All part of the ordinary contemporary political battlefield, in other words; and interesting in that respect; but the idea that Wade was therefore an expert on Antarctica was laughable, as Phil was proving at this very moment. Wade had learned what he had needed to know the way one crams for a test, and afterward retained the usual portion of knowledge from such efforts. Antarctica! as he and the staff had often proclaimed at that time—the highest, coldest, driest, iciest, windiest, and least significant of the continents!
Through Chase’s last chuckles he said, “I didn’t learn that much about it, Phil. I like my ice in Bloody Marys.”
“You’re very wise in your modesty, Wade. Here, wait a second while I make this drive. Ooh. But you’re my staff expert on the place, Wade, and there’s been some things come up in the last month that I want you to look into for me. It appears the absence of a ratified treaty is beginning to wreak some havoc down there, and if we can find out anything that we could use against Winston, naturally it would be a good thing. Of course I’d go myself to have a look around, it sounds great, but I have—ah come on!—business in Kashmir that can’t wait.”
“What have you heard?” Wade asked cautiously.
“Well, some funny stuff has been going on down there. I’ve got friends who’ve been telling me about it, and it looks funny to me. Something’s going on down there. Get the NSF rep on site to give you a full report, I’m not sure I’ve heard it all yet anyway. But if we can get something to use against Winston and his gang, it would be good. That guy is really beginning to get on my nerves, just between you and me—”
“And the rest of humanity.”
“—screwed the population planning, the foreign aid, the debt-for-nature, the UN payments, really this guy has to be stopped, he’s like leading the Götterdämmerung. He’s riding all four horses at once, that’s why he’s so bowlegged. We’ve got to see if we can find some kind of crowbar to whap him on the knees a little, straighten those legs up so to speak, and send him packing. I swear I cannot understand why the American people elect guys like him, it’s absurd. Congress from one party and President from the other, they do it more often than not, what can they be thinking? All it does is make it impossible to do anything!”
“That’s the point. That’s what they’re hoping for.”
“But why hope for gridlock? No one likes to see it in traffic.”
“They’re hoping that if the government can’t do anything, then history will stop happening and things will always stay just like they are right now.”
“What’s so great about right now!”
“Not much, but they figure it can only get worse. It’s a damage-control strategy. They can see just as clearly as anyone that the globalized economy means they’re all headed for the sweatshop.”
“True, that’s what I say all the time, but there are better ways to deal with it than gridlock in Washington!”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure! There sure as hell should be anyway.”
“Should be. But right now the voters have to go with what they have. Stop history and hang on. Hope for the best.”
“Well, I find that very sad. They’re waiting for something, Wade. They’re waiting for us to pick up the ball and run with it.”
“From out of the gridlock.”
“Exactly! So okay, that’s what we’re doing here now, that’s why you’ve got to go to Antarctica. I’ll send you what I’ve got on the situation so you can read it on your way.”
“On my way?”
“Yeah. There’s National Transportation Safety Board people going down, you can join them.”
Wade had written on his notepad To Do: and under that, Break Gridlock, and under that, Go to Antarctica. He stared at the page, at a loss.
Phil laughed again. “What’s the matter, Wade, don’t you like the cold?”
“Not that much.” In fact Wade had grown up in Hemet, California, and he began to shiver when the temperature dropped below ninety. Even with the global warming he considered Washington a cool place.
“Well, I hear it’s not that cold down there anyway.”
“In Antarctica?”
“It’s spring down there, right?”
“Early spring. Actually two weeks away. The coldest time of year there, as I recall.”
“See, you are my expert! Ah, ha ha ha! You’ll get used to it. Hold on a sec, Wade, I’m going to putt.”
Chase often relaxed from his humanitarian efforts by playing in working foursomes, with the other players telecommuting like himself so that they played in semidetached realities, and did not converse a great deal; but this time Wade could hear a lot of banter in the background, and guessed this was a more social round. It was possible Pakistan did not have as many telegolfers as the States, where the courses routinely had modem jacks and fax machines next to the ball cleaners. “So, Wade, go down there and find out what’s going on and how we can use it. There’s a flight leaving from LA for Auckland tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Do we have a bad connection, Wade?”
“No.”
“All right then, get to it and let me focus on this next drive. I envy you this opportunity, Wade, and I’ll make it down there next time, so I want you to learn everything so you can tell me where to go. And I’ll want a daily report, you can tell me everything and it’ll be almost like I’m there, you’ll be my eyes and ears like you always are in D.C., only this will be more fun for both of us. We’ll talk soon, I have to visualize this drive now, bye.”
He grew up near Redlands, California, in a region still covered by orange and lemon groves, and avocado orchards. But the inexorable metastasizing of Los Angeles rolled over his home when he was a boy, and he watched mute and uncomprehending as over the years of his childhood and youth the groves were cut down and replaced by freeways, malls, condominium complexes, and gated suburban communities. And when he went off to Berkeley to go to college, and began to think about what had happened to his childhood home, it made him mad.
He transferred to Humboldt State to study forestry. He hiked, he learned to climb, he learned ice craft. He moved to Alaska for a year. He went back down into the world to go to law school, to learn environmental law in order to better fight for the wildernesses he had come to love, wildernesses that were everywhere being overrun by the insane proliferation of human beings and their excesses. He saw more clearly every day that the big slogan-ideas like democracy, free markets, technological advancement, scientific objectivity, and progress in history, were all myths on the same level as the feudal divine right of kings: self-serving alibis that a minority of rich powerful people were using to control the world. Modern society, like all the societies before it, ever since Sumer and Babylon, was a giant fake, a pyramid scheme in which the wealth of the world funneled up to the rich; and its natural environment was laid waste to bulk the obscenely huge bank balances of people who lived on private islands in the Caribbean.
He got his law degree and took a job with the Wilderness Defense Club’s big office in Washington, D.C., figuring that to make the biggest impact he had to be in the heart of the beast, doing battle over the big laws. The WDC was one of the biggest environmentalist groups in the world, and its Washington office had won several of the most important victories for the environmental movement in the last decade. They were a tough smart gang of committed lawyers, they made it seem like more than a rearguard action, they worked fourteen-hour days and then talked through the Georgetown parties all night long.
He joined them and fought the good fight. They won some and lost some. He developed some diseases of civilization: he drank a bit too much, he smoked cigars sometimes, he couldn’t seem to stay in relationships for more than a year; the women he connected with wanted more than policy, and many of them were not much interested in spending their precious vacation time ice-climbing in the Yukon or on Baffin Island. There seemed no one quite on his wavelength, even in the WDC. They were all neurotic; and so was he. The discrepancy between his beliefs and his life was nearly too much to bear.