by John Hunt
“We’re pleased to meet you.” Dad smiled. “We’re neighbors, living a couple of dozen miles back towards the Seward Highway, and just came to see if there was anyone around. We don’t mean you any harm.”
The old man treated us to a measured look. He must have liked what he saw, because he visibly relaxed, and lowered the gun.
“Apologies for the poor welcome. Come on in to the hotel here. We can have the dining room to ourselves. I’m Nathaniel, Nat for short.”
We introduced ourselves over coffee. Nat seemed well supplied. “Yes,” he elaborated, “I’ve enough to keep myself going through to the spring. How about you guys?”
“We’re fine, thanks,” said Dad. “But where is everybody? We were hoping to meet up with like-minded folks.”
Nat shrugged. “We heard how things were going elsewhere, especially in Anchorage. Didn’t seem like it was going to get better for a while. We’re shut off here, by the mountains, not much land for growing anything. Heard it was different in Valdez, the other side of Prince William Sound. It’s bigger than us, a few thousand people, but not too big. Got an airport, for when things get better, they’ll get relief early on. Main thing is, they’ve got plenty of oil, it’s the end of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Dozens of storage tanks they can tap into. The community had organized itself there, set up a committee to run the place, and invited us over. Unanimous vote, except for me. They took a dozen boats, those which they could start the motors on, and headed across the Sound – about three days motor-sailing. I opted to stay. Thought about joining them since, sailed over there a month back, but I didn’t like what they were getting up to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Using soldiers as mercenaries to police the place.”
“But wouldn’t that be better than here by yourself?” I asked.
“I was born and raised here, been here all my life, and ain’t going to leave because of a power cut. Besides, from what I hear, the grass isn’t greener anywhere else.”
“But how do you hear?”
“Ham radio.”
Dad made a frustrated sound. “Wish I’d got hold of one. I’m a mechanical guy, not electrical. What else have you learned? What’s happening in the rest of America, the world?”
Nat frowned. “It’s patchy, depending on where the ham operators are. I don’t think there are any left in Anchorage, for instance. Basically…many places smaller than a town seem to be OK, if they haven’t started fighting amongst themselves. Some figure that around half the people have died. Plague, cholera, smallpox, starvation, you name it. We’ve got off relatively lightly up north; there’s food, if you know where to look. Those doing best were already living out in the sticks, off-grid.”
“How did it get so bad?”
“The solar storm hit the grid too hard for it to get restarted. They’d get one bit going, but then the area around it would overload and shut it down again. The coal plants didn’t have enough power to restart. They were working on it, but there aren’t enough of them to make other than local differences any more. The military has enough backup systems, so we can still fire missiles, the country’s “safe,” so they said, but they couldn’t get the lights working,” Nat said drily.
“Washington? The government?”
“Washington’s finished. They’ve got everything – malaria, typhus, dengue fever, as well as cholera and plague, it’s the same all the way around down the coast, through to Texas. Everyone who can’s fighting their way inland. The government’s holed up somewhere, haven’t heard a squeak out of them for a month. There are no official channels. There’s all kinds of rumors flying around – the government have moved underground, or to Hawaii, no one knows.”
“How can people think they’ve gone to Hawaii?” Dad asked. “That’s crazy. How would they get there?”
“How does anybody know anything? You listen to the radio now and you don’t know who’s crazy and who’s real. No way of telling. Weird stuff on there.”
“You mean there’s no government, at all?” I chipped in.
“Nothing that we can find.”
TWENTY-NINE
“I thought there would have been something, surely,” Dad said. “What’s happening overseas?”
“Basically, cities everywhere are disaster zones. Not enough food, water, plenty of disease. They’ve all emptied. Third World countries have come through it best. Places like India – hundreds of millions of people who barely used electricity anyway, and with a warm climate, they just keep on doing pretty much what they’ve always done. Except where the people living in the cities have fled into the country, which can’t support them all, then there’s fighting. And where there were tensions already, it’s got worse. War all over the Middle East. Split by religion, sect, tribe, nationality, we don’t hear anything anymore. Borders don’t seem to matter. And nothing from China.”
“Europe?”
“A mess. Putin’s invaded.”
“What?”
“Guess he always wanted to, sees a chance to get the Russian Empire back. Did it almost immediately. Not sure how far he’s got, they’re mostly walking and its hand to hand fighting. No tanks or planes. The Russians have some oil, the Europeans haven’t any. But anyway, there’s no armies in Europe to fight back, and few guns. The weapons they have are mostly too sophisticated to use, nothing with solid-state electronics survived the solar storm. The Russians have the advantage with older equipment, they’ve been re-fitting Second World War guns and vehicles.”
“England should be safe from the Russians?” Dad asked. “They couldn’t cross the Channel? We have family there. My brother. Cousins.”
“There are still ham operators functioning, but it’s dire. Crowded island, no food. Most of it was imported, they’ve got no machinery to bring the harvest in. You know how few scythes and sickles there are in the country, and how few people can swing one? And people can’t get off the island, not that it’s much better on the continent. So it’s martial law. London’s pretty much deserted, a few people up in the skyscrapers, or in the tunnels, but it’s a jungle there. There’s still a government, but it’s moved a couple of times. Went to York first, I think they’re on the Isle of Man now.”
“The Royal Family?”
“Last known address up in Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, with a battalion to protect them. But no one’s heard about them for a while now.”
There was a pause, as we absorbed the news.
Dad put his head in his hands. “My God. This isn’t going to end soon, is it?”
“Reckon not. Can’t see the grid coming back. The transformers were all destroyed. They were all customized for each substation, so there’s no inventory of replacements. There’s no electricity for factories to make more of them. I can’t see how it could be done now. And there’s no government to organize it. Even if there were, the people who might’ve known how to do it are dead or in hiding.”
“It’s hard to believe. Just a couple of months ago…I can’t take it in.”
Nat went over to Dad, and put his arm around him.
“Must come as a shock the first time you hear it, Donald. I’ve had some time to get used to it.”
Bob stood up, looking at the mountains on the other side of the bay. “So it really is everywhere,” he said, quietly. “I kind of thought it must be, but it’s still hard to believe.”
“I know,” Nat replied. “I really do. Still,” he said shrugging, “this is our new life now. We’ll just have to get on with it. Here, I’ve got another radio kit, and spare batteries, and there are extra antennae on the roof. Let me show you how to set it up. Be good if we could keep in touch, a pleasure to have neighbors again. We can figure out call signs, and we’ll be able to talk to each other any time.”
We were there for the day. I chopped some wood for Nat while he, Dad and Bob talked. I wondered what had happened to my former games opponents, who I used to play against in the evening. Mostly, I’d never noticed where they came
from, if they had let it be known in the first place, but I knew they were from all over the world. How were they getting on? Were they still alive? I’d never know. We’d never met, and never would. I looked around the bay, and the mountains. The world had narrowed overnight to people you could physically see and touch. I shivered.
Dad had brought some goods to barter and pressed them on Nat in return for the radio and the lesson.
“I can’t thank you enough,” said Dad, as we prepared to leave.
“Thanks are on my side,” said Nat, as they shook hands. “I was getting a bit lonely here, to be honest. Was getting the feeling of being the last man alive, kind of thing. Going nuts.”
“Do you want to come back with us?” asked Bob. “You look like you’d be an asset.”
“Thank you kindly, but no. I’ve got my sail-boat, couldn’t live anywhere away from the sea. Used to be my job, I was captain of the ferry here. We’ll talk on the radio, OK? But from what you say, I’m going to lock the gates in the tunnel. It used to be shut at nights anyway and I guess it’ll be safer now to keep it closed. Just give me a call if you want to come through again.”
“By the way, did an oil guy come through here?” I asked. “A few weeks ago, big, fat, executive type? Aggressive?”
“Him – yes, friend of yours?”
“No, not exactly, we just bumped into him.”
“Sure he came. A real pompous ass. Complained like hell about everything, he went on the boats with the others to Valdez.”
“Did he have a woman with him?”
“No, he was by himself. Gave some spiel about surviving the wilderness single-handed – and fighting off bears. Sounded fishy to me. Happy to see him move on. Last I heard, they’d locked him up in Valdez for making trouble.”
The sun was below the hills when we got back, the whole sky streaked red and purple. Little brown bats were flickering around the lodge. “Wow, that smells good,” Dad said as we walked through the door. “Fish stew?”
“A little experiment,” replied Matthew. “We don’t have the ingredients for my usual recipes, but we’ve plenty of herbs, and it’s fun to try something different. Could do with getting to the shoreline sometime for mussels, clams. Prawns would be nice. But though I say it myself, this isn’t bad.”
“But all those people, everywhere,” Mom said, as we talked over the meal. She still looked in shock. “I just can’t believe what’s happened.”
“But it has, Mary,” Louise replied, clasping her shoulder. “We didn’t want it, but we have to live with it and be strong.”
Matthew started trembling. “Sorry, I’ve been struggling to take this in. Hadn’t quite believed it yet.”
“Focus, people,” Bob added. “We’ve got a situation, we figure out how to deal with it, then we do it. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Let’s enjoy this meal.”
We pigged out on one of the finest meals I’ve ever had. “That really hit the spot,” Bob muttered.
“Wicked,” added Jessie.
THIRTY
“Wierdly, I feel a lot better having talked to Nat,” Dad said the next morning over a breakfast of hotcakes and blueberry juice. “At least we know where we stand, now, and there’s at least one guy around here we can trust.”
“I love it even more here now the mosquitos have gone to heaven,” chirped up Sue as everyone laughed.
“OK.” Dad clapped his hands. “We’ve got our lists here of things to do, and I’ve drawn up a rough schedule to keep us on track. We’ll start with the fence. I’ll mark out the line, about half an acre – that should be enough? Jim – the postholes and poles for supports. Mary, we’ll have two fences I think, a gap between them and we stuff that full of thorns – there are loads of those plants around here. Could you take Louise, Jessie, Sue and Bess with you?”
“But they’re prickly,” Bess interrupted.
“That’s the idea, Bess,” Dad replied. “Just think of it as the more prickly it is, the safer we’ll be. And we’ve got plenty of gloves. Jim, can you dig the shit from the outhouse, the fluids should mostly have seeped through. We’ll use it for vegetable beds. Matthew, we couldn’t get any food in Anchorage, but we’ve got seed.”
“We’ve got winter vegetables by the look of things – spinach, leeks, kale, parsnips, cabbage, turnips and chard.” Matthew was rummaging through the boxes. “That’s good. We’ll need to be planting before the end of the month.”
“Great.”
“And berries,” added Matthew, “we’ve missed out on those. Blueberries and raspberries, they might be finished now, but there should be cranberries and dewberries. We could do with barrel loads. If we add the rest of our sugar, boil it – that’ll keep us in vitamins through the winter. I can make fruit leather out of them, that lasts for months.”
“Anything else?”
“Mushrooms, mega sacksful of them. They’re coming into season. If we’re careful about baking them, till they’re dry enough to snap, they can last for years.”
“What can we do about flour?”
“The old-timers used to make it out of cattail roots and acorns,” said Louise. “But I don’t know how.”
“There’ll be plenty of acorns soon,” said Matthew. “Let’s collect some, and the roots, and I’ll figure out how to make it. We’re going to need more meat though.”
Bob stood up, shuffling his feet, I think it was the first time I’d seen him look embarrassed. “Matthew, friend, I owe you an apology. And to everyone here for what I said the other day. I’m sorry. Wish I’d known you before. I’ve never eaten so well as lately. Let’s shake on it.”
Matthew beamed broadly through his bushy beard, looking a few inches taller. “That’s OK, Bob. Glad to be able to provide something. I don’t do a fraction of what you do.”
“Right, that’s good.” Dad stood up and clapped his hands together. “We all have something to contribute. We’re going to have to work really hard now, everyone, all commitment. Bob, we’ll take a short cut, go down to those other lodges and dismantle one, build a cabin for the Hardings that way, rather than do it from scratch. I think it should be separate, better not to have all our eggs in one basket. Big fire risk, winter’s the danger time. Having two places would give us a backup. Can you and Matthew start on that, while Jim and I do the fence? What force can a bear exert per pound of weight?”
“Dunno about that,” Bob replied, “but the posts need to be this thick” – and he opened his hands to indicate a foot wide.
The postholes for the fence didn’t take long, and then I switched to helping with the Harding’s cabin. We’d decided to limit the use of the chainsaw, but short of spending extra weeks on the work we had to. Bob used it to cut down ten-foot sections of pine trees, around two feet in diameter.
“Pass me that’s whosowhatsit, Jim – the draw-blade – we need to peel off the bark like this.” He drew it down the trunk.
“Why bother doing that? Looks better with the bark on.”
“It’s full of insects, beetles, the wood’ll soon rot if you leave them there. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly.”
I worked at it for a couple of days, the glutinous sap sticking all over me, hands getting raw, muscles aching, the scent of resin in the air.
We placed the stripped poles in pairs, upright, and cemented in. Dad and Matthew nailed the planks from the dismantled cabin across, leaving a gap in the middle, which we all filled with earth and any other insulation we could find. Bob made extra windows and doorframes. We beat down the earth inside and put in a raised floor, keeping it off the cold earth, stuffing moss into all the cracks, and covering that with mud. For the extra roofing we added a score of spruce poles at an angle to the ridge, then used the wooden walls from the cabins for the first layer, then a polythene sheet, another layer of poles, then cut out rectangles of moss, half a foot deep, and put it in two layers on top, with poles to hold it down till it grew together.
It took us a month. W
e sweated and itched, working like demons, all the daylight hours.
Even Bess and Sue chipped in. We didn’t have time or the energy to argue. The work was back-breaking. We really needed a crew, but a lot of it ended up down to me; Bob couldn’t raise his arm much, Matthew wasn’t strong, and Dad didn’t seem that well.
By now the sun was setting behind the hills before seven p.m. and it was starting to get dark at eight. The temperature was close on freezing most of the day and there were flurries of snow, and still a lot to get done. We built a shelter for the woodpile and covered walkways made out of corrugated iron between the dwellings, so fire couldn’t spread from one to another. We sorted out the stores, building outhouses, one for gas, diesel and kerosene, another for the bulk of what had come on the truck, including all the tools. We added inside shelving in the cabin all around the walls, for what we reckoned to use through the winter. We built an extension to the main cabin, all along one side of it, separated by curtains in the first third, one half which could be pulled back for privacy – and personal washing – and put a bath in. Of the rest, one half was for drying clothes, the other half was lined with corrugated iron, with a fire pit in the center, and a new chimney at the top for the smoke to escape. It had a damper on it, but we were planning to keep this burning as low embers day and night for hot water and cooking. We added another stove and chimney and all helped with making more shutters and draught excluders, filling cracks with mud and securing the polytunnels with wire and ropes.
We were sitting around a brazier on the verandah one evening, its flames mirroring the streaky yellow-red sky. Occasionally we could hear the large smack of a beaver’s tail on the water.
“Should be as snug as a bug in a rug,” Bob said. “Went better than I thought. Maybe we’ll get through this. For this year, anyway.”
“Of course we will,” Mom replied. “Though I wish there was an alternative. It just doesn’t seem right that we’re out here by ourselves.”
