The River That Stood Up

The afternoon thunderstorm came at four o'clock, the way it had every day, and Soren stopped chewing his cracker to watch it arrive.

"There's no river," Maya said.

"There's a whole river. We crossed it yesterday."

"Not that one." She pointed up, at the clouds stacking themselves above the trees. "That one. Where's it coming from?"

Soren looked. The sky had been clean blue an hour ago. Now there were clouds, fat and gray, sitting right on top of the forest like they had grown there. No wind had pushed them in. He had been watching. He would have noticed wind.

"Clouds come from the ocean," he said. "Water evaporates off the sea and blows inland."

"The ocean's a thousand miles that way." Maya jerked her thumb east. "A thousand miles. And it rains here every single afternoon. You think the same ocean water makes it all the way here, every day, on time, like a bus?"

Soren opened his notebook. He wrote down four o'clock and drew a small cloud. Then he stopped, because Maya was right and he didn't have the next part.

"Watch the trees," Maya said.

"Trees don't do anything."

"Watch them anyway."

So they watched. The forest steamed. That was the thing Soren hadn't had a word for. In the heat after midday, a faint haze lifted off the canopy, off the tops of the trees, like breath off a crowd of people on a cold morning, except it was not cold at all.

"It's sweating," Soren said.

"Trees don't sweat."

"They kind of do. We learned it. The leaves have little holes and water comes out of them. Transpiration." He said the word carefully. "A big tree can push out hundreds of liters of water a day."

Maya went quiet. Then she said, "Out of the leaves. Into the air."

"Into the air."

"How many trees are out there?"

Soren looked at the green going on and on past the station, past the next hill, past where green turned blue with distance and then turned into the bottom of the sky.

"Billions," he said. "Hundreds of billions, maybe."

Maya stood up. She did that when something was arriving. "So every tree is a little fountain pointing up. Hundreds of liters each. Billions of them. All breathing water into the sky at the same time."

"That's, um." Soren tried to multiply it and ran out of zeros. "That's a lot of water."

"That's a river," Maya said. "Going up. Instead of down."

The first drops hit the tin roof. Then the whole sky let go at once, the way it did here, no warning, a wall of it.

Soren had to raise his voice. "But wait. If the trees make the water that makes the clouds, then the rain falls back down, and the trees drink it."

"And breathe it up again."

"And it rains again."

They looked at each other. The rain hammered the roof.

"It's a loop," Soren said. "The forest is watering itself."

"It's not waiting for the ocean." Maya pressed her face close to the screen, where the rain was coming through in a cool mist. "It made its own weather. It made its own rain. Nobody's filling it up. It just keeps handing the water to itself."

Soren was writing fast now, his pencil tip pushing little dents in the wet page. River up. Cloud. Rain. Roots. River up again. He drew it as a circle with no beginning.

"That can't be the whole thing," he said. "Some water has to come from somewhere first. To start it."

"The ocean starts it," Maya said. "A little. The wind brings some in off the sea. But the trees catch it and pass it inland, tree to tree to tree, thousands of miles. They carry the rain to each other." She was talking fast, the words tumbling. "That's how the rain gets a thousand miles from the ocean. It doesn't blow there. It gets grown there. Each tree breathes it a little further in."

There was a scientist who worked at the station, a tired woman named Dr. Okafor who studied beetles and mostly wanted to be left alone with her trays. She was sitting at the far end of the porch, drinking coffee and pretending not to listen. Now she said, without turning around, "They call it a flying river. The vapor coming off the forest. There's more water in it than in the Amazon River on the ground."

Maya turned. "More than the actual river?"

"More than the actual river." Dr. Okafor took a sip. "You're standing under a river right now. It's just standing up instead of lying down." She went back to her beetles, as if she had not said the largest thing anyone had said all week.

Maya sat back down slowly.

Soren stopped writing. "If you cut the trees," he said, and then didn't finish it, because he could see the loop in his notebook and he could see what happened if you opened the loop. No trees breathing up. No river standing up. No clouds growing out of nothing at four o'clock. The rain would just stop. The forest would dry itself out by not existing.

"So the rain doesn't make the forest," Maya said quietly.

"The forest makes the rain," Soren said.

"They make each other." She wasn't talking fast anymore. "There's no first one. They're holding each other up."

The rain began to thin. In ten minutes it would stop, the sun would come back, and the steam would start lifting off the canopy again, loading the sky for tomorrow's four o'clock.

Maya pressed both hands flat on the wet screen and felt the mist push through the mesh against her palms, cool, going one direction.

"Soren," she said. "Which way is it moving? The water on us right now. Is it coming down, or is it on its way back up?"

Neither of them could tell. Out past the screen the whole forest was steaming, and the drops were still falling, and both things were happening at once.