes come out to spot check before they calibrate his headgate for water bounty.

But all their due diligence can't protect them from the likes of Lolo. Lolo has found the secret to eternal life as a tamarisk hunter. Unknown to the Interior Department and its BuRec subsidiary, he has been seeding new patches of tamarisk, encouraging vigorous brushy groves in previously cleared areas. He has hauled and planted healthy root balls up and down the river system in strategically hidden and inaccessible corridors, all in a bid for security against the swarms of other tamarisk hunters that scour these same tributaries. Lolo is crafty. Stands like this one, a quarter-mile long and thick with salt-laden tamarisk, are his insurance policy.

Documentation finished, he unstraps a folding saw, along with his rockbar and shovel, and sets his poison jugs on the dead salt bank. He starts cutting, slicing into the roots of the tamarisk, pausing every thirty seconds to spread Garlon 4 on the cuts, poisoning the tamarisk wounds faster than they can heal. But some of the best tamarisk, the most vigorous, he uproots and sets aside, for later use.

$2.88 a day, plus water bounty.

It takes Maggie's rolling bleating camel stride a week to make it back to Lolo's homestead. They follow the river, occasionally climbing above it onto cold mesas or wandering off into the open desert in a bid to avoid the skeleton sprawl of emptied towns. Guardie choppers buzz up and down the river like swarms of angry yellowjackets, hunting for porto-pumpers and wildcat diversions. They rush overhead in a wash of beaten air and gleaming National Guard logos. Lolo remembers a time when the guardies traded potshots with people down on the river banks, tracer-fire and machine-gun chatter echoing in the canyons. He remembers the glorious hiss and arc of a Stinger missile as it flashed across redrock desert and blue sky and burned a chopper where it hovered.

But that's long in the past. Now, guardie patrols skim up the river unmolested.

Lolo tops another mesa and stares down at the familiar landscape of an eviscerated town, its curving streets and subdivision cul-de-sacs all sitting silent in the sun. At the very edge of the empty town, one-acre ranchettes and snazzy five-thousand-square-foot houses with dead-stick trees and dust-hill landscaping fringe a brown tumbleweed golf course. The sandtraps don't even show any more.

When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple of towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how “hot” it was. It didn't really matter how “hot” it was. The problem wasn't lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn't touch it.

They were supposed to stand there like dumb monkeys and watch it flow on by.

“Lolo?”

The voice catches him by surprise. Maggie startles and groans and lunges for the mesa edge before Lolo can rein her around. The camel's great padded feet scuffle dust and Lolo flails for his shotgun where it nestles in a scabbard at the camel's side. He forces Maggie to turn, shotgun half-drawn, holding barely to his seat and swearing.

A familiar face, tucked amongst juniper tangle.

“Goddammit!” Lolo lets the shotgun drop back into its scabbard. “Jesus Christ, Travis. You scared the hell out of me.”

Travis grins. He emerges from amongst the junipers' silver bark rags, one hand on his gray fedora, the other on the reins as he guides his mule out of the trees. “Surprised?”

“I could've shot you!”

“Don't be so jittery. There's no one out here 'cept us water ticks.”

“That's what I thought the last time I went shopping down there. I had a whole set of new dishes for Annie and I broke them all when I ran into an ultralight parked right in the middle of the main drag.”

“Meth flyers?”

“Beats the hell out of me. I didn't stick around to ask.”

“Shit. I'll bet they were as surprised as you were.”

“They almost killed me.”

“I guess they didn't.”

Lolo shakes his head and swears again, this time without anger. Despite the ambush, he's happy to run into Travis. It's lonely country, and Lolo's been out long enough to notice the silence of talking to Maggie. They trade ritual sips of water from their canteens and make camp together. They swap stories about BuRec and avoid discussing where they've been ripping tamarisk and enjoy the view of the empty town far below, with its serpentine streets and quiet houses and shining untouched river.

It isn't until the sun is setting and they've finished roasting a magpie that Lolo finally asks the question that's been on his mind ever since Travis's sun-baked face came out of the tangle. It goes against etiquette, but he can't help himself. He picks magpie out of his teeth and says, “I thought you were working downriver.”

Travis glances sidelong at Lolo and in that one suspicious uncertain look, Lolo sees that Travis has hit a lean patch. He's not smart like Lolo. He hasn't been reseeding. He's got no insurance. He hasn't been thinking ahead about all the competition, and what the tamarisk endgame looks like, and now he's feeling the pinch. Lolo feels a twinge of pity. He likes Travis. A part of him wants to tell Travis the secret, but he stifles the urge. The stakes are too high. Water crimes are serious now, so serious Lolo hasn't even told his wife, Annie, for fear of what she'll say. Like all of the most shameful crimes, water theft is a private business, and at the scale Lolo works, forced labor on the Straw is the best punishment he can hope for.