gated now. You’d need a car or truck filled with explosives to get through.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said.
I was thinking about Holocene deposits and how I had never really given the Cenozoic much of a fair chance. Mostly because I’m anti-mammal.
Jules was annoyed.
“Yes, you would,” he said, “even if you jump out, a truck or a car is not going to get through the gate with enough momentum to knock the tower over. You’d need explosives.”
The blaring subtext broke my train of thought… Hi, I’m Jules. I’m the Know-How Guy of the Group. Sitar music fades… It was just bunch of residual pre-feminist hat-doffing and it was irritating because I wanted to explain methane clathrates to Tamara.
“You don’t want to take out multiple lines running south anyway,” I said. “You’d want to take out one big line going south so the others lines stay open and carry the overload. That way you might even blow a substation if an HV fuse opened too slowly.”
Tamara set a full kettle on the woodstove.
“So how would you do it?” she asked.
“I’m curious too,” Jules said.
I hadn’t thought about it but I hate being patronized. I’d defended my dissertation against some of the best scientists in the world. Real jerks, some of them, and I didn’t feel like getting talked down to by some tinkering Robinson Crusoe of Anarchy Island.
“Well…” I said loudly, “I might start by looking at the soil those things are built on and when they were built. There’s a lot of silt, sand and gravel along the river and compacting is expensive. They used to be far more carful about it than they are now. I’m sure they did as little as possible. I’d look at where the towers sit on non-cohesive soils.”
Kimba swipes at the usurper.
“That just shows where it’s less stable, not how you’d get to the base of the tower to set explosives,” Jules said.
From the jungle, Kimba’s spirit father yells out a warning—
“Fuck getting to the tower. Those gates are meant to slow down someone stupid enough to drive a truck through them. I wouldn’t bother with it at all.”
—But his words of warning turn into fireflies and Kimba charges on.
“I’d find a spot on bad soil where the line crosses the river and set a bunch of charges to try to dunk it in the water.”
“It wouldn’t work,” said Jules.
Methane bubbles popping as I followed my pride down a hole.
“It’s called soil improvement,” I said. “They tried to use it to build the Russian railroad in the 1930s. A guy at Davis was an expert in it. You set charges on unstable ground to cause liquefaction. Works like an earthquake and turns the ground to quicksand for a few seconds. Half this area is prone to mudslides and everyone builds on it like they’re setting up a pup tent. Theoretically you could do a lot of stuff that way.”
“Could you really?” Tamara asked.
“I have no fucking idea but it beats driving a Volvo into a transmission line.”
The room was silent. Tamara’s eyes were sharp small moons. She held a tea bag by the string between her fingers and it spun midair like a cat toy.
“Well,” she dropped the bag into a cup and grabbed the kettle, “Coryn and Asher get back tonight. We can ask them if they know more about the guy who drove into the tower.”
“Who?”
“Coryn and Asher.”
I had forgotten about the others. The empty rooms of the farmhouse were integrated into my sense of the natural order. The idea that people were coming to fill them disturbed me. I knew nothing about them, just irrelevant details, that Marco and Daria shared a room but weren’t together, that Asher was trans, that Coryn spent a year in Thailand with a begging bowl and Black Francis had a crush on Tamara, which she resented.
“I think you’d like Daria,” Tamara said, “She was a biology major.”
I hate biology majors. It’s the chick squad for scientists.
Nothing more was said about transmission lines or the Permo-Triassic Extinction. After that conversation though, I began to sense the work going on beneath the seed-based cheeses and zines. An undercurrent of excitement bearing no relationship to anything on the surface and which ran through the most trivial interactions. I recognized the feeling from my childhood, the excitement that was there when people came to our house. Or when we went to theirs and slept over or drove back late. Credence, Cady and I would spend the whole day running around