“Oh, God, yes, I must.”
“You must try but it is unlikely you will get through. Things are that bad.”
“Pelee must think I died in the eruption.”
“Thank Napiw, you were not killed. I will see to it you regain your strength. I will make sure you see you daughter again.”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
On the evening of June 13th, a week prior to the summer solstice, a massive Canadian high pressure dome that had been building for weeks over the Mackenzie River delta on the Arctic Ocean thrust fully into the continental United States and overspread the northern Great Plains, the Ohio River Valley and the Northeast. The arctic, deprived of nearly ten percent of its normal twenty-four hour late-spring sunlight allotment by the heavy aerosol blanket from the Yellowstone eruption, never relinquished its late winter temperatures. Now a vast ocean of frigid air slid from the polar latitudes and stole into the heartland with no fanfare whatsoever.
At the international airport at Winnipeg, Manitoba, the automated weather station registered a freeze of 15 degrees Fahrenheit. At Pierre, South Dakota, the mercury bottomed out at 17 degrees, same in Duluth, Minnesota. Des Moines, Iowa: 19. Springfield, Illinois: 20. Lexington, Kentucky: 23. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: 22. New York City: 28 degrees. Boston, Massachusetts: 26.
In the soil furrows of croplands across state after state, water molecules imbedded in food crop plant cells stiffened, one by one by one, into a solid state. Molecules built into crystals with needle sharp edges, perfect for piercing cellulose-based cell walls in countless plants in endless rows of crops. Soybeans, in particular, and corn fell victim to the ice crystal invasion from within. Red wheat, millet and oats, staples that could stand considerable cold, lost their fight as temperatures cascaded to the teens in the northern plains.
During the night, as the dew point and frosty temperatures collided, ice built up frost armies that marched on every surface across the land. Swaths of ghostly white clothed every living thing in wispy, thorny crowns of ice. The frozen regiments advanced west to east as the night wore on, leveling all but the heartiest of plants in the kingdom.
CNN late night editors, working through the wee hours, chose to mark the killing frost as their lead story for Morning Edition. In the history of television journalism there had never been a lead about the death grip of something so simple as common frost. Hurricanes, typhoons, drought and tornadoes were the usual summer meteorological fare, but summer cold? Never.
Abel invaded Bobcat’s domain in the video studio just before 6 a.m. Clothed in a parka, long johns and boots, and slumped in a seat, Independency’s figurehead flipped on a television monitor to pick up the headlines at the top of the hour.
“Our lead story is about winter in summer, about unprecedented cold June temperatures across much of the continental United States,” crowed a CNN anchor. “The National Weather Service is reporting widespread killing frost across the Northeast down to the North Carolina piedmont region, across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and through many of the Great Plains states as far south as Oklahoma.
“Agriculture officials from the affected states, whose farmers have suffered the loss of early plantings, are warning of a complete collapse of cereal grain and feed grain crops, including corn, wheat, soybeans, oats and more this year.
“For a closer look at the unusual conditions, we go live to Ohio and Ohio Agriculture Director Warner Reinhartson in Columbus. Thank you for getting up so early to be with us this morning.”
The man on camera shrugged and uttered in a heavy smoker’s voice, “You’re welcome.”
“What can you tell us about these latest cold conditions, sir?”
A stocky bulldog of a man in his late fifties, squinting behind glasses and topped with a military buzz cut, stood beside the black waters of the Scioto River in downtown Columbus. He rasped his words. “We have a disaster unfolding here in Ohio. We’ve lost our spring planting and subsequent plantings to the cold.”
“What are the prospects for replanting and a late harvest this fall?” asked the CNN anchor from studio facilities in Atlanta.
“It’s dangerously late in the season,” the state bureaucrat said, an edge of urgency in his voice. “I don’t know how to tell you this.” The man scratched his forehead and wrinkled his face. “With the prospect of other summer frosts or early fall frosts, there may very well be no harvest at all come fall. None whatsoever. It could be that bad. I have asked the governor to convene a meeting of experts to develop a strategy to safeguard what reserves we have in our grain storage facilities here in Ohio.”
“What impact will this latest weather have on Ohio’s economy?”
“Ohio may very well be a heavily industrialized state, but half of our economy is tied to agriculture. We can’t lose an entire crop. It would be devastating.”
“Can anything be done to alleviate the situation, director?”
“I’ve urged my colleagues across the breadbasket states to light a fire under Washington. The window is closing on planting anything. This country has got to take every step necessary to protect what food reserves we still have. If we fail to act….” The man stopped in mid-sentence and looked off-camera.
“Yes,” prompted the newscaster, “If we fail to act?”
The agricultural director looked squarely into the television camera lens. The man’s face crammed the monitor that Abel was watching through red morning eyes. “I’m afraid of the consequences,” he wheezed.
The CNN feature continued. Abel was drawn in, completely smitten. Food was at the heart of everything. Food was the foundation underpinning every society, he reasoned, weighing the implications of the report. As nowhere else on the face of the earth, people in the United States took food abundance for granted.
Before a news camera, pancake-flat fields in the truck-farm country of central New Jersey stretched away under morning light cast ruddy pink and dull. A CNN reporter had whisked her way down from New York City during the night on the empty New Jersey Turnpike to find Everett Mason, now sixty-one years of his age, standing amid rows of stunted tomato plants enduring a cold shower of water from portable, high pressure irrigation nozzles.
“I’ve been farming this land for forty years,” the man explained, directing his gaze at the reporter just off camera. “We’ve got ninety acres in fresh produce. I started out helping my dad, you see. After he died, I took over the farm. Our family has been at it ever since. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Why the sprinklers so early in the morning, Mr. Mason?”
“Just before dawn, we had temperatures down to twenty-four degrees. That’s one hell of a cold night for June. March sure, but the middle of June? No one has ever seen that kind of a chill here at this time of year. It just doesn’t happen. We’ve got the irrigation system up and going as soon as we could, but I think it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“You can stop frost in its tracks when the temperature drops below freezing if you spray the plants with water. A blanket of water ice forms on the plants and keeps them warmer than the air temperature. If the temperature isn’t too cold, it works fine. You save your crop.”
Mason pulled up an ice-coated tomato plant and looked it over. The truck farmer lamented, “This is the second planting now. We lost the first during the first cold spell after that Yellowstone blowup. These plants are small, too small. They should be big and full of green tomatoes just weeks away from being ripe enough to pick, box up and ship north. They aren’t growing. Just too little sun and too damn cool during the day, every single day.”