December 2024
Hendrik
HENDRIK HAD WAITED twenty years for the telephone call. After hanging up, he leaned closer to the map covering much of the wall behind his desk, and stared at the handwritten scrawls and sketches. The notations told the story of the rising sea level and weakening currents—tracked by tidal gauges, buoys, and the radar altimeter in Jason satellites orbiting eight hundred miles above the earth.
The call came on a day when his head was clear, when he could focus and plan. Too much was at stake to panic. He told himself there wouldn’t be proof of anything after all these years. But that wasn’t quite true, and time was running out to do something about it.
The earth had been warming since the waning of the ice age, and in recent years at a terrifying pace. Glaciers melted. Rivers swelled with melted snow from mountains and gushed into the open mouth of the ocean. More water evaporated in higher than normal temperatures. More moisture in the atmosphere caused more rain. More flooding. Powerful storms whipped the sea into foam, breeched dikes, flooded low-lying areas. The sea level kept rising.
The coastline was at risk of suffering the same fate as the lost world of Doggerland—now the North Sea—but once marshes, hills, and forests. Doggerland had been home to hunters and gatherers until rising water forced them to higher ground six thousand years ago.
Climate change wasn’t the only danger threatening the mudflats.
Gas production underneath the Wadden caused the sea bottom to sink. If too much subsidence was detected, production would be restricted or halted. They called it the “hand on the tap” principle. But whose hand? Environmentalists claimed a conflict of interest because the institutions hired to advise the Ministry also worked for the energy companies. As gas was extracted, the area of mudflats that stayed dry during low tide shrank.
Now the most powerful storm in a hundred years was ravaging the country. Hendrik had followed the weather reports and studied the satellite pictures. In Amsterdam, rain filled basements like bathtubs.
He brushed his teeth and combed his hair in front of the bathroom mirror. He had watched his reflection change over the years, seen it sag, thin, wrinkle, until the promising young man he had once been vanished. Until he barely felt like a man anymore. Human, but impotent. Invisible. And yet, deep inside him, a flame burned. He had a wrong to right before it was too late. After pulling on his clothes, he went downstairs to deliver the news to the family.