The calm after the storm

My mother always tells us stories about her mother, my grandmother. My grandmother grew up in a beautiful house by the shore. My mum's fondest memory is the one of her whole family sitting around this big chair, listening to her mother’s stories of the sea, gentle wind, and raindrops that tickle your cheeks while hiding from the extreme heat they were suffering outside. She would talk about herself as a little child, spending entire mornings running across the beach, bothering tourists that didn’t understand the real beauty of what they were living, and whole nights jumping as high as they could to prevent getting absolutely soaked by the waves. She told them about their father, my grandfather, who she met during one of the weekly beach cleanings that the youth organization of their town organized. With a childish smile on her face, she’d tell her children how, one day, she accidentally stepped on a broken crystal bottle some uncaring person had left there, despite the continuous warnings that were shown at all times on social media and television, and cut her foot. The group coordinator saw her sitting on the sand, absorbing all the blood with a paper towel she luckily found in her pocket and quickly ran to help her. He picked her up, bridal style, to the nearest first aid refuge, while she complained relentlessly. She wanted to continue her work, to continue doing something good to save the world as much as she could. 

Sometimes people would ask her what her big motivation was, and she always answered with the same story: “When I was seven, my brother and I found a turtle whose mouth was completely shut by a plastic that had wrapped itself around it. It was dead. That day I vowed that I would do anything in my power to keep that from happening to any other animal.” And so she did. Or at least, she tried. When she was eighteen years old, instead of moving far away to study some posh degree in the best university, she chose to stay home and enroll in the local university, where she studied marine biology and environmental sciences. When she was about to finish college, an international youth social movement started to demand solutions for the impending disaster, and she didn’t hesitate and joined the scientific committee. She would tell people the same things over and over again: this is a crisis, if we don’t act now, it’s going to be too late. It is technically too late now. Whenever she told these stories, you could see the sadness and rage rushing through her, because she always thought she could have done more.

My grandfather a lawyer, 10 years older than her. He helped her out countless times. Being a young, driven, educated, energetic and intelligent woman like she was, she received death threats, she was sued by multiple international companies that she outed as the main contributors to pollution, she was insulted by media and she was even arrested once. As a young farmer’s son, he knew he had to take special care of the world, it was in his genes. He moved to go to university and became a volunteer in many organizations. When he finally finished his degree, he founded Legal Team for Climate, an organization of lawyers who worked along with experts to find a legal solution to the disaster. He even tried to improve the situation via politics, but people never understood the urgency of the matter, and, well, he couldn’t make them. People would always say he did it out of love for my grandmother, for his family, and his planet. That he believed that young people deserved a livable world.

I have never actually met my grandfather, as he died when my mother was only one year old. All the memories I have of him come from pictures, newspaper cuttings, videos, his old diaries, and the countless stories everybody who knew him tells. When the Great Catastrophe of 2039 happened, everybody who lived by the water had to move to safer places. The water took everything in its way as its own, not sparing anything it found, not even human lives. Many people didn’t survive the Great Catastrophe, neither the floods that started it nor the mass migration that started because of it. My grandfather didn’t die there, though. Months after they settled in Bolivia, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. The few pictures that were taken during my mum’s first life year show an incredibly aged young man with an oxygen mask, watching his daughter from a distance. Nevertheless, even the best doctors (that they could afford) couldn’t save his life. This is to show that even wealth can’t save people from certain situations. 

Money didn’t save my family from losing their house in the floods. Grandmother always said that she knew it was coming, though, so she actually had everything packed months in advance. She remembered how every day, the waves would get a little closer to the streets, and then a little further into the yards, till it finally burst in and took everything they hadn’t secured. 

Sometimes, I’ll look outside the window and see the dry ground, the lack of green, and I wonder where it went wrong. I’m not going to lie. I get angry often. Not at my grandparents: they did everything they could to prevent this. I get angry at all those people who knew this would happen and still didn’t do anything. Sometimes, those days when the heat is so severe that you can’t move to prevent the body to collapse, I kind of wish that all those people who called the scientists liars, who pretended like there wasn’t a crisis going on, have descendants who are alive today, who suffer as much as we do. Because, just like I said, status and money aren’t going to keep those rotten children from the impending death. Other days, I simply feel hopeless, like when I watch the seasons change from extreme summer to extreme winter (it kind of makes me laugh that people still listen to The Four Seasons by Vivaldi. Or at least, chuckle sadly). Or when we have to start tying ropes to all our belongings because a new flood is coming. 

I think of all the architects who have made a living off of all these people’s (in which group I realize I’m included) misfortunes. Of all the politicians, children of politicians, who try to justify their parents’ actions, avoid blaming them. They spend millions on trying to solve something unsolvable for decades, but they like to pretend they’re doing something useful. 

Even though I never lived in my grandmother’s childhood town (and I couldn’t, because now it’s, as we call it, New Atlantis), I feel like I’m there when I open my window. The air is thick with salt, a little humid, and hot. According to the last reports that I read for class this morning, the last measure of the polar ice revealed that there was enough water to cover the entire continent except for five mountains in Argentina. I know this means the end of us. We aren’t high enough to survive this one. It may seem dramatic, but I know, just by smelling the air, that a big storm is coming, and I don’t know if our community will get out of it alive. 

I quickly take my phone to contact my brother, who is staying at a friend’s house, making his assignment that he might never have the chance to turn in. This is our life now. We live as if we had unlimited time, while we know we don’t. We read the weekly reports with fear, dreading to find out if our friend who lives 20 meters lower has lost his house. Dreading to find out how much time there is left. It isn’t until the moment when I hear the thunder that I realize that the cable has been dead for weeks, since the last storm, and that the technicians haven’t gotten around to fix it. 

A drumroll pierces the silent air. It almost feels like the whole planet it holding its breath, like it is preparing for a counterattack. The big one. The few who’ll be left after this will call this The Great Catastrophe of 2056. As I hear the storm coming closer and closer, a sudden calmness invades me. I know that, whatever happens, humans have been asking for this for centuries. As much as I know that it’s not just our extinction we’ve caused, I do know that the Earth is paying back big. The calmness is just mental, though. My heart beats to the rhythm of the thunder, my breath has become shallow and quick. It’s fear, a primal response. Why didn’t the generations before us trust their primal response? It had to be telling them the same thing, didn’t it? That they were causing their own deaths? 

It is as if the Earth is really alive because an enormous amount of water begins to fall down. I hear windows breaking somewhere, and I can only pray that it isn’t inside the house, just in case. Looking outside, I see how the baby blue sky from before is now almost black with clouds. 

I hear screaming from the streets. Or what used to be streets but now seem rivers. I have to close my eyes, mentally asking my brother and his friend to stay inside. Drowning must be such a sad death, I realize. How many people have died already because of this?

I don’t know how much time I spend talking inside my head, but when I open my eyes, I see that the sky is blue again. But I do notice that there is, about a meter and a half high, a change of shade. Water. In the minutes it must have rained, so much water has fallen down that I’m locked in my own house. 

I hear a loud noise from upstairs, and suddenly, a sound that reminds me of the waterfalls that always appear in movies. I know this is it. If I open any door or window, I’ll be dead from the impact of the water, but if I don’t, I’ll probably drown. 

I see the water arriving fiercely. I can see my brother’s football distinctly, as well as my big pen collection. A sea of color and plastics is coming towards me. I decide to give in. I can’t fight this, nor do I want to do this for the rest of my life. I let the water surround me, getting closer to my chest, closer to my neck. It’s filling my mouth, and my instinct tells me to drink. The water doesn’t taste like water should taste like. It’s a mixture of sand, earth, and God-knows-what other polluting particles. I spit it out immediately. It’s getting to my nose. I know I can only hold my breath for about 20 seconds, so I start to count. 

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15… 16… 17… 18.... 19… 20.