“Not to worry, Winnie, they’re all extinct,” joked Abel.
Winnie took a moment to reflect on his little aside. “That is something!”
Abel pulled up a chair and motioned to his guest to have a seat in a second one within a comfortable distance.
“Okay,” he said, “you first. Start from the very beginning.”
Winnie rattled off her personal history, complete with a farm family childhood, college years and interests. She said nothing about the nature of her employment. Abel listened politely, then broke in.
“Okay, you’ve given me the A-B-Cs of your youth. In the theater, you said that I hadn’t revealed to anyone who was attending the classes who I really was. But you haven’t told me who you are. You told me how you were assembled up to this point. But who is the real Winnie, ah, Winnie, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Winnie. I see where you’re going. I came here to learn how to get my hands dirty,” she explained.
Abel nodded and let his guest freewheel.
“Being an IT manager isn’t much fun, Abel. I’ve been the person you spoke about in your lecture, the person at work at a computer all day alone who doesn’t do anything really tangible. I want to be something else entirely. I’ve made some money, so now I’d like to get some earth under my fingernails.”
For fifteen minutes, Winnie wove a tale of a gregarious youngster who spent summers on her grandparents’ farm near Jefferson City, Missouri. Those days were the happiest days of her life, she explained, and she wanted to return to that experience and relive it as an adult.
Abel listened quietly, studying her gestures and intonation. Winnie concluded her long monologue and then looked directly into Abel’s eyes, admonishing him to believe every word of it.
Abel took a sip of his cooling tea. “You know, Winnie, you would be a good candidate for an Independency community.”
“Really. You think so?”
“Mmm, I do. You say you have exceptional computer skills, and you have had life experience on a farm, even if it was during summers. An Independency community might be a good match for you.”
The woman uttered a low “hmm.” An awkward silence infused the office space as each studied the other. She nibbled a fingernail. After five long seconds, Winnie piped up. “Your turn.”
Abel produced his patented grin once again. “Fair is fair.”
“What about this, this image of animals?” asked Winnie. She gestured toward the mural. “Does that say anything about you?”
Abel glanced at the immense print spanning the wall behind his desk. “That image is truly a treasure of the first order. It is, in my way of thinking, the most important work ever created by humans.”
“Why is that?”
“It is one of the very first artistic works we know of created by people just like us, but people living more than 30,000 years ago. It is a window into the minds of humans standing just over the threshold of truly modern thought. I keep the mural here because it reminds me every day how precious the spark of real consciousness is to each of us.”
“Tell me why that spark is so precious to you,” Winnie probed.
“I first saw this image on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when I was a young teen. I was stunned by it. All around me were the giant bones of mastodons, mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and here, here was a snapshot of that lost world painted by the people who lived it. It made an immense impression on me. It was a turning point.”
“There must have been other turning points.”
“Oh, yes, certainly.”
“Tell me.”
“Let’s see. I did some volunteer work as a young man, in food pantries for the poor and at homeless shelters. But it was a political event that put me on the course to where we are now.”
Now Winnie was where she wanted to be. She sought to excavate his political mind.
“What was it? What happened?”
“When I was in college, I went to see the president speak. I was with a group of student activists when we walked into the lobby of the municipal auditorium. Just as I entered I was hit, blindsided, a body blow. I don’t remember much, but I do have a sense of sailing right back out the door through the air and coming down hard on the limestone steps. I come to my senses and I’m on my back in the middle of the steps. There were scores of people sidestepping me, staring down at me, walking right by, as if I were litter on a sidewalk.”
“You’re joking.”
“Oh no, not joking. It took us some time to sort out what happened, but we concluded that we’d been forcefully denied entry, by party operatives I suppose, so that we would not get into the main hall where the president was to speak. I soon picked up my pen and put it to paper. I was angry. But anger is really a useless emotion. Better to channel anger into creativity.”
“How did that experience equal Independency, Minnesota?” Winnie prodded.
“Well, I worked with the hungry and homeless, as I said. Both were utterly helpless. They did not have a meaningful connection to the broader society nor to family. The most basic elements that keep a being whole and secure had been stripped away by any number of misfortunes and by an uncaring mass culture. Did they ever suffer.
“A few years later, I was studying scientific papers that described paleolithic living arrangements in a newly-discovered cave in France. Carbon dating placed artifacts in the cave at 37,000 years before the present. Here were people with brains and bodies really no different than our own, who had stitched together an enormous body of information about their environment and who would pass that information orally down the long chain of generations almost, but not quite, to the present day. These humans had mastered skills absolutely essential to their survival. Everyone in their paleo-community knew a great deal about those critical tasks and how to perform them well.”
Abel turned, reached over and behind his desk, and grabbed something. He held it up for Winnie to see. It was a human skull. She was startled by it.
“Fear not, Winnie. This is an acrylic resin model of an extraordinary human being. It’s someone we could not possibly have known. But, she’s just like you, Winnie.”
The woman flashed a puzzled look toward Abel, her eyes glowing incandescent.
“She’s a female. She was your age. This particular gal would be 35,000 years old if she were alive today. She never ate a chicken nugget, I can tell you that,” Abel said with a comedic flourish. Winnie let out a nervous laugh at the silly remark, then seemed to relax, settling back in her chair. She examined rough fossil features of the model skull.
“What does this have to do with soup kitchens, or homelessness, or getting your rear end kicked out of a building?”
“Just this, Winnie,” Abel said, as his grin faded flat. “Many thousands of years ago this woman lived in a tightly-composed social group. In a terribly harsh ice age climate and in a world filled with huge four-legged predators, she thrived because all her clanmates worked together as a unit. They knew their environment intimately. Most importantly, they cared for each and every one of the members of the tribe—all of them, all the time. It was either that or perish. Single mothers and soup kitchens were impossible then.
“They had mastered real world skills and had woven together an immensely strong social fabric absolutely essential to their survival. We, on the other hand, have found a way to break completely the link between the environment and ourselves and to discard the essential skills and bonds that kept our human lineage alive and thriving for untold millennia. We even go so far as to denigrate those who still know and use those skills. The Asian peasant farmer, for instance, the Australian aborigine or the Borneo bush people. We see them as backward simpletons. Of course, they have in their possession a vast treasure house of knowledge that we can no longer fathom. We think it’s useless and not applicable to our modern world.