Tuesday, the thirty-first of January 2051, twenty past noon, the Hartsburg road ditch.
Second thaw of the month. Forty-four degrees and everything dripping. The ash field across the road is half snow and half black stubble, and the little wire flag that says CREDITS ISSUED has blown flat and frozen to the ground face up, which is the only way anyone driving by would ever read it.
Janelle Woith is on her lunch hour, so the sample is hers. Her meter, her strip, and a pint canning jar from her own pantry, because she didn't want to sign out a district bottle for a citizen's complaint. The tile outlet on the county right-of-way is running harder than in December, a rope of water instead of a thread. She fills the cup. The strip goes purple in under two minutes.
pH 9.1. EC 1,390.
A county motor grader comes up the shoulder pushing slush and stops beside her truck. The driver leans out. Older guy, Carhartt hood, a toothpick.
"You the one testing the ditch?"
"The pipe."
"Cattails are dead down there every spring." He nods at the culvert. "That's us. Road salt. Forty ton a winter on this stretch."
She'd thought of salt and not written it down, which is the same as not thinking it. Salt is real. It would come off the road, not out of a field tile, it would show up as sodium and chloride, and it would not make anything pH nine. Dale had chloride normal in the pipe water.
"Salt's in the ditch," she says. "This is coming out of the field before it touches the ditch."
"Huh." The toothpick moves. "So it's not us."
"It's both of you. You're just different numbers."
He likes that, she can tell. He puts the grader in gear and goes on toward Hartsburg, laying a gray wave of slush over the flag.
She takes a second cup ten feet downstream, where the salt and the ash meet. EC 2,050, pH 8.3. Mixed water, mixed blame. She writes PIPE and DITCH on two separate lines so that nobody, ever, averages them, and that night from the kitchen table she adds both to complaint IEPA-C-51-00217, which is still Priority 4, which means nobody has opened it.
208. PIPE AND DITCH SEPARATE LINES. DO NOT AVERAGE.
Tuesday, the seventh of February, 10:05 in the morning, the district conference room, which is also the break room.
Marcy Kuhl brings two coffees and a manila folder with her first-quarter statement in it. Issuance resumed after the rename. Her check will be about what it was in October, which is lower than spring.
"I don't want to be measured against Ken," she says. "No offense to Ken."
"He'd agree with you."
"I want my own weir. On my own pipe. I'll pay for it. Measure me against me."
Janelle turns her cup a quarter turn on the table. It's a good instinct. It's the wrong shape.
"Against you when?"
"Before. After. Whatever the word is."
"You spread in—"
"Fall of '49 and '50."
"Then there's no before." Janelle pulls a napkin out of the dispenser and draws two dots and a line between them. "Nobody had a weir on your pipe in '48. Nobody had a bottle on it. Whatever your water does now, it's already after. A before-and-after needs a before. Otherwise it's an after-and-after."
Marcy looks at the napkin for a long time. "So I need Ken."
"You need somebody's untreated pipe. Or you leave one of your own fields alone and measure both. Same soil, same tile depth, one limed and one not. Five years."
"Five years of not liming a field."
"That's what a control costs. Ken's paying it now and nobody asked him."
Marcy laughs, not unkindly, at herself. "I was going to buy a weir to get out of it."
"You can still buy the weir. Put it on the field you don't lime. Then you've got your own Ken."
"What does it cost?"
"Couple hundred in scrap if I build it. A season of bottles if the board says yes. And the yield off whatever field you leave sour."
"That's the real price."
"That's the only price."
Marcy folds the napkin in quarters and slides it into the folder behind the statement, where it will be the only document in there that's true about her.
209. "MEASURE ME AGAINST ME." NO BEFORE. PAIRED FIELD. YOUR OWN KEN.
Tuesday, the fourteenth, ten after one, the Hartsburg road ditch again.
The call came Monday from a 217 number. A man named Oyelaran, Illinois EPA field operations out of Springfield, who said Priority 4 meant nobody was coming for her complaint, but he was coming to Logan County on Wednesday for a manure spill and could swing by Tuesday if she showed him the pipe.
He's younger than she pictured. A state fleet Malibu with a cooler in the back seat, seatbelt buckled across it like a passenger. He has his own meter, calibrated that morning, and he doesn't use hers.
pH 9.2. EC 1,410.
He nods. "That's high. For tile water that's very high." He fills two bottles, preserved, and writes the chain-of-custody seal numbers on a form she can actually read.
"So what happens?"
He puts his hands in his jacket and looks at the field. "That ash is land-applied under a beneficial-use letter. Agricultural liming material. That's Department of Agriculture. They own what goes on the field. We get it when it reaches waters of the state."
"Is a road ditch waters of the state?"
"That's the question." He almost smiles. "Where's it go?"
She has the map up on her phone already. County ditch, the culvert under 1200 North, Prairie Creek in a mile and three tenths, then Salt Creek.
"Then it's a maybe. Pipe to ditch, ditch to creek. If my bottles say what yours say, I write a letter to Ag. Ag writes a letter to the plant. The plant writes back that it's lime."
"It isn't lime. It's char and potash. The flag says carbon."
"The flag isn't anybody's jurisdiction." He says it flat, the way a man reads a forecast. He gets in the Malibu, starts it, and rolls the window down. "Your complaint says Other. Keep saying Other. It's the only box that doesn't belong to anybody here."
She stands there after he's gone and does the thing she does when a door closes: she lists who owns what. The plant owns the ash until it leaves the gate. Ag owns it once it's on the field, as long as everybody keeps calling it lime. The state owns the water once it's a creek. The county owns the ditch and the salt in it. The vendor owns the credits, and the registry owns the word carbon. The pipe in between, the twelve inches of plastic where pH nine comes out of the ground, belongs to the farmer who leases the field, who lives in Arizona and has never answered a letter.
The Malibu goes off toward Lincoln with its cooler. The flag is still frozen face-down in the stubble, where the grader left it.
210. FLAG = NOBODY'S JURISDICTION.
Tuesday, the twenty-first, 8:30 in the morning, her desk.
The ASH-C methods agent writes at 3:51 a.m., which is apparently when agents do their correspondence.
For the Q4 2050 baseline calculation, TAZ-17 contains 36 flagged records (12/25 2100 to 12/27 0705, ICE ON CREST, HEAD INVALID). Please provide gap-filled discharge estimates for these intervals so the reference series is continuous. A regression against the regional precipitation index is acceptable.
It's polite. If you're a spreadsheet, it's even reasonable. Thirty-six holes in a series are ugly, and there's a whole branch of hydrology for filling holes.
But the holes are the true part. For thirty-six readings, nobody knew what the ditch was doing, because there was an inch of ice sitting on the notch and she was home for Christmas. A regression would know exactly what the ditch was doing, to three decimal places, and it would be wrong in the most invisible way there is.
The District does not gap-fill ice-affected records at TAZ-17. Those intervals are NO VALUE. Any estimate for them is not District data.
She walks it to Wendell, because a refusal is policy and policy needs his name. He reads it with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.
"They'll just do it themselves."
"Yes."
"Then why refuse?"
"So when they do it, it's theirs."
He signs.
The ASH-C quarterly posts Friday. She opens it Saturday at the kitchen table. There in the TAZ-17 series, December twenty-sixth is filled in with a smooth hump of flow, a tidy curve the ditch never made, and at the bottom of the page in eight-point type: Ice-affected intervals vendor-estimated (regional precipitation regression).
Vendor-estimated. It's the most honest thing they've ever printed. It's still a hump the ditch never made, and somebody's tonnes are standing on it.
She adds a row to the site history and an eighth rule to the card, sideways, in the margin, because the margin is all that's left.
211. A HOLE IS DATA.
Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, quarter after six in the morning, Ken's ditch.
Storm eighteen. An inch and a tenth Monday night on ground that thawed last week, the first real spring water of the year, two months early. No ice. The notch is clean steel and the water jumps off it in a sheet, which is the whole point of a V.
H 0.42. The five-liter pail fills before she can find the stopwatch button, so she gets the twenty-liter bucket out of the truck bed, the one that used to hold dog food. Nine and a half seconds. Then 9.8. Then 9.3. About 2.1 liters a second. The curve says 2.05. She writes both, because the day she stops writing both is the day the curve becomes the ditch.
EC 610. pH 7.20. Bottles, duplicate, split. Her hands go numb in the jet and come back in the cab.
Ken walks down from the machine shed when he sees the truck. His own coat this time, not his dad's. He stands by the weir and watches the water go over like it's a calf he isn't sure about.
"I'm going to lime it," he says. "This fall. South half anyway. Soil test came back five-nine on the hill."
She has the pencil in her mouth. She takes it out.
"Okay."
"You're not going to tell me not to."
"It's your field." She means it. She also knows what it means. The day a spreader truck crosses that hill, TAZ-17 stops being anybody's untreated anything. Fourteen enrolled farms and an ash vendor lose their ruler, and nobody at Terraline knows it yet except a parser that will find out from a METHOD line.
"I'm a farmer," Ken says. "I'm not a ruler."
"I know."
"Will you still put bottles on it?"
"Every storm." She thinks about Marcy's napkin. "It'll be the only before-and-after in the county that's got a before. Two and a half years untreated, then lime, same pipe, with a weir on it. Somebody's going to want that."
"Somebody's going to want it for free."
"Probably."
He nods at the water going over the notch. "Write down that I told you in February. So nobody says I did it to mess with them."
She writes it in the truck, in black hours, because he asked. That afternoon she adds a row to the site history with the date in the first field, where even a machine that reads only the first field will trip on it.
2/28/51 OWNER INTENDS TO LIME (FALL 2051, S HALF). SITE WILL NOT BE UNTREATED AFTER APPLICATION.
On the way back to the office she stops at Marcy's mailbox and leaves an envelope with a photocopy of the weir drawing and a sticky note: IF YOU WANT YOUR OWN KEN, PICK THE FIELD BY APRIL. Then she drives the long way, past the ash field, where the flag has thawed loose and is lying in the ditch water now, pointed downstream.
Nobody calls about it. Nobody emails at four in the morning. The agents only read the data, and the data, for one more summer, still says untreated.
212. "I'M NOT A RULER."