Don't Drink the Water: A Citizen's Story - Softcover

McCormick, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1475966482 ISBN 13: 9781475966480

Publisher: iUniverse, 2013

Synopsis

Don't Drink the Water is not a book trying to promote any existing religious, spiritual or national agenda. It does not attempt to blame anyone for the current state of human affairs. It is the story of how the author combined his personal experience with the thoughts of many of our more renown philosophers, states-men, scientists and long term thinkers from around the world to conclude that the goal of a secure and sustainable world for all humans is not an unattainable "Utopia" Don't Drink the Water makes a compelling case - Living in a time when we have secure and stable relations with each other and our environment is simply the logical outcome of the ongoing evolution of human intelligence.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

DON'T DRINK THE WATER

A Citizen's StoryBy BOB McCORMICK

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Bob McCormick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6648-0

Chapter One

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. —Arthur Schopenhauer

I could still hear the sound of the tires on the gravel as Paul's pickup retreated down the drive. He was long gone; it had been minutes since his old Ford rounded the last visible bend and disappeared behind the trees, but I strained to listen until every last evidence of his visit faded. I could feel a hovering emptiness, shapeless and dark, waiting to move into the space Paul was leaving behind. I fought to stay with the sound. Was that the final crunch of gravel as he turned off the driveway? If I could have stopped the soft rush of blood in my ears, would I have heard his transmission kick in, would I know when he was accelerating onto the county road, winding through the woods and out toward the interstate, disappearing?

And then, suddenly, the sound was gone. I wasn't even aware of its last breath. One moment I was leaning forward, hands gripping the porch rail, straining to hear. And the next—I was surrounded on all sides by silence, bone deep and still as stone. It was the heart of February; the leaves were down, and there wasn't so much as a rustling in the sharp, chill air. I was waiting for it; I knew it would come, but when it finally arrived, the silence was so sudden and harsh, so complete, that I felt caught off guard. As if provoked, as if blindsided after the whistle had blown.

Paul had shown up at my door two days before in the way only a brother in spirit can. We grew up together, comrades on that precarious path from boyhood to manhood. We went to the same college as classmates and teammates, and we worked our first jobs together, whiling away long stockroom hours volleying crumpled paper cups back and forth between us. I was best man at both of his weddings; he was best man at both of mine. And when life gave to one and took from the other, we shared what we had.

So when I found myself alone in a cabin in the woods, with nothing recognizable left of my former life and choking on the solitude I myself had created, it was Paul I called. I could hear, tapping at the door, the pain I'd tried to run from. Like a small army of shadowy creatures scratching at the edges of my consciousness, it insisted on gaining entry. When I understood that it was only a matter of time before the army beat down the door and surged around me, I turned to Paul to stand with me, shoulders thrown against the jamb, holding it at bay just a few days more.

Paul never left upstate New York and lives there still. But when I called him from my cabin in the deep woods of Virginia hundreds of miles away, it was only a matter of hours before he showed up on my front porch. He stayed the weekend. There wasn't much to say. I was past the point of being able to give voice to a sadness I couldn't even understand myself, and with a friend like Paul, there was no need to. We sat on the front porch in the cold, letting a few words drift quietly back and forth between us. He couldn't save me from the wreckage of a battle I'd been waging in my own head for years. But with him there, I had one thin but sure thread to cling to, and it was possible to breathe in and out for those two days.

Life took over. At the end of the weekend, he had to get back to work. As I stood on the porch, watching him climb into his pickup and start the ignition, I could hear the army of shapeless creatures gathering at the door again, their nails scraping softly, persistently. I could imagine their long fingers closing around my lungs. I knew that the moment Paul was gone, I'd be left to hold the door closed against them on my own, and I didn't have the strength. Or the will.

I stood there listening hard enough to turn my ears inside out, cursing the years of construction work that had dulled my hearing. I listened as the last thread connecting me to the living ground steadily away through the gravel and faded to silence. And then I was alone. The moment the silence struck me, and the creatures burst in.

In the sudden vacuum left by Paul's retreating wheels, I sucked the winter air in sharply through my teeth, felt it swell and roil in my lungs and then push back out of my throat in one soundless sob. With the next breath, my whole body was shaking. I gasped, trying to breathe as quickly as the sobs escaped, my chest thick with their pressure. I instinctively doubled over, wanting somehow to suppress the force crashing over me. I'd been here countless times before, consumed by uncontrollable tears, and always they would run their course and leave me spent but relieved. This time, though, I sensed something was different. I could imagine no end to this jag; I recognized it as something beyond me.

Time retreated to the outermost edges of my consciousness. I wandered through the cabin, unable to see through the tears. It was all I could do to inhale between heaving sobs more like retches than breath. I was vaguely aware of sitting on the edge of a kitchen chair, my forehead in my hand. Then I was on the floor. Then on the bed, teetering close to the edge, my face in the pillow. I stood, and I paced. I furiously turned around in the cabin, half-trying to outrun the tears. I knew it was useless. I paced anyway.

I didn't notice the lengthening of the shadows until night had fallen. I realized with a start that I was in blackness too complete for me to move about. I found a wall and sank against it. I had known for months that it was a mistake to come to this place. What once seemed like a charming retreat, an escape from the persistent army that had been at my heels for years, was now a prison. I had longed for solitude, time to think, a reconnecting with simplicity, nature, what is fundamental.

When I first stumbled on to the cabin while out for an aimless country drive, I called the broker on impulse. He told me that part of the movie Clear and Present Danger had been filmed in the cabin, and somehow that didn't strike me as being at odds with my vision of woodland calm. I moved in three days later.

It was only then that I remembered the brutal murder scene shot where my couch now stood. And it was only then that I noticed the way the cabin's roof hung over the windows, blocking the sunlight. But I'd already hung heavy, forest-green curtains over them and a dull, darkly woven tapestry above the fireplace. I didn't notice the lack of sunlight until I'd exacerbated it, unconsciously shutting myself into a permanent night.

I cried in the darkness. Sometimes my whole body was wracked with painful heaving and my ears rang with the strange, choked sound of my own voice. And sometimes the crying was barely a trickle. I shook soundlessly on the cabin floor, my body locked in a fragile trembling. I knew from the totality of the darkness that it must be night, but my body didn't react. I felt no hunger; I did not sleep.

Somewhere close to dawn, I found myself wandering out the front door and onto the porch. I didn't know what, if anything, drew me out of the cabin. Maybe I was trying to escape, maybe I hoped the splitting cold and the open sky would give me some relief from the weight of the sobs. Or maybe I had entirely lost control and was giving over to purposeless steps. Somehow I realized I was standing outside, without a coat, in the semigray of early morning. I had cried through the night. The tears subsided momentarily, enough for me to see out over the porch rail and into the dense trees.

Looking out through the naked branches, I could see down to the stream that ran along the base of the hillside. It was a deep purple, almost black in the predawn light, but still I could see its subtle shimmering. The stream had held me hostage countless times that winter. With every rain, it overswelled its banks and flooded the drive, leaving me trapped in the accidental darkness of the cabin.

What a fool I was to come to this damned place, I thought yet again. There was no counting the times I'd had this thought since moving there. What a fool. What had I thought I'd find? Some kind of idyllic Walden? A reprieve from my mind, from the ever-lurking army of twisted, ugly creatures? Instead I'd only burrowed further into myself; I'd locked myself in.

And still I was crying. Through the cresting waves of pain that overwhelmed my consciousness again and again, a tiny, disconnected memory surfaced in my mind. An old friend ... I couldn't think of his name or see his face clearly. An old friend whom I used to head out to the woods with to camp. Sitting beside a fire with him, shooting the breeze, stirring the coals with sticks. I remembered him looking into the flames and murmuring, "They say hypothermia's not a bad way to go."

I didn't know what triggered the memory; I wasn't even sure it was real. But I clung to it. "Not a bad way to go." Perhaps first my body would go numb. I imagined that would be painful—I knew the distinct ache of gloveless fingers on a bitter Buffalo morning. But after that initial pain? Perhaps there would be a quietness—a retreat. The real retreat I was looking for when I came here.

It would be pretty easy. In fact, I couldn't think of a simpler way to go. No weapon to buy, no need for hard-to-find prescription pills. No testing the rafters, no tugging on the rope to try its strength. I could just stroll down to the stream in my underwear, have a seat, and wait. I wouldn't have to watch my step. I wouldn't even have to stop crying.

For a moment, it seemed as if a tiny fissure was making its way through my tears. I felt a quick burst of cold fill my lungs as I took my first uninhibited breath in hours, maybe days. There was an end to this. Just a few steps away, an easy, painless, un-dramatic exit. No struggle. No clean-up.

No clean-up. As quickly as the fissure appeared, it sealed itself again. I was a father. I was a father, and I was a fool. There was no easy out. Yes, I could wander away and freeze to death and put a final stop to this mad chase. But in throwing off the pursuing army, I'd only be unleashing it on my children. No clean-up? My son and daughter were grown, but I was still their father. The thought of gaining any relief at their expense was unendurable. I tamped it back down wherever it had come from.

And then I was lost to the tears again. Pacing. Rising in and out of awareness. It occurred to me in a brief moment of lucidity that were anyone else there, the first thing he would ask would be, "Why are you crying?" And when I could only answer, "I don't know how to tell you," he'd have to conclude that I'd gone right out to lunch, that he'd stumbled on a loony in the woods and he'd better give him a wide berth. And could I disagree?

But worse yet, he might pat my shoulder and say, "It's obvious why you're crying."

I was going through a divorce. I had moved away from Vienna, Virginia, where I'd lived for the last thirty years, where I'd become an active member of the community. I had a name and a reputation and what seemed in every respect to be the most I could ask for. And as my marriage and my place in the community receded further and further from my life, so too did many of my dearest friendships. Every way I'd once had of marking the passing of the days had gently fallen to the side—not all at once but one by one, steadily, until what was left was a dark cabin in the woods, a lapse in real estate judgment that had come to represent the colossal missed mark of my life.

So if an old friend from Vienna were to have happened upon me then, he might have nodded knowingly and said, "Bob, of course you're crying. Anyone would cry. Take a sleeping pill, go to bed, and in the morning we'll find you a good shrink."

But he'd be wrong. I wasn't crying for my marriage. I wasn't crying for Vienna, Virginia, or for the committees I sat on, or for my career in local politics, or even for my many lost friendships. I was sure none of those losses did much to help my psychological state of affairs, but they were ultimately, sadly, beside the point. What got me to that cabin in the woods had little to do with any personal mistakes I'd made along the way, as great as those might have been and as devastating as I knew they were to so many people, not the least of whom were my wife and children.

The failure was much bigger than my single and—in the end—unoriginal story of personal struggle and loss. I failed at the one thing where failure was unimaginable, where its consequences were boundless and terrifying.

Over the course of my life, I had come to know with absolute certainty that a better path for humanity is possible, a path of cooperation, reason, and farsightedness, but I had been unable to communicate the idea. I understood that the line between what we call "primitive" and "modern" humans needs to be continually redrawn, and that our generation is standing on the wrong side of that line. We are all members of a generation that can still justify taking each other's lives, and we don't have a sustainable relationship with our own life-support system. Poverty, hunger, gender injustice, and illiteracy still plague our species with no end in sight. And thirty thousand of our children die every day from preventable causes.

I had also come to learn with the same level of certainty that we have the tools and the potential to intelligently create our own future, regardless of our current circumstances or our experience. But the organization I founded to promote this certainty, the Global Plan Initiative, was stalling. The potential that I knew each of us holds in the palm of his or her hand—however large or small or privileged or impoverished that hand might be—threatened to go unrealized. And I had been unable to stir even those closest to me to recognize that potential, to open themselves to it, and to allow it to carry them forward. I had failed, and the consequences of that failure were too great to bear.

* * *

I cried for two days. I hadn't known it was possible for a human being to cry without pause for so long. I thought I would surely reach a point where I just dried out, but it never came.

Eventually, through the fog of my despair and panic, I understood that though suicide was out of the question, so too was continuing to endure the pain. I was headed over the edge. With no one left to turn to, and truly nothing left to lose, I called my wife.

We had not lived together for six months, and our marriage was effectively over. But she knew me, or at least knew the person I once was. She had witnessed my wrestling with the conflict between the problems that continue to confront humanity and the unrealized potential we have to overcome those problems. She had witnessed my despair when I first began to understand this conflict, and she had seen my joy and hope when I founded the Global Plan Initiative to confront it.

But she was also one of the many to whom I had been unable to effectively communicate my thoughts. She met my hope with resistance, telling me I'd bitten off more than I could chew, telling me to give it up. One day toward the end, as I tried to express to her the urgency of the idea, my hands dancing about with excitement as I spoke, she leaned back in her chair and said, "Bob, if you want to talk to me, you're going to have to stop using your hands." That's when I knew she could not help me, and if I wanted to continue, it would have to be alone.

Still, we had loved each other. When Paul was gone, when I'd cried alone through the night and knew the battle was all but lost, I called my wife. She told me, "Listen, I have a lunch appointment today. But I'll pick you up, and you can come along."

So I ended up at lunch with my soon-to-be-ex-wife and our old friends from Vienna, a couple I had been close to for many years before the Global Plan Initiative turned my life in a new direction. I managed to contain my tears through lunch. I sat there with red-rimmed eyes, unable to contribute, an empty husk. I'm sure they noticed my strangeness; how could they not? I was leaking despair like a beached tanker. But they were old friends, dear friends, with a front-row seat to the disintegration of my marriage. I imagined they wrote off my sorrow as regrettable but all too common: a simple case of divorcé's blues.

My wife took me back to the house we had shared for all the years of our marriage. The tears immediately began again, and I found myself back on the couch in the living room. I had spent many nights there in the last two years before I moved out. And I spent that night there too, hardly any different from the night of anxious wakefulness I'd spent in my darkened cabin. My wife, a lifelong nurse, gave me a sleeping pill, but the escape of sleep never came. I only cried.

In the morning, my wife's face appeared above mine through the blur of my tears. "I don't know how to help you," she said. "This is beyond me. We're going to the hospital."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from DON'T DRINK THE WATERby BOB McCORMICK Copyright © 2013 by Bob McCormick. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1475966482
• ISBN 13: 9781475966480
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188