Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [106]
I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry was going to be on the test.
I glowered. “Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.”
The whole front row looked stunned. Their pens stopped moving.
“What you people learn for a test you forget the next day. That’s bullshit. That’s a waste of your brains and my time. If I can’t teach you something you’ll remember, then I haven’t even been here this year.” I crossed my arms and glared at them. “You kids think this pollution shit is not your problem, right? Somebody will clean up the mess. It’s not your fault. Well, your attitude stinks. You’re as guilty as anybody. Do you, or do you not, think the world was put here for you to use?”
Nobody was fool enough to answer. I observed during the long silence that half the kids in the room were wearing stone-washed jeans. I yanked up Hector Jones by the arm and made an example of him. I have to admit I disliked Hector partially for unfair reasons: his father was a former hoodlum named Simon Bolivar Jones who’d been noticeably unkind to me in school.
“Stand up here,” I said. “Show everybody your jeans. Nice, right? Turn around. Nice ass, Hector. Wonderful jeans. They were half worn out before you bought them, right?” I smacked Hector lightly on the butt and let him sit down.
“You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains. The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they’re fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got them.”
“Trees grow back,” Raymo said. Raymo was a brave young man.
“Excuse me?”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke as if I were his deaf grandmother: “Trees…grow…back.”
I cupped my hands around my mouth and said, just as loudly, “Not if the whole…damn…mountain is gone, they don’t.”
“Well, there’s other mountains.”
“Sure, there’s some other mountains,” I said, feeling that I might explode if I weren’t careful. “If you got hit by a truck, Raymo, I guess your ma would say, ‘Well, I have some other kids.’”
About half the class thought that was funny. The other half was probably trying to figure out how to get out of my classroom alive.
I stared them down, ticking like a bomb. “Sure. Trees grow back. Even a whole rain forest could grow back, in a couple hundred years, maybe. But who’s going to make it happen? If you had to pay the real price for those jeans—the cost and the time and the work of bringing that mountain back to life instead of leaving it dead—those pretty jeans would have cost you a hundred dollars.”
I felt strangely high. Furious and articulate. “Think about the gas you put in a car,” I said. “The real cost. Not just pumping it out of the ground and refining it and shipping it, but also cleaning up the oil spills and all the junk that goes into the air when it gets burned. That’s part of what it costs, but you’re not paying it. Gas ought to be twenty dollars a gallon so you’re getting a real good deal. But soon the bill comes due, and we pay it, or we eat dirt. The ultimate MasterCharge.”
I can’t swear they were listening, but they were watching me carefully. Thirty-six blue eyes ticked back and forth as I paced the floor in front of my desk.
“If Grace gets poisoned, if all these trees die and this land goes to hell, you’ll just go somewhere else, right? Like the great pioneers, Lewis and Clark. Well, guess what, kiddos, the wilderness is used up.” I walked around my little square of floor like a trapped