«Listen, your mom and I have been thinking, and we’ve decided—we’re moving.»
«To hell with it, I’m almost eighty, it’s time to live for myself in the end.»
«Dad, who exactly are you living for here, if you don’t mind me asking?»
«Me? Here… Ah, you wouldn’t understand anyway.»
Father waved his knotty hand at me and went to the kitchen. He always did this when he had nothing to counter with, or when the facts were clearly against him. I decided not to give up and followed him.
This new whim about moving was concerning.
«Don’t walk away from me. And where exactly are you planning to move? Mom, do you support this nonsense? Or haven’t they informed you yet?»
«Uwe, we really have decided to move,» Mom said quietly.
She hated when we argued. And my father and I argued quite often. Actually, every time I visited them in the house where I grew up, it ended in indecent quarreling with my father and my mother’s tears. It had turned into a kind of ritual, usually concluding with a reconciliatory dinner of pork knuckle and beer.
«Fine. Let’s say I accept this. But where have you decided to move?»
«We haven’t decided where yet.»
«Don’t talk to him. He’s an idiot,» my father’s voice came through as he disappeared behind the door.
«And how did this idea come to you? Who put you up to this?»
First, I needed to rule out a scam. Elderly people often fall for all kinds of scoundrels who conduct their dirty business at the expense of trusting seniors.
«Karl came up with it.» Mom pointed to the doorway where my father’s bald head had gleamed a few seconds ago. «He approached me in the evening and suggested it, and I suddenly realized that I wanted it too.»
«What about Mrs. Pfultz’s shop, where you chat for an hour and a half? Will you find another one?»
«What about Klaus’s tavern? Dad practically lives there.»
«Every town has a tavern. But not every town has a Klaus. Besides, you’ve always told me that Wittmund is your home. You’ve lived here your whole life. Several generations of our family are buried in the local cemetery.»
«Now it’s our time too. Is that what you’re hinting at, Uwe?»
«Of course not, Mom, I said something stupid. I’m just worried about you.»
«Maybe you’re right, but it suddenly seemed to me that it was time for a change, and then Karl came with his suggestion.»
«Okay, I understand you want a change, but you can’t just leave for nowhere. Maybe you want to go somewhere warmer? Provence? Genoa? Valencia, after all? Surely you have some ideas.»
«Yes, we do!»
My father had been standing behind the door eavesdropping the whole time.
«And? What are these ideas? We’re thinking about Norden or Cuxhaven!»
He smiled proudly.
I had to take several deep breaths to keep from bursting with irritation.
«Let me get this straight—you’re planning a torturous move just to relocate either 40 kilometers west or 100 kilometers east?»
«So? Maybe you also want to sell the house?»
«No, no, we won’t sell the house,» Mom held her palms out in front of her.
«We’ll probably rent it out.»
«Well, that’s logical, of course. But still very strange. Are you sure this is really what you want? That this is your idea?»
«Martha, just look what a stupid penguin we’ve raised. I’ve told you ten times already—this is our idea. This is what we want. What difference does it make to you?»
«What difference does it make to me? I nearly choked with indignation. And who’s going to handle all of this? The move, the rental, the paperwork? You? If it’s you, then I have no questions. Go ahead.»
«As if,» my father snorted, «I didn’t bring you into this world to still be dealing with paperwork at 80.»
«That’s what I thought. And it wasn’t you who gave birth to me, it was Mom.»
«Boys, how about some beer?»
«Maybe I didn’t give birth, but I participated. I was probably wrong, since such an ungrateful creature grew up. But what can you do.»
The phone call caught me in the office when I was working on a report. The endless rows of tables on the monitor were making my eyes blur, and I was even glad for the distraction. But seeing who was calling, I wasn’t immediately sure whether to answer or not.
«Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?»
«Yes, Dad.»
«We’re coming back. Cancel the renters. I think we’ll arrive tomorrow.»
My hands started trembling. Holding the phone to my ear, I stared blankly at my dancing fingers for several seconds, wondering what melody would emerge if a piano suddenly materialized beneath them.
For two weeks, I handled my parents’ move. I even had to take vacation time. We threw out 24 bags of junk. Half of them secretly from my father. He desperately needed a spare headlight from an Opel he had sold 15 years ago. Bank statements from 2006, three broken plastic chairs from the attic, and many, many other completely useless things. The only thing he agreed to throw away almost without a fight was a malfunctioning electric razor. Of course, he agreed on the condition that we keep two others that shaved slightly better. There was also one given to him three years ago, but it still lay unopened because its time had not yet come. The box with the old razor, which I was entrusted to throw away, was tenderly wrapped in three plastic bags. Good thing I thought to look inside, because the box contained my father’s stash of 30,000 euros, which he had, of course, forgotten about.
I spent another week helping my parents rent a house in Norden, a tiny town that was slightly closer to the North Sea coast than Wittmund. Then I listed my parents’ house on short-term and long-term rental sites. I found a tenant and that was that.
After almost a month, I decided I could enjoy some peace.
«Hello! Are you deaf? Can you hear me? We’re coming back tomorrow!»
«Deal with the tenant yourselves,» I growled angrily and hung up.
My visit to my parents in their newly reclaimed old house was postponed several times. I had to catch up on work, but finally, a month after this whole saga, I jumped in the car and went to visit them. When I parked by the lawn, the sun was already approaching the horizon, and a fresh breeze gently carried away flies that seemed to be sleeping mid-flight.
The first thing that caught my eye when I crossed the threshold of my childhood home were numerous cardboard boxes with labels on them. This was completely unlike my parents, and especially unlike my mother. Mom would never allow such a thing.
«Hi, son.»
«Hi, Mom. You still haven’t unpacked?»
«Oh no, we unpacked in the first week. It’s just…»
«You’ve decided to move again?» I joked, or so I thought.
«Yes,» said Mom, looking at the floor.
«Okay, seriously, what’s with the boxes?»
«We’re moving, Uwe. But this time I told your father not to bother you.»
«And where to this time?»
I realized things were getting serious and my parents had gone crazy.
«Apparently to Cuxhaven. It won’t be any different from Norden, which you fled after two days, you do realize that?»
«Uwe. I understand everything, but I don’t understand anything,» Mom said in confusion and smiled guiltily.
«What about Mrs. Pfultz, Klaus, what do they say about this?»
«Mrs. Pfultz went to Dortmund, Klaus is selling his tavern and also saying ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to Wittmund, and Margarita… Margarita sold her house and sailed off on a round-the-world cruise.»
The strange epidemic of exodus from Wittmund amazed me. I decided not to discuss anything with my parents for now and got them to promise to hold off on moving for another week.
We had a wonderful chat over lunch. Father was rude, of course, but less than usual. It was obvious that he was also confused. He even had to change the handkerchief he used to wipe his bald head because the previous one was completely soaked. I said warm goodbyes to Mom and Dad, got on the highway, already by moonlight, and started thinking.
As a child, I dreamed of being a detective. When I grew up, I became a big data analyst, which was roughly the same thing, but three times more boring and five times more profitable. Both professions involved solving puzzles through information analysis. This puzzle needed to be solved in a fairly tight timeframe.
Citing family circumstances and promising my boss to catch up on work upon my return, I decided to get to the bottom of this.
First, I needed to understand the scale of the disaster. I visited several real estate rental sites to see how things were in Wittmund. Things were bad. Nearly a third of the houses were for sale or rent. Prices had dropped due to oversupply even compared to last month when I was looking for tenants.
Knowing the neighbors a bit, I saw that it was mainly the homes of elderly people that were being sold or rented. This was strange. It’s known that the tendency to change locations is more characteristic of young people. I needed to determine the cause of such a massive desire to leave.
Since my parents were silent as partisans, I called several realtors and began questioning them about the reasons for selling homes. They couldn’t give any coherent answers, and one even said that he too had noticed this strange trend and didn’t understand the reasons.
If others were noticing the anomaly, then I was on the right track.
I called my mother once more and asked why Mrs. Pfultz, Klaus, and Margarita had left. She said that Mrs. Pfultz missed her children and decided to move closer to them. Klaus was tired of selling beer to grumpy old men like my father and wanted to settle further south. And Margarita was tired of the windy and rainy weather and had always dreamed of living on a cruise ship.
No one complained about any disturbance, no one expressed any particular discomfort with Wittmund. All the family friends just suddenly decided to leave without any apparent reason.
I also asked my mother why she and Karl had returned, if they were so tired of Wittmund. She replied that after moving, they both felt they had lost a part of themselves and needed to return as soon as possible. But upon returning, they again realized they needed a change of scenery. Mom was a smart woman and understood how stupid this sounded, but it didn’t affect her and my father’s determination to leave.
Which they did a week later, when all my big data analytics had led nowhere. I felt I was missing something, but couldn’t figure out what. The only victory I could pride myself on was convincing my parents not to sell the house. First, I had temporarily moved in, and second, I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t ask to come back again.
Two more months passed. Autumn was taking hold, and I was walking through rainy Wittmund, amazed at the number of closed shops and cafes. The town with a population of 20,000 seemed to have died out. The exodus of elderly people, who formed the backbone of the population, continued, and it seemed that soon Wittmund would turn into a ghost town.
The problem had become noticeable to everyone, but no one seemed able to find answers to the obvious questions. My parents stoically endured their move to Cuxhaven and weren’t rushing back yet. Some of their peers returned, but immediately left again.
I managed to meet with the town mayor, who was also puzzled by what was happening and could only shrug his shoulders. The mystical flight of the older generation had fascinated me. I saw it as a personal challenge. My wife thought I was irrationally spending all my free time on this problem, and when asked what was happening, she only replied, «Who knows, these things happen, it’s just life.»
Such an answer was categorically unsatisfactory to me, and I continued to dig deeper.
Moreover, a couple of times I felt the urge to leave Wittmund myself and didn’t understand why. Either I had aged and was also subject to the incomprehensible influence, or I was simply tired of Wittmund, or I subconsciously wanted to escape the responsibility of solving this issue.
I examined environmental maps of the area, bought a nitrate analyzer, a Geiger counter, and other paranoid tools, ran around markets and lawns with them, but none brought me closer to understanding what was happening. I took soil and water samples, sent them to laboratories, even found a map of ancient burial grounds to rule out completely mystical causes.
Another month later, there wasn’t a single person over 65 left in town. My progress, however, was quite modest.
I managed to find only one statistical pattern. The migration wave had covered the town and region from north to south. That is, those who lived in the north of Wittmund wanted to move earlier than those who lived in the south.
The obvious conclusion was that the cause lay in the geographical-ecological plane. Sipping coffee, I again opened several real estate sites. My intuition finally didn’t fail me. Similar problems began to be registered in several regions in northern Germany, not only in Wittmund but also in Wesense, northwest of Wittmund, Kamuni-Wangerland, and that very Norden where my parents couldn’t last even a couple of days.
I felt I had stumbled upon some important coincidence. Looking at the dates when properties were put up for sale, and also paying for a report on completed transactions, I was once again puzzled. The migration wave didn’t hit these regions from north to south, but differently in each region. Armed with a map of Germany, I drew arrows all over it. The arrows didn’t help at all.
The phone rang. I looked at the screen and sighed.
«Hello! Hello! Uwe! Son! It’s Dad!»
«Yes, hi, Dad. Thinking of coming back?»
«No, we’re good here, though we miss Wittmund. Well, that’s great. What did you want to say?»
«Me? You’re the one who called me.»
«I called? No. Did you call me?»
«No, Dad, you did. Didn’t you? Well, okay. What was I going to say? Oh, right. Your mother and I were remembering how you were this little thing and looked like a little worm. And, well… I love you and I’m glad you turned out to be such a good kid.»
«Thank you. I love you both too.»
«Alright, enough of this mushy stuff. Did you check and pay all the bills?»
«All of them.»
«Well, okay, that’s it, bye. Mom says hi.»
I sat in surprise for a couple of minutes at this unexpected, though pleasant, display of fatherly love.
Looking at the map covered in pen marks, I cracked my neck and decided to go to sleep. My mind was blank anyway.
«Looked like a little worm.» I jumped out of bed and ran to my laptop. I suddenly remembered an article in Biology Letters about how seismic vibrations make worms come to the surface. I quickly found it. In 2008, biologists Mitra, Callaham Jr., Smith, and Yack concluded that Diplocardia worms do indeed respond to seismic and sound vibrations transmitted through the soil. Vibrations with frequencies up to 500 Hz caused worms to crawl out of their burrows and remain on the surface until the vibrations stopped. Moreover, once on the surface, the worms could crawl in any direction, either toward or away from the source of vibrations.
The analogy suggested itself. I sat down with the map again and finally saw the cause of all our troubles. Near each area from which the elderly were fleeing, a new type of wind power station had been installed. A slightly modified blade shape allowed for generating more energy and, for some reason, was less harmful to birds.
All these wind turbines were installed at roughly the same time, and their location directly correlated with the direction of migration waves. Inexplicably, all these power stations had begun operation more than three years ago. That’s why I hadn’t connected them with the current events for so long.
I began composing an email.
«Tell me, Mr. Baum—or should I now address you as Honorary Citizen Baum?»
«You can just call me Uwe.»
«Alright. Tell me, Uwe, was it difficult to convince the government to shut down 10% of all wind farms in northern Germany? Did your plan have many opponents?»
«My hypothesis was based on confirmed data, and to be fair, I only convinced them to temporarily suspend the wind turbines’ operation. They closed them permanently themselves after scientists proved the harm.»
«Won’t this decision destroy the country’s green energy?»
«Of course not. The problem is exclusively with the engineering design of specific turbines, not with green energy as a whole. Could you please remind our viewers what exactly the problem was?»
«Oh, you’d better ask the biologists about that. Briefly, the point is that vibrations from this type of wind turbine, traveling through the atmosphere, affect the human brain. At the very least, they cause a vague feeling of discomfort and a desire to leave as soon as possible. But with prolonged exposure to these vibrations, the nervous system can begin to degrade, and people could go insane. Fortunately, we caught the problem before anything like that happened. So neurodegeneration is just a theory, but it already has scientific substantiation.»
«You wrote that stress first manifested in the older generation.»
«Yes, this is still unexplained, but I’m sure my colleagues will later be able to shed light on it. Perhaps it’s because the older generation is more susceptible to external factors affecting the central nervous system. But that’s just my assumption.»
«The wind generators were opened several years ago. Why did all this only manifest now?»
«We can answer this question precisely. When the turbines first opened, everything was normal. But because the engineers changed the shape of the blades after calculating the foundation, and the blades themselves were lighter than previous ones, at some point they forgot to recheck the entire structure. And it turned out that after about three years, the lighter but no less powerful blades slightly loosened the turbine axis, causing the vibrations to change slightly. It’s safe—the turbine won’t collapse, the safety margin is large—but the vibrations can cause trouble.»
«And how did you initially come up with this idea?»
«First, I analyzed data for three months, and then my father called me a worm, and everything fell into place.»
«And one last question. What does your father say now, after you’ve become an honorary citizen of Wittmund, received gratitude from the Chancellor of Germany, and several environmental grants?»
«He says he never doubted I would succeed. After all, it was he who gave birth to, raised, and educated me, despite the fact that I was always a stupid penguin.»