TWTBACD Ch.16 - The Year the Rains Were Wrong

Chapter 16

The Year the Rains Were Wrong

2031

2031: monsoon breaks early, Iowa dries, Sava floods

[ALL FAMILIES — A Year of Strange Weather]

2031 was the year the climate statistics stopped feeling like statistics.

The monsoon arrived in India three weeks early and then stalled over Maharashtra for eleven days, delivering twice the seasonal rainfall in half the time. Sixty-seven villages in the Konkan coast reported landslides. The Ganga in Varanasi rose fourteen metres in seventy-two hours — a rate Rajan had never witnessed in forty years on the ghats. He stood at the top of the stone steps with Priya, who was fourteen, watching the brown water cover the lower ghats and then the middle ghats and then stop, two steps below where they stood, a wall of moving water carrying everything upstream had failed to hold.

"Is it safe?" Priya asked.

"We are safe," he said.

"That's not what I asked."

He looked at his daughter. She had the river-keeper's instinct — not for one event but for the pattern behind the events. "No," he said. "What is happening to the monsoon is not safe. Not long-term."

In Iowa, the spring planting season was destroyed by a late frost in May that arrived after two weeks of unusual warmth — the kind of weather that fooled seeds. Dale's cover crop had survived. His corn did not — thirty percent winter-killed before emergence. He filed the insurance claim, replanted with a shorter-season variety, and added the event to his records. Travis, thirteen, helped with the replanting, working alongside his father in a silence that was not the absence of communication but its fullest expression.

In Serbia, the Sava flooded in September — not the spring flood Dmitri expected, but an autumn flood driven by unprecedented rainfall over Bosnia that had nowhere to go but downstream. He lost three weeks of monitoring equipment to the water. He recovered two sensors. One he never found. His data for that period had a gap that he marked in the records as: flood damage, not absence of phenomenon.

In Vietnam, a typhoon made landfall near Da Nang in October with sustained winds of two hundred kilometres per hour — a Category 4 by historical classification, though the meteorologists were increasingly noting that the historical classifications were calibrated for a climate that no longer fully existed. The Nguyen apartment building sustained structural damage. They spent three weeks in a temporary shelter. Tuan's factory was closed for ten days.

Grandmother Mai, eighty-three years old, sat in the shelter with the composure of someone who has already absorbed the full spectrum of catastrophe. "It will pass," she said, again, to whoever needed to hear it.

"You always say that," Hanh said. Hanh was twenty now, finishing her nursing degree. She had the particular exhaustion of someone who has spent too long being told that things will pass.

"Because it always does," Mai said. "The question is what you do in the meantime."

"What do we do?"

"We fix the roof. We plant again. We remember where we came from."

It was not enough as philosophy. It was entirely sufficient as instruction.