Fiction River: How to Save the World

by Fiction River

  “Profesora!” José waved his flashlight off to one side, then went scramble-splashing up the slope. Paula squinted after him, and after a moment of straining to resolve the dark, rain-fuzzed shapes, saw one of the wooden stakes tipping.

  By the time José reached the tilted stake, the two stakes on either side of it were beginning to tip as well.

  Longer stakes, thought Paula. Pound them deeper next time.

  Unless they were breaking? She hadn’t heard the wood cracking, but between the rain and the thunder, the sound wouldn’t carry far. If they were, then what? Steel stakes? They were expensive. She’d thought of rebar—cheap to buy new, and even cheaper if reclaimed—but José had pointed out that it was made to bend, and would never stand up under the weight of the water. Wooden fence posts would eventually rot, but were the best compromise between utility and economics.

  But only if they’d hold…

  Another stake on the opposite side of the V was leaning, succumbing to the pressure. It wasn’t going to work.

  José was trying to straighten the first stake, pounding at it with... something, maybe a rock? Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to work.

  She shouted, “José! This isn’t working, come down!” but before she could finish the sentence, the entire plastic line started moving. Not falling over, but moving—the hillside was sliding underneath them.

  “José!” There wasn’t time for more than that. He lost his footing and came sliding down the hill on his stomach with the stakes, the plastic, a field’s worth of mud and a pond’s worth of water.

  Paula waded in, her heart slamming and her brain stuck on “frantic.” The wave of water and earth surged past her, sending her to hands and knees to keep from being knocked backward off the hill. She crawled up, fighting through the liquid mud, terrified that José had been buried.

  Struggling to her feet, she pointed her flashlight beam over the ground, back and forth, while climbing. There! Those ridiculous white trousers—one leg from foot to knee was exposed, and the rain washed the mud clear.

  It took a minute of hard, skin-tearing digging with her hands to expose José’s face. She turned him onto his stomach, straddled his hips, and did an awkward maneuver that Dr. Heimlich probably wouldn’t have recognized, but it got José coughing and that was what mattered.

  He heaved and spat out mud and water, struggled for air, coughed again, sucked in more air. Paula pulled out her phone and called for help.

  José recovered enough to control his panicked tears before the ambulance arrived, and they both calmed down enough for Paula to stare down at the tangle of orange plastic and wooden stakes and mud covering half the experimental field.

  Catastrophic failure. Looking at how much of the hill had slumped, they’d never have been able to—no farmer working by hand would be able to—sink the stakes deep enough to prevent the slide. They needed something else. If only she had any idea what that could be.

  ***

  Two months later, nothing. Plenty of ideas, and arguments enough to take them all well into the next century, but nothing that made everyone, or even a significant subset, go “Aha!”

  Profesor Rivera thought the answer was flood-resistant plant varieties, grains or other starch crops that could thrive even under half a meter of water, with roots deep enough not to wash off a hillside. Paula explained, again, exactly how deep that would have to be, but he still kept muttering about taproots.

  Taproots? On annual grasses? Three-quarters of the plant’s energy would be wasted growing roots; there’d be nothing left to develop seed heads.

  Profesora Sanchez-Gallegos thought Paula had the right idea, but the wrong materials. “Stronger,” she said. “Walls instead of flimsy fences. Earthworks, or rock walls. It will take longer to install, but it will last.”

  “No!” said Paula, waving her mostly empty grapefruit soda at Sanchez. “I should have recorded a vid because you’re not understanding, none of you are. The entire hillside slid. Unless you dig or pound foundations down to bedrock, nothing you build on the surface will stand up to the water, the mud.” She huffed out her frustration and finished her soda.

  They all knew. In actuality, they all understood. No one had been able to think of anything that would work, anything practical, anything cheap enough for the farmers who would have to implement it. They were running in circles, digging a circular ditch deeper and deeper into the earth that had turned against them.

  The university cafe was full of bustling, chatting students and faculty. Sun shone through the windows, making the shabby room more cheerful. Everyone knew there was a crisis—a complex of crises all over the world—but people could only be grim for so long before they either sank into depression or pushed the problems away. The students, laughing and calling and tossing the occasional tamale at each other, had pushed away anything that wasn’t an imminent exam, and most of them likely weren’t even thinking about those.

  Profesora Zavala crumpled the paper wrappers from her lunch and stood. “I have a seminar,” she said. “We’ll try again next week, yes? I know someone in Israel who’s working on water control there—I’ll mail him and see if he wants to exchange problems and ideas. If we all did that, brought more people in? Maybe someone will have a new idea. We might be able to help them too. Fresh eyes on everyone’s problems, yes?”

  Paula muttered assent along with the others. It was nothing they hadn’t done before. Everyone had their own problems, and suggestions from someone who didn’t have all the information was rarely as helpful as it was in feel-good movies.

  Everyone at the table started shuffling and gathering to leave when Paula’s phone buzzed. She sat back down and pulled it out.

  Abuelo Jimenez had sent her a text. Why her abuelo couldn’t just leave a voice message, or an avatar vid like everyone else, or even a proper letter if he wanted to write, she didn’t know. But he was old, and seemed proud of his turn-of-the-century habits.

  RM RDY 4 U C U S00N

  Paula squinted at the string of characters and slowly deciphered it. Room ready for you, see you soon.

  She smirked at the message, then put her phone away. She hadn’t been looking forward to the visit, and had actually been planning to find some excuse to put it off. She knew her abuelo would be disappointed, but she’d expected—hoped—to be busy that weekend.

  What she actually was, was tired. Exhausted in her heart. A weekend, maybe even a long weekend, at Abuelo Jimenez’ place by the lake sounded wonderfully relaxing. Even if he was still puttering around in his vegetable garden, the last remnant of the farm he’d labored on for seventy-some years, a plot of beans or squash or whatever he was growing that year might help her remember why she’d devoted her life to agricultural technology—to gardening, at the heart of it—in the first place.

  She tapped the VID button and said, “Looking forward to seeing you too, ‘Buelo. Be ready to feed me!” Her current avatar, a little cartoon woman in a campesina’s rough trousers and blousy work shirt, with an old-fashioned hard hat on her head, spoke the words back to her, shifting her weight and moving her hands. Paula had chosen the mannerisms mode that fit her personality, then tweaked it a little, back when she’d changed to this avatar. It looked fine, and she sent it off.

  Abuelo always wanted to feed people from his garden, so the last bit would make him happy.

  She stuffed her trash into the recycling bins and headed across the sun-dusted campus back to her office. She had a meeting with José about his own research into alleviating soil compaction with amendments, then a seminar of her own to lead before she could head up to Abuelo’s place.

  ***

  It was raining again by the time she left town. The car’s fat, nubbed tires handled the wet and mud better than the old flat-surface tires ever had, but Paula still drove carefully up the winding road. Once she left the highway, with eight kilometers still to go, the road was packed dirt and gravel, and the wet weather had turned it into a stewed mess.

 
Abuelo Jimenez’ house was a bright island of beckoning comfort in the rainy night by the time she pulled her car up next to his ancient truck. She grabbed her bag and splashed up the squishy path to the front door, slipping inside quickly to keep the heat in.

  “There you are! I thought you’d fallen into the lake!” He gave her a quick hug, ignoring her soaked coat, then pointed her to the door she knew perfectly well. “Go put on something dry. I’ll get supper on the table.”

  “Yes, ‘Buelo.” Paula smiled at his retreating back and headed into his workroom, where she would sleep on the studio couch amid his tools and clutter. She didn’t mind at all. She’d slept in a similar room whenever she visited his farm as a child. The tools had been fascinating—they’d made her plastic toys look like cheap baby things. Abuelo’s projects, wood and metal and wires, had drawn her in, teased her with their promise of revealing how the world worked. How to make things, real things that people could use.

  She was an engineer because of Abuelo Jimenez’ workroom.

  While getting changed, she looked over the semi-ordered clutter on the big wooden bench. Her abuelo was the opposite of a specialist; he always seemed to be doing something different. Among the more common broken lamp to be fixed and cracked hoe handle to be replaced, there was always something new he was trying out or fiddling with.

  The central project on the bench that evening was some kind of partially complete woven basket.

  Paula pulled a warm sweater on over her head, slipped on a dry pair of shoes, and went to the bench for a closer look while toweling her hair.

  The basket he was working on was odd, to say the least. The base seemed to be a half-crushed pad of thick, twiggy brush. Willow strips were woven through it, loosely—it wouldn’t hold anything much smaller than an egg—and built up around the sides to form a long, narrow, rectangular basket. A handspan of willow ends stuck up, so it probably wasn’t finished, but Paula had no idea what such a basket would be used for even when finished.

  Warm, savory smells drew her out to the main room, where Abuelo was setting a cast-iron pot on the table. Paula sat down and he spooned a hearty stew onto her plate—haunch of goat cooked tender (well, almost) with peppers and onions and chunks of orange squash, and some cilantro on top. It was one of her favorites, and she knew he had made it just for her.

  They caught up a bit during dinner, exchanging news, but mostly eating in comfortable silence. It wasn’t until after, when Paula was finishing up the dishes, that she thought to ask about the weird basket.

  “Hah, that,” said Abuelo. He was sitting in his chair with a bottle of after-dinner beer, which he said helped him sleep. “I had a thought last month, while it was raining. The flat fields flood, and the sloped fields slide into the lake. You spoke of this problem.”

  Paula nodded and turned to face him, leaning back against the counter while drying the cast-iron pot.

  “Our ancestors built fields that floated. On the lakes around Tenochtitlan? We all learned this in school. If we could duplicate the old, floating fields, it wouldn’t matter how much it rains or whether it floods.”

  “But the chinampas didn’t actually float,” Paula protested.

  “Says who?” he demanded. “Abbe Francésco said they did. I read his account online. He would have had to be a ridiculously stupid man not to know the difference between a field built up from the bottom of a lake and a field that could float about on the surface of a lake.”

  Paula didn’t voice the obvious conclusion. Instead, she said, “It’d be interesting if it were true. Have you made any progress?”

  Abuelo scowled. “Some. No. I’ve tried several basket types, tight woven and loose woven. And different materials. The Abbe says brush and willow, but if he was looking at what floats at the top, he might not have known for sure. Maybe he spoke to someone who didn’t want to give away the secret, or maybe he didn’t understand the names of the plants and guessed, or substituted things he was familiar with when he wrote it all down? I keep trying, though. I know it will work eventually.”

  He’d said the same thing about many projects over the years, from a can opener to a whole tractor, and he’d succeeded more often than he’d failed. Paula wasn’t sure about this one, though.

  Every schoolchild knew the chinampas hadn’t really floated. They had been wonderfully fertile, though, filled with rich soil dredged from the lake bottoms, and kept constantly moist by water seeping in through the woven sides. It might be worth pursuing, at least on a small scale. If the containment walls were tall enough to keep out the rising lake water? But rainwater would fill the containment unless there were drainage holes, and simple drainage would let rising lake water in. Pumps would be expensive; if the farmers could afford enough powerful pumps, they could protect the fields they already had.

  Paula put away the iron pot and picked up a bowl to dry. Her abuelo sipped his beer and rambled on about his chinampas.

  “The problem is getting the densities right,” he said, staring across the room at a dark-mirrored window. “Water mass is one gram per cubic centimeter. The chinampa needs a lower density, in total, basket and soil and plants all together. Most soils, even good farming dirt, are one-point-three to one-point-six. Some is one-point-two or even a bit lower, but that’s not good enough. The Aztecs must have had a way of lightening it.”

  Paula pondered that. She hadn’t realized it was so close. “What if they used some kind of hollow cane to make the basket? Something with enough buoyancy...?”

  “It would collapse when woven. If it were strong enough to hold its shape, it would be too rigid to weave.”

  “Are we sure they wove it?”

  “Ehhh....” He frowned in thought for a moment. “Even if we had bamboo, or something similar, it wouldn’t be enough.” He pulled out his phone and tapped for a minute, then shook his head. “It would help, but to support soil and crops? They planted trees on the chinampas. Some of the farmers built houses and lived on one. We need a large margin of density.”

  Paula put away the last of the utensils and sat on a stool near him. “We don’t need enough buoyancy for a house,” she pointed out. “Or even a tractor. These things weren’t that big, and most of the small farmers still use hand tools anyway, or animals.”

  “So enough for an ox, then, and a couple of men. With a good safety margin. That’s still more buoyancy than we’d get even with bamboo, unless we built it like an iceberg, with ninety percent of its bulk under the water.”

  “It won’t work.” Paula had been getting interested, but it was getting too complicated. “We need something a small farmer could do.” She laughed and shook her head. “As it is, expecting a small farmer to weave a basket the size of a field? It’s a fun idea, but not practical.”

  “Not for the Americans, maybe, with their thousands of acres and twenty-ton combines. Small farmers in third-world countries—” he sneered at the English phrase, “—are not afraid to work with their hands. Our ancestors wove baskets the size of a field and built pyramids, all with hand labor. The Egyptians built their pyramids. The Chinese built their Great Wall. It might take a long time, but we could do this. And every field that does not flood or slide down the hill is that much more security for the farmer, or his children and grandchildren. It would be worth the time and the labor—if we could show that it would work.”

  “If we could.” She could agree that far.

  Abuelo grunted and finished his beer. “Work tomorrow,” he said. “Let’s play for a while tonight, then bed.”

  Paula nodded and got up to get the pirinola, the top used to play toma todo. Even very young children learned to recognize the instructions written on the sides of the top and do what they said, putting coins into the pile or taking coins out; Paula had played with Abuelo since she was three. He’d cheated terribly to let her win then, but when she got older he’d clean her out with no mercy. She always brought a full jar of peso coins with her when she came to visit; sometimes she left with more,
and sometimes she left with less.

  On one visit, after Abuelo had retired, she’d tried to “cheat” to let him win, the way he had when she was small. She had a good job, and thought she could pass a bit of money back to him in his old age.

  She had never tried that again.

  ***

  The next morning there were tomatoes to pick, squash to weed, and chickens to feed. Paula had to laugh when she saw the chicken houses—Abuelo had separated his old chicken house into four smaller ones, and set them on top of old oil drums on their sides, six drums together in a wooden frame to support each small chicken house. The chickens strutted up and down the ramps between the doors and the ground, apparently unaware that their homes would float in a flood.

  Or maybe they did know?

  “Have the chickens had a sea voyage yet, Abuelo?”

  He grunted out a laugh. “Four times. They are old salts now. Some of them will even run for their house when the rain begins.”

  “You should tether the houses to something so they don’t wash away. A stake—” She cut herself off. No, estupida, that wouldn’t work at all. “A tree, maybe? A high branch, in case the water rises that far?”

  Abuelo shook his head. “If there were a strong current or heavy wind, the chicken houses would break apart jerking against a rope. I’d rather they wash away whole, so I could find them later. Or at least someone could find them, and have the use of them. If a storm is that bad, whoever finds them will need them. They do me no good drowned and buried in mud.”

  “You could put a GPS transmitter in each one,” she pointed out. “They’re cheap, and you’d be able to find them if they washed away.”

  She got another grunt, that one with a nod. “A good idea. I’ll order them this evening.”

  Floating chicken houses with GPS tracking could be useful for any small chicken farmer. Paula’s work didn’t involve livestock, but she knew others whose did. She pulled out her phone and posted the idea to a couple of agricultural and weather-related groups, so it could be spread further.