The Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey

Author:Edward Abbey [Abbey, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 1990-10-14T06:00:00+00:00

IV

Through Myra’s Uncle David, a publisher’s chief accountant, Henry Lightcap was provided employment as a technical writer with Western Electric. Though neither technical nor a writer, Henry did hold a bachelor’s degree. Good enough for corporate work. Along with nineteen other men, young and old, he found himself installed at a desk under fluorescent lights, in a big office on the twenty-second floor of a forty-story tower, editing drafts of training manuals for American military forces stationed in the Arctic.

Since Henry’s security clearance would take several weeks, he was assigned the menial chore of editing a nonclassified U.S. government document called How to Dispose of Human Sewage [is there any other kind?] in Permafrost: Preliminary Draft. A work authored by C. J. Budnik, T. S. Schlunk and B. F. Cudball, FASCE (Fellows, American Society of Civil Engineers). In skimming over this 128-page monograph, the labor of two years by three full-grown men, Henry discovered—through a dense cobweb of subliterate supratechnical jargon complete with maps, charts, graphs, tables and organic equations—that Budnik, Schlunk and Cudball had arrived at no final feasible economically solvent solution to the vexing problem of how to dispose of human sewage in permafrost. Various proposals were submitted, outlined, evaluated, rejected: (1) drill boreholes through the permanent ice to a depth of five thousand feet, injecting sewage under pressure into hole casings and then compacting it to a solid state by means of specially devised tamping machines; (2) surface compaction, overland transport by snow tractor and hauler sledges to the nearest maritime port, burial at sea; (3) rocket transport into permanent orbit around Uranus; (4) once-daily transport of human personnel by supersonic jet to restroom facilities at latitudes below or beyond the permafrost zone; (5) special restricted diet for human personnel at military installations, such as, e.g., Triscuit crackers and longhorn (style) cheese; (6) satisfactory conclusion of experimental research toward development and production of a nonlethal antidiuretic colonic bungstopper effective for a minimum three-month period; (7) processing of sewage into recyclable edible matter such as Spam, or “caramel yoghurt” or Cap’n Crunchies or “Viennese sausages,” etc.; (8) temporary collection and storage of fecal materials in shallow sewage lagoons until the necessary technology for permanent disposal is developed; and (9) crap in the snow like an Eskimo, let the dogs eat it.

Solution #9, actually, was Henry’s own. Leading to an even better idea, which he offered to Karp, the project supervisor.

“What? You wanta what?”

Get on a plane, Mr. Karp, fly to Nome, Point Barrow, Baffin Bay and Ultima Thule, investigate the problem firsthand in the field. Would only take a few weeks, probably; he’d gather the data, fly back with the know-how on file to produce the world’s best training manual on Arctic sewage disposal.

Mr. Karp took a drag on his White Owl, puckered his lips to form a nozzle and expelled the smoke in a plume, draping Henry in a blue-gray hood of noxious gases.

“Back to your desk, Lightcap.”

“Sir?”

“I mean the answer is no. Your job, Lightcap, is translating these engineers’ gobbledygook into readable English, not doing shit research.

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