Ice thicknesses were weak this year. Gregorson Marechino was at the family cabin in Northern Michicago (the part of the Upper Peninsula closest to the windy one). Graduation in December seemed like a great idea three and a half years ago. Finish early, tuition-paid advisors pushing him to take more classes be damned. His father, Gregor (seriously), was pleased at the time and now, but for his nearly eponymous child’s failure to land employment up to the vacation. Finish early, but have your shit together youth. Gregorson loved when his dad called him that. Sarcasm seemed like the only response to as potent a figure as the big G (the little g had heard his father’s colleagues call him that around the house work-soirees, tickled).
It wasn’t as though the younger hadn’t fish on the hook. Three different companies had promised to get back to Gregorson the week prior after final interviews, but according to the news, each had been hit by the recent hacking and his prospective bosses were surely deep in the ensuing pile. He tried to remember how much personal information he divulged in the application process, would be annoying to be on sale on the dark web before even becoming a real life consumer. But without so much as a debit card to his name, Gregorson was not too worried about personal info compromises.
The ice was an important consideration in where Gregorson might roam on his backcountry Nordic skis. If Lake Michigan were sufficiently solid near the shore, many places were accessible from that most public of transient parks. After checking a couple ice sites on cabin day two and drinking a cup and a half too much coffee, Gregorson begged off a morning family Euchre game and struck out on the six inches of fresh snow. The powder yielded to his broadswords, and Gregorson glided into the woods, forgetting his exams and interviews. The drive to the northern Midwest did not do as much as his flights back to Arizona to clear his head after finals, but this year the snow report made it pretty okay to take the train to O’Hare and jump in the car with his parents. The Illinois Institute of Technology (a community with fewer idiots “confusing” his last name with fermented cherries) was behind him for the last time, plane ride into the sunset or not, unless one of the two Chicago jobs panned out and the campus stayed in his immediate sphere.
The trail though! Home. Dry mountain biking in the desert dodging rattlesnakes or far-afield skiing in the tundra did everything the eldest son of the Marechino family needed – adrenaline, long-lasting strong breathing (that he would surely appreciate more after dating a serial meditator in his mid-twenties), and leg over-usage. College-boy pride in quadriceps did not do much to impress prospective dates, but the ego loves what it loves in early adulthood. Perfect day in the woods, leading to a perfect glide on the lake, leading to an even more perfect woods. The day was totally planned out. Gregorson had eaten a huge breakfast and downloaded the rest of the ebook about AI’s impacts on what was left of the middle class he had audio-ified right before leaving campus (studying under a globally renowned text-to-speech expert had its perks). Earphones in, two and a half speed Aussie reader going (he and his prof had converted the voice of a excellent-enunciating weather reporter from Sydney’s channel six into their audiobook reader), the lake edge was in sight.
The tough part of this escapade was getting across the Cedar River – when the winter was deep enough, Gregorson could ski out far into into the great lake to get around the area that stayed unfrozen around the river mouth. Today, he would have to take off his skis and walk over the bridge to get to the state forest area he loved to traverse. Most of the way to his desired take-out point, Gregorson compulsively checked his school email to see if any of his fish had landed in the future earnings boat. The last thing he saw before sliding casually off the ice into the unprompting river mouth was a subject line Congratulations – hope you’ll… Before gloved but touch screen compatible thumb could open the email from his new boss, the hypothermic water swallowed Gregorson up, phone and all.
Gregorson was face to face with a sturgeon, and it looked impatient. The sturgeon adjusted his rounded eyeglasses with a wiggle of his face and said, “You’re late. You know by now that after 8am your time is mine.”
Gregorson felt he had little choice but to swim along with the sturgeon, who seemed to be a woman from her voice and age (sturgeon women live far longer than the men). Gregorson flicked his tail and followed out into the deeper section of the lake to the East. A veritable herd of crustaceans (crayfish, perhaps?) were whispering about the new guy as Gregorson swam by. His holes in the side of his head picked up a few words; “too scrawny”, “the wrong shade of fish”. Apparently not a friendly group of invertebrates. The sturgeon-manager, who Gregorson by now had gathered was named Eliza, looked back and called “you should expect to work closely with the crays, they’re critical to the process and you’re going to be liaising closely with them.”
Beyond learning that liaise could not only be a verb, but also be gerunded, Gregorson was embarrassed that he had apparently made a mediocre first impression on his business partners.
“I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU NOT TO HIRE ANY MORE PERCH!” A voice boomed out from deeper water and caused even the up-to-now confident Eliza to look sheepish.
She recovered quickly, “Bob, calm down. He’s a young pike. And extremely well-trained. Nobody survives four years of the Chicago River without some high-grade strategic thinking and grit.”
The a collection of at least a thousand zebra mussels spoke again with one voice, though much more calmly in response. “Ah, you must be the Marechino kid then. Eliza works for me and so do you. Good to meet you. Open door policy and all that shit. Good luck.”
Eliza indicates that the audience with the mussels-in-charge is over and swims off. Gregorson trails behind, hoping he has a nice desk. There’s an overturned canoe sitting with about four fifths of its mass beneath the sand and just enough of a gap for the sturgeon to swim underneath, though she declines to do so. “This is where you work. I’ll let you get settled and read the onboarding memo written on the inside of the boat. Let me know if you have any questions. The crayfish will be by soon with your first load.”
Gregorson wondered to himself what the load would be of, exactly. He knew this was one of the top operations in the Great Lakes, but wasn’t entirely sure from his interviews which part of the process he would be “process engineering”. After thanking Eliza for showing him around, Gregorson swam into the upturned boat-space, thrilled to have an office with his very first job.
The space was not exactly the mahogany corner office. There was just enough room to move the dorsals to stay upright. Probably not enough water circulation to keep the gills happy. But Gregorson was thankful to have employment that might eventually make his dad proud, especially in this economy. So much about his path seemed like it was pre-determined by his family. So be it. Gregorson go to reading that onboarding memo.
This boat’s warranty does not cover use on open water. Should a user find him or her self on a body of water larger by volume than a pond, the manufacturer will not be held responsible for any negative outcomes and the rower hereby agrees to having complaints resolved via binding arbitration, with an arbitrator appointed and paid by the manufacturer.
Employment contracts were rough these days. Apparently this was a state that had employer-friendly laws on the books. Damned Republicans, Gregorson thought. His parents both claimed that he would move “into the right” one inch for every dollar he paid in taxes, but it was still well before paycheck number one. Gregorson waited, re-reading the memo. He wanted to make a good impression on his first day, even if his muscles were starting to get sore with the floating in one place; he was used to motion.
Finally, a set of crayfish antennae appeared under the lip of the boat, followed by pincers and a segmented body. After introducing himself as Chuck, the crayfish apologized for his peers in collections. “They really don’t like new people, it makes them paranoid about cost cutting. But now that you’re here, the zeebs might even need more of us, so I’m not worried.” Chuck left behind a pile of tiny rocks that were meant to be counted and piled onto quagga mussel shells in groups of a dozen.
Gregorson dutifully piled rocks onto the shells until he ran out. As he was poking his head out to look for Eliza or Chuck and see what time it was (he was hungry and ready to go home), Chuck and several other crayfish barged into the boat-office with another pile of shells and rocks, while panfish that didn’t bother to identify themselves dragged away the rock-heavy shells. Not meaning to shout, but not ready to be alone again, Gregorson blurted out before the last craytail could disappear, “what are the shells with rock piles for?!” One of the little lobsters (not Chuck) turned around just enough to reply: “Eliza didn’t tell you? The zebra mussels run this part of the lake and they absolutely hate the quaggas. Nothing pisses a quagga off more than a pile of rocks on the shells of one of their dead. The zeebs want to build a wall all the way around this part of the lake bed, covered in quagga corpses. Oh, and the quagga’s unlucky number is twelve, so they hate that even more. but the lake currents tend to move the shells around and wash the rocks away. So we probably have jobs for life!”
With that, the crayfish was gone, back to gather up and transport more pebbles and shells for desecration, apparently. Gregorson thought he was going to be sick. This was what it meant to have a real job in the real world, outside of the school?
Gregorson coughed and water spilled out onto the sand. The photographer that had pulled Gregorson out of the water using some impressively engineered combination of rope and a tripod had build a huge fire, and the snow was melted for five yards away from the fire. His toes and fingers were just regaining feeling. “How long was I under?” Gregorson asked his savior.
“You were only in the water for sixty seconds, tops. I have a video of you checking your phone and sliding right into the open water. You’re going to have to give me a pretty good reason not to post it every platform, now that you’re going to survive and keep all your limbs.”
Aghast, Gregorson pleaded weakly, “But I’m just starting my first job soon! They’ll rescind the offer I was trying to look at for sure if they see that their newest analyst can’t even pay enough attention to stay out of deadly cold water!”
The photographer laughed. “I’m not putting this anywhere, but I think you’ll want a copy of the footage to memorialize the profound saying, don’t text and ski. I’m Quagga, by the way. Q for short.”
Gregorson looked grateful, then puzzled, then asked, “so who do you work for?” Seemed like the closest thing he could think to the universal college party conversation starter what’s your major. Not that anyone ever remembered that kind of thing. Anyway, Gregorson was trying to work out how his mind was feeling split between what was clearly reality and that stuff that was playing out in his brain while he was submerged.
Q laughed again. “I don’t work for anyone, that way of life is for the fishes. Soft, sun-starved, airless animals. Offices are no place for the vigorous outdoorsmen like us, nearly drowning in river mouths and making big beach fires. I’m a freelancer, taking enough gigs to pay the bills and enable my real passion, rescuing oblivious young people from freezing water.”
Gregorson managed a chuckle at that one, but couldn’t help but darkly consider his real future. Were florescent lights and swivel chairs any better than menacing, repurposed legal jargon on the inside of an upturned boat?
Ten years later, and in late February, Gregorson is back in Upper Peninsula. He’s skiing again, this time far more attentively (and now with angular eyeglasses, turns out his distance vision wasn’t that great). He skied off the lake right before that fateful river mouth, and found none other than Q. The photographer laughed and walked past his tripod and toward Gregorson. “My man, what have you been up to the last ten years?”
Gregorson told the story of rejecting all the offers he received after graduation and striking out under his own shingle. One of his image processing projects (done in his free time) had led to the submarine drone-based identification and removal of nearly every zebra mussel in Lake Michigan.
Roman Ryan 