End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  A. J. LIMKIN

  10. Mrs. Meller’s Farm

  Tommyhawk Creek in Nebraska flows into Snake Creek, which empties into the Niobrara River, a tributary of the Missouri. Tommyhawk Creek is 9.3 miles in length and courses through a bleak and rocky land, ruined by ancient glaciers for any important human use. Part of this hinterland is thinly wooded but trees do not do particularly well there, and part of it is covered with grasses, weeds, shrubs and vine. There are hollows, ice-dug, where postglacial soil has been collected and then deposited by the seasonal winds and by rain and as the result of erosion. In some of them the prairie grass that once supported bison herds grows abundantly. Tommyhawk Creek winds through such places, and in a few it forms small ponds that are known to ducks and used in their migratory flights.

  A few homesteaders of the early nineteenth century occupied this poor region and ruins of many of their domiciles can be seen. Most of the second and third generations went elsewhere, and in 1950 there were only three families still on the Tommyhawk. By 1979, widow Meller was the sole person left on the creek, where she lived by herself in a dilapidated, paintless but sturdy house her grandfather had built. The nearest neighbor was more than two miles away. Mrs. Meller did not mind. She’d been born and raised in the house, and during her married life had returned with her husband for summer vacations. Bryant Meller was an amateur geologist of sufficient competence to have made several small contributions to technical journals. He had also done considerable hunting and taught that art to his wife, one he practiced as an economy measure, for food, not as a sport.

  Ulla Johnston Meller enjoyed solitude now that she had retired from her profession of teacher. She did not mind being snowbound in winter and she did not suffer from the intense hot spells of summer. At the age of sixty-seven in 1979 she felt self-sufficient, placid, thankful to the Lord for having the outdoors and the lifetime security of a small pension plus the annuity her husband had accumulated for her. She appreciated a kind of freedom and tranquillity which had almost disappeared as an American characteristic long since.

  She knew every square rod of the surrounding land in a ten-mile radius. She was interested in wild flowers and in the local fauna. Almost unconsciously, she had absorbed much of her late husband’s geological lore. She was sharp and observant if solitary, and so, slightly “peculiar” to the minds of those who knew her and had known her all her life.

  She was a tall and rather gaunt woman with a long neck and a smallish head which she carried at a raised angle, as if her attention were usually on some object above eye level. She had a heavy frame and yet small-boned features, brilliant gray eyes, wide apart above prominent cheekbones, and a leathery complexion. She might have seemed an “American Gothic” type on first glance but a second would dismiss that thought. Her movements were squirrel-quick and as sure. Her natural expression was pleasant, and her eyes very intelligent. Her voice was soft and cultured, her laugh infrequent, but musical. She was, in a rare degree, the ideal woman, even the ideal person to make her strange discovery in the spring of 1979. Perhaps no individual within a hundred miles would have noticed, as she did, the anomaly. And nobody else, having realized after a few days that it was just that, an oddity—nobody in that part of Nebraska—would have continued to observe the unusual if then unspectacular finding, and also take notes of the precise developments that occurred in the months ahead.

  She had taken a walk along Tommyhawk Creek in mid-May with no more purpose than to revisit wild flowers beginning to bloom and to enjoy the green-scented balm of the warm morning.

  Coming to a small pond into and from which Tommyhawk Creek ran, a pond of about an acre and the nearest of three to her house (which was six miles upstream from the brook’s juncture with Snake Creek), Ulla stopped when she saw that a greenish-brown “slime” had bloomed in the upper end of the still pond water. She, of course, knew it was not slime but alga, a single-celled green plant. That day she merely noticed the growth, a balloon-shaped bushel of something she had never seen before.

  Three days later when she discovered her Jersey cow, Reneta, had wandered, Ulla sought the animal in the likeliest place—at the pondside where it would be tearing up green, young shoots. As she caught the animal’s halter she saw, with some surprise, that half the pond was now green-gold owing to the proliferation of the alga. She was aware that under ideal conditions many such primitive plants multiplied rapidly. She knew that the upper three miles of the creek drained several abandoned farms where houses had burned or tumbled down and nude chimneys stood, places where barns had collapsed or burned, too, so that rich manure piles were slowly eroded and rain-rivulet-carried into the creek. The ponds supported considerable fish populations, and she occasionally caught a few fish for her table. Even so, she felt this swift bloom was a bit excessive.

  Not many days later she began her notes.

  On May 21 the one-acre pond was solid with green “slime” which was not slimy to the touch but felt like fine wet netting. The stuff bulked above the surface more than a foot, and there it had turned golden brown. This portion was, plainly, dead and the green below alone was alive.

  By June 5 the stuff had been carried into the two ponds downstream and all three small lakes were choked apparently to their bottoms with the growth. Several times recently she had donned her late husband’s waders and, with a pitchfork, walked out into the mass and shoveled it about. She had found that a good many minnows and a few fish of eating size had been trapped in the fast-multiplying stuff and died there. The rest must have fled.

  Experimenting with a sample in her rain barrel, she found the dead material floated without any lift from below. And in two more days her first pond and the two downstream, with most of the open, running water between them, were filled with dead or living algal cells. She was, then, fairly sure that the phenomenon was at least rare.

  She realized that if this species could grow at such a rate there could get to be unguessable miles of choked brooks and ponds before the distant first frost. It would spoil fishing wherever it grew so densely. It would compel those few people downstream who watered stock to keep scraping open drinking places. And if it ever got as far as Beligman, a town on the Niobrara River which took its “city” water from that source, it surely would mess up things at the plant there.

  The evening after she came to that conclusion, Ulla sat down and thought carefully about what action she should—or maybe shouldn’t—take.

  Her late husband had known many geologists and she had become acquainted with several of them. They would certainly know whom to give the information to: an algologist, if such a rare specialist could be found on the faculty of any university. Thinking of an “algologist” upset her a bit. Ulla hated to be made a fool of and what she thought was a novelty in the plant world could easily be something familiar.

  She decided to wait a little longer.

  Perhaps that was unfortunate. Possibly, even probably, it would not have mattered. Patrolling the creek and ponds now, she couldn’t see any water but just two miles of solid golden-brown dead cells piled in trillions above the green living plants. This condition moved downstream to a long reach of the creek that was quite deep and fairly wide so that the flow in it was imperceptible in summer. It therefore was comparable to one of the ponds.

  Here, soon, a change occurred. In a few days Ulla noted and clearly described that difference in her record book:

  “As the green or living network of this plant enters the slow and deep area, its crust of a foot or two of dead plants riding above water level, it begins to turn pale, and soon the green or living material dies.”

  Later notes describe that process further: “Everything in the slow, deep channel is dead. And what still fills the stream and ponds above seems to be turning pale (the green stuff) too. Very glad I didn’t call for experts. Looks as if the whole, gigantic ‘bloom’ is ending.”

  A month later she wrote, “Can’t find a single patch of green (living) material anywhere.
All of it dead, golden brown and floating high, but nothing has passed beyond the channel, as a series of boulders block up that stretch by forming a barrier across the channel’s end. That is what made the deep-water place. Only in high water does the creek pour over this natural dam, though it trickles beneath it always. So the show is over! It’s over, except for the fact that, in and above the natural dam, there’s a bank-to-bank, thick mountain of the dead stuff. So far, it hasn’t rotted. It doesn’t smell badly, just like woodsy soil or peat.

  “Under my magnifying glass I can see that each cell, when dead, has formed a hard coating around itself, one easily felt when you rub a bit between the fingers. The dead plants are like minute, spherical, high-floating nuts, with hard shells, and inside them is a little fluid and the rest air, or maybe gas. When the fall rains come this will, I hope, be carried away—as it still chokes the stream and pond from well above the water to near the bottom, thick and slippery and tacky, sticking together pretty strongly.”

  In August a two-day series of thunderstorms and near cloudbursts greatly raised the creek and, Ulla observed, a fair amount of this odd debris broke away and went over the natural dam, downstream, in chunks and clots that increasingly broke up in fast-running stretches of the brook. The “fall rains” that year were abundant, and by the time ice started to form on the ponds as well as on the long, slow-current stretch, most of the dead material had been washed downstream. After the ice became thick, Ulla observed that the fish which had left the area were returning.

  She could not have been expected to carry her inquiry or even her guesses any further. She had no means to identify the alga as a mutant. She assumed it had used up whatever it was fertilized by, and had also completed its cycle. Neither she nor even her geologist-hobbiest husband had discovered, in the “long, slow stretch of deep channel,” a mineral spring that flowed in from underwater. She could not be expected to realize that the chemical change in the channel water, together with nutrient exhaustion, had stopped the progress of the strange plant above that point.

  Much less could she, or any layman, have imagined that the living plants which perished in the mineral-altered area had left in the bottom sediments billions of spores, and that many of these were new mutant forms which would and could produce plants able to survive the minerals fatal to the parent stock.

  The year 1980 was rung in during a blizzard.

  [Editor’s note: Although this section, Part II, has been confined to events in the seventies, a brief exception seems appropriate here.]

  The winter of 1979–80 was marked by heavy snows in this part of Nebraska. When the thaws came, they were torrential, with the result that several times the average annual load of fertile material entered Tommyhawk Creek above Ulla’s place. In May the bloom began again. Also a bloom of the double mutant occurred in and below the channel with the mineral spring.

  Once Ulla discovered the alga had passed the natural dam and was multiplying for a mile downstream she decided she must take action.

  Feeling foolish, she nevertheless composed a letter to one of the professors of geology she’d met, Professor Wayne Collet, a very nice man at Nebraska State. Ten days later her letter was answered by the arrival at her farm of a small, middle-aged, red-haired, slope-shouldered man who introduced himself as Dr. Elgin Peterkin, of Kansas State, sniffing, every three or four words.

  “I happened to be doing a visiting lecture tour at Nebraska and Collet showed me your letter. I’m an algologist, and I found your word interesting but not, say, astounding. Just—interesting. Perhaps you’d lead me—”

  Ulla did.

  Dr. Peterkin had various jars and bottles in his car trunk and, after he had scouted a half mile of green-gold clogged creek and ponds, he filled these containers with samples. In that process he seemed to resent Ulla’s presence. He kept muttering disjointed bits about other “similar blooms,” leading her to assume that her strange finding wasn’t all that unusual. He mentioned the “Sabre Lake explosion” for one, said the alga was a “close relative of the stoneworts” and so on, dampening Ulla’s confidence in her boldness—though she had thought that, on his first view of the mess, he had been excited but not wanting that to show. She did not like him, really.

  He refused an invitation to lunch rather brusquely and, before driving off with his samples, made it clear that this “local phenomenon,” his words, had set him on a “wild goose chase.” He also suggested that she keep the situation quiet as the bloom was “self-limiting” and any tale she spread around would only cause needless worry and end up making her the butt of ridicule and the agent of starting annoying, unsound rumors.

  It was not then known to Ulla that the scientist, a mediocrity, had twice humiliated himself by erroneous conclusions he had caused to appear in learned journals. That double blunder had cost him a full professorship and violently damaged a very tender ego. This strange and, the man knew, unprecedented finding filled him with the desire to report it first and so gain the credit. He deliberately miscued the widow in order to gain time in which to study this novel alga and then announce the discovery as his own.

  In that, he succeeded.

  A very late and record-breaking frost a few days after his visit set back the algal bloom before it reached Snake Creek. In early August the widow found that the scum was growing again but it was a cold summer and a September frost, not unusual in the region, once more killed back the fast-multiplying “stonewort” relative.

  Meanwhile, Peterkin, back at Kansas State U., grew the alga in jars, then barrels, and then, at the end of June, furtively tossed a green handful into a farm pond he had driven around the near countryside to locate. It duly became clotted and puffed up with the plant and its growth rate staggered the algologist. At that point he mailed his already prepared paper to the Journal of Algological Biology with photographs and notes of other botanists and biologists confirming what the monograph stated. This document was published in the fall quarterly issue. By then the farm pond bloom had been winter-killed after its ruin of the farmer’s fish-culture pond. The deposit of cold-resistant spores in the choked pond were carried next spring over the earthen dam, under a highway, to a brook and thence into the Cinnamon Run, which paralleled the road.

  In the following summer widow Meller read a report in the Cedar Rapids News-Enterprise of a green-scum plague that was spreading in a considerable area of Kansas. That it was her mutant alga she didn’t immediately guess. It was not until mid-August, when the green, living plant avalanche with its golden-brown topping clogged fifty miles of the Niobrara below Sears Falls, that the widow realized the Kansas “water plague” was indirectly owing to her concern in the matter. By then, the “Green Slime War” was national news, and as a result Ulla grimly fought a war of her own. Conscience told her she could have acted a year before she did, and that she could have alerted more scientists than that pinheaded Peterkin—now claiming entire credit for the alga’s discovery and lending his name to it besides, Peterkinsis. But sheer stubbornness fought against Ulla’s conscience. She’d done what seemed most sensible the whole time and the best thing to do now was forget it and try to ignore the news stories and TV pictures.

  The origin of the distant and much-altered stonewort relative, Peterkinsis, was demonstrated by a brilliant young biologist, D. D. Wilson. His imaginative and resourceful efforts to that end elicited a tale which, even then, was becoming a ritual. For the horrendous green pest was virtually handmade by man. That synthesis began after the great public brouhaha in 1970 over the creation, stockpiling, storage and transport of chemicals and other materials designed for “germ” or “biological” and poison-gas warfare.

  Nixon ordered a halt to all such diabolical effort excepting what was required for defense against those weapons. To create in the laboratory a defense, whether against bacteria, viruses or poison gases, it is first necessary to obtain, breed or fabricate the living or inorganic “weapon.” So the Nixon fiat did not stop the ongoing experiments wit
h such lethal agencies. But there was so much continuing outcry, by “environmentalists,” against similar war agents, the “defoliants” used in Vietnam to strip jungles of leaves and thus render the foe naked, that a certain part of the continuing research into exotic weapons (and possible counters) was transferred to other federal bureaus and the work was mingled with other projects as disguise.

  For the motive of concealment the Department of Agriculture erected a very extensive research facility in the remote, little-populated southwest corner of Cherry County, Nebraska. Ten square miles of wasteland were triple fenced with guarded openings only for a new road and rail spur. To this posted quadrangle were brought a large number of scientists, aides, engineers and others, all of them having been cleared by the FBI and sworn to secrecy.

  The fact that a dozen discoveries of benefit to man came from this “plant and insect research center” is beside the present point. What is of moment is the work of Johann Pollenni Schuckebber, a world-famous algologist. His project was so secret that only his superiors in Washington knew its purpose. That was to develop a strain of algae which would do, if seeded in enemy waters, just what Ulla’s actually did do.

  Starting with five hundred species of algae, Dr. Schuckebber created mutant strains in thousands, using chemicals of the many varieties then known to induce gene changes, as well as a cobalt source, and other less ordinary means. He developed several strains, species, perhaps, with hard, enduring cell membranes. But none of his long lines of altered plants had all the properties he sought, and his work ceased with his death in 1976 from a heart attack at his benches.