The fourth of May, Monday, 2:15pm. The lab is a converted dairy annex on the Peoria side of the river, and the sample cooler hums louder than anybody who works there. Dale has printed the run. Dale doesn't trust a screen he can't write on.
Every row on the sheet carries the same red flag: HOLD EXCEEDED. Chloride holds for twenty-eight days. The December bottles are five months old.
"Chloride doesn't go anywhere in a bottle," Dale says. "Nothing eats it. The flag is right and the number's probably fine. Both go on the sheet."
"Both go on the sheet," Janelle says, and reads down the page with her finger.
HARTSBURG (CONTROL): K 1.9 / CL 12 SE-0611 B: K 6.4 / CL 14 BRAUER: K HIGH / CL 13 MILLER: K HIGH / CL 15 LUTZ S40: K 5.9 / CL 41
There it is. Lutz's muriate, right where his own initials on the release form said it would be. Gary, Brauer and Miller show the potassium up and the chloride flat on the floor with the control. That's ash, or something else that didn't come out of a potash bag.
"His K's only up four over Hartsburg," she says. "His chloride's up twenty-nine. The bag's nearly a pound for a pound."
"At the bag," Dale says. "Not in the water. The clay grabs the potassium and holds it on the exchange sites. Nothing grabs chloride. It walks straight down to the tile. So it gets there first, and it leaves first." He taps the CL column. "Which makes it a better tracer than you're giving it credit for. A field can hide its potash in the clay for a year. It can't hide the chloride for a month."
Then the last high row.
EHRHARDT: K HIGH / CL 29
Twenty-nine isn't Lutz. It isn't the floor either. She sits with that one while the cooler cycles off and the room goes quiet enough to hear the fluorescent tube.
Dale has a pencil out before she does. "Where's his main come out?"
She pulls up the tile map on her phone. Ehrhardt's main runs north under County 14 and comes out at the culvert on the far ditch. The county salted 14 eleven times in January. She plowed behind the salt truck twice.
"Road salt," Dale says. "Or potash. Or both. That bottle can't tell you which."
So the water didn't answer for Ehrhardt either. It just got louder.
"Unless," Dale says, and writes NA in the margin. "Road salt is sodium chloride. Muriate's potassium chloride, no sodium in it. If it's the county's salt, sodium comes up with the chloride, about two-thirds of a milligram for every one. If it's a bag, sodium sits flat on the control. Same run, same bottles. Costs me almost nothing."
"Run it on everything. December and whatever I bring you next."
"Already writing it."
She types a new column beside K: CL, MG/L, HOLD EXCEEDED, REPORTED AS MEASURED. Under Ehrhardt she adds a site note she checked herself: MAIN CROSSES CO. 14 ROW AT CULVERT. ROAD SALTED JAN 2048. The record column stays what it was. UNKNOWN.
26. CL ON THE DEC BOTTLES. LUTZ 41, K HELD IN CLAY, CL WALKS. GARY/BRAUER/MILLER FLAT. EHRHARDT 29, UNDER A SALTED ROAD. NA ADDED TO RUN. RECORD STILL UNKNOWN. 2 H, LAB TICKET.
The eleventh, Monday, 9:02am. Haskell answers his phone on Mondays, at two minutes after nine.
"Your field is in," he says. "Legal changed one word."
"Which word."
"They don't want the grower to feel the form is required of the grower. So now it's required of the sampler. You have to fill the box. The farmer doesn't have to give you anything to put in it."
"That's what NOT OBTAINED is for."
"That's what I told them. Twice."
She's parked at the Mackinaw scale house with the window down, because bay three smells like wet basalt and diesel and she likes that better than the cab. A spreader backs in behind her, beeping.
"I want chloride on the pilot," she says.
"Every bottle?"
"Every bottle with a K on it. It tells a potash bag from ash without asking anybody anything. Lutz came back forty-one. The fields with no potash on paper came back flat."
"And the one who wouldn't sign?"
"Twenty-nine. Under a salted road."
Haskell goes quiet the way he does when he's doing arithmetic and politics at once. "Lab quotes six dollars a bottle. Four districts, call it nine hundred bottles a fall. That's fifty-four hundred I don't have in the line."
"You found it in January for the mill."
"The mill wasn't in the line either."
"So put it in the supplemental. Same as my hours."
She can hear his pen. "Chloride, conditional on funding. With a note that it does not establish application."
"Write that last part twice."
"I'll write it once and bold it."
27. HASKELL: FIELD IN, REQUIRED OF THE SAMPLER NOT THE FARMER. CL ON PILOT, CONDITIONAL, $5,400 ASK IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL. 1/4 H, BLACK, PILOT LINE.
The fourteenth, Thursday, 6:30pm. Ehrhardt is spraying. She waits at the field edge by the culvert until the sprayer comes around, he sees the county truck, and the boom folds.
He doesn't climb down. He opens the cab door and leans out.
"Still not signing."
"I'm not asking. This is your water." She holds up the sheet. "It came out of your tile. You get to see it before Springfield does."
That gets him off the step. He reads it standing in the road with the engine idling behind him: K high, Cl 29, the red flag, her note about the culvert.
He points the sheet at the asphalt under his boots.
"County salts this road like they're mad at it. Your truck. My main goes right under it." He hands it back. "That's the county's salt."
"Could be."
"Write down that I said so."
"You going to initial it?"
He actually thinks about it, which she appreciates. "No."
So there it is. He'll talk to her in a road and he won't sign in his kitchen, and the planner has one box for both and the box is labeled with a signature.
She decides in the truck, while the sprayer moves off again. What he said doesn't go in the record column, because the record column is paper and he gave her none. It goes in the site notes, in quotes, dated, with NOT INITIALED after it, next to the culvert note.
The planner offers to mark him GROWER STATEMENT (VERBAL): NONE. She declines. He didn't say none. He said the salt was the county's. He never once said what was in his bag.
Then she pulls the county's own January salt log off the highway server, which she can do because it's her union's road, and attaches it. Eleven passes on 14. That one she didn't need anybody to sign.
28. SHOWED EHRHARDT HIS WATER. "COUNTY'S SALT." NOT INITIALED, SO SITE NOTE, NOT RECORD. DECLINED "VERBAL NONE." ATTACHED CO. 14 SALT LOG, 11 PASSES. 1/2 H GREY.
The twenty-eighth, Thursday, 5:40am. Two point one inches fell between ten and four. The beans are in and nobody's in a field, so the only truck on County 14 is hers.
Every main she knows is running. Gary's outlet on 0611 is pushing a brown rope of water the width of her wrist into the ditch. She fills A and B with the long-handled dipper, caps them, writes the time on the tape in grease pencil, and puts them on ice. The clock starts now. She is not reading HOLD EXCEEDED on the next sheet.
Lutz's south forty is running clearer. Two bottles.
Then the culvert.
Ehrhardt's main comes out on the far side of 14, in the bank of the county ditch, inside the right-of-way. She checked the plat at her kitchen table last night. The pipe is his. The bank it sticks out of is the county's. She doesn't need his signature to stand in her own road's ditch.
She stands in it like a guest anyway, boots on the riprap, out of sight of the house.
The ditch is no good to her. In a two-inch rain it's carrying the shoulder of County 14 too, January's salt and whatever else came off the asphalt overnight, and that's exactly the thing she's trying to keep out of the bottle. So she wades to the bank and reaches the pipe mouth at arm's length with the dipper, and fills straight from the outlet before the water touches the ditch. It smells like cold iron and nothing at all. A, B, and a third for a duplicate. If anybody fights about this bottle it'll be the mill's lawyers, and Dale says a dupe is the cheapest lawyer there is.
Then one more bottle from the ditch itself, ten feet down, where the road water and the tile water have already mixed. Not for him. For the road.
A light comes on in the Ehrhardt kitchen. Nobody comes out.
On the tape she writes where each one actually came from. OUTLET, NOT DITCH, CO. 14 ROW, PUBLIC SIDE. And on the fourth: DITCH, CO. 14 ROW, MIXED. Not his field number on either.
When she logs it, the planner wants the bottles on his parcel ID with GROWER K RECORD pre-filled NOT OBTAINED. She moves them to the road segment. The record box doesn't apply to a ditch. She leaves it blank, the planner flags it yellow, and she lets it stay yellow.
The bottles are in Peoria by 9:30, still cold. Dale signs the chain of custody without looking up. "Fresh," he says, like it's a compliment.
29. 2.1 IN. ALL MAINS RUNNING. FRESH A/B ON 0611, LUTZ S40. EHRHARDT: A/B/DUPE FROM PIPE MOUTH, OUTLET NOT DITCH, PLUS ONE DITCH GRAB. IN HOLD. LOGGED TO ROAD SEGMENT, NOT PARCEL. 3 H, BLACK.
The twelfth of June, Friday, 4:10pm. Haskell's email has a PDF attached, and somebody who isn't Haskell has highlighted one line of it in yellow.
FY2048 MID-YEAR SUPPLEMENTAL, SWCD TRACER PILOT. HOURS: FUNDED AS REQUESTED. CHLORIDE ANALYTE: $2,700 OF $5,400 REQUESTED.
Half. Four hundred fifty bottles out of nine hundred, next fall, across four districts.
Under it Haskell has written: Best I could do. You pick which half. Write down how.
The May results came back Tuesday, all inside hold, not a red flag on the page, with Dale's sodium column on the end.
HARTSBURG (CONTROL): K 1.8 / CL 11 / NA 8 SE-0611: K 3.1 / CL 13 / NA 8 LUTZ S40: K 4.2 / CL 28 / NA 9 CO. 14 OUTLET (A/B/DUPE): K 3.3 / CL 17 / NA 10 CO. 14 DITCH, MIXED: K 2.4 / CL 24 / NA 16
And the December sodium, on the old bottles, flag and all: Lutz 9, Ehrhardt 14, control 8.
Gary's water is coming down with the chloride flat, the way ash washes out of a field. Lutz's sodium sits on the control. That's a bag, and it's leaving the way Dale said, chloride first: forty-one in December, twenty-eight now, the potassium still mostly in the clay behind it.
The ditch grab is the road. Chloride thirteen over the control, sodium eight over, almost exactly the two-thirds Dale wrote in the margin. Dale puts one line under it on the sheet: After this spring most of January's salt should be out of the shallow soil. Salt in a ditch in late May is coming off the shoulder, not up the tile.
The outlet is the one that matters, and it's three bottles that agree to a tenth. Chloride six over, sodium two. Salt would bring about four. In December it was seventeen over and six. Salt would bring eleven.
So Ehrhardt was half right. Some of what's in his tile is the county's salt. Not all of it. The sodium takes part of the road off the table and leaves the rest of the chloride sitting there with nobody's name on it. Fresh water, three matching bottles, a second ion, and it still won't say whose. That's how water is. It tells you what's in it, not who put it there.
The planner has already drafted an allocation. It's always helpful.
RECOMMENDED: PRIORITIZE CL ON FIELDS WHERE GROWER K RECORD = NOT OBTAINED OR UNKNOWN. EXPECTED INFORMATION GAIN: HIGH.
She reads it twice. As arithmetic it's right. The fields that wouldn't sign are where chloride would tell you the most.
It's also a rule that says if you refuse the form, the state runs an extra test on your water. Every sampler in four districts would carry that rule to every kitchen table. Nobody would sign to dodge a test. They'd stop talking to the county truck, period, and she'd be back in December with expired bottles and no names.
She opens the pilot intake sheet and writes the rule herself, in the method section, where Dale can check it.
CL ANALYTE, FY2049: ODD-NUMBERED BOTTLES BY LAB SEQUENCE, ASSIGNED AT LOGIN. SELECTION IS BLIND TO GROWER K RECORD STATUS.
The planner tags it in grey italics: LOWER EXPECTED INFORMATION GAIN. She leaves the tag on. It's true.
Then she calls Dale, because the lab assigns the sequence and she wants a person to say yes.
"Odd numbers won't do it," Dale says. "You hand me A and B together. I log them one after the other. Odd lands on every A and no B. You'd test every field once and throw out every duplicate, and the dupes are the part that holds up." He sounds almost pleased to find it. "Do it by field. I flip for each field at login and write the seed in the method section. Heads, both bottles get chloride and sodium. Tails, neither. Nobody in my building knows whose field is whose. That's the point of a lab."
She deletes her line and types his.
CL/NA ANALYTE, FY2049: ASSIGNED BY FIELD AT LAB LOGIN, SEEDED RANDOM DRAW, SEED RECORDED IN METHOD. A, B AND DUPLICATES OF A SELECTED FIELD ALL RUN. SELECTION IS BLIND TO GROWER K RECORD STATUS.
The grey tag stays on. Still true.
She sends Haskell the method line with one sentence under it: Chloride is a water test, not a penalty for not signing.
He writes back in four minutes. Bolded.
She sits in the truck in the district lot with the engine off and the windows down. Somebody is mowing the county strip along the fence, and the cut-grass smell comes in with the heat. Somewhere in June 2049 a sampler she's never met will stand at a stranger's kitchen table holding a half-page release form. The farmer won't sign, and the sampler will be able to tell him, truthfully, that it doesn't change which bottles get tested.
Ehrhardt's row stays UNKNOWN. His road segment stays yellow.
30. SUPPLEMENTAL: HOURS YES, CL HALF ($2,700). MAY FRESH: 0611 3.1/13, LUTZ 4.2/28/NA FLAT, CO. 14 OUTLET 3.3/17/NA 10 (PART SALT), DITCH 24/16 (ROAD). DECLINED PLANNER "TEST THE NON-SIGNERS." CL/NA BY FIELD, LAB COIN AT LOGIN, BLIND. 1 H, BLACK, PILOT LINE.