Margot Cleverly's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The next morning Margot drove out to the cabin before school. She stood in the main room and looked at what she had: two workbenches, a coil of copper wire, blueprints pinned to the wall, and no way to run a single motor. Her students were coming in three weeks. Dead tools would waste the whole build. She needed power, and she could not run a line from the road without a permit and a name on paper. She made a list on the back of an envelope. Solar was too slow and too visible on the roof. A gas generator would idle loud enough to carry across the reservoir. That left the creek behind the cabin. It ran fast all summer. She had taught the water wheel unit for six years. She could build one in a weekend if she had the parts. The parts were the problem. A used marine alternator, a deep-cycle battery, an inverter, pipe, bearings. Too much to charge to the school. Too much to buy in town without someone noticing. She drove two counties over to an estate sale posted online. The house was a bright coastal place with wide porches and faded shutters. A tiered planter of herbs sat by the steps, tagged three dollars. Inside, a widow was selling her husband's shop. Margot found the alternator in a milk crate under a bench. She found the battery beside it. She paid cash and asked no questions and the widow asked none back. She worked at the cabin through Saturday and into Sunday. She dammed a narrow point in the creek with stones and a sheet of plywood. She mounted the wheel on a shaft cut from old pipe. She wired the alternator through a regulator to the battery, then the battery to the inverter. Her hands cramped. She skipped lunch. A pale elk stepped out of the trees at dusk and watched her from across the water, then moved on. At sundown Monday she flipped the switch on the inverter. The meter jumped. She plugged in a bench lamp. It came on steady. She plugged in the drill press. It spun up clean and held its speed. She sat down on the floor and laughed once, hard. She walked down to check the intake before dark. The creek had cut wider around her dam already. On the far bank, half in the shallows, a river crocodile lay watching the wheel turn. She had never seen one this far up. It did not move. She backed away slowly and climbed to the cabin. She had power. She also had a dam that changed the water, and something downstream had noticed. Come morning she would need to reinforce the intake before the creek tore it out, and she would need to decide what to do about the animal that had claimed her tailrace.