Flight Behavior

Ovid seemed the smallest bit amused. “I meant more recently than Herbert Hoover. Fifteen years ago people knew about global warming, at least in a general way, you know? In surveys, they would all answer, Yes, it exists, it’s a problem. Conservatives or liberals, exactly the same. Now there is a divide.”

“Well, yeah. People sort themselves out. Like kids in a family, you know. They have to stake out their different territories. The teacher’s pet or the rascal.”

“You think so, it’s a territory divide? We have sorted ourselves as the calm, educated science believers and the scrappy, hotheaded climate deniers?”

Dellarobia definitely felt he was stacking one side of the deck with the sensible cards. Where did wild-haired girls knitting butterflies in the woods fit into that scheme?

“I’d say the teams get picked, and then the beliefs get handed around,” she said. “Team camo, we get the right to bear arms and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and taking care of our own. The other side wears I don’t know what, something expensive. They get recycling and population control and lattes and as many second chances as anybody wants. Students e-mailing to tell you they deserve their A’s.”

Ovid looked stupefied. “What, you’re saying this is some kind of contest between the peasant class and the gentry?”

She returned his look. “I definitely don’t think I said that.”

“Something like it. One of your teams has all the skills for breaking the frontier. And the other seems to be nursing a restive society that grows in the wake of the plow.”

“Huh,” she said.

“But would you not agree, the frontiers of this world are already broken?”

“I guess. Maybe. Well, no. It depends.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah. If it’s true what you’re saying. That this whole crapload is going to blow. Then what, we start over?”

Ovid said nothing. She knew she’d crossed a line of disrespect, putting it that way. This was like church to him, or children. The thing that kept him awake at night. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just saying. The environment got assigned to the other team. Worries like that are not for people like us. So says my husband.”

His brow wrinkled gravely. “Drought and floods are not worries for farmers?”

“You think any of this is based on information? Come on, who really chooses?”

“Information is all we have.” Ovid stared at her, somehow managing to look as naked as she’d ever seen him. Which was very. “Everyone chooses,” he said. “A person can face up to a difficult truth, or run away from it.”

She shook her head. “My husband is not a coward. I’ve seen him stick his whole arm into the baling machine to untangle the twine while it’s running. Trying to save a hay crop with rain coming in. I mean, if we’re talking guts. He and my in-laws face down hard luck six days a week, and on Sundays they go pray for the truly beleaguered.”

He seemed to take this in, even though he probably didn’t know as many men as she did who’d lost an arm to a baling machine. “These positions get assigned to people,” she said. “If you’ve been called the bad girl all your life, you figure you’re already paying the price, you should go on and use the tickets. If I’m the redneck in the pickup, fine, let me just go burn up some gas.”

Ovid seemed perplexed. Maybe he knew more about butterflies than people.

“I hate to say it, but people are not keen on a person like me coming up here to work with a person like you. Pete sure wasn’t, at first. He got over it. But not everybody does.” She’d finally had a look at the gossip site Dovey mentioned, and it scalded her. By many accounts Dr. Byron was a foreign meddler in local affairs. By some, Dellarobia was carrying his child.

“Was there some difficulty with Pete?”

“Pete’s great. Bonnie and Mako, they all were. For some reason you all decided to let me in. But trust me, if you’d first run into me as your waitress down at the diner, you would not have included me in the conversation about your roosting populations and your overwintering zones. People shut out the other side. It cuts both ways.”

She could imagine herself in an apron bringing them coffee at one of the grease-embalmed booths at the Feathertown Diner, rest in peace. Ovid actually might have asked her opinion, even there. I never learn anything from listening to myself, he’d said that first night. The moment for her to shut up would be right now.

“Humans are hardwired for social community,” he said. “There’s no question, we evolved with it. Reading the cues and staying inside the group, these are number-one survival skills in our species. But I like to think academics are the referees. That we can talk to every side.”

“Could, maybe. But you’re not. You’re always telling me you’re not even supposed to care, you just measure and count.” Okay, she thought. Now shutting up.

“It’s a point,” he said. “If we tangle too much in the public debate, our peers will criticize our language as imprecise, or too certain. Too theatrical. Even simple words like ‘theory’ and ‘proof’ have different meanings outside of science. Having a popular audience can get us pegged as second-rank scholars.”

Dellarobia was surprised to hear it. If people behaved sensibly anywhere, surely it would be in an institute of higher learning. Although “second-rank scholar” was not an exact equivalent to “whoring with the enemy.”

“Is that why you don’t talk to reporters? Because, honestly, you’re good.”

He exhaled such a long breath, she wondered if he might collapse. “It’s a hazardous road. For ecologists especially, my field. Ecology is the study of biological communities. How populations interact. It does not mean recycling aluminum cans. It’s an experimental and theoretical science, like physics. But if we try to make our science relevant to outsiders, right away they look for a picket sign.”

“I could see that,” she said.

“If I hear one more milksop discussing the environment and calling it ‘the ecology,’ honestly, Dellarobia. I might break a Mettler balance on his head.”

“Wow.”

“In my field, we can be touchy about this,” he said.

No kidding, she thought.