“If we ever wanted to, our friend group could transition nicely into a BDSM circle,” I announce to my friend George as we stare at nearly $1,000 worth of locks and chains in a pile on the living room floor.
“Is that a thing? A BDSM circle?” he asks, looking up from his project of color-coding keys to locks with iridescent nail polish.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “You can ask the cops about it.”
“Probably not the best strategy . . . .” he says as he sets up a stopwatch.
“Ok! Let’s try Pancakes with Blueberries.” The code name for the position we’ve chosen doesn’t sound like the sexiest of moves, but we haven’t chosen it to be sexy. After all, we are not (as of now) a BDSM circle. We are just friends, with a lot of locks, a lot of chains, and a plan to shut down a natural gas pipeline.
I got involved in activism my senior year of high school. For my first act of civil disobedience, I skipped school to attend a rally in Washington, DC against the Keystone XL pipeline. High school tyrant Mr. Maxfield told me that if I went, he’d give me detention. As an anxious teen whose identity hinged on straight As and approving nods from adults, I cried about the decision beforehand to no less than three teachers and two administrators. But the next Saturday, wearing my homemade No Tar Sands shirt in the no phone zone cafeteria with all the other adolescent miscreants, I felt like a complete badass. Four years and many protests later, here I am searching under the couch for missing adult diapers as I prepare for my second arrest for direct action.
Today, there are six of us planning to block construction of the West Roxbury pipeline with our bodies. Ian, Amy, and I will jump in a pit where the pipeline will go and lock ourselves in a triangle with our backs together. This arrangement is ‘Pancakes with Blueberries’. In a pit across town Max, Sam, and Angus will fold themselves into a complicated tangle of arms and legs, with people lying down and sitting on top of each other. This we call, somewhat less whimsically, Shit Pit Yoga.
George is driving the getaway car. We have planned to do one loop around the block to scope. The second drive-by is the real deal.
“Oh my G-d I can’t do it!” Amy panics.
“No no! We’re doing it!” I cheer and lunge for the door, “Oh shit. Can we do another loop?”
Once we’re out of the car, we must act fast. The workers and security on site are used to activists. If we don’t get into formation, they’ll get us out much more quickly, meaning the whole thing will have been a big waste of time and money.
The July sun is already hot at eight in the morning. I look over the edge of the pit, then close my eyes and jump, like it’s a swimming pool, like it’s a normal summer day and I have nothing to worry about. Like I am young and fearless.
I lock my feet together first so that even if we don’t get our waists locked together I will not be able to walk away if the police try to make me. More specifically, if the police try to make me, my ankles will break. This fact that previously seemed merely strategic is suddenly anxiety-inducing. The chains have been custom tailored for my ankles by an engineering major friend. They are tight, requiring the lock to be just so to close. I close it.
For our waists, each person is in charge of the lock to their left. (Always go left.) I reach around and my clammy fingers fumble with the bolt between Ian and me. Shit. How much time has passed? 20 seconds? A month? I scoot backward to get a better angle and the lock slams shut.
“I’ve got pancakes!” I call out.
I wipe my hands on my pants, which are long despite the 90 degree weather because I’ve been told that jail is cold. I’m fighting global warming, but I still hate the cold. I wipe my hands so I’ll be ready for what’s next: super glue.
“It never really works,” George told us weeks before in a prep meeting. “Your hands will be too sweaty from heat and nerves, but it confuses the cops and looks good in a headline.”
I spread it across my palm and up my arm then pass the bottle off to Ian before we grasp hands. He passes it to Amy, and Amy throws it aside hoping we don’t accrue an additional littering charge for this detritus. All hands together and no one has even noticed the commotion. We’ve got blueberries.
Climate change is bad. Really bad. Most of the time, even I am a climate denier. I will lay my body down in the sand, but I don’t know how to grapple with the voice in my head, with the numbers in the news, with the knowledge that my country has condemned hundreds of thousands to death. People will lose their homes. People will lose their livelihoods. People will die. It’s started already. And the people who will bear this burden first and hardest are communities of color, low-income, and indigenous communities. I don’t know how to feel this, I mean really feel this, and still wake up in the morning. I get the urge to ignore. I get the desire to look away. Of course I deny.
In the pit, we clutch each other’s hands as if they aren’t already glued together.
“I’m nervous,” Amy tells me. We do the only reasonable thing there is to do; we sing.
“The tide is rising, and so are we.” The song comes from Rabbi Shoshana Freedman and singing it I have never felt more powerful. Shouting and sirens begin to drown our voices. We sing louder. The construction workers, police, and firemen circle us, looking down over the sandy drop off. They grumble about how to cleanse what is, for this morning, a money-losing pit of filthy activists.
Over the radio, we hear: “Wait, they’re in your pit too!?”
Oh yeah we are! We are everywhere.
The fireman throws his jacket over my head to protect my eyes from flying sparks. It’s heavy and I have a vague memory of elementary school field trips from back when I had a simpler understanding of what it meant to be a civil servant. Without warning, I am sprayed with a hose. This is also, in theory, to protect me, but sitting in a puddle of mud in darkness beneath a fireman’s jacket, warm metal against my bruised ankles, all I can think is, How did I get here? Why do my friends, my beautiful friends who are in their early twenties, who navigate depression, and grad school, and dinner, and dating, why must they put themselves in situations like this? What a totally absurd thing to do with a Monday morning.
The moment I am free from my ankle chains, I am bound at the wrists.
“You’re under arrest for trespassing and disturbing the peace.”
Personally, I thought our music was perfectly peaceful, but the National Lawyers Guild, who provides legal aid to activists, says arguments based on the quality of the singing will not hold up in a court of law.
As I am led past two fire trucks and an ambulance to the police wagon, I call out to my jail support an important message, “Please bring pizza!”
In the first holding cell, we cheer as Max, Angus, and Sam are led in.
“We love you!” Max, whose baby will be born within the week, has a towel wrapped around his waist.
“What happened to your pants??” we ask.
“Well . . . .” Max monotones, “Sam was screaming because of the superglue and they poured acetone on my dick.”
“What??”
But Max is led to the back to be fingerprinted.
“I guess it’s good he’s already having his baby.” Ian shrugs. Nothing fazes Ian.
Here is the truth. The sacrifices we will have to make are going to be bigger than $40 and a day in jail. Change is happening, but not fast enough. At this point we are not fighting to stop climate change. Our fight is for degrees. Degrees of warming. Degrees of deaths.
To those who would call young activists idealistic I would say, yeah. The criminal justice system is racist, and cruel, and life-ruining. But because I am white, young, college-educated, and protesting climate change in a liberal-leaning region, I am free to pass through its tendrils relatively unscathed. And I would be lying to say it’s not partially for selfish reasons that I engage in civil disobedience. I am terrified by the thought that the fires, storms, droughts, and hostility to immigrants and refugees we see now may not in fact be “the new normal”. The new normal will, in all likelihood, be a lot worse.
There’s kind of a relief in jail that at this moment, there’s nothing more I can do. In my cell, with nothing but my tired mind, receding adrenaline, and wet clothes, I can finally accept that this is out of my control. It is unacceptable to live resigned to the reality that we will not be able to do enough. It’s self-sustaining to acknowledge this truth. People will lose their homes, communities, and livelihoods. People will die. Hopefully fewer because of us, but there’s really no way to know. We will keep fighting anyway. We will sing louder. We sing to be heard, but also to say, “We hear you. We have not, and we will not, forget you.”
The marches and rallies, the meetings and pits have all taught me how to love. This is the way I have to say “I have your back” to Amy and Ian and George and Sam and Max, to our unborn (or soon to be born) children, to my sisters, to the fighters everywhere. There is no winning in a world where people will die needlessly, but there is still loving. There is still believing in a world worth fighting for. When we are singing, when we are laughing, this is when I find the strength, trust, and commitment to lay my body down.
Outside the jail, my hands oily with pizza grease, I hug my friends as they’re released. On Sunday, we’ll debrief the action in our normal meeting and eat home-cooked chili from a comically large pot. We will think about how we can confuse the police for longer, how we can maintain pressure, how we can engage more people in West Roxbury. We’ll break out the ukulele and play John Prine crooners. For now, I run and jump on Angus as he walks from the precinct.
“Angus!!!!! We did it!” I cheer.
“Oh my G-d did you actually get us pizza? I’m so happy!” he says to George, who is without a doubt the best jail support a grimy activist could ask for.
“Of course!” George smiles. He yells to the precinct as we walk to the car, “See you next week!”
Next week, there will be a new pit to fill with new songs. Next week, we will be everywhere.
I imagine this building is somewhat well known in this fictional place. I think it was probably converted into living space while the world was busy being a little more post-apocalyptic than solarpunk, with new residents scavenging materials from whatever they could. It’s since grown into a sort of community art project, proud of its history, squatters’ rights, and the reuse of its materials. The first floor is mixed residential/commercial space (you’d almost have to go out of your way to keep a former parking garage from being handicapped accessible, but I figure some first floor places would make things much easier). The roof is covered in a fruit tree orchard; I used apple, pear, and peach trees, all carefully found and cut out in detail before I completely blasted them to get them to fit the style I was picturing. I figure these are in big planters rather than directly on the surface of the roof. The building can support it, but standing water, especially in places that freeze, can be really bad for buildings, and tree roots can crack concrete just as well as ice.
I thought a lot about the design for the streetcar. I was torn between wanting its purpose to be visually clear at a glance and wanting to show something genuinely strange or futuristic.
I settled on a 1910s-ish streetcar both because it’s visually clear and because I think it might be a practical starting point for a society that’s trying to rebuild from scratch using entirely local manufacturing. The design is crude, but it’s proven—streetcars like this were ubiquitous in the US once upon a time. And they used 1910s-era motors, controls, metallurgy, and manufacturing. It feels like this would be a reasonable starting point, especially with a ready supply of scavenged components and high quality metals laying around above ground in the form of existing vehicles (even wrecks).
I like to imagine that this is a newer phase in this city’s public transit infrastructure, that they’re starting to standardize their vehicles to simplify things. I like the idea that the first generation of these streetcars would be genuinely a community project, that the city/public transit folks settled on some specifications and devoted their limited budget and manufacturing to producing standardized bases, (the bottom frame, wheels, motors, and pantograph rig) and that people build the carriages out of whatever they have access to. Each streetcar would be a unique, craft-built contraption, sort of ‘public transit by way of Weekend Wasteland’: all kinds of crazy streetcars made from campers, boats, old school buses, whatever people had access to. City safety inspectors and a committee of local people, with an emphasis on the disabled, would review each one and specify any necessary changes. This gets them a fleet of ready streetcars quickly, allowing them to start providing services while more slowly manufacturing standardized ones to replace the most problematic of the home-built machines.
The slow standardization would be somewhat contentious within a community that took pride in building its own infrastructure, and in the art-like variety. They might chafe at standardization and formalization, like it’s a sign that society is stratifying again, though the convenience of a more reliable transit network might help balance it out. As a nod to the artistic spirit and history of the fleet, the new vehicles are painted uniquely by members of the community.
This piece originally appeared under a Creative Commons license onthe artist’s portfolio.
(Selected from the field guide left on your nightstand)
Common Raven:
Your favorite bird. There was a big one that lived in the hospital courtyard and, on your good days, I’d take you out to see it. When I said I thought it was actually a crow, you said very matter-of-factly that it was far too big to be a crow—like me mixing up crows and ravens hadn’t been an inside joke for most of our marriage. It was good to laugh again.
When you got too sick to go outside, you put your wedding band on the sill hoping the bird would come visit. Ravens like shiny things, you said. I said I still thought it was a crow. You smiled and told me crows also liked shiny things.
I set my own wedding band down next to yours while you were sleeping. Maybe two shiny things would call that many more ravens to your window.
The Clapper Rail:
Because it was a sub-species, then its own species, then a sub-species again. Like you, its environment was ruined, and it held on as long as it could—where else was it supposed to go? The marshes dried up.
Your hometown’s water was toxic—your parents couldn’t afford to move.
Piping Plover:
Went extinct in the early 21st century despite conservation efforts, but sightings continue to this day. Most are likely the result of different shorebirds and people with hope meeting on lonely beaches.
New Carolina Parakeet:
A joke bird, named by the internet when they finally decided birds were, in fact, real. It’s an introduced species, or maybe a few species people aren’t bothering to differentiate that have spread north of Florida. They’re not real Carolina Parakeets.
Remember in undergrad when we kept running into each other after our 8AM discussion sections? Remember when that turned into coffee? Not the real stuff, that’s too rare and expensive these days for broke college students, but the diluted “coffee flavored” stuff that’s so syrupy it sticks in your mouth for hours after drinking it.
Sometimes, you settle for the fake stuff.
Saltmarsh Sparrow:
It’s always the ones in the marshes, isn’t it? Like it’s always the poor towns in rural areas with space to spare. It’s the places where the people they don’t care about get pushed/the places where people are forgotten.
The land under the marsh is more valuable than all the life on top of it.
The plastics and chemicals company killing your hometown is more profitable.
Ruffed Grouse:
What’s in a photo? Brown, non-descript, just another bird in the underbrush. Then you see the photos of the male’s mating display: wings flared, tail wide, neck rough black and shining, drumming like a failing heart.
Photos of you on the news: dying in a hospital bed but still smiling. I preferred the photos I snapped of you before, when you wouldn’t even look at the camera. When we were out in the woods looking for birds, and your eyes scanned the trees for the source of some far-off, chortled song.
The ruffed grouse is extinct in most of its former range, but it’s a shy bird. Maybe it’s still there, and we just don’t see it.
Kirtland’s Warbler:
A success story, brought back from the brink like I thought you might be.
You beat the cancer as a kid. You escaped the poor town. You were a professor, a specialist. You were tenured. You were an activist. You’d spoken before Congress about your hometown—not that they listened. You’d beaten the cancer before. Why couldn’t you beat it again?
Bobwhite Quail:
Did you know there is a population of these still living in Italy? You probably knew that. They’re not even supposed to be there, but they are. I like to think you’re also still living somewhere else, even though you’re supposed to be here with me. If I think hard enough about it before I fall asleep at night (when I manage to fall asleep), maybe I’ll wake up where and when you are.
Maybe with the success of the meadow conservation project, they’ll reintroduce Bobwhites to the eastern US.
You would have liked that.
Klee’s Most-Eastern Meadowlark:
A subspecies, lost. Is one loss worth it, if it spurs on change? The vanishing of Klee’s Most-Eastern Meadowlark galvanized a large-scale conservation push of eastern meadow habitats. Now the Meadowlark itself seems safe. A bill named after you works its way through Congress. It’s going to make it easier for communities to fight companies that pump toxic waste all over them. Your mother texted to tell me they’re shutting the chemicals plant down.
But the song specific to the Klee’s subspecies is gone forever like your own off-key singing and the way you badly mimicked bird calls.
American Crow:
You always laughed because I couldn’t tell the difference between a crow and a raven. I leaned into it, till you thought I was playing. But you know what? I really can’t tell the difference between them to this damned day. But I knew you made friends with the big black birds that lived in the trees behind our house. You’d give them peanuts on the regular. You’d pick up little bits of costume jewelry from the second-hand store for them.
After your funeral, I put our wedding rings out on the deck railing—if I can’t have you, I’ll be friends with your friends, be they crows or ravens.
In the morning they were gone. So I set out peanuts and wait.
Dustin picks up the sand dollar and rubs it between his fingers, feels the strange chalkiness of it. He studies the delicate etchings, the five-pointed flower, before putting it in his mouth and closing his eyes. The texture against his tongue. The light salt.
Organics are some of the coolest things left over from the Before Times, and Dustin feels like finding one must be a good omen. He knows some of the marsh people collect them, stash them in the little mud jars they use to store treasures, alongside the metal circles once used for trade.
This particular organic, a sand dollar, is exceedingly rare, especially for this particular stretch of the Nouveau Gulf Coast. Dustin knows this because he is a collector, or a trader rather, owner and operator of Before Times Shells & Gifts, Hand-Harvested Souvenirs from Pre-Armageddon Louisiana. He drives a bulky Before Times van, from BT 1900 and 84 to be exact, filled with artifacts carefully selected from the seaside: scraps of metal from barges and oil rigs, wooden bits of shrimp boats, the occasional tou-lou-lou shell or tide-beaten fiddle string, or maybe a flashy Carnival doubloon.
As he moves down the shore, past the raggedy old pier, his heart picks up pace, knowing the sand dollar is of high value—and not just to the petro-tourists who pay billions of solar-credits to visit the rigs. The sand dollar looks and feels like a world Dustin has never known—except through hand-me-down memories.
Years ago, when Dustin was in his early 20s, his uncle would sit at the table in the mornings and talk about the Before Times, how the sky was various shades of blue most days, and there were so many birds he couldn’t even remember the names of most of them—and how the marsh stretched so far into the horizon. How the swamp fires lasted just a few weeks per year.
Dustin really did not want to hear about it, was so tired of hearing about it, would shrug his shoulders and sigh to himself before leaving for work.
Fire-free swamps and flocks of seabirds were old-fogey stuff, and what’s a blue sky got to do with him or his life? The sky is pink now and that’s that. Every once in a while, he sees a pelican float above, and the sight of the magnificent bird, coasting on air in spite of its size, makes his breath catch. Why can’t he just enjoy this pelican without knowing there used to be so many more? Can’t he just have this one thing—without someone nagging him about what all is missing?
Sometimes, as he was trying to escape his uncle and head to work, the hip neighbor would stop by to chat, wave through the screen door and loudly ask hey, comment ça va?
This also annoyed the piss out of Dustin, who found this particular guy’s French pretentious and performative, something he used to seem cool. Dustin would offer a tight smile and answer pointedly in English: fine, everything is fine.
Now, as Dustin studies the waves, he realizes he misses being asked the question: how are you? He even misses the French.
Given the option now, he might even respond in French. He might say something like ça va bien—not because he is actually well or anything, but because it’s the only answer he remembers.
In English, things really are pretty terrible. He could use a full range of synonyms for disaster and despair, has a whole lexicon at hand for tragedy, grief, and mourning. But in French, everything is always good and well—because bon and bien are all he knows.
He places the sand dollar in the bag’s special side pocket, zips it tight, and keeps walking. He moves quickly past the driftwood memorial for the marine scientists. Stops at the rotting wooden shell of a trawl boat. Grabs a bright green scrap of net, feels its stringy texture with his fingers, and drops it into the bag.
The hot pink of the sky grows deeper. Offshore, a manmade constellation appears above the horizon: lights glittering from the old oil platforms. Orion—or Orion’s Belt, he thinks, if Orion was a roustabout.
The surf moves, and Dustin spots a flash of blue and white in the tide. A piece of concrete statue, the Holy Mother. He can tell by the shade of blue, the same blue as the veil on the Virgin Mary his own mother displayed near their front door.
Dustin doesn’t pray, hasn’t prayed since his favorite priest got kicked out of the church, hasn’t prayed since his aunt was refused Communion for protesting the first fossil fuel war, but he does pause to bow his head. The crashing waves are the prayer. The incoming tide.
He puts the piece of statue in his bag and moves on.
As he walks, he feels the ocean suck the sand from under his feet, the landscape always shifting beneath him. He lets the tide grab and tug his soles as he sifts through today’s collection: the frayed strings of the net, the coarse concrete of the Holy Mother’s veil.
He unzips the side pocket and runs his fingers, softly, over his prize find. Tapping his fingers gently against it, Dustin feels a sudden urge to throw the sand dollar back into the sea. He realizes he doesn’t want anyone to own the sand dollar, not even himself, and especially not some tourist.
But first he does want to lick it again. Maybe he can taste how things used to be. For once, experience that time and place first-hand, through his own senses. The sand dollar tastes like salt and air and bones and sun and the most hidden parts of the sea. It tastes like his uncle’s dark roast coffee and ghost crabs and the way the light hits gold in the marsh in late summer.
Satisfied, he pitches it toward the hot pink horizon, watches it clunk into the sea, and gets back to searching the sand for lesser curiosities.
Orion’s Belt twinkles, and a half-moon is high in the neon sky. Dustin clutches his bag, walks away from the waves, toward the marsh. The Holy Mother will catch a good price, he thinks. He climbs into his clunky van and heads home, the taste of another world still on his tongue.
Arthur Corey owns a small house in Port Charlotte, Florida. It’s bright lemon yellow, with a lawn he’s trying to kill, and a carport with no car, where a glass table gathers bong ash in the shade of seagrapes.
Coccoloba uvifera is more closely related to grapes than he is, but less than oak trees are. It has thick, wide leaves and round, edible, purple fruit that grow in clusters. The Calusa, when this was their patch of sand, probably had a better name for them. Seagrapes are native to the Gulf Coast, and grow right up to the edge of the waves, where fiddler crabs duel in their roots.
These ones were little when Arthur planted them, just past his knees when they were in the ground. Now, they tower over the roof of the carport, keeping the glass table shady and cool while he eats cereal there in the morning. The lawn underneath them is never coming back, and it makes him smile to see brown leaves pile up, to hear anole lizards rustling between them.
Every time he walks his dog, he notes what’s growing in the neighbors’ yards. The soil is sand, just sand entirely, so he has to be strategic. Not just anything will replace the lawn he’s murdering.
Many of the neighbors have huge oak trees, Quercus virginiana, the live oak of the South, the state tree of Georgia, the magnificent wide shade tree that shelters Spanish moss and sparrows and a hundred other beings in its jungle branches. All acorns are edible if the tannins are soaked out, and Arthur heard a rumor the Calusa made an oil from them, and the young ones grow a starchy tuber in their roots sometimes. They are so well-adapted to the Gulf Coast that they increase the value of homes because they offer hurricane protection, in addition to shade. Arthur doesn’t know how old the ones in the neighborhood are, but many of them shade entire front yards. They live more than four hundred years.
He wants one. Right there, in the center of the lawn. He thinks about it constantly.
Rewilding a lawn in a FEMA flood zone is fatally optimistic. He knows this. Whatever tiny habitat he manages to recreate here has a lifespan precisely that of Thwaites Glacier.
Quercus virginiana has withstood millions of hurricanes, regrown after a hundred thousand fires, survived shipbuilding and suburbs and squirrels only to come out shining in the sun and bursting with acorns. It is a “species of least concern.”
But it is not a seagrape.
It is not a sea anything.
It will not grow at the edge of the waves.
It will not live for four hundred years in this yard. He’s certain of that.
Mostly certain.
His doubt is a Kantian doubt. What if everyone did what he’s doing? Kill their lawns, restore native ecosystems, get rid of their cars, smoke more weed, replace farms with food forests, sequester the fuck out of atmospheric carbon. Would it be enough to slow the death of Thwaites?
What if an oak tree could still shade this little yellow house in 2425?
It might see the strip mall suburb of Port Charlotte turn into a thriving town of vibrant neighborhoods, where every block has people trading seagrape jam and grilled nopales, acorn oil, backyard eggs, and fresh caught fish.
2425 is a mast year. The family living here makes acorn pancakes, muffins, porridge, soup, and ice cream for the Port Charlotte Winter Solstice Barbecue. The pancakes win a prize.
In 2325, the oak tree is a neighborhood unto itself. Mockingbirds gossip in the high branches. Cardinals chirp to each other from across its wide crown. An armadillo forages among its fallen twigs, crunch-crunching through the acorn caps.
In 2225, the oak shelters lost wanderers in a storm.
In 2125, the girl who lives here then climbs up the trunk, into the low, thick branches, to rescue a Florida panther cub. A species of least concern. The limbs are strong enough for both of them.
In 2025, Arthur Corey sits at his glass table, Cheerio-laden spoon hovering inches from his lips, sick with violent hope.
Because of the heavy chop that day, there is no time for a tour.
“You shouldn’t have a problem finding things,” the captain tells me. She’s wearing a neon orange vest over her life jacket and a neon orange beanie crushed atop her head, and the overall effect makes her look like a traffic cone. “You’ve looked at the schematics, right? Well, there’s a manual in there, and it’s not like you’ll get lost.”
She glances meaningfully at the structure looming into sight. From far off it looked like a spindle in a strange spindle-forest, but in the past forty-five minutes it’s grown from spindle to behemoth. I spent those forty-five minutes and the three hours before them above-deck, my ass getting progressively sorer as the boat knuckled through the chop. But it was better than being below, where the captain’s warnings about nausea had proven correct almost immediately.
“We can’t dock today, so we’ll bring her around for you to step to the platform. Got your bag?”
I sling my duffle over my shoulder. “Yep.”
A metallic buzzing fills the air as we approach. The turbine’s three massive blades, each the height of a five-story building, are spinning quickly today. The sky is cloudless and bright, but it doesn’t do much to change the air of desolation about the place. Even at the start of August, the Labrador Sea is cold and mean, subject to violent squalls that blow down from what’s left of the Arctic. Without the sea ice that used to lock up the water, it’s the perfect place for companies like ZephyrCorp to build their mammoth offshore wind farms. The outfit here contains some three thousand turbines that power most of Nunavut and Newfoundland. Some people might say that’s a decent exchange for the sea ice, but I think that’s bullshit.
“There’s a satellite phone if you need to get in touch. Rations should all be provided for, and it’s got a state-of-the-art system for purifying water. Even allows for showers once a day. You remember the safety briefing?”
“Bad weather, stay inside.”
“And the ladder. Always rig in on the ladder. We had a guy fall once, broke both arms and both legs.”
A series of platforms ring the base of the turbine, and as the ocean rises and falls away I can see mussels and rockweed clinging to the lower ones. Long ribbons of kelp swirl like a head of dark hair. The captain brings the boat around to where a metal ladder extends, platform-to-platform, until it reaches a final landing far above (I think) where the sea can reach. A hatch is built into the side of the tower.
“Ready?” the captain asks.
You’ve got to be kidding me, I think, realizing that she means for me to attach my ZephyrCorp-issued harness to the rig on the ladder and hop over. Well, at least if I fall into the ocean it’s not as cold as it used to be.
“We’ll be back in three weeks!” she shouts once I’ve made it. I can hardly hear her over the wind and the hum of the turbine and the spray of the sea.
And then the boat is peeling away back into the drift and I am utterly alone.
All the rooms in my new home are stacked one on top of the other, with a ladder running through the center all the way to the very top. Thankfully there’s an elevator too, since I’ll be climbing the five-hundred-or-so feet to the gearbox and generator every day to take readings. I’m here on a repair job, but the repair is already finished, so really all I’ve got to do is monitor the new part and make adjustments if necessary. Easy money.
The first landing is a storeroom with shelves of freeze-dried meals and canned food, an emergency life raft, and water tanks that get re-supplied daily by advanced seawater filtration. On top of that is a small kitchen: electric stove, pump sink, cabinets stuffed with an assortment of bowls and mugs, electric kettle sitting by a basket of various teas and coffees. Above, a small shower and toilet, and then the bedroom, with a single bunk covered in lumpy quilts. The turbine is self-powered, which even I have to admit is kind of cool. The walls are studded with soft halogen lights. The hum is dampened, but still omnipresent.
A modern lighthouse, I think, and for the next three weeks I’m the lighthouse-keeper.
I toss my duffle on the bunk. Three weeks: far shorter than my usual gigs, and the pay is better too. Before this it was a two month forest-tech job in central Oregon running controlled burns, and before that a season fruit-picking in the shrinking Salinas Valley. It’s a patchy way to make a living, but I’ve never really been a career person. I don’t see the point in spending years locked into one thing, building some useless piece of technology or studying a subject so niche it’s irrelevant. Most of that industry will probably dry up anyway. It’s hard enough just affording food these days.
Across from the bunk is a locker (A locker? Seriously? Who’s going to steal my stuff, the fish?) and a sort of lab-space with a bench and set of metal cabinets. Laminated diagrams are pinned to the walls, many of them depicting safety directives in language-less icons of various accidents, overlaid with red xs and sad-faces. There’s a screen and keyboard, no doubt powered by the turbine too. I press a key and the screen winks to life.
ZephyrCorp SeeWind PL-X, Model D-495, “Selene”
So the turbine has a name. Before I can stop myself, I think, Darcy would love that.
I have told myself I wouldn’t think about Darcy. I left my phone on the mainland, so that even if there was a lick of service out here I wouldn’t be tempted to call. In fact, I thought the job would be a good thing, would force a clean break. There is nothing more to say in that relationship. Nothing more to be done. As my mother used to say, sometimes love is not enough.
I’m living in a turbine named Selene, in the middle of the Labrador Sea, Darce, I think anyway. How’s that for giving up?
For my first sojourn to the top of Selene, I decide to try the ladder. Five hundred feet, it turns out, is a very long way to climb, and knowing the harness will catch me should I fall isn’t enough to stop my stomach somersaulting every time I make the mistake of glancing down. I think of the guy who broke both arms and both legs and triple-check the rigging with a shaking hand.
By the time I reach the nacelle I’m soaked with sweat. The humming up here is more of a dull roar, and I can hear whooshing outside from the turbine’s enormous blades. The nacelle houses the gearbox, generator, and drivetrain, everything that actually converts each turn of the rotor into power. After a quick check on one of the switchboards—yep, everything in order—my work for the day is done.
It’s going to be a long three weeks.
There’s a small viewing platform on top of the nacelle, so I rig myself back into the ladder and climb the remaining fifteen feet or so. I push open the hatch and the wind nearly tears my hat off. The sheer, dizzying height—endless ocean spreading out in all directions, rows of turbines, the long wrinkle of each wave, one after another, like striped wallpaper—is not what makes my breath catch.
The platform is almost entirely covered in nesting birds.
They seem to be some kind of gull, smaller than an ordinary seagull and pure white, with beady black eyes and a dot of red on the tips of their beaks. Their nests are made of driftwood and kelp, held together with bits of down, and most have two or three chicks inside. Over the roar of the generator and the great whooshing of the blades, the air is filled with warbles and screeches.
“What are you guys doing here?” I mutter, mostly to myself. A few of them regard me suspiciously, but quickly decide I pose no threat and turn back to their hatchlings. The chicks can’t be more than a few weeks old, fuzzy balls of speckled down. I watch them with some consternation.
Wind power is supposed to be a climate solution, but people forget about all the climate disruption caused just by installing these mammoth farms. Noise pollution during construction messes with marine mammals’ echolocation and the migratory paths of birds. Drilling into the seabed dislodges huge clouds of sediment, effectively light-starving whole ecosystems that can take years to recover.
And two turns of a turbine blade can power a family’s house for a whole day, I hear Darcy’s voice say.
What if I’m supposed to clear out these nests, huh, Darce? I think back. What if ZephyrCorp makes me dump them all into the sea?
On my ride back to the base, I think briefly about using the sat phone to call the mainland. Back in my room, I switch on the screen and open Selene’s digital manual. I scroll through Gearbox, Generator, Tower Segments A through D, until I find Upper Platform. I scan the various components, and read, to my immense surprise,
platform decks are built to mimic the contours of sea ice and coastal beaches, to provide nesting habitat for sea birds
I flip through the design spec. The platform is made of a kind of neo-plastic, ridged like a piece of paper that’s been crumpled and then flattened again. The birds can stay; in fact, they’re expected. I should feel relieved, and some part of me does, but—seriously? How is a giant, humming wind turbine a good place for a nest?
I spot something I hadn’t noticed before in one of the cabinets. It’s a book, titled A Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Arctic, and next to it, a small journal. They must have been left by the last technician. I pull out the book. A page has been dog-eared, and it opens to a picture that matches the birds on the platform.
Ivory Gull (critically endangered). A scavenger species of gull that is typically found among ice floes in the High Arctic. During breeding season, the ivory gull will congregate in breeding colonies around Greenland and Nunavut Province, building nests on sea cliffs or directly on the sea ice, one of the only known species to do so.
So that explains why the gulls are nesting here, instead of on the sea ice they expected to find. They aren’t here because they want to be; they’re here because they have nowhere else to go. A familiar, gray feeling settles into my chest as I think about the little gulls and their fluffy chicks.
I put the bird book back and pull out the journal. It’s full of observations, sporadic and in a variety of hands, dating back almost a year. Some detail whale sightings, or white sharks who now range this far north, but the most recent entries are all about the gulls: their nest-building and egg-laying, the trading of incubation responsibilities by the parents, the eventual hatching of the chicks.
I close the journal, the gray feeling spreading like a storm front moving in. A cheery catalog of observations doesn’t override the reality: the turbine platform is a refugee camp, the birds displaced, and their real habitat now a thing of the past.
I grew up in a suburb north of Boston, with a rocky beach only a few minutes walk from our house. The water was always frigid, even in the summer, but I used to walk that beach in all seasons combing for whatever the ocean delivered and often accompanied by at least one family member.
My father’s parents came here from Lebanon, fleeing their own sort of crisis, and my parents settled down just a few houses over from them. In fact, most of my extended family could be found within a one-mile radius of that bit of coast, and most family gatherings ended at the beach for a walk or the distribution of dessert or to stargaze. At the time, the world was hurtling towards climate disaster, but my family kept their heads down, certain it would never affect us. “Going green” was a matter of opinion, like personal style, and never mind the things I learned in school or that my friends’ parents worried about.
But eventually the sea turned against us, creeping higher year by year, and when there were storms, the flooding got so bad that the first floor of our house became permanently moldy and water-damaged. Eventually my parents had enough and moved us to a “temporary” apartment fifty miles inland while they “figured out renovations.” It was the beginning of the end for their marriage, but I didn’t know that.
Back then, I thought we were going to get our shit together and fix things, that we’d put the world right and my family would move back to our house by the sea. I was an activist, was even thinking about going into policy myself. I voted green, went to all the marches, called my senators, but still, still by the time anything changed, it was too late.
“We are getting our shit together,” Darcy told me when I voiced this. “Look at that new solar-powered housing complex upstate! Or the bill that just passed for the electric bus system!”
At that point we’d been dating almost a year, but I still hadn’t taken her to meet my family. I told her it was because I didn’t visit often, which was true, but really it was that her rainbow-dyed hair and propensity for physical touch (she described herself as “a hugger”) would be as jarring to my parents as their dour TV dinners would be to her. I didn’t want to think of what would happen if the conversation turned to politics.
And even to me, her optimism rang hollow. Sure, now we were changing, now that everything was fucked. The damage was done. The planet was never going to go back to how it was, how it should have been. My parents finalized their divorce, and my childhood home fell into ruin, becoming more a part of the coast I used to walk with each passing year.
I never visited that beach again.
Just as I promised myself I wouldn’t think of Darcy, I promise I won’t worry about the gulls. But somehow I find myself visiting them every day when I make my trip to the nacelle (now by elevator) to take readings.
I start recording observations in the old technician’s journal. Just for completeness of the record, I tell myself. And if I spend long hours up there, it’s only because watching the adults flying is something to do. They dive and soar with impressive agility through the high winds, which are always blowing in the kind of rip-roar you’d expect for, well, a wind farm, and I soon stop worrying about the turbine blades chewing them up.
The chicks, for their part, are growing fast. Every day they seem a bit bigger, a bit louder, more ready to explore the world beyond their driftwood-and-kelp nests. They beat their little wings in rebellion and scream at their parents for food. Their feathers are coming in with a bit of gray speckling, and I read in A Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Arctic that they won’t be pure white until they reach maturity.
One parent always stays in the nest while the other goes off hunting, and one day I get curious and go out to watch them in action from the base platforms. The sea is in full force, but so are the gulls, diving into the waves and coming back with crustaceans or small fish in their beaks.
The longer I watch, the more I notice that the base platforms have been designed precisely for this habitat: they extend further than they need and spiral around the turbine to create pockets like coves. Somewhere beneath them must be a structure that roots the thick, leathery arms of kelp. This artificial reef attracts schools of small fish, and sometimes something larger that causes them to roil and leap out of the water. It’s . . . not what I expected to find surrounding such an industrial structure.
I remind myself not to be fooled. It’s just a toy model of the ecosystem that would have been here with the sea ice. Where are the seals, the sea leopards, the killer whales?
As if on cue, a jet of water trumpets into the air and I nearly fall over in shock. Jesus Christ, it’s a whale, not thirty yards away. A lone humpback, gliding through the water as if turning on an invisible wheel, its knobbed back transitioning to a flat flap of tail in one smooth motion. I turn instinctively to say something snarky—are we finally getting our “guaranteed sighting” from that whale-watching cruise you dumped all that money on, Darce?—before remembering that I’m alone.
I run back inside Selene and take the lift to the upper platform, where I watch the humpback’s steady progress through the turbines and then the empty sea long after it’s out of sight. Around midnight the sun dips below the horizon. The gulls are bedding down with their mates; the air is filled with cooing. Hundreds of turbines spin noiselessly in the twilight.
Are there people in any of them? Is someone else looking out, not knowing that I’m looking back? The thought makes me strangely sad.
I’ve never minded being alone, so why do I ache with loneliness?
I wake suddenly to a sound like a freight train.
There’s a moment where I wonder if I’m dreaming, and then it comes again, engulfing the circular room with a roar that makes the walls tremble. It’s a wave. Outside, there are waves high enough to crash over my quarters, forty feet above where they were this morning. Terror overtakes me. The sea is coming for me again.
I force myself to breathe, and I recall distantly that the forecast had mentioned a storm. Selene was made to withstand even a Category 5 hurricane. Whatever is happening outside, it can’t touch me here.
I reluctantly slip out of bed and check the weather data. The winds are blowing at sixty miles an hour, with gusts up to ninety. The gulls, I think, a cold fist of dread closing over my heart. They’re going to be blown right off the turbine, nests, chicks, and all. Before I can register what I’m doing, I’m pulling on my boots and running for the elevator.
Going up feels like being inside a cargo jet taking off. There’s a low-pitched moaning that must be the wind, and a higher note, like an overtone, that gets louder as I ascend. The walls vibrate, my very bones vibrate, as if I’m inside a bell as it’s ringing. The safety briefing flashes across my mind momentarily—bad weather, stay inside—but all I can think of are the gulls. Maybe I can save some of them, move their nests into the nacelle just for the night, just until the winds die down . . . .
I stumble out of the elevator. The floor is rocking; the entire turbine is swaying. Nausea rises in me. I race up the remaining fifteen feet of ladder to the upper deck. I can still save some of them. It’s all I’m thinking. I reach for the hatch, and that’s when I discover I’m not rigged in, oh fuck I’m not rigged in, and I’m falling, falling into empty space . . . .
Slam.
My body hits something solid. The landing. Through the grate I can see the tower spiraling into darkness. By some miracle I missed the edge. I lie there, dazed, tasting blood in my mouth.
How could I be so stupid? To forget my harness? To even think to go out there? The gulls are probably long dead. They were never going to make it. Never. My mind fills with horrible images: their flimsy white bodies hurtling through the storm like flotsam, my family’s old house splintering in the waves, my last fight with Darcy before we separated.
“Can’t you just entertain the idea?”
“There’s nothing to entertain, Darce. We’d never be able to afford it, not even if I took a salary job and you went back to that shitty tech company.”
“Maybe not that house exactly, but other places like it are starting to go on the market, and the idea is that it’s a collective, you’re not just paying for a house, but you’re paying into the whole system, the clean energy grid and the farm and—”
“And there’s a million other people who want to live in a place like that, so it’s going to go to the highest bidder. Obviously.”
“Jesus, I knew you were going to be like this. I knew the first thing you’d do was shoot it down, like you always do—”
“Don’t make me the bad guy just for being realistic.”
“You’re not being realistic, you’re being pessimistic.”
“Right, I forgot I was speaking to the only resident of Darcy’s Dreamland.”
“You’re the one who lives in a dreamland. You’re so convinced that the world is a horrible place, that it doesn’t matter what anyone says or does—you’re just going to find what you expect to find! Well I want more than that!”
I lie splayed on my back, aching, and I’m aware of tears dripping down my face.
“Darcy’s Dreamland” is what I used to teasingly call her side of our debates, back when we used to go for hours, her the optimist and me the pessimist, and then we both saw it as a point of pride that we could be so different, like it made our relationship stronger. Until it became the very thing we resented about each other. Or perhaps I made it so, because she was right: I couldn’t let go of my cynicism, and it would poison everything she wanted for us.
A wave of grief washes over me. I think of the gulls, of my family’s home, the beach, once loved then hated. How do I justify it, Darce? How do I believe in it like you do, a future, a home, a child?
Selene sways and sways, feeding off the storm, embracing its power, and somewhere far off, the homes of Nunavut are flaring with light.
Somehow, I manage to drag myself back down to my bunk, where I fall into a fitful sleep. I don’t know how long I’m out for; it feels like days. When I finally wake, cocooned in blankets, the roar of the waves is gone.
My entire body aches. I pull off my shirt and twist to find mottled purple bruising extending down my back. Probably further, but I don’t really want to look. It hurts to inhale, making me suspect I’ve cracked a few ribs. At least I can still walk. Lucky I didn’t break both arms and both legs, or worse, everything else.
I limp down to the kitchen and brew a strong pot of coffee, putting off as long as I can the journey back up to the gearbox. I don’t want to see the empty platform, streaks of guano and scatterings of driftwood all that remains of the nests. But after eating and washing up and re-organizing the stores and entertaining myself with a crossword puzzle, I’ve run out of excuses not to do my job.
I don’t care, I tell myself, as I punch in the upper level on the lift. I always knew it was going to happen. And if I was smarter, I wouldn’t have gotten attached.
But when I lift my head through the hatch, I’m as shocked as I was the first time.
The gulls are still there. Their nests look a little worse for wear, sure, and some birds have feathers sticking up oddly, but they’re all still there. Without missing a beat, the adults are back to their foraging, delivering new bits of refuse for nest repair. And the chicks—if they can even be called chicks anymore—are spreading their speckled wings and levitating a few feet in the air, where they wobble like tiny kites. The polar sun is fierce in the cloudless sky.
I read once that if you look hard enough, you can always find a reason to hope. But I think the truth is closer to Darcy’s appraisal: you can always find a reason not to, and those reasons often feel more convincing. Hope isn’t found, it’s created. And sometimes, the reasons follow.
The fledglings lift higher and higher on the updrafts. The parents are watching; some launch themselves off the platform and begin circling above. They’re demonstrating, I realize. And then the first brave chick takes the leap of faith, following the adults off the platform and into open air. My heart lurches, but it’s got wings, hasn’t it? The others take the cue, and suddenly they’re all careening into the sky.
All across the horizon, small white specks are streaming from the tops of the other turbines like magnolia blossoms scattering in the wind. There must be thousands. The entire wind farm is a vast nesting colony.
Against all odds, the gulls have found their niche in this new world.
