Earth Abides

by George Rippey Stewart

  When they had finished, they sat on the davenport for a last cigarette. Ish’s mind could not help snapping back to the everung’s discussion. Even though things had not turned out as he had at first planned, still he felt that he had carried a main point.

  “Communications,” he said. “Communications—maybe that’s the big thing! Take it anywhere in history. When a nation or a community got isolated all by itself, it went conservative and then retrograded. It got to acting just the way George and Maurine are over there, gathering in all the things out of the past, and freezing just at that point. That sort of thing, maybe, happened to Egypt and China. But then when there’s contact with some other civilization, everything loosens up again, and gets going. That’s the way it will be with us.”

  She did not say anything, but he knew from the very fact of her silence, that she did not altogether agree.

  “What is it, darling?” he asked.

  “Well, you see, I was thinking maybe it wasn’t so good for the Indians when they got into communication with the white people, was it? Or how about all my people on the coast of Africa when they got into contact with the slavers?”

  “Yes, but maybe that’s just my point. How would we like it if some slavers came over the hill some fine morning, and we had never known they were anywhere around before? Wouldn’t it have been better if the Indians could have sent some scouts over to Europe, and been ready for white men who came with horses and guns?”

  He was pleased that he had countered so cleverly. After all, her argument had merely been for letting things slide and for living in ignorance. That kind of philosophy could never win in the long run. But all she said was: “Yes, perhaps, perhaps.”

  “Do you remember?” he went on. “I was saying this a long time ago. We’ve got to live more creatively, not just as scavengers. Why, I was saying this way back even at the time our first baby was going to be born!”

  “Yes, I remember. You’ve said it a great many times! And still some way or other, it seems to be easier just to go on opening cans.”

  “But the end will come some time, and it shouldn’t come suddenly the way this stopping of the water has today.”

  Chapter 3

  When he awoke that next morning, Em was gone from the bed. He lay still, relaxed, calmly happy. Then his mind seemed to turn over suddenly and take hold—and there it was, starting to make plans, thinking.

  After a minute, a slight sense of irritation came over him. “You think too much!” he said to himself.

  Why did not his mind, like other people’s minds, allow him to rest and be happy without any planning ahead into the future, whether of the next twenty-four hours or of the next sixty seconds? No, something took over with a rush and a whir, and even though his body lay still, his mind turned over and started, and there it was running on, like an idling engine. Engine? Well, naturally, today he would think of engines!

  But the quiet happiness between sleep and waking had definitely left him, and pure contentment was gone. With a resentful push of his arm he threw back the blankets.

  This morning was bright and sunny. Though the air was cool, he went out to the little balcony, and stood there, looking off toward the west. During all these years the trees had everywhere grown taller, but he could still see the mountaintop and much of the Bay with its two great bridges.

  The bridges! Yes, the bridges! To him they still were the most poignant reminders of the great past. The children, indeed, as he had often observed, scarcely thought of bridges as anything different from hills or trees; they were just something that was there. But to him, Ish, the bridges stood testifying daily to the power and the glory that had been civilization. So, he thought, some tribesman—Burgund or Saxon—might once have looked at a strong-built, not yet decayed, Roman gateway or triumphal arch. But, no, that analogy did not hold. The tribesman was sure and content in his own ancient folkways; he was first of the new, confident master of his own world. He, Ish, was more like the last of the old, a surviving Roman—senator or philosopher—spared by barbarian swords and left to brood over an empty and ruinous city, anxious and uncertain, knowing that never again would he meet his friends at the baths or know the deep security that came to a man when he saw a cohort of the Twelfth march down the street. But no, he was not just like the Roman either.

  “History repeats itself,” he thought, “but always with variations.”

  Yes—he had a chance to think a great deal about history! Its repetitions were not those of a stolid child going over and over the multiplication table. History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets.

  As he stood on the little balcony in his pajamas, he felt a light breeze cool on his face. He sniffed it in more deeply, and again it brought to him the realization that even the smell of things had changed. In the Old Times you were not conscious of any characteristic smell to a city, and yet there must have been a complex mingling of smoke and gasoline-fumes and cooking and garbage and even of people. But now there was only a fresh tang to the air, such as he had once associated with country fields and mountain meadows.

  But the bridges! His glance came back to them, as if to a light in the darkness. The Golden Gate Bridge he had not visited in many years. Such a journey would mean a very long walk, or even a long pull for a dogteam; it would mean camping out overnight. But he still knew well what the Bay Bridge was like, and even from where he stood he could see it clearly.

  He remembered what it had once been—six crowded lanes of swiftly moving cars, the trucks and buses and electric trains rumbling on the lower level. There was, he knew, only one car on the Bridge now—that little empty coup parked neatly at the curb near this end of the West Bay span. The yellowed certificate of registration had been, when he had last noticed, still fastened to the steering-column—John S. Robertson (or, he could not surely remember, it might have been James T.) of some number on one of the numbered streets in Oakland. Now the tires were flat, and the once-bright green paint had weatherd to moss-gray.

  On the surface, to the eye, they had changed. The towers that hid their tops in the summer clouds, the mile-long dipping cables, the interlocked massive beams of steel—no longer they cast back the morning sun with a bright sheen of silvergray. Over them now rested softly the neutral pall of rust, red-brown color of desolation. Only, at the tops of the towers, and along the cables at good spots for perching, the quiet monotone was capped and spotted with the dead-white smears of the droppings of birds.

  Yes, through the years the sea-birds had perched there, the gulls and pelicans and cormorants. And on the piers the rats scurried, and fought, and bred and nested, and lived as only rats can—squeaking and fighting, and breeding and nesting, and at low tide feeding on mussels and crabs.

  The broad roadway, unused, showed few signs of change—only roughness and a few cracks here and there. Where blown dust had settled into cracks and corners, a little grass was growing, and a few hardy weeds, not many.

  Within its deeper structure also, the bridge was still intact and unchanged. The superficial rust had done no more than wipe out a small fraction of the safety-factor. At the eastern approach, where salt water during time of storms splashed against the long-unpainted steel supports, corrosion had been eaten somewhat deeper. An engineer, if there had been one, would have shaken his head, and ordered the replacement of some members before allowing traffic to resume.

  But that was all. In the enduring structure of the bridge, long-dead civilization still defied the attacks of all the powers of air and sea.

  Ish roused himself from his trance-like contemplation, and went in to shave. The clean touch of the steel was at once soothing and stimulating. Cheerfully now, happy with the expectation of purposive action, he found himself thinking of the things to be done that day. He would have to see that they started in again with work on the outhous
es and the well. He would make more plans about the expedition into the far interior. (President Jefferson giving instructions to Lewis and Clark!) He would have to see what could be done about making a car work once more. Perhaps, he thought happily, this would be the day on which they would take the road again, not only in a car literally, but also figuratively—the road toward the rebirth of civilization.

  He finished shaving, but the moment seemed golden. So he lathered again, and started over his face once more…. This community now, these thirty-some people who held the seed of the future—they were fair enough individuals, not brilliant by a long way, but sound. The original adults had been better in spite of their shortcomings than you would have expected to get if you had merely reached down into the great bin of humanity in the old United States and taken the first that came by chance. He ran over them again rapidly in his mind, and ended upon himself. How did he stack up among the others?

  Yes, he could remember years ago, in this same house, he had even sat down and listed his qualifications for the new life. Such things, for instance, as having had his appendix out. Well, having no appendix was still an advantage, although actually, no one had been bothered with that kind of trouble. But he had listed other things which now, he realized, had ceased to be advantageous. He had listed, for instance, his quality of being able to get along without other people. That was no longer a virtue. Perhaps, it was even a vice. But he himself had changed also in those years. If he listed his qualities now, they would not be exactly the same ones. He had read widely, and learned much. Even of more importance, he had lived with Em, and had become the father of a family. He had matured, as a man should. He had a stronger will, he realized, than George or Ezra. If the test came, they would yield to him. He, alone, could think into the future.

  He disassembled the razor, and threw the blade into the medicine closet, where there were already a lot of blades lying around. He never bothered to use a blade more than once, because there were so many thousands of them available that there seemed no need of economy. And yet this problem of what to do with the old razor-blades was still curiously present. He remembered jokes about that, from long ago. Funny how a little thing remained the same after so many big things had changed irrevocably!

  After breakfast Ish went over to talk with Ezra. They sat on the steps of the porch. Before long, more people came along, and a little group formed, as always happened when anybody seemed to be having an interesting conversation. there was talk back and forth, and a good deal of easygoing fun-making, with a little horse-play among the younger people. Everybody seemed to agree, in general, that they ought to get to work again, but nobody was in a special huffy to begin. The delay chafed Ish, especially when George in his slow way began again to bring up the old question of the gas-refrigerator.

  At last, however, Ezra and the three younger men with an accompanying rag-tag of little boys and girls moved off to begin work. As soon as they had really started, a kind of enthusiasm fell upon them. Everyone, even Ezra, suddenly began to run, trying to see who would be the first one there to start digging. Ish could see Evie running with the rest—although she could not know what was happening—her blond hair streaming wildly behind her. Who got there first, he could not tell, but in a moment dirt started to fly in all directions. He did not know whether to be amused or perturbed. Everyone seemed to be turning serious work into a kind of play, as if unable to distinguish between work and play. That might sound fine, but you could not accomplish much, he thought, without settling down to labor. As it was, the playful enthusiasm would wear out in half an hour, and the dirt would move more slowly; then, children first, older ones soon afterward, everyone would probably drift off to something else.

  When once they stalked the deer, or crouched shivering in the mud for the flight of ducks to alight, or risked their lives on the crags after goats, or closed in with shouts upon a wild boar at bay—that was not work, though often the breath came hard and the limbs were heavy. When the women bore and nursed children, or wandered in the woods for berries and mushrooms, or tended the fire at the entrance to the rock-shelter—that was not work either.

  So also, when they sang and danced and made love, that was not play. By the singing and dancing the spirits of forest and water might be placated—a serious matter, though still one might enjoy the song and the dance. And as for the making of love, by that—and by the favor of the gods—the tribe was maintained.

  So in the first years work and play mingled always, and there were not even the words for one against the other.

  But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm-clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time-clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.

  Only Ish and George were left standing there by Ezra’s porch-steps. Ish knew that George was getting ready to say something. Funny, Ish thought, you wouldn’t think anyone could pause until he had said something; George paused before he said anything.

  “Well,” said George, and then he paused again. “Well…. I guess I better go get some planks… so I can wall in the sides… after she gets deeper.”

  “Fine!” said Ish. George at least, Ish knew, would get the work done. He had carried the habit of work over so strongly from the Old Times that he perhaps could never really play.

  George went off after his planks, and Ish went to find Dick and Bob, who had been collecting and harnessing the dogteams.

  He found the two boys in front of his own house. Three dogteams were ready. A rifle-barrel was sticking out from one wagon.

  Ish considered for a moment. Was there anything else he should take along?

  He felt a lack.

  “Oh, say, Bob,” he said, “run in, please, and get my hammer”.

  “Aah, why do you want that?”

  “Oh, well, nothing in particular, I guess. It might come in handy for breaking a lock.”

  “You can always use a brick,” said Bob, but he went.

  Ish used the momentary delay to pick up the rifle and check that the magazine was full. This was pure routine, but Ish himself was the one who insisted on it. There was only a very small chance of meeting a rambunctious bull or a she-bear with cubs, but you took the rifle along for insurance. Ish, at times when he woke up in the night, still remembered very vividly the occasion when the dogs had trailed him.

  Bob came back, and at once handed the hammer to his father. As Ish gripped the handle, he felt a strange little sense of security. The familiar weight of the dangling four-pound head brought him comfort. It was the same old hammer that he had picked up long ago, just before the rattlesnake bit him. The handle had been weathered and cracked then, and it still was. He had often thought of choosing a new handle in some hardware store and fitting it to the head. As a matter of fact he could just as well have picked out a whole new tool. Actually, however, he had very little use for the hammer. By tradition he took it along every New Years Day when he cut the numerals into the rock, but that was about its only practical value, and even for that purpose a lighter one might have been better.

  So now he stuck the hammer into the wagon by his feet, and felt comfortable. “All ready?” he called to Dick and Bob, and just then, something caught his eye.

  A small boy was standing, half-hidden in the bushes, looking out at the wagons. Ish recognized the slight figure. “Oh, Joey!” he called on
impulse. “Want to go along?”

  Joey stepped out from the bushes, but hung back.

  “I have to help digging the well,” he said.

  “Oh, never mind, they’ll get the well dug without you or” [he added to himself] “they more likely won’t get it either with or without you.”

  Joey took no more urging. Obviously this was what he really been hoping. He ran to Ish’s wagon, and climbed snugly at his father’s feet where he could just find room. He held the hammer in his lap.

  Then the dogs were off with a furious rush and an outburst of barking, as they always liked to start out. The two other teams followed, with the excited boys yelling and their dogs barking too. The dogs around the houses barked back. It made a fair imitation of a riot. As always, hunched in the little wagon behind six dogs, Ish felt ridiculous, as if he were acting in some silly pageant.

  Once the dogs had started, they stopped wasting breath barking, and settled to a slower pace. Ish collected thoughts, and went over his plans.

  He made his first stop at what had once been a station. The door was open. Inside the little office, though it was walled in glass, the sunlight filtered through in subdued yellow. Twenty-one years of fly-specks and blown dust had coated the windows thickly.

  He saw the old telephone directory hanging from its book beside the long-dead telephone. As he took the book and opened it, bits of brittle yellowed paper broke off from the pages and went fluttering to the floor. He found the address of what had once been the local agency for jeeps. Yes, with the roads in the condition they were, a jeep would be the thing.

  Half an hour later, when they came to the proper streetcorner, Ish looked through the dirty display-window, and his heart jumped with boyish excitement at seeing a jeep actually standing there.

  The boys tied up the teams, and the dogs, well-trained, lay down in orderly fashion without snarling the tram. Dick tried the door; it was locked.