Goodbye To All That
Today was my final day of work at the Sierra Club. Now I can be objective again, to answer that question.
Here’s what I wrote to the staff, nationwide, yesterday:
Goodbye To All That
Dear Sierra Club,
This is my farewell message. Those of you who don’t have time, but want to know what’s going on or what my personal electronic address is, should skip directly to the end. It’s long, for an e-mail. But, those who know me, would you have expected anything different?
1.
The first time I saw Archimedes Plutonium was at a public lecture in cosmology and advanced mathematics. This was college.
The lecture was in the basement of Dartmouth’s Nelson Rockefeller Center, in a hall constructed like a house in the Oakland hills: you entered at the top and carefully picked your way downslope. Then you hurtled yourself into a chair and trusted that gravity would keep you securely in place. When Plutonium stepped into the room, everyone, as if on cue, turned around in their seats to look up at him. I’d only ever heard of him until that day: heard of how he was supposed to be a genius (self-proclaimed); how he’d burnt out, then dropped out of graduate school in Utah and cycled across country; how he’d used his mathematical wizardry to grow immensely wealthy on the stock market. Archimedes Plutonium was also a dishwasher at the college-owned Hanover Inn. He preferred the title “potwasher,” which has the same number of letters as “plutonium,” and starts with the same letter of the alphabet. He may be the world’s foremost proponent of the Plutonium Atom Totality Theory, in which the entire universe is a giant atom of plutonium, and we mere specks in its outer electron shell. If you follow the chain of legal names he claims to have had, you’ll discover he was once called Ludwig Plutonium, and, before that, Ludwig van Ludwig.
We all turned to look at him, for we could hear his briefcase. There was Plutonium, standing for a moment, facing all those faces, a thin man of medium height, dressed in bright blue lightweight clothes (Teva sandals, shorts, hand-made hat). He wore silver-framed glasses. And he carried a silver Halliburton briefcase, which emitted a high-pitched sonic whine, like, many of us thought, the electric timer on a thermal detonator. Plutonium took a seat and set his briefcase next to him. Nothing came of it. During the question-and-answer, he asked repeatedly about the universe’s blackbody radiation. Men in their 50s and 60s, senior members of the math and physics faculty, jeered him. Plutonium is supposed to have been a potwasher only to gain access to the college’s computer resources and college e-mail. With his dartmouth.edu address, he was rumored to have contacted Oxford dons and Nobel Prize-winners. A colleague told me that Plutonium was once physically removed from an event with Murray Gell-Mann–he of the quark model and the eightfold way. I saw Plutonium several times the following summer, gliding through campus on his bike, his hand-made hat strapped securely to his head, his hand-decorated cape floating behind him. And then he was gone.
2.
When I was at the U.S. Geological Survey, the senior geologist I worked with, David, asked me to accompany him to a site visit in Larkspur. A man named Steve (I am not using his real name) had been in contact with David for years, asking him to examine the unique rocks he had found in his yard. David finally relented, hoping this would satisfy Steve enough to leave him alone.
Steve’s was a sunny residential neighborhood of perfectly manicured lawns. He lived in an airy ranch-style house cut into a hillside. His backyard had a million dollar (or million-two, depending on the market) view of the San Francisco Bay. He greeted us in a striped polo shirt and jeans, ruddily complected. And then he showed us where to find buried treasure.
He said it was Sir Frances Drake’s treasure, bestowed on the circumnavigator by the native aristocracies along the Pacific edge of the Americas. While Drake came up the coast in his Golden Hind (neé Pelican), Steve told us Drake actually had a second ship–contrary to historical records. That ship, having grown overloaded with treasure, had to be scuttled in a stream near the San Francisco Bay. With plans to return and salvage the treasure, Drake managed to erase any mention of his second ship from history so that no one else might seek it. His workers–sailors and native people–had helped to hide the ship. They established a complex system of signal rocks that pointed the way to find it. Over the centuries, the abandoned ship and the stream and the signal rocks had been covered over by earth, and then by Steve’s house.
And so Steve was in the process of excavating his front and back yards. In his backyard was a tunnel nearly 20 feet deep straight down. Beneath the surface of his front yard was a small warren of tunnels, supported by columns of earth. David and I hesitantly descended a ladder into the excavation. Steve eagerly showed us the signal rocks he’d discovered underground, and he crawled into his newest tunnel yelling back that it would lead to the ancient stream in which the ship was sunk. He had removed about 38 tons of earth, which he kept in storage. He had quit his downtown San Francisco job at the financial firm SmithBarney. He was getting closer to the stream, closer to the big discovery.
Despite his persistent attempts to get UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library involved, especially with triumph so near, the staff there had stopped responding to him. He found that perplexing. Fortunately, he told us, Steven Spielberg was interested in making a movie of his life that would cut back and forth between Drake’s story and Steve’s. Unfortunately, local authorities had red-tagged his house, and neighbors were complaining that his dig was damaging the street. To make matters worse, David, with his thirty years’ of experience in California geology, tried to explain that these rocks were nothing special. The rock that Steve claimed was beryl–the mineral from which we make emeralds–was not a precious stone. What Steve had found were chunks of all kinds of local rock that, over geologic time, had been incorporated into a single layer, a fruitcake mixture that geologists call the Franciscan Mélange. We told Steve that his was a dangerous situation, we told his girlfriend, who dropped by, that this was dangerous. That there was no suitable support structure for working underground. That a heavy rain might cause his yard to collapse in upon itself. But Steve insisted we take some of his samples for further study. He waved goodbye as we drove away.
3.
The first story I wrote for the Planet here at the Sierra Club was about the so-called nuclear option. An old man contacted me by phone to explain how I’d misunderstood the Constitution as part of my explanation of the parliamentary maneuvers that senators threatened to use against each other when Republicans wanted to eliminate the filibuster. He also told me he was waiting for a big financial deal to go through, one which had to do with rubber plantations. He said he couldn’t wait to get his hands on some “filthy lucre.”
4.
The title of this farewell message is taken from two sources: Joan Didion’s essay, which I’ve read a couple of times, and Robert Graves’ autobiography, which I’ve not read at all. Both, in a way, have to do with the scales falling from one’s eyes.
In Didion’s essay, she notes that New York is said to be a city for the very rich or the very poor, but she adds, “It is less often said that New York is also…a city for the very young.” I’m not going to New York anytime soon, though I nearly did. Didion explains why she left New York and returned to California, where she was born (as was I). It’s also about how we grow out of certain things and into others, particularly in our late twenties.
At the beginning of the Graves, he writes, “The objects of this autobiography, written at the age of thirty-three, are simple enough: an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again; money.”
I don’t plan on forgetting, and this message is my formal good-bye. But that last thing: money. Pink Floyd, remember, sang of it, “it’s a gas,” and made a lot of it that way. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Certainly, the three men I’ve just described are different from you and me. Is it coincidence that wealth, treasure, filthy lucre are present in each of their stories? Or, perhaps more accurately, the perception of wealth and the pursuit of riches?
For the last decade, I have been involved with organizations that attract their fair share of cranks, crackpots, people who simply see things in a different way–dreamers, all of them, searching for something, on the move, or almost.
But now I’m going to Berkeley, to the journalism school. “Why?” you may ask.
I suppose I need new material.
5.
It’s been a real honor and pleasure to work with scores of Sierra Club staff, volunteers, and partners, as a grant writer in Conservation and then as an editor and graphic designer at the Planet.
Going forward, I expect to hear more about how the Club is taking the initiative and focusing on solutions. Keep at it.
Goodbye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that.
6.
In future, you can e-mail me at [e-mail redacted]. Or, if you are already using one of my dozens of other e-mail address, just keep on keeping on.
