Climate Fiction Story by Ogechi Obi

In the winter of 2043, Maine sees no snow. There’s no rain, no sleet, no hail. No icicles collect on the eves and no frost on the sidewalks. It’s the warmest winter to date, warm enough to walk outside in January without a coat. People walk in shorts and sit and laugh on their porches at night. The groundhog goes on to predict an early spring and he’s right. The weather hits eighty degrees by the end of March. Weeds dot every lawn before April first. Pollen paints every house on every main street in what will be another long allergy season. In the summer of 2044, the record highest temperature is broken .

In mid-June, the temperature in Windham soar to a hundred and eight degrees. The record is broken again in the summer of 2045, when the temperature in Auburn climbs to a hundred and ten degrees. A rolling power-outage is planned so that repairs can be made. When it gets hot like this, the power grid can’t keep up. Despite electric companies promising that there will be fewer storms and hot weather outages, the power goes out again. This summer will be no different from the others: long, dry, and frustrating. People will flock to lakesides and beaches, or sit in the sweltering dark, as the lights show no sign of returning soon. 

In 2056, a farmer walks through his field. He points to what will be dumped and what can be sold. The blueberry crop is all but spoiled. What can be harvested is shriveled and small and will fetch a lower price, but it’s all he can do to keep the farm afloat. Everything costs more these days, from fertilizer to fuel. Returns on those investments dwindle year by year. Already, he can count five family farms that have sold, some of them as old or older than his own six generation business. He never knows what might happen next. Tomorrow, he might wake up and decide he, too, will have to sell. What he’ll do afterward, he can’t imagine. 

In 2070, there’s a great exodus of people fleeing climate disasters--fires, flooding, and scarcity--for the clean forests of Maine. A family packs out of their home in the New York suburbs and moves into their camp on Flagstaff. They’ll live there while they househunt. Meanwhile, they drag their canoes to the water, where they find a mosaic of rocks and pebbles. There’s still water, but it’s receded from its old shorelines into something small and murky. In recent years, this lake has been pumped to feed wilting farms further North. Water usage has gone up, fueled by record summer and spring temperatures, and new lakes are tapped into for drinking water. Smaller amounts are used to fight forest fires brought on by drought. That means little to this family. What they’ll remember is a field of exposed rock, glistening in the sun. 

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It didn’t start this way. 

People grew accustomed to freak-weather like lobsters grow accustomed to hot water. They looked back on the year before and saw not so much change. The next year, they looked back and saw, again, not-so-much-change. 

I was born in 2040, in the middle of a brutal snowstorm that calmed everyone’s fears. The drought would let up, if it kept snowing like this. And it did, for four more days, burrowing the entire town in ice for at least a week and snapping the power lines for at least two. Maine would be a safe-haven, a refuge, as it had always been for vacationers, and painters, and poets. Now, it would be the safe-haven for all America. 

I remember the sound of construction, the dust of blocks and boards. Houses shot up like sprouts and trucks rumbled into town at all hours. People were leaving the coast and low-lying Southern states. Nature had taken those places and converted them to swamp-land, full of sinkholes. Now everyone wanted to be in the mountains or living on a hill.

The early 50s are a blur to me. It was dry and it was hot in the summer. My lips were always chapped. The winters didn’t snow, but by then, we were accustomed to long weeks spent waiting for a snowfall of a few flakes. 

The late 50s worried everybody. The wells that fed our pipes ran dry. 

“There are just too many people here,” my mother said. But everyone else said there was not enough water. 

My parents sold our camp in the 60s. It was too far from the shore and the lake too dried up to be worth much. I used to swing from a tire tied to a tree, dangling above the water. The tire now sits in the sand, buried in an inch of cracked soil.

By the seventies, something had to be done, but no one could agree what. Since no one could agree, nothing got done. In the mid seventies, the piecemeal effort had begun. Some companies committed to conserving water, conserving land. Some companies committed to radically reducing emissions. Others straggled behind, because quick change was not cheap, and prices had continued to climb. Some states joined compacts of change, others kept their old ways. But the air didn’t care about state lines. 

It was in 2075 that a great dust cloud blew in from the West, which was far worse off than Maine. Decades of drought had stripped the soil and kicked up a column of dirt with the wind. It ate up houses and battered its way inside, coating everything and everyone in a thin layer of grit. It was the worst year to date for those with asthma, but by 2075, it seemed every other day a new “worst” was named and they all ran together into a single frightening future.

Now it’s 2080, we live the best that we can. We walk into the woods and remember that we still have this. The sun, the stars (sometimes), and the summer moon. The government decided to do something, when the Potomac spilled into the capital and flooded Congress while it was in session. Change is one of those things that we have to see to believe. Unfortunately, we don’t see the change happen, only the before and after.

My family still lives here. Our feet are rooted to this ground and there is nowhere else to go. The last thing left to do is hope we haven’t gone too far. We hope that green grass means this land is salvageable. We hope that bird calls in the spring signal the return of a cycle as old as the earth. We hope the seasons mean something and that the tides keep rolling, over the shallow waters, that we hope will swell again, someday soon.

We have to believe that we can be saved. And we have to believe that we’ll never see the day when the last drop of the Kennebec rolls into the Atlantic for the final time.