Recently, the Crescenta Valley Water District held a science fiction writing contest for middle and high school students that focused on life without water. Below is the winning submittal by Nicolas Dermardirosian.

CVWD is also hosting Imagine A Day Without Water on Saturday, Sept. 28 from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Judy Tejeda Reservoir, located in the 4700 block of Rosemont Avenue.

The Last Orange Tree

By Nicolas DERMARDIROSIAN

River picked off the leaves with black spots. He hoped that meant it wouldn’t be able to spread. The small tree sat in a pot outside of the grocery store that River had been living in for a few months. It sat next to one of the last solar panels in the valley.

The sun was harsh on human skin, but was an important source of energy for the young orange tree and the panel.

While most valuables and products were stripped at the beginning of the water crisis, some usable canned food remained. Most ran to the coast in hopes of distilling salt water. They failed to consider that distilling is expensive and inefficient, especially at large scales. The mass exodus of people to beach towns only led to the Santa Monica Distilling crisis. River didn’t know though. He still had an old radio, but the music never stopped for news. River was sure that he was the last person left in La Crescenta. [He] had not seen anyone else in months.

River was able to continue on by using a makeshift atmospheric water generator that he made in college before the crisis. While it supported River and his tree, [atmospheric water generators] were unable to be mass-produced at the scale needed to stop the water crisis. Still, each year more moisture left the atmosphere and eventually the yields would not sustain them.

Even without that, the solar panel powering it would need maintenance that River was unable to provide. That was a problem for later.

Despite most human-operated radio stations going down, automatic stations continued on – endless playlists of song after song. Even though hundreds of different songs played each day, when River went over to turn it on, he recognized the song. It was called “Rivers in the Desert,” though he never knew the name of it. He just thought it sounded nice.

There wasn’t much for him to do alone there, but he wanted to do at least something productive. River decided to try to find some old textbooks in the high school, hoping that he could learn something useful. While all of the electronics were long gone, some of the old physical textbooks were probably still in storage in case of a power outage. Those happened a lot leading up to the crisis.

The sun beat down upon him but he tried to stay in the shade. It was his old high school so he knew the area, but it still took a few hours. Most of the greenery was dead but a few bushes and trees remained using what little ground water they had. Although the building was in some level of disrepair, it was the same high school that he remembered. A mural of a blue falcon remained intact as it was out of the sun. It was a peregrine falcon, a species lucky enough to be able to survive in both warm and cold climates. Most of them migrated to the arctic as water began to dry up, using the ice as a source of freshwater.

Ironically, the once desolate continent of Antarctica was now the most prosperous area of life on the planet. Scientists refused to allow governments to melt and steal frozen freshwater due to the adverse effect on the climate. As a result of that decision, countless lives were lost – in the short-term at least.

River used a small flashlight he had bought at a hardware store a few years earlier. He still knew his way around the hallways and started looking through classrooms to see if he could find anything. As he entered one classroom and shut the door behind him, he heard what sounded like footsteps in the hallway. Finding nothing inside, he cautiously reopened the door and looked around, but nothing was there.

River continued on in the hallway, checking each classroom for textbooks or anything else he could use, but they were mostly empty. When he reached the end of the hallway, he found a door ajar. It had steps leading down into what looked like a basement. River walked down as quietly as he could, worried that there could be someone there.

The basement was cool and there were shelves full of all sorts of antique objects: personal computers, laptops and textbooks. River grabbed a few that looked interesting and began to leave. As he walked back up the stairs he saw something scurry beneath him, and [he] jumped in shock. He fell on his back and pointed his flashlight to see that it was just a ground squirrel. Like the remaining flora, the ground squirrels survived off the small amounts of underground moisture. This one must have come in when he opened the door to the school.

With his fears gone, he went outside to start the trek back. The sun was starting to go down. While there was nothing and nobody that could hurt him at night, River was still shaken up from the scare of the squirrel and didn’t want to get lost, so he chose a classroom, took a blanket from his pack and used it to sleep for the night. Before sleeping he read one of the books he took, a book on biology. He propped up his flashlight to read and looked for anything about orange trees, drought or diseases. After about an hour, he gave up and went to bed.

In the morning River packed up his things. He felt as though the falcon was watching him as he left. When he returned to the grocery store he found that the black spots on the orange leaves had spread not only to other leaves, but to the stem. It was likely that the whole orange tree was diseased at this point.

River spent the next few days checking the books he found and tried everything he could think of, but it was of no use. Eventually the spots spread further and the young tree began to die. Without the knowledge or the resources, River was powerless to save it. Days passed until eventually he looked at the tree, and it was evident that it was dead, its formerly bright green leaves turned brown and black. As more days passed, the tree stayed in the pot. There were no insects to decompose it so it sat there, dead, next to the solar panel, in front of the old grocery store.