Last Tree Standing

Last Tree Standing

By John G. Jung

Copyright 2022 John  G. Jung

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

ISBN 9781005861339

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Cover Design: SelfPubBookCovers.com/Daniela

Other Books by John G. Jung:

Eden 2084

Black Rock

All Around the Circle

A Sound in the Night

Brain Gain

Seizing Your Destiny

Broadband Economics

From Connectivity to Community

Streets For All: 50 Strategies for Shaping Resilient Cities

Performance Metrics for Sustainable Cities

Innovative Solutions for Creating Sustainable Cities

To my daughter Catherine, who knows many trees!

TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 – The Plane

CHAPTER 2 – Twelve Years Earlier

CHAPTER 3 – Santiago

CHAPTER 4 – Easter Island

CHAPTER 5. - Getting Ready

CHAPTER 6 - South Pacific Garbage Patch

CHAPTER 7 - A Good Days Work

CHAPTER 8 – Tsunami

CHAPTER 9 – Nemo Island

CHAPTER 10 – Agile 2

CHAPTER 11 – The Mystery Metal

CHAPTER 12 – Discovery

CHAPTER 13 – Family

CHAPTER 14 – Lottery

CHAPTER 15 – Island Life

CHAPTER 16 – A Sound from the Sky

CHAPTER 17 – Debate

CHAPTER 18 – Alpha Beta

CHAPTER 19 – One Year Later

CHAPTER 20 – The Proceedings

CHAPTER 21 - International Space Station

CHAPTER 22 - Homecoming

What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last Palm Tree say while he was doing it? Jared Diamond, Collapse

Chapter 1

The Plane

The sky above was a bright blue sea. The ocean to the horizon glimmered like a bright blue sky. Marty’s eyes had difficulty focusing with the sun’s penetrating rays blinding him. He was unable to see the direction the plane was traveling. But his hearing pointed to the eastern part of the island. He faced the direction from which the faint sound of the plane was coming. He knew it must have been a plane. It wasn’t the sound of a bird. He almost forgot what the sound of a bird sounded like. It had been a long time since he heard one. It was a long time since he heard the sound of a plane too. But something in his memory told him that the sound he was hearing was a plane and he needed to get its attention.

As the sound of the engine became louder minute by minute, he ran out onto the hot white sand and began shouting and waving his arms frantically. He was shoeless and his bleached black pants were tattered, with one pant leg longer than the other. His white, short sleeve shirt had turned tan-colored with several brown stains and was ripped where a shirt pocket used to be. He was a mixture of tanned and red burnt skin, with dirty, bushy blonde hair and a long blonde beard that looked messy from sweat and dust.

The crashing waves muffled the sound of the plane, but Marty felt that it was still traveling in a direction over the island to be able to see him and the signal that they had made on the beach in anticipation of this precise moment. In the past, other major signals could have been started if there was enough time on the raised rock platform at the end of the beach and other points around the island. But there wasn’t enough time. As Marty ran toward the massive pile of wood on the rock outcrop at the end of the beach, he reached down to a burning log from a smaller fire and lit the pile at a strategic spot to quickly initiate a massive flame. The kindling of dry grass and dried palm fronds below the tent-like structure of wood produced a huge puff of smoke, followed by a flame that could be seen from a distance, even in the brightness of midday. Or so Marty hoped.

The sound of the plane and Marty’s shouting attracted several of the islanders to venture out of their huts to look up into the sky. They wiped the tears away from their eyes as they looked up into the forbidden brightness of the sun. It had not been their habit in recent times to venture out into the daylight in the midday sun. The heat and sun exposure quickly burned their exposed skin and dried their mouths worse than if they stayed in their empty huts. They hoped for a cool breeze, even if they didn’t have water to cool their burning throats. As they looked up into the sky, they could hear the engine of a plane above them. But they could not tell what kind of plane. It was a noise from a distant world and a faraway time that they had long lost touch with. Some of the inhabitants lingered to listen. Others listened for a moment, but since they could not see it, they retreated into their huts that provided shade from the burning sun. They laid down onto their woven grass beds and fell back into their long midday sleep.

Ruth and Mia joined Marty on the beach, shouting and waving their arms trying to attract the plane. It was now nearly over top of them. They put their hands over their eyebrows to try to see it, but the sun’s burning rays were directly in the way.

Marty sensed that he could see movement and shouted: There it is! But it was a blur. He could not tell what it looked like. The blur moved slowly above them. The distance between them and the plane must have been great. They never heard the roar of the engine, just the distant sound of it passing overhead. They knew that any plane in the area was an opportunity. They had this opportunity before. That is why they decided to build the woodpile and keep the smaller fires going to use it as a signal. They set huge piles of wood ablaze as a massive bonfire to signal that they needed help. But this was the last pile that they would burn on the beach. There would be no more. They knew that cutting any more trees down for such fires would be their suicide pill.

The pile roared fast and high. The flames reached over 30 feet. The dried palm fronds created a thick gray smoke plume that turned into a smoky cloud in the sky above them. They hoped that it would cause enough of a visual clue to someone flying above or along the horizon of the sea to notice the massive wooden series of letters laid out on the beach that read: HELP! to investigate. Marty, Ruth, and Mia stepped back from the flames. The heat was burning their skin, already sensitive to the rays of the sun and the heat of the day. They continued to frantically wave and shout as the blur above them continued its straight course without making any suggestion that they might turn to get a closer look.

The pile of wood continued to roar as the sound of the plane’s engines began to fade in the distance. Ruth and Mia stopped shouting and waving their arms. Marty continued to try to get the plane’s attention and continued shouting long after it was gone. Ruth and Mia just watched. Their sunken eyes and drained burnt faces under unwashed and unkempt stringy hair told the story of their existence. Their clothes had not been changed or cleaned in months. The colors of their clothes were indistinguishable from the dirt and stains on them. As Marty began to falter in his steps and halted periodically with his raspy shouts into the sky, it reminded Ruth of a sputtering car, emptying its last breath in its engine before dying on the side of a road.

Finally, Marty stopped. He fell onto the white beach and repeatedly slammed his fists hard into the hot sand. When he finished, he looked up at Ruth and Mia, shivering in the heat with the roar of the blazing pile of wood behind them. He cried softly. A tear ran down his cheek, paving a way past the sand-covered face that had long been burnt and leathered by the sun. Mia reached out to him to help him up from the sand and asked, what now? 

Chapter 2

Twelve Years Earlier

August 15, 2019

Dr. Roberta Pollock , a research scientist, and her team, hired by a consortium of organizations ranging from large corporations to research institutions and NGOs, met before the start of the semester with teachers at Westchester High and a professor from Columbia University. The professor and the scientist had been collaborating on research about the Great Pacific Plastic Garbage Patches and scientific ways of collecting, processing, and adapting plastics effectively and sustainably. The funding that Dr. Pollock raised came from three very eclectic and usually opposing philosophies, the American Plastics Association (APA), seeking to maintain the plastic industry as viable and forward-looking; the Ocean Cleanup Fund (OCF), an NGO seeking to clean the oceans of the plastic debris; and the United Nations (UN).

While coming from different perspectives, their funding is aimed at achieving the same outcome but from different perspectives. The APA sought to find ways to ensure that their industry was forward-looking and could reuse and re-engineer the plastics that they would find in the Plastic Garbage Patches around the world. The OCF was a trendy NGO filled with what the 1960s would have called hippies seeking to rid the world of its greed and consumerism around plastics and other debris. The UN was interested in cleaning the oceans of the world on behalf of its member countries and using sponsorships and volunteers to assist them.

The students were to become volunteers, but their travel, food, and accommodations would be covered. Dr. Pollock was very convincing in her promotion of the program that attracted the Columbia professor, who in turn, reached out to the Westchester High School teachers. The Westchester High School received a grant from a former high school graduate who had worked in the plastics industry and made millions from it, only to feel guilty about what it had done to the world. Before his death, he bequeathed $10 million to the school to develop a profit-bearing fund that would annually generate scholarships and host an extensive field study program to work on climate change issues. Here was a way, she claimed, to meet the program’s goals by targeting the Great Pacific Garbage Patches.

At the meeting with Dr. Pollock was Columbia University Professor Isaac Williams with Westchester teachers Harvey Josephs and Linda Sherman. The office at Westchester High School was already a dedicated climate change wing of the school with models, pictures, and examples of initiatives that the students and teachers had achieved over the years. The room included a library, monitors and computers with access to videos and data, and worktables upon which several students had developed prototypes of debris cleaning vessels. A scale model of the LEOB, a massive vessel named after the inventor of plastic, the Belgian scientist Leo Baekeland, was being studied by several students when the teachers and their guests arrived. The teachers shooed the students out to allow the professor and scientist to make their pitch.

Thank you for inviting Professor Williams and me here today, Dr. Pollock started to speak, as she dramatically rose out of her chair and walked toward a map of the world on the wall. Pointing to an area in the South Pacific, southwest of Easter Island, she began to explain her proposal.

We learned of your extra special school program, explained Dr. Pollock, and we wanted to invite your school to partner with us in our 3-month exploratory mission to the South Pacific Plastic Garbage Patch. A recent research team investigated the South Pacific Plastic Garbage Patch which is about 700 miles off the coast of Chile. It is located west of Easter Island in an area that covers nearly 2 million square miles of ocean. The patch is mostly underwater but some areas are visible from the sky. Some say that it is the size of India, it’s that large!

The accumulation of the marine debris such as nets and buoys and other plastics dumped by maritime vessels and from outfall from rivers collected in these patches around the world is mainly due to the circulation of the oceans called Gyres, interjected Professor Williams. There are five of these major patches around the world. Six if you count the Mediterranean Sea. The one we are specifically interested in the South Pacific was discovered in 2011 by the 5 Gyres Institute. It was confirmed to exist in 2017 by the Charles Moore Expedition. Most of it is not visually detectable. It resides below the surface and is in small bits the size of rice. Of course even more has become microscopic and has unfortunately become part of the food chain.

The plastic patch we are looking at, continued Dr. Pollock as she pointed to the map of the world, is contained within this South Pacific Gyre created from its counter-clockwise rotation coming from the east coast of Australia to the west coast of South America via the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and up toward the equator where it heads back west.

The reason no one seems to know much about the area and only discovered this patch recently was that no one ever goes to the area, claimed Professor Willaims, chuckling as he said it. It is the most remote part of the world. There are no landforms and the ocean is expected to be very deep throughout most of it, except where there are undersea volcanoes as an extension of the Ring of Fire. Few satellites orbit in this region to take photographs and send data about the area. That is until they need to deorbit and drop into it if they don’t burn up in the atmosphere first. Planes don’t even travel in the region because there are no countries in the immediate area. The most remote point in the South Pacific is thousands of miles away from any land whatsoever, or so we think. Until Moore’s Expedition, we didn’t know much about the area and especially about this plastics patch. And as he discovered much of it is small and under the surface.

Yes, it’s a massive empty area that has collected plastic of all kinds, reiterated Dr. Pollock, but as Professor Williams mentioned, most of it is quite small. In fact, the majority of it is composed of microbeads. These are tiny bits less than 5 micrometers in size. They come from things we make such as personal hygiene products, microscopic bits that come off fishing nets, microscopic fibers from washing clothes, and others that break down from the debris itself that is collected and continues to rub against each other in the open sea.

It will take decades to clean, interjected Professor Williams.

Yes, continued Dr. Pollock, but we have a consortium of scientists, research institutions, and engineers that will be on the first expedition to the South Pacific to research how to best clean the various bulk as well as microscopic plastics. We even have a company that will experiment on recycling the plastics that are accumulated and made into pellets for recycling worldwide.

Dr. Pollock and I have raised most of the funding needed to join the LEOB on its inaugural expedition and processing tests when it is expected to depart Santiago in May of next year, informed Professor Williams as he shuffled through some papers. After he found the sheet he was looking for, he passed it over to the teachers. We are looking for volunteers to join us for the inaugural expedition. It will be historical and would give your high school the reputation that I know you would like to achieve.

We have a group from Santiago, Chile, interjected Dr. Pollock, who have agreed to join us and a group is forming across Europe as well. We also understand that the UN has a group from various countries throughout Asia that they want to include. Now we are seeking a fourth group from North America. We understood that Westchester had this special high school that might be interested. So that is why we are here.

Yes, Linda and Harvey, we’d like your school to be the first in North America to have this honor, said Professor Williams, smiling broadly.

The LEOB is a special vessel, continued Dr. Pollock, switching her projector on to show an image of an extremely large vessel that the teachers had not yet seen other than hypothetical sketches. The school developed a scale model based on those sketches, but it was nothing like the final design that Dr. Pollock was presenting.

It is still classified and under construction in Santiago, continued Dr. Pollock. It’s not yet known to the world. But what I can impart to you today is that it’s actually two frigates. One was acquired from Myanmar. It was built in the 1960s and was bound for scrap. The other is an old German vessel from the 1940s that was to have become a museum, but it lost its funding. They were both decommissioned and the LEOB Foundation acquired these frigates for a song.

Dr. Pollock pulled out a pamphlet that showed some details of the LEOB that weren’t in the slide presentation. She passed it over to Linda and Harvey for a closer look. They were brought down to Santiago where the two vessels were physically joined at the hulls allowing for the decks and portions of the hulls below to be linked. These two vessels were remarkably similar in shape which made it possible to join them. Both are more or less around 400 feet long with a beam of 80 feet and a draught of over 20 feet. The area where they joined is where ramps have been built at both the forward and stern of the ships and the sorters lead the debris into the bellies of the two hulls for processing. The processed bricks that the LEOB will create will be able to be placed on independent commercial barges that would come to the LEOB to remove its cargo and bring fresh crew and supplies. Theoretically, the LEOB would not have to return for many years until the job is done.

Dr. Pollock, interjected Harvey, If the hulls are used for the sorting and processing of the debris, where are the accommodations for the crew and volunteers?

Thanks for the question, Mr. Josephs, responded Dr. Pollock. The upper decks of the two vessels will be large enough for all of the crew and volunteers and then some. There will also be many researchers, engineers, scientists, and professors on board doing other work besides collecting and processing the collected debris. There are also many additional accommodations available when there will be an overlap of passengers during the transition between the old and new batch of volunteers. In addition, the main decks of the two vessels have significant sterns to land helicopters on them if we have guests from time to time. This is also a large staging area where the plastic bricks would be placed onto pallets, and using forklifts and cranes, they’ll be transferred onto the commercial vessels.

How will they collect the debris? asked Linda.

Well, Miss Sherman, started Professor Williams. The LEOB will be equipped with four independent vessels, which they have called Agiles. They are to be located along with the outer decks of the ship. They can also be lifeboats but are primarily designed to be versatile enough to maneuver the massive booms used to collect and channel the debris to the collection ramps of the vessel. This is where the four volunteer groups come in. We’ll explain more during orientation. Because the summer will have less light, it will start with a 9-hour workday with three shifts of four volunteers and crew members on the Agiles. The volunteers will also have an opportunity to work in the bellies to experience the sorting process and observe the engineers working on the pellet processing and converting the plastic into reusable bricks.  It’s an opportunity to learn as they work.

The four groups will be extremely multi-cultural, added Dr. Pollock. It is hoped that they will bring back their experiences and positive environmental messages to their countries. We will be adding new groups to replace them every 3 months. Professor Williams has colleagues at the UN and in other parts of the world who would be doing the recruiting year-round.

The scientist and professor continued to explain the details of the program. Harvey Josephs and Linda Sherman were amazed at the opportunity. Their school was perfectly suited to send its top graduating students for the months before starting their freshman year at university.

And of course, continued Dr. Pollock, we would love it if you both could join your students on this inaugural program as chaperones.

Linda and Harvey’s eyes opened wide at the invitation. Linda expressed her enthusiasm without hesitation. Harvey was a bit more reserved. He was an older teacher who had taken groups of students on trips to Europe, Japan, and Australia in the past, often with problems ranging from teenage drama, homesickness, drunkenness, and even a love triangle among a group of students that went awry. Harvey, a 50-year-old single male teacher, had been at Westchester High for nearly 25 years and had seen it all. He was one of the instigators of the climate change program at Westchester and was thrilled with its advancements, but he wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of babysitting a dozen volunteer students for three months. He was in remission from a previous bout of stage 2 liver cancer. He was successful with his surgery and radiation treatments but he was being monitored twice a year in the event of a relapse. He was also overweight, balding, out of shape, and losing his hearing, which he wasn’t telling anyone about. And without his glasses, he was lost. He thought of being on a ship for three months in his condition and wasn’t too thrilled about it.

Sitting in his chair at the table with a blue blazer, beige cotton Dockers, and light blue cotton shirt, Harvey put his open palms over his face and lowered them, sighing deeply. He said that he'd have to think about it.

Linda, a 26-year-old single teacher in her second year at Westchester and a specialist in climate mitigation and adaption research, saw this as an opportunity of her lifetime. It would be great on her resume if she ever wanted to get into a significant NGO or company keen to meet its climate obligations.

Sitting in her seat at the table in a white sweater and blue skirt with her long blonde hair in a bun, she propped up her horn-rimmed glasses and was excited about the opportunity. She could barely hold it back. She was visibly shaking in her seat with anticipation, pumping her left leg up and down as she spoke.

It would be an honor, stated Linda. Speaking for myself, I would be honored to participate. Linda looked at Harvey. He didn’t answer right away. Hesitantly, he reached for something to say.

Well, I will have to see, remarked Harvey. I have a few things going on.

We see you as an essential part of the mission, Harvey, reaffirmed Professor Williams. He had previously met with Harvey who wanted the opportunity for his class but had expressed his reluctance to go himself before. Professor Isaac Williams, a 55-year-old Columbia professor knew what it meant to be reluctant to go on such a demanding voyage. He too had health problems. Diagnosed with Leukemia, he had been in remission for several years, but they were still monitoring him. He was hoping that Harvey would join him so that they could both reinforce themselves that it was wise to go on the trip despite their health.

Smartly dressed in a brown tweed blazer and a crisp white cotton shirt and black dress pants and black brogue dress shoes, Professor Williams sat back in his chair for a moment, rubbed his close-trimmed beard, and fixed his wire-framed glasses. He paused briefly, raised his right hand, and pointed his index finger at Harvey, saying, This is your baby. The Westchester program will finally meet its goal of joining a world-class initiative. You can’t stay back and miss this opportunity.

Dr. Pollock agreed by nodding her head. Yes, I agree, it’s essential that both of you, Linda and Harvey, join the project. Dressed in a smart office outfit in an all-gray skirt and top with a darker gray jacket, accented by a colorful green, white and blue scarf loosely wrapped around her neck, the scientist smiled at the two Westchester teachers. Just think of the notoriety and legacy that it will make for your school and program.

I’ll see, was all that Harvey uttered. He clapped his hands together in a jovial moment, smiling brightly at the two guests. "You have Linda for certain and I am a maybe at this moment. So let me