Urla is laughing behind camera — camera back to TV screen — zooms in and out erratically on presenter struggling against onslaught of water —
Erin: If you’re stranded in the wilderness you need a weapon. Ideally a rifle. If you don’t have a rifle nature will sometimes throw you a rope in the form of a makeshift weapon. Behold.
For example
— Erin flourishes her pen to the camera —
Erin: This thousand-year-old arrowhead I found on the floor. I will tie it to a stick with the cord from my parachute. If you don’t have an arrowhead or a parachute cord, use your initiative. Initiative is man’s best weapon
— she winks — Urla laughs —
Erin: I am on a journey of SURVIVAL. (THROWS BACK HER HEAD AS SHE SHOUTS) Every step of this journey is me. Man. Surviving. Not dying. Never succumbing to the weakness that is death
CUT TO —
INT. — still in same interior but props have moved — belongings piled in corner — Erin has T-shirt tied to her head turban style and is brandishing a broom handle like a scythe —
Erin (GESTICULATING BROOMSTICK ON EMPHASISED WORDS): The tropics are home to most of the plants and animals in the world, most of which are trying to KILL YOU. Not every creature in the jungle wants to kill you. Instead these ones want to EAT YOU ALIVE. Sometimes in the jungle it can feel like everything is out to get you. BECAUSE IT IS. Man must reassert his dominance in the jungle. I flick the tarantula off my leg
— Erin mimes flicking her leg —
Erin: Petty bug
— pan to television — presenter is in a desert, talking with spear-clad barefoot gentleman who is holding up to him the corpse of something furry — pan back to Erin, who is looking at the screen —
Erin: If you are stranded in the desert you can expect a visit. FROM DEATH. It would take years to learn all the skills of the San Bushmen but I have done it in a matter of hours. They eat every morsel of the desert hare and respect its soul. I will bite out its liver and leave the rest because its liver contains a vitamin that is vital for preventing something bad I mentioned earlier
— onscreen presenter passes the carcass back to the San Bushman —
Erin: Take the rest of the carcass. I have no use for it. No, you may NOT have one of my adventure-sports-sponsorship power-bars, San Bushman
— camera shakes with laughter —
CUT TO —
EXT. FROZEN LAKESIDE — Erin in snow next to a body of frozen water — she is now brandishing a large stick —
Erin: Here in the Arctic there are fish under the ice. I have a frozen deer leg so that’s what I’m going to use to smash through the ice. If you don’t have a frozen deer leg, use your initiative. I’m going to make a line using some cord from my parachute. And some other really useful stuff I found in my pocket
— she takes to hitting the ice with the stick —
CUT
HOW TO CONVEY INVISIBLE DEATH
CONTAMINANTS THAT CAUSE ADVERSE CHANGE
I was back standing on the ice sheet in a blizzard. There were two figures in orange jackets with their hoods against the blizzard and goggles on, glaciologists. They were peering over one of those big drills they use to get ice core samples. As the core came up its gradation changed, from glowy green like a nuclear ore on top down to pure white. The glaciologists conferred.
‘Witnesses described huge bonfires on which the bodies of the birds were burned,’ said Rachel Carson from beside me.
I could hear clearly what the glaciologists were saying even though they were very far away.
‘The core shows residue,’ said the one.
‘Hmm, yes, they also found it in the underground rivers,’ said the other.
‘When some of the Eskimos themselves were checked by analysis of fat samples, small residues of DDT were found (0 to 1.9 parts per million).’ Rachel Carson always spoke with no lilt of emphasis in her voice. Not to me or anyone really. Maybe to herself.
‘It’s much worse than we thought.’
‘Much worse.’
‘The fat samples were taken from people who had left their native villages to enter the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Anchorage for surgery.’
I asked, ‘Where have the bees gone, Ms Carson?’ But my voice was lost to the wind.
‘For their brief stay in civilisation the Eskimos were rewarded with a taint of poison,’ she said instead.
‘Quick, empty it and let’s go.’ The glaciologists emptied their lab pockets into the core hole. There was a pause as they leaned and peered into it, then a succession of plops like pebbles in still water. Then they replaced the core.
The noise took me back home to the cul-de-sac between the two lamp-posts that marked the boundary of where I was allowed to play when I was little, where Mum could still see me from the living room as she did the polishing and listened to Boyzone. There is a wall, the side of Marge and Graham’s house, where Charlotte from next door was sat facing it, making the noise, crack crack crack, that the snails made when we would throw them against it if we were bored so their shells burst and their guts spilled out. We would have to kick them down the drain in time before Graham would come out to shout at us when he guessed what we were doing to his wall. Down into the underground sewage, plop plop plop.
When I was little I was fascinated by the sewage system. To get rid of anything all you had to do was flush it down a drain. In the yard there was a drain lid, and if you lifted it you could watch all the things coming through the drains in the house on the way off to wherever they were going. We used to put the dog poo in it then flush the downstairs toilet to send it away. If there was ever any evidence of something bad I had done I would lift up the drain lid, put it inside, run in to flush, then run back, in time to see it being washed into oblivion.
One day I sat on the toilet and I jumped up because something had tickled my leg. A snail was sliming its way out of the sparkly white basin. It had come from this elsewhere place and made its way through the plumbing inside our house to the top-floor toilet. This changed something fundamental about how I saw the drains from then on, my own miniature Copernican Revolution. Suddenly the philosophical implications of flushing into the black-hole-void needed to be scrutinised because drains were now not the portal to the place-of-no-return I had thought them, a bit like how Jerry R. Ehman who got the Wow! Signal must have felt, like, ‘I am not alone something has come out of the void to me wow!’
Maybe in the dream of the glaciologists on the ice sheet I am realising the similar always-there-but-not-appreciated
