Read Online The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham - Free Book Online

bottle —” She reached over to the table, grabbed the bottle of ginger ale, and turned it over. “One. PETE. Polyethylene terephthalate. It’ll be the first to go.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œThere are bacteria that eat plastic.”
    She told him of the Japanese researchers who found Pseudomonas downstream of a nylon manufacturing plant that was dumping its waste into the river. The bacteria were using by-products from the plant as their only source of carbon and nitrogen. They had adapted to survive on the waste from the plant.
    â€œI’ve seen hundreds of tampon applicators, like pink snail shells, washed up on beaches where sewage has been pumped into the water. Nylon fishing rope, busted-up bleach jugs, coffee cup lids. You name it, the beaches are covered with it. Then there’s the grocery bags flapping in trees, syringes in Tompkins Square Park. They say it’s a social problem that recycling can solve. But that’s not the right tack. It’s a technical problem. No matter how much we recycle or landfill, burn or bury, more plastic will be made. So, instead we’ll soon have microbes capable of digesting plastic. They’ll eat their way through all that crap.” She patted Leroy on the knee. “Well, my inebriated friend, I’m going for a run in the park.”
    â€œWhat about dinner?”
    â€œI need to get back to the lab.”
    â€œYou just arrived last week. What could you have going so soon?”
    She stood up and ran her hands down her legs to loosen her jeans where they had bunched up around her thighs. “I’ll show you sometime.”
    He put his cup on the floor.
    â€œSee you around,” she said and left the room.

6
    Lily Lake Road
    A tree crashing behind my tent wakes me from an apocalyptic dream. The wind has picked up again. There is no point in moving. I am already wet, and if a tree has my number, well, there must be worse ways to die than being crushed in a tent in the middle of a storm.
    The hurricane hits hardest southeast of here, toward Halifax. When the air finally grows still that afternoon, I go for a walk to assess the damage. Spruce have toppled across the roads and taken power lines with them. Their root systems, planar from growing in the thin soil, offer themselves up like dinner plates to the sky. The power is out at Martin and Jenifer’s. There is something comforting about seeing that Mother Nature is still in control, that our juggernaut can be stopped by a storm.
    You’d think I’d hate camping by now. It seems like every time I get in a tent the weather turns sour.
    It was August 1978, and I was a week shy of my third birthday when my father took us on a tour of New England. He told me the story of that trip enough times that it’s my memory now, vivid as it could not possibly be given my age then, given that, according to him, I slept most of the time we were in the car.
    He sat behind the steering wheel of his 1972 Buick LeSabre, a powder-blue convertible, blasting Who’s Next from the eight-track tape player. He sang along to Music from Big Pink and Blue all the way across Massachusetts, with the top rolled down, the wind blowing my mother’s hair back, and me lying on a blanket in the back seat. We drove through little towns in Vermont, past white clapboard houses and fire hydrants painted with stars and stripes, chipped now, to celebrate the Bicentennial. We pulled into the campground near Bennington in the dark.
    Across a stream my parents found our site as raindrops began to splatter the windshield. It rained for a week. Dad took me exploring in the woods, the two of us coming back soaked despite our rain gear. I wasn’t bothered by the rain, or so he told me. Mom stayed in the lean-to, reading, playing solitaire, and cooking. We went to bed as soon as the sky began to get darker after supper. On the fifth day Dad walked in the deluge to the canteen to buy the local paper.