Caravan
by Amy Benson
They walked, first west, away from the shore, a cluster of humans on foot, several thousand strong. The ocean had come to seem like an alligator at the edge of their peripheral vision, a malevolent mouth, gliding unseen at times, drooling along their streets, then suddenly snapping up a swath of beating hearts and dragging them under.
When they reached Interstate 75, they turned north, since south was dissolving. Every season was now hurricane season, and late summer, only a month away, marked the start of the colossal storm season. For the most part, they lacked the baseline for American personhood—a car. And July in Florida was a terrible time to be on the highway, but they had heard rumors that the US would be redrawing the border soon, making it official, so they had little time to lose. The tarmac was like melted sugar—relentlessly sticky, each gob of tar its own little furnace. They had, to a one, overestimated how much of their lives they could carry on their backs or push in strollers or shopping carts or wheelbarrows or drag in rolling suitcases. By mile ten outside Miami, small children had draped themselves over anything with a wheel. A few flatbeds inched along beside them, carrying water barrels, sacks of rice and jugs of cooking oil, and sunstruck travelers. The exhaust fumes made the nearest walkers woozy with metallic nausea.
Bicycles and pedicabs acted as scouts and messengers: is there fresh water up ahead? Is it guarded? Can they find a good spot to bed down? Night six they’d been run out of an orange grove. Flashing lights, a megaphone, shotguns cocking, a sound intimately familiar from movies and video games. Many had lost blankets and cooking pots and shoes as they fled.
If they walked at night, they needed to carry less water and fewer collapsed. But the night felt hallucinatory—nothing existed outside of the shoulders of the person in front of them and the shoulder of the road scattered with glass shards, wrappers, and chunks of rubber and metal. Trucks blared horns, cars careened. They rotated who walked in the back of the caravan, the position most vulnerable to accidents, and draped them in reflective vests. And in the stretches of dark where the highway lights had not been maintained, the danger was physical and existential. This was no time to marvel at the vastness of the universe or feel like a speck on a speck. They felt insignificant every moment. Some of them since birth. Some had realized it later, when they flunked third grade math, or when they understood the jolting pain down their spine was never going away, when they figured out that having a baby meant they would never own a car let alone a house, when they couldn’t come up with college application fees or tuition for HVAC or cosmetology or solar panel maintenance training or even money for the uniform at Benihana. And now, they weren’t even a speck: between places, a migrant doesn’t exist.
But their homes back in Miami didn’t really exist anymore, either; they were in a state of matter between solid and liquid, not plasma but chunky, like cereal or stew. Sometimes their mattresses on the floor were dry when they lay down, wet when they rose, the floor throughout simmering in an inch or two of water. It was an emergency the first five, ten times it happened. Every squeegee, mop, and towel deployed, hours of work missed, blankets strung across the room and hung from the porch to dry,
Then they’d adapted, neighbors sharing tips: They screwed hooks into the walls to lift cords out of the murk. They scavenged pallets and laid them across the floors, first one layer deep, then two. The pressboard furniture puffed and dissolved so easily, so they slid cinder blocks under the corners of couches and dressers. Rice, flour, formula, powdered milk, they stored on the highest shelves next to rat traps. Their shoes—there was little they could do. No socks, leather, or sneakers. Only plastic sandals that could shed water. Their t-shirts and chinos were stuffed onto high bookshelves. And the books that might have populated those shelves? Books and paper were incompatible with perpetual flooding. Baking, stoves, refrigerators, computers, wallpaper, curtains, blankets, pads, tampons, diapers, pills, crisp food, and pets, all incompatible with the seeping, sometimes rushing water.
If their rental had carpet, they begged for permission to pull it up; some eventually took the permission not granted. They saw the rot: baseboards and posts swelling and going soft, concrete pitting and mortar washing away. They began to fear that in a strong wind, their homes might break off at the base and cartwheel away. They’d seen footage of houses up and down the coast doing just that. They listened with near envy to reports of drought across the globe and whipping up a second great Dust Bowl out west. “What if,” someone said, “They could build a big machine or a special kind of plane that could fly around and mix up the weather, like stirring batter.” Grab some of the endless wet and streak it west, ribbon some drought back through the hurricane states, until they come out even.
The reduction of services had seemed at first like paranoia. Was it their imagination or had the washed-out roads been left for months? Sinkholes opened that were never closed. But they knew for sure when trash collection had been trimmed to every other week. And after a year or two, it became entirely unpredictable: trash trucks sporadically careened down the streets, residents chasing behind with bursting bags. In the heat, the smells became baroque. In the storms, the bags washed out to sea or down streets where they blocked crumbling storm drains and turned runoff into lakes. Burn pits popped up, positioned so prevailing winds would carry the fumes to unseen territories. But occasionally a west wind would yank the smoke around and their eyes would stream. Power outages stretched longer and longer, and neighbors went in on generators, loud and poisonous, that they wheeled from house to house on rotation. Calls to the internet provider shifted from two hours on hold followed by a terse “Repairs are pending,” to the automatic message, “We’re sorry, X1 no longer provides service in your area.” Some of them still received X1 bills. And they worried about their credit rating if they didn’t pay, until that worry was replaced by the worry that their credit rating was no longer a meaningful number.
Some of them knew or worked for people who had moved onto the water. The marinas downtown were overflowing with houseboats and yachts. Then they could see, popping up about 150 feet from shore, what looked like modernist houses clustered in miniature subdivisions. They heard these villas had solar, rain barrels, hydroponic vegetable gardens, and, most importantly, WIFI and a trash boat that made rounds every two days. They were parked in front of South Beach and the owners came ashore in skiffs for meals, meetings in the high rises, shopping, clubbing. It was, improbably, still a destination for international tourism. The fact that the functional city had retracted behind massive seawalls like a medieval fortress was a selling point, not a deterrent: the wealthy still rented speedboats and rooster-tailed across the bay, drank cocktails at art openings, lay out on the beach, which was sprayed with fresh sand once a month, and danced in night clubs to celebrity DJs who knew how to bring them up, up, up, before dropping them through the beats. They needed that particular story to play on loop. It was an adult playground. An island where they might feel the thrill of risk, minus any actual risk. The storms were a minor drama—the chance to be disassembled, their selves dissolved, until the generators kicked in.
But they required humans to rent them the boats and spray the sand and pick up the trash and clean the floating villas and deliver groceries and ferry the drugs and sweep the dry sidewalks and refold the rejected clothes and fix the engines and bring drinks in thongs and scented body oil, up and over the berms, in and out of the fortress every day. An older worker remembered reading a magazine story years before about the Dalit caste in Mumbai living under sheets of corrugated metal and scouring landfills for something to eat or sell. Short lives, bubbling with parasites, infected cuts, unchecked tumors, stunted lungs. And the heat—the sun above felt as close as a reading lamp, and the trash mounds ignited from below and burned. They remember thinking, What must that be like, to live without hope? That worker, the whole neighborhood, had known, now, for years, and the time before knowing seemed far away. This is what it’s like: they would tread water, sometimes literally, until they got tired. Then they would sink.
They began to hear rumors. They’d come home from work in the enclave with snippets of news. And someone had a relative visit from Atlanta, another left for a hotel job in DC and called with news. They felt like they were trying to piece shredded documents back together. And those wobbly documents suggested that the U.S. had cut ties with what was left of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Marshall Islands. The lights in Puerto Rico had gone dark after Hurricane Irma ten years before and had never come on again. The U.S. was keeping the mouth of the Mississippi and enough territory along its banks to defend it, but the teetering city next to it? New Orleans effectively had been abandoned long before, but now divesting from territory might become official policy. The country seemed like a corporate conglomerate shedding unstable investments that had become liabilities. They could see dimly, slowly, and then suddenly, that their own state—with the exception, perhaps, of the island of South Beach—was going to be eased out of the union. FEMA relief had stopped everywhere but the enclave, how many years before? NASA had moved its launch pads to Virginia. Disney World and Sea World and all the other worlds had been moved to the outskirts of Atlanta, now the largest city in North America. Atlanta had drinking water, the right amount of rain, and no tectonic fault lines, and hurricanes landed in their feeble old age, not in their muscular prime. Their own state had the most miles of coastline, the fewest feet above sea level, and it was a punching bag for the juiced-up sea. They were not too big to fail; they were exactly the right size.
This, like every other shift on the planet, was unprecedented. History as they knew it had been about land seizure, sale, forfeiture but by/to an entity that wanted it—the land, raw materials, and the fealty and labor of its people. If your country cut you loose, what would happen? Would the governor become president? Or worse? In charge of a police force and a state legislative body and a slate of laws passed to be flies in the national ointment, but which, without a nation, were just flies. If Florida was cut loose, the Union would pull the National Guard and all their tactical equipment back north over the new border. What would stop any of it? They would no longer be a state, answerable to the union. They would just be a bunch of people who didn’t ask to be born where and when they were. Florida would be left with a fleet of garbage trucks, pesticide trucks to keep the pestilent mosquitoes in check, harbor police boats, and a troop of school buses that would begin to haunt the sides of roads, abandoned where they sputtered out.
If it weren’t for the flooding, they figured they could stay and govern themselves—at least until some puffed-up maverick decided to become a warlord. And one warlord would spoor a bloody future for them all. Many remembered world history class: the Roman empire eating itself, being eaten, the USSR shattering into oligarchies. They held council meetings in school gymnasiums. Was it better to stay put with their jobs, which were mostly clean and dry, but come home to conditions increasingly primitive? Or could they collectively threaten walkouts from the hospital, hotels, and restaurants and demand apartments in the fortress of South Beach? Or should they sweep themselves under the skirt of the retreating nation before it trimmed its raggedy hem? A different metaphor won out, for most, in the end: it seemed better to get out of the gangrenous appendage and into the healthy blood supply closer to the heart.
But not everyone agreed and not everyone could make the trip. Residents without papers couldn’t go—they would get deported, and not back to Miami but to their childhood homes in Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, homes it would take a dive team to find. Or their homes in Panama, Guatemala, or Belize, where warlords or dictators had already filled the vacuum. The crumbling homes and disappearing services in the outer ring around Miami were still preferable. They were not burdened with the vestiges of hope or a memory of what their lives were supposed to be for: accumulation, elevation, being able to pass through class and caste like bubbles through a chain-link fence. That had been the American version of safe. The undocumented in their neighborhood were using the absolute definition of safe—that they could stay alive, relatively unassaulted. In other words, they were afraid of being sent back to their greater desperation. They stayed. And a few recluses stayed—they could still get brown alcohol and drinking water and corn chips, a paradise compared to walking god knows how far to god knows where with a godforsaken mob. Nah, they’ll stay and string empty plastic quart jugs together as floats just in case.
Some pregnant women stayed with partners or mothers, hoping the hospital in the fortress would take them. Pregnant, despite the ad campaigns aimed at the lower class to scare them off having babies. “The best thing you can do to fight our climate catastrophe is to stay child free!” “Can you guarantee a better life for your child?” “Children born today will struggle to find clean water, nutritious food, and healthy air. It’s up to you! Stop the suffering before it starts!” People in neighborhoods like theirs didn’t have baby showers or gender reveal parties. When their bellies were undeniable, they’d sheepishly confirm it. “Yup… sorry.” “It was an accident.” “You know, it’s hard to find condoms these days.” And, indeed, the birthrate had fallen along with life expectancy. Meanwhile, schools in the fortress offered discounts for siblings. Many colleges turned to legacy-only admission policies. Inheritance laws dictated blood relatives only as beneficiaries.
The caravan was forced to leave behind a group of elderly and infirm folks, promises bubbling on both sides: We’ll send for you. I’ll take good care of myself. We’ll look out for each other. This is not the end. On the road they tried to forget that they had traded a human being for the idea of dry land somewhere north. Some kept a diary, hoping to show their loved one someday, some spoke to them under their breath, like a prayer. Some were secretly happy to be traveling light.
They were a deliberative body; they’d had debates, a rough plan. Well, less a plan than a direction. The loudest voices kept saying, Duluth. They’d heard that this place, Duluth, was a haven for climate refugees. They didn’t know if they liked that term—refugees were the downtrodden of the world, while they were hopeful, making a positive move. But they liked the sound of Duluth: next to the largest body of fresh water in the world, with dry streets, mountains nearby, other people like themselves, in a state known for its niceness. When they found it on the map, though, they blanched. 1831 miles away! They were closer to about twelve foreign countries by boat. They’d have to cross through at least seven states. And then there was snow. Most had never seen snow and there would be walls of it. And they had plastic sandals and tank tops and little else. But Duluth was not, now, as brutally cold as it had been last century. Perhaps they could find indoor jobs for the winter, maybe even in a greenhouse. They could handle that close, wet heat.
Duluth. They passed the word around, trying to make it sound pretty. They talked about diving into that lake when they got there—like a baptism, an initiation. Cool their scalps; scrub the 1800 miles off. They didn’t realize it would be winter then. Ice fishing shanties would be dotting the shore. Duluth without seawalls. Duluth without reptiles. Duluth, like a sea shanty making light the work.
But after the incident in the orange grove, a few news outlets latched on to their story. They were a mob, a horde, a cloud of chaos. They were breaking laws against loitering whenever the caravan paused. And laws against trespassing. Laws requiring a parade permit for gatherings over twenty people. Laws disallowing foot traffic on major roads. Laws against camping or even lying down on public land. But the news called them illegals, their beings outside the law. The footage was all shot by a drone and not one reporter asked a single caravan traveler a single question. If you pose questions—What do they want? Where are they headed? Can anything be done to stop them?—without trying to answer them, the questions become implications: They want what you have. They’re headed for you.
The caravan didn’t know that news outlets had turned them into an infographic. A pulsing red dot inching up the Florida appendage, trying to keep a fifteen mile/day pace. They had agreed at the beginning to stick together no matter what, but some of the fittest began to argue that if they split into two groups—low and high gear—they could get to Duluth first and try to find housing, some jobs, scout the emergency food banks. They could prepare a soft landing. Of course, the unofficial leaders argued, everyone was free to make their own decisions, but if the strongest among them abandoned the weakest….
They carried on together. And began to get pelted with objects—bottles of pee (caps on and off), clods of something sticky (tapioca pudding?), whole bags of household trash. And then the real threats—rocks and sticks. They scattered into the ditch when punks with baseball bats shoved out the window swerved close. The worst was handfuls of lit fireworks, which didn’t technically hurt anyone but scared an older woman into a heart attack from which she didn’t recover. Her family stayed behind in Gainesville with her body, hoping to bring her ashes along to Duluth. When the county mortuary demanded 5k for the cremation, they told each other stories, instead, as they struggled to catch up. Remember when Mom literally wrestled an alligator that popped out of the storm drain? We ate good for a week! Do you think she really believed in mermaids? Remember how Mom said she got arrested when she was young for stealing a lipstick? Juvie for a month, but she said she’d do it all over again for that shade of red. What do you think Mom would like to be eating/singing/complaining about right now?
But other people showed up, too. A beat-up delivery truck pulled over with donations. They looked at the coats and thought of Duluth but knew they couldn’t carry them all the way there. The shoes, the t-shirts, the water and food, though, were balms. The children fought over stuffed animals when there weren’t enough to go around. A water truck put its hoses on the softest setting and took several passes, misting them. It felt like the best day of their lives when a fleet of ice cream trucks came jingling up alongside them and passed out popsicles and ice cream sandwiches and rocket pops.
They still didn’t know they’d become a story, though, that these people were making themselves actors in the story—protectors/enablers, devils/good Samaritans, stories that had little to do with them. They thought, for the most part, that the drive-by people embodied the poles of human nature. Destroy something because it’s there, because you can—kick an anthill on your way to work, break off a tree branch just so you can fling it. Or, just as arbitrarily but with more effort, give cover, comfort, and aid—climb a tree one-handed to deliver a baby bird wrapped in a tissue back to its nest. The yin and the yang—one day a tender feeling, the next a steely snap. A child’s prank elicits a cascade of laughter or a shout or a slap. Our better and worse natures in an endless wrestling match, one pinning the other, then getting flipped and held down.
But then trucks began buzzing them, filled with men carrying signs, some with guns. “Go Home Aliens!” “You’re Not Wanted Here!” “You take my land, I take your LIFE” “Aliens can SUCK it!” They chanted and sometimes shot the air over their heads. That’s when the travelers got it; they were a thing, and they didn’t know how bad it would get. No ice cream sandwich in the world could counterbalance a gun. But what could they do? If they kept going, they might, truly, be massacred. History was full of such unsurprising surprises. If they turned back, they would have lost everything in the present and have nothing for the future. If they simply stopped, would they still be massacred? Put in jail? They pressed on and found that a yang occasionally showed up: counter-protestors with signs of their own—“Rights for the Undocumented!” “God is Love” “Poverty is Violence!” “What you do to the least of us, you do unto ME”—and acted as unofficial escorts.
But it was a provocation to the gun toters, which was a provocation to the state troopers. And as they approached the Georgia border they noticed the northbound traffic had disappeared. Closer still, they could see the flashing lights ahead. A police blockade. Drones like a swarm of gnats overhead. Some, if they were or might be mistaken for white considered just walking through, casual. Some considered going wide, making a dash for it overland, but it was flat and scrubby, nowhere to hide. Why did they need to hide? They did, the lights told them they did. So they piled up together, filled in the highway, and approached slow, slow, slow, until they stopped yards from the phalanx.
“If you do not have a valid United States Passport, you will be detained until you can be repatriated.” This boomed from a loudspeaker somewhere in the fray.
A buzz of limbs and voices followed. “Passport?” “Passport?” “Why do we need a passport?” “I have my driver’s license…” “Maybe my hospital staff ID?” No one had a passport; why would they? A few had expired papers from other countries, which they flung as far as they could at the side of the road, lest they get sent back there. How do they prove that they were legal residents? Some—white, brown, black—had been here for generations, so permanently a part of the country that they had never sought, and could never afford, to leave it.
By this time, the Florida State Troopers had massed behind them and multiple caravan travelers were trying to swallow panic attacks, going weak at the knees, getting splashed with the dregs of water bottles. The tiniest thing—a shout, a clatter, a drone collision overhead, and they would be pinned between firing ranges. They were pinned, but the high voltage chaos slowly turned into a meat processing plant. Six rough lines appeared out of nowhere, at the head of which they were searched, zip tied, and shuttled to nearby tents—Army base-sized tents with cots and rows of porta-potties outside and guards with broad-chested, wheezing dogs.
They couldn’t know, though, that on the other side of the dogs and the toilets and the eyes in the sky, lawyers were filing motions for a host of injunctions. Stays on deportation: absence of evidence is not proof. And, it shouldn’t need to be said but they would say it: citizens can’t be detained for crossing state borders. D.C. was scrambling, confronted with the demand to define the legal status of Florida sooner than they’d wished.
“Florida is a treasured part of the Union. We remain 50 states strong and we always will.”
The statement rolled out from under the truth. “Part of the union,” but not explicitly a state; “50 states strong,” but for every state they ditched, they could divide another. If there could be a Virginia and a West Virginia, there could be a North and South California or an Upstate and Coastal New York. But, either way, state or indeterminate territory, further briefs argued, this group would be grandfathered in. They’d broken no laws that warranted more than a ticket or two. Clerks at firms and the state and federal courthouses juggled calendars and set hearings three, four weeks out. Lawyers on both sides researched and wrote in offices chilled to sweater weather. They shopped online over lunch breaks, checked on flights to Iceland, argued with kids about tennis camp and chore lists and family Mandarin lessons. They were supposed to be at the beach this week, but now this mountain of work and the pool filter and the second solar panel from the left were on the fritz again. Life never worked out the way you thought!
After the first week in the camps, they set up six-foot fans at one end of each tent and created wind tunnels, better than baking under airless canvas. A Great Prohibition was created to warn the children from sticking their fingers through the wide-spaced fan covers. A game arose, though, to stand behind the fans and throw things into the air to see what might happen. Sprays of dust, tiny pebbles like buck shot, bits of paper for a brief confetti shower. The adults would shout and run at them; the children would scatter. The little drama played out over and over.
Their weeks were broken up by the shower truck coming through. Sprinkler heads and shower curtains over hastily assembled aluminum frames, their bare feet sinking in growing puddles of rust-red mud—showers for as long as the big tank of water held out.
Their time was also punctuated by interviews. With the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, the FBI, and Senate junkets from warring parties. The questions were relentless and seemed to address people who weren’t them, imaginary people. What was their political affiliation, who were their leaders, were they not following someone’s instructions, did they believe in God, which god, how many times a day did they pray, did they own guns, had they ever been convicted of a crime, had they ever committed a crime besides the many they’d committed on their rampage through Florida (add to the long list, public defecation, littering, child endangerment, possibly elder abuse), what other languages did they speak, how many children did they have, why did they have children, where were they born, how far would they go to protect them, how much healthcare and welfare had they consumed, had they ever served in the military in this country, had they served in a militia or military of another country, did they view or make pornography, did they have sex with men or women, what gender is indicated on their birth certificate, have they now or have they ever been part of a gang, isn’t it true that they were a gang fleeing a rival Miami gang, is it true that they’d sabotaged business in the South Beach enclave before they left, where had they left land mines, where were they hiding gold/drugs/gems/plutonium/identity papers/data/weapons, what was their plan?
They said Duluth.
The agents laughed and leaned harder. But when they compared notes, Duluth was everywhere. A legion of agents was dispatched to Duluth to knock over trash cans and shake out the couch cushions. It was, after all, the home of a major nuclear plant. It was the terminus of the Great Lakes shipping route, freighters from all over the world still chugging like battering rams through 20% of the world’s remaining fresh water. It was a threshold to Canada. The demographics had been tipping away from legacy citizens for some time now. How were they only now noticing? Were there cells, were there gangs, were there loosely guarded portals?
After weeks of 110-degree heat, one journalist without a photographer was allowed to interview two subjects. It was a lifestyle magazine, but the journalist had ambitions: why did they leave, what was it like to live on the outskirts of South Beach, how were they being treated, what was their plan, and did they have a message for the American people?
“A message? Um… we’re scared. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
“They seem to think we’ve done something terrible. I don’t know what.”
“We just want a place to live.”
“No, no. Tell them we would be good neighbors.”
The journalist left feeling queasy. They’d been out in the heat for nearly two hours, and the smell had been unrelenting—the porta-potties, the tents, the interviewees. But he labored in his office as hard as he could between coffee breaks in the morning, which turned into whiskey breaks in the late afternoon. He crafted images in lieu of photographs and was paid when he finished, but the magazine told them him were going in a different direction for the cover story—a colorful photo-essay about how jetsetters were bringing lavish zeppelins back. The title ran: “What a Gas! The Dirigible Life at 12,000 Feet!” The contract had a non-compete clause, so the story died in his office.
A verdict with a tangible result came toward the end of October as the country was nearing an election that seemed like life or death, the same life or death every four years. Political commentators and news outlets decided that the drone footage of them walking again along Interstate 75 meant death for one candidate and life for another. They had lost a few more travelers: one to heart failure and another to dehydration. But they thought sadness and fear were to blame. It was turning toward fall, which brought the dregs of hurricanes—rain and hefty winds, but at least it was a few notches cooler. They had to just keep going! Something was ahead for them!
Atlanta. Atlanta was ahead. Some began to lobby for settling there. It was a mega city, growing all the time. Surely there was room for a few thousand more. Maybe they could bargain labor for a parcel of land or slip into encampments or shelters and apply for public housing or find an abandoned warehouse and eventually claim squatter’s rights. These tactics had worked for migrants, they’d heard. But others had heard the city had gotten so overgrown, so expensive that life would be the kind of hard they already knew. At least they could try for a different kind of hard. Duluth and the images of its stern, cold water won out.
Atlantans thought everyone wanted to be them and so they assumed the travelers’ destination was Atlanta. Concerned citizens began writing op-eds and calling their city council and state representatives. Some letters took the standard arguments: Our welfare system is already teetering under 19 million people. What about Atlanta’s young people--they need job training and housing, they’re the real Atlanta, but they’ve been neglected, hopeless. One op-ed led with compassion: these poor people had been interred on the Georgia border, kept in horrific conditions, interrogated, and who knows what else. But they should not be allowed to cross city limits because of that. If they weren’t a terrorist cell or gang before, they surely were now, radicalized by their mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. and Georgia state governments. The unstated gist was: abused people should continue to be abused lest they gain the power to avenge their abuse. There were town hall meetings and closed-door meetings and phone calls to federal agencies. Then, what began as “concern” ended with another mass arrest as soon as the caravan crossed city lines. They called it a “welfare check” and a “public safety detention” and backed it up with cholera-and-yellow-fever-era laws against newcomers in close proximity.
Though they were now indoors, fed and watered, this incarceration was worse by far. They were separated into three facilities: men’s, women’s, and juvenile. Bloody feet, blistered skin, and zip ties cutting into the flesh, pee and garbage and rocks and bullets and a fear so strong it vacuums up every oxygen molecule—nothing was worse than this. Not even the other inmates. Spit in their food, kidney punches in the bathroom, hair shorn jaggedly in the middle of the night. Nothing was worse than separation. Their babies. Had they given them enough lessons and warnings? There were never enough. It was like their bodies no longer mattered since they had projected themselves out toward their children, partners, parents, beloved friends, and surrounded them with the protective bubble of their spirit. Like one of those giant inflatable balls you can climb inside, roll down a steep hill, and stumble out, happy and whole.
The mayor of Atlanta had received a letter when the caravan was 100 miles away, and the protests against them had reached national news. That letter went into the shredder before the mayor ever saw it. But plenty more followed. Eventually, after the caravan had been detained and separated behind bars, after counter-protestors materialized with signs and chanted outside the jails, after the producers for a popular TV journalist began courting the office for access to the travelers, after the Attorney General again stepped in, this time questioning the legality of their arrests based on a dusty statute, the letters landed on the desk of the mayor. They were written by hand with little circles dotting the “i”s and an occasional sketch in the margins. They might be the work of crackpots or performance artists or cult leaders, who knew? But maybe they were legit. Maybe this was a way out.
Dear Madam,
We bring to you a remarkable opportunity for the group of Miamians currently in your care. I’m sure your facilities are excellent, comfortable and safe, but my husband and I offer them the chance for a fresh start with paid jobs, on-site housing, and medical facilities. We see the potential in this plucky group! They had the courage to leave their homes and the sense of community to stick together. They sound like our kind of people!
Let us explain. With major corporate backing, we are opening a brand-new theme park outside of Dayton, OH, with rides and experiences, and all of the fair games and fun food everyone knows and loves. We’re set to open this spring, but we don’t have the reliable staff we will need to keep the park humming. We had already settled on building on-site housing for staff when this opportunity fell down from the blue, blue sky! We have completed several apartment buildings for low-skill workers (like ticket sales, custodial staff, ride operators, restaurant workers, and costumed characters) and are racing to complete a small neighborhood of duplexes for skilled laborers (first aid staff, life guards, mechanics, fabricators, marketing and design, research and development, human resources, and paralegals)….
A later letter began:
Dear Madam,
We hope you have received our previous missives. We hope we can come to a suitable arrangement re the aforementioned offer. Surely you can see how our proposal could be a perfect solution for everyone. This may be the most perfect solution we’ve ever seen to anything! Protests continue outside your facilities, though we’re sure the Miamians are well taken care of! They need a place to live and we need reliable, on-site staff. Synergy like this doesn’t come along every day!...
The mayor had to admit this was true. The legal fees were ballooning, coverage of their detention vacillated between “Gang of Squatters Foiled” and “Migrants’ Detention a Blow to Climate Justice.” The National Mayoral Conference was coming up and if the headlines didn’t disappear, she’d be this year’s villain. But what if they were crazy, what if the letters were a tapestry of lies, what if the venture was legit but failed, where would the migrants go, what if it was a cult, what if this was some modern-day indentured servitude. Oh god, what if this was a trap to traffic them—almost 2000 people!—and she just handed them over? It took her several days to get to: What if the caravan didn’t want to go?
Okay, okay, that’s what she had staff for, due diligence. A reconnaissance mission found a middle-aged couple, eccentric for sure, but with enough savvy to shepherd their theme park brainchild through corporate funding negotiations and maintain creative control. In the meeting back in Atlanta, an air of hesitancy hung around the staffers, but they had verified the housing. Hot and cold water turned on in the apartment buildings, the toilets flushed. There were no trees for miles and you could hear every footstep in the apartment above, but their fingers didn’t go through the walls and the entire operation wasn’t built on a flood plain, so thumbs up as far as they were concerned.
That just left the caravan itself. They consulted with the jails for their read on the male and female ringleaders. And they pulled out three of each for the pitch. It felt like pitching to whipped dogs, but they pulled out all the stops, as if it were any other meeting. Coffee and pastries, carafes of juice and purified water, a powerpoint with talking points from the couple’s letters and pictures of the apartments. When they got to the housing, some of the caravanners were slack jawed. Brand new apartments? Everything working? On site laundry? Dry? What about the children? Would they have to work, too? No, no, Ohio had not repealed child labor laws. Only the adults had to be reliable workers. And the park was committed to an onsite school for the kids with them. It would probably take a year to get a new facility up and running, but they would have tutors available until then.
What if they don’t like it or have to leave? Can they leave?
Ah, well, the contract stipulates here that if they leave before two years are up, they would owe back rent and school fees for as long as they’d occupied the housing. After two years, though, they could move on and owe nothing! It says so right here.
Would they get paid?
It’s true the wages would be on the low side, but think of everything they’d get: job training, uniforms, housing, medical and dental up to a reasonable amount, school, and job security.
It was, in truth, more than they could have dreamed of. And, while some part of them wanted to resist being beholden for two years, being a problem disposed of and a commodity shipped off like crates of liquid hand soap, any qualms were obliterated by the fact that they would all be reunited quickly and forever. Forever.
Which happened fairly quickly after the meeting. Word went around the jails—all of us, only two years, and, really, what was the choice? Jail or kids + job + plumbing + healthcare + Wi-Fi at a theme park. They got to pick through some secondhand clothes before the buses arrived. But the buses only trickled in, one, two at a time. Atlanta staffers tried to get them to leave as soon as a bus was full: Not to worry, more buses on their way! Quickly now! You’ll rendezvous at the park! But the travelers refused. They would get on the buses with the children and all leave together—yes, all forty or so buses—or they wouldn’t leave at all. With protestors and news drones just beyond the razor wire, officials relented.
The caravan turned into a convoy but with a police escort. Up into the hills of northern Georgia, twisting through the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, scarred by fire, then descending into the flats of OH, now dusted with snow in early January. Under the dusting, the fields were brown and gouged, like photos they’d seen of fields after warfare. Had there been warfare here? They didn’t know, and, from a swiftly moving, temperature-controlled vehicle, they didn’t much care. They were going to be home soon, where they would be assigned apartments and build a routine out of their own will and responsibilities. A shower, a toilet, a washing machine, a stove.
They began seeing billboards fifty miles out.
WORLD’S COOLEST THEME PARK UP AHEAD!
FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!
The billboards depicted kids blissfully screaming on a roller coaster shaped like the extinct blue whale and families dressed up in wigs and glittery clothes, posing on a red carpet. When the buses slowed to turn, they saw a gargantuan digital sign:
Welcome to CLIMATE JUST RIGHT
Your Time Machine to a Planetary Party!
On either side of the highway were rows of solar panels, and in the distance on one side they could see a stark forest of windmills and on the other the swirls of roller coasters. The buses took a service drive past a vast network of color-coded parking lots and then an airfield next to a series of glass ten-story buildings labeled: Planetary Suites. They passed the entrance, over which was a sign, Climate Just Right, with a digital background scrolling through nature scenes like an aughts-era screen saver: coral reef scuba diver, ice climber scaling a frozen waterfall, sea kayaker paddling next to beluga. Humans inserting themselves in nature rather than hiding from it. They drove along a twenty-foot fence that blocked all but the highest rides and buildings from view, passing loading docks along the way. Drove for longer than they could have thought, until they reached the far side of the park and a series of two-story, U-shaped buildings in beige stucco, the same color as the earth that stretched for miles, as if the builders had been trying to camouflage them. But in the center of the U-shape were jungle gyms, swing sets, and some raised beds that could be used for gardens. It was a touch of welcome—the proprietors had thought of them, they were human beings who needed to play, to grow things.
They were given three days to settle in before a week of orientation, aptitude testing, and job placement. A sweet three days. The apartments were spare, but they had a wealth of basics: a bed and linens in each of the two bedrooms; couch, two sitting chairs, and a TV in the living room; in the bathroom, basic toiletries and a first aid kit; table and four chairs in the dining nook, and a stocked pantry in the kitchen—oil, flour, rice, sugar, boxed soups, powdered milk, canned fish and meats, dried beans, some basic spices. And no water on the floor to keep the cords out of, no cinder blocks or pallets. Just bare floors. A few older women set to work gathering worn out clothes from the group and tearing them into strips to make the rag rugs their grandmothers had taught them to make. There’d been no need of rugs for years.
The opening meeting was held in a cavernous employee cafeteria just through the back gate. The group was surprised to find the owners themselves would be leading the presentation.
“Hey, howdy, good morning, hola, how dee do! We couldn’t be more excited that you’re here, that you’ll be part of the Just Right family as we launch the world’s biggest and most important theme park! It means so much to us that we could do our part to save you all from the terrible effects of climate change. That’s at the center of Josh’s and my vision—doing our part!”
Josh took the mic while the screen behind them came to life. “We’re going to take you through the vision for the park—and be sure to note on the forms in front of you any areas you’d like to work in! So the park will be entirely fueled by renewable energy sources, which will power the amazing environments you’re about to see. The idea is—actually, it came to Ella almost like a dream, wouldn’t you say? Well, everyone was really sad about all of these experiences they’d heard about from parents or grandparents or even had themselves as a kid or maybe they just saw in pictures or on old TV shows. All this stuff that had disappeared, that they couldn’t do anymore. And you know, hey, that’s true. But what if--what if—you could? One stop for all of the stuff people miss the most in a totally fun, guilt-free environment? We thought about how popular Colonial Williamsburg used to be and knew we were sitting on a goldmine. And get this: we are sold out through November and we haven’t even opened!”
Ella swept back to the mic, “So let’s take a look at some of the big attractions! Here is our coral reef pool!” An image flashed on the screen of a woman in a white bikini and snorkel gear pointing to a colorful cloud of fish. “This is a pool the size of a football field with a beach at one end, coral reefs throughout, and little islands guests can rest on. Just look at those fish! But guess what? Hmm? They’re not real! Can you believe they’re little robots? They move just like the real thing used to. And no sunblock or chlorine will hurt them!”
“Okay, now,” Josh said, “we’ll let you in on a special experience we’re working on—you’re the first to hear of it. Guests will be able to purchase a special sea turtle package. They’ll get to clear the beach of trash and cover the electric lights before the ‘moon’ rises. Then they can watch baby sea turtles hatch—robots!—and help them find their way to the water. Isn’t that amazing?”
The slide switched to a snowy slope. “Oh, we’re so proud of this one. See those ski route markers? They’re actually off gassing vents. We built a ski resort—bunny hill to black diamond—entirely out of trash. That’s right, it’s not a landfill, it’s a trash mountain. We made something beautiful from trash collected across the Midwest. Any ski instructors here? Ha, ha! You’re gonna have to love the cold to work at this attraction!”
The slide changed to what looked like a large garden with farm animals in the distance. “Oh, this is going to be a happy one—probably mostly for families and school trips, so if you like working with kids… It’s called Happy Fields and Farmers, and guests will have the chance to ‘plant’ carrots, tomatoes, corn—all the fun stuff—and then water them and watch them grow. It’s all mechanical and happens super fast, which makes it fun! They can even, for an extra charge, have teams and compete to see who can harvest the most vegetables. And then staff resets the game for the next group.”
“Hey, don’t forget the animals.”
“Ha, no! Guests will get to collect ‘eggs’ among real chickens and milk mechanical udders that express rice milk they can drink. And there will always be goats and sheep and horses they can pet. Nothing like animal therapy! So anyone who has experience with animals, jot that down!”
An image of dense tree canopy was next. “We couldn’t help naming this one ‘Fern Gully’—you all remember that movie? A classic. This attraction is a gorgeous reproduction of the Amazon rainforest, Most of the trees are artificial, but there are lots of real flowers and vines and birds from the tropics. We even have our own family of sloths! And a zipline and ropes course to give adrenaline junkies their fix.”
Josh broke in. “I kind of hate to say this because, you know, the devastation the Amazon is a terrible tragedy, but our Amazon is 100% less dangerous—no deadly insects or snakes or parasites. And it’s steamy in there, but not kill-you hot!”
The screen was now a map of California. “This, oh we’re so excited about this! It’s our most expensive add on, but we think it will be our most popular because what’s more iconic than the California we remember? The entire south side of the park is dedicated to The California Experience. That’s how committed we are to hitting all the high notes. Guests will start in the Sierra Nevadas, where they can scale rock walls in harnesses and walk behind—or even under!—a waterfall and relax in a hammock under mini-redwoods. Then it’s on to Silicon Valley where they can be Google employees and get sugar snacks and play air hockey and darts in a super-fun open plan office. They can play tech trivia for prizes or compete to ‘strike it rich’ with wild tech ideas. Then they can ride a surf simulator—real water with mechanically produced waves. There are even artificial sea otters bobbing around.”
“Oh, and this is fun—the Napa Valley excursion! They get to stomp grapes in big wooden troughs.”
“These ‘grapes’ are ingenious! They’re little globules that hold dyed water and feel like they burst when you squish them, but they’re completely refillable—how’s that for sustainable, eh?”
The footage changed to a cliffside road overlooking the ocean. “Then they strap in for the convertible roller coaster ride down Highway 1, which takes them to the grand finale: a choice between the Roller Skate Party on Santa Monica Pier or a Red Carpet Experience, a glamour makeover (aestheticians, dot this down!) with 1980s style gowns, gold shoes, tuxedos, chunky watches, and a swarm of paparazzi (actors, jot this down!) along the red carpet until their eyes are swimming with stars!”
“Now, each of these experiences is an add-on to the regular ticket prices, and some have add-ons within the add-ons. But the regular ticket price gets them access to all of the usual roller coasters, water park features, arcade games, etc.”
“Oh, a question?”
“Will we get to ride the rides or go to the… experiences?”
“Great question, thank you! Yes, during orientation, everyone will get a taste of what the park has to offer. I mean, we want you to be informed ambassadors for our guests. After that, we’ll have a Family Day once a year in the slow season and you’ll have the park to yourselves!”
“So, next we’ll give you tours in groups of 50 so you can get the lay of the land. Please no children on this tour. We have employees who will watch them when your turn comes. And, in the meantime, please fill out your preference sheets, and be sure to note if you have any special skills, training, degrees, etc. We want to be sure we’re accessing your full potential!”
Training sessions filled their days, getting ready for the VIP soft launch in March. They’d heard someone very important—maybe even the new President and his family—might be coming. They were learning how to make childcare schedules and stretch their food until it was their turn to take the bus to the mega store. Once a week they had two hours to wander through the cavernous space that had everything one could need except books. Their salaries didn’t go far, but they knew how to stretch a paycheck. Some of them had picked up extra shifts, as well, learning to care for the animals or the tropical plants in the rain forest. Some were learning how to trouble shoot malfunctioning fish in the snorkeling exhibit or test the water quality throughout the park. They’d heard a rumor, as yet unconfirmed, that if they were considered skilled they might qualify for a spot in the duplex community opening next door in the fall. They could have their own home, sort of, and a yard, more space, maybe even a duplex community pool.
Others, though, added the duplexes to a little list of worries. Nothing like worrying about a host of mortal threats. Just a few hovering thoughts as they fried scallion pancakes or stirred a savory pudding. What would happen when only some of them lived in the duplexes, maybe earned more? Would their children splash in the pool while the others looked on, outside a chain-link fence? Would they go to separate schools one day? Would they build a wall between the neighborhoods to make sure those who came home smelling of fried food didn’t mix with those who did not? Would they be able to live with only two destinations—the park and the megastore? Would their children be forced to take jobs at the park when they turned sixteen? Would that be so bad? Was it notable how hard the health clinic doctors pushed birth control shots at their mandatory physical? Or how their paychecks could be docked for obesity, but fruits and vegetables could not be found in the employee cafeteria? How similar their situation was to their previous life: entering an enclave every day to tend a playground in which they couldn’t play. But at Global Just Right! there was less freedom but no flooding.
It was fine, they were safe. It was okay that outside the window was a sea of brown rather than a sea that ran from silver, through a universe of blue, and on into purple, orange, and red. It was okay.
The television in one of the apartments flashed to an ad for Global Just Right! “Book your tickets now for this International Sensation!” They flinched at the blaring carnival music but also felt a twinge of pride—they would help launch this behemoth! And maybe Ella and Josh were right, maybe the park would spur change? People would experience what was lost and try to bring it back. Then they saw footage of themselves pushing brooms, watering plants, and giving a thumbs up alongside a mound of French fries. “You’ll get to meet actual Climate Refugees the park has saved from a watery fate! Global Just Right! couldn’t run without them. Be sure to say ‘Hi!’ as they make your trip as cool as possible!”
It was probably in their contract somewhere, and how would they have known to ask: Please don’t turn us into exhibits, please don’t say you saved us. They felt they had swallowed all the prairie’s beige earth, all of its icy wind, and a dust storm raged inside.
When they reached Interstate 75, they turned north, since south was dissolving. Every season was now hurricane season, and late summer, only a month away, marked the start of the colossal storm season. For the most part, they lacked the baseline for American personhood—a car. And July in Florida was a terrible time to be on the highway, but they had heard rumors that the US would be redrawing the border soon, making it official, so they had little time to lose. The tarmac was like melted sugar—relentlessly sticky, each gob of tar its own little furnace. They had, to a one, overestimated how much of their lives they could carry on their backs or push in strollers or shopping carts or wheelbarrows or drag in rolling suitcases. By mile ten outside Miami, small children had draped themselves over anything with a wheel. A few flatbeds inched along beside them, carrying water barrels, sacks of rice and jugs of cooking oil, and sunstruck travelers. The exhaust fumes made the nearest walkers woozy with metallic nausea.
Bicycles and pedicabs acted as scouts and messengers: is there fresh water up ahead? Is it guarded? Can they find a good spot to bed down? Night six they’d been run out of an orange grove. Flashing lights, a megaphone, shotguns cocking, a sound intimately familiar from movies and video games. Many had lost blankets and cooking pots and shoes as they fled.
If they walked at night, they needed to carry less water and fewer collapsed. But the night felt hallucinatory—nothing existed outside of the shoulders of the person in front of them and the shoulder of the road scattered with glass shards, wrappers, and chunks of rubber and metal. Trucks blared horns, cars careened. They rotated who walked in the back of the caravan, the position most vulnerable to accidents, and draped them in reflective vests. And in the stretches of dark where the highway lights had not been maintained, the danger was physical and existential. This was no time to marvel at the vastness of the universe or feel like a speck on a speck. They felt insignificant every moment. Some of them since birth. Some had realized it later, when they flunked third grade math, or when they understood the jolting pain down their spine was never going away, when they figured out that having a baby meant they would never own a car let alone a house, when they couldn’t come up with college application fees or tuition for HVAC or cosmetology or solar panel maintenance training or even money for the uniform at Benihana. And now, they weren’t even a speck: between places, a migrant doesn’t exist.
But their homes back in Miami didn’t really exist anymore, either; they were in a state of matter between solid and liquid, not plasma but chunky, like cereal or stew. Sometimes their mattresses on the floor were dry when they lay down, wet when they rose, the floor throughout simmering in an inch or two of water. It was an emergency the first five, ten times it happened. Every squeegee, mop, and towel deployed, hours of work missed, blankets strung across the room and hung from the porch to dry,
Then they’d adapted, neighbors sharing tips: They screwed hooks into the walls to lift cords out of the murk. They scavenged pallets and laid them across the floors, first one layer deep, then two. The pressboard furniture puffed and dissolved so easily, so they slid cinder blocks under the corners of couches and dressers. Rice, flour, formula, powdered milk, they stored on the highest shelves next to rat traps. Their shoes—there was little they could do. No socks, leather, or sneakers. Only plastic sandals that could shed water. Their t-shirts and chinos were stuffed onto high bookshelves. And the books that might have populated those shelves? Books and paper were incompatible with perpetual flooding. Baking, stoves, refrigerators, computers, wallpaper, curtains, blankets, pads, tampons, diapers, pills, crisp food, and pets, all incompatible with the seeping, sometimes rushing water.
If their rental had carpet, they begged for permission to pull it up; some eventually took the permission not granted. They saw the rot: baseboards and posts swelling and going soft, concrete pitting and mortar washing away. They began to fear that in a strong wind, their homes might break off at the base and cartwheel away. They’d seen footage of houses up and down the coast doing just that. They listened with near envy to reports of drought across the globe and whipping up a second great Dust Bowl out west. “What if,” someone said, “They could build a big machine or a special kind of plane that could fly around and mix up the weather, like stirring batter.” Grab some of the endless wet and streak it west, ribbon some drought back through the hurricane states, until they come out even.
The reduction of services had seemed at first like paranoia. Was it their imagination or had the washed-out roads been left for months? Sinkholes opened that were never closed. But they knew for sure when trash collection had been trimmed to every other week. And after a year or two, it became entirely unpredictable: trash trucks sporadically careened down the streets, residents chasing behind with bursting bags. In the heat, the smells became baroque. In the storms, the bags washed out to sea or down streets where they blocked crumbling storm drains and turned runoff into lakes. Burn pits popped up, positioned so prevailing winds would carry the fumes to unseen territories. But occasionally a west wind would yank the smoke around and their eyes would stream. Power outages stretched longer and longer, and neighbors went in on generators, loud and poisonous, that they wheeled from house to house on rotation. Calls to the internet provider shifted from two hours on hold followed by a terse “Repairs are pending,” to the automatic message, “We’re sorry, X1 no longer provides service in your area.” Some of them still received X1 bills. And they worried about their credit rating if they didn’t pay, until that worry was replaced by the worry that their credit rating was no longer a meaningful number.
Some of them knew or worked for people who had moved onto the water. The marinas downtown were overflowing with houseboats and yachts. Then they could see, popping up about 150 feet from shore, what looked like modernist houses clustered in miniature subdivisions. They heard these villas had solar, rain barrels, hydroponic vegetable gardens, and, most importantly, WIFI and a trash boat that made rounds every two days. They were parked in front of South Beach and the owners came ashore in skiffs for meals, meetings in the high rises, shopping, clubbing. It was, improbably, still a destination for international tourism. The fact that the functional city had retracted behind massive seawalls like a medieval fortress was a selling point, not a deterrent: the wealthy still rented speedboats and rooster-tailed across the bay, drank cocktails at art openings, lay out on the beach, which was sprayed with fresh sand once a month, and danced in night clubs to celebrity DJs who knew how to bring them up, up, up, before dropping them through the beats. They needed that particular story to play on loop. It was an adult playground. An island where they might feel the thrill of risk, minus any actual risk. The storms were a minor drama—the chance to be disassembled, their selves dissolved, until the generators kicked in.
But they required humans to rent them the boats and spray the sand and pick up the trash and clean the floating villas and deliver groceries and ferry the drugs and sweep the dry sidewalks and refold the rejected clothes and fix the engines and bring drinks in thongs and scented body oil, up and over the berms, in and out of the fortress every day. An older worker remembered reading a magazine story years before about the Dalit caste in Mumbai living under sheets of corrugated metal and scouring landfills for something to eat or sell. Short lives, bubbling with parasites, infected cuts, unchecked tumors, stunted lungs. And the heat—the sun above felt as close as a reading lamp, and the trash mounds ignited from below and burned. They remember thinking, What must that be like, to live without hope? That worker, the whole neighborhood, had known, now, for years, and the time before knowing seemed far away. This is what it’s like: they would tread water, sometimes literally, until they got tired. Then they would sink.
They began to hear rumors. They’d come home from work in the enclave with snippets of news. And someone had a relative visit from Atlanta, another left for a hotel job in DC and called with news. They felt like they were trying to piece shredded documents back together. And those wobbly documents suggested that the U.S. had cut ties with what was left of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Marshall Islands. The lights in Puerto Rico had gone dark after Hurricane Irma ten years before and had never come on again. The U.S. was keeping the mouth of the Mississippi and enough territory along its banks to defend it, but the teetering city next to it? New Orleans effectively had been abandoned long before, but now divesting from territory might become official policy. The country seemed like a corporate conglomerate shedding unstable investments that had become liabilities. They could see dimly, slowly, and then suddenly, that their own state—with the exception, perhaps, of the island of South Beach—was going to be eased out of the union. FEMA relief had stopped everywhere but the enclave, how many years before? NASA had moved its launch pads to Virginia. Disney World and Sea World and all the other worlds had been moved to the outskirts of Atlanta, now the largest city in North America. Atlanta had drinking water, the right amount of rain, and no tectonic fault lines, and hurricanes landed in their feeble old age, not in their muscular prime. Their own state had the most miles of coastline, the fewest feet above sea level, and it was a punching bag for the juiced-up sea. They were not too big to fail; they were exactly the right size.
This, like every other shift on the planet, was unprecedented. History as they knew it had been about land seizure, sale, forfeiture but by/to an entity that wanted it—the land, raw materials, and the fealty and labor of its people. If your country cut you loose, what would happen? Would the governor become president? Or worse? In charge of a police force and a state legislative body and a slate of laws passed to be flies in the national ointment, but which, without a nation, were just flies. If Florida was cut loose, the Union would pull the National Guard and all their tactical equipment back north over the new border. What would stop any of it? They would no longer be a state, answerable to the union. They would just be a bunch of people who didn’t ask to be born where and when they were. Florida would be left with a fleet of garbage trucks, pesticide trucks to keep the pestilent mosquitoes in check, harbor police boats, and a troop of school buses that would begin to haunt the sides of roads, abandoned where they sputtered out.
If it weren’t for the flooding, they figured they could stay and govern themselves—at least until some puffed-up maverick decided to become a warlord. And one warlord would spoor a bloody future for them all. Many remembered world history class: the Roman empire eating itself, being eaten, the USSR shattering into oligarchies. They held council meetings in school gymnasiums. Was it better to stay put with their jobs, which were mostly clean and dry, but come home to conditions increasingly primitive? Or could they collectively threaten walkouts from the hospital, hotels, and restaurants and demand apartments in the fortress of South Beach? Or should they sweep themselves under the skirt of the retreating nation before it trimmed its raggedy hem? A different metaphor won out, for most, in the end: it seemed better to get out of the gangrenous appendage and into the healthy blood supply closer to the heart.
But not everyone agreed and not everyone could make the trip. Residents without papers couldn’t go—they would get deported, and not back to Miami but to their childhood homes in Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, homes it would take a dive team to find. Or their homes in Panama, Guatemala, or Belize, where warlords or dictators had already filled the vacuum. The crumbling homes and disappearing services in the outer ring around Miami were still preferable. They were not burdened with the vestiges of hope or a memory of what their lives were supposed to be for: accumulation, elevation, being able to pass through class and caste like bubbles through a chain-link fence. That had been the American version of safe. The undocumented in their neighborhood were using the absolute definition of safe—that they could stay alive, relatively unassaulted. In other words, they were afraid of being sent back to their greater desperation. They stayed. And a few recluses stayed—they could still get brown alcohol and drinking water and corn chips, a paradise compared to walking god knows how far to god knows where with a godforsaken mob. Nah, they’ll stay and string empty plastic quart jugs together as floats just in case.
Some pregnant women stayed with partners or mothers, hoping the hospital in the fortress would take them. Pregnant, despite the ad campaigns aimed at the lower class to scare them off having babies. “The best thing you can do to fight our climate catastrophe is to stay child free!” “Can you guarantee a better life for your child?” “Children born today will struggle to find clean water, nutritious food, and healthy air. It’s up to you! Stop the suffering before it starts!” People in neighborhoods like theirs didn’t have baby showers or gender reveal parties. When their bellies were undeniable, they’d sheepishly confirm it. “Yup… sorry.” “It was an accident.” “You know, it’s hard to find condoms these days.” And, indeed, the birthrate had fallen along with life expectancy. Meanwhile, schools in the fortress offered discounts for siblings. Many colleges turned to legacy-only admission policies. Inheritance laws dictated blood relatives only as beneficiaries.
The caravan was forced to leave behind a group of elderly and infirm folks, promises bubbling on both sides: We’ll send for you. I’ll take good care of myself. We’ll look out for each other. This is not the end. On the road they tried to forget that they had traded a human being for the idea of dry land somewhere north. Some kept a diary, hoping to show their loved one someday, some spoke to them under their breath, like a prayer. Some were secretly happy to be traveling light.
They were a deliberative body; they’d had debates, a rough plan. Well, less a plan than a direction. The loudest voices kept saying, Duluth. They’d heard that this place, Duluth, was a haven for climate refugees. They didn’t know if they liked that term—refugees were the downtrodden of the world, while they were hopeful, making a positive move. But they liked the sound of Duluth: next to the largest body of fresh water in the world, with dry streets, mountains nearby, other people like themselves, in a state known for its niceness. When they found it on the map, though, they blanched. 1831 miles away! They were closer to about twelve foreign countries by boat. They’d have to cross through at least seven states. And then there was snow. Most had never seen snow and there would be walls of it. And they had plastic sandals and tank tops and little else. But Duluth was not, now, as brutally cold as it had been last century. Perhaps they could find indoor jobs for the winter, maybe even in a greenhouse. They could handle that close, wet heat.
Duluth. They passed the word around, trying to make it sound pretty. They talked about diving into that lake when they got there—like a baptism, an initiation. Cool their scalps; scrub the 1800 miles off. They didn’t realize it would be winter then. Ice fishing shanties would be dotting the shore. Duluth without seawalls. Duluth without reptiles. Duluth, like a sea shanty making light the work.
But after the incident in the orange grove, a few news outlets latched on to their story. They were a mob, a horde, a cloud of chaos. They were breaking laws against loitering whenever the caravan paused. And laws against trespassing. Laws requiring a parade permit for gatherings over twenty people. Laws disallowing foot traffic on major roads. Laws against camping or even lying down on public land. But the news called them illegals, their beings outside the law. The footage was all shot by a drone and not one reporter asked a single caravan traveler a single question. If you pose questions—What do they want? Where are they headed? Can anything be done to stop them?—without trying to answer them, the questions become implications: They want what you have. They’re headed for you.
The caravan didn’t know that news outlets had turned them into an infographic. A pulsing red dot inching up the Florida appendage, trying to keep a fifteen mile/day pace. They had agreed at the beginning to stick together no matter what, but some of the fittest began to argue that if they split into two groups—low and high gear—they could get to Duluth first and try to find housing, some jobs, scout the emergency food banks. They could prepare a soft landing. Of course, the unofficial leaders argued, everyone was free to make their own decisions, but if the strongest among them abandoned the weakest….
They carried on together. And began to get pelted with objects—bottles of pee (caps on and off), clods of something sticky (tapioca pudding?), whole bags of household trash. And then the real threats—rocks and sticks. They scattered into the ditch when punks with baseball bats shoved out the window swerved close. The worst was handfuls of lit fireworks, which didn’t technically hurt anyone but scared an older woman into a heart attack from which she didn’t recover. Her family stayed behind in Gainesville with her body, hoping to bring her ashes along to Duluth. When the county mortuary demanded 5k for the cremation, they told each other stories, instead, as they struggled to catch up. Remember when Mom literally wrestled an alligator that popped out of the storm drain? We ate good for a week! Do you think she really believed in mermaids? Remember how Mom said she got arrested when she was young for stealing a lipstick? Juvie for a month, but she said she’d do it all over again for that shade of red. What do you think Mom would like to be eating/singing/complaining about right now?
But other people showed up, too. A beat-up delivery truck pulled over with donations. They looked at the coats and thought of Duluth but knew they couldn’t carry them all the way there. The shoes, the t-shirts, the water and food, though, were balms. The children fought over stuffed animals when there weren’t enough to go around. A water truck put its hoses on the softest setting and took several passes, misting them. It felt like the best day of their lives when a fleet of ice cream trucks came jingling up alongside them and passed out popsicles and ice cream sandwiches and rocket pops.
They still didn’t know they’d become a story, though, that these people were making themselves actors in the story—protectors/enablers, devils/good Samaritans, stories that had little to do with them. They thought, for the most part, that the drive-by people embodied the poles of human nature. Destroy something because it’s there, because you can—kick an anthill on your way to work, break off a tree branch just so you can fling it. Or, just as arbitrarily but with more effort, give cover, comfort, and aid—climb a tree one-handed to deliver a baby bird wrapped in a tissue back to its nest. The yin and the yang—one day a tender feeling, the next a steely snap. A child’s prank elicits a cascade of laughter or a shout or a slap. Our better and worse natures in an endless wrestling match, one pinning the other, then getting flipped and held down.
But then trucks began buzzing them, filled with men carrying signs, some with guns. “Go Home Aliens!” “You’re Not Wanted Here!” “You take my land, I take your LIFE” “Aliens can SUCK it!” They chanted and sometimes shot the air over their heads. That’s when the travelers got it; they were a thing, and they didn’t know how bad it would get. No ice cream sandwich in the world could counterbalance a gun. But what could they do? If they kept going, they might, truly, be massacred. History was full of such unsurprising surprises. If they turned back, they would have lost everything in the present and have nothing for the future. If they simply stopped, would they still be massacred? Put in jail? They pressed on and found that a yang occasionally showed up: counter-protestors with signs of their own—“Rights for the Undocumented!” “God is Love” “Poverty is Violence!” “What you do to the least of us, you do unto ME”—and acted as unofficial escorts.
But it was a provocation to the gun toters, which was a provocation to the state troopers. And as they approached the Georgia border they noticed the northbound traffic had disappeared. Closer still, they could see the flashing lights ahead. A police blockade. Drones like a swarm of gnats overhead. Some, if they were or might be mistaken for white considered just walking through, casual. Some considered going wide, making a dash for it overland, but it was flat and scrubby, nowhere to hide. Why did they need to hide? They did, the lights told them they did. So they piled up together, filled in the highway, and approached slow, slow, slow, until they stopped yards from the phalanx.
“If you do not have a valid United States Passport, you will be detained until you can be repatriated.” This boomed from a loudspeaker somewhere in the fray.
A buzz of limbs and voices followed. “Passport?” “Passport?” “Why do we need a passport?” “I have my driver’s license…” “Maybe my hospital staff ID?” No one had a passport; why would they? A few had expired papers from other countries, which they flung as far as they could at the side of the road, lest they get sent back there. How do they prove that they were legal residents? Some—white, brown, black—had been here for generations, so permanently a part of the country that they had never sought, and could never afford, to leave it.
By this time, the Florida State Troopers had massed behind them and multiple caravan travelers were trying to swallow panic attacks, going weak at the knees, getting splashed with the dregs of water bottles. The tiniest thing—a shout, a clatter, a drone collision overhead, and they would be pinned between firing ranges. They were pinned, but the high voltage chaos slowly turned into a meat processing plant. Six rough lines appeared out of nowhere, at the head of which they were searched, zip tied, and shuttled to nearby tents—Army base-sized tents with cots and rows of porta-potties outside and guards with broad-chested, wheezing dogs.
They couldn’t know, though, that on the other side of the dogs and the toilets and the eyes in the sky, lawyers were filing motions for a host of injunctions. Stays on deportation: absence of evidence is not proof. And, it shouldn’t need to be said but they would say it: citizens can’t be detained for crossing state borders. D.C. was scrambling, confronted with the demand to define the legal status of Florida sooner than they’d wished.
“Florida is a treasured part of the Union. We remain 50 states strong and we always will.”
The statement rolled out from under the truth. “Part of the union,” but not explicitly a state; “50 states strong,” but for every state they ditched, they could divide another. If there could be a Virginia and a West Virginia, there could be a North and South California or an Upstate and Coastal New York. But, either way, state or indeterminate territory, further briefs argued, this group would be grandfathered in. They’d broken no laws that warranted more than a ticket or two. Clerks at firms and the state and federal courthouses juggled calendars and set hearings three, four weeks out. Lawyers on both sides researched and wrote in offices chilled to sweater weather. They shopped online over lunch breaks, checked on flights to Iceland, argued with kids about tennis camp and chore lists and family Mandarin lessons. They were supposed to be at the beach this week, but now this mountain of work and the pool filter and the second solar panel from the left were on the fritz again. Life never worked out the way you thought!
After the first week in the camps, they set up six-foot fans at one end of each tent and created wind tunnels, better than baking under airless canvas. A Great Prohibition was created to warn the children from sticking their fingers through the wide-spaced fan covers. A game arose, though, to stand behind the fans and throw things into the air to see what might happen. Sprays of dust, tiny pebbles like buck shot, bits of paper for a brief confetti shower. The adults would shout and run at them; the children would scatter. The little drama played out over and over.
Their weeks were broken up by the shower truck coming through. Sprinkler heads and shower curtains over hastily assembled aluminum frames, their bare feet sinking in growing puddles of rust-red mud—showers for as long as the big tank of water held out.
Their time was also punctuated by interviews. With the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, the FBI, and Senate junkets from warring parties. The questions were relentless and seemed to address people who weren’t them, imaginary people. What was their political affiliation, who were their leaders, were they not following someone’s instructions, did they believe in God, which god, how many times a day did they pray, did they own guns, had they ever been convicted of a crime, had they ever committed a crime besides the many they’d committed on their rampage through Florida (add to the long list, public defecation, littering, child endangerment, possibly elder abuse), what other languages did they speak, how many children did they have, why did they have children, where were they born, how far would they go to protect them, how much healthcare and welfare had they consumed, had they ever served in the military in this country, had they served in a militia or military of another country, did they view or make pornography, did they have sex with men or women, what gender is indicated on their birth certificate, have they now or have they ever been part of a gang, isn’t it true that they were a gang fleeing a rival Miami gang, is it true that they’d sabotaged business in the South Beach enclave before they left, where had they left land mines, where were they hiding gold/drugs/gems/plutonium/identity papers/data/weapons, what was their plan?
They said Duluth.
The agents laughed and leaned harder. But when they compared notes, Duluth was everywhere. A legion of agents was dispatched to Duluth to knock over trash cans and shake out the couch cushions. It was, after all, the home of a major nuclear plant. It was the terminus of the Great Lakes shipping route, freighters from all over the world still chugging like battering rams through 20% of the world’s remaining fresh water. It was a threshold to Canada. The demographics had been tipping away from legacy citizens for some time now. How were they only now noticing? Were there cells, were there gangs, were there loosely guarded portals?
After weeks of 110-degree heat, one journalist without a photographer was allowed to interview two subjects. It was a lifestyle magazine, but the journalist had ambitions: why did they leave, what was it like to live on the outskirts of South Beach, how were they being treated, what was their plan, and did they have a message for the American people?
“A message? Um… we’re scared. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
“They seem to think we’ve done something terrible. I don’t know what.”
“We just want a place to live.”
“No, no. Tell them we would be good neighbors.”
The journalist left feeling queasy. They’d been out in the heat for nearly two hours, and the smell had been unrelenting—the porta-potties, the tents, the interviewees. But he labored in his office as hard as he could between coffee breaks in the morning, which turned into whiskey breaks in the late afternoon. He crafted images in lieu of photographs and was paid when he finished, but the magazine told them him were going in a different direction for the cover story—a colorful photo-essay about how jetsetters were bringing lavish zeppelins back. The title ran: “What a Gas! The Dirigible Life at 12,000 Feet!” The contract had a non-compete clause, so the story died in his office.
A verdict with a tangible result came toward the end of October as the country was nearing an election that seemed like life or death, the same life or death every four years. Political commentators and news outlets decided that the drone footage of them walking again along Interstate 75 meant death for one candidate and life for another. They had lost a few more travelers: one to heart failure and another to dehydration. But they thought sadness and fear were to blame. It was turning toward fall, which brought the dregs of hurricanes—rain and hefty winds, but at least it was a few notches cooler. They had to just keep going! Something was ahead for them!
Atlanta. Atlanta was ahead. Some began to lobby for settling there. It was a mega city, growing all the time. Surely there was room for a few thousand more. Maybe they could bargain labor for a parcel of land or slip into encampments or shelters and apply for public housing or find an abandoned warehouse and eventually claim squatter’s rights. These tactics had worked for migrants, they’d heard. But others had heard the city had gotten so overgrown, so expensive that life would be the kind of hard they already knew. At least they could try for a different kind of hard. Duluth and the images of its stern, cold water won out.
Atlantans thought everyone wanted to be them and so they assumed the travelers’ destination was Atlanta. Concerned citizens began writing op-eds and calling their city council and state representatives. Some letters took the standard arguments: Our welfare system is already teetering under 19 million people. What about Atlanta’s young people--they need job training and housing, they’re the real Atlanta, but they’ve been neglected, hopeless. One op-ed led with compassion: these poor people had been interred on the Georgia border, kept in horrific conditions, interrogated, and who knows what else. But they should not be allowed to cross city limits because of that. If they weren’t a terrorist cell or gang before, they surely were now, radicalized by their mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. and Georgia state governments. The unstated gist was: abused people should continue to be abused lest they gain the power to avenge their abuse. There were town hall meetings and closed-door meetings and phone calls to federal agencies. Then, what began as “concern” ended with another mass arrest as soon as the caravan crossed city lines. They called it a “welfare check” and a “public safety detention” and backed it up with cholera-and-yellow-fever-era laws against newcomers in close proximity.
Though they were now indoors, fed and watered, this incarceration was worse by far. They were separated into three facilities: men’s, women’s, and juvenile. Bloody feet, blistered skin, and zip ties cutting into the flesh, pee and garbage and rocks and bullets and a fear so strong it vacuums up every oxygen molecule—nothing was worse than this. Not even the other inmates. Spit in their food, kidney punches in the bathroom, hair shorn jaggedly in the middle of the night. Nothing was worse than separation. Their babies. Had they given them enough lessons and warnings? There were never enough. It was like their bodies no longer mattered since they had projected themselves out toward their children, partners, parents, beloved friends, and surrounded them with the protective bubble of their spirit. Like one of those giant inflatable balls you can climb inside, roll down a steep hill, and stumble out, happy and whole.
The mayor of Atlanta had received a letter when the caravan was 100 miles away, and the protests against them had reached national news. That letter went into the shredder before the mayor ever saw it. But plenty more followed. Eventually, after the caravan had been detained and separated behind bars, after counter-protestors materialized with signs and chanted outside the jails, after the producers for a popular TV journalist began courting the office for access to the travelers, after the Attorney General again stepped in, this time questioning the legality of their arrests based on a dusty statute, the letters landed on the desk of the mayor. They were written by hand with little circles dotting the “i”s and an occasional sketch in the margins. They might be the work of crackpots or performance artists or cult leaders, who knew? But maybe they were legit. Maybe this was a way out.
Dear Madam,
We bring to you a remarkable opportunity for the group of Miamians currently in your care. I’m sure your facilities are excellent, comfortable and safe, but my husband and I offer them the chance for a fresh start with paid jobs, on-site housing, and medical facilities. We see the potential in this plucky group! They had the courage to leave their homes and the sense of community to stick together. They sound like our kind of people!
Let us explain. With major corporate backing, we are opening a brand-new theme park outside of Dayton, OH, with rides and experiences, and all of the fair games and fun food everyone knows and loves. We’re set to open this spring, but we don’t have the reliable staff we will need to keep the park humming. We had already settled on building on-site housing for staff when this opportunity fell down from the blue, blue sky! We have completed several apartment buildings for low-skill workers (like ticket sales, custodial staff, ride operators, restaurant workers, and costumed characters) and are racing to complete a small neighborhood of duplexes for skilled laborers (first aid staff, life guards, mechanics, fabricators, marketing and design, research and development, human resources, and paralegals)….
A later letter began:
Dear Madam,
We hope you have received our previous missives. We hope we can come to a suitable arrangement re the aforementioned offer. Surely you can see how our proposal could be a perfect solution for everyone. This may be the most perfect solution we’ve ever seen to anything! Protests continue outside your facilities, though we’re sure the Miamians are well taken care of! They need a place to live and we need reliable, on-site staff. Synergy like this doesn’t come along every day!...
The mayor had to admit this was true. The legal fees were ballooning, coverage of their detention vacillated between “Gang of Squatters Foiled” and “Migrants’ Detention a Blow to Climate Justice.” The National Mayoral Conference was coming up and if the headlines didn’t disappear, she’d be this year’s villain. But what if they were crazy, what if the letters were a tapestry of lies, what if the venture was legit but failed, where would the migrants go, what if it was a cult, what if this was some modern-day indentured servitude. Oh god, what if this was a trap to traffic them—almost 2000 people!—and she just handed them over? It took her several days to get to: What if the caravan didn’t want to go?
Okay, okay, that’s what she had staff for, due diligence. A reconnaissance mission found a middle-aged couple, eccentric for sure, but with enough savvy to shepherd their theme park brainchild through corporate funding negotiations and maintain creative control. In the meeting back in Atlanta, an air of hesitancy hung around the staffers, but they had verified the housing. Hot and cold water turned on in the apartment buildings, the toilets flushed. There were no trees for miles and you could hear every footstep in the apartment above, but their fingers didn’t go through the walls and the entire operation wasn’t built on a flood plain, so thumbs up as far as they were concerned.
That just left the caravan itself. They consulted with the jails for their read on the male and female ringleaders. And they pulled out three of each for the pitch. It felt like pitching to whipped dogs, but they pulled out all the stops, as if it were any other meeting. Coffee and pastries, carafes of juice and purified water, a powerpoint with talking points from the couple’s letters and pictures of the apartments. When they got to the housing, some of the caravanners were slack jawed. Brand new apartments? Everything working? On site laundry? Dry? What about the children? Would they have to work, too? No, no, Ohio had not repealed child labor laws. Only the adults had to be reliable workers. And the park was committed to an onsite school for the kids with them. It would probably take a year to get a new facility up and running, but they would have tutors available until then.
What if they don’t like it or have to leave? Can they leave?
Ah, well, the contract stipulates here that if they leave before two years are up, they would owe back rent and school fees for as long as they’d occupied the housing. After two years, though, they could move on and owe nothing! It says so right here.
Would they get paid?
It’s true the wages would be on the low side, but think of everything they’d get: job training, uniforms, housing, medical and dental up to a reasonable amount, school, and job security.
It was, in truth, more than they could have dreamed of. And, while some part of them wanted to resist being beholden for two years, being a problem disposed of and a commodity shipped off like crates of liquid hand soap, any qualms were obliterated by the fact that they would all be reunited quickly and forever. Forever.
Which happened fairly quickly after the meeting. Word went around the jails—all of us, only two years, and, really, what was the choice? Jail or kids + job + plumbing + healthcare + Wi-Fi at a theme park. They got to pick through some secondhand clothes before the buses arrived. But the buses only trickled in, one, two at a time. Atlanta staffers tried to get them to leave as soon as a bus was full: Not to worry, more buses on their way! Quickly now! You’ll rendezvous at the park! But the travelers refused. They would get on the buses with the children and all leave together—yes, all forty or so buses—or they wouldn’t leave at all. With protestors and news drones just beyond the razor wire, officials relented.
The caravan turned into a convoy but with a police escort. Up into the hills of northern Georgia, twisting through the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, scarred by fire, then descending into the flats of OH, now dusted with snow in early January. Under the dusting, the fields were brown and gouged, like photos they’d seen of fields after warfare. Had there been warfare here? They didn’t know, and, from a swiftly moving, temperature-controlled vehicle, they didn’t much care. They were going to be home soon, where they would be assigned apartments and build a routine out of their own will and responsibilities. A shower, a toilet, a washing machine, a stove.
They began seeing billboards fifty miles out.
WORLD’S COOLEST THEME PARK UP AHEAD!
FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!
The billboards depicted kids blissfully screaming on a roller coaster shaped like the extinct blue whale and families dressed up in wigs and glittery clothes, posing on a red carpet. When the buses slowed to turn, they saw a gargantuan digital sign:
Welcome to CLIMATE JUST RIGHT
Your Time Machine to a Planetary Party!
On either side of the highway were rows of solar panels, and in the distance on one side they could see a stark forest of windmills and on the other the swirls of roller coasters. The buses took a service drive past a vast network of color-coded parking lots and then an airfield next to a series of glass ten-story buildings labeled: Planetary Suites. They passed the entrance, over which was a sign, Climate Just Right, with a digital background scrolling through nature scenes like an aughts-era screen saver: coral reef scuba diver, ice climber scaling a frozen waterfall, sea kayaker paddling next to beluga. Humans inserting themselves in nature rather than hiding from it. They drove along a twenty-foot fence that blocked all but the highest rides and buildings from view, passing loading docks along the way. Drove for longer than they could have thought, until they reached the far side of the park and a series of two-story, U-shaped buildings in beige stucco, the same color as the earth that stretched for miles, as if the builders had been trying to camouflage them. But in the center of the U-shape were jungle gyms, swing sets, and some raised beds that could be used for gardens. It was a touch of welcome—the proprietors had thought of them, they were human beings who needed to play, to grow things.
They were given three days to settle in before a week of orientation, aptitude testing, and job placement. A sweet three days. The apartments were spare, but they had a wealth of basics: a bed and linens in each of the two bedrooms; couch, two sitting chairs, and a TV in the living room; in the bathroom, basic toiletries and a first aid kit; table and four chairs in the dining nook, and a stocked pantry in the kitchen—oil, flour, rice, sugar, boxed soups, powdered milk, canned fish and meats, dried beans, some basic spices. And no water on the floor to keep the cords out of, no cinder blocks or pallets. Just bare floors. A few older women set to work gathering worn out clothes from the group and tearing them into strips to make the rag rugs their grandmothers had taught them to make. There’d been no need of rugs for years.
The opening meeting was held in a cavernous employee cafeteria just through the back gate. The group was surprised to find the owners themselves would be leading the presentation.
“Hey, howdy, good morning, hola, how dee do! We couldn’t be more excited that you’re here, that you’ll be part of the Just Right family as we launch the world’s biggest and most important theme park! It means so much to us that we could do our part to save you all from the terrible effects of climate change. That’s at the center of Josh’s and my vision—doing our part!”
Josh took the mic while the screen behind them came to life. “We’re going to take you through the vision for the park—and be sure to note on the forms in front of you any areas you’d like to work in! So the park will be entirely fueled by renewable energy sources, which will power the amazing environments you’re about to see. The idea is—actually, it came to Ella almost like a dream, wouldn’t you say? Well, everyone was really sad about all of these experiences they’d heard about from parents or grandparents or even had themselves as a kid or maybe they just saw in pictures or on old TV shows. All this stuff that had disappeared, that they couldn’t do anymore. And you know, hey, that’s true. But what if--what if—you could? One stop for all of the stuff people miss the most in a totally fun, guilt-free environment? We thought about how popular Colonial Williamsburg used to be and knew we were sitting on a goldmine. And get this: we are sold out through November and we haven’t even opened!”
Ella swept back to the mic, “So let’s take a look at some of the big attractions! Here is our coral reef pool!” An image flashed on the screen of a woman in a white bikini and snorkel gear pointing to a colorful cloud of fish. “This is a pool the size of a football field with a beach at one end, coral reefs throughout, and little islands guests can rest on. Just look at those fish! But guess what? Hmm? They’re not real! Can you believe they’re little robots? They move just like the real thing used to. And no sunblock or chlorine will hurt them!”
“Okay, now,” Josh said, “we’ll let you in on a special experience we’re working on—you’re the first to hear of it. Guests will be able to purchase a special sea turtle package. They’ll get to clear the beach of trash and cover the electric lights before the ‘moon’ rises. Then they can watch baby sea turtles hatch—robots!—and help them find their way to the water. Isn’t that amazing?”
The slide switched to a snowy slope. “Oh, we’re so proud of this one. See those ski route markers? They’re actually off gassing vents. We built a ski resort—bunny hill to black diamond—entirely out of trash. That’s right, it’s not a landfill, it’s a trash mountain. We made something beautiful from trash collected across the Midwest. Any ski instructors here? Ha, ha! You’re gonna have to love the cold to work at this attraction!”
The slide changed to what looked like a large garden with farm animals in the distance. “Oh, this is going to be a happy one—probably mostly for families and school trips, so if you like working with kids… It’s called Happy Fields and Farmers, and guests will have the chance to ‘plant’ carrots, tomatoes, corn—all the fun stuff—and then water them and watch them grow. It’s all mechanical and happens super fast, which makes it fun! They can even, for an extra charge, have teams and compete to see who can harvest the most vegetables. And then staff resets the game for the next group.”
“Hey, don’t forget the animals.”
“Ha, no! Guests will get to collect ‘eggs’ among real chickens and milk mechanical udders that express rice milk they can drink. And there will always be goats and sheep and horses they can pet. Nothing like animal therapy! So anyone who has experience with animals, jot that down!”
An image of dense tree canopy was next. “We couldn’t help naming this one ‘Fern Gully’—you all remember that movie? A classic. This attraction is a gorgeous reproduction of the Amazon rainforest, Most of the trees are artificial, but there are lots of real flowers and vines and birds from the tropics. We even have our own family of sloths! And a zipline and ropes course to give adrenaline junkies their fix.”
Josh broke in. “I kind of hate to say this because, you know, the devastation the Amazon is a terrible tragedy, but our Amazon is 100% less dangerous—no deadly insects or snakes or parasites. And it’s steamy in there, but not kill-you hot!”
The screen was now a map of California. “This, oh we’re so excited about this! It’s our most expensive add on, but we think it will be our most popular because what’s more iconic than the California we remember? The entire south side of the park is dedicated to The California Experience. That’s how committed we are to hitting all the high notes. Guests will start in the Sierra Nevadas, where they can scale rock walls in harnesses and walk behind—or even under!—a waterfall and relax in a hammock under mini-redwoods. Then it’s on to Silicon Valley where they can be Google employees and get sugar snacks and play air hockey and darts in a super-fun open plan office. They can play tech trivia for prizes or compete to ‘strike it rich’ with wild tech ideas. Then they can ride a surf simulator—real water with mechanically produced waves. There are even artificial sea otters bobbing around.”
“Oh, and this is fun—the Napa Valley excursion! They get to stomp grapes in big wooden troughs.”
“These ‘grapes’ are ingenious! They’re little globules that hold dyed water and feel like they burst when you squish them, but they’re completely refillable—how’s that for sustainable, eh?”
The footage changed to a cliffside road overlooking the ocean. “Then they strap in for the convertible roller coaster ride down Highway 1, which takes them to the grand finale: a choice between the Roller Skate Party on Santa Monica Pier or a Red Carpet Experience, a glamour makeover (aestheticians, dot this down!) with 1980s style gowns, gold shoes, tuxedos, chunky watches, and a swarm of paparazzi (actors, jot this down!) along the red carpet until their eyes are swimming with stars!”
“Now, each of these experiences is an add-on to the regular ticket prices, and some have add-ons within the add-ons. But the regular ticket price gets them access to all of the usual roller coasters, water park features, arcade games, etc.”
“Oh, a question?”
“Will we get to ride the rides or go to the… experiences?”
“Great question, thank you! Yes, during orientation, everyone will get a taste of what the park has to offer. I mean, we want you to be informed ambassadors for our guests. After that, we’ll have a Family Day once a year in the slow season and you’ll have the park to yourselves!”
“So, next we’ll give you tours in groups of 50 so you can get the lay of the land. Please no children on this tour. We have employees who will watch them when your turn comes. And, in the meantime, please fill out your preference sheets, and be sure to note if you have any special skills, training, degrees, etc. We want to be sure we’re accessing your full potential!”
Training sessions filled their days, getting ready for the VIP soft launch in March. They’d heard someone very important—maybe even the new President and his family—might be coming. They were learning how to make childcare schedules and stretch their food until it was their turn to take the bus to the mega store. Once a week they had two hours to wander through the cavernous space that had everything one could need except books. Their salaries didn’t go far, but they knew how to stretch a paycheck. Some of them had picked up extra shifts, as well, learning to care for the animals or the tropical plants in the rain forest. Some were learning how to trouble shoot malfunctioning fish in the snorkeling exhibit or test the water quality throughout the park. They’d heard a rumor, as yet unconfirmed, that if they were considered skilled they might qualify for a spot in the duplex community opening next door in the fall. They could have their own home, sort of, and a yard, more space, maybe even a duplex community pool.
Others, though, added the duplexes to a little list of worries. Nothing like worrying about a host of mortal threats. Just a few hovering thoughts as they fried scallion pancakes or stirred a savory pudding. What would happen when only some of them lived in the duplexes, maybe earned more? Would their children splash in the pool while the others looked on, outside a chain-link fence? Would they go to separate schools one day? Would they build a wall between the neighborhoods to make sure those who came home smelling of fried food didn’t mix with those who did not? Would they be able to live with only two destinations—the park and the megastore? Would their children be forced to take jobs at the park when they turned sixteen? Would that be so bad? Was it notable how hard the health clinic doctors pushed birth control shots at their mandatory physical? Or how their paychecks could be docked for obesity, but fruits and vegetables could not be found in the employee cafeteria? How similar their situation was to their previous life: entering an enclave every day to tend a playground in which they couldn’t play. But at Global Just Right! there was less freedom but no flooding.
It was fine, they were safe. It was okay that outside the window was a sea of brown rather than a sea that ran from silver, through a universe of blue, and on into purple, orange, and red. It was okay.
The television in one of the apartments flashed to an ad for Global Just Right! “Book your tickets now for this International Sensation!” They flinched at the blaring carnival music but also felt a twinge of pride—they would help launch this behemoth! And maybe Ella and Josh were right, maybe the park would spur change? People would experience what was lost and try to bring it back. Then they saw footage of themselves pushing brooms, watering plants, and giving a thumbs up alongside a mound of French fries. “You’ll get to meet actual Climate Refugees the park has saved from a watery fate! Global Just Right! couldn’t run without them. Be sure to say ‘Hi!’ as they make your trip as cool as possible!”
It was probably in their contract somewhere, and how would they have known to ask: Please don’t turn us into exhibits, please don’t say you saved us. They felt they had swallowed all the prairie’s beige earth, all of its icy wind, and a dust storm raged inside.