The Other Side of the Wall
Mount Vernon, WA
2019, Senior, Creative Writing
The news is on. It is nothing new—images of fire and death and destruction flash across the screen in a whirlwind of angry, red headlines. I have heard nearly a million times by now about how the Earth is going to end by the turn of the century, and how we’re almost completely out of fresh water, and how all of Florida will actually be submerged by the dark, unfeeling ocean this time. Can it just happen already so I can stop hearing about it? And how there are riots at the stores over people trying to hack their ration cards to get the coveted bottled water packs and the few wrinkled, scraggly fruits and vegetables that have survived the droughts and water scarcities and diseases of the year.
I turn it off.
“Laia!” I hear my mom yelling at me from across the thin, water-stained walls of our house. “Have you gone to get the groceries yet?”
“Not yet,” I call back, after a few moments of wide silence. I don’t like the grocery store much—there’s so much yelling and fighting every time I have to go there. I have vague memories from when I was little, of a rainbow of exotic fruits and nuts and delicacies, shipped in from every corner of the world on freight trains and seafaring cargo ships and the bellies of massive white airplanes. My mom says you could get anything you wanted, and you didn’t need ration cards, either. But now everything is shades of brown and artificial and encased in cardboard and plastic, at least at our store. On the other side of town, the kids at school tell me that they still have some of those bright foodstuffs, in a hidden basement that you need a password and a net worth of about a million dollars to get into. The food is still shipped in from far, far away, on a network of hidden smuggler vans and even the holds of government helicopters, but people like us don’t shop there. We used to have money, when I was little, but then the stock market went to hell and my dad got laid off from his job as a pilot, because they didn’t need pilots when the Middle East puts an embargo on oil to the U.S. after the third world war.
At the grocery store, I carefully select a package of purified water; a glossy bottle of SPF 175 sunscreen; a mesh bag of some tiny, slightly-too-red apples; a box of chips; and some cereal. I check the ration card balance for the month and then decide to put back the chips. After my purchase has been rung up and I make my way past a security guard putting a red-faced, loudly swearing man in handcuffs with my head down, I decide to ride my bicycle the long way home, beside the giant walls separating us from the ocean. Living in a coastal city is dangerous, but it’s also cheap. The closer you live to the walls, the cheaper the real estate. We live practically next to the wall. There’s fighting at home, like at the store, except this time between my mom and my dad, over the bills and the shower water tank being broken and whatever other problems we’re facing right now, so I’m in no hurry to get back. There’s always something broken. Right now, I think it may be me.
The cold, salty air hits my face like the wall I am pedaling besides, except this barricade is invisible and briny. I see a giant banner splashed with photographs of the Coastal Patrol, smiling in their maroon and indigo colored uniforms. The words read, “They fight the ocean so you don’t have to!” in blocky yellow print. I used to like the ocean, even when it was still a giant fearful thing to most of the world, but before it became our very most urgent enemy. Before we were fighting a war against the rising sea levels and toxic chemical spills, and the battlefields were the coasts of the country. Camouflage uniforms were traded out for sleek wetsuits and thermal energy-powered flippers. The War on Water, they call it. Now I don’t really know quite how I feel about the ocean. It threatens our lives and kills dozens every week, and I know I should hate it for this, but for some reason I still feel a little bit drawn to the deep turquoise waters and the pale gold sand. One time I said this in a school essay, and my teacher gave me an F because it was, according to him, an inappropriate belief to hold.
Pedal, pedal, pedal. I pass an old man walking a flea-bitten mutt of a dog, a woman struggling to get her three skinny children to stop running off and trying to scale the wall to peer through the strong plastic windows at the checkpoint station, and a stray cat rooting through a spilled garbage can.
Sometimes I like to think about what my life would have been like if the planet hadn’t risen two degrees in as many decades. If the oceans hadn’t engulfed so many cities and homes and people, dragging them down to their murky depths without a second thought. First went Seattle, then Los Angeles and Boston and Providence and Charleston and Miami. We live in Pensacola, and the scientists tell us that we should expect the tides to start breaching the wall during the flooding months in the next couple years, even though as recently as ten years ago, they told us over and over not to worry. Not to panic. That it would all be fine. That was their mantra. The president assured us that the sea levels would go back down and stop rising, that it would all be okay. He was wrong. So very, very wrong.
I am surprised to find a small tear running down my cheek. It is surely just due to the stinging wind, I tell myself. I reach up to wipe the tear off my face and adjust my old, scratched helmet, when my bike tire catches a rut in the cracked sidewalk. Before I really know what is happening, I am flying through the air and then lying on the rough ground in an ungainly heap.
I lay on the ground for a few minutes, just breathing. I don’t feel like getting up, but I have to. Who even knows what pathogens and chemicals are teeming on the ground, festering in the humid air that we have had all week up until the brief, cloudy reprieve of today? The sun is just starting to peek through the dense grey clouds, more powerful than any of us.
Suddenly, a shadow falls over me, blocking my view. I quickly sit up, reaching for the pepper spray in my pocket. My heart skips a beat when I realize that it is empty. Crime has skyrocketed in recent years, all over the country but especially in the coastal cities. There aren’t enough funds for a proper police force near the wall, not when there is the impending threat of a barricade breach and the perpetual repairs and fortifications needed to protect us.
My fingers brush across the sharp plastic edge of the ration card, and then the metal serrations of my house key. It’s not enough to do any real damage, but it’s all I have. I squint into the glaring rays of the sun, which has finally beat through the last of the clouds protecting us, like it always does, trying to make out the features of the figure towering over me.
“I have a weapon!” My voice shakes a little bit, despite my efforts to keep it steady. “Get back!” I quickly brace my arm behind me and jump to my feet, backing up a few feet in the process and holding the sharp end of the key out in front of me.
The figure throws their arms up in a gesture of neutrality. I narrow my eyes and don’t lower my woefully insufficient, makeshift weapon. “What do you want?” I hate how I have to regard every stranger with suspicion, but this is not exactly known as a good neighborhood. Nowhere near the wall is.
Now that I am at least somewhat less defenseless, I take the time to study the mysterious person. She is a woman of about 70, if I had to guess, although it is difficult to tell nowadays, since the sun ravages and bakes skin so much more easily than before the rapidly growing ozone holes. We live near one of the biggest, which only serves to make our rent that much more affordable. Her eyes are slightly crazy.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” she says. “I just need to tell someone, anyone…”
I can’t help it. My curiosity is piqued. I slowly lower the key but don’t put it back in my pocket yet. “Tell somebody what?”
“About that,” she says, pointing to the wall with a slightly desperate expression.
I shrug. “It’s just the wall. What about it?” What else can I say, after all?
“Don’t you ever wonder what’s on the other side?”
“The ocean,” I say. What else could there be but that immense wall of toiling black liquid?
“Yes,” she replies, “But have you ever seen it with your own two eyes?”
I shake my head. “No, they don’t let anybody see it.”
“Well, would you like to see it? See the ocean?” The lady nods in the direction of the wall.
“How?” I ask, even though I know I should probably walk away right now.
She glances over her shoulder, as if she is making sure we are alone, and then lowers her voice. “Follow me.”
I know it’s stupid. I know I could get in so much trouble. But at the same time, I know I can’t say no. Maybe this will help me figure out why I’m so interested in the thing that’s trying to kill us. So I follow her. She tells me her name is Kate, and that she is a doctor—or at least she was, before the government stripped her of the title. She explains that before the War began and the world went bad, she used to work to help save the earth and keep the environment clean.
“There was once a time when we didn’t try to tame the ocean, or blast the atmosphere with particles from satellites to try to control the weather, or make escape plans to shuttle people to Mars when things really go south,” Kate says, leading me into a dark tunnel, which I hesitantly follow her into.
We finally reach a ladder stretching up into what I realize must be the center of the wall. I am certain that this is illegal, but when Kate motions for me to follow her up the ladder, I do it anyway. It seems to go up for forever. Rung after rung, until my hands are sore and covered with flaking metal and my muscles are straining and my lungs are gasping for a reprieve.
I know I’m not supposed to be doing this. They’ve drilled it into my head for years, at school and on the news and on colored posters in the dimly lit, usually halfway flooded subways. But for some inexplicable reason that I’m not 100 percent sure of myself, I put one hand over the other. Again and again. Soon, I find myself on the last rung. So close. Dr. Kate is standing at the top of the wall, her back to me. I take the last step and pull myself up, not even noticing the burning in my muscles as the sight unfolding in front of me seems to knock all the air right from my lungs.
For miles and miles—as far as the eye can see—is an infinite stretch of ocean, its surface like a shattered cerulean mirror, with glints of tangerine and lemon reflecting in the fading afternoon light. It’s close enough to touch. I don’t even care that I no doubt look like an absolute fool. In books, whenever somebody says their jaw is hanging open, I always used to think it was stupid and something no real person had ever done. Now I realize that my jaw just never had a reason to hang open before now.
“This,” Kate says softly, more to herself than me, I think. “This is what we’re fighting. People used to go to the beach, on purpose, for fun. There were striped umbrellas and lemonade and laughter. The sea was something that tickled your feet. Waves were something that people rode on a surfboard. Now this is what we’ve come to. It’s unforgivable.”
I nod silently. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s crazy. All I know right now is that I can’t seem to take my eyes away from the ocean. It’s magnetic, drawing me towards it with some unexplainable gravity, and I’m not sure how I’ll ever go back to normal after this.
I reach a hand out and brush the silky surface of the water, and when my fingers meet the ocean, I somehow become even more confused. I should be filled with feelings of fear and revulsion and disgust and whatever else, but I’m not.
“You have to change this.” Kate looks at me intently. “You have to make people realize that we need to be fighting for the ocean, not against it. We need to fix this. There’s still time, if we change today—if everyone does. If people like you help them to.”
“Okay,” I say, one hand still in the water, my thoughts spinning at a million miles an hour. Maybe all along we’ve been fighting the ocean as the enemy, but maybe all along we were the bad guys. Maybe it is up to everyone, even me, to make a change. And then I say louder, as the last rays of the coral-colored sun dip below the horizon, “I will.”
Reflection
I was inspired to write a fictional short story on this topic because I love expressing myself through stories, and I love how deep and emotional a message I can get across. This year in school I decided to take an environmental science class, and I was honestly a little bit shocked in my studies at just how bad climate change and global warming, particularly in correlation with our oceans, is getting. In my story, which is set in a world that is obviously slightly in the future but shares some disturbingly similar details with our situation today, I decided to show how bad the consequences of climate change and sea level rise have the potential to be, but to also connect it to the fact that we, as individuals and as a society, have the power to change our ways and take accountability for our own devastating actions. It's not too late to change!