Diane finished and Frank held out a hand to help her. She took it and hauled herself up, their grips tightening to hold. When she was up the young woman moved in to replace her, but Diane took up a towel and said, “Wait a second, let me wipe up the wet spot.”
“Oh I hate the wet spot,” the young woman said, and immediately threw a hand to her mouth, blushing vividly. Frank and Diane laughed, and seeing it the young woman did too, glowing with embarrassment. Diane gave the bench a final flourish and handed it over, saying, “There, if only it were always that easy!”
They laughed again and Frank and Diane moved to the next machine. Military press, leg curls; then Diane looked at her watch and said, “Oops, I gotta get going,” and Frank said “Me too,” and without further ado they were off to their respective locker rooms. “See you over there.” “Yeah, see you.”
Into the men’s room, the shower, ahhhh. Hot water must have been unusual in the hominid world. Hot springs, the Indian Ocean shallows. Then out on the street, the air still cool, feeling as benign as he had in a long time. And Diane emerged at the same time from the women’s locker room, transformed into work mode, except wetter. They walked over to NSF together, talking about a meeting they were scheduled to attend later in the day. Frank arrived in his office at eight A.M. as if it were any ordinary morning. He had to laugh.
The meeting featured a presentation by Kenzo and his team to Diane, Frank’s committee, and some of the members of the National Science Board, the group that oversaw the Foundation in somewhat a board-of-directors style, if Frank understood it correctly. By the time Frank arrived, a large false-color map of the North Atlantic was already on the screen. On it the red flows marking the upper reaches of the Gulf Stream broke apart and curled like new ferns, one near Norway, one between Iceland and Scotland, one between Iceland and Greenland, and one extending up the long channel between Greenland and Labrador.
“This is how it used to look,” Kenzo said. “Now here’s the summer’s data from the Argos buoy system.”
They watched as the red tendrils shrank in on themselves until they nearly met, at about the latitude of southern Ireland. “That’s where we’re at now, in terms of temperature. Here’s surface height.” He clicked to another false-colored map that revealed what were in effect giant shallow whirlpools, fifty kilometers wide but only a few centimeters deep.
“This is another before map. We think these downwelling sites were pretty stable for the last eight thousand years. Note that the Coriolis force would have the currents turning right, but the land and sea-bottom configurations make them turn left. So they aren’t as robust as they might be. And then, here’s what we’ve got now—see? The downwelling has clearly shifted to southwest of Ireland.”
“What happens to the water north of that now?” Diane asked.
“Well—we don’t know yet. We’ve never seen this before. It’s a fresh-water cap, a kind of lens on the surface. In general, water in the ocean moves in kind of blobs of relative freshness or salinity, you might say, blobs that mix only slowly. One team identified and tracked the great salinity anomaly of 1968 to ’82, that was a huge fresher blob that circled in the North Atlantic on the surface. It made one giant circuit, then sank on its second pass through the downwelling zone east of Greenland. Now with this fresh-water cap, who knows? If it’s resupplied from Greenland or the Arctic, it may stay there.”
Diane stared at the map. “So what do you think happened to cause this fresh-water cap?”
“It may be a kind of Heinrich event, in which icebergs float south. Heinrich found these by analyzing boulders dropped to the sea floor when the icebergs melted. He theorized that anything that introduces more fresh water than usual to the far North Atlantic will tend to interfere with downwelling there. Even rain can do it. So, we’ve got the Arctic sea ice break-up as the main suspect, plus Greenland is melting much more rapidly than before. The poles are proving to be much more sensitive to global warming than anywhere else, and in the north the effects look to be combining to freshen the North Atlantic. Anyway it’s happened, and the strong implication is that we’re in for a shift to the kind of cold-dry-windy climate that we see in the Younger Dryas.”
“So.” Diane looked at the board members in attendance. “We have compelling evidence for an ocean event that is the best-identified trigger event for abrupt climate change.”
“Yes,” Kenzo said. “A very clear case, as we’ll see this winter.”
“It will be bad?”
“Yes. Maybe not the full cold-dry-windy, but heck, close enough. The Gulf Stream used to combine with Greenland to make a kind of jet-stream anchor, and now the jet stream is likely to wander more, sometimes shooting straight down the continents from the Arctic. It’ll be cold and dry and windy all over the northern hemisphere, but especially in the eastern half of North America, and all over Europe.” Kenzo gestured at the screen. “You can bet on it.”
“And so . . . the ramifications? In terms of telling Congress about the situation?”
Kenzo waved his hands in his usual impresario style. “You name it! You could reference that Pentagon report about this possibility, which said it would be a threat to national security, as they couldn’t defend the nation from a starving world.”
“Starving?”
“Well, there are no food reserves to speak of. I know the food production problem appeared to be solved, at least in some quarters, but there were never any reserves built up. It’s just been assumed more could always be grown. But take Europe—right now it pretty much grows its own food. That’s six hundred and fifty million people. It’s the Gulf Stream that allows that. It moves about a petawatt northward, that’s a million billion watts, or about a hundred times as much energy as humanity generates. Canada, at the same latitude as Europe, only grows enough to feed its thirty million people, plus about double that in grain. They could up it a little if they had to, but think of Europe with a climate suddenly like Canada’s—how are they going to feed themselves? They’ll have a four- or five-hundred-million–person shortfall.”
“Hmm,” Diane said. “That’s what this Pentagon report said?”
“Yes. But it was an internal document, written by a team led by an Andrew Marshall, one of the missile defense crowd. Its conclusions were inconvenient to the administration and it was getting buried when someone on the team slipped it to Fortune magazine, and they published it. It made a little stir at the time, because it came out of the Pentagon, and the possibilities it outlined were so bad. It was thought that it might influence a vote at the World Bank to change their investment pattern. The World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review Commission had recommended they cut off all future investment in fossil fuels, and move that same money into clean renewables. But in the end the World Bank board voted to keep their investment pattern the same, which was ninety-four percent to fossil fuels and six percent to renewables. After that the Pentagon report experienced the usual fate.”
“Forgotten.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t remember our reports either,” Edgardo said. “There are several NSF reports on this issue. I’ve got one here called ‘Environmental Science and Engineering for the twenty-first Century, The Role of the National Science Foundation.’ It called for quadrupling the money NSF gave to its environmental programs, and suggested everyone else in government and industry do the same. Look at this table in it—forty-five percent of Earth’s land surface transformed by humans—fifty percent of surface fresh water used—two-thirds of the marine fisheries fully exploited or depleted. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere thirty percent higher than before the industrial revolution. A quarter of all bird species extinct.” He looked up at them over his reading glasses. “All these figures are worse now.”
Diane looked at the copy of the page Edgardo had passed around. “Clearly ignorance of the situation has not been the problem. The problem is acting on what we know. Maybe people will be ready for that now. Better late than never.”
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“Unless it is too late,” Edgardo suggested.
Diane had said the same thing to Frank in private, but now she said firmly, “Let’s proceed on the assumption that it is never too late. I mean, here we are. So let’s get Sophie in, and prepare something for the White House and the congressional committees. Some plans. Things we can do right now, concerning both the Gulf Stream and global warming more generally.”
“We’ll need to scare the shit out of them,” Edgardo said.
“Yes. Well, the marks of the flood are still all over town. That should help.”
“People are already fond of the flood,” Edgardo said. “It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.”
“Nevertheless,” Diane said, with a grimace that was still somehow cheerful or amused. Scaring politicians might be something she looked forward to.
Given all that he had to do at work, Frank didn’t usually get away as early as he would have liked. But the June days were long, and with the treehouse finished there was no great rush to accomplish any particular task. Once in the park, he could wander up the West Ridge Trail and choose where to drop deeper to the east, looking for animals. Just north of Military Road the trail ran past the high point of the park, occupied by the site of Fort DeRussey, now low earthen bulwarks. One evening he saw movement inside the bulwarks, froze: some kind of antelope, its russet coloring not unlike the mounded earth, its neck stretched as it pulled down a branch with its mouth to strip off leaves. White stripes running diagonally up from its white belly. An exotic for sure. A feral from the zoo, and his first nondescript!
It saw him, and yet continued to eat. Its jaw moved in a rolling, side-to-side mastication; the bottom jaw was the one that stayed still. It was alert to his movements, and yet not skittish. He wondered if there were any general feral characteristics, if escaped zoo animals were more trusting or less than the local natives. Something to ask Nancy.
Abruptly the creature shot away through the trees. It was big! Frank grinned, pulled out his FOG phone and called it in. The cheap little cell phone was on something like a walkie-talkie or party line system, and Nancy or one of her assistants usually picked up right away. “Sorry, I don’t really know what it was.” He described it the best he could. Pretty lame, but what could he do? He needed to learn more. “Call Clark on phone 12,” Nancy suggested, “he’s the ungulate guy.” No need to GPS the sighting, being right in the old fort.
He hiked down the trail that ran from the fort to the creek, paralleling Military Road and then passing under its big bridge, which had survived but was still closed. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, with Beach Drive gone and all the roads crossing the park either gone or closed for repairs. A sanctuary.
Green light in the muggy late afternoon. He kept an eye out for more animals, thinking about what might happen to them in the abrupt climate change Kenzo said they were now entering. All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.
He walked south on a route that stayed on the rim of the damaged part of the gorge as much as possible. When he came to site 21 he found the homeless guys there as usual, sitting around looking kind of beat.
“Hey, Doc! Why aren’t you playing frisbee? They ran by just a while ago.”
“Did they? Maybe I’ll catch them on their way back.”
Frank regarded them; hanging around in the steamy sunset, smoking in their own fire, empties dented on the ground around them. Frank found he was thirsty, and hungry.
“Who’ll eat pizza if I go get one?”
Everyone would. “Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with a hoarse laugh that falsely insinuated this was a joke.
Frank hiked out to Connecticut and bought thin-crusted pizzas from a little stand across from Chicago’s. He liked them because he thought the owner of the stand was mocking the thick pads of dough that characterized the pizzas in the famous restaurant. Frank was a thin-crust man himself.
Back into the dusky forest, two boxes held like a waiter. Then pizza around the fire, with the guys making their usual desultory conversation. The vet always studying the Post’s federal news section did indeed appear well-versed in the ways of the federal bureaucracy, and he definitely had a chip on his shoulder about it. “The left hand don’t know what the right one is doing,” he muttered again. Frank had already observed that they always said the same things; but didn’t everybody? He finished his slice and crouched down to tend their smoky fire. “Hey someone’s got potatoes burning in here.”
“Oh yeah, pull those out! You can have one if you want.”
“Don’t you know you can’t cook no potato on no fire?”
“Sure you can! How do you think?”
Frank shook his head; the potato skins were charred at one end, green at the other. Back in the paleolithic there must have been guys hanging out somewhere beyond the cave, guys who had offended the alpha male or killed somebody by accident or otherwise fucked up—or just not been able to understand the rules—or failed to find a mate (like Frank)—and they must have hunkered around some outlier fire, eating lukewarm pizza and making crude chitchat that was always the same, laughing at their old jokes.
“I saw an antelope up in the old fort,” he offered.
“I saw a tapir,” the Post reader said promptly.
“Come on Fedpage, how you know it was a tapir.”
“I saw that fucking jaguar, I swear.”
Frank sighed. “If you report it to the zoo, they’ll put you in their volunteer group. They’ll give you a pass to be in the park.”
“You think we need a pass?”
“We be the ones giving them a pass!”
“They’ll give you a cell phone too.” That surprised them.
Chessman slipped in, glancing at Frank, and Frank nodded unenthusiastically; he had been about to leave. And it was his turn to play black. Chessman set out the board between them and moved out his king’s pawn.
Suddenly Zeno and Andy were arguing over ownership of the potatoes. It was a group that liked to argue. Zeno was among the worst of these; he would switch from friendly to belligerent within a sentence, and then back again. Abrupt climate change. The others were more consistent. Andy was consistently abrasive with his unfunny humor, but friendly. Fedpage was always shaking his head in disgust at something he was reading. The silent guy with the silky dark red beard was always subdued, but when he spoke always complained, often about the police. Another regular was older, with faded blond-gray hair, pockmarked face, not many teeth. Then there was Jory, an olive-skinned skinny man with greasy black hair and a voice that sounded so much like Zeno’s that Frank at first confused them when listening to their chat. He was if anything even more volatile than Zeno, but had no friendly mode, being consistently obnoxious and edgy. He would not look at Frank except in sidelong glances that radiated hostility.
Last among the regulars was Cutter, a cheery, bulky black guy, who usually arrived with a cut of meat to cook on the fire, always providing a pedigree for it in the form of a story of petty theft or salvage. Adventures in food acquisition. He often had a couple of buddies with him, knew Chessman, and appeared to have a job with the city park service, judging by his shirts and his stories. He more than the others reminded Frank of his window-washing days, also the climbing crowd—a certain rowdy quality—life considered as one outdoor sport after the next. It seemed as if Cutter had somewhere else as his base; and he had also given Frank the idea of bringing by food.
Chessman suddenly blew in on the left flank and Frank resigned, shaking his head as he paid up. “Next time,” he promised. The fire guttered out, and the food and beer were gone. The potatoes smoldered on a table top. The
guys slowed down in their talk. Redbeard slipped off into the night, and that made it okay for Frank to do so as well. Some of them made their departures into a big production, with explanations of where they were going and why, and when they would likely return again; others just walked off, as if to pee, and did not come back. Frank said, “Catch you guys,” in order not to appear unfriendly, but only as he was leaving, so that it was not an opening to any inquiries.
Off north to his tree. Ladder called down, the motor humming like the sound of his brain in action.
The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that—even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:
1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
2. the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;
4. then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.
One could, therefore:
1. pursue a project in paleolithic living,
2. change the weather,
3. attempt to restructure your profession, and
4. be happy,
all at once, although not simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among differing populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because there were no witnesses. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.
Fifty Degrees Below Page 7
