by Nancy Smith
An enormous cylinder, a pipe seeming to go nowhere, stretched into the lakebed and stopped at a pumping station near the middle. If viewed from space, its size belied, he might think the pipe was any sewer line. But, just like the Alaskan pipeline was built to deal with the 1973 oil crisis, this pipeline was built to deal with this current water crisis.
Above the edge of the dirt pit that had been the lake floor, construction was near completion on Frank’s baby, an enormous hydro-farm, a long arched greenhouse, set high on concrete pilings that were solidly encased in glass and wire mesh making a 360-degree window around the farm.
One hundred feet from the farm was a dilapidated, broken power station shorn up by solar power from a home panel grid. Before the drought, many individuals had installed solar panels on the roofs of their homes and had sold any excess back to the city. At the time, the amount of electricity that the power station produced had been woefully inadequate causing black outs and shut downs. The solar power generated by the home panels had been swept up and targeted to the local hospitals and police stations with the promise that if there were excess it would be rationed back to the homes. He was still waiting for that to happen.
An assistant, Frank couldn’t recall his name, a young man in dirty jeans, his thin hair pulled into a ratty tail, exited the building and grinned as he walked past Frank.
“Morning, Dr. Harvey.”
“Hi there.” Frank could tell by Pony’s face that he knew that Frank didn’t know his name. Frank had a dozen assistants, all of which he hired because they worked well independently. This allowed Frank to focus on what he needed to do.
“Big day,” Pony said.
Frank nodded in acknowledgement. It was a big day. His heartbeat raced and not solely from his jog. Frank slowed to a walk and then stopped altogether, his hands on his knees, as he gasped for breath.
At the start of the famine, farmers had cut down their drought-ruined crops. With no hope of germination of the next crop, they hadn’t bothered to plant more. With no water for the animals or their pasturelands, ranchers had sent their herds to market early. They’d auctioned beef and pork at triple price, until there was no more. Like Easter Islanders who had cut down their last tree guaranteeing their own demise, the farmers had plowed under their last field and the ranchers had sold their last cow to market, thus guaranteeing a famine that could not end.
As dry as it was here, that’s how wet it was on the east coast. Florida over to the Louisiana Gulf Coast overflowed with water, rivers of water, floods of water, water with nowhere to go.
Frank was determined to transport the water from where they had too much to the empty reservoir. There was no understating what a full lake could mean to the city. Austin could be one of the last places on earth where sunshine and water came together in reasonable proportions to make food.
Frank had gone to his boss, Pierce Wagner, with his idea for a pipeline. Frank worked for a think tank funded by the Wagner Company. The think tank looked for solutions to an ever-growing list of survival issues.
Frank had done a lot of research into hydraulics, irrigation and water management. He had a plan for growing food, a good plan, one he knew would work.
“Aren’t you a botanist? Wouldn’t you need an engineer for this?” Wagner had asked.
“I’ll hire if I can. I’ll figure it out if I can’t.”
“Hasn’t a pipeline been tried before?”
“It failed for political reasons, not scientific ones.”
“When was that? Before the collapse?”
Frank nodded.
Frank had been stunned when the Wagner Company funded his project instantly and completely. Wagner had practically thrown money at him.
Pushed by an ambitious schedule, Frank had built his pipeline from a water restoration and reclamation plant on the Mississippi River at Shreveport, Louisiana all the way to the refurbished water storage reservoir at the Lake Travis pumping station. Shreveport was the most populated city within eight hundred miles. It lay about 335 miles east of Austin, across a vast expanse of parched nothing. Stragglers from what should have been upstream states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Illinois poured into Shreveport from spaces where the ground was so sterilized that nothing would ever grow again. On the coast, the water level rose in Houston, Baton Rouge and New Orleans making those places inhospitable and so their populations escaped to Shreveport as well.
Shreveport had plenty of water and a good amount of sunshine, but food was pathetically insufficient to feed their ever-growing population. Shreveport had taken up arms to deter any further population increase, but they still needed additional resources from somewhere. He had heard a rumor that thousands of people had barricaded themselves in a casino—already a small village of its own—and protected themselves with whatever force was necessary.
Frank entered the back door of the glass hydroponics farm. Under a filtered glass skylight, row after row of dirt sat in what would soon be a mineral nutrient bath connected by a weave of intertwined gutters. Frank walked down an aisle, checking on pictures, signs that indicated what would sprout with regular water: strawberry vines, tomatoes, and green beans.
Hundreds of thousands had died in Austin alone. Billions had died around the world. This was his responsibility, his job—to create food — to save his family: Etta and Alex—to save them all.
