Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Eastmere ·
The Water That Took the Tally
Reservoir gauges read normal, but the paper tally charts stop at line thirty-three on every page, whatever the week's actual rainfall.
- filed: "Before the first frost"
- reference: "EM/RW/06"
1. Filed by the works foreman on the autumn maintenance trip to the Eastmere impounding reservoir, party of three, two nights at the bungalow. Scope per the standing order: gauge well calibration, spillway debris clearance, float line inspection, and the reading of the painted staff gauges against the paper tallies held in the record box. Everything in this file was written in the bungalow or in the boat, in the wet, and the paper smells of the res, and I have not tried to disguise that.
2. Eastmere is a small concrete weir with a gauge well in the valve house and a set of staff plates painted down the tower face. The water is quiet water. On the first inspection of the trip, all instruments agreed. The well float read the same as the staff plates to the width of a fingernail, the record chart in the well drum was inked and turning as it should, and I signed the calibration line in the works diary saying so. That signature is the last line on which this file and the reality of the summer agree, and everything after it is a discrepancy recorded by three men who were cold, sober and doing this work for a combined seventy years.
3. The float line inspection went as usual. The wire is greased, the weight descends true, the counter reads. Nothing came up wrong on any of it. Debris on the spillway was one fence rail, which I have logged with its two nails. The anomaly, when we found it, was not in the res at all. It was in the record box.
4. The tallies are ruled sheets, eighty lines to the page, filled in by the reader's own hand each morning, morning reading at the top line, evening at the bottom, the page turning over about a working week. The sheets for the season past are complete. Every page has an entry in every line from the first to the last. The pages of the season before are exactly the same, and there is one difference, and I want the reviewer to take it not as a mystification but as a counting: every page stops at line 33. All of them, both seasons, back to the ones browned in the box, every page's rule of entries goes top line to line 33 and does not continue, and the pages are not blank below 33, and the paper shows no fading and no water stain, and ink sits on every page up to a line that is numbered 33, and no entry below.
5. We went through four boxes of them in the valve house with the stove going, and I said aloud that this was a filing joke, someone reading thirty-three and quitting, and the junior read me back six consecutive masters from the water board copy where the same pages are intact through line 80 with readings in the same ink of the same dates, and the copy and the original agree line for line to 33, and then one goes on and one does not, and the two hands are the same man's. He wrote them both. He wrote the full copy and he wrote the short original in the box, and the ink is the same, and the nib is the same, and one page is whole and one page is not.
6. On the second evening I took the evening reading myself, because after four hours of pages I was not going to let the drum tell me again what was wrong with the well. The well and the staff agreed, and the chart that night inked its line good, and in the morning the entry I wrote went in at the top of the page in my hand in my ink, and turned the page over the page that had my yesterday in it stopped at 33.
7. The page stops. We checked and I cannot explain this and the junior will not carry the sheets to the office and the other man has signed the trip sheet and gone quiet about the boat leg. The gauges are normal. The res is normal. The record box's tally charts stop at line 33 every page, and if the reviewer turns back to paragraph 2 they will find I have already admitted signing the one line in this file that said all of it was well.