Tuesday, the twenty-second of November 2050, twenty to eleven, her desk. Thanksgiving week. Half the office has already gone to somebody's mother's house.
Dale's sheet is in the district inbox at 7:12, which means he ran it Monday night after the markets. The cow on his letterhead is still upside down from the scanner.
#17-S16. SO4 224 mg/L. Dup 219. Split 229. Mn 0.09. ALK 2.7.
Inside three percent again. Janelle does the arithmetic on the back of the envelope the electric bill came in, because her son has the fox calculator at school. Two hundred twenty-four times nine-tenths of a liter a second: about two hundred milligrams a second. S15 was about three-seventy. Per inch of rain, S15 was about two-thirty. S16 is about one-seventy.
Lower. A lot lower. The number fourteen farms would like.
She sits with the coffee going cold and lists, on the same envelope, every reason a cold storm moves less sulfate per inch. Fourteen hours of rain instead of three. Ground chisel-plowed a week earlier that took the first half-inch like a sponge before the tile ever ran. Forty-one degrees. Pyrite oxidizes slower cold, if any of it is still oxidizing, which nobody knows. One storm.
None of those is lime. None of them is the repair either. They're November.
And under all of it, worse: both numbers are one grab each. Two hundred milligrams a second is the flux in the minute she filled the bottle. S15 she caught three hours into a sharp three-hour storm. S16 she caught on the long cold tail of a fourteen-hour one. Divide a moment by a whole storm's rain and you get a ratio that depends on where on the hydrograph the bottle was. Per inch needs event volume, the whole storm's water under the curve, and a weir and a pail on Tuesdays don't give her that. She writes SAMPLED AT DIFFERENT POINTS ON THE HYDROGRAPH on the envelope and underlines DIFFERENT.
She posts it the way card thirteen says: head, pail, predicted against timed, the flow, and the METHOD line, LOAD = SO4 x Q. Then, in the hundred-forty characters the district upload form gives her under the vendor's green leaf:
S16 LOWER PER INCH. 1 COLD STORM ON PLOWED GROUND. NOT A TREND. NOT RECOVERY. NEXT STORM DECIDES. -JW
Eighty-seven characters. She leaves the rest empty on purpose.
Ray leans over the cubicle wall on his way to the lot. "Good news?"
"Smaller news."
"Is that good?"
"It's smaller."
He nods like that's an answer and wishes her a good Thanksgiving.
She doesn't tell him the rest, which is that a smaller number is more dangerous than a bigger one. A big number makes people argue. A small number makes them stop reading. Somewhere a model is already drawing a line through S15 and S16 and extending it into spring, and the line goes the way everybody wants, and the line is two points and a holiday.
By three the fleet map has picked it up. The little sparkline next to Ken's gray dot bends down at the end. It doesn't show her note unless you hover. She hovers, to make sure it's there. It is. Nobody else will.
198. 11/22/50 DALE S16: SO4 224 (DUP 219, SPLIT 229). LOAD ~200 MG/S. PER INCH ~170 (S15 ~230), 1 GRAB EACH, DIFF HYDROGRAPH PTS; NEEDS EVENT VOL. COLD, 14 H, PLOWED. NOTE: NOT A TREND. 1.1 H, GRAY.
Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of November, a quarter past one, Dale's lab in Tremont.
The jar has ridden on her dash for four weeks and in the cup holder for two. She sets it on Dale's counter between a box of filter papers and his radio, which is playing hog futures at a volume meant for a man who used to run a grain dryer.
"It's not a district sample," she says first. "It's not anybody's sample. It's a jar."
Dale holds it to the window. Gray, with black flecks, like pepper in gravy. "Pekin boiler."
"You know it."
"Anybody who's had a car wash near that plant knows it." He unscrews the lid and sniffs it, which is not method. "What do you want?"
"Total carbon. Carbonate carbon. Whatever you'd run to tell somebody what it is."
"Who's paying?"
She has two twenties in her wallet and puts them on the counter. Card thirteen says no stipend. It doesn't say she can't pay for things herself.
Dale looks at the twenties and doesn't touch them. "I'll run it with Ken's January cores. Same furnace day. Nobody pays for a furnace that's already hot."
He calls at ten to five. She's back at her desk and writes while he talks. Total carbon 4.3 percent. Carbonate carbon 0.2, basically nothing. The rest is char, the black flecks. Calcium oxide high, potassium high. Paste pH on his meter, 12.0.
"So it's not lime."
"It's a lime kiln that forgot it was one. Give it a wet spring and it'll pull some carbonate out of the air. Some. You'd need to sample that field every month to know how much, and you'd need to know what it was before it went down, and nobody did either."
"The flag says enhanced weathering."
"The flag can say what it likes. Rocks weather. That's ash." He stops, frowns at his own line, and takes some of it back. "Fair's fair. Biomass ash, the calcium came out of plants, not out of a kiln. Nobody cooked CO2 off limestone to make it. So whatever it does take up out there is real. It'll take some up. I just can't tell you how much, and neither can they, because they never measured the field." The dryer-starting laugh. "The chemistry's fine. It's the arithmetic they're selling. Write it down."
Wednesday the thirtieth is Terraline's vintage deadline. It doesn't rain. She checks the sky at noon anyway, out of a habit she resents.
199. 11/29/50 ASH-C JAR TO DALE (NOT DISTRICT; FEE WAIVED). TC 4.3%, CARB C 0.2%, REST CHAR. CA/K OXIDE HIGH. pH 12.0. 'NOT LIME.' 11/30 DEADLINE: NO STORM, NO READING. 2.6 H, 41 MI, OWN TIME.
Tuesday, the sixth of December, five past eight, the Hartsburg road.
First snow, two inches, dry, the kind that blows off the hood. The dentist's pipe at HB-S4 is a trickle through a lip of ice. EC 570, pH 7.41, the cup full in two-forty. She writes it with the pencil she keeps inside her coat so the lead won't snap.
Across the road the ash field is white. The windrows have been disked in and snowed over; you'd never know. The wire flag leans out of the snow at the corner. She scans it from the truck window and the dashboard has changed one word. CREDITS PENDING is now CREDITS ISSUED. 2050 VINTAGE.
The field drains north to the county ditch along the road, and the ditch is public right-of-way, thirty feet from the centerline, the county's and not the farmer's. The field's tile comes out of the bank a hundred yards up: black corrugated, the rodent gate rusted open. She walks it in boots, knee-deep in the low spots, with the cup and the meter and one clean bottle she didn't plan to use.
A thread of water. Four minutes ten to fill the cup. Her fingers quit halfway.
EC 1,480. Twice the dentist's pipe across the road.
pH 9.4.
She reads it again on the old meter, because she doesn't believe the new one. 9.3. The kit strip goes a purple-blue she has never seen out of tile in eleven years, the color of a bruise on its second day. Tazewell tile runs seven and change. It's bicarbonate country, buffered to death. Nine-four is what you get when something alkaline and fresh is in the ground and the first melt finds it.
She has the cheapest test in the truck for which kind. Same kit, same titrant, two endpoints: phenolphthalein first, then the total. The sample goes the faintest pink she's ever had to hold up to the sky to see, and clears at the fourth drop. P comes to 1.1, total to 9.6. She does it in her head twice because she wanted the other answer. At nine-four there's next to no hydroxide in anything; a fifth of that alkalinity is carbonate and the rest is bicarbonate. That's not raw lime washing out. That's ash weathering, taking up CO2 and leaving as bicarbonate, which is exactly what the flag says it's doing. The chemistry is on their side. Whatever's wrong, it's not in this bottle; it's in what they subtract it from. The vendor's forty pages never mention phenolphthalein. It costs eleven cents.
She stands with the bottle in her hand and doesn't fill it. Not a district site. No QAPP, no chain of custody, no owner who asked. A number with no before, like Gary's junction box, and some vendor will have a leaf on it inside a week.
She fills it anyway, to the brim, no headspace, because water at nine-four will keep taking CO2 out of any air left in the bottle and lay calcite on the wall, and in a month the lab pH will read lower than this and somebody will quote the lab. Labels it INCIDENTAL, ROW, NOT A SITE. FILLED TO BRIM. FIELD pH IS THE VALUE, the date, her initials, the water temperature, 2.1 C. Photographs the pipe, the flag, the road sign, and both meter screens with snow behind them.
Back at the truck she sets the bottle in the cooler next to nothing, because the cooler is empty this week, and it rides there alone, rattling against the ice pack that still smells like bait.
The truck heater takes ten minutes to give her back her hands. While she waits she thinks about the farmer, whoever leases that ground, who probably got a check for this and probably doesn't know his tile runs at nine-four. She doesn't know his name. The flag doesn't say.
200. 12/6/50 HB-S4 EC 570 pH 7.41. INCIDENTAL: ASH-C TILE TO COUNTY DITCH (ROW): EC 1,480, pH 9.4 (2ND METER 9.3), 2.1 C. P-ALK 1.1 / T 9.6: OH ~0, ~1/5 CO3, REST HCO3 = WEATHERING (THEIR CLAIM HOLDS). FIGHT = BASELINE. BRIM-FILLED, FIELD pH = VALUE. FLAG NOW 'CREDITS ISSUED, 2050 VINTAGE.' 1 BOTTLE, NOT A SITE. 2.2 H, GRAY.
Tuesday, the thirteenth of December, half past nine, Wendell's office.
Wendell reads the incidental note twice, then the photographs, and then he takes his glasses off, which he does not do.
"Nine-four."
"Nine-three on the old meter."
"Off the right-of-way."
"I didn't open a gate."
The glasses go back on. "It's not ours. The board won't fund a site we don't have an owner for, and the budget's—" He waves at his screen, which is red. "You can send it to the state. As a citizen. Not on letterhead."
"I don't want to complain. I want to know what they think it is."
"Then ask them."
She already knows which question. Spreading a combustion by-product on cropland in Illinois runs through a beneficial-use determination under section 22.54 of the Environmental Protection Act, a piece of paper that says what the ash is allowed to be and what pH and leachate limits it has to meet. Asking whether one exists for ASH-C, and what it says, isn't a complaint. It's a records request anybody can file. If the answer is that there isn't one, then it's a complaint.
Wendell hears 22.54 and takes his glasses off again, which is how she knows he's found a reason to care that isn't his budget.
The flag has a contact address, and of course it's an agent too: a different blue logo, the same manners. She writes three sentences. Sampler for Tazewell SWCD. Requesting the methodology for the ASH-C amendment east of the Hartsburg elevator. How is weathering measured, and against what control.
The answer comes in nine minutes, two faster than Terraline's. A forty-page PDF. She reads the contents with her finger and stops at 4.3.
REGIONAL BASELINE. Drainage-water alkalinity flux for treated fields is estimated against a regional untreated reference. For central Illinois installations, the reference is District Control SCHAEFER-17 (Tazewell SWCD, public data), per Terraline Reference Network.
She reads it twice and turns the monitor so Wendell can see it from his chair.
The ash company doesn't sample its fields. It doesn't sample the ditch she stood in. It reads Ken's weir, the one she built out of flashing and a thirty-eight-dollar receipt, and calls the difference between Ken's ditch and nobody's ditch its removal. It got Ken's ditch from Terraline. Terraline got it from her.
"Huh," Wendell says.
"Two programs now."
"Is that legal?"
"It's public." She hears herself say it, and it's true, and it's the problem. Public means anybody can read it. It doesn't mean anybody reads it right.
At the bottom of the PDF there's a partnership tier with a stipend. She closes the file without answering.
201. 12/13/50 ASH-C METHOD 4.3: BASELINE = SCHAEFER-17 'PER TERRALINE REFERENCE NETWORK.' #17 CONTROL FOR 2 PROGRAMS. W.: COMPLAINT AS CITIZEN ONLY. FIRST: IEPA RECORDS REQ, BUD UNDER 22.54 FOR ASH-C? LIMITS? NO REPLY TO OFFER. 1.4 H, GRAY.
Tuesday, the twentieth of December, ten past three, the office half dark for the holidays.
Marcy Kuhl calls first. Terraline's issuance notice came at 4:03 that morning, she says, like everything they send. The 2050 vintage for her four hundred acres is final, and there's a footnote she wants Janelle to hear. She reads it slowly, the way you read a recipe somebody else wrote:
"Reference values below the District's stated rating limit were excluded per District guidance."
"They read it," Janelle says.
"They read something. My check's smaller."
"How much smaller?"
"Enough I'm calling you the week before Christmas."
Janelle walks it through on the phone, because it should check, and it does. They dropped the cells where the reference read below her rating limit. Those were the control's low-flow weeks. Leaving them out isn't the same as putting in the small true numbers, so the reference flux averages high, the difference between Marcy's fields and the control shrinks, and her credit shrinks with it. Smaller check. That's the right direction.
"So it's fair," Marcy says.
"It's fair this quarter. If they ever decide to fill those gaps by drawing a line between the weeks they do have, it can go the other way."
"Which way?"
"Whichever way the line goes. That's why the file says don't."
She doesn't say sorry, because it isn't hers to be sorry about. She says the true thing: the number Marcy was paid on in Q3 came from water that didn't exist, and the number she's paid on now came from water that did. Marcy is quiet. Then she says her husband wants to know if he can buy Janelle a beer, or if that's a stipend too.
"A beer is a beer."
Then the rating file. Three lines of points now, seven lines of warning, NO VALUE in every cell below an inch. Downloaded eleven times this month. She can't see by whom. She can guess.
She thinks about the ash pipe running nine-four into a county ditch under snow, and a PDF measuring it against Ken's. About fourteen farms and one ash company and whoever's third, all holding up her ditch as the place nothing happened. Ken's ditch was repaired in January. Ken plowed it in November. It has a weir in it made of roof flashing and a vendor's sticker under the waterline. It's the most-handled ditch in Tazewell County. It's the worst control anybody could pick, and it's popular because it's the only one with numbers.
She can't stop anyone reading a public file. She can make the file say what it is.
At the top, above the title, a new first line:
SCHAEFER-17 IS A DISTRICT MONITORING SITE. IT IS NOT AN UNTREATED CONTROL FOR ANY PROGRAM. SEE SITE HISTORY.
And a tab called SITE HISTORY, one row per thing that's been done to the ditch. Tile repair, 1/50. Terraline sticker. Weir, 8/50. Chisel plow, 11/50. Dates and nothing else. Anyone who wants to call it untouched can read the list first.
She takes it to Wendell's door because she always does. He's getting into his coat and reads it standing.
"They'll keep using it."
"They will."
"Then why."
"So when somebody asks later, the file said."
He initials the printout, W.T., and goes home for Christmas.
Outside the window the ditch behind the office is frozen at the edges and running black down the middle. Card thirteen has five lines on it now. There's room for twenty more, and she already knows the next one will have to be about ice on the weir crest, because nobody has written down yet what a frozen notch is worth.
202. 12/20/50 TERRALINE ISSUANCE: 'BELOW RATING LIMIT EXCLUDED PER DISTRICT GUIDANCE.' M.K. PAID LESS. RATING FILE LINE 1: '#17 NOT AN UNTREATED CONTROL FOR ANY PROGRAM.' SITE HISTORY TAB. W.T. INIT. 1.6 H, GRAY.