By Thomas Belton

MEMORANDUM

Environmental Oversight Committee
United States House of Representatives

To: Lawrence C. Jones: USEPA, Chief, Bureau of Monitoring and Extractions

From:  Wallace J. Ebbits, Esq., Executive Assistant to Representative Hynes; Chairman, Environmental Oversight Committee

Subject: Review: Biannual Water Report

Upon receipt of the above referenced report, penned by one Mr. L.C. Jones – Chief BME, I assigned the said text to my staff for an in-depth review. And as the resources available to my Committee – given the short shrift to our well know requests for additional resources in a fading world where none may yet know from whence his priorities arise – yet still I dedicated my sparse resources to a sequella of said documentation; attempting to adjudicate exactly what was endeavored in those pristine days of June when you and your, said crew, Mr. Jones, pushed up into the Highlands of New Jersey.

However, I digress. Feel assured Chief that we here at Quality Assurance are not unequal to the task, and will perform this normally trenchant programmatic component in spite of the weightier tasks assigned us. Let me begin by saying that we have read your report, Mr. L.C. Jones, and a penurious detailed review it was. It seems that the forty pages of your report held only five actual pages of explanatory text; the rest a series of unidentifiable maps with no datum of control, and no significant idea as to where you were when you performed these tasks. A set of tables were equally inexplicable and filled with tiny 9-font text that only one with better eyesight than mine could interpret (we therefore discarded the tables and attempted to understand your import by reading the text). As best we could determine your map seems to indicate that you were either in northern New Jersey or else in central Ohio. Your female team (??) (if that’s what the reference photo of the three young strange creatures in the internal photos depicted, at least they seemed to be women with their ersatz nubular chestal areas seemingly enlarged, yet concealed by the rubberized chest waders they wore in the photos as they apparently crossed an ice-creased stream in the midst of a barren forest (A digression: Were the absence of leaves on the trees indicative of your missing date of field deployment  i.e., a subtle clue as to when you actually had gone afield).

Yet I dither again and must assume that they were indeed women, albeit strangely dressed in rubber. I could see long hair beneath a reversed baseball cap of one of your workers (a trait I find exceedingly offensive in today’s youth). If a brim is placed so exactingly on the brow of a cap by the manufacturer to protect one’s eyes then why do the young feel so compelled to reverse nature. But in today’s unisex world it could indeed have been a slightly built man in the rubberized gear with his lunch basket sequestered in the chestal areas of his wader.

The narrative of your report – Mr. L.C. Jones, Chief BME – where I hoped to ascertain some sense of what you had done on this foray into the wilderness was equally obtuse. There was no introduction (why, indeed, were your strange unisexual field workers out and afoot in the maudlin days of treeless New Jersey). Second, your methods were nondescript to say the least. What indeed am I to understand by your statement that ‘hardness-weighted’ samples were discarded? Why? Were they too heavy to take back from the field? Were the ‘hexavalent chromium’ samples left to simmer too long? Your photos of the sampling plots looked a little like yellow sulfurous emissions that reminded me of my Grandmother’s ancient ‘Vapo-Rub’ inhaler.

So, at the end of yet another disastrous set of pages – trying to interpret the wherewithal of what your esteemed crew was doing in the field – I was left adrift again, and at a loss for words. So, I leave you with this parting observation. I trust you will find alternate employment elsewhere. Your talents are obviously wasted as a Field Biologist. Have you considered Sanitation Engineering?

Cc: Honorable Howard W. Hynes; Congressman and Chairman, Environmental Oversight Committee

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MEMORANDUM

Bureau of Monitoring and Extractions
Division of Water Quality
Environmental Protection Agency

To: Wallace J. Ebbits, Esq., Executive Assistant to Representative Hynes; Chairman, Environmental Oversight Committee

From: Lawrence C. Jones: USEPA, Chief, Bureau of Monitoring and Extractions

Subject:  Follow-up Response to Review: Bi-Annual Water Report

Upon receipt of the above referenced review of the report I sent to you in early January (unknown to me why it took you a full three months to read forty pages. Perhaps it’s your famous dyslexia, which is well discussed in the backrooms of this, our illustrious workplace). Albeit, due to the tardiness of your response, I would like to offer the following riposte, shall we say as an explanatory text (not to address the confusions so evident in your previous missive, obviously drafted while you were under the influence of some medication, prescribed or illicit. It is hard to tell from your perambulatory ramblings). Yet I digress. So, let me tit-for-tat your responses to the aforementioned transmittal.

As you indicated concerning your own lethargic Committee, Mr. Wallace J. Ebbits, Esq., we too in Agency Field Operations are short-handed due to the latest reductions in work force or riffs as they are so quaintly known (For what reason I don’t know. Makes me think more of laundry additives than a pink slip directing someone to seek employment elsewhere), Yet I will return to this. Spare resources indeed existed to adjudicate exactly what could be endeavored in those halcyon days of December when my crew pushed up from the lower Piedmont into the, indeed, reverential hills of northern New Jersey.

Let me begin by saying that we have read your review, Mr. Ebbits, and what an injurious non-detailed review it was. Let me take to task each and several of your observations then address them with explanations unassailable as to our intent.

You complain that, of the forty pages, only five are text. But dear Sir, the gist, the essence of the story is only needed in those brief paragraphs. If anyone with wit, intelligence, the ability to read a map; the acumen to sum a series of numbers in easy columnar fashion, (taught in any of our most destitute inner city schools; one of which I am sure you, yourself attended but probably slept through those most auspicious moments when addition and subtraction was taught), needless to say the five pages were all that were necessary to convey to an aficionado of the bureaucracy such as yourself – renown for the terse remark “only the summation please and let the details speak for themselves” – to err on the side of brevity.

Now as to the supporting appendices you reference and their obtuse nature (i.e., the maps and tables you so incomprehensibly fail to capture in your small imagination), let me take to task each in brief.

‘The Maps’ of the yet unidentifiable kingdom with no datum of control as you so slyly put it, Sir. I draw your attention to the middle of the said map, where in large letters, highlighted in a penumbral red is the name of your own fair domicile and municipality. I thought sure you’d recognize the same, for in my reading of our Weekly Gazette I found that your Mayoralty (for indeed you are the reputed mayor of said town, and recently written up in the newspaper as the recipient of an illicit, dare I say illegal, remuneration from patrons of your private men’s club. A restricted affair, I am told, on the far side of a housing development that you helped to procure permits for (or so it said in the aforementioned Gazette). Yet returning to the map. I was convinced that you would recognize the site of your rise and fall without so much as a short rejoinder from me.

‘The Tables,’ reduced to exquisite simplification for just such an untrained bureaucratic mind as yours, I assure you are in a 9-font text format so as to fit the deliverable specifications; a report size sustained by recent budget cutbacks (paper is at a premium) thereby our attempt at reductum infinitum with pages of equality and clarity (in essence – to the fewest dollars allowed).

The ‘Field Crew? Only as fine an eye as yours could tease out the indelible fact that the three young strange creatures in the internal photos are indeed women. I was impressed by your sensitive reference to their ersatz chestal nubular areas; for indeed they do seem enlarged – yet as you mentioned – by their rubberized chest waders. An observation I would find you most adequate to induce, since I have been informed by your ex-wife (the third woman on the left in Photo number 3, page 7) that when you were married you had a distinct preference for said rubber products upon retiring for the evening. I should say, however, that she was discreet and would not let on as to function of these said products used in your somniferous state.

And indeed ‘The Season!’ I congratulate you on your ability to see that it indeed not a leafy affair (the time of the season when most field work is done in the rest of the rational world) but as you can see we are forced to go abroad on the highways and wade through ice-bound creeks in search of data to support our judicial policy-makers in the House of Representatives (keen to understand circumstances far beyond their control) for in fact we did not receive funding approval for this project (delayed by your own inestimable staff) until November, thereby guaranteeing that we would be abroad on the Nativity of our dear Savior’s birth.

‘The Narrative!’ I’d hoped to reduce the lengthy technical descriptions of what water chemistry and strange biological creatures we encountered while afield; since I was certain that those of your ilk could only draw upon your puny education and a background imagery suitable more to Alchemy or Paleolithic cave descriptions of beasties and bugs than science. Perhaps I could make it more comprehensible if I laid it only as in a ‘Medieval Beastarium’ with pictures of unicorns and griffins prancing about, or Sphinxes filled with riddles. The hardness of the ‘weighted samples’ alludes to the acidity or its inverse, its alkalinity; a concept I’m sure your young children could explain to you, if only you had Parental Custody. ‘Hexavalent chromium’ alludes to the six electrons encircling a chromium molecule reducing it to a toxic state (as the drivel that ekes out of your office door on a regular basis’ especially during the budgetary process when all who wish something from your office must comes seeking like an Asian sycophant, with gifts and drink in hand; to prime the pump, so to speak, and seek holy benediction).

And as to the allusions of ‘sulfurous emissions’ and your Grandmother’s Vapo-Rub inhaler; I refrain from describing what delicious images this has brought to mind. Thinking of you and your Granny, both under a towel inhaling such gaseous effusions of camphor and steam in some a bucolic vision of childhood (I was not sure if you had one, others have me believe you sprang like Athena fully formed from Zeus’ thigh; a raging bureaucrat filled with a sense of omnipotence); Oh, what delights!

So, in conclusion, I respectfully resubmit the same ‘Bi-Annual Water Report’ – sans corrections – and ask you to reassign it to someone else on your esteemed staff (hopefully someone besides yourself; someone with a subtle sense of the universe; someone who can read). My crew and I await your esteemed opinion else we venture into the field again, and find ourselves refuted with recriminations for not having accepted your interpretations (at the end of yet another disastrous set of pages) and of course filled with your wherewithal and your loss for words.

So, I leave you with this parting observation, Mr. Wallace J. Ebbits, Esq. I trust that you too will find alternate employment – elsewhere. Perhaps your talents might also be employed in the sanitary field. I believe there is an opening on my Field Crew. We pop sewer manholes next week and begin the latest in a series of superb investigations as to the source of some gaseous emanations, sulfurous and yellow, a task I’m sure you are suited to, given the excellent description of your Grandmotherly emanations.

Cc:      Field Crew; Bureau of Monitoring and Extractions

Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. His professional memoir, “Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State” (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/protecting-new-jerseys-environment/9780813548876

His most recently published short stories in 2021 include “Seneca Village Arises,” (Meet Me @ 19th Street Journal), which was awarded “Best First Chapter” in the journal’s contest for a Young Adult novel dealing with racial inequality. http://www.archstreetpress.org/bargemans-daughter/ and “Peter-by-the-Bay” (Adelaide Literary Magazine) https://adelaidemagazine.org/2021/06/15/peter-by-the-bay-by-thomas-belton/ His short story, “The Murderous Wood,” featuring T.S. Eliot, Sir James George Frazer, and Robert Graves as sleuths was published in “Mystery Weekly Magazine” in 2019. He has also published short stories in the Young Adult literary magazine Cicada, “The Bargeman’s Daughter” and The Arts News, “Atelier.”

He is also a poet and his most recently published poems were in the journals, New World Writing, “Bus Ryde to Skool.” https://newworldwriting.net/thomas-belton-bus-ryde-to-skool/ and The Ekphrastic Review “Wonderland” https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/wonderland-by-thomas-belton .

In non-fiction he has published hundreds of scientific articles and essays. His 2021 essay on climate change was published in “Superstition Review,” the literary magazine of Arizona State University titled “Sea Level Rise and the Two Cultures.” https://blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu/2020/11/17/sea-level-rise-and-the-two-cultures-a-guest-post-by-tom-belton/ He was also interviewed on science writing in the era of climate change for that same publication: https://superstitionreview.asu.edu/issue26/interviews/thomasbelton

He is also a frequent Op-Ed writer for the New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.