Gibraltar Falls

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Gibraltar Falls

I love my history class, but as I looked around at my classmates, I realized that I was pretty much the only one paying attention.

Not that I totally blamed my classmates, as it was the last day of school before spring break, so most of them have ... other things on their minds.

So did I, but I tried and focus on our teacher anyway ...

“All right, let’s just do a quick review of what we’ll be covering when you come back before you all run away on me.” Our teacher said.

“One hundred years ago, there was a Great Disaster. No one to this day knows what caused it, but the effects were felt around the world. Continents shifted, cities fell into the ocean, it was remarkable that there were survivors at all, much less as so many. The survivors worked on restoring the world, and although much progress has been made, we still have work to do. The past one hundred years, and where we are now will be our focus when you come back from your holidays.”

Just then, the bell rang, and the teacher said, “Which starts now. Have a good break.”

We all filed out, and headed to our respective lockers. I was almost finished pulling the last of my stuff out when I heard Grace behind me say “You planning on leaving without a goodbye?”

“Never” I replied, turned around, and gave her a kiss.

“Are you going to come back to school as Carter, or Kathy?” she asked.

“Still working on that. Might wait till summer to do a full changeover.” I replied.

“Where you going to spend spring break?” She asked me.

“My parents have been wanting to take me to where they met and were married for a while, so they saved up enough, and we’re going to Gibraltar Falls.”

“Oh wow. Which side? My folks are going to be doing business in North Africa and we might get a chance to swing by the African side.”

“We’ll be on the European side, mostly in some little Spanish village that has been rebuilt to look almost exactly as it was before the Great Disaster. I’ve heard they’re talking about building a bridge across the falls, too bad its not built yet, or we could meet in the middle.”

“We’ll figure something out. It’s not like there aren't ferries going back and forth all the time.”

“Unless you find some handsome man in Africa.” I said.

“Or you find someone in Spain - man, woman, maybe a bit of both ...”

“I’d rather keep you, if it’s all the same to you.” I said, and we kissed again.

I packed up my stuff, and went home, and that night, after supper, I made sure I had everything for the trip. Not for the first time I envied the people before the Great Disaster who had instantaneous communication through the internet. It’s not that we’ve lost the technology, it’s that the rare earth metals used in making phones and computers are now ... well ... rarer, and so only the very richest people have such devices.

The next morning we go down to the train station and head towards Gibraltar. The train uses solar power and glides across the countryside quietly and quickly. As we travel, my mom and dad talk about the improvements that have been made since they first came down here on their way to a honeymoon by the Falls. They talk about the series of canals and locks that allows ships to cross from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean across the tip of what was once Spain, and the plans to build a suspension bridge across the Falls.

I guess to them, it represents the resilience and ingenuity of mankind.

Me, I was too busy missing Grace.

She was the first person besides my parents to learn I felt more like a girl than a boy, and we’ve only grown closer since.

I did have to admit that the Gibraltar Seaway was pretty impressive seen from the train.

But it was nothing compared to the Falls itself.

I’d seen pictures, of course, but they paled compared to the real thing.

Caused by the Great Disaster, it’s more than five miles long, and more than twenty-five miles high. There is nothing like it in the world, and people like my parents have been coming for at least the last thirty, fifty years, turning it into the number one honeymoon destination.

Maybe that does say something about our species, that we can turn what is essentially a wound in the very planet itself into a place for wonder and love.

And I found myself hoping that Grace and I will coming here on our honeymoon, and that by that time I will be as complete a woman as I can be.

It’s nice to have stuff to look forward to, you know?

End.

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Comments

Slowly I turned...

erin's picture

...step by step...

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Oh, yes

erin's picture

Light little bits of SF like this filled the magazines of the fifties and I loved it. :) I also love vaudeville.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

maybe a meteor.

or the Earth is actually inside one of those snow globes and someone gave it a shake ?

Oh, and thanks for the link, I had forgotten that little bit of vaudeville ...

DogSig.png

"It’s nice to have stuff to

"It’s nice to have stuff to look forward to, you know?"

It definitely is beecause it gives hope. Hope for a better future.

Nice one Dot.

L

Interesting

You imply some sot of disastrous continental shift bu never specify details. Well done.

thanks, Wendy

continental drifting only at fast and furious speeds maybe ...

DogSig.png

intresting point

There is some literature around that there was something like a Gibraltar falls ;). Or at least with the Atlantic being kept out and the Mediterranian being a lower plain behind Gibraltar at a time (pehistoric)

http://legacy.earlham.edu/~samueke/Gibraltar.htm

L

the two continents are getting closer to each other

I saw a show on some nature channel on how in a few million years Africa will hit Europe, and the Mediterranean will be first an inland sea, and eventually a salt plain. I just took the idea and tweaked it a bit ...

DogSig.png

Gibraltar Falls

It's interesting that you took one of the theories of what caused the Great Flood and turned it into a story. I like how the human race marches on after sugh a huge cataclysm.

the human race marches on

yeah, I wanted to go away from the dystopia idea that seems so popular right now, and imagine us as resilient and imaginative instead ...

DogSig.png

Great Flood

No such thing, of course. No wooden boat on Ararat, etc. We have lots of writings from before, during and after the 'Deluge' that never mention it. Then there's the animal life that was nowhere near where said boat was supposed to be (sloths, marsupials) that somehow survived... On the other hand, there are Aboriginal dream time tales from Queensland that quite accurately recount coastal flooding in the very distant past, well before the Noachian flood.

What I did think of was Julian May's Saga of the Exiles, which takes the real example of the Pliocene Mediterranean basin, which was dry at the time, and eventually flooded (in real world) by a breach at Gibraltar--a real enormous waterfall of the kind you describe.

From memory, Harry Turtledove wrote 'Down in the Bottomlands', which was set in a dry Med basin, and featured interactions between civilised Neanderthal and Sapiens people.

I read some stuff about Gibraltar after writing this story.

its got a fascinating history. Apparently before World War II there was a guy who wanted to dam the strait to make a huge hydroelectric site, and turn the Med into farmland. But after he died, the idea kinda fizzled out ...

DogSig.png

Gib

I know the place very, very well. The current in the straits is weird, water flows both ways at once (out of the Med at depth, inwards on the surface). the Spanish and Moroccans are in regular and recent discussions about a rail tunnel from Tarifa to Africa. Despite claims made in Gib, that Europa Point is the southernmost part of the European mainland, you can see La Tarifa to the West and, ahem, South...

The shallowest part is 280 metres deep, and the Strait opened five and a third million years ago, or slightly less than five and a third million before the supposed boating trip for Noah.

Dry Mediterranean

I remember reading an article where they found evidence of the Nile river bed deep under the Mediterranean. I forgot how many hundreds of feet down it was. But it really looks like the Straits of Gibraltar were closed, once upon a time.

By the way, there was a more recent cataclysmic flood in North America -- just after the past ice age.

An ice dam held back a huge lake full of glacial melt water. When it went, it really went. Thus, places like the Badlands were created.

http://hugefloods.com/

The Med

...has been drained and flooded several times, as revealed by the salt layers in drill cores all around the Med. The last time was long before the earliest hominids appeared in Kenya. The ancient rivers would have run all the way down to the salt lake in the bottom, which was the lowest place on Earth. Then, as now, evaporation in the Med exceeds the flow of all rivers, requiring the difference from the Atlantic. The evaporated saltier water is heavier, sinking to the bottom and flowing back out to the deeper basin.

The Scablands floods have been extensively studied. In addition to the website mentioned, the University of Washington has a truly wonderful series of public lectures by the same professor on YouTube, which see.

It has been calculated that the total insolation falling on the ice would has been far insufficient to melt that volume of ice (even if it was black) in the time alloted, leading to speculation that end of the ice age might have been aided or caused by the impact(s?) now known to have struck the area at that time, leaving no trace on the ground below 2-3 miles of ice.

The Black Sea flood was later, currently dated about 8000 years ago. It destroyed a prime habitation area, displacing people who would have fled with only what they could carry.

Correction...

...it was Central Washington University

Black Sea

Remind me which big mountain is in that general area...

I was watching a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, and they compared a Dreamtime story, which spoke of flooding and loss of land, and it matched quite well the historic human-scale geological record.

Ararat

joannebarbarella's picture

You couldn't forget it!

The geological/marine records indicate that the Great Barrier Reef has only existed for around 14000 years. As you surmised that ties in reasonably well with Dreamtime legends and human occupation of the pre-existing littoral.

You might be interested in

Brooke Erickson's picture

You might be interested in the late Randall Garret's Gandalara series.

Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks

Atlantis Legend

joannebarbarella's picture

There is evidence that the Dardanelles, not too many thousands of years ago were dry but became a huge waterfall that eventually created the Black Sea and inundated what some now believe was Atlantis and that this was caused/ related to a vast influx of water occasioned by the end of the Ice Age which raised the water levels from Gibraltar all through what was then the Mediterranean (much lower than now) and inundated vast areas of land between Africa and Europe.

From where we sit an attractive theory, not so good if you were the people evicted from their homes and land by the rising floodwaters.

ah, the stuff I learn

after writing a story about a trans girl going on spring break ...

DogSig.png

Gibraltar Falls

I love vignettes like this... some of my very favorite writing is in the same sort of style and this is a great one!

Add some fun geekery in comments and a bonus! A Turtledove story I didn't know about!

Well worth the... erm... (wonders what word applies to clicking when no mouse is involved...:)

Thanks!

Abby

Battery.jpg

Atlantis

better candidate for that is Santorini, which was once a big round island and is now a submerged crater. It caused the collapse of the Minoan (Atlantis?) civilisation it was so violent.

One odd bit of chronology that fits with the eruption is the claimed date of the Exodus. There is a theory that the route wasn't south of Sinai on the Red Sea but north of it. Santorini will have triggered a mega tsunami, so there you have all this sea floor suddenly drained... followed by an inrush of flood waters at a speed too great to escape. Sound familiar?