Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Whiteout
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
When lonely enough, dejected enough, a traveler will talk to anyone. If you listen for it, travel is mapped with chance conversations, simpering revelations and murmured cries for friendship.
The fiftyish woman sitting across from me in the chandeliered lobby of Quebec City’s Chateau Frontenac, dressed in a woolen, camel-colored business suit, her hair braided tight to her scalp, might be an architect or an attorney. Instead, she is a climate scientist.
Outside the storied hotel’s wedding cake façade, a Canadian blizzard storms. Inside, a whiteout of an entirely different sort is occurring.
Appraising me, her eyes are red. Lower lip quivery. Face drawn.
Before I know it, I am on a guided tour of her life. Raised in the American South, her life has been shaded by bruising racial animus re-colored at home with racial pride. A scholarship took her to Harvard to earn a PhD in climate science.
As her life’s travelogue unfolds, the timbre of her ivy league voice flowers into a deep, melodious Southern drawl. No longer code-switching her dialect, her uncontrolled, gulping breaths have the force of air rushing through a small vent. People milling in the hotel lobby fade in and out of focus.
“I came here for a climate conference,” she tells me. “I’m leaving. I’m going home. I never got to present my paper.”
As she tells it, a handful of conferees, mostly younger academics, showing off their woke virtue, circulated an open letter declaring she had disrespected indigenous peoples and lacked gender sensitivity. They called out her suggestion that panelists ‘powwow’ before their presentations, her use of the word ‘lame’ as ableism and for addressing a mixed-gender group with the phrase ‘you guys.’
Her story, raw and surging like the wintery St. Lawrence River, knots my stomach. Her raging, rumbling frustration shakes me as if I were the last leaf off a yellow birch tree in a windy snowstorm.
Following a lifetime of other people telling her how to talk—what she should say and how she should say it—her proud professionalism is flattened. “They’re lynching me with words,” she says through gritted teeth, her voice muffled.
“We are killing the planet. That’s all I can handle. I don’t have time for vocabulary catechisms. I barely have time for my children,” she confides.
I listen, priest-like.
I wonder if she has ever hidden in her lab, quietly, while the Red Guards on her campus buried the language land mines she herself has just exploded. Does she know that most free speech attacks at American universities come from self-styled progressives, the same people who most likely support climate science.
In her crumpled face, I see her coming to terms with a future of erased possibilities and perpetual invisibility. Not judged for who she is, but excluded for what she is not. Silenced for not being a woke white liberal. Silenced with the rest of us.
When she is talked out, her energy depleted, a grieving silence shrouds us. We are at the popup funeral for her dead voice.
I risk a smile and say my name.
