TY - JOUR
AU1 - Whetter, Darryl
AB - When the FBI spent millions and more than a decade hunting the Elves in, those ironists, Operation Backfire, they were regularly amazed at how polyamorous the ecoteurs were. “Musical beds,” one agent called it. For all the post-9/11 terrorist money the FBI pulled down to hunt hairy vegans up and down North America, for too long the Feds thought of the Elves as individuals, not a cell. Chargeable, punishable individuals who would—and here they were right—stew in individual prison uniforms. But if the FBI agents had actually been the terrorism experts they were amply paid to be, they would have started with the polyamory, not mocked it. When you’re not just a criminal but a criminal to make a better world, of course the old rules don’t apply. Not him and her, but us. Canadian, American, bisexual, polyamorous, ecoteurs—the Elves slipped all borders. Here, too, Calgary bike courier and Green Army soldier Rory MacAllister bucked the trend. Already he thought Ocean Janak’s love might be his second greatest strength. His legs and her tough young heart. He’d never before complained about the Elves’ revolving bedroom door policy, but he’d also never felt himself dissolving down into wisdom, beauty and strength in one irresistible package. No ecoteur is an island, but he certainly wanted islands and oases of time with fierce O. So: take the leggy screamer camping. Her bliss about their first camping trip together lasted until she saw this Celeste that was lending them some gear. There was nothing suspicious about borrowing camping supplies. That Mr. Anti-Classroom Rory needed to pick up gear from a friend at the university, her university, well, she and Celeste were just 2 out of U. Cal’s 26,000 students. Maybe this Celeste was one of the Critical Mass group riders. Maybe she rode courier for a summer job. Maybe. Falling in love is a fog, a wet, settling blanket that appears to cover everything. The charged, infinite damp. Sweet ubiquity. Here, briefly, was immunity from tedium. Only early love transmutes every errand into foreplay. He could borrow a car to get them out into the Rocky Mountains they could see daily from Calgary but were too rarely in. Their first road trip and their first tent sex combined. Round up the gear. Only as they drove the borrowed hatchback to the rear of U of C.’s Art Building did Ocean’s jealousy radar begin to ping. Celeste? An art-school chick? Normally the only art that interested Rory were his own precious tats and whatever high adrenaline thrash music he was jacked into on a ride. I’d rather be an art gallery than go to one. And what jock needed to worry about some skinny, neurotic art chick? Female art students invariably dressed as Betty Page, cyborgs or the dykes that they were (at least temporarily). As if some color-theory mop of fellow dreadlocks had abs you could bounce a loonie off. Every woman knows that between the sheets we’re all performance artists. Still, some residual jealousy radar, chick-scan, chickdar, took one look at makeup-less Celeste and called out the talons. Dreads under a bandana, eight pounds of shrapnel piercing her face and practically a gauntlet of silver rings on her knuckles. Art school chicks—always the chance that they love to go cra-zee, crazy, crazy on you. No way should an unhealthy mind be more arousing than a very healthy body, but still. Celeste and her corduroy sway. The code on those two was another sharp irritant. Fucking paint-spattered, Carhart-overall Celeste had the audacity to shoot Rory a She’s okay? look that ran all the way down from her pierced eyebrows, through her eyes to her little bitch-skeptic chin. Hel-LO, kiln-skank, I can see that shit! Perhaps worse, young, foolish parts of Ocean were relieved to see Rory nod his approval. The approval of his heart, his soul, yes. Absolutely. But in front of someone else? Celeste bent down (oh the braless cleavage, oh the northern bushes) to open the locked cabinet drawer of some pitted worktable and began stacking bound rolls of old canvas in front of Rory, not Ocean. Little stitched sleeves subdivided the canvas into numerous narrow pockets and allowed the whole thing to become a compact roll like some tradesman’s wrench case from life before cheap plastic. Ocean waited until tool-belt Celeste was bent over for another bundle before she snatched one up. There are people who need to capture whatever puck, ball or flying disc is in play and people who don’t. “What are these, anyway?” The series of canvas sleeves each held a palpably stiff rod of some kind. “Tent pegs,” Rory immediately answered while stepping between the two young women. Ocean raised one bundle and nodded at the other three. “Big tent. We hosting a festival?” Rory smiled from one side of his dreads to the other. “Always.” Behind him, Celeste closed her eyes once before handing over a final bundle. Every Web entry, ecotage manual and ecoteur’s “book club” meeting she’d been through for Green security warned her about “that guy—always male and almost always young, childish and child-free— who exempts himself from security protocols on the grounds that he gets things done. Just because he’s another eco-warrior (or claims to be!) doesn’t mean he’s not trigger happy. History is clear on this: Beware the cocky young male.” But she too was tired of just talking and planning, talking and planning, of “strategy sessions” that strategized nothing (again and again). Go forth, young Rory, and do your direct action. Just don’t expect me to go with you. Ocean heard a romantic door clang shut behind them much more loudly than the actual scuffed fire doors they pushed through on their way out of the stained campus art center. Until today, they’d been all hope and light. Here, late on a Thursday morning in September, they crossed that inevitable, terrible threshold from bliss into the attempt to recapture bliss. Post-bliss already. Or maybe not. Leaving the scarred, reeking hallways of an art school she recognized one of love’s central traps. She expected to be loved as she would love, not as her lover would love. We claim to want another but too often just seek ourselves in another body. Wherever Rory was around her, she could always feel the long, braided muscles of his legs, could sense their cabled years. She was the team player, not he. Rory loathed team sports, their rah-rah, their herd mentality. No accident, he argued, that the sports people love to watch are team sports. Steroid millionaires who are fast or tough in short, visible bursts. The gaudy need of it, the death cult sacrificing young bodies to concussions, Parkinson’s and arthritis. Ocean, always able to ground herself in her body, had not just enjoyed but excelled at team sports. Good at basketball, a killer on the volleyball court: her sniper’s serve, her vengeful spike. Captain of the team, no less, the sweat leader, queen ponytail. She, not he, had much more experience investigating whether the best defense was indeed a good offence. Nonetheless he strutted out of the art building switching from heart shots to head shots, leaving her scrambling on the D. Nodding at the borrowed hatchback he asked, “You have a license?” “Of course.” Until that moment, she couldn’t have imagined a boyfriend who ever even doubted she did. What was a teen Calgarian if not a driver? “Mind driving ‘til we’re out of the city?” He tossed her the keys before she answered. Sporty Ocean caught them in her left hand. The answer of limb, vector and speed was always faster for her than any word or conscious thought. Two decades from then she might, if she survived Fort Mac, tell a lover, not just a friend, how sad it was to meet her first annoyance with him and those flung keys. But she was young and had been vowing almost daily since the age of seven not to be another weak female. Instead she felt her long, tanned legs catch the sun as she strode across the parking lot. Your art-school slut have facets of muscle down each leg? Driving out of another city or even in another direction out of Calgary might not have defused the tension so quickly. Sure, they had Calgary’s notorious congestion to battle, that four-lane anti-climax, but Calgary is the last border post between the flat Prairies and the jagged, bursting Rockies. To be in the city is to see the craggy playground of the Rockies awaiting you. No, she had to say it. “You fuck that chick?” A side-long, steely glance with the steering wheel loose in just her left hand. Coupledom yawned open before her. Instantly she was aware of her own fears and, just as pressing, the threats they posed to their communal pleasure. She could harry and harrow her fear or she could swat it away for the common good. She punched his thigh and added, “Don’t answer. Yet.” Clearly, he’d just been asked to keep himself to himself when necessary. No point telling her that in fact he didn’t have a driver’s license. As if movement required a license. He didn’t need permission notes from the mommy state to move. Car equals identity? No thanks. That crime, too, he kept to himself. The mountains healed. Born-again, detoxifying, off-her-meds Andrea Janak had sent her daughter an article claiming that test subjects who walked in the woods for twenty minutes increased memory retention and recorded reduced stress. Subjects who walked around the clang and concrete of cities showed no improvements on the same tests. The woman who had previously taught her to spot the “keyhole look” of breast implants, who called the series Game of Silicones, now sent her daughter links to articles about shinrin-yoku, the Japanese art of ‘nature bathing.’ Be forest cleansed, her new mother advocated in life and business. The trailhead Rory directed them to was remote and wild, exactly what she’d liked about him so far. Well, that and this beacon of beautiful, private light he turned on her. On the few times she could beg her parents to go camping as a child, their so-called campgrounds had been playgrounds crossbred with treed parking lots. By the first morning, the often fractious Blake and Andrea were firmly united in their sore-back complaints, their desperation first for coffee then for better coffer then for closer, nicer washrooms. Hardly the wilderness. How great, then, when Rory said, “Let’s leave our phones in the car. Self-reliance is the whole point of a tent.” Every word of that was gospel to him, even if he didn’t mention that cellphones are GPS beacons to even low-level police. The whole point of leaderless resistance was to keep information divided into separate channels. The heart was one channel, the Green War another. Similarly, most in the Green Army or EarthFirst! or the Animal Liberation Front stayed very divided from the fact that leaderless resistance was first developed by the Ku Klux Klan. We are the hydra. Cut off one head, we’ve still got four to bite with. Thwarting prosecutors wasn’t always admirable. They drove up into foothills then, quiet abruptly, the Rocky Mountains, via a major highway then a rural one and finally bumping along a logging road. Eventually, a four-wheeler track running off perpendicularly caught Rory’s eye. “Park there.” Blocking the access of noisy, soil- chewing polluters wasn’t a hard sell to Ocean. Few enmities are as immediate as that between four-wheelers and mountain bikers. “Can you back it in?” The crumbling sides of the gravel swath of logging road made reverse- turning the car a small challenge. At least one of them knew how much Ocean loved any challenge of coordination and confidence, especially when she had an audience. If she ever read Distraction by challenge as some clickable, likable button or box on a self-identification questionnaire, she might start admitting this about herself. But she’d also want to add her own qualifier, Never bored or boring. Reversing and advancing some stranger’s hatchback nearly as old as she was, she’d never have admitted that Distraction by challenge might also have been the foundation of their relationship. The ratchet of the handbrake was a satisfyingly conclusive sound after a small job well-done. She turned to him and grinned. “Back to the bodies.” And the bodies were fine. In his high-rise Calgary office, Blake mocked, at least silently, Rory’s reed-thin, vegan body, with his twelve-year-old’s hips and pipe-cleaner arms. To Ocean, his skinniness was another kind of nakedness. Another kind of flaunted nakedness. Here are my bones, here my muscles. Heroin chic but shockingly strong for his size. He hoisted his pack up with one wire filament of an arm and a little lawnmower-starting coil of the hips. She thought of his tough, narrow body as a plucked guitar string. There is no music unless the strings are stretched tight. Sensible, and not, to be a couple who worked best when moving. Quick kisses as they hefted and cinched, but the real tongue sweeps and dives had to wait until they’d put two kilometres under their long, bare legs. When he stopped her by reaching out to grip one of the countless nylon loops on the back of her pack, she knew it was for an us kiss and a tiny trail grope. Turning back to him she felt how the backpack exposed her soft animal belly. She reached back to grip him by the belt then below the belt. Adult life was one long debate about whether the right kiss excuses everything. As far as she was concerned, literal virginity was nothing to be desired: a paucity of skill, possible pain for the female and a brief sprint for the teen boy. Great, though, to discover the later, subtler virginities. Hours into the steady sweat of their laden march they found a clearing near a brook and mutually, silently recognized that it was more than just a good campsite. The sun, normally so hidden behind the seemingly endless run of white spruce, lodgepole pine and larch, flashed down on the meadowy clearing. With one of them still technically a teenager and the other not far removed (not that he’d admit it), neither was about to have sex outside for the first time. Still, that meadow allowed more than a bar-alley zipper fumble. She spread out their groundsheet and lowered her tanned knees down onto it. When he reached for his tent, she stopped him with a firm hand to his warm chest. A firm hand and a beautifully slutty shake of her head. Her smiling chin pointed once at the nearest camp mattress. A man who needed no convincing got convinced anyway. This was their first sex outside and, for her at least, her first sex outside in daylight. The sunshine was a prison-break spotlight tracking them everywhere. Flagrant, vulnerable and so wetly proud. Panting, smiling and still echo-shuddering, a smear of bliss, she finally curled into his chest and flank. She tented her fingers over the Vehement tattoo on his hip, that vasectomy advertising. “I get it,” she muttered into his slick, still-heaving ribs. “I get it. Thank you.” She was just old enough to see that planned sex can still spill out plenty of unplanned talk. The fingers she had tracing his V-for-victorious-vasectomy tat eventually got replaced with her half- swatting, half-prehensile thigh. She rocked his hip a little in the grip of her thigh. “I get it gratefully.” How … ridiculous she’d been to stay on the pill all those months while he was already taken care-of. How pre-programmed, how before. She had planned camping sex while he had planned camping speeches. Originally he’d thought to wait until their first long night, all campfire, whisky and huddle, to ask about her convictions, to really start plumbing the depths of her commitment. Best, he’d thought, to let darkness shrink the world around them. But they were them beneath the trees in air washed by pine and sun. He stared down into her eyes. “We didn’t pick up tent pegs this morning, and I’d like to do more than just camp out here.” Reflexively, she sat up and covered her breasts. Then she wished she hadn’t. “They’re ceramic spikes,” he continued. “Immune from metal detectors but just as strong.” “As in strong enough to …” She trailed off as if even speaking the words could be evidence. And because of course she already knew the answer. “Strong enough to snap the chain on some Jusqvarna kill stick. Meyerhaeuser thinks they can cut down this hundred-year-old forest and replace it with some toilet-paper monospecies.” “If they replace it.” Her comment was much faster than her realization that nobody else had ever wanted to hear her speak like this. He wanted her and everyone else to speak like this. Beyond speech, he wanted to know what she’d do. “Show me,” she said. Men and gear. The gender fearless Rory was always ready to cup, stroke or brandish himself for her, but few sexual invitations to reveal himself excited him as much as some chance to show off some (other) tool he used, from bike to drill to, apparently, ceramic spikes. He lived with his bike like any knight with a sword or rocker with a guitar. Invite him to show you some gear, and he was at his pack straps and zippers as keenly as he’d just been at her shorts. He unfurled one of the canvas bundles with a market-day pride. He used the top flap of the canvas case to partially extract one cylinder from its sleeve without touching it directly. “Gorgeous vitrification. You could scratch glass with these. Cone-ten hardness. That’s like, 2400 degrees Fahrenheit, all courtesy of U.Cal.” “And Celeste.” He nodded briefly. “Couldn’t happen without her. And, yeah, she and I have been together. There’s a bit of hooking up in the cells. The secrecy, the trust, the common cause—far more intimate than body shots at the campus bar.” More pressing than her private chuckle over the irony of ecoteur cells risking time in prison cells because of their fight against malignant petroleum’s polycyclic cells was, once again, the teleportational feeling of instantly understanding him. Him and whatever others floated below the tip of the Rory iceberg. The cells. She reached out to touch one of the dark ochre pegs. “Oh, baby,” he pulled the bundle away from her naked fingertips. “No fingerprints, ever. Here.” He returned the stitched case to her hands so she could feel the rods through their canvas. “Go on, try to break one.” Straining a sheathed rod between her thumbs she finally admitted, “No wishbone here.” Relieving him of the entire case she stroked the bundled cloth down his naked, muscled abs. When she took one knee-step forward he had to either resist or decline. He lay back and she climbed into her already familiar cowgirl straddle. They could both feel their wet mess and, undeniably, his deflation beneath them. Holding the rod-case by two cloth corners, she wacked it a little around his pale, tattooed chest. “So, what’s my job?” He reached up with a kiss she had no interest in refusing. “My partner in crime.” They had a date of drill bits, not camp cooking. “Fuel the machine,” was their mutual slogan for cramming some nutritious, filling, minimally-evil food into their lean bodies as quickly as possible so they could get on with more exciting body projects. Theirs was a foreplay of gear, not food. They ate standing up, spooning couscous and something while they worked. He strapped a large leather drill holster around her sinewy thighs and irrepressible hips. By the time he loaded the drill, her father’s ‘liberated’ drill, she looked down at the holster to say, “Macho and jingoistic? Yes. Effective, necessary and kinda fucking cool? Also true.” She was soon to learn that some older, hippie ecoteurs preferred old-fashioned, power-free bit-and-brace hand- drills to sink their tree-spiking holes. Grandpa tech. Not Rory. Gloved, he held up two nine-inch drill bits, spiraling shafts of steel porn cock. “We get caught out here with these, we’re convicted instantly. I’ve made these cuffs to strap them to my forearms.” Most, but not all, staff at Calgary’s flagship Mountain Equipment Co-Op store would be surprised to see their pack- replacement straps and selection of miscellaneous Velcro and plastic buckles put to eco-samurai use. “I’ve wiped the drill of fingerprints. Twice. If we’re chased, toss it whenever you get a lead on them.” Smart of him, she was just able to recognize, to only mention pursuit and prosecution once he’d already strapped the thrilling holster to her thigh. “There’s almost no risk of RCMP out here, and Harper hasn’t yet allowed timber security to carry guns. You’re quicker on your feet than any of the former criminals they’ve temporarily put into nylon security jackets, but they have the advantage of being gleeful sadists. We’ll take turns on the drill and on lookout.” They did, to her joy. Footnotes 1 Excerpted from Whetter, Darryl. Our Sands: A Novel. Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, 2020. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Hardness Scales: An Excerpt from the Novel Our Sands1
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isz107
DA - 2020-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/hardness-scales-an-excerpt-from-the-novel-our-sands1-9W7xPGbFXc
SP - 150
EP - 158
VL - 27
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -