On the subject of capitalism’s nonchalant and everyday violence, my obituary of socialist playwright Edward Bond was published recently at Locust Review. And now on with the show…
“A carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the small village… sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions in 2020, and now another major leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, has once again exposed the risks carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities in their path… Soon, pipelines like this could be coming to cities and towns throughout the country.” – Emily Sanders, Jacobin
“no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.” – Warsan Shire, “Home”
It had been in the news before it happened. Not a warning exactly. Nothing so straightforward as that. Had it been, maybe we’d have listened. But when the air was poisoned, we surely thought back to those headlines, the ghastly pictures of children crying next to rubble. And – for those who had dared to read on – the devastating words from those who had lost everything, framed by chilly, matter-of-fact prose. The kind of presentation that distances. Lives flattened onto our screens.
On some level, we were correct when we thought it couldn’t be us. Why would it be? Could any of us remember a war on our own soil? Those of us who served abroad might have recognized these missiles and bombs. Seeing one crashed into your driveway? The corner shop? Or where the bus stops every day to take your children to school?
Somewhere, people are preparing these kinds of explosives, mechanisms capable of bringing down whole buildings, leveling residential blocks, of obliterating the places someone is so used to seeing every day that it never occurs to them they might not be there. Someone builds this thing for the expressed purpose of destroying itself and everything around it. Someone does this, but nowhere near here.
Everyone around here knows our history. A small town we certainly are, humble even, but there’s plenty to know, to remember, to learn and pass on. The archeologists and historians tell us there has been some settlement here for at least 2,000 years. We know about the Niutachi of course. If anyone who came before ever went by a different name, we do not know it. Isn’t it bizarre how a whole people can be lost, even as their place remains?
The Niutachi had their own appreciation for the beauty and fertility of this place. So did the Europeans – of a kind – when they showed up. They also thought they had more right to the land than the people who were here first. You know the rest of that story. If you didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of anything around here to teach it to you.
In any case, as our farms grew, so did we. We fed ourselves and other towns. Many across state lines. It was only natural that so many would find their way here. And so we grew.
When the Farmall plant opened in 1926, fortunes turned again. Every home had a picture of a tractor in the kitchen or living room, normally with a family member standing next to it, beaming with pride.
I would sit on the hilltops and look down at what used to be that plant. It still stood, still stands. You could still see the faded letters of the International Harvester logo on the building’s side before the sunset. Broken windows, weeds growing and winding their way through the brick. The silence, where once you’d have heard the faint rhythms of coming and going and working and building, was fitting.
Most of us still had memories of our fathers – and more than a few of our mothers – heading here in the morning before we went to school. Sometimes, when production was especially demanding, they’d be gone before we even woke up. Nobody could ever have said we were happy – at least not as happy as all the pictures with tractors made us seem – but it was something.
Something. Not the nothing my friends and I looked down on from the hills. It had become a regular happening by the time most of us were done with school. The bars wouldn’t serve us, still underaged and all. But we knew where to get something cheap, something that would let us forget the weights that were growing in our chests, something that would let us laugh for a bit. Even if the laughter could only be ironic, a short reprieve from the constant Sunday we now woke up to. Everyone needs their rituals, even if they bear no resemblance to the ones our parents performed.
Compressed tightly enough, any gas is a bomb. That was, naturally, the biggest fear, the most persistent whispers and worried rumblings when the Kinder Morgan men started poking around the town. Maybe there were a few passing thoughts about the eyesore of the dull gray pipes jutting out of someone’s backyard, but by then we had been so used to the abandoned IH plant that saying something seemed silly. What’s a bit more ugliness? Especially when it had been so long since anyone had been willing to write a check for any portion of our property.
The Kinder Morgan men were most reassuring that the likelihood of a fiery eruption was quite low. An eruption would never be their word. What we didn’t consider was that the gas wouldn’t need to explode to kill, to take apart a human being, to drive people from their homes. A weak point in the pipe, a bit of rust, a microscopic twist or blemish; these would do the job. Quiet, small, minute even, leaving no sense that something foul was slowly creeping into the air, crawling into our mouths and lungs, making our brains slow and our hearts fall off beat.
Nobody knew it was happening. How could we? Everybody gets headaches and sore throats. Tired? Everybody is tired; everybody is stressed. Blurry vision? It can be written off, not even worth mentioning to your neighbor. You have trouble reading your mail; so what? Time to stop putting off your eye exam. No reason to make a fuss.
Only when I realized I hadn't seen her come out of her house in a couple days, when I knocked on the door and saw a pale and sweaty and confused imitation of my neighbor answer the door; only then did it occur to me that something is very wrong. Several homes on my street hadn’t opened their front doors for days, several kids absent from the bus stop.
I stood in the road, my vision reeling, unfocused as it tried to take in the rows of houses and what might have been in them. Kids unable to wake up. Parents dry-heaving into the sink. You could always tell the homes from the empty houses – and there were a few on my street, like most others. It wasn’t just the overgrown lawns and dark windows, but something about the movement in them that you could sense outside as you walked past. An unpresent presence, as imperceivable as the vapor wafting up from the ground. But now? Now every house had this same inert weight wrapped round it.
It took the people from Kinder Morgan far longer to show up than the ambulances. Far longer than FEMA. Several days longer. By then it was clear that other streets and neighborhoods had been affected. We were told to stay in our homes, wait for a knock from the paramedics or emergency workers. It seemed a suicidal prospect, but who were we to argue, even if most of us had had the strength?
It wasn’t even the same Kinder Morgan men who finally arrived. These ones wore suits, and kept their distance on the town’s outskirts. We only knew they were here because we saw on our news feeds or TVs. Those of us who managed to stay conscious and coherent watched their words of practiced concern and measured promises; real and unreal, here and nowhere.
The bus lurches forward, jolts me awake. It’s the first time I’ve slept in days. Mostly I’ve been too anxious, too scared I won’t wake up again. I don’t know how long it’s been exactly since I dozed off, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. The emergency workers had been as serious getting us out of our homes as they had when they told us to stay in them. Only this time there was real urgency, speed, even efficiency. Clearly they were in a rush to evacuate, which to me meant something was about to happen that they wouldn’t tell us about.
Outside the window, my street slides away. The houses seem strange now, no matter if they’ve been empty for five years or five minutes. All of them stare back at me, like they might unhook their jaws at any moment. None of them do, but it’s enough to make everything around them feel dead and dangerous. The light from the lampposts is dull and inert, almost bouncing off the window, leaving the bus dark and quiet, sealed off. And as we wind through the streets of the industrial sector, the grand void of the International Harvester plant looms imposingly, as if its own darkness has finally had the chance to stretch out and feed itself.
We picture disaster as cataclysm. An explosion, or the ground opening up. Buildings swallowed whole. But right now I’m watching a father scream and cough, his sick body writhing while the emergency workers take away his son’s body. Behind him, his home is still intact, though on the most technical sense, it’s not his home anymore. Very likely it never will be again. War proves unnecessary. Or maybe it just takes different forms, stalking under every town, every home, every street corner.
Somewhere several faces we would never recognize are crammed into a room hovering high above their own landscape. The view extends for miles over city streets, apartment building and office complexes, even across rivers and forests, but not to us. They talk of a kind of damage control. Not how to minimize the damage itself, but rather how to control the awareness of damage. Thus the carefully phrased statements, the photographs intended to tug at the heartstrings, the assurances of help and relief.
You’ll see all of these. For most of you, it will be the first time you’ve ever heard of what was once this town. Maybe you’ll know our history too now. Will it matter? With nobody here to remember, is it even a history? Or is it just a story, another collection of lives and events, flattened onto your screen?