Disturbed at the thought, at all these machinations, he found himself wishing he were back in D.C. That was shocking, because when he was in D.C. he was always desperate to return to San Diego, biding his time until his return, at which point his real life would recommence. But it was undeniable; here he was in San Diego, and he wanted to be in D.C. Something was seriously wrong.
Part of it must have been the fact that he was not really back in his San Diego life, but only previewing it. He didn’t have a home, he was still on leave, his days were not quite full. That left him wandering a bit, as he was now. And that was unlike him.
Okay—what would he do with free time if he lived here?
He would go surfing.
Good idea. His possessions were stowed in a storage unit in Encinitas, so he drove there and got his surfing gear, then returned to the parking lot at Cardiff reef, at the south end of Cardiff-by-the-Sea. A few minutes’ observation while he pulled on his long-john wetsuit (getting too small for him) revealed that an ebb tide and a south swell were combining for some good waves, breaking at the outermost reef. There was a little crowd of surfers and bodyboarders out there.
Happy at the sight, Frank walked into the water, which was very cool for midsummer, just as they all said. It never got as warm as it used to. But it felt so good now that he ran out and dove through a wave, whooping as he emerged. He sat in the water and pulled on his booties, velcroed the ankle strap of the board cord to him, took off paddling. The ocean tasted like home.
Cardiff reef was a very familiar break to him, and nothing had changed. He had often surfed here with Marta, but that had little to do with it. The waves were eternal, and Cardiff reef with its point break was like an old friend who always said the same things. He was home. This was what made San Diego his home—not the people or the jobs or the unaffordable houses, but this experience of being in the ocean, which for so many years of his youth had been the central experience of his life, everything else colorless by comparison, until he had discovered climbing.
As he paddled, caught waves, and rode the lefts in long ecstatic seconds, and then worked to get back outside, he wondered again about this strangely powerful feeling of salt water as home. There must be an evolutionary reason for such joy at being cast forward by a wave. Whatever; it was a lot of fun. And made him feel vastly better.
Then it was time to go. He took one last ride, and rather than kicking out when the fast part was over, rode the broken wave straight in toward the shore.
He lay in the shallows and let the hissing whitewater shove him around. Back and forth, ebb and flow. Grooming by ocean.
“Are you okay?”
He jerked his head up. It was Marta, on her way out.
“Oh, hi. Yeah I’m okay.”
“What’s this, stalking me now?”
“No,” then realizing this might be a little bit true: “No!”
He stared at her, getting angry. She stared back.
“I’m just catching some waves,” he said, mouth tight. “You’ve got no reason to say such a thing to me.”
“No? Then why did you ask me out the other day?”
“A mistake, obviously. I thought it might do some good to talk.”
“Last year, maybe. But you didn’t want to then. You didn’t want to so much that you ran off to NSF instead. Now it’s too late. So just leave me alone, Frank.”
“I am!”
“Leave me alone.”
She turned and ran into the surf, diving onto her board and paddling hard. When she got out far enough she sat up on her board and balanced, looking outward.
Women in wetsuits looked funny, Frank thought as he watched her. Not just the obvious, but also the subtler differences in body morphology were accentuated. He could tell the difference from as far away as he could see people at all. Every surfer could.
What did that mean? That he was in thrall to a woman who despised him? That he had messed up the main relationship of his life and his best chance so far for reproductive success? That sexual dimorphism was a powerful driver in the urge to reproduction? That he was a slave to his sperm, and an idiot?
All of the above.
His good mood shattered, he hauled himself to his feet. He stripped off the booties and long john, toweled off at his rental car, drove back up to his storage unit, and dropped off his gear. Returned to his hotel room, showered, checked out, and drove down the coast highway to the airport, feeling like an exile, even here on his own home ground.
Something was deeply, deeply wrong.
He checked in the car, got on the plane to Dallas. Waiting in Dallas he watched America walk by. Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.
He settled in his next plane seat, feeling more and more disgusted and angry. NSF was part of it; they weren’t doing a damn thing to help. He got out his laptop, turned it on, and called up a new file. He started to write.
Critique of NSF, first draft. Private to Diane Chang.
NSF was established to support basic scientific research, and it is generally given high marks for that. But its budget has never surpassed ten billion dollars a year, in an overall economy of some ten trillion. It is to be feared that as things stand, NSF is simply too small to have any real impact.
Meanwhile humanity is exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for our species, badly damaging the biosphere. Neoliberal economics cannot cope with this situation, and indeed, with its falsely exteriorized costs, was designed in part to disguise it. If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic anthropogenic extinction event over the next twenty years, which it will, American business would continue to focus on its quarterly profit and loss. There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. And yet government and the scientific community are not tackling this situation either, indeed both have consented to be run by neoliberal economics, an obvious pseudoscience. We might as well agree to be governed by astrologers. Everyone at NSF knows this is the situation, and yet no one does anything about it. They don’t try to instigate the saving of the biosphere, they don’t even call for certain kinds of mitigation projects. They just wait and see what comes in. It is a ridiculously passive position.
Why such passivity, you ask? Because NSF is chicken! It’s a chicken with its smart little head stuck in the sand like an ostrich! It’s a chicken ostrich (fix). It’s afraid to take on Congress, it’s afraid to take on business, it’s afraid to take on the American people. Free market fundamentalists are dragging us back to some dismal feudal eternity and destroying everything in the process, all while we have the technological means to feed everyone, house everyone, clothe everyone, doctor everyone, educate everyone—the ability to end suffering and want as well as ecological collapse is right here at hand, and yet NSF continues to dole out its little grants, fiddling while Rome burns!!!
Well whatever nothing to be done about it, I’m sure you’re thinking poor Frank Vanderwal has spent a year in the swamp and has gone crazy as a result, and that is true, but what I’m saying is still right, the world is in big trouble and NSF is one of the few organizations on Earth that could actually help get it out of trouble, and yet it’s not. It should be charting worldwide scientific policy and forcing certain kinds of climate mitigation and biosphere management, insisting on them as emergency necessities, it should be working Congress like the fucking NRA does, to get the budget it deserves, which is a much bigger budget, as big as the Pentagon’s, really those two budgets should be reversed to get them to their proper level of funding, but none of it is happening or will happen, and that is why I’m not coming back