David Strumfels: To Learn, to Love, to Live

Illustration by Dell Harris

It was well past midnight by the time Bill Malone got home from his twelve-hour shift at the Jiffy Mart. Exhausted, he dragged himself into his compartment, hoping for nothing more than his usual warm shower and mug of cocoa before collapsing into bed. He knew, of course, that Janet would be long asleep; her job at the arboretum was no less taxing than his own, and she had been putting in extra hours so they could afford his classes and study materials.

But Janet was not asleep. To the contrary: she practically grabbed him before the door was closed, and pulled him over to the pad before he could make any protest. Once there, there were no words: she simply turned him toward the pad and let him read the contents.

His exhaustion was instantly forgotten. “All right! We re in! We made it!”

He scrolled through the letter again and again, hardly able to believe the words. Graduate school! At last! Finally, he was on his way to a real job. A real career. Hell, a real life.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And not just to him, of course: he felt Janet’s hand on his shoulders, her smile on the back of his head, her warmth in his soul. Reaching back, he took her hand and squeezed it tightly, almost too tightly. “This makes it all worth while,” he said, close to trembling. “All the years of hard work. They’ve finally paid off.”

“The hard years,” Janet reminded him with a return squeeze of equal intensity, “are just beginning.”

He could only nod his head at that. It was true of course; it was still a long, difficult road to where they wanted to be, one filled with more than its share of potholes, icy roads and dead ends. This might be the most exciting moment of their lives, but Bill knew it was preceding many very difficult ones. Bill had a feeling there would come a day when his shifts at the Jiffy Mart would sound like a wonderful dream he’d once had.

“But we’ll get through them all right,” she said, reading his mind as usual. “You’ll see.”

The first day of school only reinforced that feeling. The classroom was filled with people much like himself: ambitious, grimly-determined faces which had gone through just as much as he had to get here, and were as determined to not be among the two-thirds who didn’t make the cut. Professor Eisenhart’s first lecture didn’t help either: “The first thing you’re going to get through your heads is this isn’t Greenpeace or some other feel-good club where you pay your dues and pat yourself on the back. When I’m finished with you—those of you still left—you’re going to know Mother Earth and how she works better than a doctor knows her patient. And if you think you’re ecology-minded now, believe me: you’re the Marquis de Sade fancying himself a lover of women. So if any of you are doubting your commitment… now is the time to step aside before you put in a lot of time and hard work for nothing. There are no faint hearted types in this field, believe me.”

When he told Janet, however, she didn’t flinch, or look the slightest bit concerned. “Bill Malone, if there’s one thing nobody can doubt about you, it’s your commitment,” she told him in no uncertain terms. “You have nothing to worry about.”

Bill grinned at her confidence in him, not to mention the gigantic hug and kiss that accompanied it. But that didn’t make his studies any easier. By mid-term he was already beginning to wonder what was so bad about being a grunt at the Jiffy Mart anyway. At least it was a steady job with a steady income, not to mention a minimum of headaches. A life like that—-but then he thought of the child they hoped to have some day: that child deserved a better life, whether he wanted it or not. Besides, giving up now would be an act he’d never live down. He couldn’t do it, not after all he’d been through.

The decision turned out to be the correct one. Amazingly, he not only passed that first final but—of the correctly predicted one-third of the original class remaining—got the highest mark. Eisenhart gave him a wink as he passed out the scores: “I’ve told the rest of the faculty not to cut you any slack, Malone,” he said. Janet, naturally, was ecstatic, and they celebrated with a filet of soy steak and the best organic wine they could afford. “I told you,” she said afterward, when the lights were low and the music soft. “I told you you could do it.”

Things didn’t get any easier after that, however. Bill learned more than he would have thought possible to stuff into his head: chemistry, geology, meteorology, climatology, hydrology, biology, zoology, botany, toxicology, herpetology, ichthyology, ornithology, entomology, mycology… merely keeping all the names straight was a strain, much less all he had to know about them. And those, he discovered, were just the fundamental sciences he had to be grounded in before he could hope to master the skills he would need. But his professors were not sympathetic to his groans: “We tried ignorance,” one finally made it plain, “and it doesn’t work.”

Fortunately, Janet was always there to keep his spirits up when it seemed like he could hardly keep the world under his feet another moment. “You can make it,” she would say while rubbing his shoulders and back, sore from so many hours hunched over the pad, “You know you can make it. All you have to do is stay at it and you’ll get there.”

“If I do, it’ll be because of you,” he would thank her, and return to his studies with a vengeance. She never said anything to that, of course: it was too obviously true for her to deny. Without her, he would never have made it this far, and they both knew it.

The second year got heavily into philosophy and environmental ethics. Again, it was nothing like his undergraduate courses, where he’d been required to do little more than mouth the professor’s personal biases: he was expected to do real thinking here. Animal rights, for example: while Bill couldn’t agree with all of Dr. Heron s postulates on the metaphysical basis of rights, he discovered for himself why it was criminal to regard any competing species as “pests,” and to ruthlessly exterminate them, regardless of its effects on the human population. Then there was the hypothesis, or concept was perhaps the better term, of Gaia, the notion that the entire planet was in fact a single living organism, with its own body and mind, and rights. They spent an entire semester on that, and the planetary consequences of technological development. For the first time, Bill wondered if it was getting to be too much even for Janet; she seemed increasingly distracted when he got into those discussions. Finally she confessed she just couldn’t follow him anymore: “You’ve graduated to a higher plane of consciousness, I’m afraid, one that I can’t reach.”

The big test came in the third and fourth years. Both of them had been expecting him to start his field work for some time, of course. But Janet couldn’t give up her job at the arboretum to join Bill in the rain forests of New Guinea, or the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Or the deserts of Mexico with his Native American spiritual guide. Those eighteen months were the toughest in his life. But there was no doubting the value of his experiences; you could learn an enormous amount about the Earth in classrooms but until you lived with her, intimately and continuously, you didn’t really have the kind of relationship you needed if you were to work with her without exploitation.

The same lack of intimacy, however, pressed even Janet’s patience to its limit. More and more Bill could sense the frustration and resentment inside her, the increasing anger at the long separations, and her loneliness. It was made worse by her growing inability to understand what he was learning, however hard he tried explaining it to her.