Thin Walls | By Hanna Sander-Green

Thin Walls

written by Hanna Sander-Green

1st Place

Winters are still cold here, but my grandma says there used to be more snow. Snowbanks so high you could sit on your daddy’s shoulders, and even then you couldn’t see over. She says the lake used to be thick with ice well into April. I guess it’s different here now — like everywhere – but it’s plenty cold outside today.

Inside the house, I’m warm. My grandma used to pay hundreds of dollars a month to feel warmth like this is in her house. Two hundred or 300 dollars or more, she said.

The walls were thin, then. You couldn’t sit in the window sill, as I am now, awash with sun from the south. You couldn’t even set a book or a mug on the sill – that’s to give you an idea of how thin the walls were. She says they held some heat, yes, but before you knew it, the heat always found its way outside, like a 16-year-old sneaking out after curfew. So, she had to pay more money for more heat that would soon escape, too.

She said the windows were worse. Set your hand on one and you’d feel the cool touch of the outside air, inside! And they’d be built facing any old bearing on the compass. Big windows facing straight north, if the view was to your liking.

She said the electricity — for the heat, that she paid so much money for — came from far away. Not from panels on the roof, like mine. Not from a wind turbine down the road (we have those, too). She paid a company that ran a power plant hundreds of miles away. She was connected to that plant by a thick web of wires, crisscrossing the forests this way and that. The company paid to have coal shipped from hundreds of miles away from the plant, on trains. Before the trains, the coal came from inside mountains and rolling hills; their tops were scraped off as if they were no more than an unwanted layer of thick icing on a cake. And if all of those great distances weren’t enough, the companies who owned the coal mines and the power plants and the wires running every which way, they were all somewhere else, too, in a big city not connected to any of it.

Funny thing my grandma told me: they called the rocks and the soil and the trees, the thick skin of the mountain above the coal, ‘overburden.’ You know what sounds like a burden to me? Hauling coal out of the middle of a perfectly good mountain, shipping it halfway across who-knows-where, making electricity to send even farther along, heating a house with it, just to have it seep out of the windows and walls, anyways. Then paying all that money for it, month after month.

Another burden would be having to move your house to higher ground, after the river spilled its banks one too many times. That’s what happened to my grandma.

Good things came of building part of the city over, though. That’s when they built the thick walls and made sure the big windows faced to the south. That’s when they put solar panels on many of the roofs, gardens on others. That’s when they disconnected from the wires that brought the power from the coal that came from inside the mountains so far away.

Grandma says the best part of all was that the companies that dug up the coal had to help pay for a lot of the big move. Other companies too, those that drilled and scraped the earth for oil and those that shook the land so violently when they went about fracking for natural gas. Because it was they who made all of the money back when things were different (when my grandma paid so much for heating her house), and it was they who had to take responsibility for the river flooding year after year.

About the Author

Hanna Sander-Green has a BS in physical geography. She’s worked as a backcountry lodge cook, a ski patroller, a whitewater raft guide throughout Canada, and a virtual bookkeeper. Her life has changed dramatically in the last year, when she became ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis. Hanna is a mom to two young children and a growing collection of houseplants in British Columbia, Canada.

Why Hanna wrote this story:

“I read about this contest in Emily Atkin’s fantastic newsletter called HEATED. I decided to write about a future that I dearly hope for, and think is possible, if we can build enough public engagement around — and mobilization for — serious climate action.”