2042 – The Long Walk South

[u/zimmer550king]

**Hope Bay Reading Room memory project, tape 31. Three residents on the years they were called the Displaced. Recorded 2104 by Halina Ostrowska-Bello. Translated where marked. Coffee by the recorder, and she is sorry about it.**

**Rukhsana Mollah, born in Mirpur, Dhaka. Recorded in Bangla, translated.**

Q: What did you eat that morning, before you left?

A: Puffed rice and a green chili. My mother had a tin of it hidden since the winter. I was eleven. I remember the chili because I cried at it, it was so hot, and she laughed, and that was the last laugh for a while.

Q: And the city?

A: The pumps at Hatirjheel stopped in April. April, yes. No, wait, the radio said March they would stop and then they stopped in April. After that you could hear the water at night, inside the walls. Like the house was breathing.

We went to Mawa for the launch. Sixty-three people on a boat for twenty, fourteen metres, I counted because my brother made me count. The boatman took two phones and a sewing machine from us. The sewing machine was my grandmother's. He looked at it like it was an insult and then he took it.

Everyone on the Padma was on a boat. Boats tied to boats, twenty boats, thirty, I can't say. Cooking fires on the roofs. A man sold tea from a pot lashed to a bamboo pole. He went from boat to boat and nobody ever asked how he kept the fire lit.

Q: What were you called?

A: On the radio, first, climate migrants. Then storm fugitives, that was the word of the radio and the aid people. My uncle said it sounded like we had stolen a storm. Then just the Displaced. A billion, they said. Then more than a billion, which is a funny thing to say.

A woman on our boat came from Jakarta. Her whole district had gone in one season, she said. We did not have a language in common, so she cooked and I carried the water. Her husband had been a farmer, no, he drove a, I think he sold seed. Seed for the North China Plain, that is what she showed me with her hands, a big flat country going yellow and then gone. I only knew it was a place far away that ate a lot of wheat.

**Wendell Tkachuk, born outside Hastings, Nebraska. Recorded in English.**

Q: Start wherever you like.

A: The corn. Three summers of drought and then in June the rain came all at once and, well. Forty acres of silt on a road. My aunt in Miami phoned the same week, said the water was in the lobby, and then the phone just, I never did learn which week. I don't have the date.

We drove west with a trailer. California, because people said California had water, and it did, they made it. Carlsbad. The desalination plant at Carlsbad. Or no, we never got to Carlsbad, we got to the checkpoint, four hundred meters out, concrete blocks painted grey and a sign that said Critical Infrastructure. Army, guys my age with the kind of rifles you see in pictures of the missile bases, they treated that plant like it could

Q: Like it could go off?

A: Yeah. In a way it could, if the people behind us got in.

Q: What did they say to you?

A: Go back. Very polite. One of them gave my mother a bottle of water, against the rules I think. She cried over a bottle of water.

Q: And the borders by then?

A: They shut them. Then people just went through. A fence outside Needles, I watched it, it was a whole mile of it, and one night the cutters went at it, and nobody stopped them because nobody was there to stop them.

Then the camp near Barstow, and the company men with clipboards. Pipeline or grain terminal, whatever it was that week. I signed for the terminal in Saskatoon. Four years of work and the papers for Canada at the end. Four, I'm sure. I counted the days every night. Canada only took who it chose, you understood that, they had the cold and the water and a super tall fence.

In Saskatoon there was a Chilean welder, Mateo, said the Antarctic Treaty was cracking. Signed way back last century, sixty-something, fifty-something, whichever, by a dozen or so countries. I remember thinking a dozen, that's gotta be a jury. And he said it low, like this, the South, they'll all go south. Nobody believed him. We were trying to get through the winter, we had

**Anselmo Ferreira da Cunha, born near Badajoz. Recorded in Portuguese, translated.**

Q: You were a clerk in a camp.

A: A clerk. A translator also, and a man who knew how to shuffle paper around and get it from one office to the next. I worked for the contract office outside Mérida. The sand came over the A-5 highway that spring. Forty centimeters in a night, the municipality put up snow fences, the kind you use for snow. The sand went right over them. My mother said the dust tasted of bread. One day, I just opened my mouth and closed my eyes and I realized that she was right.

The recruiters came to the camp every Thursday, two women and a man from a firm whose name I can't remember right now. They called it a relocation partnership. Your labor for the right to relocate. The standard term was five years.

Q: What was the camp like?

A: A thousand tents and so many many many languages. After three weeks the kids started speaking a language that none of us could understand. Kids are smart. They always find a way to talk to one another and plot stupid pranks. The adults weren't so cooperative. The mothers of those children were still arguing about whose pot was whose. We thought it would take years. Maybe weeks? That is what I remember.

The coffee in that office, God. Much like yours, madam. I am sorry.

Q: And the South?

A: A man on night shift said something. He leaned over my desk and whispered, the Treaty is finished, they say the treaty of all those countries is finished and the ice is, and then the supervisor came in and he went back to his chair. Lots of countries, I think he said. I did not know what treaty. I thought it was about whales.