Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  She’d changed out of her sneakers into flip-flops after visiting the nests. Running in flip-flops on a path grown up thick in clover and scattered with broken branches doesn’t work, so she’s walking and crying when she gets to the path box, which is down on its side, metal post bent and half uprooted. It’s empty, the baby bluebirds fledged over the weekend, thank goodness. The box in the garden has been knocked over too—but that one’s not empty, Kaylee remembers now, there were six new hatchlings in that one this morning. She shakes off the flip-flops and runs to the gate, left open in Jane’s haste. The latch on the box popped open when it hit the ground; the nest has fallen out, scattering tiny pink bodies and loose feathers on the grass. Quick as she can, Kaylee stands the nest box up and steps on the base with her bare foot, to jam it back into the ground. She picks up the nest, built entirely out of Jane’s straw garden mulch—square outside like the square nest box, a soft lined cup inside—and fits it back in. Then, one by one, with extreme delicacy, she picks up the fragile, weightless baby birds, puts them back in their cradle, and latches the front. She can’t tell whether the tiniest are even alive, but a couple of others twitch a little bit when she’s handling them. It’s a warm day. Now, if the parents come fast, most of them ought to make it.

  But then Kaylee thinks, Where are the parents? She’s never once checked this nest, not while it was being built and not while the eggs were being incubated and not this afternoon, when the parents weren’t carrying on something terrible. There’s been no sign of them. With a sinking feeling she faces the truth: They were almost certainly killed in the tornado.

  She hears footsteps swishing through the clover and starts to explain before Jane even gets to the gate: “The garden box was down and the nest fell out, and I was trying to put everything back together, but the parents haven’t come back—what should we do?”

  Jane comes in carrying Kaylee’s flip-flops, looks into the box, then scans the sky, then shakes her head. “I doubt the parents survived. These babies won’t either unless we hand-raise them, which is a big job under ideal conditions and right now—nature can be ruthless, Kaylee. You did the right thing, and if the parents had come through, they could take over now. But as it is—”

  “You said we could hand-raise them? How?”

  Jane makes a pained face. “I’ve never tried it with swallows. With robins or bluebirds you make a nest, using an old bowl or something lined with paper towels. Then you soak dry dog food in water and feed them pinches of that every forty-five minutes, for a week or ten days. You have to change the paper towel every time you feed them, because they’ll poop on it. When they get bigger—”

  “Do we have dog food?” Kaylee says. “I want to try! I’m sorry I behaved like such a creep,” she adds contritely. All at once she desperately wants to try to save these morsels of life, helpless and blameless, from the wreckage of the world. How badly she wants this amazes her. She can see Jane thinking about it, wanting to refuse. “Please!” Kaylee says. “I’ll do everything myself, well, I will as soon as you teach me how. Do we have paper towels? Please, Jane, I just have to try this, I just have to.”

  With a rush of relief she sees Jane make up her mind. “Well—we do have dog food. Very expensive, low-fat dog food. No paper towels, but toilet paper and tissues. We can manage. But Kaylee, listen to me now: even experienced rehabbers commonly lose about half the baby birds they try to rear, more than half when the babies are so young. You can see why, when they’ve been stressed and banged around, and gotten chilled—I don’t want you to set your heart on this without understanding how hard it is to be successful.”

  Kaylee nods as hard as she can. “I understand! Really, I really do, I won’t go to pieces if it doesn’t work. Oh, thanks, Jane, thank you, I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d said no.”

  “But if we’re going to do this we need to act fast. We’ll take the whole nest,” she says. “Back to the house. It takes a little while for kibble to soften up, so we’ll start with canned; these babies need to get warmed up and fed ASAP.”

  “How come you’ve got all this stuff stashed under the stairs?” Kaylee asks Jane, when the little swallows are safely tucked into their artificial nest (Roscoe’s bowl, lined with Kleenex).

  First she and Jane had to hold the hatchlings in their hands, three apiece, to warm them up enough so they could eat; Jane said little birds can’t warm up by themselves when they first hatch out, which is why the mother has to brood them. “Normally we do this with a heating pad or a microwaved towel or something.” Then she opened a can of Hill’s Prescription Diet w/d, under the intense scrutiny of Roscoe and Fleece. “Watch this time, then next time you can help. Their gape response isn’t working, but it should come back once we can get a bite or two down the hatch,” Jane said. And sure enough, when Jane carefully pried a tiny beak open and pushed a bit of canned food as far back as she could with her little finger, and closed the beak to help the baby swallow, the beak opened again by itself.

  Now they had all been fed. (They hadn’t pooped, which probably just meant they hadn’t eaten since before the tornado.) And Kaylee, yearning over their bowl, thought to ask Jane about the supplies.

  Jane sits back in her chair, then stiffens. “Oh!” she says, “That’s what I cut myself on, that bracket on the shelf there. Wedged between paint cans. Can you push it back out of the way?” Kaylee gets up, holding the bowl carefully, and tucks the bracket out of sight; she is helpfulness itself. “Last summer,” Jane says when Kaylee sits back down on the mat, “after I’d been down here with the dogs three times in about three weeks, I started thinking, What if this was the real deal? All I’ve got in the way of emergency supplies is six jugs of water!” So I took a weekend and made a list and went shopping. Good thing I did.”

  “Are we getting more tornadoes than we used to? My mom keeps saying that, but my dad thinks she just doesn’t remember.”

  “I don’t think anybody knows for sure. But a lot of information about climate change passes through this house,” Jane says, and pauses, and Kaylee can tell she’s thinking, used to pass, so she hitches forward and looks very interested, and Jane catches herself and goes on: “… and I’ve seen several articles about the effect of climate change on weather lately, and quite a few climate scientists seem to be leaning that way. The argument goes that warmer ocean temperatures mean more storms. Heat is just energy, and heat affects how much moisture there is in the atmosphere.”

  “So more heat and more moisture in the atmosphere means more tornadoes?”

  “It means more frequent and more violent storms in general, apparently. There are computer models that say so, not that that proves anything necessarily. Tornadoes are complex, lots of things affect their formation—but it is true that they’ve been occurring earlier and farther north than they used to. Unusually high temperatures, unusually frequent tornadoes, so the thinking goes, and it does make sense. Though actually,” she adds, “there’ve always been more tornadoes in Kentucky than people think.”

  “We had something last year in science about Hoosier Alley,” Kaylee chimes in. “It was something about a new definition of Tornado Alley—if my SmartBerry was working I could look it up! But anyway, there’s still Tornado Alley but now they’re talking about Dixie Alley and Hoosier Alley and something else.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.” Jane winces and shifts in her chair.

  Pleased to think there was anything she knew that Jane didn’t, Kaylee says, “Hoosier Alley, that’s Indiana and the western two-thirds of Kentucky, and pieces of a couple other states too. So what all do you have here?”

  “Besides what you see?” Jane considers. “Mostly food. Cans and PowerBars. Dishes. Spare clothes. Tools. Stuff to clean up with. Also cans and kibble for the dogs—birds too, as it turns out.” Kaylee grins happily. “And speaking of birds, before it’s time to feed them again, would you mind helping me with this cut? I can’t see the darn thing, and I want to pour some peroxide in there to c
lean it out and bandage it with something less, ah, bulky. It’s going to need stitches but we’ll let a professional handle that part.”

  Kaylee does mind, quite a lot really, but she takes herself in hand and acts like she doesn’t. They climb back out the window—Jane’s set a little step stool just outside, to make it easier to come and go—and then Jane takes off the bloody shirt, and the tee shirt too this time, and holds the arm out from her side while Kaylee pours most of a bottle of peroxide into the jagged mouth of the wound, struggling to keep from gagging while pink bubbles froth and fizz there. In nothing but a bra, Jane’s back and arm look scrawny and old. She is old, Kaylee thinks uncomfortably; and while she’s helping apply the clean bandage and wash dried blood off the arm, and helping Jane into a clean shirt from one of the plastic tubs, she’s hoping she won’t have to do this again. She’s not proud of it, but that’s how she feels.

  When the arm has been dealt with, Jane becomes managerial. Feed the baby swallows. When that’s done, get the dogs out by lifting them through the window (Kaylee lifts, Jane directs, protecting her arm). Bring the boxes of supplies outside. The porch above the patio is gone, but they clear the pink insulation batts, tumbled firewood, broken branches, and nameless debris away, and have a firm, level surface to work on. It’s also enclosed by fencing which has survived the tornado, making it a good place for the dogs to sleep if it doesn’t rain tonight, and in fact the sky has cleared completely and the radio robot says it will stay clear. Roscoe and Fleece can look through the patio doors straight into the shelter.

  Amazingly, the outhouse has withstood the storm. A tree right next to it is down, but the little structure is still sitting there a trifle cattywompus on its foundation. “Praise the Lord,” Jane says, “at least that’s one problem we haven’t got.” She also says, “It might be a good thing these patio doors won’t open. They may be reinforcing the wall. We can stay in here and keep dry till they come to get us, unless there’s another storm.” Kaylee doesn’t want to think about another storm. “Let’s make a fire,” Jane says. “It’ll cheer us up to have something hot. Want to build it, Kaylee?” Kaylee admits she has no earthly idea how to go about building a fire. “Watch and learn, then” Jane says. “Next time it’ll be your turn.”

  The evening has turned chilly; the fire feels good. Kaylee puts down her empty plate and holds her mug of instant hot cider in both hands. She’s sitting on a log of firewood, but Jane’s chair has been handed through the window and Jane is sitting in that, cleaning up her plate of beans with the shambles of her house around her, as if nothing could be more natural. The dogs, stomachs full and bladders empty, lie peacefully on either side of Jane. There’s almost a campfire feeling to the moment, except when Kaylee accidentally looks at the light fixture from which the phoebe nest with its five babies has disappeared without a trace. She looks away quickly, and thinks instead about how deftly Jane built the fire. How she assembled the big sticks, smaller sticks, really tiny twigs, and dry grass Kaylee collected for her—combining them like following a sort of recipe—then lit one match, and hey presto! magicked forth the coals that heated the pots of water and beans. She says, “Where did you learn to build a fire like that? Without even any newspaper? My dad always uses lots of newspaper.”

  Jane hands her a granola bar and unpeels one for herself. “I usually use paper too, when I’m firing up the wood stove,” she says, and then there’s another one of those pauses when Kaylee knows she’s thinking But I’ll never do that again. Jane takes a deep breath. “But I always make fires for grilling or whatever without paper. One match, no paper, that’s the rule. I can’t do the ‘one match’ thing every single time, especially not if there’s any wind, but it seems like a good skill to keep up.”

  “But where? Did your parents teach you?” She bites off the end of the bar.

  “I learned in Scouts,” Jane says. “I was a Girl Scout from Brownies clear through high school. We did a lot of camping. Then later I was a counselor at different Scout camps for several summers. Primitive camps, these were, with latrines and cold water from a hydrant, and lots of campfire cooking. Plenty of fire-building practice, all in all.” In a moment she adds, “I never had any kids, but I always assumed I would, and I always thought that when I did I would teach them certain basic skills. How to swim, was one. How to build a fire with one match and no paper, that was another.”

  “I wish somebody’d taught me.”

  Jane laughs. “The last time I looked, somebody was teaching you! By the time you get home you’ll have something to show your dad. But the skills kids need nowadays are so different than they were when I was your age, it’s hard to believe. What are you, fourteen, fifteen?”

  Kaylee swallows her bite. “Fifteen last month.” She takes another.

  “You’ve got so many skills already, at fifteen, that I don’t have and never will have. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with that SmartBerry, for instance; I’ve seen your thumb going lickety-split on that thing and wondered how the dickens you do it!”

  Kaylee grins, feeling proud. Then the grin fades. She says slowly, “Right now those skills aren’t too useful, are they?”

  “We’re in a sort of time warp here, just for a couple of days. A natural disaster. When things get back to normal—”

  “But you were saying before,” Kaylee says, feeling funny, “that there’s going to be more and more natural disasters. Because of climate change.”

  Jane looks at her sharply. “I didn’t actually say that, you know. What I said was, some scientists think there will be, but we don’t know for sure.”

  It was obvious she was trying to avoid saying anything that would offend Kaylee’s parents if it got back to them, but Kaylee wanted to know what she really thought. “We’re pretty sure though, right?”

  After a moment Jane nods. “Yes, we are. We’re pretty damn sure. But it’s good to know how to manage whenever a crisis does come, nobody could argue with that.”

  “Right, but what I’m thinking now,” Kaylee says, refusing to be deflected from her line of thought, “is that there’s something wrong with getting so far away from knowing how to manage. I mean, if you weren’t here, what would I do? I don’t know anything, nobody I know knows anything! My mom would die if she had to use an outhouse! Let alone go in the bushes! I mean,” she said more quietly, “it’s not about outhouses, that’s dumb, but it seems like there’s just something wrong. About everybody getting so far away from, like, the basics.”

  Now Jane is looking at Kaylee in a new way, more serious, almost more respectful. “It could be argued,” she says finally, “that getting so far from the basics is one way of thinking about climate change. Why it’s happening. Why people don’t want to believe in it, so they won’t have to stop doing the things that make it worse.”

  “My parents sure don’t believe in it: they think it’s hogwash,” Kaylee admitted. “Nobody in my church believes in it. But,” she says, “you do, you live like this on purpose. Is that why? To stop making things worse?”

  Jane stands up carefully and stretches. “Time to feed the babies. When we’re done, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you about that.”

  Kaylee lies in the dark, thinking. She and Jane are sleeping in their clothes on the basement floor, in beds put together from a hodgepodge of old porch cushions and blankets. Kaylee has insisted that Jane take the only pillow; her own head rests on a bundle of Jane’s spare clothes stuffed in a bag. The dogs are sharing a blanket on the patio. A funky lamp in what looks like a pickle jar, that burns olive oil, is a comforting source of light in the otherwise total darkness.

  It turns out you don’t have to feed hatchlings every forty-five minutes all night, only during the daytime. The six babies are asleep too on the work bench, their dog bowl nestled in the hollow of a hot-water bottle, covered by a towel.

  Kaylee’s thinking about Jane’s story. It turns out that living like this—conserving water, composting, recyling everythi
ng, composting, driving as little as possible, generating some of her own electricity, growing most of her own food, buying most of the rest locally (“Except tea. I could give up tea only if there were none to be had.”)— is consistent with trying to reduce the impact of people on climate change. But Jane had been living like this long before anyone had thought to worry about global warming. The reason is that when Jane was in college she had met an old couple who were living completely off the grid, except they had an old car they used to go to cultural events sometimes. They had no electricity, no phone or indoor toilet. Their cistern was higher than the house, so they didn’t need a pump. They would never have even noticed a power outage. “They would have noticed a tornado,” Kaylee had said darkly, and Jane had nodded ruefully. “They were lucky. A huge tornado came quite close to their place about forty years ago, but it missed them.”