Somebody threw out the coffee can under the window unit over the Fourth and replaced it with the same can. Same brand, same blue lid, the lid in the recycling. Janelle notices because the drip sounds different in a can with no rust ring in the bottom. Higher.
The sixth of July, a Tuesday, 2:30 in the afternoon, the Tazewell County SWCD office. Dale's PDF comes in first this time and his text a minute after. She opens the PDF first, because that's what came first, and then she sits there feeling like she's been tricked into a habit.
#17 Schaefer, storm 4 (6/30): SO4 188, alk 2.9 Hartsburg W, baseflow 6/22: SO4 29 Schierer N80, baseflow 6/30: SO4 33
The text: 17 still burning. hartsburg wet spot not doing anything. good. D.
So the gray inch she found at the Hartsburg junction three weeks ago is just wet. Wet clay, basement smell, nothing in it turning to acid. Its sulfate sits within four milligrams of Schierer's. Two controls she can explain. One field she can't use as a control at all, which is the one she had on card ten already.
Schaefer's is down from 212 to 188. That could be four days of rain diluting it. It could be the gray pocket under the old splice running out of things to rust. One number won't tell her which, and she's learned this year not to let one number tell her anything.
Two numbers might. Rain thins everything in the pipe together, sulfate and chloride both, so the ratio between them holds. A pocket giving less thins only the sulfate, so the ratio falls. Dale keeps the splits frozen for ninety days. She texts him before she can talk herself out of the twenty dollars: can u run CL on #17 storm 3 and 4 splits. want SO4/CL not SO4.
yes. tues. D.
She takes out card ten. CASES, in carpenter's pencil, two lines under it. The SO4 column she ruled on the right edge in June is two digits wide because every control she'd ever sampled read in the twenties and thirties. 188 needs three. She rules the column wider, a sixteenth of an inch, and writes the number in small.
3. 7/6/49 #17 STORM 4 SO4 188, ALK 2.9 (DOWN FROM 212. RAIN OR RUNNING OUT, CAN'T SAY YET). CL ON STORM 3+4 SPLITS ASKED: FLAT SO4/CL = RAIN, FALLING = POCKET. HTBG W 29, SCHIERER 33 = NORMAL. WET SPOT IS JUST WET. 0.3 H, GRAY.
Gray because it was Dale's number and her afternoon, and nobody's buyer will ever look at it.
The eighth of July, Thursday, ten to seven in the evening, the Schierer porch. Loretta brings out two coffees without asking. That's how Loretta says she has a minute and wants it spent on something.
Troy has his phone out before Janelle sits. "Got this. You tell me."
An email from YardDesk Partner Desk. The signature says Reese, and under Reese, in gray, Partner Desk agent. A human reviews all agreements.
We noticed your field is used as a reference control by Tazewell SWCD. Reference Partners receive $9/acre/yr and a complimentary TileTap pod for the control outlet. Reference data improves credit accuracy for everyone.
"Seven hundred twenty a year for the north eighty," Troy says. "For a pod. I'm doing it for you for nothing."
"You are."
"So what's wrong with it."
She drinks Loretta's coffee. It's strong and there's cinnamon in it, which is new.
"Nothing's wrong with nine dollars," she says. "Right now your outlet is the one thing in this whole project nobody gets paid on. No pod, no listing, no reference credit. That's why it works as a control. It's the one field that isn't on anybody's curve."
"They'd be paying me. Not the ash."
"They'd be paying you to be on their curve. Then when your pod fouls in June, and it will, there's a biofilm on those things like the skin on cold gravy, you've got gray hours, and somebody fills them. Not you."
Loretta, from the screen door: "Read the rest of it, Troy."
He scrolls. A section headed Data. He reads it with his lips moving and then hands Janelle the phone, face up, like he's handing her a bill.
Reference data collected by Partner devices is YardDesk data.
"Huh," Troy says.
She looks at it a long time. Since the last update the dashboard has shown her two hand readings from storm night as two dots with her initials, because Cody filed a ticket and somebody in Chicago built it. Her numbers stayed hers. This sentence takes the control out from under them. If the field she lays next to the ash every storm belongs to the people selling the ash, then her two dots are being compared against a line the vendor owns.
"Whose idea was it to send this?" she asks.
"Says it noticed." Troy shrugs. "It's an agent. They notice."
It noticed from her own protocol. The control agreement is public; it's in the board packet. Somewhere a model read district board packets and made a list of unpaid controls, and every farmer on that list got nine dollars an acre in his inbox the same week.
96. 7/8/49 T. SCHIERER: YD 'REFERENCE PARTNER' OFFER, $9/AC/YR + POD ON CTL OUTLET. DATA = YD DATA. HE HASN'T ANSWERED. L.S. SAYS READ IT. 0.9 H, 22 MI, BLACK.
The ninth of July, Friday, twenty after seven in the morning. She's in the truck in the office lot with the engine off and the windows down, because she doesn't want to say it at her desk where Ray can walk past.
She can't tell Troy not to take seven hundred and twenty dollars. It's his field. He signed the control agreement the first time because Loretta told him the district was the only one at the table not selling something. That's still true. It just isn't worth seven-twenty.
She turns card nine over and writes on the back, three lines, block letters so they'll photograph.
IF YOU SIGN: 1. I KEEP SAMPLING YOUR OUTLET BY HAND. SAME DAYS, SAME METER. 2. MY NUMBERS STAY MINE AND THE DISTRICT'S. NOT THEIRS. 3. IF THEIR POD AND MY METER DISAGREE, THE DISTRICT REPORTS BOTH AND SAYS WHICH IS WHICH.
Under it: If those three can't be true in writing, your field stops being my control. Not because you did anything. Because I can't measure with a ruler somebody else is being paid on.
She photographs it on the dash and texts the photo instead of calling. Troy will read a call as an argument. A photo he can hand to Loretta.
7:41. so ur saying dont
7:42. im saying ask them for 2 and 3 in writing. if they say yes take the money.
7:44. and if no
7:45. then i need a new control and you get to stay a farmer
7:52. A thumbs up. From Troy that can mean got it or leave me alone or Loretta's reading it now. She decides it means the third.
She thinks about where she'd find another control. Somebody with tile, no ash, no pod, and a main that isn't rotting. Every one of those she can name is now a name on a list in Chicago, about to get the same email. A field nobody's paying to watch used to be the normal kind. It's turning into something rare, like an unlocked church.
97. 7/9/49 DECIDED: TROY MAY SIGN. CONDITIONS: HAND SAMPLING CONTINUES, MY DATA STAYS DISTRICT'S, DISAGREEMENTS REPORTED BOTH. IF NOT IN WRITING, SCHIERER LEAVES CONTROLS. SENT HIM PHOTO. 0.3 H, BLACK.
The fourteenth of July, Wednesday, quarter after ten in the morning, Schaefer's field. Nine days without rain. The beans curl at the leaf edges by afternoon and flatten out again by morning. Ken Schaefer's dog follows her out from the yard to the old splice and lies down in the one piece of shade in the section, which is under her truck.
The flag from May is still there, pink gone almost white. She sets the probe eighteen inches east of the old hole so she isn't coring her own backfill, leans her weight on the T-handle, twists, pulls.
Brown to fourteen inches. Then tan with orange, more orange than in May, the rust freckles running together into streaks. That goes down to twenty-six. Then gray from twenty-six to the bottom of the probe.
In May the gray started at nineteen. In May the hole was eighteen inches west of this one, and the ground was wet from a week of rain, and today it's had nine days of sun. Three things changed, not one.
She breaks the bottom off and smells it. Egg, faint. Fainter than May, but there. Something down there is still turning sulfate back into sulfide, which means part of the pocket is still sealed off from air, whatever the top is doing.
She walks three feet farther east and cores again. Orange streaks all the way down to thirty inches. No gray at all. That tells her where the edge of the gray is today. It doesn't tell her where it was in May, because in May she didn't core here.
She lays both cores on the tailgate and holds her phone over them with the May photo open, and photographs the three of them together: May's core on the screen, gray most of the way up; today's two in the sun, the gray only at the bottom of one.
She'd like to write that the pocket is shrinking. She can't, quite. Gray clay doesn't turn orange in eight weeks; the gray body is mostly what it was. What's new is the streaks, thin orange lines along old root channels and worm holes, where air now gets down through the pores because the new plastic main pulls the water off. That's where the sulfur meets the air and turns to acid. The lime in the till eats most of the acid. The calcium leaves out the pipe with the sulfate, which is the 188.
The carbon is the part she had too simple on card ten. Acid on lime, with plenty of lime around, doesn't throw off gas right away. It makes bicarbonate, and the bicarbonate rides out the pipe in the water. The gas comes later, downstream, as the water sits in a ditch and breathes, or the lime drops back out on a stone. Dale's two numbers say how much. She does it on the back of the receipt from Casey's: 188 milligrams of sulfate is about 3.9 milliequivalents. If every bit of that acid had stopped at bicarbonate, the alkalinity would read at least 3.9. It reads 2.9. The one-unit gap is the carbon that's already gone, to air or onto the clay. Not over Ken's beans. In the numbers.
A field losing carbon and reading, at the pipe, like a field losing alkalinity. The gap between those two numbers is the only place a pod could ever see it, and a pod only measures one of them.
It will keep doing it until the gray is gone. She has no idea how big the gray was to start with, so she has no idea how long.
The outlet trickle, nine days dry: 7.34. Lowest dry reading she's taken there.
Ken's dog gets up and moves when the shade moves.
4. 7/14/49 #17 SPLICE CORE, 9 D DRY, 18 IN E OF MAY HOLE: GRAY TOP 26 IN HERE (MAY: 19 AT HOLE 18 IN W, WETTER). FRESH ORANGE STREAKS ALONG PORES 14-26. 3 FT E: NO GRAY TO 30 = EDGE NOW, NO MAY CORE TO COMPARE. FAINT EGG = SO4 REDUCTION STILL BELOW. DRY 7.34 (LOWEST). SO4 3.9 MEQ VS ALK 2.9: ~1 MEQ GAP = C TO AIR OR EXCHANGE. SO4 BOTTLE. 1.4 H, 48 MI, BLACK.
The sixteenth of July, Friday, twenty to seven in the morning, the 0611 outlet. Gary's ash field, last October's spread, the one with the pod. Cody's van is already there with the side door open and a new pod sitting in a foam cradle on the passenger seat like a sandwich somebody packed for him.
"Summer membrane," he says. "Algae eats the spring one." The old pod is in a zip bag on the floor and it is green.
She takes her pipe reading while he works. Her meter, the cracked strap: 7.58. He swaps the pod, waits the two minutes it takes to settle, and turns his phone so she can see. 7.60.
"Plus two," she says.
"Told you I'd get it under five."
She waits until he's packing the van. She doesn't want to ask in front of the pipe, though there's nobody here but a red-winged blackbird on the culvert rail.
"The attributed points. My two dots. Can Iowa have that."
Cody looks out at the field, not at her. The corn is over his head now and he's looking at the wall of it.
"It's a tenant setting," he says. "Every customer's a tenant. Illinois tenant has it on because I filed it on yours. Mills County's a different tenant. Different contract."
"So they'd have to ask."
"They'd have to ask for it by name." He finds a pen in the door pocket and writes on the back of a pod receipt, block letters, and hands it to her.
attributed_manual_points = true
"If they ask for points in general," he says, "the support agent tells them it's on the roadmap. It tells everybody things are on the roadmap. If they ask for that, it's a checkbox and somebody has to check it."
"You can't just tell people that."
"I just told somebody." He slides the side door shut. "Don't put my name on the card."
She puts C.D. on the card. That's an initial, not a name. He knows that's what she'll do. That's why he told her.
In the truck she photographs the receipt and sends it to Arturo with one line: ask for this exactly. dont paraphrase.
Arturo is in the field, or in a Casey's lot, or asleep. Nothing comes back. She pictures him on hold with the Iowa support agent, saying points and getting roadmap, saying person three times, the polka out of Council Bluffs. Four words in lowercase with underscores between them, and whether a field tech in Glenwood gets to keep his own readings depends on him typing them exactly.
98. 7/16/49 0611 SUMMER POD SWAP: PIPE 7.58, NEW POD 7.60 (+0.02). C.D.: POINTS ARE A TENANT SETTING, 'ATTRIBUTED_MANUAL_POINTS = TRUE', MUST BE ASKED BY NAME. SENT TO A.P. 0.7 H, 52 MI, GRAY.
That evening she drives the long way home past the Schierer place, which isn't the long way, it's just a different way. The porch light's on. Troy's truck is in the yard.
On the fridge in the kitchen, through the screen door as she goes by, she can just see a square of white that might be the photo of line 90. Loretta said she'd put it up.
Her phone buzzes at the stop sign. Troy.
sent them ur 3. reese says forwarding to a human
Then: loretta says if the human says no we keep being free
She looks at that until the car behind her honks, which out here means a neighbor and not a stranger, and she lifts two fingers off the wheel and goes.
At the kitchen table she lays card nine and card ten side by side. Nine is lines about other people: Troy's offer, Troy's conditions, Cody's checkbox. Ten is lines about dirt. Four of them now. Schaefer's gray may or may not be going away; nobody's watching it but her and Ken's dog, and so far she's only watched it from two different holes.
She writes 98a. 7/16/49 T.S. SENT CONDITIONS. YD 'FORWARDING TO A HUMAN.' between 98 and the bottom edge, small.
Then on card ten, under line 4, she rules line 5 and leaves it empty. Next Wednesday, if it stays dry, she'll core Schaefer's splice again, a hand's width from this morning's hole, so the next number has something honest to stand next to. She can't make the gray go faster or slower. She can measure it a week apart, which no pod is set up to do.