Nice? Nice?

Answer: At the college where I teach, we instructors take classes from time to time for such things as maintenance of rank, promotion, and most importantly to stay current in our field. As you know, in our country things change rapidly. One wouldn’t want the teacher to know less than the student. In my conservative field, English, the only rapid change we see is in the area of technology, and I had taken most of the techy courses that were out there at the time. So I got to thinking that I might do something different this go round. There was a course called something like “biodiversity and sustainability.” Ah, I was a schoolboy in liberal, blue-state Massachusetts in the late sixties during the ecology phase, the country’s original “green” phase. Ah, my eyes were already misting over with nostalgia. Ah, the good old days in Boston. Ah, my longhaired, love bead, tie-dye, perhaps high, hippie teachers. Ah, their optimism. Studying nature in a classroom? That would be nice. Nice? Nice? Are you kidding! How, oh how, did I miss the words “total immersion?” Just great. Nature would be my classroom. So here I was in the Everglades up to my knees in mossy water, on my guard for alligators, snakes, and other creeping things. All these dangerous animals. And then it hit me. Man is an animal too. And dangerous. It wasn’t an original thought, and to be honest I had had it before. But never with such power and such light. In this ecosystem, the alligator is the top predator, but man is the topmost predator of all. Man can take the alligator and turn it into a purse, an amusement in a zoo, an exotic meal. Now what if there were some intelligent species of creature above man on the food chain? I remembered as a child in Boston coming home from the pond with a gift for my mother that I withdrew from my pocket dead. Tadpoles. And I wondered what species of boy could go down to the pond, pick up a handful of humans and at home withdraw them from his pocket dead. What species of boy could bring one of us home on a makeshift leash only to hear his mother say, “Get that stinky creature out of this house! It’s mangy and full of disease.” And what species of boy would pout and say in protest, “But mom, every boy should have a man?” And that was it. As the wildly flying birds sang above my head, I envisioned the novel from beginning to end, the many issues I could explore, the biblical sound of it, the title, everything. I had to get it down on paper before I ruined it by over thinking. When class was over, I sped home.