Chapter 34: Kaitlyn Gets Disciplined
On the Wednesday after Memorial Day, Kaitlyn called me and set up an early lunch date. “I’ve got some huge news to tell you.”
“Can’t wait!” I replied eagerly, even though she didn’t sound entirely thrilled.
After we got to the restaurant and sat down, she began, “Davie, you won’t believe what happened to me today at work.”
I didn’t say anything, just gave her a “go ahead” gesture.
“Yesterday as I was about to get out of the office for the day, in walks The Goat. He works late, patrolling campgrounds and such, as when he caught us the other day.”
I interrupted, saying, “I didn’t apologize for that one yet. You warned me someone might see us, and you were right. I’m sorry for getting you into trouble.”
“Yes, well, wait until you see just how much trouble,” she said ominously.
I gulped.
“So anyway, The Goat walked up to me with a sneer and said, ‘I thought you’d still be in jail!’ and then, trying to be calm and reasonable I said to him, ‘Officer Poulsen said that since there was no one harmed that he wasn’t going to charge us with anything. He gave us a bit of a talking-to but then let us go. I think he was more upset with you marching us out in public view like that!’ He didn’t like that, but he just said, ‘Well, we’ll see about that!’ and stalked off.”
“I got back to finishing up my day’s work when my desk phone rang. It was my boss, and she told me to get into her office, right now. You can imagine how scared I was! I thought I was about to lose my job!”
“But you didn’t, I hope?” I replied.
“No, but stop interrupting, and let me finish my story,” Kaitlyn said, a bit sharply.
I mimed zipping my lips shut and gave her the ‘go ahead’ gesture again, adding a little bow of my head this time.
“Well, I got into my boss’s office — Sherry Richardson, for whatever that’s worth — and Sherry just pointed at the chair in front of her desk and said, ‘Sit.’ I sat, nervously. Then she said, ‘I hear you had some adventures over the weekend, even a run-in with the law.’ I admitted that that was true and started to protest about how there was no harm and all when she interrupted me, saying, ‘And Ranger Goetz caught you and isn’t happy that you aren’t facing criminal charges right now.’ By this point, I’d just given up, Davie. She had me, so I just hung my head and waited for her pronouncement.”
I reached my hand out over the table and picked up her hand for comfort. Mine as well as hers. I should have listened to her!
“Sherry then let out a low short laugh, Davie! My boss laughed at me! I looked up, and she was smiling. I just dropped my head again, Davie, I couldn’t watch her laughing at me.”
I rubbed the knuckles on her hand with my thumb.
“Then…” she paused here, letting it drag on, “…she said, ‘Ms. Gutierrez…no, Kaitlyn. I think we’re about to break past formality here between us. Kaitlyn, I’ve been skinny dipping a number of times myself. I even went camping one time in the rough, outside any campground, and my boyfriend at the time and I ran around in our skin several times. And we stayed naked a lot in the tent, too!’ she confided with a wistful smile on her lips, her eyes locked far into the distance on years-old memories.”
“Davie, my heart lost a ton of weight in that moment! I was still nervous, so I asked her, ‘You’re not mad? I can keep my job?’”
“‘Oh heavens yes, Kaitlyn!’ she said. ‘What you do on your own time is your own business. I’d have been annoyed if you’d gotten yourself thrown in jail and so were unable to come in to work, but you apparently managed to avoid that, which I interpret to mean that what you got caught doing wasn’t all that bad.’ I shook my head ‘no’ at this, but didn’t interrupt. She then said, ‘But we’ve got to do something about Ranger Goetz, or he’s likely to keep making something of this, so what I’m going to do is punish you with field work: overnight trips out to deal with the odd occurrence I can’t send one of the Rangers on. That’s how we’re going to sell it, anyway, but I know you’ve been itching to get out into the field and put that degree to more practical use than the office work I’ve been having you do.’”
I dared to interrupt Kaitlyn at this point, saying, “That’s good news, right?”
“Oh, yes, Davie, I’m tickled!” Kaitlyn said, perking up from her gloomy story.
“Oh, I’m so happy for you…but I’m still feeling guilty about dropping you into this mess,” I replied.
“Well, I’m just going to have to punish you, too, then: can you go with? Sherry sent me away to pack for my trip as soon as our meeting ended, telling me she wanted me out of the office ASAP so she could start laying down the official version of the story. I’m supposed to be there by two or so. Can you get free? It’s only overnight; we’ll be back mid-day tomorrow.”
I thought she might’ve called me earlier about this — last night, or even this morning — but deciding it was a sort of test I only replied, “Um… I think so. It’s been pretty quiet today so far. Give me a sec to call my boss and clear it.” I did and got permission to take off, with the promise that I’d make up any backed-up work on Thursday evening after I got back. “I can go!” I reported.
“Great! My first assignment is to meet with some coal mining people who are looking at a seam on BLM land, so they want me to go along and rep the government’s interests. We’ll be meeting up with a BLM geologist coming in from another office.”
“I see why they wanted someone educated on the job then,” I commented.
“It’s a bit outside my training, but Sherry said the best way to learn the job is to be thrown into it neck-deep. So here I go! She gave me some talking points and guidelines, but it’ll be me and the geologist up against the mining company’s lawyers and engineers.”
“Sounds scary,” I said.
“Well, this is an informal assessment. And, it’s not like my position is to outright refuse: the way the laws are written, the land is there for use by everyone, not just eco-freaks like us. My job will be to avoid an outright rape of the land, not keep it virginal.”
I thought about that a bit. “I’m not sure Gaia would have a strong position on that, if we were able to ask. The land is there to be used, and that includes its natural resources. I do hope we can get to a post-coal world soon, but for now, it’s still the cheapest option. Counterbalancing that is all the CO₂ and such, but to Gaia, the world’s animals, including the humans, are just one part of the system. If we kill ourselves off, Gaia goes on. I don’t think you or I have a conflicting agenda from Gaia as her mage representatives. She’ll let us wipe ourselves out. What we carry to this meeting are our own purely personal beliefs. I can sum up my own ecological philosophy as ‘Don’t poop where you sleep.’”
“The thing is, Davie, we’re fouling our own air, too,” Kaitlyn replied heatedly.
“Sure, and that’s one reason I want humanity to get past coal, hopefully in my lifetime. It’s just that humans are adaptable, and I think we’ll work our way past these problems eventually. For ourselves, nudism is a pretty good answer to global warming. Winter around here gets pretty nippy, so I wouldn’t mind a little global warming. And yes, I know about all of the more negative effects, but a lot of that affects people a thousand miles or more away. I care a bit about them — my family is in coastal Mumbai, remember — but up here on the desert plateau, rising sea levels and bigger hurricanes and such are someone else’s problem. I expect that over time, lots of people will just move inland.”
“Yeah,” she retorted, “abandoning their homes and businesses and livelihoods! Don’t we owe them something?”
“I’m not saying my caring scale goes to zero at that distance, just that I use most of my reserves of care for people right here. It’s the natural way. I’ll even go so far as to say that it’s a type of mental illness to flip it around, spending all of your time worrying about what goes on thousands of miles away while ignoring what happens at home. That leads to homelessness and poverty at home while you send checks to UNICEF for African children. We can care some about the Africans, but shouldn’t we spend most of our concern on our affairs at home? I care more about Utah than about Alabama, and more about Moab than about Provo, and more about you than about some random guy I saw across the room down at the coffee bar.”
She just looked up at me with a small smile at that, so I went on. “Sociologists have studied this: it’s called Dunbar’s Number, which is how many people a person can have stable social relationships with. It’s roughly 150, varying by person, but probably no higher than 250. Those are the people I really care about, Kaitlyn, and I just can’t see global warming affecting us very much.”
Kaitlyn didn’t look happy, but she stayed silent, so I continued, “My family…well, I never was very close to them, and the longer I live here, the dimmer those relationships get. Some have probably fallen out of my Dunbar limit, now that I think of it. But, one person that’s entered my limit is you, Kaitlyn. Part of loving you is taking up part of your burden of care, so I will back you on this within reason.” She brightened a bit at that.
“You’ve seen how I live: I’m kind of an odd case. I bike almost everywhere so that my truck gets maybe 2000 miles on it a year. I live lightly on the land, choosing not to do things like dumping water on the desert to maintain a lawn that’s wholly out of place in this ecosystem. I choose to practice home nudism rather than put in air conditioning. Yet, I’m also into computers which suck up a big fraction of the nation’s energy production, without which we wouldn’t need as much coal and other natural resources. And when I do drive, it’s a big ol’ gas guzzler. Am I evil, Kaitlyn?”
That set her back. “No, Davie, I honestly don’t believe that. It’s just…”
“I know,” I put in. “It’s difficult. There aren’t easy answers.” I let it sit for a few seconds, then said, “Consider this: one path out of our current situation is solar power. Someone calculated what it’d take to power the entire US from solar power, and as I recall, they reported that it would take something like a tenth of the land area of Utah, which is a good choice of site for such a project, since it’s mostly sunny here in the southern part of the state. So, how would you like to see the canyonlands paved with solar panels?”
She squinched her face up. “That’d be terrible!”
“Yeah, and then you’ve got to consider all the mining you’d need to support it: rare earths for the panels, cement for the concrete bases, steel for the supports, copper for the wiring to tie it all into the grid… But hey, Connecticut would be free of coal smoke! You see? Dunbar’s number at work. It’s not so nice when the rest of the country dumps on us to solve their problems, is it?”
“Yeah, I guess not,” she said.
“Maybe we should send the solar panel farm to New Mexico? There’s some awfully desolate land out there. Or better, Nevada. The federal government owns most of the state anyway. But now why do they get the fuzzy end of the lollipop? Maybe their citizens would like to drive through their state without staring at acres of chitinous black solar panels, too?”
I let that sink in a bit, then went on. “Another option is nuclear, but that winds most of the eco-freaks right up. Properly managed, it’s as close to clean free energy as you can get, but it’s been stalled for decades on what-if worries. There’ve only been a few serious accidents with nuclear power, and those have resulted in far fewer injuries and deaths than those from extracting the coal, natural gas, and oil we’ve used instead, plus more deaths from the pollutants created by their use. Yet those few nuclear accidents halt all forward progress, even though it could mean shutting down all coal mining and coal-fired power plants. And we’d get better at managing nuclear power plants if we had a thriving industry that could maintain a healthy economy around them, but instead, we’ve got decaying infrastructure, which just leads to more risk of accidents.”
“All right, I’m with you: it’s hard,” she said.
“Yeah, well, getting back to your coal miners,” I said to get us off the doom and gloom, “I think what I’d recommend that you do is simply to follow the law. You’re too junior to be putting up serious roadblocks simply out of personal pique; you have to have just cause. But, let them know we’re watching and that we will ensure they stay within the law if they go ahead with this project. As for us personally, we could even swoop in and lay some smack down if they start cheating.”
“Oooh, that sounds good!” she brightened.
“Here’s an idea: get your boss to arrange for us to go out on inspections of mines and such. You and I can then slip in and do a little extra-special inspection while out there. If we find something worrisome, we can either bring it up through channels or drop a little justice on them then and there, as seems fitting for the case.”
I could see her mood lightening.
“I don’t want to get too ‘gray’ on this, but if we’re invited out to these sites on an inspection, then it’s not trespassing. And we’re there to look and report, right?”
She smiled determinedly. “I think I might just be able to arrange that.”
“Good. We can’t stop it, but we can keep ‘em on the rails,” I concluded.
“Right,” she agreed. “Well, we’ve got to get going. I need to meet up with that geologist, and it’s two hours’ drive out to the site.”
“Tell you what,” I offered, “I’ve got a 2-bike rack for mi burro, and it’s a better vehicle for stomping around in the hills than your Subaru anyway. What I’d like to do is camp out near your work site, do a little riding around this evening after we meet your geologist colleague, then tonight…” I let Kaitlyn fill in the details. “It’ll save the government a hotel stay, and we’ll get to have a little fun with it besides.”
“Sounds like a plan. I wonder what my boss will say when I tell her I canceled my hotel booking?”
“I think she might guess,” I offered.
She blushed and put both hands over her mouth. “Oh, wow. I think you’re right.”