Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I was just getting ready to begin my scheduled on-line interview with a newsmaker when I received an email from a Westphalian friend containing photos she took of contemporary Chicago street art. They contained a not-so cryptic message about extinction, like something the CIA might send to an uncooperative African ruler.  I could only guess at the artist’s intent, but it got me to thinking: What becomes of the American Dream without rare earth metals?

It was time to begin the interview.

A couple of keystrokes and Joshua Ballard was miraculously there in front of me on my computer screen.

Interesting guy.

Every once in a while, he’d pop something like a peanut into his mouth, one at a time. He looked like somebody who ate meat.

We talked for the better part of an hour and might have kept going except that he had to get ready for an appearance on the nationally televised Laura Ingram Show on Fox News. He’s been all over the national news lately. Earlier in the day, he was featured in a national AP wire release and by stock advisors at Motley Fool.

I always start interviews the same way, just like when I meet somebody new in a bar or in a truck stop café... or in a barber shop... “Where ya’ from?”

Joshua Ballard grew up in a small town in the Mississippi delta region of southeast Iowa. I told him I was familiar with the area. I used to haul molybdenum from a mine in Colorado to the industrial complex there where those giant windmill blades were made.

Josh (I started calling him that and he seemed comfortable with it) was born in 1972, just as America was starting to go downhill. His parents had been in their 20s in the 60s and had picked up some of the cultural traits. His parents, he said, were not hippies, but meditated instead of going to church; more “spiritual” than “religious.” He said his father was a small town “entrepreneur,” starting up businesses that never seemed to get comfortably off the ground. When his father was in his 60s, he joined the Peace Corps. His mother was a youth counselor of some sort.

His family didn’t have lots of money, but there was always food on the table. His parents divorced when he was ten years old.

As a teenager in the 80s, he wasn’t into the “in” things like the football team, varsity sweaters, or shoes endorsed by famous athletes. He was a skateboarder and wore scuffed-up shoes. He didn’t feel like an outsider, though. He said he felt “independent.”

He was a voracious reader, if not always of the required classroom texts. By the time he finished high school, he wanted to be a writer.

He went off to college and there it seems like his life took a 90-degree turn. For some reason, which I’d like to discuss with him at greater length in the future, he wound up in the university’s Russian Studies program. He learned our Cold War enemy’s language, its history, its culture. He soaked up anything he could get his hands on that was Russian.

After college he went to live and work in Russia, teaching English to Russian speakers and translating for international corporations.

He was there throughout the 90s, which were terrible times in Russia.

He married a Russian gal and was embraced by an extended Russian family. They lived in a small town in Siberia. He knew the people up and down the street, their language, the friendly ones and grumps. They were just like the people he’d grown up around in a small Mississippi delta town on the other side of the world. They were not his enemies. They were his family. He didn't feel like an outsider, just independent.

For reasons I didn't even try to explore, Josh fell into the world of international finance. He was putting deals together in Ukraine when the Maidan coup happened in 2014. I’d like to talk to him about that some more sometime in the future. Maybe he was in the CIA. That would be interesting.

So, anyway, to make a long story short, last December Josh was named CEO of a new mining and processing company called USA Rare Earth, a name which says it all, and why Josh has been all over the news lately. The supply chain for rare earth metals has become a huge story. China in particular and the Eurasian landmass and Russia in general control the supply of what we need to live the American Dream.

Just a year ago, hardly anybody (including me) had ever even heard of rare earth metals. Now they’re front page above-the-fold headlines at supermarket newsstands across the country. Regular people are beginning to realize what our lives would be like without them — an extinction. No color television. Tethered to walls by telephone lines. We’d have to forget that we’d ever gone to the moon in order to keep from going crazy.

Fearing riots in the streets by jonesing cell phone addicts, Trump is rewriting regulations to permit increased domestic production, alarming the powerful environmentalist lobby.

USA Rare Earth is one of six or seven American companies currently being fast-tracked to open new mines and processing facilities. Josh said, however, that even if all of them were up and running at full capacity today, they would still only be able to produce about 40 percent of what we need to avoid extinction. We can’t do it alone.

Access to Ukrainian rare earth deposits would help. We could strong arm China by going to war with Russia and just take what we need.

Or we could do it another way.

I told Joshua about my idea of building a tunnel beneath the Bering Sea, connecting the planet's two great landmasses. He'd be able to drive his car to go visit his extended Eurasian family. Sitting around a kitchen table, warmed by fire on a cold Siberian night, the family should be able to figure out a way where nobody has to go extinct.

Josh nodded, like saying ok, and then he had to go for his appearance on the nationally televised Laura Ingram Show. If, as I suspect, Josh is not in the CIA, we can still hope that our CIA can be re-trained to work that way.

--30--

Our Newest Westphalian

Michael Kennedy

Portland, Oregon

Snapshots in an Old Shoebox

by Michael Kennedy

You find them by accident

in back of a closet

or in the garage

or somewhere in the basement. 

You take the box into the kitchen

remove the cardboard lid

dump the photos onto a table

and smell the mildewed paper. 

The old Black & White photos 

fading color photos

with bent corners, 

perhaps a torn photo with yellowing Scotch tape. 

Faces smiling at you

from decades ago

standing in an awkward row

or sitting leaning into a dining room table

saying, “cheese!”

Perhaps they are under an umbrella at the beach

or holding up diplomas at a graduation 

or posing with flowers at a wedding. 

A few snapshots have lists of names and places.

Most are just photographs

of unlabeled people

hoping they look good for the camera

wondering why they’re there.

Your task is to invent an order

to create a sense of identity

While the faces look back at you

eager to know they still matter.