Termination Shock

“Heads up!” he shouted as the truck angled across the road and plunged into the woods. Saskia and Amelia were in the cab with him. Alastair and Fenna were in the open box aft. Alastair literally did put his head up but then hastily ducked down as the truck began smashing its way through foliage so dense it was not possible to see more than a few meters in any direction. Apparently this idiom “heads up” really meant its exact opposite. Branches were whipping and cracking, and Rufus swerved whenever he spied an onrushing tree that he deemed too thick to smash into the ground with the truck’s front bumper. This, however, did not happen as frequently as one might expect. It was a different sort of forest from what Saskia was used to. She had grown up, and still resided, in a thing in the middle of The Hague called Huis ten Bosch, which literally meant “House in the Woods.” The woods were classic fairy-tale old-growth Euro-forest with relatively sparse undergrowth. The stuff that they were driving through in Rufus’s truck was nothing but undergrowth. She hadn’t seen a single tree thicker than her wrist. As the wall of green had rushed toward them in the windscreen, she had braced for impact, because it looked so solid. But most of it went down under the front bumper like ripe wheat.

At one point they surprised a wild pig. This ran away from them, and Rufus swerved to follow it. Saskia feared for a moment that this man might actually have no purpose in life other than killing pigs, and that he was, accordingly, seeking to run this one over. But he kept hitting the brakes at moments when the gas pedal would have ended the pig’s life, and Saskia understood that he was following the pig. Using it as a guide through the wilderness. For as dense as these woods might appear when viewed through the windscreen of a lurching truck, in the eyes of a pig sprinting for its life it apparently seemed as open and as easily navigable as the Dutch inter-city rail network.

Anyway, it worked in the sense that they broke out of those woods a minute later at one end of the long straight earthen dam that she had spotted just before the crash. They could not see over it to the right, but obviously the lake must be on that side. Before them was an open grassy slope, unnaturally regular, angling down to a stream that (as she could see as more of the scene came into view) was fed by the spillway: a concrete and steel edifice, pierced by a row of gates, that was integrated into the grass-and-earth dam a couple of hundred meters distant. Saskia, or for that matter any Dutch person, could see at a glance how all this worked. It might have green stuff growing on it and birds—(Were those vultures!? Like in Westerns!?)—soaring above it, but that natural stuff was just a tegument, like paint on a house, allowed to cling to a structure that was in fact absolutely unnatural and engineered. Manholes and standing pipes erupted from little square islands of concrete: the visible bits of a huge buried infrastructure. Every surface that met her eye had been architected by some Texan engineer who was paid to do nothing, every day of his career, except think about what water did.

Ultimately, of course, it sought the sea. The reason that this little river had been allowed to remain in existence was that it gave excess water somewhere to go besides flooding the airport or the housing developments. Right now the gates of the spillway, off to their right, were all wide open and water was coming through them as if shot from fire hoses. The river was running fast, at some risk of spilling out of its banks. But had it done so it would have flooded an area that the engineers had carefully delimited with levees and embankments, isolating it from the slightly higher plateau of the airport. And for just the same reason, no one in the airport—none of the emergency vehicles holding on the other runway, none of the ground crew, none of the people butchering hogs and alligator around the crash site—had line of sight to them right now. The only thing Saskia could see peeking above the top of the airport’s protective berm was the uppermost part of the control tower, but soon enough that dropped from view and they were weirdly alone. There was an employee parking lot below the spillway complex, but no vehicles were parked there. Dam employees well knew the consequences of parking their cars in a floodplain.