Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of December 2050, ten to seven in the morning, Ken Schaefer's ditch.
It rained all Monday night on the snow, half an inch by the district gauge, warm air sliding up from St. Louis, and by daylight the snow had gone gray and then gone. Storm seventeen, by Janelle Woith's count. The first since the rating file got its new first line.
The ditch is running brown and loud. The weir box sits where she and Ray set it in August, roof flashing and plywood, and across the V-notch there's a lip of ice an inch thick, clear on top, milky underneath. Water is going over the ice, not the steel. The staff gauge reads 0.31 feet.
The staff isn't lying. It's reading a pool the ice is holding up, and the pool is real water. What's wrong is the curve. The rating was built on a clean sharp V with the jet springing free, and an ice lip raises the crest and makes the water cling and dribble, so every discharge anybody computes off that head this morning is a number about ice.
Before she touches it she runs the pail once on the iced notch. Five liters in 4.7 seconds.
She chips it. Rubber mallet from the truck, gloves off because she can't aim with them on, shards going downstream like broken plates. Eleven minutes. The flow surges while the notch clears, so she waits fifteen more for it to settle, stamping her feet, watching the head come down to 0.27 and hold.
Then the pail. Five liters in 4.6 seconds. Again, 4.8. Again, 4.5. About 1.1 liters a second. The curve, on a clean notch at 0.27, says 1.05. Inside five percent. She writes both, because one of them is a promise and the other is a bucket. Then the thing worth keeping: same pail flow, near enough, 0.31 on the ice and 0.27 clean. The lip was holding four hundredths of a foot. That's what ice does to this plate, and now she has it once.
EC 820, pH 7.18. Two bottles, a duplicate, the split for Dale. The water's so cold the meter takes a full minute to stop wandering.
Ken comes down the lane in the side-by-side wearing his dad's barn coat. "You chipped my weir."
"Ice on the crest. The gauge is fine. The curve doesn't know about the ice."
"How long?"
"I don't know. Nobody was reading it."
Except whatever reads the public feed, she thinks, which posts what the logger says.
In the truck with the heater on her hands she opens the district app and finds the logger rows back to Christmas. She can't delete them. Nobody can delete anything anymore. She also can't say when the lip formed, because nobody stood here between her last visit and now. So she picks the last row she can defend: Christmas afternoon, 1500, the last reading where the head still tracks open water and the district air record is above freezing. Everything after that she flags, ICE ON CREST, HEAD KEPT, Q FROM HEAD INVALID, 12/25 1500 TO 12/27 0705, START INFERRED (LAST OPEN-WATER ROW + DISTRICT AIR T), and at the bottom of card thirteen's rules she adds one more in pencil.
203. 12/27/50 S17 THAW. ICE LIP ON V-NOTCH, GAUGE 0.31 (ICE). PAIL ON ICE 1.06 L/S. CHIPPED. H 0.27, PAIL 1.1 L/S VS CURVE 1.05: LIP = +0.04 FT. EC 820 pH 7.18. LOGGER FLAGGED 12/25 1500-12/27 0705, START INFERRED. RULE: ICE = NO Q FROM HEAD (KEEP HEAD). 2.4 H, GRAY.
Tuesday, the third of January 2051, twenty to nine at night, her kitchen table.
The kid's asleep. The dishwasher is doing the thing where it knocks. She has her own laptop open, not the district's, because Wendell said as a citizen and she is going to do it exactly the way he said.
The state portal opens with a friendly box and an intake agent, the state's, with a seal on it instead of a leaf. It asks what she wants to report. She types: possible high-pH discharge from a farm tile outlet to a county road ditch, Hartsburg Township, Logan County line. pH 9.4.
Are you an affected party?
Landowner. Downstream Water User. Neighbor. Other.
She sits with that one. She drives that road twice a month. She picks Other, and in the box she writes Resident of Tazewell County. Measured on public right-of-way.
It asks for evidence. She attaches the four photographs from the sixth of December: pipe, flag, road sign, meter. In the description she types the readings, then, because the form has room, the two meters, the strip color, the time it took to fill the cup. She doesn't put the district's name anywhere. She doesn't attach the ASH-C method PDF either, because that one's about money, and the state doesn't do money. It does water.
Do you have laboratory results?
She types pending and deletes it, because she hasn't paid Dale yet and isn't sure she will. One field bottle collected, not yet analyzed.
The agent thanks her. It gives her a number, IEPA-C-51-00217, and a sentence that's nearly a poem. Complaints are triaged by risk. Agricultural drainage complaints without a fish kill are typically assigned Priority 4.
Four is the bottom of its list. She asks, in the box at the bottom, what would make it higher.
A fish kill, a drinking-water intake within 1 mile downstream, or a visible discharge of industrial material.
She reads industrial material twice. Boiler ash out of the Pekin plant is industrial material. Disked into a field and snowed over, under a little wire flag that says CREDITS ISSUED, it's a soil amendment. Same ash. Different form.
She closes the laptop. The dishwasher knocks twice more and quits.
204. 1/3/51 STATE COMPLAINT AS CITIZEN, OWN LAPTOP. IEPA-C-51-00217. AFFECTED PARTY: OTHER. PRIORITY 4 (NO FISH KILL). 'INDUSTRIAL MATERIAL' = HIGHER. 0.9 H, OWN TIME.
Tuesday, the tenth, twenty past eleven, Dale's lab in Tremont.
She brings the S17 split and the incidental bottle in two different coolers, because they're two different things and she wants them to stay that way in her own head.
"District," she says, setting down the blue one. "S17, with dup." Then the red one, her son's old lunch cooler with a stegosaurus on the lid. "Not district. One bottle. I'm paying."
"You paid last time."
"You didn't let me."
She puts the two twenties on the counter again, and this time he picks them up, because he can see her face, and writes a receipt on a carbonless pad with her name on it and not the district's.
He calls Thursday. She writes it under the tenth anyway, because that's when she paid.
S17 first. Sulfate 241, duplicate 236, split 245. Manganese 0.11, alkalinity 2.9. At 1.1 liters a second that's about 265 milligrams a second, bigger than S16, smaller than S15.
"Bounced," Dale says.
Between S15 and S16, she writes. Still not a trend.
Then the stegosaurus.
"Alkalinity nine-point-eight milliequivalents. Your tile water runs three. I ran the pink first, same as you did at the pipe. P about one. Lab pH nine-one, which is lower than yours, like it should be after five weeks in a bottle. So it's mostly bicarbonate, some carbonate, and hydroxide's nothing." The radio in the back is doing soybean futures. "Potassium one-forty. Your normal tile's three, four. Sulfate three-ten. You know what that is?"
"Tell me."
"Weathering. The ash is doing what their brochure says. First melt goes through it like a coffee filter and the lime comes out the other side as bicarbonate. I wanted it to be lye too. It isn't."
"Is it hurting anything?"
"One bottle? A trickle into a road ditch in January? Not much. The cattails won't love it." He's quiet a second. "It's what the flag's counting, you know. All that alkalinity heading down the ditch. That's their removal, and it's real. The chemistry's fine. It's the number they take it away from that's Ken's."
She writes it with cold fingers in a warm office. It's worse this way, and she knows it. A caustic pipe would have been a story. Real removal, measured against a ditch nobody asked, is a method.
On the bottom of the receipt, in pencil, Dale has added Not a district sample. She tapes it to the back of card thirteen, and the next morning she adds the result to IEPA-C-51-00217 as a citizen, from her kitchen, before the bus.
205. 1/10/51 DALE. S17 SO4 241, LOAD ~265 MG/S. 'BOUNCED.' INCIDENTAL (PAID $40, OWN RECEIPT): ALK 9.8 MEQ/L, P ~1 (LAB pH 9.1, LOWER = OK): MOSTLY HCO3, OH ~0. K 140, SO4 310. 'WEATHERING. IT ISN'T LYE.' REMOVAL REAL; FIGHT = BASELINE. ADDED TO COMPLAINT. 1.8 H, 41 MI, OWN TIME.
Tuesday, the seventeenth, a quarter past two, the district front counter.
Ken doesn't come in. He calls, or he waits at the ditch. Today he comes in with his cap in his hand and two printouts folded in quarters, and unfolds them on top of the cover-crop pamphlets.
The Terraline Reference Network page. The ASH-C method, section 4.3. His name highlighted in both, in the yellow his daughter uses for homework.
"My nephew searched my name," he says. "Said I was famous."
"You're a reference."
"I'm a ditch." He taps SCHAEFER-17. "Nobody asked me. Nobody's paying me. And a guy from the feed company asks me at the elevator am I the Schaefer with the control field, is it true nothing's on it. Like I'm doing something wrong if I put something on it."
That's the part she hadn't thought through. A control isn't only a number. It's a farmer who's now not supposed to farm any differently, because two companies are measuring their customers against him.
"You can do whatever you want with your field," she says. "Fertilize it. Lime it. Drain it to China."
"Then what happens to them?"
"Their baseline moves. Maybe they notice."
"Can I pull the weir?"
She makes herself say it plain. "Yes. It's your ditch. We monitor with your permission. You can pull it today."
He looks past her at the bulletin board, at Ray's August photo, Ken in the water to his shins, both of them holding the flashing. "I don't want to pull it. I like knowing." He folds the printouts back up. "I just don't want my name on their paper."
"I can't take your name off their paper. I can change what the district calls the site."
"To what?"
"A number. TAZ-17."
He thinks about it the way he thinks about a seed contract. "Do that. And put that it was my idea."
206. 1/17/51 KEN AT COUNTER, NAME HIGHLIGHTED IN BOTH. FEED REP: 'THE CONTROL FIELD.' TOLD HIM FIELD AND WEIR ARE HIS. KEEPS WEIR. REQUESTS RENAME, OWNER REQUEST. 0.7 H, GRAY.
Tuesday, the twenty-fourth, five to eight in the morning, her desk.
She did it Friday afternoon, by protocol, with Wendell's signature on the change form. SCHAEFER-17 retired. TAZ-17, same coordinates, same data, same SITE HISTORY tab with a new row at the bottom. She'd typed FORMERLY SCHAEFER-17 into it first, and then sat looking at it: his name next to the new number, public, permanent, for anybody who searched either one. That was the opposite of what he'd asked. She moved the old name to the internal change log, where Wendell's signature is, and the public row says 1/20/51 RENAMED AT OWNER REQUEST. PRIOR ID RETIRED. The first line of the rating file now reads TAZ-17 IS A DISTRICT MONITORING SITE. IT IS NOT AN UNTREATED CONTROL FOR ANY PROGRAM. SEE SITE HISTORY.
She didn't set up a redirect. The district's portal doesn't have redirects. It has IDs.
There are three emails in the district inbox, stamped 4:02, 4:03 and 4:09.
We are unable to retrieve data for District Control SCHAEFER-17. Has this site been discontinued?
That's Terraline's agent.
Our regional baseline feed returned no records for SCHAEFER-17 for the reporting period. Please advise on the replacement reference.
That's the ASH-C methods agent.
The third is Marcy Kuhl, a screenshot of her Terraline dashboard: her fields still green, and next to the regional reference a little gray box, REFERENCE SITE UNAVAILABLE, and under it Q1 2051 issuance calculations paused pending reference reassignment. Under that Marcy has typed one line. Was this you?
At 7:58 she answers the agents first, the same text to both, because they're the same kind of thing.
SCHAEFER-17 was renamed TAZ-17 on 1/20/51 at the landowner's request. Data and history are unchanged at the new ID. The District does not designate reference sites for any program. Please read line 1 of the rating file.
Nine minutes later both have found it, by coordinates, she'd bet, since the name was the only thing she took away. Marcy's gray box turns green. REFERENCE SITE: TAZ-17. The ASH-C feed resumes. Neither agent mentions line one.
Marcy calls instead of typing.
"It was Ken," Janelle says. "His ditch. He asked."
"So it's back."
"It's back. Under a number."
Marcy laughs, short. "Then what was the point?"
Janelle looks at the screenshot, the gray box, the word paused. The old ID went dead Friday afternoon. For four days the site their whole region was subtracted from didn't exist, and nobody's arithmetic noticed until the Tuesday batch ran at four in the morning. Then for about four hours two programs couldn't pay anybody, because one farmer didn't want his name on their paper. That's how much was standing on one ditch, and how long it takes anyone to look.
"Now somebody knows how much was standing on it," she says.
"Somebody who?"
"You. Me. Ken, when I tell him." She pauses. "Not them. They found it in nine minutes."
After she hangs up she sees it plain. The rename moved a label. They can use Ken's ditch as their control because the district publishes it with no terms at all, and anything with no terms is free. She opens a blank change form for Wendell and writes one line on it: District monitoring data may not be used as an untreated reference without landowner consent. She doesn't know if he'll sign it. She doesn't know if the agents read terms any better than they read line one.
After the call she writes the rename on card thirteen, and then, under the rules, a seventh one, in smaller letters because she's running out of card.
207. 1/24/51 RENAMED TAZ-17 (OWNER REQ, W.T. SIGNED). 4:02-4:09 BOTH AGENTS 'REFERENCE UNAVAILABLE.' M.K. Q1 PAUSED. BOTH RE-POINTED IN 9 MIN. NEITHER READ LINE 1. OLD ID DEAD 4 DAYS UNNOTICED (FRI PM-TUE 0402), ~4 H PAUSED. PUBLIC ROW 'PRIOR ID RETIRED'; OLD NAME TO INTERNAL LOG ONLY. DRAFTED DATA-TERMS LINE FOR W.T. (LANDOWNER CONSENT). RULE: A NAME IS NOT A CONTROL. THE TERMS MIGHT BE. 1.2 H, GRAY.
She puts the pencil behind her ear. Out the office window the parking lot is bare and wet, the snow gone to ditches, and somewhere south of town a weir with no ice on it is reading true for nobody in particular.