0.0.0.0 Would Our Legacy Survive?

by Richard Graupner

  Being an engineer by training, he had, through hard work and integrity, progressed well and at an early age had been highly placed in a large organization. It had taken its toll, however, and my father left the corporate world with a nervous breakdown at a relatively young age. He simply walked out, with nothing in mind other than that he no longer wished to do ‘that’. He tried consulting for a while and then got together with his own previous senior management team and started a company in partnership with them. His thinking was that they could now do it their way. Sadly, as he found out, he was still within the same system, and within a few years he finally understood it was all the same, and he walked out of his own company.

  The years after that were hard. As on the occasion when he left the corporate world, we came within a month or two of losing everything. My father took on tough work, working in areas in Africa recently out of civil war and other difficult environments to keep us afloat financially. He felt he needed to change, but he was caught by the need to still work within the system to provide for all of us. He finally was asked by a small company to assist them on contract, and he remained there for over five years, doing well for our income but struggling still within the system and finding the behaviour of people constantly disappointing. His most common saying was simply, ‘Why can people not just do the right thing?’ He struggled with this, wondering why people simply could not see the problems caused by their behaviour. ‘The information is out there,’ he would say, ‘why are people so averse to investigating life more?’

  He knew the answer, of course, but could not understand how the need to fit in, to not stand out or to not think differently, could be so powerful as to shut down people’s minds. The system, however, did not want free thinking despite supposedly encouraging it. Funding went where subtly directed, maintaining control through the financial systems. He could see this farce and was frustrated that others could not see through it.

  My musing was interrupted by my father standing up slowly. He had placed himself close to the entrance of the hive, sitting down quietly on the grass. I checked my watch. About fifteen minutes. He turned to me, ‘Don’t get nervous or worried, as it will affect them. If you really get agitated, just move a bit further away.’ I had not really thought of it up till now, but I suddenly realised he was going to remove the honey with no protection, not even using the smoker! How does one stay calm then? I wondered.

  Standing next to the hive, my father pointed out how the activity into and from the hive had virtually stopped. ‘Knowing I am coming, and my intentions for the hive, they send most of the hive out so as to limit the numbers in the hive and the potential for injury while I work.’ I was not sure what the entrance should like but there was definitely very little activity. My father took the thin blade he had brought with him and slid it under the lid, gently sliding it all the way around. ‘The bees use all the available attachment space,’ he said. ‘You need to cut loose the cones and other structures attached to the lid before you can open it.’ Opening the top, my father put the lid down gently, moving slowly but deliberately. He checked the hive, gently cutting loose and then pulling the different sliders up a few centimetres to check them. The fourth one he removed all the way and, using the fine brush, gently removed the few bees clinging to the comb, dropping them back into the hive. He placed the comb in the large bowl he had brought with, and then replaced the removed comb with a new starter frame, being careful and slow, allowing the bees to move out of the way and not be crushed. He replaced the lid, also careful not to crush any bees whilst doing so. He picked up the bowl, came over to sit with me, and said, ‘Mentally thank them, and feel gratitude towards them for their generosity. Don’t just think it, you must feel it,’ he said, emphasizing the word feel. ‘Now watch the entrance,’ he said after a few moments. Within about two minutes, the hive entrance was abuzz with bees coming and going. I was starting to get it. My father was now in his element – this was where he was happy. My friends, though, would struggle to believe what I had just seen when I tell them.

  ‘Breakfast!’ I jumped, startled by Angela’s comment.

  ‘Where were you just now?’ she asked. Angela could read me very well by now and was quite adept at reading others as well. She would be a wonderful keeper of the more esoteric knowledge, being also very willing to teach others. She was very wise for her age, considering our circumstances. Was it coincidence she ended up with me?

  I could hear my father, and my mother for that matter, ‘Coincidence, my ass! There is no such thing. You attract what you think about. Your thought is the tool by which you create.’

  I remember arguing somewhat on this one. ‘But so many people have read The Secret22, and other similar books. They said it does not work.’

  ‘Did they believe what they thought? Did they live their belief? Did they stick with it? Or were they simply working with a short-lived hope?’

  I remember my father saying, ‘People today are into the quick fixes, wanting everything instantaneously. So they believe it must be the same with the really important aspects of life, including love, a wonderful home, not house, home! And so on. Few people are prepared to put in the effort, and in this case mental effort and discipline, to make it happen.’ I remember my dad and his plot. He stuck to what he wanted and was prepared to wait for it. He was right of course; it was all out there. Other writers, such as Deepak Chopra in his book Synchro Destiny23 and Dr Wayne Dyer in his book The Power of Intention24, just to name a few, were all clear on this. My folks had been right. I, like most people back then, simply wanted everything right now, and why not? Thinking about Angela coming into my life, I realised now that once I had gone a fair way in the transfer of the ‘survival’ and ‘societal’ requirements to the community, I had begun to think regularly about how I was to pass on this seemingly strange knowledge. I knew my dad would have been great at this and really wished that at this point I had someone like him to help me. I smiled, thinking of what my father would have said to me.

  ‘Come on, out with it. You can’t keep me in suspense like this.’ Handing me my bowl, Angela sat down on one of the logs we often used as a stool. Sitting opposite her, I noticed the bit of honey in my bowl with the porridge and fresh milk. I had not been a milk drinker in my youth, but I understand now why my father had called the commercial milk back then ‘coloured water, devoid of any meaningful sustenance’.

  I noticed Angela had no honey. ‘There was only a little left,’ she answered to my query. ‘Besides, I have to watch my figure.’ I could not resist the challenge.

  ‘Meaning what exactly?’ I countered. She giggled, but said nothing. I was not fat, but I definitely had a bit of weight I did not have during the active years leading up to the establishment of the community. My role had changed some years ago now from active survival activities to knowledge transfer. The more sedentary lifestyle had taken its toll on my body.

  ‘I was thinking about my father,’ I began. ‘The honey triggered the memory. I had gone to see him, to ask him how real the possibility was of the ice cap slipping into the ocean.’

  All three villages knew what had happened. My father had insisted that knowledge of the earth, its topography, continents, the ocean and wind currents which distributed heat, or energy to be more specific, around the world, all had to be transferred into the surviving peoples. ‘It’s no good them not knowing,’ he had said. ‘That simply breeds superstition and other nonsense which becomes inbred, limiting our capacity to move forward.’

  ‘The morning after he confirmed that it was possible, and that it had happened before with tragic consequences, he took me to show me how he handled the bees without protection, and how they let him remove honey with no fuss at all.’

  ‘The love-and-gratitude approach you have taught all of us to use with them?’ Angela queried.

  ‘Exactly! Like everyone here, it seemed then to me that he was way out there and t
hat I was required to call the medics and possibly those with the straitjackets. I remember being dumfounded and excited at the same time. It was during the hard years after the ice cap slipped that he taught me so much more of what I know. He never stopped reading – or experimenting with nature. He would go out in those early years for days, travelling by foot, collecting books and items the other survivors found no value in.

  I am not sure if we would have survived had it not been for the deep intuition that he had. I remember when we were walking back from collecting the honey from the beehive I noticed an excavation extending from the house along the slope towards the north.’

  Drifting back in time I was amazed at how clearly I recalled what had transpired.

  Chapter 13

  ‘What’s that?’ I had asked my father, as he laid the bowl with the honeycomb in the sun on the porch. This was to warm and thin the honey, he had said, making it easier to extract from the comb later and limiting damage to the comb, allowing it to be easily reused by the bees.

  ‘I want to modify the house a little’ was all he said. He seemed a little reluctant to talk about it at the time, and so I did not push him further. I realized later that he had not wanted to tell me as he did not want to frighten me any further. He had been honest about answering my question on the ice cap, but he did not want to show yet how seriously he took the situation.

  What he had been doing, though, and what I only saw for the first time fully when he moved Mom and I out there, no questions asked, just two days before the ice cap slipped, was creating a hidden space below the house. I was dumbfounded when I saw what he had done. The cutting in the slope I had noticed earlier was gone, and it seemed as though the slope had somehow been extended, covered now in instant lawn, and looking quite nice, actually. The house inside looked pretty much as it did before, with only the sparse furniture my father had originally brought out to the house.

  ‘Where is all the furniture and other stuff you’ve been buying?’ my mom queried.

  ‘Later’ he replied. ‘I need to release the fish into the pond. Get the cat baskets out of the car so long.’

  As he walked off into the distance with the plastic bag holding the tropical fish from the tank in our town house, and the goldfish from my tank, my mom and I were naturally quite perplexed. We were out here as my dad had insisted, looking as if we were moving house but with no removal van doing any moving. The atmosphere in the car during the drive had been tense, with my father refusing to divulge anything other than to bear with him. We knew that very little remained of my father’s tools and other bits and pieces at the house in town, these having been removed load by load by my father over the preceding months. But he had also being buying a lot of stuff. Where was it?

  Coming back from the pond, my father stated that the water was quite warm and perhaps some of the fish would survive. It was November after all, and summer was fast approaching, but that did not explain dumping the fish in the wild pond, especially as I knew my father had stocked it with two indigenous ‘wild’ species some months back once the pond was stable. When he had removed the fish, I thought it was to place them in a new tank in the house on the plot. I was starting to get real nervous about all this.

  I turned from looking at the pond and noticed my mother standing, arms on hips, staring at my father with that stubborn look on her face. My father looked deadly serious though and simply said, ‘Come with me.’ We followed him about ten meters along that new stretch of grass, pushing through a bushy patch of smelly black wattle, a non-indigenous aggressive species originally from Australia.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like this plant’ I asked.

  ‘It serves a purpose here’ was all the response I got. My dad turned, ducked low, and disappeared into what appeared to be a solid rock face. My mother looked at me, a strange look now on her face, and then ducked down and exclaimed, ‘It’s a tunnel!’ She struggled a bit to get low enough as the entrance was only just over a metre high. Once she was in, I ducked and moved into the tunnel too. Within three paces, I was able to stand upright. I turned forward and bumped into my mother who was standing still, staring down the tunnel.

  Looking past her shoulder, my mouth fell open. The tunnel was made from concrete, those precast things I think they use under smaller bridges. I cannot remember the name, although I am sure my father had told me at some time over the years. Stacked all along the sides were his tools, wood, pieces of steel, and other odds and ends. Ropes and wire and many other bits and pieces hung from hooks higher up on the sides, which were probably about two metres high. Along the roof of the tunnel, there were small LED lights, providing sufficient light to move safely down the tunnel, but no more. ‘To save energy’ my father had said later when I asked. ‘We will not have much in the near future.’ Now I knew that in South Africa around that time that the state electricity supplier had been struggling to meet demand, and that we had undergone a few power cuts in the past months, but wasn’t this a bit over the top? I was to realise sooner rather than later just how much forethought he had put into all this.

  Reaching the end of the tunnel, I stood there with my mother, struggling to grasp the scene. Before us was a large open cavity, with quite a number of poles rising from the floor to the roof, obviously supports for the floor of the house above. There were three walled areas, quite small, which turned out to be two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The bulk of the space was taken up with food, neatly stacked pile after pile of tinned food, and a host of other items.

  ‘I thought you were donating all this food to orphanages? And what is the rest of the stuff here?’ My mother seemed both angry and frightened at the same time. There were metal trommels, as we called them, largish containers with lids.

  ‘Clothes, blankets, medical supplies, books, and other odds and ends’ replied my dad. ‘I didn’t tell you because I did not want to frighten you unnecessarily.’

  ‘Frighten me! You think you’re not frightening me now?’

  ‘It’s necessary now. It’s going to happen.’ My mother was really agitated now.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ she said, almost in tears.

  Although she asked the question, I think both my mother and I knew. It had virtually taken over the news channels. In the past two days, large crevasses had appeared on an enormous section of the Antarctic ice cap. A few small chunks – I say small, but they were around a kilometre long and up to two hundred metres wide – had already slipped into the sea on the edges, and the waves from this had already been easily noticed and measured in New Zealand yesterday, causing some damage to facilities close to the water line.

  ‘That ice cap is going to go, and go in a big way, and suddenly. The waves and effect are being played down by scientists to try to prevent panic. Sadly, it’s going to be catastrophic for the planet. You have heard me explain it before.’ He had done so, and Mom had told him not to as it was frightening me. She was right, as mothers usually are. I had my whole life ahead of me. Didn’t I?

  ‘Are you saying, if that happens, we are going to live underground, in here?’ It was obviously not an appealing thought, and I am sure my mother, like I and most of the people on earth, did not understand why that would be necessary.

  ‘Yes. It is going to get violent, and people in a panic do not think rationally. They will become quite barbaric, and we will not be able to fight off everyone who comes past, when they have nothing to lose, in their eyes anyway.’

  ‘We have to be very careful when we enter and leave; we cannot leave tracks. That is why I chose that rocky, broken area for the entrance. We can stand in the trees and safely check the surroundings before moving out.’

  ‘Why don’t we stay in town until, and if, it actually happens?’ Way to go, Mom; I’m with you on that one. This was not appealing to me at all, and although not seriously claustrophobic, I was not a happy chappy in confined spaces.
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br />   ‘Not a good idea, however appealing. People will remember seeing someone travelling in an odd direction and wonder where they went. We can’t afford to be seen, or risk not getting out of there once people panic. Right now we have seemed normal, moving in the area while the local labour is busy on the farms and not moving around in panic. It just needs one indiscretion to ruin the whole thing.’ Now I was getting scared. My dad was deadly serious. ‘I am going to spend today showing you around, and then we are going to hide the car tonight and make it look like no one is here for the next few days. I have rigged up a small TV off the aerial above so we can watch what happens. We have solar power off a number of panels hidden around in the trees, with batteries over there. I am not kidding about being careful, and I am going to be a royal pain over the next few days harping on this. I have spent the last three weeks practicing this so I have a fair idea of what needs doing. Please bear with me on this.’

  By now my chest was tight, and I was struggling to breathe. To be honest, I suspect I had been repressing the acknowledgement of this point in life, of the potential for this to happen as my father had explained it to me. He was right about the scientists playing it down. They were reporting that only a few more of these smallish slabs were expected to slip into the sea. Their body language and voices betrayed this so-called conviction though, and it was obvious, although I suppose only to those who were open to the possibility that this was far worse than they were punting it to be.