The fourth rule of the Warrior Ethic: Thrive.
We felt like giddy college students on spring break. The days and nights were hot and dank, but we moved through America in the open convertible, the wind blowing away contrails of country music that blasted out of the AM radio. We got off the interstate and took the two-lane back roads.
When hungry, we tried to find small diners in small towns, though many were closed up. We saw deserted family farms, homestead porches drooping from dry rot and termites, barns stripped to the stud bones to provide distressed wall panels for the McMansions of the swells. We drove through vast corporate farms with robotic irrigation, run by Mormon MBAs in short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, clicking their mice in air-conditioned, prefabricated trailers.
We took turns driving and, for our little twinkie, sleeping. When MouthBreather slept in the back seat, Melpomene would play some prank on him, tying his shoelaces together, or painting a red clown smile on his face with lipstick she bought at a gas station. She couldn’t get over it, this sleeping thing. She was always easily amused, in a casual, lethal way.
We took a small detour to the north. An imminent global apocalypse was not going to stop me from visiting Yellowstone National Park. We could actually sense it from hundreds of miles away – she was calling us home. As we approached the park entrance, we could see, delineated in our minds, the network of magma channels deep below, the underground streams of superheated water, the shattered caldera that once unleashed unimaginable power across North America.
There is simply nothing like it, on Earth or on Shaula.
Melpomene was ecstatic, and I could not stop her from jumping over the fences and into the sulfur hot springs, or standing naked in the venting fumaroles – she called it a bikini wax. I joined her a few times, surrounding myself with a protective wall of steam, since my fragile human body was not as robust as her android body.
We were sandwiched by the hot summer sun above and the immense reserves of steam at our feet. We drew strength and joy from both sources, and felt powers that we could not access on Shaula. We were like the fringed gentian – a lovely blue flower that opens up in sunlight, and draws sustenance from the earth and the sky. If we could meet ScrumMaster here, the upcoming grisly war would be a cakewalk.
The desolation of climate change was less evident here, perhaps from the healing powers of mother Earth’s firebox under our feet. We saw a huge herd of bison grazing peacefully in a meadow sprinkled with wildflowers. Melpomene and I rushed across the meadow and mingled among them. The beasts knew us and did not fear. Then we jumped up, and walked across the broad backs of the herd, back to the car. MouthBreather seemed resigned to our ways, and merely said “Are you nuts?”
The creatures we saw were rife with ambient steam, the elk, the black bears, the wolves, but nothing matched the grace, beauty and awful power of the grizzly bear. We sensed one foraging in a low rise near the Yellowstone River, and we jumped out of the car and climbed up. There was a presence unlike anything we had felt before, and when we came upon her – a mother with her cub – we stared at each other in mutual admiration, trust and respect. Melpomene walked up to the cub, and rubbed her cheek (she was a yearling sow) and then continued over to the mother. The grizzly was unconcerned, and they communicated in the way that fire spirits communicate everywhere in the universe. I too was drawn to her. She growled low and sweet, and recognized me as Queen.
Back in the car Melpomene begged me to bring the grizzly along with us. “We would be unstoppable!”
MouthBreather, who would be obliged to share the back seat with the grizzly, raised some heartfelt, practical objections. Melpomene was unconvinced, but I reluctantly realized that just this once, pathetic human logic trumped Gaia’s dark desires. “She is rather large, Melpomene. Besides, she has to care for her daughter.”
We could have stayed there for weeks, but we had strategies to implement, and campaigns to endure. We pointed the Pontiac convertible west again, and left Yellowstone behind.