Nicole Walker
Oil and Water
Transformation is a two part process: a
combination of substitution and disappearance. The first element,
the original, on its way to becoming something else, is no longer
itself. The new element fully replaces the first. The first element:
you can’t find it anywhere.
Imagine a planet thick with ferns, with trees that
grew sideways where moss hung to the floor. Picture great seas of
rain hooking ground cover to canopy. Imagine this place is neither
the Pacific Northwest nor the
Amazon. Imagine that between the drops of rain and connecting flora,
gigantic eyes peer. So much water makes everything gigantic: trees,
eyes, scales, legs, tails, sloths. Makes you wonder if the carbon
atoms themselves are larger—if you could hold one in your hand and
look at each of the eight electrons. Carbon, like water, connects.
Its atoms are strangely able to bond with themselves, making them
particularly strong. They’re also willing to bond to many other
elements, particularly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and the halogens,
making them kind of slutty with their willingness to interact with
almost anyone.
Diamond is one allotrope of carbon. In the diamond
structure, each carbon atom is covalently bonded to four others and
has a tetrahedal geometry. In essence, a diamond is one large
molecule. And yet, what can you really know about elemental essence?
Is the carbon a piece of black coal a substitute for diamond? Is a
fiddlehead’s frond, crushed by millennia, a watery diamond or a
molecule of thick water? Things are more slippery than they are
solid, more like open bonds outstretched like arms always reaching
to slide into or onto something, always willing to morph into
something else.
There was a snake lying across one of the lanes of
the four-lane road that connected to the city’s suburbs via only
dirt and rock. The four-lane’s beginning was nothing but scrub oak
and, apparently, snake habitat. The end was the edge of the
foothills, the end of the city, the beginning of orchards and
horses. A road that wound, snakelike, and then disappeared into some
pastoral landscape we pretended had something to do with nature but
was really irrigated farmland.
There wasn’t much we could do for the snake—Mark’s
Volkswagen Fastback had run right over it. Mark got out to look at
it. The thing was flattened in two parts. The blood is dry, Mark
called as he bent over the snake, looking at the tires of his car
and then back to what was left of the body. Some heavier automobile
had already pressed most of this snake into the ground, tucking its
energy into the dirt for future generations’ resource needs.
I didn’t kill it, Mark noted happily. He liked animals—even
snakes. He was glad he hadn’t hurt anything.
The idea that this place was our secret though had
been damaged. Evidence of another vehicle driving beyond the suburbs
to our four-lane broke our belief that only we knew this road. A
belief in singularity, in possession, is the protection of youth.
Old age must be the sad realizations that someone has been here
before and that all roads have somewhere to go.
To get to the four -lane you have to turn off 94th
South, toward Draper where all the horse properties were being
turned into small castles and pretend-lodges—each house a one-time
forest of its own now siding, now balcony—some with redwood, some
cedar—all wood, all imported to this alpine-desert city where scrub
oak and junipers and a few Doug-firs made up the green specks in the
otherwise mostly ochre landscape. Follow along Dimple Dell road—the
same one my mom’s step-dad, the only grandfather I’d known, used to
take us to see the horses when I was younger—turn left, and then
take a right on the road that curves back toward the mountains, into
the foothills. And then that curve stops. You’re at the end of the
road. You have to cross the dirt road to move toward something
entirely different.
The Fastback always
took the ending of the pavement hard—the all-metal dashboard clicked
and clanged for the two hundred feet or so until we were back on new
asphalt, freshly paved, and onto the unnamed, four-lanes going
nowhere. This road started somewhere suburban and dead-ended up
here—in the foothills, flanked by scrub-oak, at the edge of a
flattened snake. Metal and rubber trump dirt and scale.
Utah
has seen substantial oil and gas exploration since natural gas was
first discovered in 1891. Oil and gas production took off in earnest
during the mid 1940s [1]. Since production first started, over
13,500 wells have been drilled, covering much of the state, as shown
in
Figure 1.
Total oil production as of October 2003 has been 1.24 billion
barrels (BBO); total gas production has been 7.65 trillion cubic
feet (TCF). The
United States presently uses
approximately 19.6 million barrels of oil (MMBO) a day and 62
billion cubic feet (BCF) of natural gas a day [2]. Thus, over the
past 65 years, enough resources have been produced to supply the
U.S.
with oil for just over two months and gas for about four months at
today's rate of consumption.
http://www.redrockheritage.org/oilandgas1/
My dad drove a VW Karmann Ghia when he was in
college. In my mind it was purple, the shade I swore he told me he
dyed his hair. But purple hair would have been far too wild even for
his hundred-mile-an hour-driving ways and I don’t think they, even
these days, paint cars purple. When I’m thirteen, my dad drives a
Cadillac even though his mother’s side of the family has always been
committed to the Buick. In the most suburban of ways, my dad is
still rebelling.
My twin sisters, Paige and Val, and our mom and
dad are sitting around the kitchen table for dinner like we do most
nights. We are eating stir-fry. My mom, when she cooks with water
chestnuts and thin strips of steak and soy sauce, is a more
adventurous cook than most of my friends’ moms. She also recycles.
My dad is trying to convince us that it would be a
good idea to take a new job and to move to
Houston. We, my twin sisters and I, do not
want to go. We’d lose our friends. Our school. Our house with its
many good-for-hiding closets.
“It’s hot there, dad,” we
respond. “It’s humid,” we complain. “I’ve heard there are snakes all
over there,” I argue. I picture a backyard, green like our
over-watered lawn here but, if you look closely, it moves,
undulates. The Houston backyard is a
seething mass of green-backed snakes and soft lawns. My dad tells us
that he would be the president of a company—no longer the
vice-president of research, not the VP of sales, but the president.
He would tell the buyers what kind of drill bits to look for. He
would decide whether or not to pursue extracting oil from shale
rock. He would decide if it was wise to wring crude from beneath the
twisted Colorado River.
I give him a stone-cold look and tell him that
there is no way that I am going to
Houston,
Texas
to live with all the green and rain and snakes.
He tells me I’ll go where he tells me to go.
But we don’t end up moving to
Houston
even though the oil industry was booming for the first time since my
dad had become a geological engineer. The job would have let him be
a star—president of his own drilling research lab. He’d be home
more, travel less to Venezuela and France. He could get out from under
the shadow of Christensen Diamond, his family’s diamond-drill bit
business where my dad’s job was as much thanks to nepotism as his
cousin’s even though my dad had a Master’s in geology from Columbia
and his cousin barely had his high-school diploma.
Instead of moving, he continued to go to work
every day with a sandwich, topped with unusual condiments like
horseradish and red bell peppers, my mom made him. His office had
chalkboards on three walls. He’d work some math problems in the
morning detailing some exercise in force and mass and pounds per
square inch. He’d walk down the hall for coffee. His great-uncle
Frank, the president of the company, would invite him in, pour some
bourbon in my dad’s mug and tell him to get on the phone with some
clients, to bring him some buyers and stop wasting his time with all
that chalk. That’s for drilling. We sell diamonds, he told my dad.
Ugly and big diamonds. The only science you need to know is that the
bigger, the better.
Once the site has been selected, it must be
surveyed to determine its boundaries, and environmental impact
studies may be done. Lease agreements, titles and right-of way
accesses for the land must be obtained and evaluated legally. For
off-shore sites, legal jurisdiction must be determined.
Once the legal issues have been settled, the crew
goes about preparing the land:
1.
The land is cleared and
leveled, and access roads may be built.
2.
Because water is used in
drilling, there must be a source of water nearby. If there is no
natural source, they drill a water well.
3.
They dig a reserve pit, which
is used to dispose of rock cuttings and drilling mud during the
drilling process, and line it with plastic to protect the
environment. If the site is an ecologically sensitive area, such as
a marsh or wilderness, then the cuttings and mud must be disposed
offsite -- trucked away instead of placed in a pit.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/oil-drilling.htm/printable
Mark’s hand was on my knee. No pressure. It was
just a gesture. A friend of the Bishopric, his role, had been
appointed to drive me home. I was just a Mormon girl, my role, with
a shocking inability to call my parents for a ride. That’s the kind
of girl I could learn how to be. Don’t we turn here? I asked with
pretend innocence. Oh, let’s take the back-way, Mark-the-Elder
suggested.
It wasn’t enough that he was seventeen and I was
fourteen and he was teaching me to drive—telling me about the power
of first gear, reminding me to let go the pressure with my left
while applying pressure with my right. It wasn’t illicit enough for
the bark of the scrub oak to rub against my naked back. I had to
become the Mormon girl I never had been. The one who didn’t
occasionally smoke one of Mark’s Camels, except now here, he’s
offering me one suggesting that while the Joseph Smith’s Words of
Wisdom prohibited some kinds of smoking, smoking with a girl who’s
pretending to be a virgin, nonsmoker, in a VW Fastback was an
exception to the rule. If you’re a member of the priesthood, there
are rules that, subject to interpretation, can allow for all kinds
of things. The priesthood—a cabal of men who know just what’s good
for you—play many roles: interpreter of God’s will, emissary to the
prophet, instructor of women, father to the children, especially the
girl-children who need so much guidance. Mark asked me if he was
crushing me. He was. They always are. But it’s the thin ones who
don’t bother to ask.
Role-playing is a bit about pressure—the way you
have to not giggle, have to stay in character, have to pretend
you’re wearing a modest dress rather than a pair of shorts that your
boyfriend gave to you back when he was playing the role of your
boyfriend instead of the role of your Bishop. The way the hand on
your leg can’t move too quickly to your thigh. The way the roles
constrict and confine you so much that you almost can’t move, and if
you do, the hand grips your thigh a little more tightly. When he
stops the Fastback by the ring of scrub oak, I pretend to ask him
why I should get out although I know there’s already a blanket laid
out under the ring of trees. As the good girl I’m pretending to be,
I obey my Bishop when he suggests I lie down, when he suggests that
perhaps I should unbutton my shirt to cool down. The Bishop, you
know, has already baptized me, laid my whole body down in the water.
He’s seen my body through the sheer white of my christening gown.
Why not look at it through the gauzy filter of the too-bright
sunlight. When he lies down upon me—all 200 hundred of his pretend
Bishop-like body, hairy as a Bishop, tall as a Bishop, as practiced
as a Bishop suggesting that the parting of the legs is like Moses
parting the sea and if God didn’t want it to happen, then the legs
wouldn’t part. Obviously, the Mormon girl and God are in cahoots.
The legs and seas are parted for the Bishops and the Moseses of the
world. I lie still and try to feel soft though I can feel my body
hardening under the weight and the pressure and the metaphors begin
to mix: how much disappearance is required for transformation? Where
did the innocent Mormon girl I pretended to be go? She was just
around here—her grandmother took her to Sunday school. She drank the
sacrament from the little paper cups. She ate the cubed Wonder bread
as it came down the aisle. Sometimes she took two pieces. Sometimes
she thought she was more Mormon than her own mother or her own
father who was baptized in this religion, who had grown up thinking
there was no substitute for the one right church. Of course, they
didn’t consider the nature of the church tended toward plurality
with its polygamy and multi-tiered heaven. Perhaps Mormonism is the
religion of metaphor, transference, and transformation. It may well
also be the church of fathers who are Bishops, unpaid lay-priests
who sometimes forget who are their daughters and who are their wives
or have a unique capacity to let their women be both,
simultaneously.
Once the land has been prepared, several holes
must be dug to make way for the rig and the main hole. A rectangular
pit, called a cellar, is dug around the location of the actual
drilling hole. The cellar provides a work space around the hole, for
the workers and drilling accessories. The crew then begins drilling
the main hole, often with a small drill truck rather than the main
rig. The first part of the hole is larger and shallower than the
main portion, and is lined with a large-diameter conductor pipe.
Additional holes are dug off to the side to temporarily store
equipment -- when these holes are finished, the rig equipment can be
brought in and set up.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/oil-drilling.htm/printable
We go to the four-lane because it’s the end of the
road. Because there are no cars on it. There will be, of course,
when the ground is dug out from the hillside and the snakes are
baited and the scrub oak is torn from its hardy roots and they build
their cedar mini-lodges there. But for now we’re here because
there’s a road—except for that one bit that’s nearly impassable for
a 1967 Volkswagen, and the privacy provided by scrub oak. Scrub oak
grows in a circle. It surrounds you like a wreath or a maze. Its
provenance is distinctly western although what it exactly is is hard
to discern. On the internet there is little information. There’s a
disambiguated Wikipedia entry. There’s a paper by
Tom Chester who discovered that Quercus berberidifolia, the
best-known species of scrub oak, is not as widespread throughout the
west as he once thought. There are other kinds of scrub oak
mixing in with berberidifolia—it’s
hard to pick out what’s scrub and what’s oak.
But the genus name, same as all oak, sounds like
query, sounds like question, sounds like open, come in here and
hide, come into my closet and I’ll take you to another world a Lion,
A Witch and A Wardrobe-style, come into this species that is
undefinable, unfindable, unwikipediable, and lie on the ground.
Quercus sounds quirky and odd and isn’t it better to be odd than
normal, those short little stubbies, scrubbing the foothills with
their bristle-brush leaf-heads.
Quercus berberidifolia, Quercus acutidens, you are all things
teenage—carpet and correct, flowers and Accutane. Your side effects
are usually dermis-related—rashes and blotches, eczema and acne, but
sometimes you open up, let in to feed the woodpecker. Let in a
western snake—a rattler, a yellow-bellied racer, or, most likely, a
rubber boa mound in the V between root and trunk. Take care, rubber
boa. Four lanes are a lot of lane to cross. Even when traffic is
light.
Quercus sounds like want but sometimes you should
get everything you query.
Scrub oaks are not the kind of trees that become
diamonds. You need a rainforest for that—the kind where the ground
is so wet and the leaves are so thick they give off as much moisture
as the clouds that rain down do. In the temperate rainforest in
December, it’s cold enough that the earth is sending up its water
and you can’t tell if it’s raining from above or below. In December
in the temperate rainforest, your shoes have drenched your socks and
even your Gortex has begun to seep. You step from fallen tree to
fallen tree until one decays into dirt right under your foot and you
fall into a fern and your pants that were just damp before are fully
wet thanks to the leaves shaking their spores and rain onto you. In
the rainforest, all this water lets the trees grow fast. It lets the
ground absorb the fallen trees. The mushrooms dig in and break up
solid matter—cleaving a red cedar trunk with its hard conch shell or
moving moss this way and a fern that with the fluted edges of a
chanterelle. Things go up fast—or fast for tree time—and for a long
time. All that tree sucking up all that carbon, pumping out the
oxygen back into the sky. The carbon builds thick trunks and wide
branches. It builds canopy and systems of roots. The carbon is
pumped up by rain and then put down into the ground by more rain and
mushroom, by time and the weight of a thousand pounds of water
tucking it deep into the ground. Dig with your hand deep into the
dust. You’ll find the carbon remnants of a thousand old tree that
fell a thousand years ago. Sit on it. Fell another tree upon it. Let
broken branches and dusty lichen, fern spore and ash leaf crush.
Bring down an ice age upon it. Bear upon it all the weight of your
fathers and their father’s fathers. Tamp it down like the moist
tobacco in a pipe. Be patient. Let the tectonic plates shift. Let a
mountain or two rise and begin to fall. Then begin to dig—first
you’ll need a machine to dig the diamond. Then take that diamond and
dig deeper until all that water has turned into a buried sea of
unreflecting memory. The
forest relieved of pressure spews.
The drilling of oil is not as romantic as all
that. Press the collar firmly into the cool desert sand. Tuck of
metal digs into the ground like you would attach the parchment of a
lamp shade to its metal cast—somehow the marrying of pliable surface
to unbending alloy makes the coupling secure. Ease your drill bit
and the pipe in the hole. Attach the kelly—the pipe that transfers
rotary motion to the turntable wand to the turntable itself and
begin drilling. Turn on the motors, powered by diesel engines. Don’t
forget to attach the bit—use a diamond if you have one. You’re going
through rock here. Through sludge and shale. This is the past you’re
digging through. You’ll need to circulate mud through the pipe and
out of the bit to float the rock cuttings out of the hole. There’s a
lot of stuff in there and no way for it to get out if you don’t
flush it out. Something got to disappear before something new can
appear. Add new joints as the sections get deeper. Yell something
loud when you’ve found what you were looking for.
Sometimes Mark played the father-figure role: I
was only fourteen but he was teaching me to drive on the four-lane.
The fastback had a manual transmission. I was short and the seat’s
tracks, worn out from twenty years of slipping back and forth, were
stuck back so I had to scoot to the end of the seat to reach the
pedals. We didn’t worry about the cops. As soon as we crossed from
the pavement of subdivision and onto the stretch of rock and bare
dirt, we were moving into our own land with our own laws. The laws
of drivers’ ed, along with a few other laws, simply evaporated. If
you discover a road that seemingly goes nowhere, doesn’t it mean
it’s meant for you?
Nowhere doesn’t have many rules and there, you can pretend to be
whomever you want to be.
Later, my dad helped to teach me to drive too. He
gave me driving hints and cautionary tales from the time I was ten.
“Always check your blind spot.” “In the time it takes to sneeze, an
oncoming car could slam into you.” I never knew if I should take
this to mean that I should not sneeze or not close my eyes when I
sneeze or not drive during allergy season. I would nod my head
rather than ask. He said it with such authority, like he was the
president of a company or at least the driver with the best
insurance rating. Unlike when Mark was teaching me to drive, far out
on the flat four-lane, my dad took me to the subdivision dug high-up
into the foothills. But like Mark, he made me brake with my right,
keep my left on the clutch and, then quickly move brake foot to
accelerator foot, letting out the clutch so slowly that an ant might
well have been pushing the car. I stalled the car a couple of times
but I made it up the hill. My dad was impressed with my quick study
and the fact that I never let the car roll backwards. Teaching was
not a role my dad was particularly good at. He lost his patience
quickly, taking the hammer out of my hands when I pounded the nail
crooked, erasing the math steps I’d scribbled down wrong, clipping
the transistor into the right wires of the radio I was making. But
since I already mostly knew how to drive, dad was pleased with his
pedagogy.
The press and release I had
learned from Mark but the timing, I learned from my dad. He let me
drive all the way home meaning I had to cross four lanes of traffic,
stop and start and make it up one more hill. I wanted to be a good
driver like my dad. I kept my hands at ten and two. I tried not to
sneeze.
Gasoline engines work a lot like a sneeze. Well,
not really so much, but a little. A sneeze is, according to the
Bendryl spokesperson Patti Wood, a sudden, violent, spasmodic,
audible expiration of breath through the nose and mouth. According
to HowStuffWorks.Com, the internal combustion engine is more like a
potato cannon:
The
potato
cannon
uses the basic principle behind any reciprocating internal
combustion engine: If you put a tiny amount of high-energy fuel
(like gasoline) in a small, enclosed space and ignite it, an
incredible amount of energy is released in the form of expanding
gas. You can use that energy to propel a potato 500 feet. In this
case, the energy is translated into potato motion. You can also use
it for more interesting purposes. For example, if you can create a
cycle that allows you to set off explosions like this hundreds of
times per minute, and if you can harness that energy in a useful
way, what you have is the core of a car engine!
But, if you think the irritants of the
planet—allergens, air, itch-causing viruses—tickling the membrane
like so many spark plugs, and the energy of the lungs compressed
into that small interior space of the nostril, you can see the
connection.
Hydrocarbons ( HCs ) are any molecules that just
contain hydrogen and carbon, both of which are fuel molecules that
can be burnt ( oxidised ) to form water ( H2O) or carbon dioxide (
CO2 ). If the combustion is not complete, carbon monoxide (CO ) may
be formed. As CO can be burnt to produce CO2, it is also a fuel.
The way the hydrogen and carbons hold hands
determines which hydrocarbon family they belong to. If they only
hold one hand they are called "saturated hydrocarbons" because they
can not absorb additional hydrogen. If the carbons hold two hands
they are called "unsaturated hydrocarbons" because they can be
converted into "saturated hydrocarbons" by the addition of hydrogen
to the double bond.
It is important to note that the theoretical
energy content of gasoline when burned in air is only related to the
hydrogen and carbon contents. Octane rating is not fundamentally
related to the energy content, and the actual hydrocarbon and
oxygenate components used in the gasoline will determine both the
energy release and the anti-knock rating.
Two important reactions are:-
1.
C + O2 = CO2
2.
H + O2 = H2O
There are tiny bombs going off in your car. The
reason for the anti-knocking devices? To reduce the percussive
explosions created by the mad mixture of gas, air, and fire. The
spark plug fires. The gas responds appropriately. Additional
chemicals and the fine art of modern-day computer-monitored fuel
injectors that keep the amount of oxygen just so to prevent the
cracking of the engine block, the loosening of the bolts and
gaskets, or, in worst case scenarios, the entire blowing up of the
car. It’s a tricky balance, packing the past into the small interior
of your tank and using the smallest amount of immediate fire to
propel your automobile ever so slightly into the future.
Mark smoked Camels. My dad smoked Benson & Hedges.
Each brand tells something about what each man thought he wanted to
be. The same tobacco, for the most part, goes in between the paper
although the Benson & Hedges filter matches white unlike the
flecked-gold paper of the Camel. B & Hs are also thinner and
therefore, more refined, or perhaps effete, looking. Cowboy versus
sophisticate is how those signs read supposedly differently. And yet
it is still dried leaf and dry paper burning into so much nothing.
If it wasn’t for the smoke and the butt, you’d never know that sign
existed at all. If Mark and dad had exchanged cigarette brands,
would Mark have started wearing cufflinks and learning French via
book tape on the drive to work? Would dad have started riding a
moped and wearing jeans ripped wide with holes.
Carbon plus oxygen turns cigarettes to smoke,
gasoline to air, men into metaphors. A sea of cars during rush hour
is propelled by pressed plankton never seen by human eyes. Only the
polar bears seem to notice the heat from tailpipes rising along with
the sky-bound plants
It’s hard to see my dad at all through the haze of
smoke and memory. When I google Bruce H Walker, the searches return
only a link for an ophthalmologist and one for a hotel management
company. Nothing about a geologist who smoked Benson & Hedges, who
knew a lot about diamonds, who had introduced his kids to the
internet as early as 1985.
As far as the internet is concerned, my dad has completely
disappeared. Sometimes though, the sight of a single, narrow
cigarette brings the history, if not the man himself, back.
Mark and I spent most of our time together driving
around in the Fastback. Leaded gas was eighty-five cents a gallon
and, while the black stuff that puffed out the muffler didn’t seem
particularly healthy, no one had even suggested that the invisible
stuff we were pumping out the back of the exhaust pipe was layering
itself against the atmosphere, glazing the sky in sheets of glass
that could build so thick and reflect back only so much light and
grow so heavy, that all that glass might shatter, raining in hot
sluices all that pressed forest back down upon our heads. The heat
that was in the ground was converted in the car. Laws of conversion
should have warned us but we were convinced only by what we could
see. The gas smelled so much like old fire going in and like nothing
when it came out. We had no need to think of it again.
So we drove, down by the Old Mill where the Big
Cottonwood River drained and the mill’s walls and fences made of
river stones were collapsing back into the river, we drove downtown
and turned the car toward our suburb way out south and watched the
lights warm the valley, we drove by the four-way and we drove down 7th
East—the six-lane road that connected the suburb to the downtown and
where I imagine I have spent the bulk of my driving-life. It was on
the freeway exit onto 7th East where the policeman pulled
us over. Mark’s car had expired plates. So expired that they made us
get out of the car. That they put us in the back of the police car.
That I sat on the blue vinyl seats and looked at the place where
locks should have been but where none were, and waited while they
called Mark’s mom. Mark’s dad showed up unexpectedly with Mark’s mom
in his boat of a Ford Galaxy. We squished into the back with his
brothers. Mark’s dad, who drank as much as my dad but came home far
less often and punched holes in walls a lot more often, went off
alternately about being responsible enough to getting the emissions
fixed so his damn car would register and that he was lucky to not be
hauled off to jail for driving a fourteen year-old girl around.
Who was this guy pretending to be a father, blown
in as if on the wind, figuring only as father as he drove the boat
of a car down the road? I pretended I wasn’t there. Mark pretended I
wasn’t there. His mom gave me a short smile and I turned to look at
Mark’s car as the tow-truck’s hook dug under the front panel. I
watched as the truck towed the car down 7th East and made
a left on 21st and drove out of sight, disappearing like
all the oil in the world.
Nicole Walker
Nicole Walker’s first book of poems is forthcoming from Barrow
Street Press. Her work has most appeared in Ploughshares,
Shenandoah, Bellingham Review, Fence,
Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter,
and Crazyhorse. She has been granted an award from the
National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of the University of
Utah’s doctoral program in English with an emphasis in creative
writing, she is now an assistant professor of poetry and creative
nonfiction at Northern Arizona University. |