Sea Change Read online

  He left an eleven-year-old nerd, dressed in Levi’s, a tee that said CHESS PLAYERS HAVE GREAT MOVES, and a baseball cap. He returned looking like a thirty-two-year-old investment banker trying to be cool, dressed in a $300 Ferragamo zip-front polo, designer jeans, and sock-less shoes that cost more than my weekly salary. He carried a state-of-the-art laptop that could probably have moved satellites in orbit. Jake had invested in an independent production company that had struck movie gold with two wildly popular films about aliens who battled Earth. Jake was rich.

  “Wow, look at you,” I said, not approvingly.

  Ian could always read me. “You don’t like it. Dad said you wouldn’t. But just because some of the world isn’t blessed doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t enjoy the fact that through our own efforts, we are.”

  I stared at him. No way that was Ian talking, or even Jake. I asked, “Who is she?”

  “Who’s who?” But he shifted from one foot to the other as we faced each other at the SeaTac arrival gate. Passengers streamed past.

  “Your dad’s new girlfriend. It’s okay, Ian, he’s an adult. So am I.”

  He turned sulky. “Sage Scott.”

  I blinked. She was a huge international star with more beauty than talent. “Well,” I said heartily, “that’s fine. But—”

  “Mom,” Ian blurted out, “don’t hassle me because I like money, okay?”

  “Money is useful,” I said, and hugged him again.

  But it wasn’t that easy. With almost-teenagers, it never is. There were times during the next week when I wanted to apologize to my long-dead parents for my own teen years.

  Ian was disdainful of his old school and wanted to transfer to one that had a good lacrosse team.

  Ian was disdainful of his old clothes.

  Ian refused to go with me to the soup kitchen where once a week for years now, we’d helped feed the homeless.

  When Ian said, “People can always feed themselves if they just try, just like the rest of the world could if it got its act together. All you have to do is grow food,” I’d had enough. Arguments weren’t going to do it here. He needed immersion learning.

  “Pack up your designer duds,” I said. “We’re taking a field trip.”

  “Where?”

  “Overseas.”

  “I don’t want to. Mom, I missed enough school already.”

  “Like you really mind that. And we’ll only be gone for a long weekend, so pack up.”

  He was eleven, and eleven-year-olds don’t have household veto. Not in my house. Ian went with me. Sulky, barricaded during the long flight behind laptop and earbuds and resentment, he went.

  Chennai was a huge, prosperous commercial and cultural center in southern India. A tourist draw, it had the gorgeous Kapaleeswarar Temple, museums, parks, a British fort dating from the Raj, the Tamil film industry. That was not the Chennai I took Ian to.

  I’d arranged for a guide who, along with an armed bodyguard, took us to outlying slums, to coastal villages flooded by the rising sea, to fields so ravaged by inland drought or coastal salt water that they could grow nothing. Ian saw ragged, starving children living in tin boxes, beggars whose bones stuck out sharp as chisels, a fight over the food on an aid truck that left two people lying bloody in the road. Each night I brought him back to Chennai to eat rich food in expensive restaurants. I spent the money from my divorce freely, and I didn’t have to say a word.

  Sweating in the heat, Ian said, “Sage was wrong. Those people—they can’t grow enough food.”

  “No. Each year, childhood deaths from malnutrition rise sharply, and it’s only going to get worse. The need for food is projected to rise 70 percent over the next thirty years. And as to poverty—well, a handful of super-rich people have as much money as the whole bottom half of the world’s population put together.”

  “That can’t be right?”

  “It’s not right.”

  “I mean, that can’t be correct.”

  “It is.”

  He said nothing more, staring at a child digging through a stinking garbage dump for something to eat. Back at the hotel, after a shower, I saw him checking statistics on his laptop. At dinner he stared at the exquisitely cooked food on his plate.

  “Mom, what can we do?”

  “Donate. Understand the situation. Care.”

  He picked up his fork, put it down again, scowled. But not, this time, at me. I thought I saw down beginning on his upper lip—could that be true? So soon?

  “I can sell a lot of my stuff,” Ian said, “and donate the money.”

  “That’s your choice, honey,” I said. “But keep what you really need. The trick is to decide what that is.”

  He nodded. I thought, Take that, Sage.

  But I knew I was really talking to Jake.

  Our Air India flight landed at JFK to utter bedlam. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack. But Ian, glued to his phone as we walked through the jetway, said, “Mom, a lot of kids died from pills.”

  “Pills? What pills? A contaminated street drug? Or overdoses? I’ve warned you time and again that—”

  “No. Look!” He thrust his phone at me, but by then we were off the jetway and a TV blared at us, volume loud, people buzzing around it like angry gnats.

  “. . . another sixteen children dead in three states—”

  “. . . and if you or your family have any of this product in your home, do not use it! Don’t flush it into the water system or put it in the garbage. Take it to your doctor’s office or the closest ER, where it will be destroyed in a way that does not contaminate the environment. To repeat this important warning—”

  “As panic spreads—”

  “Mom,” Ian said again, and now he sounded scared.

  “Come on, honey,” I said. “It’ll be all right. Let’s get an Uber home.”

  Even then, I knew it was not all right. But not I, not anyone, understood the full weight of what was to come.

  It turns out that it takes only a few months to destroy an entire national economy.

  It wasn’t really a few months, of course. This had been simmering a long time. But it might have gone on simmering if it weren’t for Klenbar, an antidiarrhea drug manufactured by agribusiness giant Meridian Enterprises. Meridian, along with three other agribusiness companies, grows 80 percent of America’s food, including corn, soybeans, wheat, and sugar beet. All except the wheat contain genetically modified organisms. So did Klenbar.

  The drug was biopharmed: made from genetically altered plants grown on a heavily fenced farm in Indiana. It had FDA approval and had been on the market for two years with no problems. During development, Klenbar had been tested and tested again. Since then, hundreds of thousands of moms had given it to children to prevent dehydration during childhood illnesses. It worked well, tasted good, and had no side effects.

  Then something went wrong and, before Klenbar was identified as the cause, a hundred sixteen children in thirty states died.

  Later, scientists would figure out what had happened. It was a “monkey event”—if enough monkeys type long enough, eventually they will produce Hamlet even though the odds are vanishingly small. Minuscule odds are not zero odds. The Klenbar monkey event happened through horizontal gene transfer: the movement of genetic material between unrelated species by some means other than reproduction. With Klenbar, the means was Agrobacteria tumefaciens, a bacterium that occurs naturally in soil. Genetic engineers often use A. tumefaciens, custom modified, to introduce new genes into plants.

  Bacteria are promiscuous. They are constantly exchanging genes with each other and the environment. The Klenbar tragedy occurred because a bacterium picked up a lethal gene from a soil fungus that should not have been there and transferred it to the GMO plant growing a key ingredient of the drug. The usual antibiotic cleansing of A. tumefaciens from the harvested plant missed the fungus gene, which nobody was looking for. Genes express only under certain conditions; the lethal gene found those conditions. The entire
chain of events was a millions-to-one chance occurrence.

  But it had happened.

  Gene expression is complicated by so many factors: epigenetics, micro-RNAs, environmental conditions. Risk assessment is even more complicated, and most people do it very badly. Ask 100 people on an ocean beach whether they are more likely to die from a shark attack or from a bath in their own bathtub, and ninety-nine of them will get it wrong.

  The GMO debate had been simmering for decades. Pro-GMO people pointed out the equivalence of GMO food to “natural” crops, which weren’t natural at all due to extensive crossbreeding, and to the need to feed the world. They declared those who opposed genetic engineering to be antiscience, Luddites, unhumanitarian. Anti-GMO people pointed to the risks of monoculture failure, heavy use of pesticides, and unpredictable changes to ecosystems. They declared the opposition to be reckless, tools of agribusiness, and unhumanitarian.

  Both sides were right, although the problem so far had never been the GMOs themselves but the way they were used. Instead of improving the food supply for the needy developing world, agribusinesses concentrated on profitable crops for richer nations. They fought hard to resist giving information to consumers, including labeling food and explaining what heavy chemicals were being sprayed on fields that sometimes abutted residential areas. Agribusinesses were right, however, when they’d insisted that no person anywhere had ever been harmed by any GMO.

  Until now.

  I spent hours staring at the TV. Protests across the country escalated into violence, flames, and shooting.

  SAY NO TO GMO!

  GMO = DEAD KIDS

  CLEAN FOOD FOR OUR KIDS

  Meridian had immediately recalled all bottles of Klenbar. But people—a lot of people—didn’t get the word. They gave Klenbar to their sick children, and those children died.

  KILL THE GMO KILLERS!

  LOCK THEM ALL UP!

  Some lunatic with an illegal assault rifle fired on Meridian employees reporting for work at the company’s manufacturing facility. The shooter fired during a shift change and twelve people died, including three of the protestors beside the front gates. An off-duty cop shot the killer, and then someone in the crowd shot the cop.

  A fringe ecoterrorist group deliberately injected poison into cardboard bottles of coffee creamer in a supermarket in Chicago. More people died. The coffee creamer was made of soy; 90 percent of soybeans grown in the United States are genetically engineered. A huge number of planted social-media posts declared that the GMO soy had killed and that the government and agribusinesses were conspiring to cover it up.

  Greenpeace, which had always ripped up fields of GMO crops by night, sometimes while wearing theatrical hazmat suits or gas masks, now did so openly. The theatrics were still present, however, along with plenty of news drones.

  The protests did not slacken. Demonstrations began to target lawmakers, especially those up for reelection in November. Candidates opposing them sprang up, some legitimate but some promising everything from a total ban on GMOs to burning the CEO of Meridian Enterprises as the Antichrist.

  Agricultural commodity markets had always been highly volatile in economic terms, but not like this. The stock market plunged, rallied, and then, after the soy poisonings, dragged the entire country into a depression. People tried to grow their own food in backyards, on decks, on rooftops. Organic farms sold out of produce as people hoarded. Hoarding caused more riots. Meridian declared bankruptcy. It looked as if, without a bailout, Monsanto and Dow might do the same. The unemployment rate soared. The violence continued.

  I didn’t care about any of it. Not after May 6, 2022.

  “I can beat him, Mom. I know I can. I’ve been studying!” Ian bent over his suitcase, packing his chess clock. He was spending the weekend on the Quinault reservation, a first for us. Chess prodigies can spring up anywhere, and Lawrence Underwood had a father willing to drive him all around the Northwest for tournaments. Lawrence, a year older than Ian, was the better player, but that only seemed to spur Ian on. The boys had liked each other immediately and over the last year had become friends. It seemed to me that Lawrence’s father was not thrilled about the friendship. However, Ian had been invited to go home with Lawrence for the weekend after a tournament in Aberdeen.

  I drove him there, hearing Ian chatter about chess in the way that all mothers learn to do: listening without actually listening. I registered the rise and fall of his voice, the pitch and inflections and pauses that let me interject an appropriate “Really!” or “Then what?” I wasn’t absorbing information about chess; I was absorbing the excitement of my sweet boy.

  He lost his match; Lawrence won his. Ian called me Saturday afternoon. “Mom, we’re going clamming and Mrs. Underwood says I have to get your permission. Can I please go? Please?”

  “Sure. And remember to thank your hosts for taking you.” It was the very end of the season, and the clams had been particularly juicy that year.

  “I will! Bye! Love you!”

  What did I do the rest of that day? I can’t remember. Nothing is clear until the second phone call, Sunday morning. “Mrs. Sanderson,” said a quiet female voice that didn’t know I’d dropped Jake’s surname, “this is Naomi Patterson. I am Lawrence’s grandmother. Ian and Lawrence and some other children are in the Taholah Medical Center, very sick. It might be bad clams.”

  The world stopped. When it started up again, it reverberated with one thunderous sound: No.

  Did I say good bye to Naomi? I can’t remember. All I remember is that roaring No, and the Blob floating off the coast, an unseasonably early algae bloom. And then the birds.

  As I sped along the coast, a bird dove at my car, hitting the windshield in a spatter of feathers and blood. It slid off the hood as another darted this way and that before falling out of the sky. It landed, flapping wings on the ground.

  Then I knew for sure.

  This had happened before.

  The Blob—all the blobs—was caused by a stable high-pressure region in the atmosphere. Winds hadn’t mixed the cooler water under the ocean’s surface with the warmer water at the surface, which had just gone on getting warmer and warmer in the sunshine. April temperatures had averaged fifteen degrees above normal. The main algae out there in the bloom, Pseudo-nitzschia, loved it. Nothing else did. P-nitzschia outcompeted most other microscopic marine life.

  Under the right circumstances, P-nitzschia manufactured domoic acid, a neurotoxin. The algae didn’t always make the toxin; “the right circumstances” included the presence of certain marine bacteria. P-nitzschia was a major food for tiny sea creatures that then were eaten by shellfish, razor clams, sardines, anchovies, small fish. Most of those experience no ill effects. Not so for the birds that eat them. Domoic acid, the structural analog of glutamate, causes excitotoxity. With enough domoic acid, bird brains overload. The crazed birds lose all sense of direction, swooping and diving psychotically, crashing into things. Sometimes they die.

  So do otters, sea lions, larger mammals.

  In 1961, birds that had ingested domoic acid went crazy in a California beach town. Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about it.

  In 1987, three people on Prince Edward Island, Canada, died from eating blue mussels laden with domoic acid. Neither cooking nor freezing affects the toxin. There is no antidote.

  In 2004, a bloom with P-nitzschia toxins closed beaches the entire summer, destroying razor-clam harvests and crab fisheries.

  In 2020, six people in Florida died from eating toxin-laden sardines.

  The bloom I tore past now had been certified as not producing domoic acid. But the Catastrophe had just happened, and, it turned out, certification hadn’t been updated. The Washington Departments of Health and of Fish and Wildlife had their hands full. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Integrated Observing System were struggling to survive. People assumed the beaches were safe because no one told them otherwise. Unsafe ingestion of domoic acid occurs at 20 milligrams pe
r kilo of body weight.

  Sometime during Saturday night, Ian and Lawrence and five other people began to vomit.

  Then cramps and diarrhea, fouling beds.

  Then dizziness, confusion, mucus from the nose.

  Then seizures and cardiac arrhythmias as the neurotoxin burned out all muscular control.

  For five of those people, things didn’t progress that far. They had more body weight, they preferred other foods with their clams, they were not a slight, nerdy eleven-year-old who loved clams above all other foods. I sat beside his bed, holding his hand, talking to him even though he didn’t answer. The copter was on its way to airlift him to a bigger hospital. It would be all right; it had to be all right.

  The copter was delayed. The arrythmia caused by the excitatory toxin could not be controlled. I was still holding Ian’s hand when he stopped breathing.

  Jake, without Sage Scott, flew up from L.A. for Ian’s funeral. I don’t remember much about it. Nothing really penetrated through my fog of grief, rage, and sedatives. The aftermath is what I remember more clearly, when Jake had gone back to his life. The terrible flowers (white for the death of a child) thrown on a compost heap. The people who had been solicitous reabsorbed into the national Catastrophe. It was the aftermath that remains as clear in my mind as a knife in my brain.

  I walked the beach where Ian died, every day for the rest of that summer. The beach was on tribal land and I must have been observed, but no one stopped me. I stared at the algae bloom on the ocean until I thought I would go blind. I cursed and yelled. The one thing I could not do was cry. That seemed monstrous to me, that I could not cry for Ian. I was stone: not the cold rigid stone of boulders but the furious, erupting rock of volcanoes. Jeremy, when he could not get me to do my job, gave me a paid leave of absence.