by Tom Wright
“Your friends have told me much about you and your journey. You’ve been through quite a lot. I am sure you will make it, and I sincerely hope that you find your family safe and well.”
“We know it’s a long shot,” I responded. “What do you know about what has happened on the mainland?”
“Less than you, I think. We came out here right at the beginning. We have no contact with the outside world, and you’re the first people we’ve seen since.”
“Do you really think you can make it here?” I asked.
He told me that they had everything they needed. Among their numbers were people skilled and knowledgeable in engineering, construction, survival, hunting, and many other useful disciplines. I wasn’t concerned about that.
“What did you do before, Frank?”
“I was a molecular biologist for a major industrial firm. I became disillusioned with corporatism and in researching an alternative, came in contact with some members of this group. Long story short, I was honored to be selected as the leader of the group when the shit hit the fan.”
“You must know that it’s going to get very cold this winter. I mean it’s already snowing here, and it’s July.”
It turned out that I wasn’t telling him anything that he didn’t already know. They had surmised the same things we had, and despite the obvious difficulties that lie ahead, they were already locked into their course and simply had to make the best of it.
“The ocean will moderate the climate here,” Frank said, “But we are laying away all the resources we can to prepare for the long winter.”
“And hopefully the experts were right about global warming,” he said.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” I quipped. “As a meteorologist, I know that the only thing we’re sure of is that we aren’t sure of anything.”
“I don’t know, the consensus was pretty strong. All the experts agreed,” Frank said.
“Well, that’s what we were told. I’m just not as enamored with experts as everyone else—any experts. Experts agree about all sorts of things that don’t turn out to be right. I could give you a list a mile long, but, suffice it to say, there was a time when all the experts agreed that the earth was flat.”
Frank laughed. “Touché! I guess we’ll find out.”
“Indeed we will,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure that we have cut our carbon emissions now—a lot! Unfortunately, this isn’t a controlled experiment.” I pointed toward the sky. “I think that will have a lot more to do with it than CO2.”
Everyone continued talking, but I zoned out and just stared at the fire. I had to admit that even though on some level I envied the people of Gilligan’s Island, I longed to be back on Kwaj. If all of this had happened just a few weeks sooner, I would be there with my family right now. I would have had everything—the safety and solace that these people enjoyed along with warm weather and an abundance of food. It had occurred to me early in our trip that we might be able to get our families and go right back out to Kwaj. However, after all that had happened, I knew the odds of us making it were slim.
Come to think of it, I had been so focused on getting back to my family and worrying about their safety, that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what I would actually do once I got there. My friend Sean McMasters popped into my head. His dad had a ranch in the Olympic Mountains not far from where Kate’s parents lived. He mentioned to me one time that the ranch was his bug out spot. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I suddenly wondered if he made good on that plan. If we couldn’t make a go of it at Kate’s parents’ house, maybe we would check that out. I knew for sure that he would welcome us. He was good people as my grandfather used to say.
All that worry made my head hurt. The booming sound of Frank’s voice startled me out of thought: “Matt. Are you sure you are ok? You don’t look so good.”
“I think we should go now,” I blurted out.
The group stared at me. Frank finally responded: “That would be suicide without instruments in the dark. These passages are filled with sand bars and rocky reefs that you can only see in daylight.”
Jeff and Sonny helped me back to the teepee. Jill came in just before I drifted off with some more herbs.
“Do you really trust that stuff?” I asked.
“They have regular medicines but not really anything that would help you. They insisted that we try, but we don’t want to take what they have, especially if it won’t help. These natural medicines are as good for you as anything.”
Jill held her hand on my forehead, and it felt red hot on my skin. She was full of life again, a bundle of energy. Surely she still suffered inside, but she had a purpose, and sometimes that’s all anyone needs.
“Jill,” I whispered. “I think you should stay here.”
She stood silently feeling my forehead. Then her fingers searched along my scalp to where the stitches were. She delicately explored the wound with her fingers. She walked to the other side of the teepee to retrieve something and returned. She stuck her finger in a jar and pulled out a dollop of some pine scented salve. She silently rubbed it over my stitches with great tenderness.
I broke the silence: “It’s not that we don’t…”
“Shhh!” She lamented.
When she was done with the salve, she leaned down and kissed me on the cheek and hugged me. I hugged back.
She whispered into my ear: “I know what you are doing, so you can just stop it. You and Jeff and Sonny are my only family.” And she walked out of the teepee.
. . .
The next morning, Jeff and Sonny woke me early and escorted me to the boat. I insisted that I was fine, but they refused to release my arms. It turned out that it was a good idea, because the path down to the beach was slippery from rain and snow the night before. I nearly fell twice. Rain tapped at the leaves as we walked down the moist forest path, and our breath turned to cloud as we exhaled. The salty air filled my nostrils. It smelled as it had for millennia, a hearty, almost metallic aroma that was neither offensive nor pleasant in and of itself, but was inviting if only because it smelled like life.
As we emerged from the forest, a slight breeze slapped me in the face, but I hardly noticed as I focused on the RY. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They had fashioned an entirely new mast out of a tree and restrung the cables and sails. It was a thing of beauty. A knotty-pine mast, and save for the light tan color of the pole, you could hardly tell anything had happened.
Frank strolled up.
“Nice work,” Jeff said. “We can’t thank you enough. Won’t you take some of our supplies? At least Sonny’s beer?”
Sonny chuckled nervously.
“No. You will need those things. We have all we need here.”
“That is really impressive,” I said, pointing to the RY.
“Thank you,” he said. “We have excellent artisans among us.”
“I’ll say! And thank you.”
“You’ll have to take it easy. The wood is fresh and flexible and strong, but it is not seated well. If you overstress it, she could come free.”
Jill strolled up, trailed by a half dozen women. The women held trays of freshly prepared foods—gifts for us. Jill’s mile-wide smile lit up the beach.
“Guess what I just did,” she said gleefully.
“By the look on your face, I’d say you just won the lottery,” I said.
“I just delivered number 180!” she said, ignoring me. “A healthy baby girl!”
We all smiled at the thought of new life. We needed good news like that.
“I hope you all watched closely,” Frank said to the group of women. “There will be more of those, and it’s best to learn from a pro.”
“Oh go on!” Jill said. “They would have done just fine. It was more of a case of them letting me have the honor.”
As we were getting ready to board the skiff to take us out to the RY, Frank pulled me aside.
“I wanted to ask you about something you said last night,” Frank said,
“about the climate here. It sounds like we’ve both come to the same conclusion about what took place. What is the worst case scenario, meteorologically speaking?”
“We could easily be heading into another ice age,” I said. “Our climate is balanced on a razor’s edge. That is why, right or wrong, the climatologists were so worried about CO2 and global warming. They talked of a tipping point where we would head into irreversible warming, a sort of feedback loop that we couldn’t stop. Well, there is also a tipping point and feedbacks in the other direction. Send up enough crap to block out the sun for an extended period of time, whether by nuclear war, volcano, asteroid impact, or whatever, and it could get real cold, real quick. Build up enough snow on the continents during a prolonged winter where it doesn’t melt off in the summer, and then it begins to feed back, and we’re off toward snowball earth.”
“So if the glaciers come, head south?” Frank asked rhetorically.
“I can’t imagine the glaciers coming this close to the ocean. Can you imagine what kind of heat reservoir this ocean is? What worries me is the lack of sun. No sun, no photosynthesis. As a biologist, I don’t have to tell you what that would do to the food chain. In the end, it might not matter where you are, but you’re starting off at a disadvantage in an already cold place like this. Maybe you’ll be fine—you certainly seem to have to smart people around here. I’m just saying.”
“I really appreciate your concern and your insight,” Frank said.
“It is the least I can do. One more thing to consider: everybody left on earth will eventually figure out what I’ve just said. It may be hard to find a safe place in the south. If you can make it here until the sun comes out again, you might do really well.”
Frank looked out over the bay considering what I had said.
“Now I have a question for you, if it’s all right,” I said.
“Shoot,” Frank said.
“It’s something I’ve always wondered about, and you are the only biologist I’ve ever known.”
Frank stood up a little straighter, squinted his eyes, and tilted his head in order to concentrate on my question. One thing I liked about Frank is that he made whatever you were discussing seem like the most important thing in the world at that moment.
“Since you have only 180 people here, how can you avoid inbreeding down the line? If you were the only people left on the earth, could you repopulate it?”
Frank carefully considered his answer.
I continued before Frank could answer: “I mean, we know that the religious story of creation cannot be true—two people could not have populated the whole world, but what is the optimal number?”
“Yes, of course, it would have been impossible for only two people to populate the whole world,” Frank agreed. “And that is not at all consistent with the theory of human evolution. Genetics is very complicated and not my specialty, but I’ve seen studies that indicate remote Pacific islands, whose populations had been devastated by natural disasters, were able to repopulate from as few as twenty people with few ill effects. In fact, some studies have shown that of the original people that crossed the Bering land bridge and populated North America, the genetic material of only 70 of them can be found in their modern descendants. It doesn’t take much genetic diversity to carry on.”
“Huh,” I grunted, satisfied with the answer.
“Besides,” Frank continued with a chuckle, “We might be hillbillies now, but that doesn’t mean we fancy our daughters!”
I laughed. By this time, Jill had come back to see what the holdup was. She caught the tail end of our conversation.
“He’s very inquisitive,” she whispered to Frank, just loud enough to make sure that I could hear it.
“It’s perfectly all right,” Frank replied smiling. “None of us knows everything, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to.”
After the goodbyes, one of the island men shuttled us out to the RY and helped us aboard.
As we cast off and began to motor away, I looked ashore. People emerged from the forest and began waving. By the time we got out of earshot, it looked as if the entire community was on the beach. It probably was. That’s the kind of people they were.
16
DAY 47 AT SEA, NORTHERN VANCOUVER ISLAND, CANADA (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 50.7°N, 128.5°W)
The ache in my head seemed to be worsening, but I didn't care much. I just wanted to get there and get it over with—whatever it was. I began to have prolonged bouts of nausea and vomiting which worried my shipmates greatly, especially Jill. I blamed it on seasickness, like that which I had experienced when we first set sail. Jill rightly pointed out that after more than a month at sea, only a few days on land shouldn’t be enough to cause it to return. After that, someone always seemed to be unable to sleep when I was at the helm, but, curiously, no one had any trouble sleeping when anyone else stood watch. I could have complained, but maybe they were right. I decided instead to just let them fake insomnia in order to hide how much they cared for me.
Sonny and I sat silently staring as we passed mostly uninhabited sections of northern Vancouver Island. It was a calm day by our standards, but clouds continued to envelop the mountains rising up from the beach. The clouds occasionally lifted enough for us to see a crust of snow over the higher elevations. I reckoned the snow level to be no more than a thousand feet—very low given the time of year.
The engineers on Gilligan’s Island tried to fix our electronics, but to no avail. As Jeff thought, we would have had to replace nearly the entire system of electrical wiring, and they just didn’t have the supplies. So, we were still dead reckoning, but having regained our bearings, we had a good fix on our position.
We weren’t making great time due to the abnormally light wind and opposing current, but the new mast and sails were holding up well. The folks of Gilligan’s Island had dyed our only remaining sail dark and made us another dark sail, so we could keep them up most of the time without being easily seen. With any luck, we figured it would take no more than three days to reach Whidbey Island. Given what we’d been through thus far, we thought that the odds surely must have favored good luck.
We had passed several outcroppings of buildings, but Sonny and I jumped up to take a close look at the first real town we had seen on the whole trip. The sign above the port indicated the name of the town, which was a long Indian name that I had no chance of pronouncing. Like most towns in this part of the world, it was probably a fishing village. It looked quite nice despite lacking any sign of life. There was no smoke, no lights, and no movement of any kind.
I scanned along the shoreline toward the south and came to the entrance to the town where something gave me a start. I couldn’t make out any details from two miles out, but I had no doubt about what it was. A person who had been hanged from a tree rocked slowly back and forth in the breeze. My eyes quickly darted around and found others—six in total—hanging from light poles, trees, and even the welcome sign to the town. I noticed a small sign attached to the victim hanging from the welcome sign, but couldn’t read it.
“Do you see that?” I asked Sonny.
“No, what?”
“At the south end of the town—those bodies. Can you read the sign on that one?”
Sonny scanned frantically around the scene and then stopped. “Yep, I see it. I can’t make it out. What does it say?”
I rummaged through the drawer below the wheel and found Jeff’s sailing scope. I pointed it toward the town and twisted the two-part scope to bring it into focus. It turned out there were others—maybe a dozen—and they all appeared to be men, or were at least dressed like men. The ones hanging closest to the ground looked like they were missing their feet—perhaps chewed off by animals.
I bored in on the sign and tried to hold the scope steady on the rocking boat. I struggled to focus on the letters and then I finally put all the words together. I said it out loud for Sonny’s benefit: “Looters and rapists go back!”
“Good for them,
” he said sincerely.
We sailed for another hour past endless evergreen forests and driftwood littered beaches. Snowcapped mountains jutting up into the overcast became more frequent on the island the further south we moved. Other than the occasional bird, we saw no further sign of life along the coast. It looked just as it had for thousands of years, and during brief moments of detachment from reality, I actually found myself enjoying it.
I picked at the remnants of food from our friends on the island. Suddenly, a whooshing sound behind me gave me a start. Water sprayed over the gunwale and pelted us. The seas were only a few feet and the wind light northwest, so it couldn’t have been a breaking wave. Sonny sprang out of a half sleep as the drops hit his face.
“What are you doing?” he asked confusedly.
I had already turned but saw nothing except a vanishing disturbance in the water.
“Porpoises?” I offered.
We had seen many porpoises in Kwaj and knew they existed much further north, but hadn’t seen any in weeks.
As we watched, several large mounds of water formed just to our starboard. The mounds continued to grow in the center, and the water around the edges sloughed into the depression until, finally, the huge animals breached the surface.
Six of them flew out of the water and performed a variety of dives for our entertainment. A torrent of water sprayed over us as the several-ton animals crashed back into the sea. They were not porpoises.
“Killer whales,” I said.
They immediately did a second breach for us and made quite a show of it. The closest whale came straight out and went straight back in nose first with very little splash. The next closest whale came out sideways and fell back in on its back, sending a shower of water in all directions. Satisfied that we had seen them, they proceeded to swim alongside of us, surfacing only occasionally to breathe.
I pounded on the window and roused Jeff and Jill. They hurried topside, and we watched the whales play. Their clicks and whistles occasionally pierced the unusually calm quiet weather. We counted a total of ten whales, at least two of which were calves. I thought I recognized one male amongst the pod—males have much larger dorsal fins—but I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter, they were beautiful whatever their sex.