The twenty-fourth of June, Wednesday. Ninety-four by one o'clock. It hasn't rained since the eighth.
Nobody writes about the dry half of tile sampling, so here it is. Every outlet on the circuit has gone from a rope of water to a damp lip of iron stain on the pipe, and she drives all fourteen of them anyway, because that's the job, and because a pipe nobody looks at in June is a pipe with a raccoon in it by August.
At 0611 she kneels on the riprap and puts her arm in the outlet to the elbow. Warm mud, and something that moves and is probably a crayfish. The sump below holds four inches of green water that's been cooking for two weeks. She doesn't bottle it. Standing water isn't tile water. It's soup.
On Lutz's south forty, mud daubers have built three tubes inside the probe guard, neat as organ pipes. She knocks them out with the back of a screwdriver, gets stung once on the wrist, and says a word Dale would write down. The wand reads in window on the 1413 cal anyway. The wand doesn't care about heat.
Two rodent guards are gone. One on Miller's main, which she replaces from the bin in the truck. One on the Bloomington lease, which is the tenant's pipe, so she writes it down for the tenant.
By four her shirt is salt-white under the arms and she's finished the jug. The cooler has ridden empty all day, ice packs sweating for nothing.
The planner wants each zero entered as NO SAMPLE. NO SAMPLE goes grey on the district sheet and looks like she stayed home. She enters them as NO FLOW, OUTLET INSPECTED. It's a real code. She checked. It's three pages deep in the protocol, under Dale's initials from 2046.
31. HEAT. 14 OUTLETS NO FLOW, INSPECTED. LUTZ WAND CLEARED (DAUBERS), IN WINDOW. MILLER GUARD REPLACED, LEASE GUARD MISSING, TENANT TOLD. CODED NO FLOW, NOT NO SAMPLE. 7 H, BLACK.
The twenty-sixth, Friday, 7:20am, before the heat. She's on the public side of the County 14 culvert reading the staff gauge, which reads zero, when Ehrhardt comes down the lane in a feed cap with his coffee.
He hasn't spoken to her since the day he told her the salt was the county's. He doesn't say good morning now either.
"What'd it read."
She knows which water he means. The outlet is on a road segment and road-segment results are public, so she gets the May sheet out of the truck and hands it to him folded to his line.
CO. 14 ROW, OUTLET: K 3.3 / CL 17 / NA 10
He reads it longer than it takes to read three numbers. His thumb sits on the sodium.
"That high?"
"Gary's was 3.1 in May. Lutz's was 4.2. Hartsburg's about two." She doesn't tell him what that means, because she doesn't fully know, and she says so. "Some of the chloride's the road. The sodium says that much. Not all of it. It doesn't say whose the rest is. It says what's in the pipe."
"My dad put potash on the north eighty in '31. Nobody tested anything then."
"No."
"So it could be him."
"It could be him. It could be ash. It could be a bag of yours. The water doesn't sign either."
That almost gets a laugh out of him. It comes out as air through his nose.
He doesn't ask for the release form and she doesn't take it out. It's in the truck under the cooler. She can feel exactly where it is, like a tooth.
"Can I keep this."
"It's a county ditch. It's yours."
He looks across the gauge at his own pipe sticking out of the bank, and the two empty bolt holes where the guard used to be. "Raccoons."
"I saw. It's your pipe."
"I got one in the shed that fits." He finishes his coffee instead of going to get it. "I'll put it on."
At 4:30 on her way back the guard is on, bolted crooked, one wing nut that doesn't match the other.
32. EHRHARDT ASKED FOR HIS RESULT. GAVE MAY SHEET (PUBLIC SEGMENT). NO FORM OFFERED, NONE ASKED. HE PUT HIS OWN GUARD ON. ROW STILL UNKNOWN. 1/2 H, BLACK.
The ninth of July, Thursday, 2:15pm. The Pekin shop terminal, a box fan on the floor pointed at her shins.
YardDesk's 2047 vintage drain sheet has come back for signatures. Isometric wants it closed before the two-year drain rolls into its second year. It lists the fourteen Pekin Yard fields, tonnes of mill ash spread, tonnes of carbon claimed per field, and one box at the bottom for her.
SAMPLER ATTESTATION: SAMPLES COLLECTED PER PROTOCOL. RESULTS CONSISTENT WITH ENHANCED WEATHERING.
The first sentence is hers. She collected them, and the nine she didn't collect in hold are flagged HOLD EXCEEDED where anybody can see.
The second sentence isn't hers. The cations in the tile are up on five fields. Some of that on Lutz is ninety pounds of potash he admitted to. Some on 0611 is ash that was never basalt. Some under Ehrhardt is the county's January. Nobody, not Dale, not the committee, not the planner, has said what fraction of any of it is carbon. Mill ash carries oxides, and some oxide does take up CO2 as it sits and carbonates. Nobody has measured how much on these fields. The potassium in a ditch doesn't say whether it took any.
The planner notes the attestation is REQUIRED FOR VINTAGE CLOSE and the box is not editable.
She calls YardDesk. A woman named Prue in Decatur says the language is standard and every sampler signs it.
"Then every sampler's signing something the lab didn't say."
Prue says she can upload a signed PDF with a comment.
So she prints it. She signs the first sentence. She draws one line through the second, initials both ends, and writes underneath in block capitals: SAMPLER DOES NOT ATTEST TO CARBON. SEE EXHIBIT F AND LAB RESULTS. The copier jams once. She uploads it.
The planner reads the PDF and turns the vintage yellow.
VINTAGE 2047, PEKIN YARD: ATTESTATION MODIFIED.
The yellow goes to the chair, to Haskell, to YardDesk. Her hours for the week get paid Thursday like every week. She checks the stub anyway.
33. 2047 VINTAGE: SIGNED "COLLECTED PER PROTOCOL." STRUCK "CONSISTENT W/ ENHANCED WEATHERING," INITIALED. "DOES NOT ATTEST TO CARBON." VINTAGE YELLOW. 1 1/2 H, BLACK.
The sixteenth, Thursday, 10:40am. She's at the Mackinaw scale house with the engine running for the air when her phone shows a Seattle number.
He says his name is Corwin Abate and he verifies drain vintages for Isometric. He has her PDF open. He sounds like a man who has read a lot of PDFs with lines through them and liked none of them.
"One thing," he says. "Does the strike mean the samples are bad."
"No. The samples are what they are. Nine are flagged and the flags are on the sheet. The rest are in hold."
"Then what's the strike."
"The sentence says consistent with weathering. I didn't measure weathering. I measured potassium and chloride and sodium in tile water. None of it is a carbon number."
He's quiet. Then he does what she figured somebody would do sooner or later.
"Would you sign RESULTS DO NOT CONTRADICT ENHANCED WEATHERING."
A spreader backs into bay three, beeping, gray basalt dust coming off the bed. Wet basalt and diesel through the window.
"A thermometer doesn't contradict it either."
He laughs, once, like it surprised him. Then he says the thing she didn't expect.
"Honestly, the number I'd want is alkalinity. Bicarbonate in the drain water. That's the carbon actually leaving the field. Cations are a proxy for a proxy. Nobody in your district runs alkalinity, do they."
"No."
"Can your lab?"
"I'll ask Dale."
"If you get alkalinity on the same bottles, I can read it. I can't read a strike-through." He says the vintage stays yellow pending sampler clarification, which is her. He'll note her objection as METHOD, not INTEGRITY. She makes him say the two words again so she can write them on the back of her hand.
She calls Dale at 10:58.
"Alkalinity's cheap," Dale says. "Four bucks. Fourteen-day hold. Fill it to the brim, no air, keep it cold. The minute that bottle breathes, CO2 walks out and the number goes with it." He thinks about it. "It's the only test I run where the bottle lies to you if you let it breathe."
34. ISOMETRIC (ABATE): STRIKE IS METHOD, NOT INTEGRITY. DECLINED "DO NOT CONTRADICT." HE WANTS ALKALINITY. DALE: ~$4, 14-DAY HOLD, NO HEADSPACE, COLD. VINTAGE STILL YELLOW. 1/2 H, BLACK.
The thirtieth of July, Thursday. It broke at two in the morning, one point four inches in ninety minutes, and the beans are standing in it.
She's at the Pekin shop by 4:50 for the case of 250 mL bottles Dale left on the dock. Brown plastic, no preservative. Taped to the box in Dale's capitals: FILL TO OVERFLOW. CAP UNDERWATER IF YOU CAN. NO BUBBLE. COLD. D.
You can't cap a bottle underwater at a tile outlet. You can do the next thing. At 0611 she holds the bottle in the rope of water until it runs over her knuckles, tips the cap in from the side, and screws it down with water still squirting out the threads. She turns it upside down in the headlights. A bubble the size of a lentil.
She pours it out and does it again. The second one's clean.
Lutz's south forty, clean on the first try. Hartsburg control, forty minutes the wrong direction, clean on the second, sleeves soaked to the shoulder. Ehrhardt's outlet from the public bank with her arm at full reach, OUTLET NOT DITCH on the tape, three tries because the dipper keeps knocking the bottle sideways. The guard he bolted on crooked is still on. Each brown bottle goes straight under the ice packs. The daubers haven't come back to the Lutz wand.
Four alkalinity bottles, plus A and B on all fourteen. The tape on each brown one says the time, the outlet, and NO HEADSPACE, which she has never written before in her life. She's wet to the hips at 7:15 and it's already eighty-one.
In Peoria Dale lines the brown bottles up on the bench and turns every one upside down himself.
"Nobody's paying for these yet," he says.
"I know."
He holds the 0611 bottle against the window. "You know what this is, though. Seven dry weeks under beans and then an inch and a half in ninety minutes. Most of that went into the dirt. What came out the pipe at dawn came straight down the cracks. That's rain and whatever's lying on top, not water that sat in the ground making bicarbonate. First flush after a drought is the worst bottle you can fill for a weathering number and the best one for anything still on the surface." He sets it down. "And it's limestone till with fertilizer on it. Nitrate's a strong acid. It eats the lime and makes bicarbonate all by itself, no air involved. Alkalinity alone can't tell you weathering from lime plus nitrogen."
"So what can."
"That one." He taps the Hartsburg bottle, the one she drove forty minutes the wrong way for. "The control, and a nitrate run on the same pour. I'll put nitrate on all four. It's cheap."
"I'll run them under QA. Method validation. That's honest. We never validated alkalinity on tile water and we should have." He writes LOGIN 7/30 0940, HOLD TO 8/13 across the top of the sheet.
In the planner there's no alkalinity column under the vintage. There's a CARBON ESTIMATE column, and YardDesk's model fills it in from tonnes spread, and she can't touch it.
So she makes the column where it belongs, under WATER CHEMISTRY, next to chloride and sodium. Milligrams per liter as calcium carbonate. A water result. If somebody wants to turn it into tonnes of carbon, they can do it in a column where she can read their arithmetic.
The planner suggests linking the new column to CARBON ESTIMATE for VINTAGE SUPPORT. She declines. It asks if she's sure. She's sure.
She sits in the truck in the Peoria lot with the engine off. Four brown bottles are in a cooler on the other side of that wall, and for fourteen days they hold the one number anybody has actually asked her for. Nobody knows yet what it says. Not Abate, not Haskell, not YardDesk, not her. The vintage is yellow. Ehrhardt's row is UNKNOWN. Somewhere in a shed on County 14 there's a wing nut that matches the one he didn't use.
35. 1.4 IN. ALK BOTTLES BRIM-FULL, NO HEADSPACE: 0611, LUTZ S40, HARTSBURG CTL, EHRHARDT OUTLET. PLUS 14 A/B. DALE RUNS UNDER QA, HOLD TO 8/13. ALK LOGGED UNDER WATER, NOT CARBON. 3 1/2 H, BLACK.