Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Last month, in the mild of winter, on the north coast of Alaska, one of the world’s largest land-based oil rigs was being moved along a gravel road when, unexpectedly, it toppled over and crashed to the ground. Apparently, no one knows why, but evidently temperatures were around and above freezing.
Here’s me, a life-long city dweller in Canada’s warmest cranny, thinking about a gravel road in Alaska in January. I used to go out with a snow-plow driver based in the Rockies, so maybe I’ve thought about this more than the average national-park bear. You don’t plow gravel roads, so they would likely have been moving it on whatever that surface was. Snow with 10-million pounds on it is going to be ice.
The rig was probably made to be moved on ice roads, and in January, the roads should be ice. But if it was above freezing that day, the ice would be melting and possibly unstable. Maybe not the best time to move this thing, but I wonder if anyone on site was thinking about how above-freezing temperatures would affect the ice, because this city-clicker is.
For the most part, when I think about climate change, I think of rising sea levels impacting coastlines. I don’t have the scope of understanding to regard much of what is coming our way, but this incident feels like entrenchment in protocols that are no longer 100-percent applicable. That’s the scary part. The not dealing with what is almost obvious. “Every January we move ‘The Beast’ down the road because the ice is solid.” (I have no idea if this is the case; I’m fictionalizing here.)
The song attached, written in 1988, is a glimpse into an imagined apocalypse, the result of theories and dreams based in greed. The narrator admits they don’t know if we could have stopped it, but they wanted us to try. The ominous buzz of slightly-out-of-tune-notes at the end reminds me of a gathering swarm of angry bees.
“Then” from Calico Kills The Cat (K, 1988) (download):
