A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  I pause, look at Stephen, who listens sympathetically. Yet there is nothing in his experience that would make it possible for him to imagine the despair that haunted us in our search for other survivors, nor that perverse mix of hope and fear we felt when we approached a place where we thought we might find survivors: hope that we’d find people alive, that they might have some contact with the rest of the human race; fear that they might be less than benevolent or sane, that they might kill first and wonder about us later. We had a horse, wagon, guns; throughout history, people have been murdered for less.

  And Stephen can’t imagine the loneliness that accumulated around us every time our hopes were dashed. We didn’t believe we were the only survivors in the world. If we had survived, others would. Somewhere. But not here, and we began to wonder if we’d ever see another living human being. That kind of loneliness is beyond imagining, and it seemed then beyond enduring.

  Stephen says earnestly, “It’s sad to have to live off other people’s misfortune, but you and Rachel never harmed anybody.”

  I look into his guileless face, the color of bronze, smooth and unlined. “No, Stephen, but we didn’t hesitate to take advantage of their misfortune. We had pledged ourselves to survive. But in the weeks that followed, the year turned to winter, and that only made that unnatural winter worse. We were always cold, always exhausted. Just keeping warm took hours every day, not only tending the fires, but sawing and splitting wood. After we used all our seasoned wood, we had to go out in that foul, dark cold and cut trees. At least, we still had chain saws that worked. And most of the time, we had water in the house, but only trickles. Bathing and laundry became almost too difficult to consider, but as long as we kept fires in the kitchen and bathroom and cleared the ice off the reservoir every day, we managed to keep the plumbing intact. And, as Rachel said, we could be grateful no one ever got around to making toilets electronic.”

  Stephen smiles at that, but it fades as I go on. “It was a terrible time, and I always had the feeling that the darkness was the shadow of death. Every night I dreamed of death, dreams that woke me up, left me shaking. I think we might’ve given up if we’d only had ourselves to consider. But we had the animals. We lost two goats and more chickens and rabbits, although we did get a wood stove set up in the garage. And we lost Cyrano, one of our male kittens, but the animals that lived depended on us.”

  “And you depended on each other,” he says quietly.

  “Yes, that above all. Neither of us could’ve survived alone, and that brought us together in a way I don’t think anyone could understand unless they’d been through a similar ordeal. And finally, we had some hope.”

  His lips part expectantly. “What was it?”

  “Well, it came on the winter solstice, which seemed fitting. I went out that night with the dogs so they could relieve themselves. Two feet of snow lay on the ground, and the wind was screaming out of the east. I looked up into the sky, expecting to see the same thing I’d seen every night for nearly a hundred nights: absolute darkness. But on that night I saw . . . the moon.” I smile, remembering the wonder of it. “A full moon, Stephen. It was veiled in dirty clouds, but I could see it. I called Rachel to come out, and we wept and shouted and danced in the snow. Nothing I’ve ever seen in my life was as beautiful as that amber moon.”

  “It was like the rainbow, wasn’t it? The rainbow God sent to Noah after the Flood.”

  I feel my smile fade. The god that sent the rainbow to Noah, according to the writers of the Pentateuch, sent it as a covenant that the world—their world which was little larger than mine is now—would never again be destroyed by flood. That god did not, it seems, make any promises about not destroying the world by nuclear fire and ice.

  “Stephen, what the moon on the winter solstice meant was simply that hope was no longer unreasonable.” I open the diary, and his eyes fix on it avidly. “The first entry in this diary is dated January first of the new year. It begins: ‘Another blizzard today. We haven’t seen the moon again nor even a break in the clouds since the winter solstice.’ ”

  His shoulders slump, and I add: “There was no promise in the moon on the winter solstice. The Long Winter didn’t end then. More of our animals died, including nearly all the hens. Of course, the hens that survived weren’t laying; it was too dark. We were just lucky Josie kept giving milk through the worst of the winter. But it wasn’t until March, I think . . .” I turn a few pages in the diary. “Here it is. March first. We saw the sun. Briefly and dimly. About the same time we saw a few gulls and crows. I don’t know where they went during the winter, those that lived. South, maybe. I have great respect for crows—even if I’ve cursed them over the years for eating the seeds right out of our garden—but seeing the gulls gave me real hope. I suppose I’m biased toward gulls because they’re so beautiful. The essence of freedom and grace.” Then I smile at Stephen. “That’s rank romanticism. Gulls are hardheaded and birdbrained. But it wasn’t their beauty that made them so welcome to us. The fact that they survived suggested that not all the birds in this part of the world had been destroyed. We lost the sandpipers, you know.”

  “What’s a sandpiper?”

  I try to explain it to him, my voice husky with memories of those doughty little birds flying over the surf like sparkling schools of fish, and when they fed in the sand, flurrying in and out with the waves like animate foam. I can only hope sandpipers survived on other beaches elsewhere in the world. What’s a world without sandpipers?

  I clear my throat and go on. “One reason we were so glad to see the gulls and crows was because they’re such good scavengers. In January and February, we still had violent storms to sweep the beach clean, but by March, there weren’t as many storms, and the debris collected above the high-tide line: dead fish, crabs, jellyfish, kelp by the ton, sea lions, even gray whales. The stink of it—our noses never got used to it.”

  He wrinkles his nose. “That must’ve been awful.”

  “Yes, it was. The flotsam and jetsam of death. And not just dead animals and seaweed. The storms drove in wrecked boats, broken lumber from houses, even furniture. And sometimes . . . human remains.” I look down at the diary. “Anyway, the winter wasn’t over for us, but it gradually eased off. In March it warmed up enough to rain instead of snow. But at times the rains were freezing rains, and that cost us some of the trees in the orchard.” I turn more pages. “By late March we had an occasional almost clear day, but all that year the sky had an odd, opalescent cast, and there were always sundogs and halos. The light was reddish gold, the shadows blue green. The sunsets were spectacular. By the first of April, the frogs were singing, and some of the wild plants were showing signs of life, and our bees began foraging for pollen. The winter killed a lot of them, and Rachel consolidated the five hives into three and kept feeding them honey from the year before, but we thought it a miracle that any of them survived.”

  I close the book, keeping my place with one finger. “But nothing really flourished. We planted a garden in early May. Outside, I mean. Rachel had seedlings growing in the greenhouse before that. But the outside garden was a continual disaster. There were frosts in May, and we had to start all over. We sowed clover and orchard grass for the livestock, but not much of it took hold. In April we started letting the goats out in the north pasture. It wasn’t fenced then, and we hobbled them so they wouldn’t wander off, and that was a mistake. One day we came home from a scavenging foray in time to see a pack of feral dogs kill one of the kids. We knew then we couldn’t leave them outside our fence without one of us on hand. We’d made our fence fairly dog-proof; added three lines of wire to make it higher. Power line. Makes good fencing, and there was plenty of it around. But we had to let the goats into the north pasture because there just wasn’t enough forage inside our fence. We began taking turns on the scavenging trips, so one of us could serve as shepherd. I don’t know whether it was worse going out alone int
o that ruined world, or staying home and waiting for Rachel to return, wondering if she would. We still found food in some of the houses, and we collected anything else that might be useful, even some furniture, but that was mostly for the hardwood. One of our projects was making soap—as a pesticide; we still had plenty of soap for our own use—and that took hardwood ashes.”

  He asks, “Couldn’t you go up to the Coast Range for big leaf or vine maple like we do?”

  “We did later when we had more time. Just keeping ourselves and the animals and the garden going took all our daylight hours then.”

  “Did you still live in the basement?”

  I skim a few entries in the diary. “No, we moved upstairs in April. We used the basement for storage. Mostly food, what there was of it. The dogs and cats had to learn to feed themselves, so they became good hunters. Except Shadow. I think she’d had her hunting instincts bred out of her. But she was a good shepherd. She picked that up with very little training. As long as one of us was nearby, we could leave the goats and pigs in the north pasture with her, and she’d keep them from wandering.”

  Stephen’s eyebrows go up. “You let the pigs out in the pasture?”

  “Only occasionally. We couldn’t have fed them otherwise. Most of the time they stayed in the pigpen. We built the pigpen ourselves, and that was quite a project. It was jerry-built from scavenged lumber, and we weren’t carpenters, but it lasted ten years.”

  “Jerry built the pigpen?” he asks, obviously confused.

  I laugh at that. “No, I don’t mean our Jerry. Our Jeremiah. It’s just an idiom, Stephen. It means . . . well, carelessly made.”

  He nods, and I turn again to the diary. “The insects began swarming in April. There were so few birds to keep them in check, although the starlings helped. I’ll have to give them credit. And we saw a few finches and sparrows and swallows. But the garden—the bugs nearly ate it to the ground. We sprayed with soap solution and used companion planting, but it didn’t have a chance between the late frosts and the bugs and slugs and especially the UV, and if we’d had to depend on it for food for the next winter, we’d have starved. Still, we did have meat. At first, we had the animals that died in the cold, and later we had fresh rabbit. The chickens didn’t do as well as the rabbits, and we didn’t eat any of them, since we were trying to build up the flock. We shot deer occasionally. That wasn’t so difficult in late spring and summer. The problem with meat, of course, was preserving it. The only advantage of the cold in the winter was that we could preserve meat by freezing it. After the thaw, the only solution was to dry or smoke it. So, we had to build a smokehouse.”

  “Didn’t you salt any of your meat?”

  “Yes. Neither of us liked it, but we tried it. At least we had a ready source of salt here—the ocean—not only for the meat, but for the livestock. We had to boil and filter the water and put it out in shallow pans to evaporate—just like we do now.” I skim a few more pages. “In June . . . yes, I recorded that with exclamation marks. We caught one of Greenly’s horses. We’d seen the horses around his farm earlier, but we couldn’t get near them. This time we resorted to a subterfuge. We took Silver out to Greenly’s when she was in heat. That brought an older stallion, but Ceph was in his entourage, and he was easy to rope. He wasn’t even a yearling then.”

  Stephen leans back, folds his arms. “Why did you call him Ceph?”

  “That was short for Bucephalus. Alexander the Great’s horse. You remember reading about Alexander. Anyway, Ceph was beautiful, a roan with a blaze and white stockings. Of course, one reason we caught him so easily was that he was half-blind. That was what the Arkites called the Blind Summer.”

  “I’ve heard Enid talk about that. She said even some people went blind. She didn’t know why.”

  “It was because of the increased ultraviolet radiation. The ozone layer was disturbed by the nuclear explosions, and that let in more UV. That’s what gives you a sunburn.”

  “Does it sunburn your eyes?”

  “Yes, you could say that. It burned the plants, too, and only the ones that grew in the deep forest thrived. Even some of the conifers on the edges of the forest died. We went scavenging for glass to build a sort of roof over the garden. It looked like a drunken architect’s Crystal Palace. Glass filters out most of the UV, Stephen. We wore dark glasses, hats, and long sleeves to protect ourselves, but the worst of it was trying to protect our animals. We closed the hives and only let the bees out in the evening or on rainy days, but we still lost a lot of them. We covered the chicken coop and rabbit hutches, and kept the goats and horses inside the barn during the middle of the day. We fitted them with hats or cloth fringes to shade their eyes and covered the pigs with coats made of sheets. They sunburn so badly anyway. Still, we managed with most of our animals, but the saddest thing . . .” And for a moment, something in me balks. I don’t want to relive all these memories. Once was enough.

  Stephen leans forward, eyes shadowed with what he reads in my face. “What was the saddest thing, Mary?”

  “The wild animals, Stephen, the innocent victims of our insanity. The birds—oh, it made me weep to see them. At first, they kept trying to fly, but finally they just went to ground and waited to die or be killed. The nocturnal animals—coons, bobcats, owls—and underground creatures, like moles and to some extent the gray-diggers, they survived. But the gulls, my beautiful gulls, they’d gather on the beach and just stand facing the wind until they died. The stronger ones cannibalized the weaker. But some of the youngest survived, the chicks that hatched latest and didn’t have so much exposure to the UV. Still, by August, the beach was littered with dead again. The UV also eliminated most of the feral dogs. We found their starved bodies on our forays in August and September. We found dead coyotes, too. That was the first inkling we had that coyotes had moved into the coast forests.”

  Stephen nods. “I’ve heard them singing.”

  “Yes. They’re far more adaptable than most predators. Not like the bears. I remember one day . . . Rachel had gone scavenging with Silver and Sparky, and I was cleaning the barn while the goats were out in the north pasture. I heard Shadow barking and ran out to the pasture with my rifle, and there was a brown bear blundering after one of the kids. I knew he could barely see. I fired the gun into the air to scare him off. I didn’t want to kill him, but I suppose that was as close as he’d come to meat in weeks. Finally, he did knock the kid down and probably would’ve killed it. So I killed him. It took three bullets, and when the poor beast lay dead, I sat beside him and cried. I thought, I’ve killed the last of his kind. Maybe I did. At least, in this corner of the world. I’ve never seen a bear since.”

  A silence grows out of that story. At length Stephen says, “But the bear probably would’ve died anyway.”

  Stephen has never seen a bear, and I doubt he ever will. He knows them only as beasts pictured in books. “Yes, Stephen, I suppose he would’ve died anyway. And we made use of the carcass. It provided meat and oil and even a little fat for soap and bone-meal for the garden. We tanned the hide—our first attempt at tanning. Anyway, by the end of summer, the UV had let up, and some of the late crops weren’t a total loss. We stored root vegetables both for us and the livestock for winter. We scythed grass and clover for hay. It wasn’t enough, any of it.”

  I stare at the pages of the diary and the erratic tracks of my writing. “But we survived, and I should’ve been grateful. I was. And yet . . . I remember thinking sometimes that we had no right to survive. Not when so many people had died. That was one of the things that weighed most on our minds then. Grief. Grief for people we’d loved; grief for people we hadn’t known, but whose work we knew; even a vague sort of grief for the nameless billions who died in the initial blasts or of radiation poisoning, disease, cold, starvation. And there were other kinds of grief. We grieved a beautiful planet ravaged. We grieved the thousands of species of plants
and animals destroyed. We grieved a civilization lost.”

  My pain alarms Stephen, but I go on: “Rachel said civilization is the highest expression of the human mind. At least, it had the potential for that because it could free people of the drudgery of survival and provide the tools and knowledge that make comprehension and creativity possible. The trouble is, homo sapiens bring a lot of primitive genetic baggage into the world along with our wonderful new cerebral cortexes. We’re social animals with instinctive needs to establish dominance hierarchies. We’re territorial and xenophobic and, like any organism, programmed to reproduce, and we did it compulsively and irrationally. And that’s what destroyed the golden age, and with it all the art and poetry, all the discoveries and insights accumulated over the last ten thousand years.”

  Did Rachel really say that? Yes. Many times. But not in those words. The words are mine. Stephen’s narrowed eyes tell me he’s thinking about what I’ve said. He isn’t sure what it means yet, and he silently waits for me to go on.

  “Rachel knew even then that our civilization was lost. In this hemisphere, at least. But I still clung to the hope that remnants of it had survived. I was convinced that if we went east beyond the Coast Range, or north or south along Highway 101, we’d find people. Civilization. On the first anniversary of the End, we talked about a journey in search of survivors, but there was still too much to do to prepare for winter. Besides, we were exhausted, and I was afraid we’d end up sick. And at that time we couldn’t have gone south. There were a lot of lightning storms that summer, and on September fifteenth we saw the smoke from a huge forest fire to the south. We watched it for days. The wind was from the north, so we weren’t in its path, but the smoke covered half our sky. It rose in an immense cloud like a thunderhead, the color of opal where it was thickest. Strange, how many destructive things are so beautiful. Even the cloud of a nuclear bomb was beautiful.”