Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  One disaster follows another, in a relentless parade.

  While much of the rest of the country was freezing, we got what we always get in a Southern California winter: rain. In a typical year just about all our precipitation comes in the months of December, January, and February. But there really seems to be no “typical year.” It’s usually too little, or too much. Particularly after a really bad summer-fire season, when the burned areas tend to go sliding down into the canyons. This year we had heavy rainfall, and I’m sure that large portions of high-elevation Los Angeles are now in lower Los Angeles, probably including what’s left of my old house.

  We hill dwellers used to curse heavy rain, and look anxiously uphill all winter. But as a new lowlander, I see it as the boon that it is. Lake levels are high, as are newly built runoff tanks that collect from rooftops all over town. We’ll need every drop of it to get our crops through another hot, rainless summer.

  Great battles have been fought over water in the West, with guns in the early days, later in the courts. Lake Elsinore is a large body of water, and as such, there are people who covet it. It’s a constant worry.

  They can’t steal it, not anymore. As in the Old West, if you need water, you have to control the land it sits on or flows through. Southern California stole plenty of water before the Collapse, from anyone and everyone who had any. But to do that, you need huge engineering projects to siphon it off from your neighbors. Thirsty people in Arizona—and there are plenty of them, we know—can’t pipe our water to Phoenix; they would have to come here and take the town. That land is ours, we’re sitting on it and don’t intend to give it up. The good news is that, to take it, you would need an organized army, and none has shown up. Raiding parties would accomplish nothing. What would they do? Fill their canteens and leave?

  But we do worry about organized invaders, large numbers of desperate people who will risk death on the chance they can kill us or drive us away so that they can be the ones in control of our most vital resource.

  When I say army, I very much include the ones that formerly fought our wars for us, in American uniforms. We are well organized, but we could never stand up to an assault by a modern army with tanks, helicopters, and aircraft. But the regular army has no choppers, very few tanks, and not nearly as many troops as it used to have. The National Guard is disbanded. Everyone just went home. We have seen no signs of the regular army but we do know they have suffered from mass desertions, too.

  Neither Canada nor Mexico shows any signs of wanting to invade us, and without an external threat, what good is a standing, professional army? To keep things orderly? We’re doing that ourselves, thank you.

  And for that matter, what good would occupying our land and kicking us off do anybody? We are farming it as well as anyone could, and we don’t hog it. We send what’s left after our own short rations to the people around us, who are on even shorter rations. No train passes through here that we don’t add a boxcar full of food we can ill afford to spare, destination San Bernardino or San Diego.

  We no longer have hungry barbarian hordes at our borders, simmering with rage at us as they spoon up their thin daily gruel and imagine us sitting down to tables groaning with food. We got rid of the refugee camps by the simple expedient of taking them in. Not all at once, and not without trouble, but the last camp was emptied three months ago. It was a simple equation. The more willing hands we had, the more land we could plow and plant, the more ditches we could dig, the more manual pumps we could power. There was work for everybody. Even small children could pick bugs off the plants. And once people joined the workforce, once they belonged, they would fight alongside us to defend it all, instead of against us to take it away.

  But still we worry. There must be an army out there somewhere, doing something. It’s all classified, covered by the State of Emergency. We get reports over the radio, when it’s not being jammed. Someone is doing the jamming, someone still wants to keep us in the dark about the extent of the disaster and what’s being done—or not done—about it. We all believe we should never underestimate the damage that can be done by a paper-shuffler in a bunker in Washington or Sacramento who dreams up some project involving our water. Whether our old governors or new warlords who might arise, they are going to be in for a surprise if they come to take our land and our water. We will fight.

  The San Onofre power plant seems to have done what it was intended to. According to a local man who used to work there, it shut down during the quake, cooled off, and awaited further instructions. We know they got it back online because we get the power from it. When the wind blows from the west our Geiger counters show no increased radiation.

  Not so from the northwest. The Diablo Canyon reactors were hit by the tsunami and melted down, like the reactors after the big earthquake in Japan. It’s not a good idea to go within five miles of it at all, and everything from Morro Bay to Vandenberg to San Luis Obispo is evacuated, too hot to live in for long. We get elevated levels when the wind blows down toward us. It’s not something we like much, but there’s nothing to do about it except take our iodine tablets and learn to live with it.

  Our new world is so…spotty. We have been reduced to pumping water with stationary bikes providing the power, and yet for an hour a day—on most days—we get electricity from a nuclear power plant. The lion’s share goes south to San Diego, naturally, with some going to the coastal communities, but we get a little time each day to recharge our batteries. You can’t call it rolling blackouts, because we’re black more than we’re light. Maybe rolling illumination. We’re frugal with it, as we are with everything. We get an allotment of kilowatt-hours, or whatever they call them, and there’s a committee that decides what they’re most needed for.

  We haul our picked vegetables into town on horse-drawn carts, and yet we can determine the position of those carts within a few yards with GPS units. Those satellites are still up there and they should keep working for a while.

  We log on to the Internet at night…by the light of kerosene lanterns. Yes, the Net is still out there, though more like it was in 1992 than what we had come to know. We have seen so much destruction in the Southland that it’s easy to forget that, in most of the country, much of the infrastructure is still intact. The servers are still there, and so are the phone lines and fiber-optic cables and cell-phone towers. There is only enough power to run a fraction of them, but that will change, has already changed in the last few months. But though the hardware is there, most of the software was lost. E-mail addresses, Facebook pages—almost all Web pages of any kind—all were wiped out and they are hard and slow to reestablish. Most of what has come back is bulletin boards of one kind or another. People search through the millions of postings, trying to locate lost family and friends. It is slow, censored and interfered with by the government, and not well organized. The techies who might fix it are, like everyone else, mostly worried about planting and getting in the next harvest. Cyberspace will have to wait.

  So as of now, paper mail is the most reliable way to communicate. Not the postal service. If it exists, we’ve seen no sign of it. No, you hand your mail to travelers headed where you think the addressee might live, and hope for the best. Most new arrivals these days are carrying a sack of letters, and all departures.

  The Internet was never reliable, and now it’s even more suspect, but still better than nothing. I think that those who run what is left of the army have decided that even though they can’t physically control us at the point of a gun, they can try to keep us in the dark by patrolling cyberspace. We have learned that soldiers guard the large radio stations and the few TV stations that have come back on the air, and the few operating cell towers, and all content is censored by the government. The State of Emergency, you see. The big national political question these days, and the only one I am interested in, is will the SOE ever end? It’s a golden opportunity for those who favor a strong state to take over completely, in the name of protecting us. There are still many, many
people, including many in positions of power, who believe this nightmare was visited on us by some outside entity. You know who they are. The usual suspects: commies, the Arabs, the Jews, the Chinese.

  People are still also blaming the CIA, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Rockefellers, international bankers, the oil companies, and a secret defense department lab (ouch!), but you don’t hear that on government-controlled media. Those particular paranoids are confined to the pirate radio stations and what we’re calling PUV Web sites that are thriving in spite of jamming and cyber-warfare. PUV stand for pop-up-vanish, because they appear from nowhere, send out millions of e-mails, and then fade into the cyber forest. It’s sort of like dropping leaflets from a fast-moving airplane. Most of the messages are destroyed, but some get through.

  So all news is still suspect. But was it ever very different? I’ve realized I didn’t trust Big News or Mom & Pop Blog news much even before the Collapse. I just didn’t worry about it. I didn’t think about it as much.

  Somewhere out there, people are working to build natural-gas pipelines and convert power-generating stations. Diesel locomotives are being converted to coal. It doesn’t happen overnight, but things are starting to move again, mostly by train. We get two trains coming through every week, and not all of them are old steam engines now.

  America has lots and lots of both gas and coal. There are still nuclear plants in operation. In the Pacific Northwest they seem to have plenty of hydropower. Hoover Dam is still in operation, though we don’t get any of their output.

  Regular power generation will happen again.

  There are many words that have taken on a whole new meaning, and the most radical of these is probably conservation.

  Our household used to be quite proper and correct conservers. All our appliances came with the yellow sticker on the side telling us how much energy they saved. We had solar panels on the roof. We limited our water use, even in nondrought years, with low-flow toilets and showerheads. We only watered the yard at night.

  (Granted, the Escalade had a carbon footprint that was bigger than King Kong’s, but the Mercedes wasn’t so bad, and I was lobbying hard for a Prius, or even a Volt.)

  We recycled, we had all the big plastic bins for glass, cardboard and paper, metal, and plastic. When you think back, how smart was it to make the recycling containers out of plastic? Why not metal? Why plastic bags at the supermarket? Why two pounds of plastic packaging for every two pounds of stuff you were actually buying? Why plastic bottles instead of glass? Now that all the petroleum is gone—and all our miracle plastics came from petroleum, don’t forget—it seems such a gigantic waste.

  But everything we did was a waste. We wasted huge amounts of energy, physical resources, and most of all, oil.

  Now it’s gone. Now we are learning what conservation really means.

  Did you ever visit what we used to call a “landfill”? Vast mountains of garbage being crushed by a fleet of bulldozers, to be covered with a layer of dirt and, eventually, a golf course. Paradise for seagulls, a stinking eyesore for everyone else. A treasure trove for future archaeologists, who will surely scratch their heads over the megamiddens of disposable diapers. Didn’t they have cloth? Soap? Water?

  I don’t know where Elsinore’s trash used to go, but today we have a dump. It’s quite small, the size of a couple city lots, and contains mostly the plastic packaging from our rapidly dwindling supplies of pre-Collapse consumer goods, those few items we can’t find another use for. Plastic bottles have obvious uses. Tin cans can be flattened and used to line our wooden aqueducts.

  Other than that plastic packaging, we don’t throw anything away.

  We don’t waste a watt of electricity. We don’t waste a pint of water. Most of it can be reused. We process sewage. Did you know human waste, what they call “night soil” in Eastern countries, can be used as fertilizer? It’s smelly until you mix it with charcoal and dry it, but you get used to it. I have taken my shift carrying night soil, without complaint.

  As for food waste, there is none. None at all. What we used to call “leftovers” are invariably consumed at the next meal.

  We are raising pigs because they will eat anything, they have large litters, and you can use every part of them except the squeal.

  We are raising chickens because they can fend for themselves.

  We recognize that raising meat animals is not the most efficient way to feed ourselves, but what the hell. We don’t do a lot of it. Most of our meals are vegetarian, of necessity. If we get one scrawny chicken per month it’s a feast. In addition, my family has eaten and enjoyed deer, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, and possum. Yummy!

  The result is that we now produce enough fruit and vegetables to feed our community. Not gorge ourselves, mind you. But everyone is getting the Recommended Daily Allowance, and it’s well-balanced. We will soon be harvesting corn, and some wheat. Next year should be even better, if we have a good—that is, heavy—rainy season. And after the RDA, we even export food. That’s a real accomplishment.

  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be doing all this in California, where the weather is mild and sunny, and just about anything will grow, year-round. We also grow in greenhouses.

  I’d hate to be trying to support a community in Maine or North Dakota.

  One year is a good time for summing up. It also strikes me as a good time for looking ahead, to the limits of our poor abilities to do so.

  Have we learned anything? Certainly in the short term we have.

  Our community has found its way, through horrible loss and privation, to the fabled Ecotopia espoused by conservationists, by “Green” people.

  We have sustainable agriculture that doesn’t rely on chemical fertilizers.

  We have an energy-use policy unimaginable a year ago.

  We don’t pollute our precious water, and air pollution is negligible…though that will change as we burn more wood and coal, which is especially dirty. Nothing to do about it right now, but Mark is working on it.

  We have a sense of community that, in most of the country, was as extinct as the family farm.

  Most astonishingly, we have what is a virtual communism, without ever having set out to do so. There is no money anyone trusts, so no real rich and poor. People still own property, their homes, some land, but most of the countryside around here was owned by the state of California, the federal government, or large corporations. Theoretically they still own it, but just let them come and try to take it, particularly the agribusiness companies. They’d better bring a lot of weapons to enforce their deeds. We are well armed, we know how to make gunpowder, and we reload.

  It might be very different elsewhere. And our dreams of holding on to the land could prove to be pipe dreams. Big corporations very well may raise mercenary armies. Time will tell. My hope is that most of them, and their stock shares and land titles and bonds and mortgages, are as worthless as federal greenbacks, useful for starting kindling in your fireplace.

  But…

  The country is fragmented. It hardly seems reasonable to call it a country at this point. We don’t know if that is good or bad, but most of us feel we must come together.

  We have a distant government that lies to us routinely, habitually, brazenly, and it is quite clear that those who feel they ought to be in charge would like to clamp down on us all and see the chaos of the Collapse as a golden opportunity. There are hordes of restless, homeless, hungry people out there, and if a demagogue with access to television, radio, and the straitjacketed Internet were to come forward, it would be easy to scapegoat communities like ours, no matter how much free food we send to San Diego.

  That is a worry for another day.

  But I keep wondering…we have learned a lot in the short term, but how about five years from now? Ten years, twenty? The question before the jury is, are we an inherently wasteful species?

  There is no lack of energy here on this planet. The disruption was caused by how deeply we were invested in petroleu
m. We were given no time to convert, and things collapsed. But there is coal, natural gas, and hydropower. There is enough coal to last a very long time. It’s dirty, but I don’t doubt that now that we have to, we will find ways to use it cleanly. The dams are still there, and some are generating again. Pipelines are being repaired. There are hydrogen, fuel cells, solar power, wind power. Only coal is abundant enough to take the place of crude oil, but anything else will help us pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

  What I want to know is, will those millions and millions of cars sitting idly in every garage and on every curbside in America soon be converted to burning wood, coal, gas, or hydrogen, and get back on the road again? Will we once more have traffic jams, roads bumper-to-bumper with single-passenger vehicles? Will we use coal technology to flood the world with unnecessary plastic again?

  The jury will be out for a while on that one. I’m hoping we have learned a permanent lesson, and will be more sensible and moderate in the future.