Huebert’s unflinching gaze is most surely aimed at the self-destructive momentum—sometimes happening just off camera—of our free-falling human culture as it rapes the planet at whim. We’re led mid-thrust towards a terrifying climax, the horrors of which we can only speculate, like prepper Geoff and his long-suffering partner Zane (“SHTF”) running for the hills during an explosion, or like widowed Willow synthetically nursing a child in a burning wasteland (“The Empathy Pill”). We have no idea what the future will hold, but we know it isn’t good.
Much like Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time, whose poems surf the ragged oilfields of northern Alberta, or Richard Powers’ deep dive into the fictional lives of trees and the people affected by their devolving habitats in Overstory, Huebert’s Chemical Valley is a masterful exploration of dirty nature writing. As Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan postulated a decade ago, “…when all surface matter and all bodies in the biosphere contain some particulates from anthropogenic industrial processes, thinking dirty nature makes sense.”1 This sentiment is clearly beyond just a niggling thought in Huebert’s mind, it’s seeped so far into his daydreams and nightmares as to become a new language, an acquired fluency. Phrases like “teenage trees” pop up over and over, reminding us of the widespread destruction of our ancient forests. His stories become an almost obsessive-compulsive atonement, a witnessing of every Tim’s cup rattling around every parking lot from sea to shining sea. Like he’s constantly repressing a stifled holler of, “Look at this! How can we not see what’s right here, all goddamn day long?” Like he will notice us into righteousness. If we’d just look away from our phones for a minute.
Chemical Valley’s stories, for all their dystopian demons, are balanced by Huebert’s insistence on penning his characters with an empathetic hand. His gaze may be harsh, like the reality we inhabit, but his love for his fellow man, and our desperate desire for connection, is unwavering. Again, and again, we see Chemical Valley’s residents longing for each other, for safety, for hope, for a witness to their despair. They look for it in environmental protests, in vandalism, in affairs, in friendship, in work, in parties, in sports, in doing what they are told, in their children, in their phones. Always their phones.