Adam's Land

By Alison Pockat

Adam, while taking a break from school work, tries out a new tube of “special” bubbles and finds that they can be connected. As they grow, he eventually he is able to enter them, and the bubbles shrink him to the size of an ant. By jumping up and down and with a puff of breeze, Adam ends up in a tree. He finds friends and excitement in his backyard as he tries to go back to his normal size. Along the way, he gets to know a number organisms like a fungi, a bee, a wood roach, a cricket, an ant, and others who help him and also teach him about their lives and how they work to make a life, a home, and incidentally a great soil for his garden. After this adventure, Adam goes back into a bubble to visit his soil friends and ends up being blown into a snag, a seemingly lifeless tree. With the help of a squirrel, Trouble, he and Kit, his friend the cricket, travel down the snag in their bubble. They meet the creatures who live in the dead tree. Emerging out of a hole in the base of the snag, they are blown into a storm. Kit is able to leap out of the bubble and Adam travels in the bubble down the hill on storm runoff. He ends up in a pool of the creek. Along the way, he gets to know about storm water and how it affects the creatures to have to live in it. Although fiction, the book describes the very real aspects of soil and its production, life in a snag, and issues related to water from storms and how it impacts streams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640270657

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Adam’s Land

ALISON POCKAT

Copyright © 2017 Alison Pockat

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-64027-063-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64027-064-0 (Hard Cover)

ISBN 978-1-64027-065-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

For my son, Del.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my parents, especially my dad, for the exposure to natural systems and for his patient teaching over the years. Without that background and example, I would most likely not have become a landscape architect nor would I have had the knowledge or desire to write this book.

I would also like to thank Dr. Margaret Ordoubadian. Without her encouragement and editing assistance, this book would never have gone past the initial trial self-published book, Adam’s Bubble.

Finally, I would like to thank my son’s third grade teacher, Mrs. Jane Russell. The idea for this book came about because of her voiced need for a curriculum on soils that was fun and interesting to the students. This seemed like a great way to introduce the subject.

Part 1

Adam’s Bubble

Chapter 1

The Bubble

Adam was bored. B-O-R-E-D, bored. True, he could go inside and do his homework, and his mom had asked him to clean up his room. That just wasn’t what he wanted to do. School had seemed to last much longer today than most days. Besides, there was always homework and his room was always a mess. It was beautiful outside! The sky was crystal clear and unbelievably blue, and it felt warm but not hot. A perfect spring day!

Now, what to do? His best friend had gone off to the store in need of new shoes. Mom was in the front yard weeding. Nothing sounded like fun. I could go check out the creek, he thought. Adam loved to spend time messing around in the creek. Some days he spent several hours at a time just studying and playing with the animals that lived down there. Some days he actually did not see another kid all day, preferring instead to spend the day with his forest and creek friends. He especially loved the little pool area that had been created when the creek changed course. Maybe the frogs are out. Maybe I can catch a salamander.

Adam just loved frogs! They were easy to catch, and he loved to play with them. Toads were fun too, and they didn’t need to be near the water. He had tried many times to convince Mom to let him keep one, but so far she just would not budge on her very firm no. Frogs and toads belong outside, she just kept saying. Besides, how do you propose feeding them? They eat their food live.

Adam was no scholar. In fact, he spent a great deal of time trying to find ways to avoid studying and schoolwork. That was not the case when it came to nature studies. For those classes, he was all attention and often stayed late just to talk to his teacher about things that he observed in his own yard. He spent hours in the woods and in the creek watching the animals and studying the plants growing there.

There was no way that he was going to stay inside on a day like today. He enjoyed the idea of not being stuck indoors and the feeling of freedom that wearing shorts and a T-shirt gave him, especially after all the heavy clothes he had needed to wear during the winter when he was trapped indoors. The sun felt warm and gentle on his skin. His dark hair, a bit shaggy and in need of a comb, even felt warm from the sun.

Then he saw the test tube full of special bubbles. These bubbles were supposed to be almost unbreakable. They made some sort of hard, permanent outer surface that was guaranteed to last longer than regular bubbles.

The lady at the store had made them seem wonderful. She had blown some and let Adam play with them. They were really cool, and she kept winking and saying that these bubbles were very special. You will like them, she said, hinting that not everyone who encountered them would feel the same way. Adam loved that store, which sold all kinds of interesting science-related gadgets and kits, and he really liked that one lady who always seemed to know exactly what he would really enjoy. By some miracle, his mom had actually agreed to buy them, something she did not do often. He didn’t even have to use his allowance money on them. That was practically a miracle! Keep them safe, the lady had said. They aren’t for just anyone.

He had kept them safe. They had come home and been left near the back door of the garage while Adam got interested in other diversions. No one had touched them. There they were—in their red test tube. They seemed to be calling to him. It was almost as if the soap within the tube was glowing.

He pulled off the plastic cork and pulled out a small wand. The circle that held the soap was tiny. Adam thought it could not possibly create anything more than a pea-sized bubble. He blew with a short puff and got a couple of small bubbles.

They drifted around his head, and he began to bat them around as if they were baby balloons. Hey, Adam thought. They don’t break! Then he realized that he could string them together. At first, they stuck together like a small string of beads. Then, one by one, they merged and created a bigger bubble.

Adam reached over for the test tube. He dipped the little wand and blew with a slow steady breath. This time he got a much larger bubble. Joining the new bubble with the first one created an even bigger one. By playing with the bubble, Adam discovered that he could push his hand into it and that the bubble rolled out and around his hand. This was amazing! What about the rest of his body? Could he surround himself with a bubble? That would be so cool, he thought.

Again, Adam blew a bubble, and again he joined it to the first. Over and over he did this until the bubble seemed to almost take on a new form. He stepped toward the bubble. It surrounded him. By moving his arms, he got the two sides of the bubble to join together. Now he was actually inside the bubble. He looked down at his grubby tennis shoes. Should he have taken them off? Would they break his bubble?

This was more than cool! He bent down and rolled on the ground and the bubble rolled with him. Wow!

Adam rolled on the grass for a while. Then he got up on his knees. The bubble changed shape. Gee, he thought, the grass is really long. No, not long exactly. It’s big. He looked down at his hand. Everything looked normal. When he stood up, he felt like he was the same size as normal. Well, he thought, nothing to worry about! This is just my imagination. Yet, the trees seemed to have grown.

He jumped up and down, and for a while the puzzle of his size was forgotten. The feel of the bubble as he jumped was too amazing. With each jump up, the bubble bounced off his head and went back up. It came down again only when he came back down. It seemed to match every move that he made.

At some point, Adam began to realize that when he jumped up, he didn’t come down right away. He was floating! Incredible! I always wanted to fly in a balloon, he thought. This is so much better than flying in a plane to Grandma’s house!

Why were those leaves so large? Was he shrinking? Suddenly, with each jump, Adam now knew that he was getting smaller. Huh! This is a problem! How do I get back to my own size? Is this permanent? Am I dreaming? He closed his eyes and reopened them and realized that nothing had changed.

He was also floating—only very slowly drifting down to the

ground.

A little whisper of air rustled the leaves in the tree above Adam’s head. He looked up at the sound of the roar. The breeze puffed a bit more and his bubble floated up toward a star-shaped leaf. It was brown, left over from last year, and it had strangely large brown and white fuzzy areas.

The bubble was now smaller than the leaf and was floating straight toward the center of it. Good, Adam thought, I’m going to be stopped by that leaf. I can’t miss that leaf. What if I can never come back down?

Looking down, Adam saw the red of the bubble test tube with its sealed stopper lying on the ground way below him. He was a very long way up! Okay, Adam, he said to himself. Don’t panic. You’ll figure this out. What happens if I pop the bubble? Do I stay small forever? How do I get down?

Chapter 2

Fergus

Adam watched the leaf grow closer and larger until it eventually became his whole view upward from the bubble. He felt his bubble slam into the leaf and stick tight to it.

Hello there, said a voice. I’m Fergus. What brings you here?

Adam looked around and saw no one. Nothing was moving at all, not even an insect. I must have imagined it, he said to himself. No one is talking to me. How could they? But then, how could I have floated up into a tree?

What he did see was truly amazing. He was looking at what appeared to be some kind of flower—at least he thought it was a flower. It had a brown center with many splotches making up the core. Surrounding the center were white feathery hairs. As he looked, Adam could see that there