Terrarium (33 page)

Who can trace all the sources of a novel? The pedbelts of Oregon City owe something to the conveyors of a Louisiana factory where I drove a forklift during my college summers. The domed city itself is an exaggeration of the shopping malls that I first encountered in Indianapolis, consumer nirvanas hermetically sealed against weather and history. Teeg's glass tank, brimming with plants, is a smaller version of a terrarium that I saw, years ago, in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. The fossil that she gives to Phoenix resembles one I found in an Ohio creek bed. A visit to Disney World lurks behind my image of the appalling gameparks. The chemmies derive, of course, from the drugs sold over the counter and on the street in our own society, but they also derive from booze, that elixir of oblivion,
which destroyed my father. Behind Zuni's glimpse of her Oregon village burned to cinders by the health patrol, there are images of torched villages in Vietnam. The grief that Zuni feels over the desolation of her beloved country is the grief I felt over the flooding of my childhood landscape by a government dam. I could trace a public or private source for every detail in the book, from Teeg's bare feet on the opening page to the California gray whales on the final page; but I see no need to multiply examples. When I pluck at any line in
Terrarium
, I am liable to find it connected through memory to the whole of my life.

At the end of our year in Oregon, I had not quite finished one full draft of the novel. We camped our way back from Eugene to Bloomington, the roof rack of our Fiat loaded with playpen and trunks, my files stuffed with photographs and notes, my mind filled with images of mountains and rivers and ocean.

We pitched our tent in the Badlands on a night when Jesse was cutting a new tooth. He was so fretful that I gave up on sleep and eased him into the backpack and the two of us went out walking under a full moon. Soothed by moon and motion, he soon grew quiet, riding along with his fingers hooked into my hair. I could have walked forever among those dazzling hills, in that splendid light, with my boy on my back and this ground under my feet. From the pressure of his grip, I could tell when Jesse was looking this way or that. I found myself gazing through his eyes, and they were utterly clear. Stone, snake, burning bush. We walked in beauty, my son and I. We saw that these Badlands were unmistakably good, as the Lakota had always known. What we glimpsed there, I realized, was a glory that runs through all places and all creatures. No words could ever capture it. Yet no story could ever be true without witnessing to this beauty and power.

Back home in Indiana, I kept dreaming of Oregon. Over the next three years, while the nuclear arms race accelerated and the environment deteriorated and my children grew, I completed the first draft of the novel and then a second and a third. Those were the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, when the Secretary
of the Interior announced that we need not preserve the forests because God would be coming soon to end the world; when the Secretary of Agriculture declared that we could replace topsoil with chemicals; when the head of the Environmental Protection Agency approved of drilling for oil in wilderness areas and along the continental shelf; when the President himself remarked that trees are a major source of pollution and that, in any case, when you've seen one redwood you've seen them all. I was at work on the fourth and final draft of
Terrarium
when President Reagan unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative, which soon became known as the “Star Wars” plan, and which he invited us to think of as an invulnerable shield over our vulnerable heads. It was a time when anyone who loved the earth might well have despaired.

I strugged with despair, for I did not see how we could keep on piling up weapons, using up oil and iron and ozone, annihilating other species, paving the soil, fouling the waters and air, adding to our own swollen numbers, without eventually rendering the earth uninhabitable for our descendants. I still do not see any way of sustaining the industrial binge, let alone of extending that binge to the whole globe. There were just over four billion human beings, many of them wretchedly poor, when I began making notes for
Terrarium
; as I write these lines, the human population is nearing six billion, and the number of those suffering—from starvation and pollution and war—is rising even more rapidly.

The novel was finished in 1984, a year rendered ominous by George Orwell, and it was first published in 1985. Reading
Terrarium
again on the occasion of this new edition, I find that the most disturbing trends I projected into my imaginary future have, if anything, only intensified over the past decade. More and more people jam the world's highways and cities, fill the countryside, crowd out other species. More and more drugs ease our aches and compensate for the madness or futility of our lives. We keep transferring our talents to machines, leaving less and less meaningful work for humans to do. Our impulse to create an enclave where nothing can harm us, an infantile
paradise where we need only eat and play, has achieved an apotheosis of sorts in the Mall of America. Our enclosures become ever larger, more sumptuous, more perfect refuges from the planet. We move ever deeper indoors, into the sealed boxes of our houses and offices, into domed stadiums and air-conditioned cars. Within these boxes, we retreat farther and farther into the twilit zone of television, tapes, and cyberspace.

Although I set my story in the twenty-first century, I only used the future as a screen for projecting enlarged images from our own time. I had no difficulty believing that we could poison the planet, but I never for a moment believed that we could save ourselves by building and inhabiting a global network of enclosed cities. Even if we knew how, we lack the will or the means to carry it out. All the resources of our nation have been required to sustain a handful of astronauts for a few weeks in cramped capsules, and even those resources have not always been sufficient to keep the astronauts alive.

Seven years after I began fashioning the Enclosure out of words in a rented room in Oregon, engineers began constructing Biosphere 2 out of glass and steel in the Arizona desert. This cluster of greenhouses, covering 3.5 acres and fitted with the best technology money could buy, was designed to be a self-contained system, within which humans could live and work indefinitely, growing all their own food and recycling their wastes, insulated from the outside. The developers believed that such bubble shelters might one day enable us to colonize other planets, or to survive in the degraded atmosphere of this one.
Terrarium
had been in print for more than five years when the first group of colonists moved inside Biosphere 2. The press followed this endeavor with much ballyhoo, at first announcing visionary hopes, and then, as problems emerged, confessing doubts. There were hints of illness, malnutrition, stress. There were reports of squabbles among the eight colonists. An injury forced one of them to sneak outside for medical treatment. The filtration system broke down, and technicians had to pipe in fresh supplies of air. Scientists who had neither money nor reputation invested in the project began to speak of it as a tourist
attraction, a technological fantasy, a hoax. Whether hoax or bold experiment, Biosphere 2 has demonstrated that we are a long, long way from knowing enough to build a substitute for earth.

To gauge how much time has passed since I hammered out the opening lines of
Terrarium
, I need only look at Jesse, who is now seventeen years old, with his own downy beard. He is an inch taller than six feet, and he weighs 195 pounds, far too heavy for me to hoist in my arms or tote in a backpack. But he still tugs my thoughts into the future, and so does Eva, and so do the students who gather in my classes, the toddlers who chase dogs down our street, and the babies whose faces beam from the arms of my neighbors. I am still trying to imagine how we can insure that the earth will remain a home for them, and that it will not become, like Venus or Mars, a hostile planet.

For all my worries, I wrote
Terrarium
with a sense of hope, and on rereading the book I find that hope renewed. The earth remains fertile and resilient. No matter how far we have retreated indoors, we are inseparably bound to the earth through our senses, through our flesh, through the yearnings and pleasures of sex, through the cycles of birth and death. Like Phoenix, any of us may wake up to discover where we truly dwell. Like Zuni and Teeg, we may labor for what we love, no matter how many voices tell us to give up. Like the colonists gathered on the Oregon shore, we may use the wealth of human knowledge to build communities that are materially simple and spiritually complex, respectful of our places and of the creatures who share them with us. We may seek holy ground together. Even in dark times, we may keep telling stories, witnessing to a wild beauty that we do not invent, a power we do not own.

Bloomington, Indiana
Spring 1995