Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  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.

  With both of them working, they finished in time for a late lunch. Paula took a shower first, and by the time she went to the kitchen to forage, Abuelo was fiddling with one of his baskets, out in his chair in deference to decency.

  “Workroom is yours again, ’Buelo.”

  He nodded and hauled his things back to the other room. Paula found leftover beans, squash, cheese, and tortillas, and rolled up a couple of quick burritos. She made herself sit to eat them, since indigestion later wouldn’t help anything, then headed back to see what Abuelo was doing.

  Hunched over a half-finished basket, he was fiddling with wood and glue. Paula peered over his shoulder and saw he was fitting a deck into the bottom of the basket.

  “Air space,” said Abuelo. “A sealed chamber for air would give it the buoyancy it needs.”

  “Yes, but . . .” She frowned and tried to think of how it would scale up.

  “Aye, but. You’re right—I could make it airtight on a model but never on something full size. A factory could do it, but it would be too expensive for the size we need.”

  Air space. Buoyancy. Soil density.

  It was a good idea but didn’t have to be all in one chamber. Maybe small balloons?

  Or not even balloons. They didn’t need actual air pockets; pockets of lower density, greater than air but significantly less than water—that would do.

  Paula remembered José’s project, adding amendments to the soil to lighten it. That was exactly what they needed. But it didn’t have to be anything fancy or special-made;
anything light, nontoxic, breakable into small bits, and not easily crushed in the soil—even when wet—would work.

  “Junk—I need to look through your junk!” Paula dashed out of the room, heading for the junk heap behind the house.

  Abuelo always had a junk heap—piles of stuff he saved for some day when it might come in handy. Leftovers, scraps, things he collected, things that were broken, all sorts of things lived in a good junk heap. A mature junk heap could produce parts for a water pump or a wheelbarrow or a sink or a computer. What she needed was simpler than that.

  Paula dug through it, tossing things right and left, digging through the refuse, looking for something she just knew Abuelo had to have. . . .

  “If you told me what you needed—”

  “Aye! Here!” Paula pulled up a chunk of dirty white Styrofoam. It looked like it’d come packed in a box as protection for whatever had been shipped in it. Once you unpacked your new whatever, the Styrofoam was useless; there was tons of it in junk heaps all over the world, and considering how light the stuff was, that was a lot.

  “Packing foam?” Abuelo frowned, then nodded. “We could put a layer of the stuff on the bottom of the basket. That might work.”

  Paula took her chunk of foam and dashed past him, toward the garden. “Better!” she called. She grabbed a bucket and knelt in the dirt, scooping soil up with a trowel, filling the bucket about two-thirds. “The basket, one of your finished baskets! We’re going to float a plant!”

  Abuelo grunted but headed inside. By the time he got back with a basket, she had the Styrofoam chopped into nut-sized chunks. “It should be smaller,” she said. “We’ll have to think of a way to get it smaller, about the size of lemon seeds, or even a bit smaller than that. But this will work for now.”

  She mixed the foam bits into the soil, using the trowel like a spatula, folding the bits into the soil like nuts into cake batter.

  A layer of the foam-studded soil went into the basket, about three fingers deep, then she carefully transplanted a young comino, filling the space around it with more foam-dotted soil.

  “There. Shall we launch it?” She beamed up at her abuelo and got a lined smile in return.

  “Aye, let’s try it. To the lake.”

  They went down to the lakeshore, a quiet arm of a larger body that bordered his land. Ridges and markings in the soil, rock, and foliage showed where the lake had risen in the recent past. It was also probably higher than usual because of the previous night’s rain. It was quiet now, but when it stormed, the little lake could turn into a monster, devouring land and anything else in its path.

  If Paula had accounted for all the variables, it would never devour this tiny “field.”

  Crouching on the lakeshore, she set the small basket into the water. She held it for a few moments, testing its buoyancy, waiting to see whether the water soaking in would change anything. It shouldn’t, but “shouldn’t” wasn’t always so; that was what experimentation was for.

  “Well, let it go. Let’s see what it does.”

  Paula nodded and released the basket. She stood up to watch.

  It floated.

  The basket itself, the willow or whatever Abuelo had used for this one, was darkening as it absorbed water. The soil was surely absorbing water as well. It shouldn’t matter, though; the soil was light and loose, and the foam bits should take the average density down well below that of the water, even after water seeped in wherever it could.

  They watched it for a few minutes, then Abuelo said, “It would be easier to just put a chunk of Styrofoam in the bottom.”

  “Easier, yes,” said Paula. “But it’s more stable with the buoyancy spread over the entire soil depth. It would be more likely to flip with all the foam at the bottom.”

  Abuelo grunted assent.

  They watched for a while longer, then he said, “Mixing small pellets of foam into the soil also gives the soil more depth for the roots. It doesn’t matter with maize, a few others, but some plants want to send their roots deeper. Mixing the foam in lets us get deeper soil without having to weave a deeper basket.”

  “Another good point,” Paula said.

  Still, weaving a basket the size of a field? Even a small one? The chinampas weren’t exactly forty acres, but still . . .

  “How were you planning to weave a field-size basket once you were done with your models?”

  “I thought I would weave the basket on land, then launch it like a boat. Fill it with soil once it was in the water.” He frowned down at the little basket, still floating. “Our ancestors dredged dirt off the bottom of the lake. Very rich and fertile, but also heavy, and difficult to bring up. More difficult than just shoveling in dry dirt.”

  “Maybe use dirt from landslides to begin? Dirt will probably sift slowly out of the basket—you’ll have to top up each year anyway, yes? Use lake dirt for that.”

  “Could work,” said Abuelo.

  “It looks like it’s soaked through,” said Paula. “It’s still floating.” She couldn’t stop smiling, and although her abuelo was not a demonstrative man, she gave him a big hug and a kiss on the cheek anyway. “This is it; the principle works. If it scales up, if the farmers can do it, if it’s cheap enough? I think we have an answer.”

  “Not immediately, even if it works. This is a long-term answer.”

  “Large problems always have large answers. You taught me that.”

  “I’m glad you were listening.” He gave a grunt that was as close as she’d ever heard to a laugh out of him. “So, the work gets harder, yes? Now we have to build one full size.”

  * * * *

  Paula came back the next five weekends. On the first weekend, she found that Abuelo had built a frame out of reclaimed beams. They spent two days trying to weave willow wands among the beams, but it didn’t work well, even with adding more support structure. And there weren’t enough willow trees in the area, anyway.

  The second weekend, she brought José and his girlfriend Martina, who was an anthropology major. Martina seemed to be more excited than any of them, even when Paula hauled five rolls of bright orange plastic from the trunk of her car.

  “Strong, light, and cheap!” she declared to Abuelo. He grunted, and they wove with the plastic. After the first hour, they gave up on trying to keep it flat and just let it crinkle up however it wanted. By Sunday afternoon, they had an ugly orange basket, twelve meters wide by fifty meters long and three meters deep.

  After that, they spent their weekends filling it. On the third weekend, they launched the basket. It didn’t float very well by itself, but they pushed on, and Paula, Martina, and José dumped dirt into it bucket by bucket while Abuelo chopped up the Styrofoam he’d scrounged during the week. The basket sank to the bottom by midafternoon; luckily, the water was shallow and the top half stuck up into the air, making it look like a tiny, fenced-off swimming area.

  The fourth week, they had plenty of Styrofoam bits, and all four of them mixed and hauled and heaved dirt. By midafternoon Sunday, even Martina was less enthusiastic, but just before they quit for the evening, Abuelo stared at the basket, then gave it a shove. “It’s floating,” he said.

  And he was right.

  The fifth week, Paula’s department head, Profesor Nuñez, came along. He gaped at the basket, the size of a home vegetable garden, floating serenely in the lake.

  “It rained on Wednesday,” said Abuelo. “Very hard. I had to swim out with a rope long enough to go around the whole thing, then tow it back to shore with my truck. But it’s still floating.”

  Profesor Nuñez stared at him for a moment, then back at the basket, the chinampa, then nodded. “How long did it take you to make it?”

  Paula had already told him, but she let Abuelo repeat it. While she and Abuelo and the two students got to work hauling dirt, Profesor Nuñez got out his phone. He took video and sent it around, with excited messages Paula didn’t hear clearly because she was working. But the next day, Profesor Nuñez came back with the Minis
ter of Agriculture and the smiling, blond Tufflon spokesman in his expensive casual suit. He took a video of his own, smiling even wider.

  “They’ll come out with special ‘extra buoyant’ plastic and raise the price; you just watch,” muttered José.

  “We had rolls of plastic before they came,” Abuelo said with a shrug. “We’ll use the old stuff again if theirs gets too expensive.

  Paula nodded and filled another bucket. She had no doubt that someone would market special Styrofoam pellets, too. Some people would probably use them, but the thrifty farmers would get theirs from trash barrels and junk heaps, chop it up themselves, and have it for free. Poor people were fiercely practical that way.

  They finished filling the chinampa, leaving about half a meter empty to form a barrier against the lake. It wasn’t watertight, but it would prevent rough waves from rolling across the crops during storms.

  Paula came alone the next weekend. Abuelo already had the whole chinampa planted—she recognized the scattered sprouts as maize—and a group of farmers come by to stare at it. Older people, mostly, Abuelo’s friends. They were all talking, arguing, gesturing.

  One silver-haired woman was trying to figure out how to build them on dry land to protect against flooding but not need a lake to float on. That was an interesting problem too—keeping roots from anchoring the thing to the soil it sat on would be the key issue, Paula thought.

  They’d go away still talking, and the chinampas would spread. Not next week or next month or even next year, but more and more, there’d be crops that lasted through the storms and floods.

  She wondered what the people in countries where farming was huge and industrialized would do. She and Abuelo had talked of that, and she still couldn’t see someone used to driving a combine around thousands of acres, with radio and air conditioning, building a chinampa.

  That wasn’t their worry, however. The small farmers in the poor countries would grow more and prosper, and their people would eat.

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR