by Jamie Kain
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To Genevieve
PART ONE
The End of the World as We Know It
August 3, 2002
By the time you return, maybe the end will have come.
The End, as in the apocalypse, or the next ice age, or the Second Coming, or whatever.
Your leaving feels like the end of something, but I don’t know what.
Maybe you think I never really listened closely enough, never took your warnings seriously, but I did. I remember everything.
You said the world might end in fire, or in ice, and that the how of it didn’t matter so much as the importance of being prepared for the worst.
You said only the strongest would survive.
You said we would need a careful plan, and a foolproof backup plan.
You prepared us for every possible disaster scenario—except this one.
So what do we do when the apocalypse happens from the inside? When it’s our family, and not civilization itself, that falls apart?
While you were busy preparing for catastrophe, maybe the worst really did happen, and it wasn’t what you thought it would be at all.
One
WOLF
July 6, 2002
From the edge of the forest, you can catch the world unaware. You can watch like a silent animal, and you can observe what people don’t want you to see.
If you were the one sitting in the crook of the madrone tree, you would hear the car and the truck on the gravel road before you saw them emerge into the clearing and stop in front of a forlorn house.
A man gets out of the white truck and walks to the driver’s side of the car, where a woman sits inside without opening the door. He tries the door handle, but it must be locked. Then he says something. It looks as if they are having a standoff.
Their vehicles are new, shiny, clean, waxed, like cars in commercials—a silver sedan and the large white truck, which is towing a matching white camper trailer. These are nothing like the dusty cars in which I have grown up riding.
Adjusting myself in the crook of the tree to keep my left leg from falling asleep, I press my shoulder into the chill of the wood. The madrone is called the refrigerator tree because even on the hottest days it feels cold to the touch. No one really knows why. I am grateful for it on this day when the heat bears down like a malevolent force.
I sit still and silent, practicing this skill. It’s what I imagine the Native Americans did in these woods hundreds of years ago, before white people came.
After awhile I am rewarded with the sight of a hare, its dust-brown fur stretched over a long, lean body, as it eases out of a burrow. A few seconds later the ears of several baby hares poke up, their velvet black eyes peering out at the world, looking for their mother. I know from watching that they won’t venture out, not until she invites them to do so in whatever silent language of movement they use. She will nudge them back into the burrow again and again, until they are large enough to search out food and fast enough to evade predators.
And even then, only a few of them will survive, if they’re lucky.
I understand the balance nature seeks—the need for the hawk to eat the hare—but I have never felt at peace with its harshness. I don’t begin to understand why life, so excruciatingly fragile, so breathtaking in its delicate beauty, can be destroyed with such ease. Mahesh would say that no life is truly destroyed, that it just returns to the Great Mother Earth to live again, but tell that to the hare trying to keep her babies alive.
Then again, she probably understands it far better than I do.
Finally the woman, small and dark-haired, gets out of the car and stands next to it, arms crossed over her chest, posture stiff as a redwood. Then she picks her way across the overgrown yard and up onto the porch, followed by the man.
If you were the one watching now, you would know the rush of pleasure to see the girl who climbs out of the passenger seat of the pickup truck and follows after her parents. Although I am too far away for fine details, I get the general impression of her: long dark hair in a braid down her back, narrow limbs, jeans, a white tank top. A species unto herself, she moves without seeming the least bit disturbed by her unkempt surroundings.
Last to exit, from the car, is another girl. She looks like her sister, but smaller and I assume younger. The colors she wears are jarring in this dusty place—bright pink and turquoise. She calls out something to the others, then does a ridiculous skitter across the yard, like a Jesus lizard on water.
I watch, and I gather facts: a new family in the valley, neighbors where, for almost as long as I can remember, there have been none, save the angry old man who used to live in the house only a handful of times each year, using it as a place to stay while he hunted deer. Already I feel encroached upon, hemmed in. I am one whose territory has just been shrunk by development.
It’s a feeling that’s been gnawing at me even before this new arrival. It started with my mother coming back a month ago.
You might wonder why I watch, and that, you would be wise to question. It’s the big why.
Of the facts I might choose to tell about myself, I can think of none worth knowing. I sit here in the woods because it is a halfway point between the place others choose to call my home and the place I choose to call my home. I am often hovering in between, unclear about my destination.
The first home has gotten too crowded for me, with the return of my mother, Annika Dietrich.
She of the little white pills, the empty wine bottles, the bottomless need.
When she left last year, it was a relief, like having a painful tooth removed, followed by the shock of realizing that there is a hole where the tooth once lived. And then, as with all things, you change. You adapt. A year passes, or more than a year. You stop missing the tooth, you learn to chew on the other side of your mouth, and when you remember it, you recall only the pain it caused and your relief at its removal.
But my mother is not a molar, or even a canine tooth. She is an addict. A recovering one, she says, but I’m seventeen years old. What am I going to do with a full-blown mother now? What do I do with her new twelve-step religion, her higher power, or her pseudo Jesus talk that fits in at the village about as well as a snake in a henhouse?
I have no use for it, so I disappear into the trees, which are the only caretakers I’ve known who never disappoint.
Okay, I don’t completely disappear.
I am building a shelter. A secret tree house, tiny in size but big on promise.
I will soon be living like my hero, Thoreau, with his cabin in the woods. Only higher.
And maybe when it’s finished I will build a bridge to the moon.
I will learn what the crystalline perfection of solitude has to teach me.
* * *
The family has gone inside the house, leaving behind a silence that fills th
e clearing. Even the cicadas are quiet for a stretch of time. I’m about to climb down from the tree to look for a place less encroached upon when I hear the front screen door squeak open and slap shut again. I look up to see the man and the older girl there, the one not intimidated by weeds. He says something and hands the girl a rifle.
A gun?
It is long, black, ominous in the sunlight.
In a fluid motion, she rests the weight of the rifle against her shoulder as if she’s handled it a thousand times, and I watch, dumbstruck, as she heads toward the woods—and toward me.
NICOLE
Everything is a test.
If I flinch, I fail.
If I say no, I fail.
If I hesitate, I fail.
I have learned how to survive being my father’s daughter, even if that’s not what he thinks he’s been preparing me for.
So I march across the field toward the woods, Daddy’s good little soldier girl.
All you need to know about Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) James Reed you can learn by reading his self-published book, The End of the World As We Know It, a manual on surviving the apocalypse, or the next ice age, or the mega-earthquake, or whatever catastrophe finally befalls mankind.
For his money, he’s betting on social and government collapse caused by widespread shortages of food and water brought on by natural disaster. It’s as good a theory as any, I guess.
What I always wonder, but never ask aloud, is: if there’s a God, what makes us think he even wants us to survive?
I know what my dad’s answer would be. He’d say we are God’s chosen, created in his image and given the knowledge and talent to survive any catastrophes we face.
But what if my dad’s book falls into the hands of someone who isn’t chosen? This is what I would then ask, if I were a different person, in a different life, far, far from here. My idea of God is different from his.
My dad’s book doesn’t contain any chapters about himself personally. It is strictly a guide to how to skin game animals, purify water, find and build shelters, start a fire in any weather under any circumstances, set a broken bone with any materials on hand, and other such matters. Yet you can infer through the topics and his handling of them what kind of man would write a book like his.
You can make an educated guess.
And you’d be right.
James Reed is the kind of guy who brings his family to a new home none of us has ever seen before, aside from an old family photo, which he has decided we will live in, without seeking our opinions. So here we are, in the middle of nowhere. We all—myself, my mom, my sister Izzy—are varying levels of stunned and appalled.
Me: approximately 40 percent stunned, 15 percent appalled, 45 percent I-don’t-know-what. Intrigued, maybe?
Mom: 60 percent stunned, 40 percent appalled.
Izzy: 30 percent stunned, 60 percent appalled, 10 percent worried about her hair.
The place Dad has brought us is not like anywhere we have lived before, and we’ve lived in a lot of places, thanks to my dad’s army career. It’s the home my great-great-grandparents built over a hundred and fifty years ago with money they made selling groceries to miners during the Gold Rush. It’s a crumbling two-story Victorian, oddly out of place in this rugged landscape, hunched quietly here in a clearing like an old lady waiting to die, with the forest standing vigil around her. I guess the color of the house used to be white, though most of the paint has peeled off to reveal the grayish siding beneath.
There are woods on all sides, in a landscape of rolling hills that get higher to the west, as foothills turn into steep mountains. And even though this is a family home, I’ve never been here before because my dad wasn’t close to my grandparents, or his grandparents, and no one has lived here full time since I don’t know when. He’s the only child, so he inherited the house last year when my grandfather died.
I tried to picture the place before we got here, but it’s so remote that I could barely find the area on a map.
And Dad isn’t exactly interested in the same details the rest of the world is. He told us only that it had a cellar for canned goods and a big detached garage added in the sixties, where Dad would keep all his interminable supplies that he stocks away like a crazed squirrel preparing for the world’s longest winter. He said it was twenty acres in the Sierra foothills, mostly wooded but with a good clear area for a two-acre garden and some livestock, with its own underground well, a year-round stream, and a septic system.
So there is what I pictured, with my sad lack of useful information, and there is reality.
Our home for the foreseeable future is the most broken-down house I have ever seen outside of a horror movie. I can only hope the plumbing works, which occurs to me because Dad is big on lecturing us about living without plumbing—how we take running water and flushing toilets for granted, how we’d all be better off using an outhouse because it would toughen us up.
Mom will not, even for a night, use an outhouse.
She was born in Cambodia in the seventies, her earliest memories of starvation and hiding in the jungle. Once, in a rare moment of willingness to talk about herself, she told me how she saw her older brother shot in the back as they were escaping the massacre of her village by the Khmer Rouge. When she was six years old her parents were able to immigrate with her and her remaining siblings to the US, to Southern California, where they went on to have what must have felt like a shockingly normal suburban life when contrasted with what came before.
So it kind of makes sense to me that she will not consider accepting anything but middle-class living conditions. Even with Dad’s plans to renovate this house to its former glory, it doesn’t come anywhere near meeting her standards.
I think of our pristine ranch house in the desert, and I don’t miss it, but I know my mother does. Our neighborhood always seemed to me like a place without a soul, like where zombies would choose to live if they had jobs and bank accounts. Yet I think Mom sees the suburbs as the kind of place murderous dictators never take over and slaughter millions of people. She kept our house spotlessly clean and free of clutter. And she is a fan of all things new and improved—two categories this house does not fall into.
Our arrival at our new home was preceded by ten hours of driving through the desert and the Central Valley. We left at oh four hundred hours, which means early morning, before daylight, in case you don’t know military time speak. Mom drove her Honda with Izzy in the passenger seat, and I rode with Dad in his truck, which was towing the camper trailer full of the last of our household stuff. A moving company will be delivering the rest of it.
We got a five-minute tour of the house, during which I was relieved to see it does have an old, funky bathroom, along with a bedroom for each of us. There is even a decrepit sort of charm about the place, if you consider haunted houses charming. Then we were given our jobs—Izzy and Dad unloading the trailer, me finding dinner, Mom standing in the kitchen looking appalled.
She is so angry I’m not even sure she knows the words to express her rage. This is not a good sign, but Dad is a pro at ignoring female emotions. He’s been doing it for years.
Finding dinner, to most people, might mean opening up the refrigerator or picking up a take-out menu. Not in my family. In the Reed household, we find dinner the old-fashioned way whenever possible. Or at least my dad and I do.
My mother and little sister have not signed on for this particular survivalist lifestyle. They have not learned to assimilate.
For my mother, survival mode isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s what her family came to America to escape. And they did escape. From age six onward she grew up in Long Beach and learned to love all things American and middle class. She has no romantic notions about roughing it—which these days for her means skipping a weekly pedicure.
So I am the girl with the hunting rifle, forever traipsing into the woods hoping to take down something more impressive (and better tasting) than a squirrel. But this is not the right
time of day for hunting, in the glaring heat of the late afternoon. This is when animals lie low, waiting for the heat to pass. After the sun dips below the ridgeline, there will surely be deer, rabbit, and other game, though early in the morning is best, when animals are first venturing out to find food for the day.
But Dad likes to make things hard for me. He wants to know I will survive no matter what happens. Without the son he always hoped for, he’s forced to pass on his knowledge to me, since Izzy mostly refuses to participate in anything remotely outdoorsy.
I, on the other hand, am happiest surrounded by trees and sky.
Picking my way along a trail mostly overgrown with brush, I feel the cool metal weight of the barrel and stock in my hands. There are two emotions I waver between. One is reluctance to fire a gun, killing some poor animal that’s just trying to live its life. In my head, I don’t comply with every order just to please my dad.
In real life, though, I am my father’s daughter, and the other feeling is pride. I am really good at hunting. I can shoot a duck out of the air with one quick shot, then clean the carcass and fry it up for dinner over an open fire, if I have to. As much as I sometimes get tired of my dad’s constant prepping, I do like knowing I can take care of myself. I’ve never liked confronting the death of an animal, but I understand that it’s how we get food to eat.
“Let’s go find dinner,” he will say at the start of every hunting trip, and I go.
There is always that moment when I contemplate my options, consider saying no. Maybe declare myself vegetarian, just to see his reaction. But I never do. I am only a rebel in my mind.
The heat sears my skin and sends rivulets of sweat trickling down my back and my rib cage. My tank top sticks to me and I wish I had something cooler than jeans and boots on, though I know stinging nettle is all around and they are protecting me from the pain of that horrible weed, at least.
In the woods, my senses sharpen. Here on the edge of field and woods is my best chance to find game. I choose a tree trunk to lean against and grow still and quiet, slow my breathing, and wait. Gnats fly at my face, but I don’t swat them away.