Material: How to Float Two Tons of Iron

 

            In the summer after my freshman year in college, in the mid-1990s, I took a job with the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources in their Endangered Species Program.  This program performed field studies of, and created protected environments for, endangered species of flying squirrels, freshwater mussels, salamanders and, notably, bats.  It was a choice summer job for any young student eager to pull together some well-earned money and fond of hiking through the hills and valleys of north-central West Virginia.
            I was not, I will admit, the prototypical wildlife biologist.  My parents, imports to West Virginia, had raised me in a protected environment that valued books and mealtimes over the rugged unpredictability of the great outdoors.  I was six-foot-one and 145 pounds and I lacked the coordination necessary to perform well at sports.  Teachers liked me, for the most part, and at school I established an air of easy, goofy competence that rarely concerned itself with the difficult lives of my classmates, for many of whom school was but one stop in long days full of labor. 
            With a full academic year at an elitist northeastern university under my belt, I walked in to my interview at the DNR with my smug feathers in full puff.  The extent to which I felt outclassed by my peers at the Connecticut campus was fully matched by the snobbish air of faux sophistication with which I deigned to entertain the prospect of work with the people of my home state.  The first man to step forward and shake my hand that day introduced himself as Craig.  A thick, good-natured fellow with a walrus moustache and a soft-spoken manner, Craig would be my supervisor for the summer.  Just behind him stood Jack, a short, strong man in his late twenties with eager, darting eyes and a carefully maintained crew cut.  I met Denis next, a very tall, lanky man with thick-lensed glasses, grease-stained hands and a tape measure flipped to his belt.  Just after we took our seats we were joined by Linda, a boot- and cargo pant-wearing lesbian with a weathered smile and a brillo pad of black hair. 
            With broad strokes, Craig outlined the procedures for field surveys: the hours expected, the distances traveled, the habits of the endangered populations in question.  He told me about the housekeeping tasks my position would require: equipment maintenance, upkeep of a computer database of findings.  As he spoke my attention was drawn to the faces of my new co-workers.  Here, I thought, were the worn aspects of “real” West Virginians, the West Virginians my parents had protected me from: men and women who knew the land and its creatures.  Outdoorsy folks.
            Finally, they asked me what I hoped to gain from the internship.  I looked them straight in the eye and told them that I was a writer.  I talked about Annie Dillard; I invoked Thoreau.  “I am,” I said, “searching for material.”

            I got the job anyway.  I adapted to it fairly quickly.  Despite the airs I put on, I wasn’t, in fact, far removed from real work.  My parents’ generation was the first in my family to hold down the sort of sedate, respectable jobs that allow its complacent children to grow up with a sense of entitlement.  As I was learning in Connecticut, a single generation was a thin cushion, indeed.  Quick enough, even a smug pup like me had little qualm with washing out scat-laden traps or sudsing the undercarriages of state vehicles. 
            I was impressionable, and it didn’t take long to develop a high regard for the rugged, thrilling capability of my co workers.  It was not hard to recognize that these men and women did not rely on others for survival to anywhere near the degree that I did.  They spoke of their spouses with fond familiar jokiness, of their gardens with pride, of the hunting season with almost reverent excitement.  They did their jobs well without taking them too seriously.  Craig and Jack, especially, carried themselves with an easy masculinity.  Because I was, at that time, searching for guides who operated with this sort of capable maleness, I happily allowed them to broaden my views of what men can do in the world. 
            Along with this guidance, these men also offered another implicit gift: the sort of experiential knowledge that I could use in stories.  They were taking me out into the world of animals, the world – I faithfully hoped – of metaphors.  I was eighteen years old, deeply mired in a dreamy, naive adolescent fervor and had just begun, for the first time, to cast myself against the hard matter of the world.  The secret articulation of the universe’s secrets lay, continually, just beyond my reach.  All I needed, I believed, was the right metaphor to connect my sensibility with the questions of the cosmos and I would magically be able to write the sagest, most secret poetic answers.  I would be a writer.

            For the first three weeks the work was hot and hard.  Searching for freshwater mussels meant walking bent-over through knee-deep rivers with a glass-bottomed bucket pushed into the current to displace the water that obscured view of the stony bottom.  Checking flying squirrel traps meant wading through dense, shin-barking carpets of mountain laurel and shimmying up bare tree trunks.  And I have to admit that even after two summers on the job I still can’t tell you what an endangered salamander looks like.  Most mornings I showed up to the tin-sided office hungover from summer parties and, after cleaning traps and washing cars, I stole naps in the building’s basement bunkroom until it was time to embark on a survey.  All of this changed during the fourth week, however.  That’s when we began the search for Virginia Big-Eared Bats.
            Jack drove.  He listened to country-rock and pressed the pedal down as far as he could manage.  Jack had heard some statistics on the radio.  There were so many accidents each minute on West Virginia’s roads.  He had used this intelligence to develop a theory that went like this: the fewer minutes he was on the roads, the less chance of him getting into an accident.  He drove far, far too fast.
            Our Jeep was loaded down with equipment: night vision goggles, infra-red lights, mist nets, harp traps, radar detectors.  Once we arrived at the cave site and I lowered myself, heart in throat, to the sweet earth, I found that the recklessness with which Jack drove was matched by the care with which he treated his equipment.  Linda met us and with precise efficiency she and Jack strung the mist nets tight across two hollows where the bats foraged.  Jack dexterously climbed the hillside and surveyed the forest.  He identified two repeating birdcalls.  Denis helped me load my backpack and strapped it on tight; he gave me the least-breakable equipment to carry as we navigated a small stream.
            Craig was waiting at the cave.  He wore the elaborate, cyborg-looking night-vision goggles and stared into the infra-red lamps geared toward the opening.  His hand clutched a Dictaphone and he spoke quickly into it: “One bat in, two bats out, three bats out, two bats in.” 
            Jack installed the harp trap in the cave’s desk-sized opening and motioned for me to keep quiet.  He pointed toward a rock where I could sit and I fixed a dim lamp onto my hat.  The radar detectors crackled with static readings of the bats’ echolocation. 
            Occasionally, bats leaving the cave were baffled by the wires of the harp trap and fell into its wooden chamber.  Jack held these tiny animals in three fingers and showed me how to distinguish the pointy ears of the Pipistrille from the round ears of the Big Brown and Little Brown species.  He outlined the telltale characteristics of the elusive beast we sought: the endangered Virginia Big Ear.
            After a half-hour in the dark woods with no sound but the “who cooks for you” of the barred owls, the static of the detectors and Craig’s mechanical counting of bats, things had taken on a routine.  I had begun to learn to identify bat species.  Jack gave me first guess at each one we caught, and I was getting four out of five right.  Sexing was easy (as were bat gonad jokes).  We weighed the bats and measured their wings.  When Jack gave me a Little Brown to hold and it shook free of my grasp, he was good-natured about the loss. 
            Jack was here only for the Virginia Big Ear.  If we found any we would tag them. If we found enough females we would do something to protect the cave from spelunkers.  His mission was conservation.  Mine, however, was different.  I was after a spiritual metaphor.  A friend had given me a joint and it was burning a hole in my pocket.  I excused myself, pretending that I had to use the bathroom.
            I snuck through the dark woods until confident that I had gotten far enough that the smell wouldn’t carry and then I lit up.  This was college, remember, and this was how I behaved at the time.  Without any sense of real consequences, my only fear was humiliation, and that fear was not enough to stop me from acting like a jackass sometimes. 
            I didn’t realize that I had walked right into the radius of the mist nets, which were being watched by Linda and Denis.  I didn’t hear Linda’s approach until it was too late. 
            “That lighter’s probably confusing the bats,” she said and my mortification would have surely eaten me alive if she had not asked for a hit.
            We finished the joint together and then made our way back to the mist nets.  Linda explained how the nets tricked the bats, explained bats’ means of echolocation and navigation.  Then – and I perked up at this – she got philosophical.  She explained her theories of environmentalism, vegetarianism, the cycles of nature.  I took mental notes, formulating metaphor after world-embracing metaphor in my ecstatic brain.
            After nearly an hour she sent me back up the hill to Craig and Jack, who made no comment about my absence.  Jack merely clapped me on the back and grinned joyfully.             
            “We got it,” he said and then he and Craig embraced.  I saw that I had entered in onto a celebration well-underway.  “The motherload.”

            The team arrived back at the DNR offices at 1:00am and cracked open bottles of beer.  The cave, we had learned, held an unprecedented population of female Virginia Big Ears.  This was fantastic news for the conservation of the species.  Over the coming weeks engineers would visit the cave site and design an iron gate to fit across the opening, to keep cavers out.
            “Won’t the gate disturb the bats?” I asked Linda.  I was tired and still slightly stoned and I thought that I had found, in her, a philosophical ally. 
            Denis, who had some engineering expertise, answered for her.  He explained how iron L-beams are welded into the rock sides of a cave opening, leaving angled spaces for bats to come and go, while not leaving room for humans to enter. 
            “The secret,” he said, “is that the gate does not move.  Bats can predict a gate.  Usually, when in familiar territory, a bat will rest its echolocation devices and fly blindly, by memory.  So if the gate is always in the same place, it will always be avoided.”
            This made enough sense to me that I decided not to push the matter.  Besides, there were some fascinating, writable facts in Denis’s answer that I didn’t want to corrupt with too much knowledge.  There was a fine balance, I was finding, to material.  One must know the truth, but not too much of the truth.  One needed room, I thought at the time, to wiggle out some artistic flourish.
            “We’ll probably be ready to build in about three weeks,” Jack said, excitedly.
            “Who does the building?” I asked.
            “We do,” Craig said, and then a sneaky smile crept under his moustache.  “Well, we’ll get a crew from the state pen to do the heavy lifting.”

           Sure enough, three weeks later I found myself back up on the hillside with a crew of fourteen convicted felons chained at ankle and wrist.  The gun-toting guards in their green uniforms told me to avoid speaking with the prisoners more than absolutely necessary, but I was very aware of their eyes traveling up, down and through my body.  These men were huge.  They had hands that could pop basketballs.
            The project manager sat us down and paced nervously as he spoke.  The iron beams, we were told, weighed two tons each.  The challenge – and the need for the chain gang – was to hoist the beams up the hill to the cave opening.  The idea was to form two long parallel lines, facing one another, up the hillside.  We would slowly pass the beam forward, with the people in the rear continually peeling off and scrambling uphill to the front of the lines, until we reached the cave entrance.
            We were discouraged from locating our bodies directly downhill of the beam.
            This was it! I thought.  My ship had come in.  If a day like this couldn’t make me a writer, I’d better start paying attention in math class.
            Jack loudly and awkwardly ignored the advice to avoid speaking to the prisoners.  He seemed to want to convey that everyone’s the same when it comes to fate and a bad break can happen to anyone and who the hell is he to judge?  The prisoners didn’t seem to particularly appreciate his friendly regard.  They kept to themselves and worked without speaking.  Their silence made me nervous and I bumbled and got in the way as we formed the lines and hefted the beam.
            I wasn’t helping a lick, but I wanted my hands in there.
            Linda and Denis waited with the engineers at the cave entrance.  They measured angles with rulers and levels; they marked the rock with orange grease paint.  As the first few beams reached them they broke out heavy tools and showers of sparks could be seen from high on the hill where the mountain gaped.
            The day was hot and many of us began to tire.  The chain gang, however, kept plugging away methodically.  Jack and I were passed in line a few times until we found ourselves opposite each other at the bottom of the line.  Our eyes locked in dread as the beam slipped out of our hands.
            It raced downhill at a horrifying speed.  Everyone stopped to admire – almost grateful for – the terrible beauty of physics as the beam skidded down the steep slope and then, with a sudden, satisfying and utterly final scream, impaled a maple tree.
            The force of its descent sent the twenty-foot beam eight feet through the tree, which remained perfectly erect and otherwise unscarred.  Neither end of the iron beam touched the hillside.  It floated there: two tons suspended.
            “Holy shit,” someone said.           
            To be honest, I was too exhilarated to feel mortified.  Jack was sent downhill to the trucks to rustle up lunch.  I was sent uphill to the cave to lend a hand to the engineers.  For the remainder of the day, Linda and Denis kept an eye on me and I helped as best I could.
            Two days later I went back to hunting for mussels.  I took my shirt off as I plowed through the shallow waters of the Shaver’s Fork of the Cheat River.  I hoped to get tan as I worked, to look good at the parties in the hot summer nights to come.

            “I don’t get it,” a young actress interrupted rehearsal, “why is she talking about bats?”
            The theater department at the university where I was getting my MFA had agreed to produce a staged reading of a play I had written.  The actress, a pretty Pennsylvanian girl with considerable talent and the lack of tact tolerated from pretty, nineteen-year-old actresses nationwide, was performing the role of a wildlife biologist who, upon meeting her fiancé’s dysfunctional family, takes a moment to wax theoretical about the instinctual behavior of her favorite subject: bats.
            I shifted in my seat in the rear of the theater.  This wasn’t the first time I had tried to use this bat material and it had never gone quite right.  Back at my undergraduate university, full of world-embracing fascination with all things Eastern, I had composed homilies to the stillness of the gate, the blind flight of the bat, the faithful resting of “echolocation devices.”  Later, I re-approached the bat material, this time lampooning the self-importance of these earlier Zennish ideals.  This second attempt felt closer to art (at least it treated something with irony), but still…ew.  I put the bat stories away, humbled by the truth I had known that day on the hillside: if I can’t make a good story out of this, I’ll never be a writer.
            Then, years later, I found myself in school once more, stubbornly studying writing.  The bat material again began to assert itself.  I was working on a play and needed an interesting character for the female lead.  “Of course!” I cried, triumphantly, to my empty apartment late one night.  “She’s a wildlife biologist!”
            But now the director was nodding in agreement with the pretty young actress.  She was suggesting that “yes, maybe we could have some cuts here.”  I felt instinctually affronted, as people do when attention is called to something false they have written down or spoken loudly.  In that moment I hated the gate, the bats, the West Virginia DNR.  They had provided me with stories, sure, but I still lacked the grand metaphor that would make these stories art.
            At home that night, as I trimmed the material into speakable lines, my mind raced through lengthy justifications of what I had written.  After an hour of this I found that I was reliving the experience of that summer anew.
            The actress, I finally decided, was asking the right question.  The realization came to me in a flash.  Why was I talking about bats?  The real story of that summer wasn’t about the bats or the cave or the prisoners – in fact, one can’t write about such things.  They are too clichéd, too obviously symbolic and stereotypical.  No.  The real story of that summer was about leaving home and coming back.  It was about experimenting with new lives in a strange place and about how I tested those experiments when I returned to the people and places where I had, until then, always belonged. 
            That’s a story I didn’t dare to write.  The confusion of the time was too vividly painful, the mistakes too searingly personal, the consequences too embarrassingly complex to put down on paper.  Looking back now, I see that my job with the bats provided me with a metaphor after all.  It just wasn’t the metaphor I expected and it didn’t come nearly as quickly as I had hoped.  I was building a gate of fiction around myself, a gate that would, over the next several years, isolate me from many of the people I thought I loved.

            I graduated from that Connecticut university in 1998.  Since then I have moved to a few different cities, each time drifting closer to the West Virginia hills where I grew up.  Now, in Pittsburgh, I feel comfortably close yet safely distant at a cool two-and-a-half hours away.
            Now, I continue my struggle to learn how to write the more difficult stories and to do so honestly.  It’s always a challenge: to recognize the real stories from the false ones, to know good material from bad.  When I was invited to take up the pen for a new column in The New Yinzer, it seemed the correct challenge to take on, and take on boldly.
            Future columns will not be so autobiographical.  In the future we’ll talk about books and writers we are all familiar with.  We’ll wrangle with their work and our own.  But the challenges will remain the same: we have to find the real story and we have to find the strength to tell it.  Experiences on slippery mountainsides help to give us that strength.  Knowledge of craft helps to give us that strength.  In the end though, we’re alone with the stories and we must find the courage to strike with the terrible precision of physics, to hoist our two-ton burdens with a gesture that can float them effortlessly midair, suspended as if by magic.

Brendan Kerr comes to Pittsburgh via Elkins, West Virginia and Brooklyn, New York.  He is currently working on revision of his novel, The Uses of Talent and rocking with the band Workshop.  He lives in Polish Hill.