The Reenactment
Andrew drives west over the Rockies
We’re one mile from the De Borgia exit on I-90. That means we’ve been taking hair-pin turns at seventy as we head west, up and over the Rockies.
It’s the kind of epic drive that is ripe for easy metaphor or historical reverie. Around every corner is another corner. You climb one summit just to meet another.
Cherries Exit Now. The St. Regis River pouring back and forth. The Silver Dollar Motel.
Six deer with ratty winter coats. The Idaho border. Empty wastewater ponds shining metal gray in the blaze of afternoon sun.
I didn’t know that, by the way, that they were wastewater ponds.
I stared out the passenger window and puzzled at the sight until it was overtaken by a backward horizon of Douglas fir. My first thought was empty reservoir. Drought. Climate change. The big mountain as a big symbol for an issue bigger than anything I might touch in these personal essays.
I nailed the scope of the thing, but I had the symbol wrong.
It turned out I was looking at the only cobalt mine in the United States, its portals capped, its treatment ponds dry, its operations scrapped after the price per pound fell from $40 to less than $20. There at the foot of the Rockies, the fragility of global economies and US industry shining up at me but impossible to grasp.
* * *
When I got home and had a moment to spare, I pulled up a map on the internet and tried to pinpoint what I had seen on the road.
I traced our path west until I happened upon a possible match: the beautiful blue-green hues of water but in alien form, like a thickly outlined keyhole or bowling pin.
I couldn’t see a name, so I zoomed in. Thin threads of copper and white drained down onyx edges. The closest labeled landmark was O’Brien Gulch.
A search for the gulch took me to the University of Idaho Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning. And although there were no cobalt clues in their catalog, I found several black-and-white photographs of the area.
In one image, from 1921, a man is prostrate, legs spread, face-down on the ground. The pale skin at the nape of his neck is in the foreground, almost fluorescent against the dark leaves and dirt.
In another, the man is still face-down, but the camera has leapt over him and turned back around to capture the soles of his boots, a pattern of hobnails. In this photograph, we can get a sense of the terrain. We see we are on a wooded ravine, sloping downward away from the man and toward the future cobalt wastewater pond.
A few paces away, a serious-looking man braces himself against the hill, clutching a pipe and looking directly at the camera. His other hand perches in the ink-black of his hip, at attention, perhaps, over a holster.
And there is a third man. He grips a rifle and uses it to nudge our man in the back, prodding the body to arise or stay dead. The photo is captioned “Macki, John-Murder Case.”
I don’t know the order that the photographs were taken, but there’s at least one more image of the prostate man. Here, his legs are obscured by a mass of logs and debris, but now he is on his side, facing the camera. One hand dangles over his legs, and the other is casually flopped beneath his chin.
In this photograph, the man is grinning at the camera, as if to say, this, all of this, is only a performance. I was dead or I will be dead soon, but it is all in good fun.
* * *
The next weekend, after we returned home to Seattle, I attended a My Little Pony birthday party with Zade and Corrigan. While the kids danced, the dads sat around a sturdy homemade table drinking cold cider and beer.
At some point, we began trading stories about AI. I shared about the way my research colleagues have used machine learning to scour VA medical records for undiagnosed cases of dementia. Or about the interview I’d heard recently in which Daniel Kokotajlo tells New York Times columnist Ross Douthat that AI will radically transform our lives by 2028.
The other dads worked in tech, at places like Microsoft and Apple, and they were skeptical. If AI is to take over, they seemed to suggest, it will be in the same way that all technologies take over, by seeping into our routines and teaching us new ways to waste our time. Their managers, they said, were pushing AI tools as the answer for every new project, chasing a breakthrough around corners that just keep on coming.
Then one of the dads told us about the disembodied figure of Chris Pelkey.
Pelkey, I learned, had been killed in a road rage incident. Perhaps he got some words in before his death, but by the time the matter was in court, one would think he had nothing more to say. He was dead. But Pelkey’s sister used AI tools to create a video simulation of Pelkey’s voice and likeness. During the victim impact statement, she resurrected him right there in court.
From a big box of circuits and diodes, AI Pelkey looked his killer in the eye and smiled.
“I forgive you,” he said.
* * *
So much has changed since those photographs were taken in 1921, and yet our drive through the Rockies followed the same path that Lt. John Mullan carved for wagons in the 1860s. The shuttered mine is located along a belt of cobalt that has been intermittently quarried since the late 1800s.
We still have murder, though we invented road rage. We brought a murder victim back to life.
But even that isn’t new. AI is, in this sense, just another camera; Chris Pelkey’s ghost is just the next version of that actor, face-down in the leaves of a one-hundred-year-old photograph. We have been here before.
And, of course, I am all tangled up in this too.
Let’s face it. I can’t write a history of cobalt mining and a mysterious murder without putting myself, my peculiar curiosities, my sense of justice and poetry, my shortsighted tunnel visions, at the center. I can try to minimize the self, but in this kind of writing, I am the thing that’s always around the corner or over the next rise.
And at the same time, I’m the one behind the camera, the one nudging the man to lie just so. I’m the historian who sets the scene to extract maximum meaning and drama. I’m the combustionist who seeks to transform memory into pyrotechnics.
Because writing is reenactment.
And in these first few weeks of the 17 point scale, I’ve chosen to reenact rough scenes, scenes of infertility and estranged teenagers and imprisonment. Fun stuff. In fact, here, I intended to break that up, to write something pretty about heading west, about the red bark of ponderosa pines, for example, and instead I took us on a cyclical tour of murder.
Sometimes I will drive this car to the hard places, but when I can, I promise to direct the actors to smile, to offer words of unexpected grace, and to get us all home safe and sound.