by Paul Briggs
Finally deciding to let somebody else get a word in edgewise, Radcliffe turned to the naval officer with an ingratiating smile on his face. “So what’s the good word, Admiral?” Bryan Kovalchuk commanded Naval Station Norfolk, but he was a captain, not an admiral. Neither he nor Carrie bothered pointing this out.
“Weather permitting, we can have the base rebuilt by June of next year,” said Kovalchuk. “But there’s a problem.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Have you looked at the latest projections from the IPCC?”
Carrie nodded. Radcliffe rolled his eyes.
“Then you know that fifty years from now, we’re not expecting there to be much left of the base—or the city of Norfolk, for that matter.”
“Even if we accept that, fifty years is a long time,” put in Radcliffe.
“Yes, but between now and then, it’s going to cost more and more money just to keep the base operational. We’ve been asking Congress for years to allow us to prepare for sea level rise, but responses have been negative. And we’re not just worried about rising sea level any more—or rather, not just the direct effect of sea level on the base itself. We’re also anticipating an indirect effect, where the city will be less and less able to support the facility. Essential services are going to start disappearing.”
“So what’s your recommendation?”
“Shut it down now.”
“Shut down what?”
“Naval Station Norfolk.”
“What??!?” said Radcliffe. If you listened close enough, you could actually hear the extra punctuation marks.
“Seriously, that’s my advice,” said Kovalchuk. “Abandon it. Use the money you save on it to get some of the other bases ready.”
Carrie blinked.
“We’re the U.S. Navy,” he said. “We can fight any other power on the sea and win, but we can’t fight the sea itself. There are port facilities we can reconstruct to cope with sea level rise, but Norfolk isn’t one of them. It’s too low.”
“Out of the question,” said Radcliffe. “Do you have any idea how many local jobs depend on the base? Pull out of Norfolk and you basically kill the city.”
“Speaking as someone who used to have one of those jobs, I’m not crazy about the idea myself,” said Carrie. “But from the sound of things, the city is doomed anyway. If we had a better idea of where sea level is going to end up a hundred years from now, we could find a location for a new city and move everything there.”
“I’m sorry, Admiral,” said Radcliffe. “I represent my constituents. I don’t represent the Navy. We can’t let you do this.”
* * *
Rodrick Freitag’s house had made it through Gordon undamaged. It was too far north for the wind and too high up for the storm surge. Which made it the perfect place for the Bradshaws and both sets of their grandparents to spend Thanksgiving. Except for the fact that it was a small house, and not really built to accommodate nine extra people. Even getting the various cars and vans in the driveway was a complicated sliding-tiles game.
So of course, out of all possible ways to prepare the turkeys, Rod and Chelsey had chosen the one most likely to set the crowded little house on fire. They were deep-frying both of them.
In the interests of life and property, Isabel was overseeing the process. First, when the turkeys were taken out of the beer brine she measured the remaining brine and used a little Archimedean logic to estimate their volume, so she knew exactly how much oil would go in the fryer. Then she spent a full hour drying them, inside and out, at one point using a hair dryer.
The sun was setting, and Isabel was outside, finally getting the second turkey ready to lower into the fryer. She’d turned off the burner and added a little more peanut oil to replace whatever had evaporated.
Just as she had it on the hanger, Rod came out. He spent a few moments checking the first turkey to make sure it had cooled enough, then sidled over to Isabel.
She had to admit that he was a good-looking guy. Tall, reasonably fit, blue eyes, dark hair, conventionally attractive features. At some point he’d gotten a spray-on tan, but he’d had the sense not to repeat the procedure and it was steadily fading. And he’d agreed to host Thanksgiving this year. Possibly he had other good qualities as well, but Isabel didn’t know what they were.
“Smells good,” said Rod.
Isabel nodded.
Rod patted her on the back. “You’re doing great,” he said, in case Isabel needed his reassurance.
Then his hand began fingering its way down her spine toward her butt. Using one hand to keep the hanger with the fifteen-pound bird on it up in the air, Isabel removed his hand from her back with the other and inserted it into his coat pocket with a little shake of her head, just enough to let him know I’m going to keep things civil, but don’t do that again.
Rod stepped back a pace, smirked and shrugged as if to say can’t fault a guy for trying. Isabel gave him a look that said if you try that on Kristen I will personally rip off your dick, staple it to your forehead and sell you to a sideshow as the Human Unicorn. Or at least that was the message she was going for. Some of the nuances may have been lost. Whatever message it did send was enough to convince Rod to take the cooked turkey and go back inside.
Didn’t see that coming, she thought. Isabel had already disliked Rod on general principles. She felt a little better knowing her dislike was fully justified. And what had he been thinking? She had never shown him anything but basic politeness, and to be honest, not much of that. She wasn’t as good-looking as either of her sisters, nor as blonde, nor as big-breasted. Her butt was bigger, for what that was worth. Had the thing with the bear and being on Yuschak’s stupid show made her seem like more of a catch? Was Rod getting bored with Chelsey? Or did he get off on making women uncomfortable? Or did he just always have to try?
He better not try it again. At least Brad of the North had kept his hands to himself, except when he’d stuck one of them in harm’s way by mistake.
Speaking of Chelsey, her sister came out. She wasn’t wearing her usual heels, but the mass of dark blond curls on her head added a couple inches to her height all by itself. She took a cigarette out of her pocket.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Isabel. “We got aerosolized peanut oil over here. The last thing you want to be doing is lighting up.”
Chelsey muttered a curse and put it away.
“I thought you quit,” said Isabel.
“I had to quit when I had Jourdain,” she said. “It’s staying quit that’s a problem.”
“I still say if you need it that bad, you should vape.”
“And I still say vaping is birdseed.” Chelsey sighed. “I’m thinking of getting a Jellicoe treatment.”
“I’ve heard those work pretty well,” said Isabel. “I think they’re really expensive, though. Like, ten to fifteen thousand dollars, and insurance doesn’t cover them. I mean, you would eventually make the money back just from not buying cigarettes, but it’d take a couple years.”
“What are you talking about?” said Chelsey. “I get people trying to sell me discount Jellicoes every time I look at my email. They’re five or six thousand at the most.”
Emailed discount offers of medical services. Yep. Chelsey was Chelseying again.
“Chelsey?”
“Yeah?”
“You know how I’ve pretty much given up trying to talk you out of doing stupid things?”
“Yeah… what, you think this is stupid?”
“Having a change made to your brain would be risky, but it might be worth it. Having it done by the lowest bidder—that would be stupid. Also, Pratt’s been talking about grants or tax breaks or something for addiction therapy. If you can wait till next year, you might be able to get some of the costs covered.”
* * *
Isabel had to admit, deep-fried turkey was delicious. And her mom’s homemade cranberry relish was always good.
All the same, there had been one topic everybody had been
avoiding all through dinner. Finally, as the pumpkin pie was being served, Isabel bit the bullet.
“What’s the situation with the house?”
Her father put his fork down, shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead for a few moments.
“It’s bad,” he said. “Flood insurance might—might—cover the lost furniture… if I ever get the check, that is. I’m not holding my breath. I paid for the car and truck repairs myself. But if I want to get the house fixed up properly, I’ll need to take out a loan. And that’s going to mean collateral. The only thing I could use for that is the Mary Lynn.”
“Why don’t you just take out another mortgage?” said Isabel.
“I tried that,” said her father. “Turns out I can’t. The house isn’t mortgageable any more. Rod calls it ‘bluelining.’” Rod nodded his head. “Means they won’t accept it as collateral.”
“Have you gone to another bank?”
Pop rolled his eyes. “Would I be sitting here bellyaching if I hadn’t?” he said. “I’ve been to seven different banks. Nobody wants to touch the place.”
“It shouldn’t be legal,” said Mom. “It’s discrimination.”
Pop shook his head. “If they just did it to the blacks, that’d be discrimination and there’d be hell to pay. But they’re doing it to everybody who lives right on the water, so I guess that makes it all right.”
Mom nodded. “The Shermans in McDaniel have the same problem,” she said.
“Who else?”
It turned out Pop knew a lot of people in this situation. As Isabel listened to him, a picture formed in her mind.
Suppose you were a banker. One day, someone came in and asked to take out a mortgage on a nice little house on the Bay like Pop’s. Problem was, when you looked it up online it turned out that according to IPCC projections, in forty or fifty years the ocean waves would be getting into the crawlspace at high tide, undermining the foundations, rotting the floorboards, and generally bringing new meaning to the phrase “underwater mortgage.” That was assuming, of course, that another storm surge didn’t come along and get the job done early.
In theory, this shouldn’t be a problem. After all, the house would still have decades of use in it. Isabel’s car was certain to be worthless in twenty years and might be totaled tomorrow, but she still drove it. And unless you were a very young banker, by the time it washed into the ocean you’d have long since retired. The only thing that had really changed was that the house wasn’t a long-term investment any more. You’d want to make sure the borrower finished paying for it while it was still habitable, of course.
But there was a problem after all. With a normal mortgage, the worst thing that could happen was that the borrower would be unable or unwilling to pay and you’d have to foreclose on the property and sell it to recoup your losses. In this case, if you had to take the house it was an open question whether you’d ever be able to sell it again. Your bank could easily get stuck holding the bag while the value of the house dropped to zero. Normally, the way to deal with a high-risk investment was to raise the interest rate—but you wouldn’t want to do that here. That would make foreclosure more likely, not less.
And with every passing year, the risk would grow greater. With every fraction of an inch the ocean rose, the house would be harder to sell, and the temptation would grow for the borrower to stop sinking money into it and walk away, leaving you once again the proud owner of a worthless property… especially since the borrower could access the same projections you could and knew just as much as you did about how much time the house had left.
Suddenly, all that “mortgage forgiveness” right after Hurricane Gordon made a lot more sense. That wasn’t forgiveness—it was abandonment.
Chelsey turned to Rod. “Honey, haven’t you managed to sell some beach houses even with this ICP whatever thing?”
“I have,” he said. “Mostly to retirees. I’m very upfront with them. ‘You know, this house probably isn’t going to be around in thirty years.’ ‘Me either. What’s your point?’” He laughed. “Of course, even there it helps if the property isn’t already damaged.”
“So just use the Mary Lynn,” Chelsey said, turning to Pop. “I don’t see the problem.”
Pop shook his head. “You haven’t heard?”
“Oh boy. What else is wrong?”
“Algae bloom,” he said flatly. “It’s already outside Rock Hall, it’s spreading and we’re seeing a lot of dead fish along with it. Last time they said it was pfiesteria—this time they’re not even pretending to know. See, when the rains from Gordon hit Pennsylvania, they had to open all the gates on the Conowingo. A lot of silt got into the upper Bay. A lot of nutrients.”
“How bad is it?”
“We can kiss the rest of crab season goodbye, and at least half the oyster season. Depends on what DNR says… which means we’re probably screwed.” Her father had a waterman’s ingrained distrust of the Department of Natural Resources. He also had a total inability to say anything stronger than “screwed” while his daughters were in the room. “Bottom line is, if I take out a loan I might not be able to meet the interest in the next twelve months. And if the skipjack is my collateral…”
“I wish I could help out more,” said Mom, “but by the time we got the shop repaired, half our customers had gotten their boats fixed somewhere else. And with this algae bloom, it’ll be a while before anybody needs repairs.”
Nobody had much of an appetite at this point. Of course, they were all stuffed to the gills, so no harm done. Isabel spent the rest of the evening helping Chelsey rein in little Jourdain, who had all a two-year-old’s crazy energy.
* * *
That night, even the tryptophan in the turkey wasn’t helping Isabel sleep. Also not helping was the fact that she was lying on the living room floor, next to her paternal grandparents, both of whom snored like legendary beasts.
And not helping most of all was the situation with Pop’s house. And the Shermans’ house. And most of the other houses right on the Bay. And… actually everything built less than four feet above the local high-tide line on every coastline on Earth. Those had once been among the most desirable locations in the world. How many trillions of dollars’ worth of equity had been tied up in all that property? And what would happen when that money no longer existed even potentially?
The more Isabel tried to see the big picture, the more it scared her. Civilization, led by the banks, was beginning its retreat from the coasts. Like climate change itself, the process would be well underway by the time anyone could see it happening.
Over the first three weeks of December, a series of nor’easters hit the East Coast from Labrador down to Cape Cod, with a force equal to some tropical storms. One of the worst storms managed a direct hit on the city of Boston, although Winthrop Bank and Logan Airport took the brunt of the assault.
Then the weather began to ease. By Christmas, the storm factory in the North Atlantic had ceased production… for the moment.
The good news was that many cities and towns in northern Norway had been rebuilt with roofs over the streets and sidewalks, to allow them to cope with a snowfall of eight or nine feet, and with larger sewers to cope with all that snow melting in a couple of weeks during the spring. The bad news was that the heavy snow was going further south this year, over all Scandinavia, Scotland, and northern Russia and Canada.
In the Antarctic summer, the last traces of the Larsen Ice Shelf broke up and drifted out to sea at the beginning of the year. This was thrown into the shade a few weeks later by news from the other side of the continent. Since the end of November, warm seawater had been flowing under the Totten Glacier through deep troughs in the sea floor, slipping between the ice and the bedrock, unmooring, and lubricating it at the edge. On January 15, with almost no warning, the seaward end of the glacier broke up and flowed out to sea.
This caused a chain reaction for hundreds of miles inland. Over the course of the next two weeks, more than ten billion tons of ice
slid into the Southern Ocean. It was only a tenth of a percent of the glacier’s true mass, but it was enough to raise sea levels by just over an inch.
* * *
It was too early in the morning, after a long, late night of work. Carrie poured herself a cup of fresh-brewed chyq, sipped and made a face. The stuff tasted like coffee with too much sugar and had the texture of coffee with too much creamer. But it had plenty of caffeine, and it wouldn’t do to be gouging the taxpayers over the small stuff at an event like this.
First, she checked the news feed from yesterday evening, which she hadn’t had time to do yesterday. As it happened, there was nothing about global warming or sea level rise yesterday. Apart from Pratt’s efforts to wind down the drug war—which was a pretty big deal in itself—the biggest story was that Vice President Quillen had just tested positive for Huntington’s disease. He seemed to be confident that it wouldn’t be a problem. “FDR was confined to a wheelchair,” he said. “JFK had Addison’s disease. They could manage the duties of the presidency. If necessary, I will endeavor to live up to the example they set. In the meantime, I’m quite sure I can handle the duties of the vice-presidency.” The other news item of the moment was that the Supreme Court had at long last completed its judicial review, and had concluded that De L’Air diamonds were indeed diamonds and could be marketed as such, and that it would be a violation of the First Amendment for Congress to try to stop them from doing this.
Then she checked her messages from various parts of the government, to make sure there wasn’t anything she was missing. Trying to manage a conference and the Commonwealth of Virginia at the same time was not a job for people who were into sleep.
Then she checked the news from her friends and family. Thel wanted to bring a boy named Ethan to the governor’s mansion this weekend. Well, she is getting to be about that age.
Then she took a shower and got dressed. The officers’ quarters of what was left of Naval Station Norfolk were not exactly luxurious, but she could do without for a little while.