Love in the Time of Climate Change (24 page)

No one came.

A slight exaggeration. There were five of us from the science department, three staff members, one activist from town, and two, count 'em, two students, both of whom slept soundly through the whole presentation. Total: eleven people, nine of them awake.

Eleven! This guy was on the panel that won the Nobel Peace Prize and eleven people show up to hear him! None of them my students. How embarrassing is that!

The week before, we had had a guest presenter on The Mysterious New England Stone Chambers, these curious oddities that dot the rural northeastern landscape. Who built them? When were they built? For what purpose? The speaker's theory—I kid you not—was that these structures were the handiwork of a lost race of giant humans with double rows of teeth. According to him, the Smithsonian Institution, in a desperate act of conspiracy, had suppressed all evidence of them.

Wakefield was packed—not a seat vacant. Girls were sitting on their boyfriends' laps. People crowded the aisles, packed in the back. The speaker was swarmed afterwards like a rock star.

You have to understand, I've got nothing against stone chambers or extinct giants. In fact, I'm all for them. But for the love of Christ, standing room only for
that
, and then eleven lost souls for The Issue. It was almost too much to bear!

The afternoon just got worse.

Samantha had e-mailed me to say that she was missing class due to parent–teacher conferences. I was totally bummed.

I walked into class to find that the previous instructor had left the computer on and some jerk had come in and downloaded a porno. A couple was going at it, hard core, grinding, thrusting, groaning, leaving nothing to the imagination. My early arriving students looked on in amusement while I furiously fumbled to exit out. Expecting the dean to waltz in at any moment, I finally yanked the cord from the damn machine, knocking the hard drive over in the process.

“I never thought global warming could be this hot!” one of my students yelled, to much laughter.

Thank God
sh
e wasn't there!

The only upside to this was that most of them remained wide awake, hoping for another X-rated faux pas.

Of course, just as I got onto some sort of roll (joy of joys)—
BRINGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
A fucking fire alarm! On the coldest, wettest of days. No coat, no hat, no umbrella, my shoes with a gargantuan hole in the left toe. We waited for eternity outside in 36-degree pouring rain while my feet got numb and my hands turned to ice.

By the time we got back to class it was, duh, over.

I left school in spirits as foul as the weather.

I should have stayed.

Back home it was bitch night. Sarah had called and said she was pulling another double shift and couldn't come over, so Jesse was in foul temper. He and I fought over who was responsible for the disaster zone, a.k.a. the bathroom. We fought over culpability for the moldy, bacteria-laden leftovers in the far back corner of the fridge. We fought over the length of time to cook spaghetti, whose turn it was to buy pot, the collapse of the Red Sox, and the role of methane as a greenhouse gas.

If Jesus had returned in all of His infinite glory, we would have fought over the length of His goddamn hair.

I ate dinner, graded some more until I was on the verge of a breakdown, and stormed off to bed.

Sleep was elusive. I was in desperate need of a package of “forty winks in one whiff” from my morning class. But the dreaded Four Horsemen galloped through my brain and trampled through the bedroom, keeping any possibility of snoozles at bay.

Horseman #1: The Issue. Enough said.

Horseman #2: All of the other issues, from school to the general state of the economy to the prospect of spending Thanksgiving with my family to my angst over Samantha to the chances of the Patriots making it to the Super Bowl to the yada yada yada. On and on and on they paraded, demons
and devils grinning and smirking. Meditation Lake didn't stand a chance.

Horseman #3: The Roommate's snores. Two doors down and as loud as a dentist's drill. How Sarah could sleep with him was beyond me.

Horseman #3: The farts. Pasta with artichoke hearts did not go down well. My stomach was a writhing mass of swirling gastrointestinal distress. Breathing through my mouth only made me hyperventilate.

When I finally did fall into a fitful slumber, it was about as restful as Hell.

I began with a dream/nightmare sequence starring Al Gore and Bill McKibben (renowned author of
End of Nature
; founder of 350.org; guru on The Issue) grinding it out in the afternoon's porno clip, my students luridly cheering on every move. Bill was dressed all in leather and Al had a dog collar around his neck, and when they emerged from the screen into the classroom and began to come on to me, I awoke with a start. I suppose the idea of a
ménage à trois
with those two idols should have been flattering. Please don't take offence at this, Al and Bill, but … it was not.

Another lapse into sleep.

This time a class full of, you guessed it, extinct giants! Fortunately they weren't going at it, and to their credit they were wide awake, but it was still a tad disconcerting. There I was, hammering away at The Issue and there they sat, grinning away at me, evil rows of double-toothed grins. The grins floated up and over their giant bodies like the Cheshire Cat's till they merged into one huge grin, a mocking, spiteful, ludicrous grin of all grins, sucking me into the giant stone chamber that the grin had morphed into.

Thank God for the alarm clock.

A shower, a shave, and on to face another day.

Compelling Explanations—The issues director of the fundamentalist American Family Association told his radio audience that God's feelings will be hurt if Americans stop using fossil fuels for energy. “God has buried those treasures there because he loves us to find them,” said Bryan Fisher, who described Americans' campaigns against fossil fuels as similar to the time when Fisher, at age six, told a birthday present donor that he didn't like his gift. “And it just crushed that person.”

—News of the Weird

I
WORKED LATE ON A
W
EDNESDAY EVENING
, doing a formal observation of an adjunct professor, something required for all first-time faculty. It was an inorganic chemistry class and he was droning on and on about something to do with hydrogen bonds, but then again I wasn't quite sure. I was slumped in one of those god-awful chairs in the far corner of the classroom, pinching myself to stay awake amidst the stifling heat of the classroom (turn down the thermostat! Ahh!) and the relentless monotone of the professor's voice.

The best thing about classroom observation is that it makes me much more empathetic toward the plight of the student. Sitting in the back of the class gives me great insight into:

One: How boring most of us really are.

Two: How difficult it is to pay attention when it's late at night, you're exhausted, the temperature is 105 degrees, and you frankly couldn't give a shit about the subject.

Three: How amazing it is that students actually hang in there as well as they do without going stark raving mad and bolting out of the classroom screaming gibberish and tearing their hair out.

The only thing that kept me from slumping over was the shoulders, back, and hair of this gorgeous brunette in the second row. That got me fantasizing about all of the attractive students in my classes, which led to a fabulous daydream about a certain student dressed in sweet pirate garb (minus the parrot) on a deserted beach; a significant step up, mind you, from the Al and Bill debacle. By the end of the lecture, I couldn't recall a single damn thing about … what was it? Oh yeah, hydrogen bonds.

My notes, which I was supposed to submit to our administrative assistant, consisted entirely of intricate doodles around the number twenty-nine, which, truth be told, were quite inspired. Much better, in fact, than the professor's lecture.

In any event, on getting home I found Jesse semicomatose on the couch; as always, the pungent odor of pot wafted through the air.

“Howdy-doody stranger,” he said, handing me a joint.

“I can't,” I replied. “I still have grading to do. It's been one of those days.”

“Oh, but you must! You have to! God's feelings will be hurt if you don't!”

“Jesus,” I said. “What are you, a born-again Rastafarian?”

“Genesis 1:11—'And God said, Let the earth bring forth
grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.'”

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Psalms 103:13—'He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man.'”

“Jesse, you're freaking me out here!”

“Proverbs 15:17—'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.'”

“Enough! Stop already!”

Jesse threw me over a copy of the
Valley Advocate
, a weekly publication he had picked up that morning.

“Read it and weep, bro.
News of the Weird
, so it's got to be true. If God buried coal because he loves us to find it, just think how he must feel when we harvest ganja? Fucking ecstatic! Take a hit or crush God. Heaven or Hell. Your choice, bro!”

I read the “news” clip, collapsed next to him on the couch and relit the joint.

With a decision of that magnitude, grading would have to wait.

T
HANKSGIVING DAWNED UNSEASONABLY WARM
, 61 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Thanks to climate change, the English word “unseasonable” may soon become obsolete, along with glaciers, polar bears and most of Florida.

It was the fourth week in November and I had yet to wear a winter jacket. Most days, I dressed for work with only my uniform on: jeans and a T-shirt. I enjoyed flouting the traditional professorial dress code and opting instead for an outfit that screamed out my politics on my chest. “Renewable Energy = National Security” (with a picture of a wind turbine). “Compost Happens!” (an apple core). “Make Lunch Not War” (a raised fist holding a carrot). And, my favorite, the one the Climate Changers had designed and sold as a fundraiser: “Polar Bears Against Global Warming!” (an adorable baby Polar bear with sunglasses on). I did make it a point to leave at home the shirt Jesse had given me one year for my birthday: “A Day Without a Buzz Is a Day That Never Was.”

My attire inevitably annoyed my colleague Doug, who taught anatomy and physiology. He was a brilliant professor,
a retired physician's assistant who had a great presence in the classroom and terrific command of his material. As sympathetic as he was to The Issue, he was forever lecturing me about crossing the line between facts and policy, between what he referred to as straight science and activist science.

“Look,” Doug would admonish me. “Our role is to present the facts. Give students the data and let them interpret it. They need the knowledge and tools for critical thinking. Leave policy for sociology or political science classes. If you confuse that with hard science, then you're doing our students a grave disservice. Blindly moving forward your agenda makes you just as guilty as the right-wing zealots you seem so fond of criticizing. You're politicizing science.”

“I do have an agenda and I am politicizing science,” I deadpanned.

“Casey, this is no joke. Indoctrination is not education.”

“For the love of Christ, Doug, do you actually think I'm indoctrinating them just because I wear a T-shirt with a fucking polar bear on it?”

“I think you're pushing your politics.”

“Of course I'm pushing my politics.” I said.

“That's my point exactly!”

“I happen to like teaching, Douglas.” He hated to be called Douglas, but I was getting riled up.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked.

“If the temperature continues to do what it's doing, there's going to be no more teaching. You know why? There's going to be no one to teach. No one. Society as we know it will cease to exist. It's all going to come crashing down. Now that seems to me to be worth pushing politics for. It seems to me.…”