Flux, chapter 3

Diffusion Flux

Welcome to all the new subscribers who’ve joined in the past couple of weeks. I’m delighted that you’re here. Whether you’re here for the lovely interviews with nature writers; the bi-monthly journal, NatureStack, curating the best of Substack’s nature writing; the occasional essay on <waves arms around> all this; or this serial novel, FLUX, welcome. Wherever you are on this path — whether you’re brimming with wonder or weary with grief — you belong here. Together, we can return to our deep connection with the world and find hope again.

⬅️ Previous chapter

Late April 2009

Grace enters a soulless classroom to lecture about what’s going on in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York state. The entire landscape—glacial swells and valleys, farms and forests—unifies a mile beneath the surface in a Middle Devonian shale formation called the Marcellus. Marcellus derives from Mars, the Roman god of war. Apt word for the carnage of forest clearing, earth moving, drilling and hauling that rages there now.

The story that the fossil treasures of the Marcellus are there for the taking has been imposed on the land by men of industry. But the Marcellus was a secret that the land meant to keep. Everything in that underworld—methane compounds, radium, ancient bacteria—was hidden over millennia deep beneath the surface. Stashed to safeguard a fragile riot of green plants, fungi, soil, water, air, and furred, finned and feathered creatures. The biosphere is a thin layer with a thick purpose: to house all of life on earth.

If Grace were a real teacher like her mother, she might have adorned the walls of this classroom with enviroporn photographs: Ansel Adams at Yosemite, sunrise on the Serengeti, James Balog’s glaciers, Jane Goodall’s chimps. They could have captions like:

Climate is a painting. Weather is one brushstroke.

Or she could use them as section dividers if she ever writes a book.

Grace had forgotten that in middle school, she did write a book of letters to the earth. There it was, in a box of her old childhood things sent by her father’s cousin Gary. A black and white composition book, gone soft with age. Every lined page covered in tight, penciled cursive.

Dear Earth,

I could praise your sunrises or sunsets. I could write that I love to count fireflies rising from warm grass. I never trap them in jars, that’s cruel.

I could describe the sticky sweet juice of peaches. Or the way a pine forest smells after rain.

But today I’ll say, I see you. People usually only see each other. But I see you. It’s sad when bulldozers push trees over to clear land for more houses. They don’t have to do that. Most people are fine with a few trees in their yard.

I’m sorry people divide you up with fences. I’m glad the deer can jump.

I’m sorry they capture your whales and dolphins and make them do tricks for people. They’re all amazing. They deserve to swim free.

I’m sorry they drill oil wells. Or even water wells. That must hurt.

Ms. Simonds told us oil is what the dinosaurs became. And the plants from back then, and it’s all meant to stay down there because it’s poisonous. Sorry, hope that doesn’t hurt your feelings. We all have secrets, I guess.

When she first read it, Grace cringed at every I’m sorry. Her father drummed into her never apologize. That lesson has served her well.

She refuses to call what she does here teaching. She belongs in the lab or in the field, but her visiting professorship requires delivering information to undergraduates. Before her methane obsession brought her to hermetically sealed rooms like this one, she lived in khakis and waders tromping through marshes. Her sunburned skin a map of mosquito bites.

Behind closed eyes there she is, under the great dome of sky with a breeze lifting strands of hair off her sticky neck. Black mud pulls on her boot as she lifts a foot to step. Cordgrass prickles her arms and hands.

She pinches the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses to clear the sweat and opens her lecture notes. The course, Communicating Climate Change, is her department’s new initiative for students to make science more accessible outside their fortress. Her students write gems like, The earth is negatively impacted by our actions and non-actions alike. Not only does the word impacted irritate her, passive voice is too puny for what’s at stake. Subject-verb-object: someone is responsible. Stop dancing around and say it.

Who is she to judge? She ordered three books and a pair of distressed jeans off Amazon Prime last night. The package will be on her doorstep by tomorrow.

The box from cousin Gary is heavy with parts of Grace’s old air and water quality monitors, along with awards from high school. Whenever she needs a confidence boost, she slips the blue velvet ribbon with the Cross Scientific medal over her head to relive her nervous pride during the award ceremony. Her first-place project, A Portable Device to Detect Carbon Monoxide from a Localized Source, was powered by a small solar panel borrowed from NASA. Joey Strang protested over the outside help, but his project didn’t advance knowledge of anything.

At the ceremony, Grace stood on the dais and searched the crowd for her father. He didn’t come. To make up for his absence, he promised to introduce her to the engineers who designed the life support systems for the space shuttle. They could recycle moisture from the astronauts’ breath into potable water. That trip never materialized.

She’s carried the box to every place she’s lived, each time thinking she should pitch it and each time unable to. Besides science fair awards, there are ticket stubs from “Jurassic Park” and “The Matrix,” and pictures clipped from National Geographic: a cheetah at full gallop, a whale breeching, cameos of Nils Bohr, Marie Curie, and Rosalind Franklin. Some items must have been added by her father, pinned with the others to her bedroom’s 3-by-5 cork bulletin board—the only surface sanctioned by him for self-expression. A photo of her in a lab from an article about her Princeton fellowship, holding some papers and looking studious. A postcard she’d sent from Long Island while there for summer fieldwork. A press release from Cornell about PhD defenses. Her hair was so short then. Her chest aches to picture him tending that bulletin board, less a time capsule than a shrine to her absence.

A dragonfly lands on the classroom windowsill. Its iridescent blue-green body glints in the low morning sun. Behind glass, objectified like a specimen in a lab. She draws closer, afraid it will fly away but unable to stop. Such elegance, the impossible eyes, the attenuated body, the clever cross of gossamer wings. During the year she lived on Holland Island with her grandparents while her parents bulldozed their toxic marriage, she’d sit for hours at the edge of the marsh. Palms open on her knees in supplication, waiting for one to land on her hand. Saint Grace of the Dragonflies.

A good phrase to define impossibility: waiting for a dragonfly to land on your hand. None ever had. Mayflies, yes. But the dragonflies were on about their own business, nothing to do with her. Understandable. They live less than two months, devoted to the imperative to reproduce.

A thick ache in her throat pushes her closer. The dragonfly doesn’t move. She presses her hand on the glass, overwhelmed by sorrow. There is no way back to that childhood marsh from here.

There was one photo in the box that Grace had never seen. A black and white Polaroid, 1982 written neatly on the border in pencil. Her father as a young man in shorts and plain t-shirt stands in front of a tarpaper shack beside a slender young woman in a white summer dress. She has a serious face framed by a cloud of dark hair and holds a swaddled baby in her arms. Grace’s mother on her first visit to Holland Island. The little family poses beside the closed plank door of the crab-picking house where Grace’s grandmother worked part-time. A white-painted board proclaims the name: two black shapes, a star and a crab, followed by two black letters, C and O.

The students shuffle into the classroom, talking in low tones, laughing. Grace rubs her eyes and turns to watch. After two weeks, they’d already formed friendships. She’s still learning their names.

Climate is personality. Weather is mood.

To set the context for her focus on methane, she starts with carbon. Poster child of the world’s climate models. “Currently, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is 390 parts per million. There’s little hope of getting back to 350, where it needs to be to avoid climate disaster.”

Student Athlete, a young woman with close-cropped white-blonde hair, calls out from the back. “Without hope, what’s the point?”

Thrift Store Kid in his overlarge mismatched plaids says hope is an anti-intellectual crutch. “In an emergency, nobody talks about hope. They get busy.”

Spelling Bee Kid says, “Hope keeps us docile, chained to the system. That’s what they want.”

Sorority Girl says, “Hope is a higher calling. Wake up, people! There are miracles all around us.”

Other students debate hope while Grace remembers her friend from undergrad biology. High on hope, he became the world’s leading expert on the Yangtze River baiji dolphin. In 2006, he and his team scoured over two thousand miles of river with underwater cameras and microphones. They found not a single surviving dolphin. He returned to the U.S. defeated and broken. Within months, he quit his tenured post and hung himself. Hope kills. Literally.

Sports Kid adjusts his Sixers hat and says, “You’re wrong. We need hope as fuel for the fight.”

The Feminists jump into the fray. “You guys use military language for everything,” the redhead says. The tall, thin one says, “War on terror, war on poverty, war on drugs. Fight climate change. Battle cancer. Crush heart disease.”

Grace’s father’s heart seemed fine her whole childhood. Until it wasn’t. They lived in a suburban brick, one-story starter home with chimney, fake shutters, and no charm. Identical to every other house in the neighborhood, arrayed on pointlessly curving streets and cul-de-sacs. The final crop on land farmed for generations. Neighbors had added front porches, screened back porches, kitchen-master suite additions, family rooms. Not her father.

The one change he did make was to cover the pitched asphalt roof with solar panels salvaged from NASA’s cast-offs. The year Grace turned four, Ronald Reagan had made a point of removing Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. Her father never let that go, enraged by Reagan’s claim that the free market would decide what’s best for the country.

“The free market didn’t send us to the moon,” he would say.

Grace clears her throat. “Let’s focus.” She shows an image of a fracking site from the air. “Methane is one hundred times more potent a greenhouse gas in the short term than carbon. While it makes up only ten percent of global emissions, in twenty years—when you all are up to your eyeballs in marriages, divorces, careers, school loans, kids and carpools—methane will trap up to one hundred times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.”

That got their attention. “Currently, our climate models do not account for methane. Given the rapid increase in natural gas production and unchecked methane releases, that’s a dire outcome for the climate.”

Climate is a forest. Weather is one tree.

Next slide, closeup of a fracking wellhead and aerial of a black plastic-lined evaporation pit bigger than two football fields end to end. Light glints off patches of tan pink goo in the pit. “This is unbelievably sloppy. They pump fracking fluid back up the wellbore into these pits where they say it disappears, methane and all. Who here can tell us the laws of thermodynamics?”

A few hands go up. “Seriously?” A few more hands. Grace waits. They stare back. She should stop now, for real.

“Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed?” Class President says.

Close enough. “Yes,” Grace says. “It can only transfer from one form to another. Thank you, uh . . .”

“Kenneth.”

“Right. Kenneth.” She should pop quiz them on the other three, but that would take too long. Next slide, a cross section, concentric circles of well pipe. “The concrete casing outside the steel well pipe is called the annulus.” She pauses for a few salacious giggles. “Concrete will crack if the mix isn’t perfect or it cures too quickly. It’s bad bad bad to have a dry annulus.” The laughter spreads, bolder now. “But so what? Why care? Because gases in porous sedimentary rock exploit these cracks. Methane will rise up a well pipe or in your annulus, it doesn’t care which.” Even she’s laughing now.

Next slide, a bar chart. “One well in five fails on its first day. Forty percent fail over their lifetime. And it’s been this way for decades. Drillers figure it’s legal if no one finds out. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want a surgeon with such a dismal record operating on me.”

A few half-hearted pity snickers. At least someone is listening.

Grace’s father rarely listened to her. He was too occupied working late at the sprawling playground of labs, clean rooms, machine shops, and testing hangars at Goddard. She imagined heated conversations with colleagues over vending machine junk food in the canteen. He sometimes joked that the Hubble Telescope’s corrective optics were dreamed up over Skittles.

The two framed photographs in cousin Gary’s box had sat on the living room side table. In the center of one, three orange-suited astronauts and a couple of bosses flank the elder President Bush, who wears a blue striped tie, a tiny flag pin, and a practiced smile. Behind them, a poster of a rocket pairs with NASA’s blue flag. Grace’s father stands at the end of a row of engineers, serious in his graying brush cut, suit, and ‘80s-loud tie. He holds a triangle-folded U.S. flag in a shadowbox. They did love to send those flags into space. He had promised Grace one for her eleventh birthday, but swept up in a deadline, missed the occasion entirely. The next year, she didn’t bother to ask.

The other photograph is a portrait of astronaut Walter Schirra, with his parting words for humanity printed at the bottom: I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth. Schirra had scrawled across the lower corner in black Sharpie: To Paddy, thanks for taking care of our ship. Grace had never once heard anyone call her father that. He was always Patrick. Always.

Grace’s next slide is a cross-section of a vertical gas well piercing through a horizontal blue ribbon of water near the surface. “It’s common in the Marcellus region for groundwater to percolate a few hundred feet down to pockets in the rock,” she says. “People’s water wells draw from these aquifers. Gases enjoying a free ride to the surface can detour into them. That’s how methane gets sucked right into people’s kitchens and showers.”

Chess Club President raises her hand. “Don’t environmental regulations prevent that?”

Grace lives for stamping out naïveté in all its forms. “Listen up, people. If you learn nothing else in this course, get this. Regulations are written by industry insiders and former regulators who go to work for industry. When Joe Struggling Farmer can light his kitchen faucet on fire, it’s on him to prove that methane isn’t naturally occurring, as the industry likes to claim. How can he prove that? Anyone?”

They stare back like startled deer. Goth Girl takes a crack, lip ring quivering as she speaks. “They could, like, test the water? Like, before and after drilling?”

“Exactly. Yes. That’s the only insurance they have. But these folks sign leases with fracking companies because they need the money. Nobody thinks of getting a two-thousand-dollar baseline water test. They’re counting on those royalties to refinance their second mortgage and pay down equipment loans before they lose the farm. Do any of you have an extra couple thousand lying around? I sure don’t.”

Of course many of them do. The tuition here is off the charts and she’s seen the cars they drive. The stuff they throw in the dumpster when they move out.

Budding Journalist in the front row says, “Your faculty profile says you work for one of those corporations.” His eyes are small and deep set beneath a heavy brow. Something simian about him, lumbering and dangerous. He consults a long dogeared notebook, spiral-bound across the top. “United Energy Holdings?”

Grace avoids his beady eyes. “No, I do not work for them. Yes, I had to get their permission to study emissions at their wells. Big difference. Yes, you in the back?”

Science Fair Nerd, twin of Grace ten years ago, leans forward. “I feel like you’re not being honest with us. What did you, like, have to promise, to get access?”

Grace tries to clear her frustration with a deep breath. Her chest tightness sets off a dry coughing spell. The trickle of cold coffee dregs makes it worse. The students are mutinous. She glances down at her notes. Four slides and ten minutes left.

“Next class, I’ll tell you all about the brutal world of science funding. I’ve been at this for a decade. So. Many. Stories.” She cough-chokes and dismisses class early.

The dragonfly is still on the windowsill as the students shuffle out, grumbling and scheming. Did it die there? A wave of self-loathing clamps Grace’s airways, forcing her to fumble for her inhaler. When she finishes, the dragonfly is gone.

She advances the four final slides to note where to begin the next class. Impatience claws at her. What the hell is she doing, teaching them to bear witness to destruction? Wasting her life measuring messes? How is more knowledge going to change anything?

At the bottom of cousin Gary’s box, beneath everything else, Grace had found a newspaper clipping with a grainy black and white photograph of a lonely lacework house, all rotting shingles and white paint flakes. The caption beneath read: Last house on Holland Island destroyed by storm.

The land is so flat, the sky and surrounding water are visible between the teetering cinderblock foundations. Pelicans perch along the sagging ridge on either side of a leaning weathervane. A rusty old earthmover lurks nearby. Last week’s storms, the article explains, battered what little remained of Holland Island above sea level. The house collapsed in on itself and disappeared beneath the waves. The gale claimed everything, including the earthmover used in recent years by the last owner in vain attempts to reverse the shoreline’s erosion.

In the margin, her father’s distinctive scrawl, remember. The image always brings tears to her eyes. Her grandparents’ house, swallowed by the very waters that once blessed hard-working families with bounty, left them silenced by sunrises, humbled by storms. That special place where she’d turned eight.

Grace imagines the house on the muddy bottom with the crabs and eels. And what of the cemetery with its 18^th century headstones worn nearly smooth by wind and time? Or the stones she never saw that had briefly memorialized her grandparents?

The first time she’d held that yellowed scrap, her grief had flamed quickly into disgust. How had she been so wrapped up in her life that she had never made it back to visit them, had never returned to walk the island and its muddy shores? Holland Island was mired in her imagination, forever entangled with the memories and longings that had molded her. And now it’s gone.

The final page of Grace’s book of letters reads:

Dear Earth,

I like watching your birds. The red cardinals at the feeder in winter cheer me up on cold, gray days. They look so pretty against the snow.

Sorry I don’t always remember to thank you for food. My grandparents always thanked God every night for their blessings. I know it’s really you.

In the science classroom, there’s a list of ten things we can do to save you. I do the ones I can, like turn off the faucet when brushing my teeth. I ride my bike to school. I recycle. I tried composting but we got rats and Dad yelled at me. I know rats are yours, too, but seriously? Ewwwww.

Every birthday, I ask for a tree to plant in our backyard, but so far Dad hasn’t come through. I’ll keep asking.

Thanks for air. And for the sky. It’s really blue today. And for the ocean and everyone who lives in it. The way the waves fizzle into lace on the wet sand is so pretty.

Keep up the good work.

Your friend,

Grace

Next chapter ➡️

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Well casing leaks. Still from Josh Fox’s film, Gasland Part II

Evaporation pit. Still from Josh Fox’s film, Gasland II

This Note is about a gorgeous animated film I found while researching this chapter.

One of the best things about reading serial fiction on Substack is the community that gathers around. This is slow reading at its best. Twice a month, everyone experiences a new chapter and gets to weigh in on what’s happening in real time. When I’ve read stories this way, whether short fiction or whole novels, the interactions with both readers and authors is one of the most enjoyable aspects.

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