Fifty Degrees Below

A truck, rumbling in the distance. The sound of the creek burbling over stones. Distant laughter, a car starting; tinkle of broken glass; something like a dumpster lid slamming down. And always the hum of the city, a million noises blended together, like the light caught in the cloud. It was neither quiet, nor dark, nor empty. It definitely was not wilderness. It was city and forest simultaneously. It was hard to characterize how it felt.

Where would one sleep out here?

Immediately the question organized his walk. He had been wandering before, but now he was on the hunt again. He saw that many things were a hunt. It did not have to be a hunt to kill and eat animals. Any search on foot was a kind of hunt. As now.

He ranged up and away from the ravine. First in importance would be seclusion. A flat dry spot, tucked out of the way. There, for instance, a tree had been knocked over in the flood, its big tangle of roots raised to the sky, creating a partial cave under it – but too damp, too closed in.

Cobwebs caught his face and he wiped them away. He looked up into the network of black branches. Being up in a tree would solve so many problems … That was a prehominid thought, perhaps caused merely by craning his neck back. No doubt there was an arboreal complex in the brain crying out: Go home, go home!

He ranged uphill, moving mostly northward. A hilltop was another option. He looked at one of the knolls that divided Rock Creek’s vestigial western tributaries. Nice in some ways; flat; but as with root hollows, these were places where all manner of creatures might take refuge. The truth was that the best nooks were best for everything out there. A distant crash in the brush reminded him that this might include the zoo’s jaguar.

He would need to make some daytime explorations, that was clear. He could always stay in his van, of course, but this felt more real. Scouting trips for the Feral Observation Group. We’re all in the fog now, Nancy had said. He would spend some of his time hunting for animals. A kind of return to the paleolithic, right here in Washington D.C. Repaleolithization: it sounded very scientific, like the engineers who spoke of amishization when they meant to simplify a design. Landscape restoration inside the brain. The pursuit of happiness; and the happiness was in the pursuit.

Frank smiled briefly. He realized he had been tense ever since leaving the rented apartment. Now he was more relaxed, watchful but relaxed, moving about easily. It was late, he was getting tired. Another branch across the face and he decided to call it a night.

He made his way west to Connecticut, hit it at Fessenden, walked south on the sidewalk blinking in the flood of light. It might as well have been Las Vegas or Miami to him now, everything blazing neon colors in the warm spring night. People were out. He strolled along among them. The city too was a habitat, and as such a riot of sensation. He would have to think about how that fit in with the repaleolithization project, because the city was a big part of contemporary society, and people were obviously addicted to it. Frank was himself, at least to parts of it. The technological sublime made everything magical, as if they were all tripping with the shaman – but all the time, which was too much. They had therefore lost touch with reality, gone mad as a collective.

And yet this street was reality too. He would have to think about all this.

When he came to his van no one was in sight, and he slipped inside and locked the doors. It was dark, quiet, comfortable. Very much like a room. A bit stuffy; he turned on the power, cracked the windows. He could start the engine and power the air conditioner for a while if he really needed to.

He set his wristwatch alarm for 4:30 AM, afraid he might sleep through the dawn in such a room. Then he lay down on his familiar old mattress, and felt his body start to relax even further. Home sweet home! It made him laugh.

At 4:30 his alarm beeped. He squeezed it quiet and slipped on his running shoes and got out of the van before his sleepiness knocked him back down. Out into the dawn, the world of grays. This was how cats must see, all the grays so finely gradated. A different kind of seeing altogether.

Into the forest again. The leafy venation of the forest air was a masterpiece of three-dimensionality, the precise spacing of everything suggesting some kind of vast sculpture, as in an Ansel Adams photo. The human eye had an astonishing depth of field.

He stood over the tawny sandstone of Rock Creek’s newly burnished ravine, hearing his breathing. It was barely cool. The sky was shifting from a flat gray to a curved pale blue.

‘Oooooooooop!’

He shivered deep in his flesh, like a horse.

The sound came from overhead; a rising ‘oooooooooo’ that then suddenly fell. Something like the cooing of a dove, or the call of a coyote. A voice, or a kind of siren – musical, unearthly, bizarre. Glissandos up and down. Voices, yes. Gibbons and/or siamangs. Frank had heard such calls long ago, at the San Diego Zoo.

It sounded like there were several of them now. ‘Ooooop! Ooooooooooop! Oooooooooooop!’

Lows to highs, penetrating and pure. The hair on Frank’s neck was sticking out.

He tried it himself. ‘Ooooooop!’ he sang, softly. It seemed to fit in. He could do a fair imitation of one part of their range. His voice wasn’t as fluid, or as clear in tone, and yet still, it was somewhat the same. Close enough to join in unobtrusively.

So he sang with them, and stepped ever so slowly between the trees, looking up trying to catch a glimpse of them. They were feeding off each other’s energy, sounding more and more rambunctious. Wild animals! And they were celebrating the new day, there was no doubt about it. Maybe even celebrating their freedom. There was no way to tell, but to Frank it sounded like it.

Certainly it was true for him – the sound filled him, the morning filled him, spring and all, and he bellowed ‘Oooooooopee oop oop!’ voice cracking at its highest. He longed to sing higher; he hooted as loudly as he could. The gibbons didn’t care. It wasn’t at all clear they had even noticed him. He tried to imitate all the calls he was hearing, failed at most of them. Up, down, crescendo, decrescendo, pianissimo, fortissimo. An intoxicating music. Had any composer ever heard this, ever used this? What were people doing, thinking they knew what music was?

The chorus grew louder and more agitated as the sky lightened. When sunlight pierced the forest they all went crazy together.

Then he saw three of them in the trees, sitting on high branches. He saw their long arms and longer tails, their broad shoulders and skinny butts. One swung away on arms that were as long as its body, to land on a branch by another, accept a cuff and hoot some more. Again their raucous noise buffeted Frank. When they finally quieted down, after an earsplitting climax, the green day was upon them.

Senator Phil Chase said, ‘You know, it’s not a question of you being right and me being wrong.’

‘Of course not,’ Charlie Quibler replied.

Phil grinned. ‘We all agreed that global warming was real.’

‘Yes, of course we did.’

‘No!’ Joe Quibler murmured as he drowsed on Charlie’s back.

Phil laughed to hear it. ‘You’ve got a lie detector there.’

‘Going off all the time, in this company.’

‘Ha ha. Looks like he’s waking up.’

Charlie glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better start walking.’

‘I’ll join you. I can’t stand any more of this anyway.’

They were at the Vietnam Memorial, attending a ceremony to mark its reopening. Phil, a veteran who had served as an Army reporter in Saigon for a year, had said a few words; then the President had shown up, but only near the end, the feeling among his people being that this was one memorial that would be better left buried in the mud. After that Phil was forgotten by the press on hand, which did not surprise him; but Charlie could tell by the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth that the calculated back of the hand to Vietnam had irritated him.

In any case they were free to leave. Normally Phil would have been whisked by car up the Mall to his offices, but a cancellation had opened a half-hour slot in his schedule. ‘Let’s go say hi to Abe,’ he muttered, and turned them west. Offering this gift of time to Charlie; it was as close to an apology as Charlie would ever get.

A month earlier, right before the flood, Charlie had helped craft a giant bill for Phil, designed to jumpstart a real engagement with the climate change problem. Then, in the last phase of intense committee negotiations, Phil had dismantled the bill to get a small part of it passed, effectively destroying the rest. He had promised Charlie he wouldn’t, but he had; and had done so without warning Charlie he was going to.

At the time Charlie had been furious. Phil had shrugged him off. ‘I am only doing the necessary,’ he said, in his version of an Indian accent. ‘I must first be doing the necessary.’

But Charlie did not believe it had been necessary. And it did not help that since the flood Phil had been widely hailed as a prophet on the climate issue. Phil had laughed at this little irony, had thanked Charlie, had ignored with aplomb all Charlie’s explicit and implied I-told-you-sos. ‘It’s all really a compliment to you, Charles – to you and your unworkable brilliance.’

‘Um hmm,’ Charlie said. ‘Yeah right.’

He was enjoying the situation too much to invent his side of the banter. Two old colleagues, out for a walk to the Lincoln Monument; it was the rarest thing in town.

Landscaping equipment dotted the newly restored bank of the Potomac, and the background buzz of the city was augmented by their noise. The violent diesel huffing and puffing might have startled some sleeping children awake, but it served as a lullaby to Joe Quibler; the noise of trucks shifting gears on Wisconsin was his usual soporific, and he loved all big grinding sounds. So now he snoozed happily on, head nestled into the back of Charlie’s neck as they approached the memorial.

This part of the Mall had been twenty feet under the rush of the Potomac during the flood, and being landfill to begin with it had not put up very much resistance to the spate; much of it had been torn away, leaving the Lincoln Memorial an island in the stream. ‘Check it out,’ Charlie said to Phil, pointing up at the big white foursquare building. There was a dark horizontal line partway up it. ‘High water mark. Twenty-three feet above normal.’

Phil frowned at the sight. ‘You know, the goddammed House is never going to appropriate enough money to clean up this city.’

Senators and their staffs often had an immense disdain for the House of Representatives. ‘True.’

‘It’s too much like one of their Bible prophecies, what was that one?’

‘Noah’s flood? Revelation?’

‘Maybe. Anyway they’re loving it. No way they’re going to allocate money to interfere with God’s judgment. That would be bad. That would be worse than, than what – than raising taxes!’

‘Joe’ll wake up if you yell like that.’