Balsa

I can sympathize with the now not-President-Elect Hillary Clinton. I too once won a popular vote thanks to high voter turnout in coastal states, and I too was once robbed of my title thanks to an archaic electoral system. I too found the popular will overturned by a system meant to protect a republic against tyranny, and I too lost to a tyrant.

*   *   *

Of course my tyrant was not President Elect Trump, but Alexander Van Balsa, heir to the balsa model fortune. I imagine that most of you reading this will know that Clinton’s opponent was Donald Trump. Perhaps you know less about my career:

I was running for class treasurer of Elkins Park Middle School. I, like Secretary Clinton, won the popular vote—by somewhere around 5 million once the absentee ballots were tallied. Unfortunately the turnout was so low in classes like 107, Mr. Jackson’s homeroom, that the final results were deemed a resounding victory for Van Balsa. I was flattered that so many voters from outside Pennsylvania had seen fit to voice their support, but in the end it was Pennsylvania where I lived, and it was my own native Pennsylvania that turned against me in the electoral math.

I wish at that time I had been brave enough to stand up to Van Balsa’s irresponsible and frankly racist overtures, but alas I accepted defeat with the grace required to earn extra credit for my social studies class. (I needed the extra credit because I had missed several days of school thanks to a broken leg I had suffered that fall. Somehow this had become a scandal in the school paper, Paws on Park, in a series of investigative “exposes” that spelled my last name “Bird” like the animal instead of “Burd” like the first part of the prickly plant.) So after mounting a brief resistance, I caved in.

Van Balsa had promised he would fund an infrastructure program to replace the water fountains with chocolate milk fountains. I thought this was irresponsible and wanted instead to fund extracurricular technology and cultural programs. But when I lost, I figured the chocolate milk fountains were just one of those things people say when they really want to fund stadium lights and physical education instead of my chosen extracurriculars. Besides, purchasing a chocolate milk fountain was really beyond the powers of the treasurer, I thought. No use getting so worked up about it.

*   *   *

I think Van Balsa was not as rich as he said he was. Sure you always saw a whole shelf of his family’s products in any hobby shop you would enter. But the hobby shops were disappearing from Elkins Park. They were disappearing across America. Not that anybody noticed. This was a mere two months after September 11th, and Americans were understandably preoccupied. In fact, my quick capitulation to an anti-democratic election seemed appropriate—patriotic even.

Van Balsa made good on his promise to expand infrastructure projects at Elkins Park middle school, alright. In his first act as treasurer, he apportioned half a billion dollars for a 9/11 memorial commemoration in the lobby.

“That’s very generous,” I admitted to my social studies teacher, Mr. Rickland. I had taken to staying in his classroom after the fifth period bell rang for lunch. I was still hobbling around in my cast, and anyway I wanted to retreat from social life as much as possible after the humiliation of the campaign.

I thought the memorial could be a nice display. The Loverling twins had lost their mother in the attack. She’d been in the plane that hit tower two, on her way from Boston to New York on a series of business meetings. Of course the joke had been that the twins had lost their mother in the twins. I was ashamed that I laughed the first time I heard somebody crack that one, and after that I was always hopeful to see them smile, as though their happiness might assuage my guilt. Sometimes I did catch one of them smiling, but I was never sure if they each had their good days and bad days, or if it was always the same Loverling I was seeing in mourning and always the same Loverling I was seeing trying to distract herself by laughing and joking with her friends. I wondered if they might like to see a memorial like Van Balsa’s or if it would simply be a tragic reminder of a horror that they wanted to put behind them.

“Don’t you want to know what the memorial’s going to look like?” Mr Rickland asked, after what must have been a peculiar silence on my part as I considered the Loverlings. “What it’s going to be made of?”

“Um, yes, I suppose.”

Mr. Rickland grinned stupidly. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

“He couldn’t!” I exclaimed.

“He could,” said Mr. Rickland, handing me the latest Paws on Park. “And he’s going to.”

I snatched the paper and looked at the front page. There were crude renderings of the twin towers sitting atop each wing of the school. But crude as they were, it was obvious what they were made of.

“He’s building a September 11th memorial out of balsa wood?!” I demanded.

“Life size models,” Mr. Rickland chided. “The twin towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Western Pennsylvania.”

I skimmed the article for some reference to Van Balsa’s family business, but there were none. A few paragraphs down, however, there was a familiar picture of a mansion. Next to it, the same picture had been edited, with the mansion replaced by a giant balsa angular building.

“Where’s this?” I asked.

“Oh that? That’s the Elkins Estate,” said Mr. Rickland. “They’re tearing it down for the site of the balsa Pentagon.”

You have to understand. At one time, Elkins Park was home to the densest population of millionaires in the world. Most of them had made their fortune during the Civil War selling bonds or obtaining lucrative government contracts. Elkins was a grocer. After the war, he invested like all the other barons; his companies made millions pioneering the manufacture of gasoline and building railroads across the mid-Atlantic. His art collection was sold and loaned to museums all over the world. The Quaker farmland of Elkins Park was rapidly developed into a retreat for the rich, real estate for their factories, and a community for their workers and servants.

As is the way of things, the suburbs crept up from Philadelphia around the old mansions, the grand Elkins Estate included. Half the family died on the Titanic. The rest disappeared from Philadelphia lore. And soon the estates, once magnificent, were overrun by kudzu and owned by one out-of-state evangelical church after another.

The Van Balsa’s were probably the only family in Elkins Park who could afford the Elkins Estate, if they had wanted it. There had been an unsuccessful drive to turn the building into a museum and bring some of those wayward paintings and sculptures home, but now, under Alexander Van Balsa’s treasury, it looked like destruction was a sure thing.

I pulled a few physical dimensions from the Paws article and opened to the last page of the paper where the word scrambles rendered the pages mostly blank. I did some long division and some of the unit conversion we were learning about in Mrs. Kalin’s pre-algebra class.

“Do you know how much balsa wood this would require?” I demanded.

“No,” said Mr. Rickland, clearly indulging me. “How much?”

“The Van Balsa’s stand to profit up to 175 million dollars from the materials alone. Van Balsa’s basically writing his family a check with the school treasury.”

“Welcome to politics,” Mr. Rickland said, chewing his tabouli. He was always eating salad and justifying the status quo. It made me sick.

*   *   *

I wish I could say I put a stop to it. I wish I could say that I exposed the Van Balsa fraud for what it really was. But it was a different time. There were certain rules of decorum that for better or worse have since largely been abandoned in middle school political culture. When I brought up the conflict of interest to the principal, he accused me of being a Sore Loserman over the election. I was old enough to understand what he was referencing, but young enough that I had just that week had a nightmare where Osama Bin Laden appeared holding an AK-47 outside my bathroom window while I pooped.

I thought even more briefly about writing to Paws on Park—maybe anonymously. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. During the election, they had leaked that I still wet the bed once or twice a week, something that I think proved decisive in the final electoral results. I even thought about complaining to my parents. But they were the only ones who knew about my bedwetting before the Paws story ran, so I knew one of them was a mole for Van Balsa’s team. I felt betrayed.

Or maybe that explanation is too simple. Maybe I’m just now looking for someone to blame. Because the truth is, disturbed as I was by Van Balsa’s treasury, I was also impressed. Coming to school that winter seeing the giant cranes at work on the balsa south tower certainly stirred something in me. I was already too cynical to be inspired by it, but somehow it gave me a measure of the passage of time. And time, I thought, healed all wounds. The doctors removed my leg cast. The Elkins Estate was demolished. Girls stopped calling me Pee Stink.

Of course the danger of measuring time that way is that sometimes you don’t realize what’s being built until it’s too big.

*   *   *

Van Balsa’s dealings did not draw the attention of investigative reporters at Paws on Park, most of whom had turned their attention to Operation Enduring Freedom. Elkins Park simply wasn’t as exciting as Afghanistan. We had embedded one of our sixth graders with the 3rd Infantry Division, and his typo-laden accounts of skirmishes with the “Tallyban” overshadowed any potential governmental impropriety at home.

That’s not to say that there was no news coverage of Van Balsa’s Treasury department. A local ABC affiliate picked up the story first. Then it went national—the story of an eleven year old boy who had used his own good fortune to construct one of the most impressive memorials of that first year.

Two things happened after that. The first I only really appreciated months later. Inspired schools across the country began to build their own balsa models, first as a tribute to the victims of the attack, then to anything and everything American. There was a balsa tiki head in Hawaii, the balsa corn maze in Kansas. And of course the famous balsa middle finger that appeared overnight at Ground Zero. Stock in Van Balsa’s family business soared as their kits flew from the shelves. That Christmas, the Balsa WTC outsold the lego Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the K’Nex U.S. Embassy in Kenya, and the Puzz 3D Al Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory. My parents even got me a small balsa Tacoma Narrows Bridge instead of the Enigma Machine starter kit that I had asked Santa for.

The second thing, though, happened immediately. People from New York and DC began traveling to our school, climbing onto the building, and stapling photos of their missing fathers, sisters, and lovers on the building. These were people who just a few months before had been in the worst Hell imaginable, wandering the streets of Lower Manhattan with these same photos, tearfully begging each other for news or rumors or hope, all while I’d been plotting my run for the Elkins Park treasury department. I’d seen them on the news. And there I’d been just a few months later, vocally questioning the results of the election on those same news channels. The sad pilgrims all seemed to recognize me. Despite their distress, they always seemed to slow down just enough to shoot me a look of utter disgust. In those moments, I really felt that I was a Sore Loserman. And a dirtbag to boot.

*   *   *

I eventually did find out what the Loverling twins thought about the monument, but only because there was a fight. I heard about some of the troubles in the Van Balsa treasury the same way I heard about everything—not from the dutiful Paws on Park, but from my friend Glen, who got invited to the cool parties while I sat on my living room floor trying to distract myself with quadratic formula after quadratic formula.

“They’re trying to keep it hush hush,” said Glen, as we were on our way to French class. “Van Balsa can’t afford any dissent right now. Irene Loverling thinks the memorial is a beautiful remembrance of her mother. But Molly Loverling says it’s just another dead tree, and she is done looking at dead things.”

“Wow,” I said, despite my resolution to keep out of politics for the foreseeable future. “That’s interesting.”

“Interesting yeah,” said Glen. “Well their politics diverge there in other ways too. Irene supported painting the giant yellow traffic lines down the center of the hall. Molly said it was tacky and authoritarian and a waste of money. Irene supported the new metal detectors and the hiring of security to protect the monuments. Molly said the security made a lot of the students feel less safe.”

That I could understand. While Van Balsa’s traffic markers had made it easier to get from class to class before the bell rang, the security he hired had been somewhat disconcerting. I don’t know where he had gone to get these guys—if the security force was a family heirloom or if he had put out a classified ad for pasty white guys with no sense of personal space. It didn’t take a social critic to tell that Elkins Park was a diverse, but deeply segregated school. And Van Balsa’s security apparatus discriminated pretty obviously when it came to the traffic rules. I had tried to include something about race in my treasury platform to counter Van Balsa’s frequent dog whistle racism, but I didn’t really know what I was talking about and I think the voters saw right through me. Our primitive exit polls indicated that I had underperformed with African Americans. Some of the black kids in my English class called me High-water, which I thought was a term of endearment, until I realized that they were just making fun of my ill-fitting pants.

“I can understand that,” I said to Glen, attempting to remain apolitical.

“But get this,” Glen continued. “Molly told me that the real thing that’s bothering her is the war.”

“The war?” I asked. “In Afghanistan?”

“No,” said Glen. “Van Balsa’s war. The one he’s planning. In Canada.”

“In Canada,” I scoffed. “What’s in Canada.”

Glen didn’t even blink. “Why balsa trees of course.”

I tried to put the pieces together—I knew Glen was doling them out to me, but before I could really appreciate the magnitude of what he was saying, a crash erupted from the other end of the hallway. We ran towards the sound as fast as we could. I couldn’t see what was happening. The commotion was already blocked by a crowd of spectators who so far had proved themselves more effective at puberty than I had. There was screaming. I could see above the crowd’s heads the long arms of the Loverings flailing at each other. Molly was slapping Irene madly! Or I thought it was Molly, because Irene’s only weapon was editorial control of Paws on Park. There were other bodies in the fight also—arms that I didn’t recognize. It seemed like whatever kicks or punches were being thrown weren’t quite landing right, and so they keep being thrown forever. But within a dozen seconds, Van Balsa’s security force had arrived and pulled everybody off each other. There was hair on the floor and blood and one last spastic kid who involved himself in everything, clamoring up and running off.

“Back to class!” one of the security guards yelled. “Right side of the yellow line!”

And suddenly this seemed like a just law, because look what happened when you didn’t follow the law? Somebody got hurt. So we quit our rubbernecking and proceeded to 6th period.

*   *   *

I wish I could say that I joined the walkout against Van Balsa’s illegal war on Montreal’s John Macdonald middle school. But there was a test that day in my life science class on Punnet Squares, and anyway I was turning away from politics. What could I do? If I had been on the cusp of leadership and the school wouldn’t recognize the 58 million votes for me through some sort of proportional representation, then what could I accomplish by refusing to learn about genetics?

So maybe history became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or maybe I was vindicated. As you know, the war went on. Van Balsa defunded drama club and dissolved the student government, so after school, I mostly just went home and watched TV.

“Shouldn’t you be doing something about all of this?” Glen asked.

But there was nothing I could do—you all know this part of the story. There was nothing any of us could do. When I graduated Elkins Park the next year, we were still at war with Canada. I went to Junior High School. People stopped calling me Sore Loserman. 500,000 Canadian civilians were killed and millions more displaced in the ensuing Balsa Wood War. The Van Balsa family made hundreds of millions of dollars whether the price of balsa wood rose or fell. The water fountains remained water fountains.

*   *   *

Once or twice a year I have occasion to drive north. Sometimes along the Canadian border I can see the wall they’re building and I know it means my alma mater has fallen for another authoritarian strongboy. It’s tall in places; in other places, you only need to hop. But no matter the height, the material is always the same familiar wood.

I haven’t been back to Elkins Park since I graduated nearly 15 years ago. The politics of middle school finance often seem the stuff of smoke-filled rooms and secret societies. Ideologies are formed and fade quicker there than anywhere else. I wonder now if the students of Elkins Park—who hadn’t even been born at the time—remember the election of 2001. To them, Elkins Park has always been at war with Canada. To them, the Balsa wood may seem critical, but do they remember why? Has anybody shown them the transcripts of Van Balsa’s morning announcements, those somber paragraphs where Van Balsa accused the Macdonald Macaws of harboring Al Qaeda operatives in their locker room? I doubt it. Political memory is brief. The political memory of a middle school is even briefer. I suspect that few remain at Elkins Park who remember what started it all.

It ended up being many years before politics again entered my life, my senior year of high school in fact. It was a more dignified time. I stood for election that year unopposed. That spring, just as Barack Obama was adjusting to the presidency, my picture appeared in the Cheltenham High School yearbook under the award, “Most Likely to Grow Up to Be a Weirdo Who Steals Unattended Scarves.”