“The Middle of Somewhere” was published in Welcome to the Greenhouse, an excellent anthology of stories about climate change, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. A teenaged girl helps a seventy-year old woman collect data on bird hatching, that demonstrates the veracity of climate change. It is very clearly within the framework of science fiction, very science oriented, and also a revelation of character.
Kaylee is entering data on Jane’s clunky old desktop computer, and texting with a few friends while she does it, when the weather alarm goes off for the second time.
Cornell University’s NestWatch Citizen Scientist program runs this website where you have a different chart for each nest site you’re monitoring. You’re supposed to fill in the data after each visit to the site. Jane’s got a zillion different kinds of birds nesting on her property, and she knows where a lot of them are doing it, so Kaylee’s biology teacher fixed it up with Jane, who’s a friend of hers, for Kaylee to do this NestWatch project for class. Twice a week all spring she’s been coming out to Jane’s place to monitor seven pairs of nesting birds. The place used to be a farm but is all grown up now in trees and bushes except for five or ten acres around the house, which Jane keeps mowed. Bluebirds like short grass and open space.
Jane is nice, but seriously weird. All Kaylee’s friends think so, and to be honest Kaylee kind of slants what she tells people to exaggerate that side of Jane, who lives a lot like people did way before Kaylee was born, in this little log house with only three small rooms and no dishwasher or clothes dryer, and solar panels on the roof. She has beehives—well, that’s not so weird, though for an old lady maybe it is—but all her water is pumped from a cistern, plus she has two rain barrels out in the garden. Rain barrels! Kaylee knows for a fact that a few years back, when they brought city water out this far from town, Jane just said, Oh well, I can always hook up later if I think I need to. So you have to watch every drop of water you use at Jane’s house, like only flushing the toilet every so often, unless they’re getting plenty of rain. There’s a little sign taped to the bathroom wall that you can’t avoid reading when you’re sitting on the toilet: IF IT’S YELLOW / LET IT MELLOW / IF IT’S BROWN / FLUSH IT DOWN. Sometimes Kaylee flushes it down even when it isn’t brown, out of embarrassment.
The flushing thing is partly about water and partly about the septic tank. Kaylee’s friend Morgan’s house has a septic tank too, so Kaylee already knows it’s best to use them as little as possible, and that there are things you can’t put into them or the biology of the tank will get messed up and smell. If you happen to mention anything to Jane about, like, your new SmartBerry, or a hot music group or even the Anderson High basketball team, the Bearcats, when they went to the state finals, she just looks blank, but once when Kaylee asked a simple question about why Jane didn’t clean paintbrushes at the sink, like her dad always did, Jane talked animatedly for ten minutes about bacteria and “solids” and drain fields and septic lagoons. Kaylee’s friends laughed their heads off when they heard about that (“So she’s going on about how the soil in Anderson County is like pure clay, duh, so it doesn’t pass the ‘perk test,’ which is why she’s got this lagoon, and I’m thinking ‘Fine, great, whatever!’ and trying to like edge away …”). Kaylee’s seen the little outhouse in the trees on the other side of the driveway, across from the clothesline (clothesline!), for dry spells when flushing even a few times a day would use more water than Jane wants to waste. That would normally be in late summer. Kaylee’s relieved it’s spring right now.
The computer Kaylee has to use for data entry here is a million years old and slow as anything. She couldn’t believe it when Jane said one day that when and if DSL finally made it this far into rural Kentucky, she planned to sign up.
But the thing that makes all that beside the point for now, is that Jane has been monitoring certain species of birds here for years and years, and knows just about everything there is to know about them. Anything she doesn’t know, she looks up in books, or on the Birds of North America website, and then she knows that too.
On the Garden Box page Kaylee fills in blanks. Species: Tree swallow. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 0. Number of live young: 6. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status: Completed nest. Adult activity: Feeding young at nest. (Both parents dive-bombed Kaylee today for the entire ninety seconds she had the front of the nest box swung open, swooping down like fighter pilots, aiming for her eyes, pulling up just before they would have hit her head [she happened to have forgotten her hat]. When she was done they chased her all the way back to the house. Tree swallows are beautiful, sleekly graceful little birds, white and glossy dark blue, but Kaylee is so not crazy about the dive-bombing part.) Young status: Naked young. (The babies—“hatchlings” she should remember to say—hatched out only two days ago, and resemble squirming wads of pink bubble gum with huge dark eyeballs bulging under transparent lids still sealed shut, and little stumpy wings.) Management: No. Everything’s fine. Comment: Leave blank. The only thing not ordinary about this nest is how early it is, the earliest first-egg date for tree swallows ever recorded on Jane’s farm. Everybody on NestWatch is posting early nesting dates. Climate change, is the general assumption. Kaylee’s parents think climate change is a hoax. Kaylee doesn’t care whether it is or not, but saying so makes her project feel more dramatic, like, more cutting-edge. Submit.
Next site: Barn. Species: Black vulture. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 2. Number of live young: 0. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status—and right then Jane’s NOAA Weather Radio emits its long piercing shriek.
Jane comes in off the porch, where she’s been putting Revolution on the dogs to kill the ticks they pick up in the hay that grows wherever there aren’t any trees or blackberries. “What now? They only announced the watch twenty minutes ago.” The shrieking goes on and on, you can’t hear yourself think. Finally it stops and the radio buzzes three times, and then a robot voice declares, The National Weather Service in Louisville has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the following counties in Kentucky: Anderson, Franklin, Henry, Nelson, Mercer, Scott, Shelby, Spencer … Kaylee stops listening and goes back to her data entering and her texting. Nest status: No constructed nest. Adult activity: At/on, then flushed from nest. (When Kaylee squeezed through the crack between the barn doors an hour ago, the mother vulture, as always, got up and hesitantly stalked, like a huge black chicken, away from her two gigantic eggs lying on the bare dirt floor. The father didn’t show up this afternoon, which suits Kaylee just fine. Jane says he’s all bluster, but he threatens her as if he means it, hissing and spreading his enormous white-tipped black wings like an eagle on a banner, and she’s scared of him. Scared he’ll barf on her, too; they do that, to drive predators away.)
“I’m going out to the garden,” Jane says now. She’s wearing her big straw hat, so she’ll be safe from dive-bombing tree swallows. “If you hear thunder, get off the computer fast, okay?”
“Okay.” Though right now the sky through the study window looks just flat gray, not stormy at all. Young status: (Leave that blank. The eggs should be hatching in ten days or so. Jane’s hoping for two live babies this time. Most often one of the eggs is infertile.) Number of dead young: 0. And so on. Submit.