The Oregon Experiment (7 page)

“But I’ve read they’re doing stuff. Like the Klamath water war?”

Hank’s face darkened. “That didn’t get them any closer. To my mind it
lost
them ground.” He stared into his beer for a long moment before continuing. “There’s so much at stake with water. The Upper Klamath Lake irrigates thousands of acres of farming and ranching. After the dry winter
of 2001, the Feds closed the headgate at the top of the irrigation canal so that all the water would flow into the Klamath River for endangered coho salmon and suckerfish. A bunch of farmers busted the headgate open with blowtorches, the Feds closed it up again, and this went back and forth until federal marshals arrived. You had environmentalists out there supporting the Feds, and farmers coming in to protest from all over the West. A couple nights they got the gates busted open again, and for a month or so I was sure somebody was going to pull a trigger. A few of the local boys were the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of the men who blocked the highway in 1941, so their sense of mission ran deep. And the Klamath Indians have water rights around Chiloquin, too, so they had their own stake in the standoff. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think Indian rights trump everybody else’s or that environmentalists have a better case than farmers and ranchers. The point is that the wilderness trail you want to hike on with your children runs through trees that are gonna get cut if your neighbor’s gonna feed
his
kids. And it’s neighbors who’ve got to work these matters out. Not a suit in some air-conditioned high-rise in Washington, D.C.”

“What about that?” Scanlon said, seeing his opening. “You’re a government employee. Isn’t there a conflict with you working for secession?”

“So I’m a hypocrite?”

Scanlon let the question hang.

“We’re in a situation where it’s impossible to live a day without making implicit or explicit moral compromises. Period. Still, there may come a time when the PNSM gains some ground, and I’d have to drop out. I won’t be that cop at the water war.”

Scanlon shook his head, unsure of what he was referring to.

“As the summer heated up and the fields dried out, a lieutenant on the local police force—a rancher himself—drove out to the headgate with a bunch of deputies to deliver beef to our encampment. At dusk, lit up with spotlights from the police cars, he read a prepared statement over his patrol car’s loudspeaker. I was sitting on my tailgate looking across the dry canal at the Indians and environmentalists on the other side, and the armed marshals posted on top of the headgate. I don’t remember the details, but the speech was provocative, to say the least. Clear threats of violence to anyone who opposed opening the gates.

“That’s when I came home. In 1941 the secessionists took up their rifles because the Feds refused to build roads to promote logging and mining. Although most of the ranchers and farmers encamped at the headgate in
2001 had no connection to the State of Liberty, there were enough of our flags flying that anyone could see who we supported. Whether it’s water or property rights, opposition to hunting and fishing licenses or
any
federal regulations, they’ve gotten too single-minded. The majority aren’t serious about forming a new state anyway—they want no government at all. So libertarian they’re really anarchists. And then there’s their pot-growing wing. The Statue of Liberty reggae band tours the West raising money to legalize marijuana. Talk about a weak coalition—Oregon rastas at one extreme, bear poachers at the other.

“Even if they could get their act together, their ambitions are too small. I want Portland and Seattle and Vancouver. I want all of Cascadia—from Mendocino to Prince William Sound to the Continental Divide. Those watersheds create a region that’s logical, manageable, and sustainable.”

Scanlon could tell that Hank had said this last part enough times he was completely convinced by it. “I can see why a lot of the people in the Odd Fellows Hall tonight are eager to go along with you,” Scanlon said, “but I wasn’t expecting the middle-class types.”

“They’ve all got different reasons, which as you’ve noticed makes consensus impossible. A lot of them are just there for a good debate over coffee, not to say their ideals aren’t noble. In fact, it’s some of the same faces you see protesting the wars every Friday evening in front of the courthouse. They believe in what they’re doing without much regard for the efficacy of their methods.”

“The world needs those people,” Scanlon said, meaning it.

Hank nodded. “Nobody in that room has it too bad, unlike the State of Liberty folks, who really do have valid gripes. But in both groups, ideals of equity and fairness and local control are on everybody’s mind.

“And I’ll tell you, Sequoia’s on top of all this. She’s very solid. She’s the heart and soul of the PNSM, and we couldn’t ask for better. But we need an intellectual focus, too. The sorts of scholarly and theoretical things you discussed tonight. That’s where you could be a big help. That’s where we need you.”

Scanlon held his tongue. The only honest thing to say was that they didn’t have a chance. Instead, he gave Hank his phone number and grabbed the check. “Let’s do this again.” There was a lot to learn about Douglas through Hank’s eyes.

“Good talking to you, Pratt.”

·   ·   ·

Naomi missed New York. She called her old friends too much. She read the
Times
Arts section too closely. She found herself waiting on street corners in downtown Douglas for a blast of hot fumes from a city bus. A jackhammer, a car horn, even the briefest snarl of traffic soothed her like a smell from childhood.

She’d always assumed that if things didn’t work out in New York, she’d end up back in Paris. She didn’t romanticize it, just knew the city excelled in the things she loved the most. The beauty of Paris was that of humanity’s best efforts. Art and architecture, food, fashion, and fragrance. She had come to understand after her daily walks around their neighborhood that Douglas’s beauty had less to do with humanity than with wild, uncivilized nature.

And it was stunning: old-growth forests wet with moss, mushrooms, sword ferns, and rotting wood, even during the rainless summer. Wild grasses, firs as tall as skyscrapers. She’d quickly come to love the moist embrace of the fog. The gardens around town—front yards of wildflowers and unruly Russian sage—were meant to imitate wilderness, not tame it into regimented rows of flowers and manicured hedges. The striking beauty of the place was the breeze that came up over the coastal range from the Pacific, carrying with it traces of sea salt and fertile, decaying forest.

Every day she took a different route, discovering more gardens and smells. The days were getting too hot for her to be walking at eight months, and this afternoon she planned on swimming at the university. But she wasn’t about to give up the daily intoxication in her nose; in the last two weeks she’d refreshed olfactory memories and added hundreds of new ones.

Stepping slowly around a corner, lightheaded, only a few blocks from their house, she saw a green moving van, a fridge wrapped in a quilted pad standing in the street, and the mover, Edmund, wiping sweat from his forehead with a washcloth.

“Mrs. Pratt,” he called. “Am I right? I never forget a shipper.”

She stopped in the shade beside the truck. “Lovely day.”

“Well put, Mrs. Pratt. I appreciate the sentiment.” He hung the wet cloth over the side mirror, then called over her shoulder. “Hey, Clay. Guess who pops out of the woodwork?”

She turned. He was coming down the front steps holding up an exersaucer and rocking horse like a hunter with fresh kills. She stepped out of his path, but he stopped. “Miss New York,” he said, all taut skin and ropy muscles, scars and smeary tattoos. His head twitched. Sweat collected in the dip above his collarbone. He smelled boyish and feral. He smelled like heat. Then, on a breeze, she smelled Pacific salt and damp forest floor, morels, moss, rotting cedar—or was it Clay?

“Scorcher,” one of them said as her legs went watery and the sky flashed, sparking with white light, her eyes rolling back, then her neck …

Coming to, she was slumped on the rocking horse in the shade of the truck, Edmund fanning her with a clipboard. Clay’s arm, hot as a pelt, was propping up her back, and with his other hand he was holding a Pepsi cup in front of her chin. Cool drops fell from the cup to her arm, and she lipped the straw and sucked in the sweet drink. The first swallow, icy through her chest, revived her.

“More,” Clay instructed, his face close to hers.

And she did as he said, tasting his warm saliva along with the sugar and fizz. She looked into the cave of his mouth.

“Swimming’s better toward the end,” he seemed to be saying. “Especially in this heat.”

“Any number of fine pools in town,” Edmund added.

She took one last drink and pushed off the head of the rocking horse to stand up, seeing that it wasn’t a horse at all. It was a wolf.

For an hour she’d been back and forth between the bedroom and the toilet. Edmund, who’d insisted on walking her home, had made too much of her lightheadedness to Scanlon, who’d made her drink too much lemonade when he wasn’t insisting she lie down to rest. She suspected he liked her in this weakened state. Seven years ago he’d genuinely saved her from an increasingly desperate depression, cared for her through the lows, been patient and tender as she adjusted the Paxil. But when she gained strength and rediscovered her place in the world, he still wanted to be her caretaker.

She sat on the toilet looking at changing tables in a Target circular while Scanlon stood at the mirror combing through his patchy beard, which reminded her of photos she’d seen of him onstage, mid–guitar solo in his old college band—scraggly, hip, self-assured.

“Looks good enough,” he said, “except for a thin spot here.” His
department chair, whom he hadn’t seen since his interview last February, had asked him to come in for a meeting.

She could smell the lemonade in her urine. How would she tell him her nose was back? Olfactory pleasure had been their shared experience: he perceived and described; she summoned a memory, tricking her brain into sensation. She and Scanlon had been one. Now that she was wandering the world without him, drunk with lusty stimulation, she’d need to break the news in a way that didn’t make him feel that some old lover was encroaching on their marriage, a lover with whom she’d had a passionate connection that Scanlon himself was neurologically incapable of matching. To make matters worse, that old lover was standing between them, even as they kissed, and didn’t much like what he perceived of the husband.

“I don’t want to make a scruffy impression,” Scanlon said.

“You could shave it and forget the whole thing.” The oils collecting in his new facial hair had, in fact, amplified his scent.

“Screw that.” He combed over a bald patch on his jaw. “I can’t do my research if everyone suspects I’m from Connecticut.”

“But you
are
from Connecticut.”

“That’s a low blow,” he said, poking her with the comb.

Her wish that his scent was what she’d imagined for him—or else a pleasing surprise—weighed on her like regret. “But you still want to get back east as soon as we can, right?”

“We haven’t even been here a month. What’s your hurry?”

“I’ve had …” She was on the verge of telling him about her nose, but not now, not when there was tension between them. She took a breath and said calmly, “I just want to make sure the plan hasn’t changed. That your first priority’s getting the book out—not just entering lumberjack contests.”

“This is just for fun,” he said. “And who knows? Maybe it’ll lead to something that gets me going on a chapter.”

“So you haven’t started writing yet?”

“Let’s just focus on settling in for now. There’s a baby to birth, a nursery to paint.” He set the comb on the counter, inches from her nose. “Maybe you should rest today,” he murmured, patting her head, “and try the pool tomorrow.”

She took hold of his wrist and moved his hand away.

·   ·   ·

That afternoon, he cut through the quad to the simple brick building that housed the Political Science and Sociology departments.
FORESTRY
was chiseled into a slab of granite above the front door. Inside, the building was quiet—a desolate, tumbleweed silence that only summer and Christmas break can bring to a campus. The polished floorboards squeaked with each step.

Although it had been thirty years since the Forestry Department left Blodgett Hall and moved to its sprawling new quad, a floor-to-ceiling painting still wrapped around the walls of the two-story lobby rotunda. On Scanlon’s left, young men depicted in clothes circa 1950 planted seedlings while others inspected their needles, making notes on clipboards. Beyond them, in a forest thick with ferns and moss, lumberjacks (two of them bearded) were felling trees beside a logging truck. Next to them, a saw mill and a pulp mill floated along the horizon like the Land of Oz, then a nuclear family stood arm in arm, their eyes cast up at carpenters nailing rafters atop the framing of their new home. Finally, curving over the building’s front door, stacks of newspapers rolled off a conveyer belt and led back to the beginning—a young man digging a hole for a seedling. The cycle of life, as clear as in grammar-school filmstrips.

The staircase was wide, chunky wooden steps with worn edges. The banister belonged in the mansion of a Victorian lumber baron. Deep turnings in the spindles, ornate moldings, relief carvings of trees and axes on the massive newel post. Repairs through the years—split moldings and a medallion that didn’t match—were all coated in thick layers of varnish. He squeaked to the top, then walked through the door marked
POLITICAL SCIENCE
.

The outer office was empty, the assistant’s computer blank, her desk tidy. He peeked around the corner to the inner office and saw a man standing at a table and hunched over a book, his back toward him.

“Hello?” Scanlon said, and the man turned. It was, as he’d suspected, the chair, and to his delight, Cebert Fenton, who’d been clean-shaven in February, now sported a fledgling beard, even splotchier than his own. Thin and mangy, a sorry-ass beard.