Speak to the Earth by William Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

the world that time always flows by at the same rate. On the other hand, lectured Nose Hairs, Einstein argued that time passes at differing rates, depending on a number of factors that Brian, numb with boredom, promptly forgot.
    All in all, Bryan allowed that he had to side with Einstein, because he knew for a fact that when he was with Ellen, the hours flashed by. But in certain other places, like Talbot Inlet Junior High, time passed with the rapidity of a slug travelling uphill.
    Norm’s B&B provided excitement, but not the kind Bryan would go out of his way to find. Between his mother and his uncle, things were tense. Iris and Jimmyweren’t trashing each other — their family love and loyalty was far too strong — but the line they had drawn between them was broad and clear. They conversed in toneless one-word sentences. They were silent at meals. For Bryan, living in his house was like walking barefoot through briars. So he spent a lot of his time at Ellen’s and, when her parents set her to one of the many jobs they always seemed to find for her, he went to see Elias, whose parents left him pretty much alone. Bryan also helped Walter out on a few more whale-watching trips and, when the migrations had passed by, Walter hinted around a few times and Bryan helped him crabbing. Walter was not one to fall into a routine, so Bryan concluded that here again Einstein’s theory of time won out.
    Bryan’s mother was driving herself frantic, working crazy hours at the supermarket — what her boss called open shifts, which allowed him to classify her as part-time and therefore not entitled to benefits — and agitating against the government’s Orca Sound Ecological Preservation Plan. On street corners and outside the liquor store she could be found, in her sloppy pink track suit and green raincoat, handing out pamphlets. When she was at home she usually had the phone clamped between shoulder and jaw as she talked and made notes. It did not surprise Bryan that she was voted unanimously to be the chair of the SOS (Save Orca Sound) Committee. She went out and bought a fax machine, along with a dozen bundles of recycled paper, and it wasn’t long before the committee was in contact withGreenpeace and other sympathizers all over B.C., the rest of Canada, the States and Europe.
    Under normal circumstances Bryan might have been proud of her. But he had to admit to himself that he resented the unwelcome changes in his daily routine and the strained relationship among the three of them. He was irritated by the artificial silence of his home and embarrassed by Iris’s activism in the community. Around Jimmy he felt guilty because his mother was, in a sense, trying to take his uncle’s job away. Around his mother he felt culpable because he got on so well with Jimmy the tree-raper — and because, deep down, he thought his mother was going too far.
    The logging was scheduled to begin in June. Meanwhile, Jimmy worked on a crew pushing roads into the Big Bear and Salmon peninsulas so the heavy equipment and lumber trucks could get to the stands of old-growth forest that MFI wanted to cut down. In the late spring, Greenpeace and some other groups challenged the logging decision in court, but they lost. Iris said that she was not at all surprised: MFI owned the courts as well as far too many politicians. Jimmy countered with the opinion that she was paranoid, that soon she’d claim there were MFI agents in the mailbox and under her bed.
    Bryan tried to ignore the increasing tension at home and in the community as he began a new experience. With Ellen’s help he actually studied for exams. And he discovered, when reading the stack of whale books Ellenhad lent him, that when he was interested in a topic, the facts and theories connected with it stuck in his mind like burrs on wool, and when he talked about these theories and facts, he actually felt smart. But information in school books had an irritating habit of staying in the books: