Sarah Zettel: Under Pressure

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

“Ed!”

Ed Nickerson barely heard Marcy’s voice over the riot of the waves and the frigid autumn wind. He squinted towards the bow of the ship. Marcy stood up front of the mast, gripping the railing with one hand and pointing out across the rolling, grey water.

Ed’s gaze followed the line of her arm and settled on the sick, white blur spread across Lake Superior’s surface. A flock of seagulls wheeled overhead, screeching at each other and the world in general.

“I see it!" he shouted back, and a cold that had nothing to do with the weather settled around him.

Ed trudged forward to join Marcy and Doug, his other graduate student, up front of the mast. He reached them just as the prow of the Inland Sea sliced through the mass of dead fish.

There were so many of them, they flattened Superior’s restless waves. The corpses collided with the hull, making dull thumping noises. Ed’s jaw clenched as he watched the screaming, diving scavenger birds cluster around to take their share of the carnage.

Finally, Ed sighed. “Take a water sample, get the nets and—”

“Start hauling them up for tissue samples. Log them, ice them, and give you the data sheet,” Marcy finished for him.

“So much for the old wheeze about the lake that never gives up her dead,” added Doug.

When Ed didn’t respond to the quip, Doug and Marcy glanced at each other and retreated to the equipment locker.

Ed slumped against the rail and stared across the lake. They’d sailed far enough out that there was no land; just rolling, grey, fresh water under an October sky heavy with clouds. He scowled at the bickering gulls. They knew they needed to hurry. Lake Superior wouldn’t keep this display out for long.

There really was a reason the lake had its reputation for never giving up the dead. Superior was so cold that it acted like a refrigerator, preventing the decay of organic materials. Without decay, none of the gases that would normally keep a body afloat were generated. Superior would soon take these fish, as it took the bodies of the men on the Edmund Fitzgerald and all the other doomed lakers, straight down to the silt and rock bottom a mile below, and keep them there. The hopes the Waterways Restoration Project cherished for the lake would go right down with them.

What’re you doing? He demanded silently of the icy water. We’re trying to help this time!

Ed had been recruited by the project twenty years ago, when he’d had more hair and fewer hopes. Up to that point, his career as a limnology professor had consisted of writing articles in obscure publications, and a lot of what his father called “mucking about on the lakes.” The “mucking about” had mostly involved shepherding graduate students out onto Lake Superior to watch the aquaculture slowly die from invading species and human contamination.

Then the Waterways Restoration Project had asked him to come down to Detroit. He sat on a sagging sofa in the project office with his blossoming cynicism and a mug of coffee, listening to Dr. Jerry Van de Carr and Danette Washington rhapsodize about their new plan.

“You’re going to use the Great Lakes as a test case?” Incredulity had wrinkled Ed’s forehead. “The five biggest bodies of fresh water on the planet as a test?” He set the chipped mug down. “You federal types don’t do anything by halves, do you?”

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds, Ed.” Danette was a specialist in urban waterways as well as an old friend. If it hurt Ed to see what was happening up around Lake Superior and Lake Huron, he couldn’t imagine what she felt like studying the Detroit river. “The Great Lakes are big, yes, but they’re manageable. Look at Erie. The whole lake was brought back to life just by controlling the phosphorus content.”

“And it’s not exactly a test.” Van de Carr’s hand kept straying to his tie. “Right now the Europeans are breathing life back into the Caspian Sea, and the Thames, and you know what an appalling mess both those are.”

“Yeah.” Ed found his interest rising cautiously to the surface.

Van de Carr straightened the knot on his tie minutely. “It’s all information flow, Dr. Nickerson. You determine what conditions are and start changing them to what you want them to be. You relocate the invaders back to their own environments. You breed the natives by the tank load and turn them loose. You create some designer proteins to break down the waste and the pollutants—”

“Hold it!” Ed waved his hands and made the “time-out” sign. “Where do ‘you’ get the money for this fantasy?”

“From us.” Danette grinned at him. “We’re part of the Environmental Jobs Initiative. Don’t you watch the news?”

Ed shook his head. “I’ve got my own list of things to be depressed about. I don’t need CNN adding to it.”

“It’s a whole new industry, Dr. Nickerson.” Jerry’s voice began to rise. “The Green Revolution’s happening. Think about it!” Ed watched the look in the other man’s eyes drift further away, as if he were seeing straight through the plaster walls towards the Great Lakes, or a set of video cameras. “Rivers you can swim in, in the middle of cities! Lakes you can fish in and not have to worry about what you catch, either in terms of poison or quantity. Clean water. Really clean, fresh water for Mother Nature and for us.”

“And jobs.” Danette brought Ed’s attention back to her. “Real, honest-to-God, steady, good-paying jobs. You don’t need a Ph.D. to crew a ship or a fish farm, and there’ll be a mountain of construction work and data entry to be done.”

Ed opened his mouth but Danette cut him off. “It is too going to turn a profit. Soon as the basic resuscitation’s done, we’re going to put the waterways back to work. When the new gas taxes get put in, it’s suddenly going to get real cheap to ship raw materials using electric motors. Did you know that you can breed fresh water algae that’ll feed cattle? And did you know you can—”

Ed threw back his head and laughed. “OK, OK, Danette. You got me. What do we do first?”

Van de Carr’s sagging face relaxed into a smile. “First we get you a title and a paycheck. Then we pick your brains about the lakes. Then we get to work.”

So, Ed joined the revolution and found out it demanded hard work through late nights. In the early days, Ed spent as much time in Washington and Lansing arguing for funding as he did on the lakes with his students and co-workers sinking the computer sampling stations they had nicknamed “spy-buoys.” He worked in Ontario and Quebec for months at a time. The Canadians were a decade ahead of the U.S. when it came to cleaning up the lakes and the acid rains. Ed shamelessly bribed a flock of their experts to come south for the winter.

Then came the miracle. The fish hatcheries hooked up with a firm of genetic engineers to design a symbiote that could be bred to work inside the fish they were reintroducing into the lakes. The symbiote, named TDS by the PR team, would break down any toxins swallowed by its host organism, leaving only harmless proteins to pass through the digestive tract. With the announcement that the symbiote was viable, the project found a new obstacle in the form of the FDA. It’d been Jerry’s relentless shouting and string-pulling that finally mowed them down.

After that, the project took off like a rocket. Ed watched Danette’s predictions come true as well as Jerry’s. The ships did come back to the lakes. Maybe the re-fitted barges carrying garbage to and from the recycling centers didn’t have the ambience of the timber and iron-ore vessels of the previous century, but they were cleaner, quieter, and almost as profitable.