National Route 12 from Brentwood to Lodi was submerged in pitch-black darkness. Outside the car window, a few farmhouses flashed past; at some of them, massive fans were spinning with a shriek, and burners had been lit here and there, shining as brightly as midday.
At least those were the farms that had quickly noticed the sudden plunge in temperature and responded at once. The problem was that the outside temperature displayed on the dashboard was ruthlessly nosediving toward zero.
“Brian, what do we do? They say they’re gathering as many workers as they can for now, but...”
Chloe, sitting in the passenger seat, spoke as if she were about to cry. I nodded to her. Then, still on the call with Warren, I pressed the accelerator even harder.
“Sir, you remember freezing tree branches with me before when we were preparing for winter, right? Do it exactly the same way—turn on the sprinklers! You have to freeze every farm thoroughly, without leaving a single empty patch!”
As I drove, I frantically searched through my memories from before the regression, and then I recalled one fact.
‘A record-breaking spring frost, the first in a hundred years...’
If it had been something related only to wine, I would have remembered it immediately and prepared in advance. But back then, I’d only seen it mentioned in a news article as the reason fruit prices had skyrocketed—a record-breaking cold snap, the worst in a century—so I hadn’t recalled it right away.
I wasn’t certain it had been exactly 2008, but considering it had happened while I was in college, there was a high chance this was the right time. And if it was indeed 2008... just imagining it made my knees go weak. California would be devastated this year, and half the harvest would be wiped out.
“I know. We’ve opened all the valves and we’re pouring water like mad!”
“Got it! I’m counting on you!”
After hanging up, I took Chloe’s anxious hand.
Lodi was lower in elevation than Brentwood and blocked in on all sides, a frost pocket where cold air pooled like water. The three-year-old pear saplings planted here had only just begun to draw sap up their trunks and sprout new shoots. If their trunks froze and burst here, the very framework of the trees would collapse, and their lifespan as an orchard would end tonight.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”
For some reason, the road to Lodi felt unbearably long tonight.
---
At the same time, the Hartford Farm in Brentwood was also in chaos.
At an hour when the evening would normally have been quiet, William Hartford burst roughly out of his house wearing only a thick leather coat over his pajamas. One of the association members had woken him, screaming that frost damage was coming.
The moment he opened the front door, the abnormal cold that rushed in made the back of his neck instinctively go cold.
“Damn it! Check the temperature! Now!”
At Hartford’s shout, the farm manager on standby came running over in a panic with a thermometer.
“Chairman, it’s already 1.5 degrees above zero! The humidity is high, so the ground temperature has already started dropping below freezing!”
“Damn it! Turn on every wind machine on the farm right now! And light the heaters! Every single one!”
No sooner had William given the order than enormous roars erupted all over the farm. Dozens of massive wind machines over ten meters tall began rotating in unison, releasing a noise that seemed to tear through the night air. Soon after, workers drove around in trucks, pouring kerosene into each arranged heater and setting them alight.
In an instant, Hartford Farm was covered in acrid black smoke and red flames. From a distance, it looked like a vast battlefield. Hartford checked the heat pouring out of the heaters and wiped the tip of his nose as if satisfied.
Just then, a manager’s urgent voice came through the crackle of the radio.
“Chairman! I can hear sprinklers from Harris Farm over there! Those bastards are spraying water over the entire area!”
“What? Water?”
William Hartford doubted his ears and hurried toward Harris Farm. When he arrived near the farm and looked around, he couldn’t see much in the dark, but he could hear the friction of streams of water scattering through the air and the sound of a huge pump running.
“It really is water?”
Cold droplets carried all the way over clung to his skin. Hartford stood blankly listening to the sound for a moment, then clutched his stomach and burst into loud laughter.
“Hahaha! Those lunatics! That brat, Brian or whatever his name is, has finally lost his mind! Spraying water on trees in this weather? He’s planning to turn his cherries into icicles with his own hands!”
The association member who had followed him joined in Hartford’s laughter and sneered.
“Exactly. Some fool who doesn’t know a thing about farming starts playing at being a winery owner and thinks he’s untouchable.”
With a mocking smile, he proudly looked over the black smoke filling his own farm.
“Yes, that’s the end of poor, stupid bastards. Our smoke curtain will trap the heat.”
Convinced of his victory, he put a cigarette in his mouth.
---
The moment we reached the Lodi farm and I opened the car door, a breath-stopping cold stabbed into my lungs. Lower than Brentwood, this place was already no different from a giant refrigerator.
As soon as the car stopped, I jumped out and sprinted toward the main pump room.
“Start the pumps! Now!”
At my shout, the workers waiting there turned the levers in a panic. As the heavy sound of motors broke the silence and began to run, Chloe asked,
“You’re turning on the sprinklers?”
“No!”
“No?”
“That’s right. No overhead irrigation!”
“Why? Weren’t you going to make an ice layer like with the cherry trees?”
When Chloe asked in confusion, I pointed at one of the saplings and said,
“These are still three-year-old babies! If we pour water over their heads like cherry trees, they won’t be able to bear the weight of the ice, and their trunks will snap one after another! If the trunks break, the tree shape is finished. Here, we’re going with undertree irrigation. We’re going to lay water over the ground!”
“Won’t all the water freeze if we do that?”
“The groundwater from the well is roughly 13 to 16°C. That’ll be enough to have an effect.”
In California’s Central Valley and the Lodi region, deep groundwater usually maintains a temperature between 13°C and 16°C throughout the year.
“O-okay!”
At my direction, groundwater began gushing from the thousands of drip hoses and low-pressure nozzles laid across the farm floor. Warm groundwater at 14 degrees, drawn from the old farm well, met the cold ground, and white steam rose instantly.
“What is this... I can’t see!”
The farm was quickly trapped in a thick water mist, enough to make Chloe flustered. This was the steam curtain strategy I had intended. The warm groundwater would raise the surface temperature, and the vapor would wrap around the saplings, becoming a natural defensive barrier that blocked the extreme cold from outside.
“Chloe, what’s the temperature now?”
“Huh? Uh... minus one!”
At Chloe’s startled cry, my heart dropped. I had feared it, and sure enough, the once-in-a-century frost was happening right now.
“Chloe, don’t just stand there! Take a lantern and divide the sections with the workers. Check the saplings! See if frost is forming on the trunks or if any ice crystals are sticking to them. If you find any, brush them off by hand immediately and pour lukewarm water over them!”
I switched on my lantern and ran across the farm floor, which was turning into a mud pit. The April mud clung thickly to the soles of my boots and made each step heavy, but I couldn’t stop.
“Brian! Look here! The trunk... something’s wrong with the trunk!”
From far away, Chloe’s urgent scream rang out. When I ran over, I saw that one pear sapling in the lowest section of the farm was trapped in a thin film of ice, trembling faintly.
“Damn it, the radiative cooling is rising from the surface!”
I took a thermometer from my pocket and held it beside the trunk. Minus 3.5 degrees. It was beyond the sapling’s critical threshold. I immediately dragged a nozzle over and sprayed the tree.
“Chloe, there isn’t enough steam in this section! Call the workers and open the drainage pipe valve on this side further! We need more water on the ground. I don’t care if it comes up to our ankles—we have to force the ground temperature up with the water temperature!”
“Got it!”
Chloe ran across the farm, not even noticing that the hems of her pants were soaked through with muddy water. She encouraged the workers, turned heavy valves herself, and moved in perfect coordination with me.
In the fog, we pushed through thousands of saplings, relying only on each other’s lights. Our fingers froze until they lost sensation, and our cheeks stung as if cut by blade-like cold. But every time we touched the sapling trunks, the faint warmth we felt kept us from stopping.
“Brian... look over there.”
After a night that passed in a blur, Chloe, panting for breath, pointed at the sky. Bluish dawn light was seeping through the thick vapor. The farm floor had already turned into a small lake, and the fog rising from it wrapped the saplings gently, like a living creature.
In that dreamlike, beautiful scenery, we looked at each other’s ruined faces and finally let out a short breath of relief. The trunks of the saplings that had been teetering on the edge of death had, fortunately, maintained a smooth vitality without a single burst anywhere.
Chloe dropped a tear and fell into my arms.
“You did well. You did so well.”
I stroked her back and held her cold body tightly.
---
At that time, Hartford Farm.
William Hartford’s initially relaxed attitude began to disappear as time passed. And after three in the morning, when the rate of temperature decline started exceeding expectations, the smile had long since vanished from his face.
Then, at four in the morning, the temperature finally reached the devastating figure of minus 4.2 degrees. Dozens of giant wind machines were roaring as they spun, but Hartford’s calculation—that they would draw warm air from above down to the ground and raise the temperature—had failed completely. The radiative cooling was so intense that even the air overhead had already gone cold.
Instead of delivering warmth, the wind machines had turned into weapons that blasted icy, knife-like wind into the cherry trees.
“Chairman! The heaters aren’t working! No matter how much oil we pour in, the wind is too strong, and all the heat is blowing away to the neighboring farms! The temperature near the trees has dropped below minus three!”
A worker ran over with his face covered in soot and screamed.
“Pour in more kerosene! Bring more heaters!”
“The other farms have already taken and lit as many heaters as they can, so there are no more heaters to bring!”
“Damn it, then just put branches in oil drums and light fires!”
William Hartford screamed like a madman and hounded the workers, but only acrid black smoke covered the sky, and the chill at ground level showed no sign of easing in the slightest.
“This makes no sense... The wind machines are running! We laid out hundreds of heaters, so why isn’t the temperature going up?!”
He trembled as he looked at the silent killer—frost—that was swallowing his farm. Before his eyes, the lush cherry flower buds were slowly being covered in transparent ice crystals. This was not a protective layer of ice, but the frost of death, formed as moisture in the air stole the trees’ warmth and froze.
“No! No... My cherries... No!”
Screaming, he eventually brought an axe from the storage shed. Then he began hacking at a cherry tree that was already dead and beyond saving.
“Chairman!”
“Come help me! We should at least use this as firewood!”
“......”
“Hurry!”
“Yes, sir!”
The workers began chopping down the trees that had already died and had no hope left. The branches, frozen solid and drained of life, snapped weakly beneath the axe blades.
The workers shoved the cut wood into oil drums, poured kerosene over it, and set it on fire.
Whoosh!
Additional heat rose again across the farm, but unfortunately, that heat could not spread far.
“More! We have to cut down more trees!”
“Chairman...”
The workers instinctively knew it was already over. On a vast farm spanning hundreds of acres, lighting fires with dead trees would accomplish nothing...
But William Hartford, seized by madness, kept swinging the axe until he finally collapsed onto the cold ground.
“Chairman!”
“My... my cherries...”
As he looked at the red cherries hanging in the air, now covered in white frost, tears streamed down his face.