Charon's Landing

George Washington University Washington, DC

Mercer stood as the large group of students began a disinterested round of applause. He was sure that they weren’t applauding his presence, just the fact that they didn’t have to suffer through another lecture by their regular teacher, Professor Lynn Snyder. The one hundred and twenty students in the lecture hall were mostly freshmen, and though the school year was only a few weeks old, they had already developed a special loathing for Introduction to Geology. Professor Snyder’s presentation was as dry as the rocks she forced them to study.

Lynn Snyder had been a doctoral candidate at Penn State at the same time as Mercer, and despite the few years separating them, she looked fifteen years older. While he had gone to the U.S. Geological Survey after receiving his Ph.D. and later to the private sector as a consultant, Lynn had ducked immediately back into academia. It always amazed Mercer that so many Ph.D.’s spent their entire careers creating clones of themselves in a never-ending chain of teachers.

Lynn knew ninety percent of the class didn’t give a damn about geology. They signed up only to fulfill the school’s requirement for two semesters of science. Still, she hoped for that rare student who embraced the subject.

However, that special type of student was few and far between, so Professor Snyder hit on the idea of giving her classes a practical application of geology in the form of Dr. Philip Mercer. Mercer was a field man who’d proved that studying igneous inclusions and anticlines could mean millions of dollars in gold or oil or some other precious mineral for mining corporations and substantial finders’ fees for himself. Though his lecture taught nothing critical, it was usually entertaining and on the end-of-semester comment cards, his visit was always a highlight.

Mercer smiled at Lynn as he joined her on the lectern after his introduction. “Once more into the breach.”

“Knock ’em dead.” Lynn gave Mercer a playful pat on the arm.

Mercer adjusted the microphone and busied himself with a sheaf of notes he had no intention of using. His delay was a simple speaking tool to calm the audience and hold their attention for a few moments. The hundred students were spread throughout the lecture hall in GWU’s Funger Hall, one of the urban campus’s many classroom buildings. He thrust his left hand into the pocket of his light gray suit pants; his jacket was draped over a chair behind him on the dais. The room was at least eighty-five degrees despite the air conditioning. He fondly recalled the chilled air he’d felt in Alaska only four days ago.

“I know what you’re all thinking, ‘Great, a guest lecturer even more boring than Professor Snyder.’ ”

A co-ed’s voice called out seductively, “That’s not what I was thinking, handsome.”

A chorus of female whoops and cheers followed almost immediately. Mercer smiled sheepishly and adjusted his tie to cover his embarrassment.

As the cheering was dying down, Mercer leaned into the microphone and looked toward where the first voice had come. “You make me wish schools had never done away with spanking unruly students.”

Another few moments of cheering and laughter delayed Mercer’s lecture.

“How many of you are here because the university requires a year of science before they give you a poli-sci degree? And be honest.” A sea of hands were raised all across the hall. “And how many of you are genuinely interested in learning geology?” A few hands shyly went up before being lowered quickly.

“To those few who planned on learning today, I apologize, because I’m not a teacher. In fact, I don’t understand half of the things Professor Snyder will teach you this year. As she said in my introduction, I did get my Ph.D. at the same time as she did, but I had already graduated from the Colorado School of Mines. Her goal was to teach geology, while I wanted to apply it.”

He had a relaxed, unrehearsed speaking style that caught his audience’s interest as he spun tales of mining disasters and of wondrous treasures hacked from the earth. This was not the stuff of science as they’d expected but adventure stories told with a natural eye for the more fabulous elements of the tales. He talked about the fabled early days of the Kimberley diamond rush in South Africa where desperate paupers became overnight millionaires and of the Molly Maguires’ strike in the Pennsylvania coal fields that led to the establishment of the forty-hour workweek. He described what it was like to actually work miles below the earth in dust-choked shafts and dark tunnels where the constant strain of knowing gravity was pressing billions of tons of rocks down around you had driven many men insane.

Mercer spoke about the history of mining and quarrying, from the prehistoric days of scavenging shards of flint to make spear points to the earliest actual open pit mines where water-soaked wood wedges were used to cleave slabs of stone that became the temples and monuments along the Nile River. He talked about the ancient mines where children were forced to hand dig for ore, and their lives might last as much as a month but more often ended only days after entering a shaft. He talked about technological advances, about giant earth-moving equipment, huge machines that weighed as much as twenty thousand tons yet were still able to move under their own power. He talked about explosives, how four hundred pounds of dynamite registers seven on the Richter scale when set off on the surface and about Primacord fuses that burn at twenty-five thousand feet per second. He kept the students enthralled for an hour with stories and anecdotes from a world few of them ever knew existed.

When he finished, there was a smattering of applause centered at the back of the room, started by a single figure in the very last row. As the others stopped clapping, the lone figure, a woman, continued. Her applause was slow, almost taunting. A clap, a pause, and then another clap. And another pause.

The woman stood, strands of her hair escaping from under a red bandanna. Despite the oppressive heat in the hall, she wore a shapeless bush jacket over a dark T-shirt. Mercer couldn’t really make out any details of her face as she continued her desultory applause, but there was something compelling about her posture, an undercurrent of poise and confidence that her shabby clothes couldn’t hide.

“These stories are all very interesting, Dr. Mercer, quite entertaining actually, but you brag about your accomplishments with the evil candor of some Nazi scientist discussing the results of his genocidal experiments. I wonder how you sleep at night?”

Her comment surprised Mercer, but it wasn’t the words that made him pause, it was the voice. He knew immediately she wasn’t a student; she possessed a mature woman’s voice. It had a certain music to it, a timbre and catch on certain letters that made it one of the most captivating he’d ever heard, despite the accusatory tone. It took him several heartbeats to respond, “I’m sorry, but what the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your lack of concern for what you’ve done to our planet. I’m talking about your defilement of something that you do not possess. I’m talking about your rape of the earth.”

Here we go again, he thought.

“You’ve stood up there for the past hour and told us about how wonderful and beneficial mining is to mankind without once addressing the toll that has been paid by the earth. The damage that you and others like you have caused is irreparable. Our world is permanently scarred by what you’ve done, and you don’t seem the slightest bit guilty. In fact, you’re proud of your achievements. Mankind was not put on this planet to exploit its natural resources, but to live in harmony with them. The wanton destruction you freely admit to has to stop, now.

“You’ve talked about the benefits of technological advances that have made strip mining and other activities so simple, but you don’t talk about the other advances at all. Why don’t you tell us about cyanide filtration used in modern gold mining. Tell us about the 129 million dollars needed to clean up the Summitville disaster. Tell us about the seventy billion dollars needed to clean up the other ecological disasters left by greedy mining corporations. Go ahead, tell us.”

Mercer let her challenge hang in the air. He had no defense, for what she’d said was correct. Summitville was currently costing the federal government thirty thousand dollars a day, and even that money was only a temporary cure for the worst mining disaster ever on U.S. soil. Galactic Mining, a firm in southern Colorado, had been using cyanide to pick out microscopic particles of gold from ore spread on huge plastic sheets. Hasty construction of the extraction pads led to a leak that leached raw cyanide into the groundwater. No deaths had resulted from the accident, but the surrounding land was effectively dead for years to come. He didn’t want to mention that her estimate for cleaning the other mining sites on the Super-fund list was much too low.

“You seem better informed than most undergrads,” Mercer said.

“I’m not a student. I’m a member of the Planetary Environment Action League. I came here today because I knew that you would only present your side of the issue and I felt it necessary to let these students know of the destruction you’ve caused.”

“What’s your name?” Mercer asked.

“That is none of your concern,” she responded sharply.

“You sit there in anonymity and hold me personally responsible for an act that I had nothing to do with.” Mercer laughed, a quick bark that defused the tension that had swelled in the room. “By mentioning Summitville, you’re trying to lump every mining company in with one that was grossly negligent. I’m sorry, but that kind of emotional plea doesn’t wash. Nor does your call for us to live in harmony with nature. Is nature harmonious with us when she sends hurricanes into the Caribbean that wipe out whole villages or chokes thousands of people under walls of mud when the heavy rains come to Central America? The answer is no.”

Normally Mercer wouldn’t allow himself to be drawn into this type of confrontation, but today he couldn’t stop himself. With the debate over Alaska’s Wildlife Refuge raging all over the country and with so much emotionalism spent on the issue, he felt he had to present a voice of reason, if only to this audience.

“We fight nature as surely as she fights us. For every foot of ground we gain, she takes back two. Ask the survivors of the Kobe earthquake about it sometime. I’m sorry if you still don’t realize that all life is a struggle. From the time of our crushing births until our last gasping breaths, we fight for what we want. Some of it may come easy and some may come hard or not at all, but we continue to fight. The nature you are so willing to defend has forced us to evolve that way.

“Your way of thinking is so self-indulgent and self-centered that it’s laughable. It must be nice to be so comfortable that you can afford to be guilty about that comfort. Ask a miner in Africa if he cares that what he’s doing might affect the world for his children and he’ll tell you that if he didn’t do it, he wouldn’t have any children.

“Every animal extracts a price from nature for its existence, but it’s only humans who have an inbred sense of guilt for it. To disconnect man from the nature that created him is egotistical to the point of hubris. Evolution is the most awesome force ever to exist. Right now we are at the top of its chain, but like the dinosaurs, we aren’t meant to stay there forever. When nature no longer believes that the big brain of Homo sapiens is the key to survival on the planet, she’ll do away with us. It’s been tried before. Cholera, tuberculosis, and the plague nearly wiped us out, but we adapted, changed our behavior, stopped living in the filth that bred such diseases. Today, what is AIDS teaching us? In what evolutionary direction will this modern killer push us? Nature is producing viruses faster than we’re able to cure them. This is a direct competition between our brains and natural selection. By denying us our right to use our minds and to use the resources we are able to exploit, you’re trying to stop the natural progression of our species. And you accuse me of going against nature’s wishes. I advise you to take a good look at evolution and tell me who is more in concert with nature, a person who is working with natural evolution or someone who is denying that its forces continue today. Do you think a locust swarm is concerned with the destruction it leaves behind? Why do humans, the most intelligent species ever to exist, try to deny what is natural to every other creature on the planet?”

“Are you saying we are nothing more than an insect infestation?”

“To the earth and on the geologic scale in which it exists, yes, that is exactly what I’m saying. I deal with a time line that stretches billions of years while you limit yourself to your own insignificant life span. To the planet, we are one in a long line of dominant creatures and we will be usurped.” Mercer paused and shifted tack.

“I don’t deny that man has the responsibility to husband nature’s resources, to protect them for our future, but that does not mean that we must stop using them altogether, which I suppose is the goal of your organization. PEAL and other environmental groups see every issue as a double-sided coin, black or white, right or wrong, exploit or protect. But there’s a third side of the coin, its thin edge that we call compromise. I may not like it and you may not like it, but that’s the way it is.

“As we speak, the most controversial compromise in environmental history is being played out in northern Alaska. For the sake of a few thousand square acres of land, the United States may free itself from the smog that has choked our cities for generations and end our dependence on fossil fuels forever. Is the price high? Absolutely. I’ve seen the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. It’s one of the most spectacular places on the planet. But if its use means that future generations won’t have to live with acid rain or high levels of carbon monoxide or gaping holes in the ozone layer, then I believe it’s justified.

“I’m sorry if you don’t like it. I would just as soon see it left alone too, but that’s the nature of compromise. At some point in your life, when you’re not so sure that you’re right all the time, you’ll understand what I mean.”

Mercer broke eye contact with the woman and surveyed the attentive looks of the students. They were rapt by the exchange. He smiled self-consciously, embarrassed at his long-winded soliloquy. “Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your time and attention. Dr. Snyder has some amendments to your syllabi before class is dismissed.”

The applause was genuine and enthusiastic as Mercer gathered the notes he never needed. Just before he turned from the lectern, he caught the eye of the young woman again. She threw him a saucy smile, as if to say round one to you, but the fight will continue.