Speculative Fiction: St. Louis, September 18, 2036
The coffee tastes different at 5:15 AM when you know the day will hit 97 degrees by noon. I drink it standing at the kitchen window, watching pre-dawn light spread across the Mississippi Valley. Through the glass I can already feel the thickness in the air, that weight that settles in by mid-August now and doesn't lift until November. September used to cool down.
The drive to Kinloch takes forty minutes on the elevated highway. They raised this stretch of I-170 after the 2031 floods, and now the morning commute runs twenty feet above what used to be industrial parks. In the gray light I can see the old buildings sitting in managed wetland—roofs and upper floors emerging from cattails and standing water, great blue herons picking through the shallows where loading docks used to be.
The radio reports river levels at Memphis dropped another eight inches overnight. I do the math automatically: another week of light-loaded barges, another 200 tons per barge we're not moving.
The Schnucks distribution center appears as a low concrete mass against the dawn, 915,000 square feet humming with refrigeration before the sun clears the horizon. I cross the parking lot—asphalt already radiating yesterday's stored heat—and the temperature differential hits when the loading dock door opens. Seventy-three degrees to fifty-five in two steps. My skin prickles. This is the temperature I work in, the managed cold that keeps cities fed.
The morning briefing brings three problems at once. Memphis barge restrictions—rates up 29% in a week. I-70 flooding at the Kansas line. Grid failure at the Memphis cold storage facility overnight. My manager runs through them while I watch the regional logistics map, red lines spreading across the Midwest like capillaries. The software calculates cold chain timing automatically, but I'm the one who makes the calls.
Seven-thirty and I'm on the phone with Memphis, negotiating barge rates with a terminal manager who sounds as tired as I feel. Everyone in logistics sounds tired by September. We've been managing disruptions since May. I authorize the rate increase because the alternative is watching produce spoil.
The Kansas City dairy problem requires different choreography. I call the backup supplier in Springfield, reroute four trucks, notify store managers about delays. Each decision connects to a dozen others. We've built redundancy into the system because we had to. I don't let myself think about how much longer we can keep adding layers to something fundamentally stressed.
At lunch I eat a sandwich with the fleet coordinators. We talk about someone's kid starting college, the Cardinals' playoff chances, whether the new Vietnamese restaurant on Gravois is worth trying. The break room AC struggles against afternoon heat building outside. Someone jokes about the thermostat wars. This is just work. This is just September.
The afternoon is monitoring and adjustment. I watch cold chain sensors track every truck, every storage bay, every transfer point. A refrigeration unit flags half a degree warm. I call the driver, who pulls over and fixes a loose connection in fifteen minutes. Those fifteen minutes matter when you're managing perishable inventory across five states, but they're not a crisis. Just the ordinary difficulty of keeping complex systems running.
Four o'clock and the Memphis grid is back up, but the facility can't take new shipments until tomorrow. I reroute the meat delivery to Little Rock—200 extra miles, another day of transit. The costs accumulate in the spreadsheet. Transportation up 23% for the week. Inventory buffers drawn down. But the stores will stay stocked. The cold chain held. For today.
I leave at six, walking back across parking lot heat that hasn't broken. My car's interior is an oven until the AC catches up. The drive home reverses the morning route—elevated highway above transformed floodplain, radio reporting tomorrow's forecast: high of 99, heat advisory in effect. Through the windshield I watch evening light slant golden across the wetlands, and I try to remember what this valley looked like before. The Mississippi will stay low through October. It has for five years running.
At home I pour another coffee, iced this time, and stand at the same kitchen window. The light is fading now, the heat finally easing. Tomorrow I'll make more calls, adjust more routes, monitor more sensors. The choreography gets more complex each year, the costs higher, the expertise deeper but also narrower somehow. I don't know if what we're building is resilience or postponement. The work continues because it has to. One decision at a time.
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Mississippi River drought patterns: Water levels near Memphis reached -12 feet in October 2023, breaking records for the third consecutive year and forcing barges to carry 200 fewer tons per trip.
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Barge transportation economics: For each foot of draft reduction on the Mississippi River, an individual barge is loaded with 7,000 fewer bushels of soybeans, requiring more trips and dramatically increasing fuel costs and transit times.
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Cold chain monitoring technology: Modern food distribution relies on IoT-enabled sensors that track temperature, humidity, and handling conditions in real time, ensuring compliance with safety standards throughout the supply chain.
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Regional distribution infrastructure: Schnucks Markets operates a 915,000-square-foot distribution center in Kinloch with over 400,000 square feet of cold storage, servicing 100 stores across five states with specialized temperature zones for different products.