Percy Jackson rant: Grover’s quest for the wild enchilada

stop social and environmental destruction!

Of all the characters in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, the one that I came most to admire is Grover the satyr. He’s sort of a clown in The Lightning Thief, barely able to keep his Rastafarian hat and shoes on, let alone watch over Percy effectively. Yet by book five, he’s proud of his identity and seems to find the strength of will to go on, despite Pan’s death in The Battle of the Labyrinth, and his banishment by the Council of Cloven Elders; all the while maintaining a sense of humor. Who else could wake up from a dangerous magical sleep in Central Park, covered in muck, and complain so earnestly “They don’t serve very good enchiladas in the wilderness?” What a touching statement that takes us right to the point: Grover is a curious and successful blend of “the Wild” and civilization.

In these days of suburban sprawl, massive urban migration and the wholesale abandonment of rural spaces and lifestyles to huge agro businesses, we’re all kind of in the same boat. I felt a longing for more untamed lands while reading about Grover’s transformation. It’s like the impulse that seems to have driven Brad Kessler to leave New York for his tiny goat ranch in Vermont. I’m not ready to chuck it all in San Francisco just yet, but I get it.

Recently Hegui started reading The Sea of Monsters and was appalled to come across this line way at the beginning:

The monster’s shadow passed in front of the shop. I could smell the thing—a sickening combination of wet sheep wool and rotten meat and that weird sour body order only monsters have, like a skunk that’s been living off Mexican food.

It turns out to only have been a dream; but how odd to compare monster stench to a skunk dining on Mexican food. What does that mean?! Aren’t enchiladas Mexican? Is that racial profiling?

Just like Grover, we Americans want the comforts brought to us by multiculturalism, world trade and the exchange of ideas: each to his or her own enchilada. But, just as Grover was at the beginning of the series, we’re afraid of the consequences and long for the fading wild places. Aside from the obvious, pro-environmental, pro-green idea, the search for the disappearing Wild is simply an expression of nostalgia for a perfect past that never really existed and simultaneously the guilty admission of our anxiety about all things “different” from ourselves. We can’t escape the dilemma. We bring our civilization everywhere, and, after all, what is the Wild except anyplace where we humans cannot be found?

As one example, simply look at the history of our suburbs since the end of World War 2. Initially marketed as these ideal places of perfect uniformity and harmony with mankind, really safe havens from “the big city” and “the other,” on closer inspection, the reality is very different. Nowadays, all we hear about are the terrible “urban problems” like drugs, gangs and racially-motivated violence, etc., plaguing them. I never saw that on ‘Leave it to Beaver’ or ‘The Brady Bunch.’ And that’s my point: we bring these things with us because, whether you like it or not, they are part of us.

Instead of running scared from our problems into our gated communities and fantasy worlds; or worse, demonizing others with racial epithets, discrimination or war; why not act more like Grover the satyr? Embrace your little bit of paradise while at the same time actively engaging with the real world around you. Perhaps then we can have our wild enchiladas in comfort and peace, all together. I’ll have the vegetarian one, by the way…