After lunch, I was scheduled to meet with the transportation people. They were usually scattered all over the city, but for now they met me at the transportation hall of the fairgrounds where they kept their heavy equipment stashed. This was easily one the largest groups since it didn’t really require any specific skill, other than driving. Quite a few of them were trained and amateur mechanics, but they didn’t use their skills much yet. The same was true of the four civil engineers in this group. All that would change fairly soon I expected. We weren’t going to be building any new cars, trucks, buses or much of anything else for a long time. One of the mechanical engineers was the lead for the transportation group. He was quite young for a lead, but as soon as I met him, I understood why they selected him.
“Hi, Sam Kohlberg. You must be Robert Caldwell.” I liked him immediately.
“Sam, good to meet you. Lydia Baca, Jane Spencer, I think we just met the leader of the transportation group.”
Of course Jane already knew. “Yes we did. I’ve been reading the reports you’ve been calling in. You’re getting a lot done very quickly, it seems.“
“It’s not rocket science to move a bunch of stalled cars out of the way,” he replied.
I wanted to talk about that in this group’s meeting, so I decided to give him a couple of minutes head start. “But it will be akin to rocket science to keep them running for the next thirty years, because we’re not going to be building many, or maybe any for a long time.” That piqued his interest a bit, and I could tell, he was actually happy to have a challenge to wrap his head around. Actually, I suspect he already had thought along those lines himself.
He chatted with Jane and Lydia as he led us into the big room where there were a large group of men and women gathered. As we entered the conversations going on the large room softened to silence. “I want to introduce our leader, Robert Caldwell. Mr. Caldwell, they’re all yours.”
Again, I got the standing ovation. This group actually whooped and whistled. Feeling somewhat embarrassed and ever so slightly stage frightened, I got started.
“First of all, I want to thank all of you for getting our roads cleared. I know that isn’t a fun or an easy job. We all know what you’re finding in the cars on the roads. I’m so sorry, but the amazing part is that you keep showing up to do your job. I can’t imagine the pain it must cause every time you see another victim. None of us can ever thank you enough.
I know that many of you are like I am about being thanked for trying to survive in this horrible world we’ve inherited. It’s important for all of us to know and to remember that there are people, including you, who are making enormous efforts to give us a chance to rebuild our lives. It’s hard to think about, but we have to be grateful to each other, and I’m very grateful for you.”
Someone shouted something that sounded like “Yeah”, and everyone was standing and cheering again. It was inspiring. Here were all these people who were facing one of the worst tasks around, moving cars filled with heartbreaking reminders of what we have all lost, and they were keeping their own spirits up somehow.
“I need to ask you to do something a bit different for the next few minutes. I need to ask you a few rhetorical questions. I don’t need answers now, but we’re all going need them in the days and weeks ahead. How long do you think it will take to clear the roads to the farms and the other survivor communities here in California? Have you figured out which ones need to be cleared and maintained? Do we know how to maintain the roads we need? I’m guessing some of you are wondering why I’m asking you these questions. Well, I don’t know anything about roads, or cars, or fixing them, other than an oil change or a flat. The other work groups probably aren’t much better than I am about cars and roads. So if I don’t ask you these questions, who else is going to have the answers? The age of having someone in Sacramento or Washington tell us what to do is over. You are the people who understand best what we need to do to keep our transportation system going. So back to the questions I’d like for you to think about. How long can we wait before we have to start building new cars? We need to have clear, safe roads down to San Diego and over to Davis and all the way up to Seattle, and Vancouver, Canada. We need even longer roads all the way across the country. We also need a railroad or two. And someone has to keep some planes in the air. We don’t have to actually build them, but we do have to maintain them, that is, if we want to keep flying. Can we keep them safe and repaired, or are there too few of us?
Who’s going to repair these cars for the next thirty years? What about airplanes and railroad trains? I’m not qualified to answer these questions. I won’t even try. You are our best, our only hope of getting these questions answered. By the way, you won’t be alone. We have transportation groups in almost every community of any size all across the country. But before you breathe a sigh of relief now that you know you aren’t alone, keep in mind that right now, SLO is the largest community of survivors that we know about, at least here in the US and Canada.”
I stopped to gather my thoughts, and Sam stood up to say something. “I know this is a lot to take in, but he’s right you know. One of the things we’ve all been talking about is that for the first time, we have a government that listens to us. I know we’re going to have a chance to ask some questions of our own, but keep in mind, this is what it looks like when the government listens.”
Personally, I hadn’t thought of me as the government, but inch by inch, that is what was happening.
I continued, “I believe in the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’. This is what it means to me. We look at our shared problems, and we come up with shared solutions. In this case, we need you to go a step further and come up with even more questions for yourselves and then come up with even more answers to those questions. I’m going to stop my questions for this visit, and now I want to hear your questions, comments, and suggestions.”
Immediately there were hands all over the room. I decided to have a seat and start plowing through them. Most of them I’d already heard and responded to in other groups. Two were significant though: What about the people who weren’t working on anything? and When will they get paid?
Both questions had elicited a lot of reaction from the group at large. As for the first question about the non-workers, I had heard and responded to it before. What was most relevant was that clearly there were discussions taking place about the slackers. This group had taken the question a step further to ask about getting paid. I saw the two questions as part and parcel of the same problem. My response was tepid, but it was true.
“I’m not a dictator nor am I an economist. Tomorrow, we are having a noon meeting with all the work group leaders. Sam has been asked to be there, and we are asking for another representative from the larger groups like yours. Both of these questions will be discussed at that meeting. I don’t think it’ll be long before we have some suggestions for you to consider. I don’t believe either of these problems are simple so I believe they deserve careful consideration, consideration by more people than me. I hope that is a good enough answer for now. I really want to reiterate that I’m not a dictator. For that matter, I may not be much of a leader, either, but I’m good at asking questions. In my book, sometimes knowing when to ask questions is almost as good as knowing the answers.”
I saved this little speech for the end of our meeting, and the room was silent for a second or two after I finished. Then they erupted in cheers again. This was a spirited group to the end.
Sam walked us to our golf cart. “Thanks. I think they needed that. I needed that. Moving cars gets old, and some of the cars are beyond horrible. I’ll see you tomorrow at noon. Will the meeting be broadcast?”
“All our meetings are broadcast, and not just to us. Most of them are played all across the country. We’re like a reality show, but without the script,” Lydia smiled benignly as she spoke.
The whole meeting had taken over two hours. I was pooped, but when I got
back to my office, I had some really welcome news. Five retired women and a couple of retired men had volunteered to staff a pet day care. Along with a few teenagers, and the dog kennel volunteer from Orange County, we would be starting up tomorrow at the livestock exhibit a few building away. The announcement would be going out immediately encouraging people who wanted a pet to come and pick one out because their new pets would be spending the day with caring women and men while we were at work. I’ve grown to love Nelda, but we both need a break.
Even while Anna was sharing this news, Cynthia came rushing up with another note. Todd had just confirmed that all our people were safely on the ground and were even now moving to the forward positions. I felt a mix of relief, sadness, dread, and guilt all at once. It’s not a comfortable feeling. The worst was the guilt. It doesn’t do any good to realize there wasn’t an acceptable alternative. I was the one who made the recommendation that put this in motion. Now, what I was left with was this horrible mix of emotions that felt exactly like self-recrimination. I had to let it go, but nothing in my entire life had prepared me to deal with the painful understanding that my own words had sealed someone’s fate. Of course, being the objective man I am, I knew these feelings were to be expected. It didn’t make it less painful, however. When did I start thinking of myself as a man and not a boy?
I needed to meet with Jane and Lydia for a little while before I went to work alone in my office. Lydia filled me in on the upcoming meeting with the other leaders in the west coast survivor communities. I really wasn’t expecting all of the small harbor outposts to show up, but she assured me that even Gold Beach was sending a representative. Gold Beach was in southern Oregon and had an airstrip on the beach, something I still had trouble believing, given the high cost of beach front property in the pre-sickness world. The new residents of the Gold Beach outpost hadn’t even moved there yet. Then again, most of the Morro Bay outpost residents hadn’t moved there yet, either. The meeting was on for next Tuesday and would be held at the Stafford Hall on the University Campus. It was the soon to be official designated headquarters for our community. It was also where my public office would be located.
Stafford Hall is a very short walk from my designated residence, Calloway House. I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. Calloway House is, or was, a residential guest house for visiting dignitaries. In reality it was a small hotel, complete with fully equipped offices, a work room, a couple of conference rooms, a work out room, small dining hall, and a couple rooms that would double as living rooms. There were, of course, lots of bedrooms, ranging from a couple of master suites to a dozen guest rooms with their own bathrooms. It’s between Stafford Hall and the former ROTC complex. The ROTC complex is where the training for volunteer reserve defense members was to take place. On the other side of Stafford Hall is Menden Village where most of our college classes were scheduled. Menden Village also housed one of the three cafeterias we would be using. Our community would reside in the neighborhood on the southwest corner of the campus. The houses were old, but almost all of them had been upgraded and they came with large yards, many with functioning greenhouses and small orchards. Several of the houses were on the local historical register. Because I wasn’t given a choice about living in Calloway House, and I wanted my own residence for when I was no longer the speaker for our community, I was assigned a nice, fairly big house right next to the campus. Kevin, who was gone and wouldn’t get a chance to choose his own residence was assigned the house immediately next door. In the meantime, because I was officially looking after his two children, with the help of Irma Stein of course, I would be moving them into Calloway house with me. Irma took the largest of the regular rooms, and I went ahead and designated the other master suite for Kevin for whenever he came back from Indiana. My moving day was scheduled for first thing Saturday morning. I wasn’t given much choice in all of this. Lydia just handled it.
For this first meeting of all of the west coast leaders, most of our guests would be arriving on Monday and would be housed at the Phi Kappa Kappa sorority just across the street and down a little from Menden Village. It all seemed a little elaborate, but when you considered we had an entire country that was practically empty, what was a single university campus.
I needed to get ready for one last meeting before the group leaders’ met at lunch the next day. I’d be meeting with the Sanitation crew. They were the largest of all the groups and had what I considered the hardest job of anyone. They had to remove the dead bodies and take them to a large field a couple of miles northeast of the city. There, they cremated the bodies en masse. We tried to show respect, but winters aren’t that cold in California and it can be pretty warm in January. This year had been unusually pleasant weather-wise, which of course meant that the bodies were very decomposed. I planned to spend a few hours working side by side with them so I would know some of what they were going through. Two or three hours would never give me the experience that these people had endured, but I needed to try to understand as best I could. After I had worked with them for the allotted time, we would break, take showers at the sport center, have our meeting, and I would come back for my group leader meeting at the main office of the fairgrounds. In an odd way, I was looking forward to this meeting if only because nothing I did could be so difficult as what these people do everyday.
As the day drew to a close, I left my office and saw Zach talking with Anna. I invited them to join me for dinner and offered to pick up Chanelle at school while I gathered Kevin’s and my kids. I’ve noticed that Anna and Zach seem to be around each other a lot.
Later, with the kids all at the next table, our little group of diners sat together and couldn’t help but miss Kevin who usually sat next to me, Marco who was frequently there next to Lydia, and Enrique who was always nearby watching over everyone. Irma and Jane were already there as we sat together. I noticed that she was paying as much attention to the kids’ table as I was, but she also kept an eye on the teenagers just on the other side of the children. Of course, there were several tables of teenagers, just a little noisier than the adults seated around the large room. When did our teenagers get to be so mature. They weren’t like this before The Sickness. Then it struck me that with very few exceptions they were all orphans. It was like a blow to the stomach. There were plenty of children, but they were all in the care of a guardian. The teenagers, after the age of fifteen were all on their own, with perhaps a mentor here or there. Were we failing them? Yet, as I looked at them, I realized that circumstances had forced them to grow up. They were like young soldiers who had no choice but to grow up fast if they wanted to survive. What wonderful people they were becoming. I knew that most of them were in the sanitation crew I would speak with tomorrow, but here they were after a horrible day doing the unthinkable, and they were able to connect with each other and let the day go.
After dinner, I was very tired. As we talked together, I mentioned how exhausted I was and how little actual work I really did since all I seemed to do was talk to people, listen to people, read reports, and ask an endless series of questions. Irma looked at me as if I’d grown an extra nose. “What are you talking about? Do you know how stressful what you’re doing is? We’ve been wondering how you were holding up so well with everyone tugging on your sleeve all day long. You’re in the spotlight all day long and most of the night. And you wonder why you’re tired?”
Hearing her put it that way, I wasn’t surprised I was tired. Not sleeping well the previous night hadn’t helped. Still, if you can name it you can fix it. There was a reason, and I needed to deal with it.
I decided to go to bed when the boys did. Charlie was in bed by 8:30 and Jerry by 9. When I first started teaching, that sounded incredibly early but when you realize that children need a bit more sleep than adults and that we get up around 6 AM every morning, it really is almost too late. During my first year of teaching I remember going to bed at 9 PM more often than not. This was a lot like that, but worse. Fortunately, there wasn’t an
y television to compete with our sleep schedules, and the boys were also very cooperative. I’ll never know what they were like before, but now, they were almost perfectly behaved. Usually, after dinner, which is at a mind numbingly early 5 PM for children and guardians, we go to our motor home where they play for awhile with Chad. Then, I have them read for about thirty minutes before they brush their teeth and take their showers. After that, with them in their pajamas, we talk about school, life, or anything that comes up. Both boys like to talk so this is the easiest part of the day. Then we listen to the one radio station we have here. It’s a rock station but for fifteen minutes at the top of every hour, someone reads the news. I don’t know where they get their information, but it seems objective and accurate. I’m not used to being so much a part of it. My day is always reported on and is surprisingly detailed and accurate. I’m frequently quoted on things I don’t even remember saying, but I have no complaints. The first time I heard myself being reported on, it took me a few seconds to realize it was usually Jane who gave them the information. It goes with the territory. Since Kevin had been away, Chad came home with us while Irma took Dinah after dinner. I don’t know how Kevin does it. Both Chad and Dinah are very animated; Dinah because she’s a happy baby; Chad because he’s eight. Almost eight.
Every day is a slow news day when there’s next to nothing new going on. Of course, this is a classic case of no news is good news. And since I’m so much in the news, I’m doubly interested in keeping the news boring and flat. I can’t do anything about any of it anyway.
Second Thursday
Morning is actually fairly calm at my place. Chad was a bit excited about having his routine disrupted, but we coped. I took my shower first thing and then woke the boys. I didn’t have to prepare breakfast so we just took the short walk to the food court. Because I’m who I am, we get to eat pretty much anytime we like so we eat a little earlier than most families, at least the ones that eat at our food court. After breakfast, the boys played with their friends at school until school started at 7:30. Today, with the kennel opened, we’d drop off the dogs before I dropped the boys off at school. Then I’m going to meet the sanitation crew.
Pandemic Reboot: Survivors Page 23