by John Hunt
“I can’t see one, though, Mary,” Dad chipped in. “I’ve been talking to other people on the radio Nat gave us. Some places have got organized, but mostly its people looking after themselves, like we’re doing here.
“Then we’ll make the most of it,” Mom decided. “Hey, let’s think of it as an extra-long holiday, let’s make it the best winter we’ve had.”
THIRTY-ONE
We turned our attention to a cabin for me and Jessie. She was standing on a rise a few yards from the Lodge, overlooking the lake, which the wind had turned into a miniature sea, white caps on the waves. The mountains rolled on forever in the distance. Jessie’s hair streamed around her face, shirt sculpted to her body.
“You look like a goddess, Jess,” I said admiringly.
She grinned, pointing to her feet. “Then the goddess orders her worshipper to build right here.”
I spent a couple of days clearing the ground, putting down a floor of gravel and pebbles from the beach. We took the truck down the road and dismantled a cabin from the campsite. Everyone helped putting it up, a snug little place of around twelve feet by ten, supplemented with more cut logs.
“I think I could get used to this,” said Dad as he nailed in planks. “Why work all the time to pay the mortgage to live in a house which you can’t afford when you can build one for free?”
“It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it?” Matthew replied, putting nails in on the other side. “We had a large house, back in Seattle, and a huge mortgage. Six bedrooms. I don’t know why, there are only the three of us. I had a cushy job, pure gravy. All the stuff we had…I guess when it was just the three of us I overcompensated by buying things. I had three cars, seems crazy now – you can only drive one at a time.”
“We had three as well,” Dad replied. “Daft, really. One each for Mary and me, and an estate for when we went out as a family. But we could’ve managed with one.”
“Actually, I don’t really miss it, except for the hot tub we had out at the back. That was great, any time of year, hot or cold. But I guess the house isn’t ours any more, it probably belongs to the bank now. But if the bank doesn’t exist any more, whose is it?”
Bob was working on the stove and chimney, putting in a metal back and sides to help direct the heat. “Guess it won’t matter when it collapses. A place like Seattle, the woods’ll take over in a few years.”
“You know,” Matthew added, “nothing I’ve done in my life prepared me for this. No computers working, no companies needing their accounts doing, all those billions of clicks and transactions going on every day – all gone. I lived on computers, on the Internet, all day long, that’s how I met people, talked to them, did business. I could read a balance sheet like Bob here can read tracks. Tell you how healthy the business was, where the problems were, whether to save it or kill it, give you the EBITDA without thinking about it. I looked down on plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, people who actually went out killing animals were just freaks – sorry Bob – and here we are now with hammers and nails. Everything I’ve done in my life is irrelevant beside this. I still can’t quite believe it.”
“Me neither,” said Dad. “I thought I’d be helping provide for Jim and Bess by giving them cash for a house deposit or something like that. And here I am, actually helping to build it. With no power tools.”
“I wonder what’s happened to all that cash?” Matthew looked genuinely puzzled. “All those securities, trillions of dollars. All those IOUs. Quadrillions. I guess it’s all just disappeared?”
“I guess there’s all that gold in Fort Knox still,” Dad replied. “But even if you could get it, what would you do with it?”
“Do you think those days are ever going to come back, Donald? They can’t have just gone forever, surely? We’ll have companies again, jobs?”
“I honestly don’t know, Matthew, but I guess maybe not. From what Nat said in Whittier, and what I’ve heard on the radio since, it’s a different world now. We’ll be going back centuries. We’ll have to start again. What do you think, Bob?”
“I think if we don’t get this stove working soon, Jim and Jessie are going to freeze their butts off in here,” Bob replied.
After a couple of weeks it was nearly finished. It wouldn’t have the same conveniences as the other two, but we figured we’d mostly just be using it for sleeping.
“We’ll leave you to do the rest, Jim,” Bob said. “We need to get out and do more foraging. Keep the bed well off the floor. The inside needs lining. You can put those cupboards up. Pegs for clothes. And you could think about a verandah here.” He painted on the innocent face he always wore when he was about to cross the line. “Hope she’s good enough in the sack for all this.”
We were between the lodge and the lake. I looked through the door onto a spectacular view, right across the lake, the wind frilling the water, the pines swaying to and fro. A huge flock of sandpipers swept along the water, shaping and reshaping, flashing dark and light, leaving for the winter. A few months ago and my main excitement was sticking a new stamp into my book. Now Jessie and I were together, and we had our own home.
Soon enough, the day came when the work was finished, at the end of September, a couple of months after we visited Anchorage. The memory of that place, the horror of it, of the dog packs, of what could come in the winter, had driven us on. It felt as if before, in the summer, we had still been playing at it, like a working holiday. Now, we had been working for our lives.
We decorated it with spruce boughs, driftwood and candles. Sue gave us a posy of flowers. Dad nailed up a pair of antlers over the door. Mom gave Jessie a necklace. Matthew cooked a fruit cake in the shape of the cabin. Louise had quilted a bedspread for us. Bob gave me his scope, and another Winchester M70 to Jessie, hanging it up over the door.
“Are you sure, Bob?” I asked.
“You can make better use of the scope than me, Jim,” he replied. “Anyway, sometime next year we’ll kit ourselves out again.”
We didn’t get anything from Bess, our relationship had cooled now that I was with Jessie so much. That afternoon, down on the beach, Bess was sitting on her rock, rod in hand. Jessie and me walked down to say hi, hand in hand.
Bess looked up. “Can’t you leave me alone? This is my space.”
“Your space?” I replied, surprised.
“What else have I got?”
She got up and stalked off.
“What’s up with her?” I asked Jessie.
“Jim, you twerp, she feels left out. Thinks I’ve betrayed her.”
“Left out? Well, how do you think I used to feel?”
“That was your choice, Jim. Men!” She sighed. “You can’t teach them anything.”
“I could think of something,” I leered.
“C’mon then, might as well make some use of you, if Bess is going to go sulk. Here, behind these trees.”
We lit the stove in the lodge that evening, the crackling sound of spruce merging with the scent of pine from the drying logs, the flames flickering over their rounded contours, and had a party.
“I know it’s not like you’re married yet,” said Mom, embracing Jessie, “but it feels as good as that to me. Welcome to the family.” Jessie and me left for our own cabin, and I carried her in over the threshold.
THIRTY-TWO
“Daylight hours are down to a dozen,” Bob said. “Let’s make a few longer trips while we still can. See if there are any better hunting grounds around here.”
The next week, Bob, Jessie and myself were ranging further down the Portage River than we’d been before. Bob was scoping the hills around us.
“There are some promising side valleys here that we should explore,” he was saying, when Jessie interrupted.
“Smoke over there, Bob.”
A thin, faint column could be seen a few miles away.
“That must be the Begich Boggs visitor center on Portage Lake,” said Bob, looking at the map. “Must be someone there. Let’s go see.”
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br /> We moved over to the road and picked up pace. It was strange walking on tarmac again after all the trails and rough ground we’d been walking over. It felt like a ribbon of nothingness: but it was certainly quicker. After an hour or two striding rapidly along we came to it.
The Lake was evidently a popular tourist spot, and a place to set off from for hiking and hunting. There was a large car park, a couple of lone cars in it, and a campervan. The visitor center was impressively big and modern, telescopes set around the perimeter by the water’s edge. The smoke was actually coming from a cafe further along which had collapsed into a heap and was smoldering away. “Let’s go carefully,” said Bob, unhitching his rifle and taking the safety catch off. “Never know what you might find.”
We edged closer. “Shit,” Bob said, looking at the ground. “I’ve never seen so many bear tracks in one place.”
“Bob, look,” I pointed to the side of the building. “There’s a raccoon, and another.”
“I don’t believe it,” he ground out. “Whoever’s here, they’ve just been chucking food and waste out of the window.”
We could hear the shouting and yelling inside as we got to the front doors. It didn’t sound dangerous or panicky: just arguments. A sickly smell hit us as we entered. The place was a tip; rubbish everywhere, furniture overturned, some of it chopped up. The display boards about the area’s amenities and wildlife were scribbled over and ripped. A couple of very overweight boys were running around, chasing a dog. They stopped when they saw us.
“Mom,” one of them yelled at the top of his voice. “We’ve got visitors.”
An obese lady came waddling down the main stairs. “About bloody time someone got here,” she said. “Who the fuck are you?”
“We live a while away,” Bob replied, an edge to his voice. “Who are you? Why are you here? This place stinks.”
“We were here on holiday when those sunspots happened,” the woman replied. “Stupid idea, but that’s Andy, always doing something stupid and dragging us along. Couldn’t get the car started the next day, so we’ve been here ever since.”
“Where’s Andy?”
“Upstairs. Here, you’d better come see him.”
We followed her upstairs, the smell getting stronger. She led us into a room which had obviously been the local park ranger’s bedroom. A mountain of a man was collapsed in the bed, stinking of drink and urine.
“Wake up, Andy, we’ve got visitors.”
He pulled himself up, the bed creaking, and looked at us with bloodshot eyes.
“Thank God you’ve come at last, about damned time.” He snorted. “I need help, I’m ill.”
Jessie put her rifle down against the wall and went over to him. “I know some first aid,” she said. “Let me look at you.”
“I need a doctor,” he said, “not a fucking girl, go get me a doctor. Get me to a hospital.”
“Are you boiling the water you drink?” Jessie asked.
“No, what’s wrong with that? It’s water, ain’t it?” replied the lady.
“Doesn’t look like they’ve been bothering with water,” Bob said, his voice as hard as rock. “Just copping the restaurant drinks – he’s soused.” He nodded his head at the man mountain. “Look, mister, we can’t get you to a doctor, or to a hospital. We’re leaving now.”
“Isn’t there something we could do to help, Bob?” I asked.
“Well, what do you want?” he barked at them.
“We have to get back to Anchorage, we’ve got welfare checks there waiting for us,” the guy said.
“You have no idea, do you? There is no Anchorage now,” Bob replied, “but looks like you’ve had enough to feed you here. Was that from the Center stores?”
“There’s a restaurant here in the Center, and a Café along the road. But we’ve eaten most of the stuff they had. We had to chuck out food from the freezers when it went off.”
“Then I suggest you walk out,” Bob said.
“Walk out? Are you kidding?” the woman screamed. “There are bears around here, hundreds of them.”
“That’s because you’re chucking out the left overs.”
“Well what were we supposed to do with them?”
“Bury, or burn.”
“We don’t have a spade. It’s not our job. That’s for the Park Rangers to do.”
“Hey,” Jessie suddenly interrupted; one of the fat boys had taken her rifle and was running away with it, shouting wildly, “Bang! Bang!”
Bob raised his rifle, and cocked it. “That does it,” he muttered. “Miss, you’re going to get that gun back from your boy, or I’m gonna shoot him.”
“Pip, Pip!” She stumbled off screaming. “Give me that.”
Eventually, she came back.
“Look, mister,” she said as she handed it over, “we can’t walk anywhere, so what are we supposed to do? When’s the real help coming? I can’t manage here any more.”
“I wouldn’t bank on any,” Bob grunted. “Look, we’ll do what we can here over the next hour. We’ll leave you some grub, something to catch fish with – there’s plenty in the lake here. I’ll show your boys what to do, if they’ll let me. And we’ll come back later to see how you’re getting on. But you’ll need to think about storing wood for when it gets cold.”
“Wood? Where would we get that?”
“Look, make an effort,” Bob exploded. “You’re in the middle of a forest here. Stop jerking us around, no one owes you anything. Chop wood. Store it. Fish. When you’re out of food, walk out. Go to Whittier. You could get there tomorrow. Do it before the snows come. We can’t help you more than that.”
She brushed her hands through her hair; it looked grey now, but there were still traces of henna in it. “I never thought something like this would happen,” she moaned, distraught. “What’s happened to this country? Where’s the government?”
Later, we walked away, relieved to be out in the clean, fresh air.
“Those toilets,” I said, “they were just piled up with shit. Why didn’t they at least go and crap outside?”
“Hogbeasts. No self-respect. They don’t have any.”
“But we could teach them some?” Jessie asked. “Shouldn’t we do more to help? I mean, it’s not like it looks like there are going to be all that many people around next year.”
“It’s a nice thought, Jessie, because you’re a nice person,” Bob answered, looking at us both. “But you two have to remember, you’ll have to decide who you want to live with. There’s no society any more to tell you. No cops, teachers, companies. And if someone hasn’t found some self-respect when things are easy, it’s a heck of a lot tougher when things are hard.”
“Doesn’t it worry you though, Bob, that they’re just going to die, if we don’t help them?” Jessie persisted.
“We’ve all got to die, Jessie, except for old soldiers like me…I’ll just fade away, walk out into the woods one day, like the Indians do. Now c’mon, we’re going to have to move quick to get back before dark.”
It began raining heavily. We pulled up our hoods, adjusted the packs, and set off at a fast pace. After a while, Bob said, “You know, when I was in ‘Nam, I never saw an overweight Charlie. They looked like skinny rats. They lived like them too, in tunnels. Fought like ’em, would never give up. Didn’t know when they had no chance. We had our Skyhawks and Chinooks, they had mantraps and poisoned sticks. And they whupped our hides. They’re probably doing just fine now, you don’t need electricity to grow rice. This is why this country isn’t going to survive. Too many like that family. We’ve lost the will. Look, we’ll go back there sometime. But we can’t take them in – they’d drag us down, too flaky. Anyway, they can probably live for a couple of months on the fat they’re carrying.”
THIRTY-THREE
The weather had cleared up, though the mountain tops were now covered in white. It was early evening, the sun had already set, looked like it was going to be a frosty night again. Inside, we were all in the main
sitting room, with enough chairs now – we’d raided the other empty cabins along the road. The fire was burning with a nice, steady heat, stacked all around with logs. Three kerosene lamps were lit, enough to read by. The flames flickered and shadows danced around the walls, faces changing in the light. I remember thinking “light” was really “light” here. It was something you had to earn, to work for, to cultivate, that could go out, rather than a constant, even presence at the flick of a switch, like a background noise. We could hear the distinctive whirring of screech owls in the trees around us.
We were all tired but relaxed. Mom was sewing – some of the gloves had got ripped collecting all those thorns but were recoverable. Dad was listening to the ham radio on earphones. Bob was cleaning guns. Jessie was reading a wildlife manual. Bess and Sue were removing stalks from berries – we had mountains of them now – and sorting them into piles – for drink, for jam, for storage. After all the long sunshine hours they were wonderfully sweet. Matthew was figuring out on paper the possible rate of consumption of stores against supply, and time, and when the crossing lines on the graphs got critical. I was sharpening tools on the oil stone, focusing on the whispering hiss they made when drawn across it, trying to get them as crisp as possible.
“I broke my shoelace,” I said. “Do we have any others?”
“We’re going to have to start making do, Jim,” Dad replied. “Mary, do you have any string? That will do just as well.”
“This isn’t right,” Louise said suddenly. “We’re falling into the gender trap here. Donald, if we’re going to build a new community, I think we should start off right. Men should know how to find shoelaces, and sew. Women should know how to clean guns and work the radio.”
Dad thought for a minute. “Seems obvious when you put it like that, Louise. OK, we’ll work on that.”
Bob laughed. “You speak crazy sometimes, Louise. Next, you’ll be saying I should be reading!”