Chapter Twenty-Two

Levi

Enrico rounded the back of the safari vehicle. He’d taken Mojo back to his house since the group would be out in Etosha Park, and sunset was prime rhino time as the animals made their way to the watering holes to drink.

Upfront in a covered cab, the driver climbed under the wheel and opened the little window cut into the back glass so he could speak to his passengers.

Behind him, there was an open space with a roof and bench seating.

The air was turning chilly, and everyone was grateful when Enrico produced the winter coats, hats, and mittens they’d all brought with them from the vineyard and left in his vehicle.

Enrico’s commander, Josef, sauntered from one of the cabins with a stack of wool blankets. “Here we are. The temperatures will continue to drop as the sun goes down, and of course, we will have the wind blowing us.” He handed a blanket to each of them. “Do not worry. I’ve told our driver we must be back here before the sun slips behind the horizon. The predators won’t be prowling quite yet.”

“Thank you,” Gwen said, then slid onto the bench next to Levi, where he’d hoped Tess would sit.

Gwen slid all the way over to him until they were thigh to thigh, patting the seat next to her as she looked at her mother.

Josef settled in the front seat and Enrico climbed in next to him. “I had the opportunity to speak to Gwen while Mojo was hunting for you,” Josef told Tess as she slid in behind Levi, sitting next to Craig. “She has shared some of her story. If you do not mind, I will pose the same question I asked Gwen. What motivated you to work with WorldCares?”

Tess pulled the wool blanket open and tucked it around her before she spoke. “When I was a child, I was a refugee of sorts. The weather had a significant impact on my family’s daily efforts to remain safe. I want to protect people as much as possible. That was my aim when I worked on my doctorate, and I was very fortunate to find like-minded people,” she held out an open palm to indicate Gwen, “with the same kinds of global interests. While it’s wonderful to partner with other scientists at the university, I wondered where the information would go and how it would be acted on. Any research I conduct needs to support people and not be sold to an organization that might exploit a situation when those people are at their most vulnerable. WorldCares saves lives. While suffering will remain—it’s the human condition—it can be mitigated to some extent.”

Tess looked to her left as she spoke. And Levi wished he could see her face and read her emotions as she explained her story. She had, on occasion, told him pieces about her years-long effort to stay safe.

A familiar theme was that Tess and the Ya family weren’t just trying to survive the civil war but were doing so through extreme weather events.

Until he went to war, Levi had to admit that he hadn’t understood.

He knew Tess was telling him things about a life that she’d lived. But it was so far from his own experience—growing up a typical Oklahoma ranch kid—that in his mind, he’d filed those stories in the same place he might put a fictional novel he’d read or a movie he’d seen.

It wasn’t that he disbelieved her. He absolutely believed her.

But without the lived experience, he simply couldn’t fathom what life had been like for her as an eight-year-old child.

Night after night, she seemed to relive the horrors to the point that Tess tried to avoid going to sleep.

One thing Levi had learned through his experience with Tess was that when she felt endangered, his remaining a calm and steady force was imperative. Her cries sent his adrenaline through the roof, and everything in his body told him to fight for her. But there was nothing to fight. All he could offer was that calm and steady harbor.

Later, when Levi was in his own battles overseas, he’d used those skills he’d honed over the years with Tess to maintain his focus and calm. He felt sure that those skills helped him to stay alive and protect his brothers.

Of course, when he had those thoughts, Levi had to push them away because they tore at the hole in his heart.

Levi reached for his water bottle and tried to swallow down those memories.

Everyone seated, the safari vehicle drove down the pale grey dirt road.

“If you don’t mind, I would like to start right away with knowing what the weather is doing here in Namibia.”

“I apologize, Josef,” Gwen said. “Because when we left this morning, I didn’t know that we would be speaking with you, and since Tess and I are on vacation, neither of us has looked at the weather modeling in over a week. The best I can tell you is that when we left the conference in Spain, there was some agitation about the wobble near the equator and how it would impact both Europe and Africa.”

Tess leaned forward to stick her head up where she could better speak to Gwen.

“Oh, here, this won’t do,” Iris said. “You girls need to sit together. Driver, could you stop for a minute?”

“What do you want us to do, Mom?”

“Well, switch places.”

“We’re not allowed out of the vehicle.” Gwen protested.

“Can you pull over for one moment, please?” Iris called.

And, with laughter in her eyes, Tess switched places with Iris.

After retucking her blanket, Tess faced Gwen. “That one model of the wobble impacted Angola all the way down to the Namibian border.”

“What did you think?” Gwen asked.

“It would be unprecedented. But these are the times we live in, right?” Tess tipped her head. “Never say never. Since it wasn’t my model, I didn’t follow through to see if Angola was warned to put it on their radar—so to speak. But if that outlier proved to be accurate, the wobble would have a significant impact.”

“When would this happen?” Craig asked. “Wobbling? I didn’t know that was a weather term.”

“Dad, it’s like this. When there’s a powerful storm, it’s not on a highway heading in a straight line. The movements that modify the storm elements around are called ‘wobbles.’ When you’re looking at them on satellite, the shifts can seem pretty insignificant. But just the smallest movement can create an enormous impact.”

“The air current is wobbling now,” Tess said. “It’s been impacting the weather in Europe all summer,”

Gwen turned to Levi. “Look there.” She pointed to an animal nibbling on a tuft of dried vegetation. “That’s a kudu.”

“We think that wobble accounts for the torrential rains and floods in Europe,” Tess explained.

“And that’s why it’s been a relatively calm hurricane season from the Caribbean up into the United States, except, of course,” Gwen added, “for the system that affected my aunt.”

“What would that spaghetti look like?” Enrico asked. “I’m sorry, I’m jumping back to Angola. What would happen if that one outlier wobble line was accurate, and it impacted Angola?”

“A deluge,” Tess said. “For example, Morocco had six years of drought. Suddenly, there was a lot of rain in a short time span.”

“Caused by the wobble,” Gwen said. “Sounds innocuous, it absolutely isn’t.”

Tess gathered her hair and held it in a tight fist as the wind picked up. “One of their lakes, Lake Iriqui, had been dry for over fifty years, and it filled back up.”

“Wow. How much rain came down?” Iris asked.

Gwen shrugged. “Like four inches in twenty-four hours.”

“I mean,” Iris fussed with her blanket, pulling it up under her chin, “that’s a lot of rain in twenty-four hours, but enough to fill a lake?”

“Because there are sand dunes.” Gwen shuffled around a bit, and now it was her hip that pressed against Levi.

There was nowhere for him to go to give her more room. He didn’t want Tess to think that he was inviting this behavior, so he put his hands on the seat back in front of him.

“There’s no vegetation to absorb the excess water. What’s going to happen to all that rain? It’s going to run directly to low-lying areas and pool.”

“And the people?” Enrico asked.

“On the positive side of the human equation,” Tess said, “the reservoirs are full. Those who suffered from the drought will now have a source of water.”

“And the negative?” Levi asked, looking over Gwen’s head.

“Because of the length of the drought and the arid conditions that persisted for decades, the people might well have built their homes in that area,” Tess said. “Or houses were built of materials like clay that worked well under the baking sun but would disintegrate in water. Also, looking forward, the weather in the area may change for years to come because of the increased moisture in the air as the water evaporates again. What will that look like? We have no idea. This isn’t something we account for in our computer models. More rain, at this point, will degrade their infrastructure and might make getting supplies over the Atlas mountains as difficult as it was when they had their earthquake.” Tess pulled her hat lower over her ears. “The fast-changing weather patterns have become a challenge for WorldCares. We work hard to stabilize populations so people don’t feel pressured to migrate away from the land and culture they know. But the weather is shifting faster than the people can adapt.”

“WorldCares has a team of biotechnologists like my Mom and Dad, trying to forecast what strains of crops will survive weather extremes.”

“Ah, the advancement of science. Did you know they’ve figured out that feeding cows red algae reduced cow farts?” Craig grinned.

“Thanks, Dad, that’s good to know.” Gwen laughed. “Or, like I was talking to a colleague and found out WorldCares is investing in a research initiative that sprays modified bacteria DNA on corn seeds so they don’t need as much fertilizer.”

“Okay, well, good,” Craig said. “The sooner, the better. A healthy planet is something everyone would aspire to.” He leaned toward Gwen. “I’m stuck on wobbles, Angola, and its impact here in Namibia. Our vines are desperate for a long drink.”

“No one has any idea. It’s a stranger wobble than normal. But in a normal El Nino year, this sometimes happens,” Gwen said. “Our colleagues are saying with the combination of El Nino plus the temperatures in the northern Atlantic, we might as well use a Magic Eight Ball.”

“To Gwen’s point,” Tess said, “when you hear the term “breaking records” it means we’ve never seen the event before. If we’ve never researched it, it’s hard to model. We don’t know how to interpret the data. The predictions that Gwen and I generate are becoming more an art than science. Basically, we’re taking an educated guess.”

“And now?” Enrico asked. “What’s the guess?

“Personally, I’ve had my eye on a spaghetti model that dipped into Angola. I’d lay my money on the outlier.”

“The outlier,” Enrico repeated. “Then Namibia would come into play. If there are heavy rains in Angola, the flood basins in northern Namibia will fill.”

“Which could help with our drought situation,” Craig smiled.

“Maybe, Dad, but if it’s too much, it’s too much.”

“El Nino, that will pass,” Craig said. “Things should be right as rain next year.” He turned toward a baby elephant, curving its trunk around the dry leaves.

“I’m not completely convinced it’s all El Nino,” Tess said. “The winds aren’t getting that spin they need to get into the Atlantic. If they sit here, Europe gets slammed. If they move over to the United States, then the storm gets energized by the heat in the Gulf waters and becomes the mega storms that tried to skate your Aunt Pat down the mountain, Gwen.”

“We saw that this summer’s European flooding was probable and warned the Mediterranean countries’ governments. Well, our org warned them nobody would have answered the phone if I said, ‘Hey, it’s Gwen Metz. Y’all are going to flood in August.’ But WorldCares staged to go in and help in several areas where resources might be stretched thin.” Gwen caught Tess’s gaze. “I think we did a pretty good job calling it.”

“Did you catch the flash flood in Spain?” Enrico asked.

“No.” Tess turned, looking over her shoulder at him. “A flash flood is hard to predict and hard to prepare for. In general, we leave that level of granularity to the governments. Our goal is to project out between three and six months. We’re looking at trends that will affect mobility—will people need to flee an area? That’s something that is best to avoid. We have other specialists that consider the present government to predict how long recovery might take. From there, WorldCares positions resources in places where the weather will have the biggest effect on population survival.”

“And you’re here in Namibia.” Enrico let out a long, low whistle.

“To be clear,” Gwen said as she lifted her binoculars, leaning past Levi to scan, “things happen that we have no ability to predict—some aspects of war, some natural disasters mostly around geological issues like volcanos and earthquakes, and the resulting tsunamis. Morocco, last year, we were unprepared. It took us weeks to get help to the people stuck on the eastern side of the Atlas mountains.”

“Houses made of mud in that area,” Craig said. ‘You know, if we had a torrent like that in Namibia, the suffering would be immense. You may not know this, Tess, I don’t know if you went on a tour or not, but in cities like Windhoek, after the Nazis left the region, the South Africans took over governance. And South Africa Apartheid laws impacted the native people.”

Iris added, “Namibia just got its independence recently. It’s only a few decades old.”

“Ancient and yet brand-new,” Craig said. “The good people of this land have followed the laws regarding what kinds of shelter they can build and where. In the cities, they’re compressed into a small area of packed earth. Their homes are neatly built, but they were allowed little more than wooden pallets and plastic tarps. They remind me of pictures of back in the Great Depression and the Hoovervilles.”

With Gwen leaning across his lap, resting her elbows on the side of the vehicle as she scanned with the binoculars, Levi could see Tess. And he saw that look in her eyes she got when she was fighting down some memory from her past that had inadvertently sparked.

It might be that she recognized the structures from her past. It might just as easily be something he had no clue about. But there was a certain veil that closed over her, a dimming of the light that he looked for in her eyes, the muting of her normally gentle countenance. It was as if she could do something that made her disappear from sight, like an animal that sank into the environment to camouflage itself.

Levi knew that when she got like that, she needed a moment to remind herself that she was safe. He’d wait it out, keeping his hands visible, sitting still, and protecting her space.

He’d guess she was thinking of the children in harm’s way. The kids who didn’t have an Abraham who, as a teenager, swept a child into his arms and ran pell-mell for safety instead of dropping her to save himself.

Or a Mama Ya who took Tess under her wing in the years of unrest and kept her alive even though it put their family in lethal danger.

In Levi’s experience, people like that were uncommon.

Right now, in his heart, Levi was right back to loving Tess with the same fierce devotion he had when he’d left for that fateful deployment.

It was as if these last years were parenthetical for him. A sentence began (information was added) and now he could continue with his thought.

He was also right back in the raw pain of knowing how much he loved her when she didn’t feel the same. If she had, she would have sought him out at some point over the last fourteen years since she’d been widowed.

That had been the double-edged sword that stabbed him all the way down the steep hillside when he didn’t know if Tess would live.

To find her and lose her again wasn’t something Levi thought he’d survive.

It had to mean something, her being here with him, right?

Hailey knew Gwen and suggested the vineyard; Gwen brought her friend, Tess, home with her on vacation; his connection with Enrico—all of that was like the weather systems that Tess and Gwen were talking about.

The convergence of elements could shift everything.

Maybe, just maybe, Fate was moving the game pieces around the board, and she had a plan.

Maybe he could hope just a little.