Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

Nick and Anna were now working the soil in, and planting their first vegetables. It was full spring now, middle of May, steamy and green, and so they planted the usual summer vegetables: tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries, peppers, pumpkins, melons, basil, eggplant, cilantro, cucumbers.

Nick stood looking down at a broccoli plant, small and delicate between his feet. “So where will the broccoli come out?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie stared at the plant. It looked like an ornamental. “I don’t know,” he confessed, feeling a little stab of fear. They didn’t know anything.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Well, if we’re lucky they won’t show up at all.”

“Come on now. Broccoli is good for you.”

One of their agreements was that they would plant vegetables that Nick and Joe liked to eat, which was a severe constraint, but one they had agreed to, because it was not exclusive; they were planting for Anna and Charlie too. But for the boys it was mostly down to potatoes, an entire bed of them, and carrots. Joe would eat some other vegetables, but Nick would not, and so he was put in charge of the carrot bed. These were to be planted from seed, and apparently the soil had to be specially amended. Sandy soil was best, and white cloth laid over the soil during the germination was recommended—by Drepung, anyway, who was serving as their consultant on this project.

“Although it shouldn’t be me,” he kept saying, “I don’t know anything about gardening really, it’s all Qang at our place, you should have her over to do things like plant carrot seed. I think that one is tricky. She would do a fire puja and everything.”

Still, he helped them to get it planted and covered, on his hands and knees digging happily, and showing worms to Joe. After the planting it was mostly a matter of watering and weeding. Also removing snails and slugs. Joe carried these carefully to the back of their lot, where they could start life over in the weeds bordering the lawn.

“Don’t overwater,” Charlie advised Nick. “You don’t want to drown things in their beds. You have to be precise in how much you water them. I estimate about say this much, if you want to be accurate.”

“Do you mean accurate or precise?” Anna asked from the new flower bed.

“No quibbling allowed.”

“I’m not quibbling! It’s an important distinction.”

“Hello, what do you mean? Accurate and precise mean the precisely same thing!”

“They do not.”

“What do you mean,” Charlie was giggling at her now, “how so?”

“Accuracy,” she said, “means how close an estimate is to the true value. So if you estimate something is five percent and it turns out to be eight percent, then you weren’t very accurate.”

“This is statistics.”

“Yes, it is. And precision refers to how broad your estimate is. Like, if you estimate something is between five and eight percent, then you aren’t being very precise, but if you say a range is between 4.9 and 5.1 percent, then it’s a more precise estimate.”

“I see,” Charlie said, nodding solemnly.

“Quit it! It’s a very important distinction!”

“Of course it is. I wasn’t laughing at that.”

“At what then?”

“At you!”

“But why?”

“Oh, no reason.”

“It is a real distinction,” Nick pointed out to Charlie.

“Oh of course, of course!”

So this then became one of the recurrent motifs of the Quiblers on patrol, a distinction applicable, once you agreed it existed, to an amazing number of situations. Cell-phone call to fine-tune the grocery list, with one of them in the store and one at home; get some potatoes. How many? Get about half a dozen potatoes. Was that being accurate or precise? Or when someone was remarking that Nick was a very precise person, Charlie quipped, “He’s not precise, he’s accurate.” And so on.

On the way back to the garden-supply store, to get more plants and stakes and other supplies, Charlie said, “I wonder how many cubic feet of compost we need if we want to cover all four of the beds, let’s see, they’re six by twelve, say a foot deep in compost, make it simple….”

“Mom can tell you.”

“No that’s all right, I’m working on it—”

“Two hundred and eighty-eight cubic feet,” Anna said, while driving.

“I told you she would.”

“It isn’t fair,” Charlie said, still looking at his fingers. “She uses all these tricks from when she was in math club.”

“Come on,” Anna said.

Nick was helpless with laughter. “Yeah, right, Dad—she uses all these clever fiendish tricks—like multiplication, ” and he and Anna laughed all the way to the store.

Unfortunately their new spring quickly became the hottest and driest on record in the Potomac watershed, and soon, it having been a dry winter on the whole, the region had to resort to water rationing. Between that and the mosquitoes, everyone began to reminisce with affection about the long winter, and wonder if it had been such a good idea to restart the Gulf Stream, since cold winters were so much preferable to drought. Crops were dying, the rivers falling low, streams drying out entirely, fish populations dying with them; it was bad. A bit of snow and cold temperatures would have been easy in comparison. You could always throw on more clothes when it got cold, but in this heat!

But of course now they didn’t have a choice.

The Quiblers did what they could to micro-irrigate their crops, and they had enough water to water such a small garden; but many of the plants died anyway. “We’re only going to have about a fifty percent survival rate, if that!”

“Is that being accurate or being precise?”

“I hope neither!”

Anna was going to websites like safeclimate.net or fightglobalwarming.com and comparing how they rated when she entered their household statistics on a carbon-burning chart. She was interested in the different methods they were using. Some accepted general descriptions as answers, others wanted the figures from your heating and electric bill, your car’s odometer and its real miles per gallon. Your actual air travel miles; charts of distances between major flying destinations were given. “The air travel is killer,” Anna muttered. “I thought it was a really energy-efficient way to travel.”

Giving her numbers to play with was like giving catnip to the cats, and Charlie watched her affectionately, but with a little bit of worry, as she speed-typed around on a spreadsheet she had adapted from the chart. Despite their garden’s contribution to their food supply, which she estimated at less than two percent of their caloric intake, and the flex schedule for power that they had signed up for with their power provider, still they were burning about 75 metric tons of carbon a year. Equivalent to eight football fields of Brazilian rain forest, the site said. Per year.

“You just can’t get a good number in a suburban home with a car and all,” she said, annoyed. “And if you fly at all.”

“It’s true.” Charlie stared over her shoulder at her spreadsheet. “I don’t see what else we can do here either, given the infrastructure.”

“I know. But I wish there was a way. Nick! Turn that light off, please!”

“Mom, you’re the one who told me to turn it on.”

“That’s when you were using it. Now you’re not.”

“Mom.”

B eing Argentine, he was angry. Not that all Argentines were angry but many were, and rightfully so, after all the mistakes and crimes, but especially after the dirty war and its dirty resolution—a general amnesty for everybody for everything, for anything, even the foulest crimes. In other words repression of the past and of even the idea of justice, and of course the return of the repressed is a guaranteed thing, and always a nightmare, a breakout of monsters.