"In brief, I learned a great many very powerful people have attempted to hide something here, and hitherto succeeded. That I am in grave danger for attempting to bring this something into the disinfecting sunlight. That I walked away from my first close encounter with no evidence, no evidence at all of any value, save for a haunting feeling, a kind of possession which has lingered on me since I first visited this place as a postgrad not quite twenty years ago. And yet I trust mySuspicious Mindabsolutely: something is gravely, urgently amiss in Stone's Throw, Oregon.
"I suppose some context is in order. All my life I have been enamored with the idiosyncratic; with——you could say with the human aberration, as well as the aberrant human. You know——elite snipers who wear eyeglasses. Chainsmoking triathletes. Fat monks and skinny pie-eating contestants. Every individual doing their part to make our species a little more quirky and beautiful and strange. Even as a young, hopelessly bemusing postgrad, I knew this was the kind of person I would write my dissertation about. Not to 'solve' anyone. Not even to 'understand' them,per sē.How should I say it?——...well. Maybe it will come to me.
"The native tribe indigenous to this part of Oregon——the Kitseshawsee——I'll wager you've heard their name, that you've seen their arrowheads and shattered earthenwares on grade-school field trips. You might even remember their endonym means something like 'Those with the Trustworthy Faces'——a Trivia Night secret weapon, I have no doubt. What you're unlikely to know is they have a very peculiar funerary custom: 'gravelaying.' It's in the name. When a member of the tribe has died——which is often, but we'll get to that——the others place her in an open-mouthed crypt. A natural cave, usually. And her children, her grandchildren, any children at all who once sought comfort in this person——it's mostly children who do this——are invited to enter the crypt, to lay, to ingest intoxicating potions and fall asleep there among the bodies. Legend goes that the spirits of the dead will visit the little sleepers in their dreams, dispensing comfort and fond memories. Dispensing wisdom.
"You see where I'm going with this, don't you? To hate the stench of death——to spit out that which tastes rancid——self-preservation!——survival instinct!——fight-flight-freeze-fawn!——all belonging to the natural and expected order of things. And every aspect, every microbevel of every facet of our culture is supersaturated with this principle, isn't it? For God's sake we watch scary movies and the SFX people make the monster look like a corpse: empty eye sockets and rictus grin, skinny hands and bloated midsection. Even the cheesiest of them can draw from us a visceral, startled reaction utilizing these cheap tricks and why? An elementary hijacking of genetic memory. Because two million years agoHomo habilis Connected the Dots: bodies stink. That which stinks makes us sick. That which makes us sick kills us quicker.Ergofor a long and fruitful life, do not loiter near corpses nor carrion nor anything resembling these,quod erat demonstrandum.And yet...this gravelaying tradition——is it not a total contradiction, no, I daresay a complete culturalrejectionof the instincts and natural laws every other society takes for granted? (Well, every society except one, but I will spare you the suspense: the Kitseshawsee share no sociological DNA with the ancient Numidians, nor any other Berber peoples of the early Iron Age for that matter. At least not in the thirteen thousand years since the Bering land bridge sank into the sea. And many, many thanks to my old thesis advisor for her much-too-gentle recommendation to find another angle for my dissertation. Like I said: hopelessly bemusing.)
"A shrinking society with a dying culture with (not to be universalist) an unusual funerary rite. A passing grade in a class. A research paper and a diploma. That's all this place was supposed to be to me. That's all it very nearly was. Until I crossed municipal lines and suddenly the pedestrians stared like they'd never seen a three-headed, blue-skinned eggplant-person in all their lives. Until I was ordering a cheap, greasy, lukewarm dinner at a honky-tonk in my search for a motel and I asked for ice in my Cutty Sark and the bartender asked if I was insane. And I asked what kind of bar doesn't have ice, even a dive like this, and he said nobody trusts the water anymore, not since The Accident, and anyone needed drinking or washing or icing-down her Scotch had best be doing it from bottles. Until he leaned in and added, curt, fierce, all but hissing, don't I go being overheard asking that again, neither. People have a way of sticking out around here when they don't know not to drink the water. And people that stick out have a way of never being heard from again. That bartender received the best tip of his life that night, and then didn't had to trouble himself with the likes of me a second time.
"But the next morning I would cross into the Kitseshawsee reservation, I would parlay with Those with the Trustworthy Faces; I'd engage with a few primary sources, and obtain every secondary I could for taking back with me——photocopies, pictures, 'forgetting' to return a few library books, nothing was sacred to that young, intrepid thief-researcher——and come summer's end I'd return from Stone's Throw sympathetic——arrogantly pitying, maybe——but more or less unchanged. It would be many years before I thought about her again. Any true, bone-stripping thought I mean, anything more frictive than an icebreaker, a conversation piece from the lurid past. But that's the thing about this profession of ours: we go to a lot of conventions and conferences. And we get to talking with all kinds of experts in their fields. Thinkpieces are our bread and butter. Just a couple years ago I was in Denver speaking with one such a person——I suppose I'd best be vague, so as not to put him in danger also——but sure to say he had specialized in a kind of ecotoxicology, or maybe regulatory compliance, or sustainable practices. I don't even remember how the topic of the Stone's Throw disaster came up, but it couldn't have been more...substantivethan simple curiosity, wanting to pick his brain a bit. In any case, I was telling him what I recalled of a place I hadn't seen since my schooling years——both from the locals and from their newspaper archives: a certain industrial farm just a few miles upriver of Lamplight, and its need to wipe out various broadleaf and bindweed species that were choking out its bogs. A chemical called monosodium methyl arsenate. Bad containment practices. Worse disposal. I spoke also of the Kitseshawsee, of their abysmal child mortality rates even by reservation standards. The way their little ones die vomiting and seizing and bleeding from the eyes. The way the ones who manage to adulthood can't feel their feet or fingers, cannot walk without gaiting, can't wear certain textiles for the way their skin Flakes off in sheets. Early onset kidney failure. Twenty different kinds of cancer, running through the family trees the way hair color and nipple shape do for you and me. And to the tribe itself none of this is unusual, none of this is tragic or heartbreaking. It's just how people go when it's their time. It's just...life."
[The speaker pauses, breathing heavily, raggedly, though not hurriedly, and for several moments only this is heard; this and the tap of brittle rainwater percolating through the velvet canopy of her environs, padding its mossy underfloor. One more full, bracing inhale and she has collected herself.]
"Sorry. I'm sorry, I... don't recall when, but my fellow conversationist's face must have changed. He looked outraged, concerned——thankfully——he wouldn't have been worth my time, nor a peaceful parting if he'd been suffering some deficiency of conscience——but more than that, what really jolted me, he looked confused, like I'd contradicted myself when I'm sure I hadn't. 'What did you say they were growing at this farm?' he said. Cranberries, I said, blueberries, persimmons, wasabi. These were artificial bogs, see, flooded and drained again using a series of sluice gates. My companion's expression turned grave. 'I hate to be the one to tell you you've been had, Marge,' he said, 'but such a farm would have no use for MSMA. None whatsoever.'
"I asked what he meant and he obliged, starting with the part I already knew: the EPA launched a whole suite of summits at the turn of the decade. Trying to get the stuff banned worldwide. Corporate pressures had their way, of course——but as of 2010 or so, any company with backstocks of the chemical had one year to either use them, or offload them. Not only because of the human health concerns, but because once it finds its way into local soil, or God forbid, local water, very, very few plants can withstand the stuff. Arsenic closely enough resembles phosphorous in molecular structure to replace it outright during attempted ATP synthesis; leading to denatured and misfolded proteins, self-metabolism of key enzymes, etc., etc. Basically, chlorosis, necrosis, eventual total cellular collapse. There are very few plants hardy enough to survive this process and I'll give you a hint: none of them thrive in Oregon or anywhere in the P.N.W. for that matter, with its cool, rainy summers, its long winters. Cotton, rye, sugarcane, a few buffalo grasses to name a few.
"I tried to correct my companion, tried to rationalize——but it didn't matter. It never made sense for industrial-scale stores of MSMA to exist in this part of the country in the first place; not just for de-weeding highway meridians and golf courses. And it never made sense for a single farm to need enough of the stuff to contaminate an entiregoddamnwatershed. Certainly not a farm which grows cranberries. You See? It All Fits Together.
[Another long pause, with only the ambience of the boreal rainforest seeping through the back-noise of the recording.]
"I'm not...I want you to know that this is all very unlike me. Not the conspiracy part——our government have, they do, and they will again——I mean uprooting my entire life to expose it, to become one of those whistleblowers you hear about for a few days and then never again once they've been either bribed or Russian-windowed. Changing every habit, every piece of myself so I can wriggle my way to the truth like...like some kind of spiritual and moral contortionist-artist. Christ. It's who-knows-what-o'clock in the afternoon right now. I'm sitting next to a motorcycle that last year I didn't know how to ride. Because I knew I'd need it to get past all the new gates, the checkpoints, slip through gaps in fences and vehicle bollards. I checked the weather every day this week——something I never would, because when have I ever cared how my hair looks, but I knew this needed to happen on the most dismal day, when the guards would be huddled under their cargo nets around their flasks trying to stay warm. Thus the rain you hear behind me. And...and the gun, even! Last Christmas I never could've dreamed I'd need a gun, but here it is, in the handwarmer pocket of my jacket. My adorable little Smith 36. And what about the money, usually blown on rare Scotch and rarer Herbie Hancock records? And what about asking all my friends to take in Cecil and Mimi for me? They knew something was wrong with me. They all did. Earlier I called it a possessing——this place has possessed me. I think that's a good word for it. The Marion Lovelace I am today isn't the Marion Lovelace the rest of the world knows.
"You know, when I went to the department chair to submit my leave request, he asked why I was doing this. He said 'Marge, don't you know they've got to declassify the papers after fifty years? And how many has it been already? Everyone will know the truth anyway.' First of all, Dr. Tierney——you stupid,stupidman——hand over your doctorates and resign right now if that's not just you trying to sound important. If that's how you really feel! The idea that an ignoramus like you, someone so apathetic, so smug, so unconcerned with the lived experiences of others could be placed in charge of a——...ugh. Look, it's because of justice. Alright? We all know about the Trail of Tears. About forced sterilization, about throwing the Japanese into concentration camps, about Tuskegee. But just this once——just thisfuckingonce, I would like to live in a world where it's the victim who gets to see justice, not her grandchildren. Just this once, I don't want them to pay 'reparations' out of their bottomless pockets——the government, or PuraLife, or whoever it is that's been doing this. Just this once I want to believe in a world where people who destroy other people, who destroy community, who destroy legacy, have to either sit in a cell for the rest of time, or die, or just...just, go the hell away if they cannot coexist with the rest of polite society. And I'm here to make that happen so that in another thirty years I'm not looking back on a life of standing aside and doing nothing. So that's it. I'm here to unearth the bottled water company's profit scheme, or unearth whatever it is the government buried here and then smothered in MSMA so nobody would go digging, or——whatever's going on. That's myraison d'être.Of the last couple years and of right now. And...and that's what I suspect I'm about to give my life for. And I don't know. I thought I would be more scared than this. But it feels alright.
"......Yes. It feels alright.
"I've just lunched on what might be my last meal: a soggy baguette smeared with a little Kerrygold and Rocquefort, a link ofLandjäger.A demure dram of Laphroaig 18, my favorite whisky. Please, if it's my body you found and not my submission, let that be what you pour over my grave. Or if you don't have the time to bury me, leave it in my coat pocket, like the grave-goods of so many noble civilizations. I'm in a treeline not far from town. This is it: the moment I kick this dingy old Yamaha back to life and cross my own personal Rubicon. My Hellespont. If I've read the map correctly the first military installation is four klicks from here; pray for me. My name is Dr. Marion Lovelace. Signing off.
"P.S. As for the password? Highlight the break between the first two paragraphs."
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