Excerpt from The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At home in Berne, I went out to shop for food (a fun thing to do, because you can stroll down the arcades buying one vegetable from each stand) one evening and saw Stephen in a cafe?, poring over papers, sitting next to a strikingly pretty girl with blonde ringlets. I started over, but when I saw she had tousled her hair with mousse to cover bald patches, I backed up and kept on down the arcade trying to find truly fresh radicchio, which is never easy. She looked like a cancer patient, maybe someone Stephen met at a clinical test of the pump, which ought to work for chemo—I had it all mapped out.

When Stephen got home I asked who she was, and he said, "Miss Mangy Dread." That night at the club he had told her she looked like the alien in Alien, and the next time he passed the ad agency, the carpet was gone. He went inside to say hello. Her roots had suffered a bit, but she was confident her hair would grow back.

The most conspicuous thing in the shop, he said, was a poster: Wasserkraft Nein Danke. Hydroelectric power, no thanks. It was based on the perennial anti-nuclear campaign. But hydroelectric? And there Miss Mangy Dread, whose name was Birke, explained to him that the upper Rhine, since the 1950s, had been "massacred" with a canal and ten "dam steps" all the way from Basel to Iffezheim. The fertile floodplains, gone! High water into the cities of the Ruhr! Basins for holding back the water, but no wet meadows, no frogs, no storks, no life, and why? Because the power companies are taking a license to print money, earning themselves silly on this river! All the consequences carries the public, the taxpayer: flood protection for the cities, because now there are floods, since they build the dams. The loss of biodiversity, of the landscape, of the beauty of the countryside. It is no more a river, only a chain of lakes, and all emitting methane in tremendous quantities! Carbon dioxide is nothing, who cares about carbon dioxide? Methane is seventy, a hundred times worst! And the companies pay the turbines and the dam, nothing else! And they want to build five more steps, from Iffezheim to Mannheim! And all these dams together, they make only so much electricity like one modern gas electric plant!

Stephen resolved at that moment to become an environmental activist. Which of course had to involve getting information from Birke.


Stephen opined that Wasserkraft Nein Danke was mostly a way to draw attention to the ad agency. "Her boss is a marketer's marketer. He's good. He showed me a project they did where they got tattoo artists to offer this laundry detergent logo and thousands of people got the tattoo."

"That's pitiful," I said.

"It's out there," Stephen said, "but I have to admit this selling stuff that doesn't sell itself is interesting to me. With a medical device, all you need is an indication and some terminally ill hostages to lay back and let the money wash over you. Selling the idea that the Rhine should be looking like the Yukon is an actual challenge."

"It's man's work," I said. "It's like you're growing up and want to get a real job."

"It's not just the Rhine. There are all these stupid community initiatives advocating energy independence, wanting to put in little hydro plants. It's not like you could even run a milk bottling plant off one of these things, but they chop up the streams into lakes with no way of getting from one to the other. The fish can't get upstream or down. Did you know most fish ladders are dysfunctional, and a huge number of fish die in turbines?"

I was starting to sense that Stephen found me uninteresting relative to Birke.

"I thought fish ladders work," I said. "I mean, I saw one on the Columbia where people were lining up three deep to watch these huge salmon and steelhead leaping up the stairs." I spread my arms to express the immensity of the salmon and trout I had seen.

Excerpted from The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink. Copyright © 2014 by Nell Zink. Excerpted by permission of Dorothy, a publishing project. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.