by Ginger Booth
“Remember, we created PR in the first place to be exactly that – PR, public relations, for PR, Project Reunion. Because we needed to mobilize the public to do Project Reunion. We needed them to take in refugees and feed them. And we needed continued support in volunteers and taxes. That was a full-out propaganda effort.
“What I’m trying to say, darlin’, is that it’s less clear to me what you want now. Do you want Dee’s news program to be a better news program? Sounds like you have few allies aligned on that goal. Maybe not even your current staff. Do you just want Amenac–PR to survive? Do you want to get rid of censorship because it’s inherently bad, or inherently anti-democratic? Seems to me we only have a democracy at the local level, and there is no censorship there. So that argument is weak.”
“You can’t meant that, Emmett!”
“Actually, I do,” he said. “But, from the point of view of the Raj. From Sean Cullen’s point of view, or my own. As a Resco, does the public need to know why I’m giving a particular order? Or just enough to win their cooperation? Dee, the Army isn’t in the habit of explaining its orders.”
“You’re an alien. How did I end up married to an alien.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry. You were explaining something that I probably needed to hear.”
“Doesn’t matter. You already knew it,” he said coolly. “You want to put more truth on the news, show Sean Cullen how truth is useful to him. If it’s not useful to him, don’t bother him with the sales pitch.”
“I’m sorry I snapped at you, Emmett,” I said. “You’re right, of course. So what is useful to Sean Cullen? And the Raj.”
“Already said. Gain public cooperation. Prevent its opposite. Attacks on food distribution hubs. Insurrections. Riots. Panic migrations. Dee, martial law only exists for one purpose. Ensure public order. It’s what we do. Everything we do, is in support of that mission. If you want to do something else, that’s nice. But we can’t let you make it harder for us to enforce public order.”
“Truth can make people more cooperative.”
“Explaining ourselves encourages them to argue and wheedle and debate,” Emmett countered. “Darlin’, you know us. Sean and Pete and I never wanted what’s going down in Jersey now. But that’s what we’re here for. Prevent all the trouble we can. Contain and stop any public disorder we can’t prevent.”
“You do more than that, Emmett,” I murmured. “Hudson is more than that.”
“Hope so, darlin’,” he relented. “But it can’t be less.”
“Understood. That’s why Amenac backed you all along. We were traveling the same road even before we met.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Even though we’re mutual aliens. Imagine that.”
“You’re mad?”
“Sad,” he said.
“I do love you, alien.”
“Love you, too, little alien. Did that –? Nah, I should probably butt out of your business now.”
“Yeah, no, it helped. Thank you. Say, Emmett? Is Hudson really going to war against New England?”
“Hudson has no beef with New England,” Emmett said. “Nobody’s shooting. Brazeau, the lead Resco, ordered Vermont and New Hampshire into lock down, just like Connecticut. Our…envoys…stop at each checkpoint. Politely request permission to continue on. Permission granted. Then they move on to the next.”
“How many troops to our ‘envoys’?” I asked.
“Ops detail, darlin’,” he said, meaning he wouldn’t tell me if he knew. Army officers do not divulge operational details. “I’m not involved anyway. This is a regular army operation, not downstate Rescos. I directed street sweepers and civilian dislocations today, myself.”
I couldn’t help smiling at that. I remembered Emmett choreographing hundreds of thousands through the massive dance of Project Reunion. His understated style and lazy drawl belied a phenomenal managerial capacity, a bazillion details to track, like platters to keep spinning atop their poles. Sand on the streets of Brooklyn and Queens didn’t stand a chance against Emmett. My smile faded as I thought of how many bodies, how much wreckage, were tangled in that ‘sand.’
“So it won’t turn into war,” I said.
“Not if we can help it,” Emmett said. “We require that Ivan Link let us get his nuclear reactors under control. Nothing more. But if Link can’t hold New England together, then, yeah, more. Whatever more it takes.”
“But Vermont and New Hampshire seceded,” I said. “Or does that not have legal credence?”
“Bob Brazeau cast a vote of no confidence,” Emmett allowed. “So did Carlos and John Niedermeyer, for Connecticut. I can bet the Resco of Narragansett is plenty unhappy today, too. But whether Ivan Link is one of his problems, I don’t know. But Brazeau’s way out on a limb. I don’t know how this will play out. Nuclear reactor’s non-negotiable though. We wouldn’t put up with Link polluting the Connecticut River upstream, either. No different. But the troops, Dee, that’s a symbolic gesture. Until it isn’t.”
“When you war-gamed the Calm Act at Leavenworth, did you foresee things like this?”
After a long pause, Emmett replied, “Darlin’, questions like that make me wish you’d ditch PR News, so I could confide in my wife. But this is part of who you are. I respect that.”
“Right back at you,” I said. “Sorry I pushed too far. I don’t know where too far is, until I cross the line.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You wouldn’t really want me to ditch PR News, would you?”
“Not your boss, Dee. On a personal level? Mm, I think you could take it less personally. It’s the world. PR News reports on a little of it. Sometimes censorship decides what little. Sometimes lack of access. Usually lack of interest. It isn’t Dee’s news. It’s a conversation between the Northeast and itself. You provide the forum.”
“Climate change is where I most want to relax the censorship.”
“Knowing more hasn’t made me happier,” he said. “Doubt it’ll make anyone else more effective, either.”
That was an interesting choice of word, I thought. “Effective? At what?”
“Putting the world away in good order,” Emmett said. “Better than when we found it. That’s what life’s all about, right?”
I blinked. “I thought Adam Lacey coined PIAGO during Project Reunion.”
PIAGO had become something of a meme since then, one of the standard Internet acronyms – Put It Away in Good Order. Even if I am doomed myself, I shall put away my things in good order for the next person to pick up and carry on. Adam was admiring the Staten Island ferry crews at the time. They probably died in agony during the Ebola outbreak. But first they put their boats away properly, ready for Adam to revive into service again. The sentiment was a trifle dark. But I caught myself thinking it all the time, with gardening tools, or my sewing machine, or my house in Connecticut. I put them away in good order, in case it was never me who put them to use again.
Emmett said, “Adam probably picked it up from Niedermeyer. That’s who I got it from. Back at Leavenworth.”
The conversation drifted elsewhere, into intimate things at long last. But later, after we hung up, I thought about that one for a long time. What a sad little remnant of the American Dream, to put the world away in good order. Before the Calm, I couldn’t imagine saying that PIAGO was what life was all about.
18
Interesting fact: Though people scrabbled hard to earn their food after the Calm Act, the ranks of naturalists continued to rise. Several of the teams on tsunami watch in Jersey and Long Island were experienced bird-watchers. Some of the new naturalists also had an eco-terrorist bent, viewing themselves as defenders of wildlife against agrarian aggression. If such people sabotaged agriculture, they were dealt with severely in Connecticut and the other densely populated coastal areas. But they won some communities over in Hudson’s Upstate, and in northern New England.
I took a couple hours off from Amenac–PR to volunteer as naturalist and native gui
de the next morning. Alex accompanied me, plus my old camera woman from Project Reunion, Kyla, a silent eye observing everything. The crew boss Manolo Mora sent, Don Murray, stared at Kyla awkwardly. At first he spoke in stilted sentences. But gradually he relaxed and followed my lead to ignore her.
The Farm River between East Haven and Totoket fed a good size marsh, spreading a couple miles from our reservoir to the Sound, and another several miles across. Surrounded by woods and houses and roads on all sides, the marsh also featured a large hill jutting out into it, with a trap rock quarry. A remnant of old trolley line ran across the marsh, skirting the hill. Between all that, the marsh offered excellent access for cutting marsh turfs for transplant. Aside from the trolley quirk, that was probably true of a hundred estuaries strung along the Connecticut shore.
But I knew this one, from thousands of visits, in every season. When I was a kid, we explored in here, playing make-believe pirates or Revolutionary soldiers, or medieval knights and princesses, or just brought a picnic, and played in assorted tree forts and ruins. I recommended one of the ruins to Zack for the Totoket food cache early in the Calm. The old concrete bunker was easy to reach, yet off the mapped roads, suitable to hide and defend.
As a teenager, I’d walked my dog through the marsh, and snuck around there for illicit activities, beers and joints, fumbling gropes and kisses. Some of my best wild raspberry plots were by the trap rock cliff face. I took books out of the library on edible and useful wild plants, and hunted them in the marsh. Crabbing, fishing, bird-watching, swimming, kayaking, canoeing, tooling around on a motor boat – this marsh was a big part of my life. Alex had even found Angel here, the lost little girl I’d taken into my heart and life, for such a short time.
I told Delilah the best access for Don Murray and his crew would be from the East Haven green, not Totoket. First I walked him from the green through the cemetery, whose lawns, dotted with stately trees, sloped gently into the marsh. Indeed, the cemetery would likely grow into marsh this year, and no one could stop it. The winter-brown lawn was already squishy with the water left by high tide.
I pointed out a low bowl in the land, circled by trees, free of headstones, to Kyla and Alex. “I played hooky from middle school once, and hid there to read Catcher in the Rye.” The peaceful bowl of lawn would fill with water soon. The paved cemetery road looped within 30 feet of the marsh grasses.
“Yeah, this is perfect,” Don agreed. In rapid-fire Spanish he detailed the first crew to start cutting. The mostly Hispanic crew he’d brought along would be quadrupled with day laborers from East Haven and Totoket. Hudson overflowed with temporary hands, whose careers and livelihoods were gone. A good day was any day that brought work, and it didn’t matter much what kind. Hispanic lawn crews and fruit pickers and manual laborers, whom the suburbanites had doubtless ignored or looked down on all their lives, were often their bosses now. Don Murray’s experienced farm hands knew how to do the manual labor involved. The crew tried their best to direct the throng of unemployed paper-pushers, cashiers, caterers, and assorted unfortunates who had no more marketable value now than as unskilled labor.
In Connecticut as in Brooklyn, day laborers were painfully thin, especially this time of year. Some looked eager to do something worthwhile and interesting today. More cast sullen and resentful looks at their healthy, muscular, and well-fed supervisors with their broken English. Don Murray, not Hispanic himself, took it in stride.
He told them to cut sparingly here by the cemetery, in lines radiating into the marsh, and carry the turfs onto the green to drain. Maybe they’d even keep them on the green for storage. It was a big green, and brackish water was readily available to keep the turf cuttings from drying out until new homes were found for them.
“This way is the interesting bit, Don,” I told him. I led him through the cemetery, then along the street, toward the trolley museum. Along the way I read headstones. Porpora, Dicarlo, Nucci, Esposito, Sabbattini, Giordano – no question East Haven was an Italian town. But other stones told different stories. I paused briefly by the grave of Georgina Ann Horwitz, first lieutenant, US Army, WWII. I wondered what she did in the war, as an officer no less. Nurse? Clerical work? She hadn’t outlived the war by long.
“Don, do you know if these graves will be moved?” I asked.
He shrugged unconcern, and kept walking. His business was landscaping, not cemeteries.
As I stepped back into the street after him, I remembered another grave, unmarked. We buried Major Canton Bertovich, the death angel responsible for New York City, in a marsh not unlike this one, just a few months ago. Though his was more remote, in the Jersey Meadowlands north of Newark Bay. We knew his slight rise amidst the grasses would inevitably be claimed by the marsh. We didn’t expect it this soon.
It was hard enough to accept all the dead of the past couple years. Knowing that their stones and all memory of them would be lost too, so soon, brought tears. I blinked them back firmly. Georgina and Canber were dead, at peace. We who survived had the hard part.
“Keep going,” I told Don, directing him onto a wooden footbridge above the Farm River, running alongside the trolley rail bridge. I pointed north. “This is the main channel of the Farm River. You can’t see it, but the reservoir on Route 1 is maybe a couple hundred yards from here. So these marsh grasses are more suited to less salt. Could your trucks drive on the trolley tracks? This is the tricky part, crossing the bridge. If they can, then you’ve got access straight through the center of the marsh, all along the saline gradient – fresh water to sea water.”
Don frowned, and nodded skeptically.
“Another possibility,” I added, “is to get the trolleys running. Then use a trolley through the marsh, and offload here to your trucks. But I think there’s a dirt road up here to the left as well, which could bypass the bridge.”
“How long has it been since the trolleys worked?” Don asked.
“Only a couple years. Maybe less,” I said. “I’ve driven them. It’s easy. Just need power to the lines,” I pointed to the overhead electric cables, “and you’re in business. I think. Um, I’ve never actually turned one on.”
“Oh, yeah?” Don used a walkie-talkie to summon one of his crew. This particular guy – Chapin – came at a trot. He didn’t speak English, and ignored me. After a short discussion, he split off into the trolley museum. “Checking the power,” Don explained.
We crossed the freshwater channel on the wet wooden footbridge, the river only a foot or two beneath our feet. This surface was already underwater at high tide. If the water didn’t stop rising soon, the bridge would be underwater all the time. At low tide now, it looked like high tide, the mid-marsh showing plenty of water between tips of drowned grass.
We continued along the tracks, shuffling through wet old leaves over gravel, and occasionally kicking a branch off the rails. The taller edging marsh grass, winter-dead pampas grass tassels and cat-tails, waved high above our heads to the right. The steep wooded hill rose to the left, with a few more houses. Back yards full of livestock ran down to the tracks. One of Don’s crew cordially snatched up a rooster from the tracks and deposited him back on his own side of a ramshackle chicken wire fence. Goats, sheep, a pony, turkeys, and geese wandered around the property.
“They need to move the livestock, don’t they?” Alex trotted up to ask me.
I’d met the people here. The extended family of an Italian immigrant had the last several houses on the road that paralleled the tracks. It wasn’t exactly a farm. The old man kept animals because he thought they were good for his grandchildren. Animals kept children busy and even-tempered, and out of the house, he explained to me once.
I nodded to Alex. “They’re good folk,” I agreed. “I forget the name. Offer to help them if you want.”
Alex nodded back. He clambered over the chicken wire to find the owners and inquire their plans.
“Road up to Route 1,” I pointed out to Don a little farther up the tracks. A steep dirt road,
the end of the street that fronted the livestock pseudo-farm, climbed down the hill to meet the tracks in a sharp V to our left.
“And the trolley yard.” This opened up to our right, tracks splitting and joining to wend through long warehouse-like trolley garages. The rail plaza extended out into the marsh. “There are more little flat bits of land to the right all along here,” I pointed. “And with the hill to the left, it should be safe to work here as the tide rises. They can always climb the hill for safety.”
We could plainly see on the trees how far the tsunami surge had risen here, only a foot above the trolley rails. The ridge rose nearly a hundred feet higher. If the tsunami struck here the way it did Long Island, Cam and I would have been mere seconds from complete safety. This coast wasn’t like that one. Connecticut had beaches. But this was a rocky coast, not a sandy one. Long Island was our barrier island. The Sound was nearly enclosed, its mouth to the Atlantic a bare mile or two across, fifty miles to the east.
“Have you seen enough, or want to keep going?” I asked Don.
“You said there was a food cache up this way, with paved access?” Don asked. “Maybe we should walk this more, and scope out the tracks.”
“Sure, I’d love to,” I agreed. And I meant it. This might be the last chance I had to say good-bye to this hill, these raspberry brambles, this river and marsh.
We passed a Christmas wreath and fairy lights strung up in a little train platform, part of the trolley museum. They provided train rides to the North Pole to visit Santa at Christmas, right up until the borders slammed closed on New York City because of the Ebola outbreak.
“Dee, if you’re crying about it, you should tell the camera,” Kyla prompted.
So, I told her. Occasionally I’d break and point out features to Don – unusual marsh grasses and herbs, berries and sumac with high salt tolerance. But mostly I told the camera about the Farm River estuary and what it meant to me. I pointed out the heron nests a high school friend had built. He died of diabetes, a disease easy enough to manage before the Calm, but a slow death sentence now. Insulin supplies were spotty, their quality dubious, refrigeration intermittent. The PR News audience already knew that.