The Deluge, page 13
She watched me with infuriating calm. “Matt, it has everything to do with why you want to write…” She ticked off her fingers. “Because you view it as your inheritance, your birthright, your entitlement. It is your prerogative to look across the human condition and describe it through your ears and eyes, all while you cluelessly disregard what those ears and eyes are attached to. And more than that, you ignore the long chain of affluence that allows you the time to read and write and dream. You’re ignorant of how your dad came to build those golf courses he builds, of the water it takes to maintain them, of the carbon they’re responsible for that’s rapidly destroying the biosphere. None of it’s even remotely a part of your worldview.” As she was saying this, my smile was growing larger and smarmier. “And I guess that’s why I’m not all that interested in reading some Paris Review rip-off about you wagging your dick around a North Carolina prep school.”
I laughed abrasively to show her that this was not the case, even though, eerily, it was.
“You got me, Kate.” I didn’t want her to see the fear of my own empty center. Because of that fear, I felt like I had to score a point, and I reached for the only arrow I knew, the one all men learn at an impossibly young age. “Maybe we should do dinner some other time when you’re not being a cunt.”
As soon as it left my mouth, I felt how childish it sounded, and I loathed every male example who’d taught me that this was how you wound a woman. I could tell Kate was only embarrassed for me.
She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. “This is a stupid argument. I’ll call you later this week when work calms down.”
After she left, I ate by myself in front of my computer.
* * *
It wasn’t until Lucy introduced herself to me in the library a week later that I understood the summer in the proper context. Our fight behind us, I was determined to expand my reading list with Kate’s recommendations. I had just pulled Margaret Murie’s memoir Two in the Far North from the shelf when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned to see Lucy. She didn’t mince words.
“You’re hanging out with Kate Morris now, right?” I said that I was. She nodded like this was exactly what she expected and it mattered nothing to her. “Yeah, small town here. Word gets around. She do the thing where she brings some brick of a book on the first date?”
She didn’t sound jealous. Only curious. I said, “Arendt. Men in Dark Times.”
She laughed and rummaged in her backpack. “Man, what a total crazy. You, me, probably another guy or gal somewhere in between this summer. I honestly wonder how she keeps all the plates spinning, you know?”
A coldness crept over my skin, but I smiled like I was in on the joke.
“Hey.” She finally found what she was looking for in her backpack. “I actually have this of hers. Give it back to her for me, will ya?”
She handed me my copy of Hocus Pocus.
“Yeah,” I said. “No problem.”
* * *
The next time I saw Kate, she told me she was leaving. She’d been offered a job with a new organization that would focus on political races vis-à-vis global warming. “Climate justice, but with sharp elbows. Really fucking people up,” she explained. I could hear her trying to keep the undercurrent of excitement out of her voice and failing. “I’ll be coming on as organizing director. It’s a pretty amazing gig.”
I told her that was great while my gut bottomed out. The job was in D.C.
“So I put in my two weeks both at the Cowboy and the Bison Project.”
All of it came crashing down then. Maybe I should have understood this moment as inevitable—she’d never led me to believe otherwise—but I hadn’t. This is how I ended up bringing up Lucy. The artillery I had wasn’t working so I reached for the napalm. She took in that I knew she’d been seeing other people unfazed.
“I didn’t think I could have been more clear with you.” Her voice clinical. “On how I feel about being possessed. I’m not yours to tell who I can and can’t see.”
I fumed into my own crossed arms, unable to even look at her now. “You honestly spent all this time with me, and it didn’t occur to you that I’d care that you were fucking someone else?”
She smiled. “Kid, I don’t go in for slut-shaming. Not any more than I go in for the bullshit notion of possessive monogamy. I doubt there’s any way I could’ve made that more apparent to you short of texting you every time I got off with someone else.”
Trent, the big beefy cowboy made more sense. When I saw him twisting his whiskey at the bar, he was probably just going through what I was going through now. “Were you seeing Trent while we were together too?”
“So what if I fucking was?” Kate exploded. “Who are you to judge me for him or anyone else? What century did you grow up in, dude? What did you think, I want to be your housewife back in North Carolina? I’m not ashamed that I fuck who I want when I want. If you can’t handle that, it’s your problem, not mine.”
“I never wanted to make you a housewife—I just…” She left me stuttering. Embarrassed that this was more or less exactly the fantasy I’d harbored. She could be so raw, so unapologetic. “What do you think I was feeling for you this whole time?”
“What were you feeling?” she asked. Humoring me.
“Oh fuck you, come on.” I felt the burn in the back of my throat that comes with the push of first tears. “That I was falling in love with you, that…” I’d felt like I had a speech, but as soon as the word was out there it only sounded stupid. “So.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Maybe I was clumsy in what I just said,” she decided. “I don’t mean that I haven’t developed many strong—very strong feelings for you. But I’m not yours to get jealous of. And I never will be. I’ve noticed most men absolutely cannot handle that. I thought I was sparing you by keeping it all from you.”
And of course, she was right about that.
* * *
I texted to ask if we could get together before she left, but she never replied, and I expected she never would. I began to feel what it would be like to never see her again, what kind of void she would leave. Yet, she’d shown me I was a person who could stitch up his wounds before he could even feel them. I read what I’d written that summer, and I could hear her voice in my head pointing out the inanity. Suddenly, my whole life looked silly to me, a spoiled rich kid phony who’s read too much Kerouac playing at profundity. On the docks, I mostly shut down. While I was gassing up one of the private boats, Captain Ray called me from the marina. He sat on the truck tailgate smoking.
“I asked the guys, ‘What’s going on with Tar Heel?’ Damien tells me you got your heart shit on.”
“Something like that.” I didn’t want to have this conversation with Ray. What I wanted to do was quit my job early. Get the hell out of Wyoming. I wanted to go back to Raleigh, start applying to law schools, and forget I’d ever come out here. “Is this where you give me the ‘plenty of fish in the sea’ talk?”
“Sure,” he said. “Pussy comes and pussy goes. Everyone knows that.” He took a drag of the cigarette. “Doesn’t mean it can’t be goddamn awful when it goes.”
We sat looking out over the mountains, granite-colored, pocked with white snow and dark green forest. Mountains are chaos disguised as stillness, Kate had explained once. “We carve out these places in the world, spare them from our cruelties, but only because it’s one of the last ways we can still feel mystery. And then even our sense of mystery becomes another consumer edifice.”
* * *
I woke to my phone buzzing, and when I saw it was Kate, I thought I might still be moving through the ends of a dream. She told me to come downstairs. I dressed quickly, my hair sticking up all over the place, and found that downstairs meant she was in her truck. Its red bulk sat at the curb, engine off. She had her arm draped out the window, sunglasses blocking her eyes. The bed was packed with her bike, several duffel bags, and a slew of boxes restrained with a web of bungie cords. I smoothed my bedhead and hastily wiped the sleep gunk from my eyes as I approached. I wasn’t sure if I was furious at her for coming to say goodbye like this—basically slowing down on her way out of town—or forever grateful that she hadn’t left without doing so. Either way, I could already feel the despair deep in my chest, waiting to be set free.
“You at least going to get out of the car?” My tone as unkind as I could manage.
She looked at me as if deciding what to say, then picked at a scratch in the door’s upholstery.
“I’m not really a goodbye kinda person,” she said.
“There are a lot of things you’re not, Kate.”
She looked at the steering wheel, and I waited.
“Look, Matt.” Her grip on the wheel tightened. “I’m going to try to say this as clearly as I can, and I want you to think about it without your preconceived notions and social constructs—”
“Talk to me like a fucking person,” I begged. “Quit with the PC-robot jargonese.”
She smiled at me, and I wanted to scream.
“Okay, fine.” The smile faded. “Despite my best intentions, yes, I have grown quite fond of you as well. By which I mean, I went out of my way to make you feel like shit, like what you told me was one-sided. I promise you it is not. I’ve spent a lot of time telling myself it’s better that we just part ways. That would be the easiest path to sorting all this out.” Her blinding smile cracked open again and reached all the way back to her molars. I wanted to hold on to my anger, but the smile was so mischievous, so in love with life and all its bizarre possibilities. “Goddamnit, what I adore about you is you’re exactly what you say you are. I guess I didn’t realize how much I appreciate that or how good it did me in my own fucked headspace. So what I’m offering is this: If you can take me for who I am—and I mean, not try to change me, not try to make me into the person you wish I was, but just take me for the person I’ve told you I am… Then instead of goodbye, just get in my truck, dude. I’m thinking Cheyenne tonight, Lincoln tomorrow, Chicago the day after that. D.C. eventually. Go on this journey with me, and maybe it’ll be a huge mistake but that’s what life’s for, right? And it’s better to go with the wild, outrageous mistakes.”
Before she’d even finished her proposal, I knew I’d go back up to the apartment, pack the few things I cared about, and leave the rest behind. I was already gaming out how I’d abandon my lease and ask Damien to give away my furniture. I was already dreaming of the motel rooms Kate and I would stay in on the plains of Nebraska or in the palm of the Appalachian Mountains. How could I know then what would be born of that decision? The places I’d follow Kate, the people she’d draw into this cause, the passion she would spark within me, the years of rain and thunder—she once called them—that lay ahead. At that moment I was a twenty-two-year-old kid offered an adventure by a woman he’d never learn to refuse.
Kate grinned, and the dawn reflected off her sunglasses, the light flaring into my face, as bright and powerful as I’d ever known.
Book II
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What is 6Degrees? Feds Respond to Shadowy Heartland Saboteurs
How an Elusive Group of Monkeywrenchers Has Cost Energy Giants Millions while Evading the FBI
By JENJI FISCHER
MARCH 30, 2025
The charred stalk of the pipeline twists up from the ground like an exposed root. George Wisniewski squats near the crater, a divot of metal and blackened earth. Here on the golden plains near the Colorado-Nebraska border, the damage looks almost artistic.
“They hit it in three different places. They knew to space out the charges, which makes repairs more costly,” he says. “It’ll probably take six months, but see this here”—he points to the carnage of the pipeline— “this is scrap now. We’ll have to tear all this out and rebuild. We got detection systems—the PIGs—that can locate a leak of around eight percent of max flow in under fifteen minutes, but it didn’t matter because they called the operator and told them to shut the pipeline off.”
Wisniewski is an engineer for Envige Energy. It’s his job to reconstruct this oil trunk pipeline—just a sliver of the 2.5 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines that crisscross the country. At forty-two inches in diameter, this particular trunk line was carrying a load of around 800,000 barrels a day. It won’t take long, nor will it even be that expensive in the grand scheme of the oil economy. The problem is that the invisible infrastructure of gathering lines, trunk lines, refined product lines, and natural gas lines that supply American energy is highly vulnerable to these small-scale attacks. Groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria or al-Qaeda in Yemen utilized pipeline attacks to further their political goals. Now they have an American equivalent.
Following the ransomware attacks of 2021 against Colonial Pipeline and a meat processing plant, the Department of Justice began working with the private sector to beef up cybersecurity protocols in vital infrastructure. Those ransom schemes were thought to be the work of cyber criminals with links to the Russian government, which is largely why the series of bombings beginning in early 2023 have been so misunderstood.
“If you worked in pipelines, you knew these attacks were more than just some computer geeks trying to make a buck,” said Wisniewski, adjusting his glasses and looking off at a field of picturesque golden wheat. “Not sure what took everyone so long to wake up to that.”
BENEATH THE RADAR, MONKEYWRENCHING IS NOT UNHEARD OF: wellheads cemented shut, gas pads vandalized, equipment destroyed, trees felled on access roads. These are common reactions of angry folks who don’t want to see their water sources compromised or the value of their homes go down. Resentment at fracking operations has been growing for some years in the heartland. Despite the promise of jobs, communities that have to live in the dense webs of oil and gas networks find themselves racked by everything from mysterious skin rashes to aborting farm animals. At first, local police thought the bombings were the work of antagonized locals. Until this group started leaving a tag:
6DEGREES IS COMING, read the graffiti at several of the attacks.
“Law enforcement, the energy and pipeline companies—they didn’t think this was the work of the same group,” said former FBI agent Sheryl Carney, who now consults for the ACLU. “They were dispersed geographically, and it looked like the work of amateurs, not Russian commandos suddenly invading Nebraska. It’s in the interest of the private sector to slow walk cybersecurity because it’s expensive. By the third or fourth pipeline bombing, though, they were screaming for the FBI and their allies in the media to do something.”
Oil and gas, already under pressure from the economic whiplash of Covid-19, lawsuits, environmental activists, and shareholder revolt, have indeed raised the profile of the attackers. In the winter of 2024–25, following the arrest of Miles Kroll, a twenty-one-year-old student from Brigham Young, Fox News and other conservative outlets turned their attention from a bad election defeat to this new “radical eco-terrorist.” Kroll admitted to having planted an IED after the Explosives Unit of the FBI Laboratory found scraps of a backpack used as a container at a bombing site in Colorado. He pled guilty and is serving a twenty-three-year sentence due to a “terrorism enhancement” at the Terre Haute, Indiana, communications management unit, one of three secretive sites intended for prisoners with “inspirational significance.” No further arrests have been made, and the attacks have continued.
The right wing has been using the specter of eco-terrorism, among many other cudgels, to hamstring President Joanna Hogan before her historic first term is even off the ground. Though she already backtracked ferociously on Green New Deal promises made during the Democratic primary, the Republicans have been merciless at tying Hogan and the GND to the bombings of pipelines and wellheads.
Nebraska republican Bob Syracuse described the instances of sabotage as “the most dangerous terrorist activity since 9/11.” Along with fifteen cosponsors, Syracuse has introduced eco-terror legislation. The bombings have caused no fatalities or injuries.
Federal law enforcement now presumes these are not copycat attacks being carried out under the same loose umbrella. It believes the actions are centrally coordinated.
“6Degrees is not a fringe conspiracy theory,” Loren Victor Love, CEO of Xuritas Corporate Services, told CNN. “This is happening, and us Democrats must face up to the danger to the nation’s energy infrastructure.” Love’s company has received numerous contracts to protect pipelines, and he is widely viewed as the party’s best chance to pick up a Senate seat in Montana in 2026.
President Hogan, feeling the pressure and playing into her “tough-as-old-boots, monster-truck-loving grandma” persona she cultivated as a candidate, has trumpeted the creation of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. Working out of a fusion center in Denver, the FBI, ATF, and local officials from seven states have dubbed their investigation Operation Weathermen, a reference to both the legendary antiwar activists and the new group’s focus on attacking the fossil-fuel infrastructure that is radically altering weather patterns. Crafty nicknames aside, the bureau has turned up no further prints or DNA, and Kroll’s cooperation has yielded little insight into the group’s operational core.
Kroll is described by friends and family as a quiet, conservative Mormon student and husband, who took to social media to denounce the oil and gas giant he blamed for his wife’s miscarriage. In his plea agreement, Kroll claimed he was recruited online and never met his handlers in person, according to a source close to the investigation. The FBI says it is looking into a number of leads.
