litrclairejess - Tumblr blog

[litrclairejess]

Love in the Ruins - Claire + Jess

First the light appeared, then the rain.  Then it was dark again, because the approaching dawn so stoked the cloud formations that hung dark and heavy, each and every morning.

Claire got up anyway, since it would be time for the kids’ breakfasts soon, and she wanted to get started before Gran was awake.

Still, she thought, we’re lucky.  We have fresh water, filling our pitchers and our cups.  It’s something so many don’t have...

Claire shut her mind off, again. It was best to tackle one’s work without thinking about what the possibilities were. It was best to focus on the bright side of things.

She sliced a chunk off the elk hock hanging high in the servery, large enough to feed the children, herself, and Gran too when she arose.  Then came hunting for eggs in the henhouse.  A total of 11 families consumed their daily meals prepared inside the servery.  They shared this particular elk with three other families whose combined efforts had resulted in the ensnared large animal; when it was gone, they planned to trap another, but not until then.  Eating four legged animals was rare due to an overabundance of effort it took and the unpredictability; it was fish that was the staple of their diets.

The kids weren’t her kids, and Gran wasn’t even her grandmother - she was her stepmother’s mother, and the children belonged to her stepmother and the stepmother’s former husband, who’d died of cancer at age 29, seven years earlier.  The kids were now seven, nine, and 11.

Claire was now 24.  Her father was 52, and her stepmother 37; Gran was 67.  Claire’s own mother had died of cancer ten years before, at age 42.  She tried not to think about the inevitability of cancer, hitting the population as it did.  There were no cleanups anymore.  Despite the danger of the “hot sites,” it really was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.  Daily survival was the priority.  Food, in particular.  Water was blessedly less of a concern, and that’s why they were where they were.

In this, again, Claire was lucky.  They lived next to a river in a protected fort, and the adults spent the days fishing, cooking, and mending the fortifications.  It wasn’t that there was no gas--they in fact used automobile gasoline for cooking and heating, regularly.  It was that there wasn’t really any place to go.

The supply lines had collapsed shortly before the internet itself had collapsed.  In the end, it was not a lack of fuel that drove the breakdown of the transportation-dependent systems in place by the early 21st century, but that the electrical grid and communication networks were more delicate than most people realized. Single break points appeared, requiring expensive repairs, and then multiplied.  The constant storms causing billions in damage to roadways were too much, and need for repair dollars led to overleveraging nonexistent money, leading to one final economic crash.  And then there was no economy.  No longer was it satisfactory to push papers, whether electronic or tree-derived, which skills even in childhood Claire had been taught.  

She thought of the kids now stirring who’d be coming to eat their elk steaks, eggs, and sliced apples she was preparing soon. They would likely never know typing at a computer, but they would be expert hunters and fishers, potentially even canoe makers, before the age of 20.  

Even before it had all gone sideways, people had returned to learning to fish, field dress meat, growing their own vegetables, and building their own shelters in a big way.  Somehow everyone knew that it was the end of the technology that had been the detached living of a previous age.  

Field dressing meat wasn’t something done very often other than very small mammals caught with snares.  Even then, they were valued mostly for their warm pelts, not their meat; so-called “rabbit starvation” could result from eating meat that contained too little fat.

The fish and the fishing may have been unexciting, but it provided scads of the fat and protein they needed.  Nearly all group effort was dedicated to catching and preserving fish.  It meant they stayed ahead of food needs, and food was everything in a place where the fresh water flowed easily and tree bark and animal pelts were available to make clothing and shelter.

Now others were stirring, having too been raised by the first light that then quickly blanked out again to darkness.  The first peltings of rain began to hit the heavy cedar bark thatched roof of the enclosure; soon they would be thoroughly drenching, and the pilings would shake under the weight of the heavy, falling rain.  A mixed blessing, Claire thought, as she adjusted the containers and buckets to catch the fresh water falling.  Her fire had begun crackling just in time to take on strength before the heavy mists accompanying the rain could fizzle it out; now the food was sizzling in the pan.

A decade before, when the breakdown of the supply lines had started in earnest, people quickly packed up and moved to where they could guarantee themselves fresh water.  At first, for Claire’s family, that had entailed a quick trip up north to a mountain valley they were familiar with that had a year-round stream, far from the dry California desert.  They came prepared with 21st century camping gear.  All of it failed, tore, and disintegrated within three months.  They had started with a station wagon, now useless with torn-up roads and nowhere in particular to drive to, and had been packed to the gills with nylon plastics and cheap metal, holdovers of a civilization that no longer existed.  A civilization that had assumed cheap goods destined for a landfill after a short life of use was all that would ever be needed.  

Her dad had built up a large stock of MREs; the widespread grim acceptance back then that things were fading, and fast, didn’t escape anyone’s notice.  They were overproduced due to spectacular high expectation they’d be needed, and he bought enough in bulk to make sure they’d have food for a long time.  

They still had some of those MREs somewhere, in fact, but nobody ate them or was even interested anymore. They produced plastic garbage that had nowhere to go.  It was easier to learn to fish and trap, and use everything they caught.  Once you ate a plastic meal, it was gone forever, except for the unusable waste it left behind.

Things had faded quickly, and just... didn’t come back.  It was like an extended summer camping trip, where everyone found they quickly wanted to get out of the city, but there ended up being no compelling reason to go back.  People had long feared violence in the wake of a sudden breakdown in the grids that had kept everything afloat.  But when it came down to it, every human being whose survival instinct kicked in had to carry their own weight plus jugs of water, food, clothing, a sleeping bag, a tarp, and any other supplies that would keep them alive.  Nobody had time or inclination to go shoot up groups of other people to take their valuables.  There was no longer any such thing as valuables.  Not when lugging around your own weight in bottled water was necessary for daily survival.  

Work had simply ended, because trunk lines were ruptured and never fixed.  Electric grids sustained damage that became too expensive to repair, and the virtual money from an economy that was fast becoming a mirage couldn’t keep up.  It had no inherent value.  What was left was radio communications that were random and scattershot, roads to places no one wanted or needed to go, and where people did want to go - say, across mountains or along rivers - the roads kept washing out until there was no longer an infrastructure in place to repair them.   By that time, the floods had rolled over too many areas to come back.

Nobody was in contact with areas they didn’t primarily live in anymore.  Claire had no idea what the lives of any of her friends in California were like now.  She hoped they were surviving, as she was; It was too much backbreaking work simply to stay alive, to build and continue reinforcing structures strong enough to withstand the daily tempests.  

It wasn’t that there was no upshot to this life.  There was a pleasure and simplicity in existing in the present moment, and not worrying about the future, nor the past.  The past was an alien life form that no longer resembled anything in her present world.  It felt like she had come from a different planet, and now had a new life on a new Earth.  The future was in the hands of fate.  Meanwhile, all any of them could do was plug away.  

The kids were awake now, rubbing their bleary eyes, but eager and grateful for the breakfast on flat wooden slats she handed out.  The older children would spend the entirety of this particular day weaving with cedar bark under the tutelage of a Native elder who was visiting for the purpose of teaching them essential traditional building skills; the younger ones would be “helping” with duties in general, following the adults around the fort.  Gran was stirring now and would be up in a bit.  Gran stayed up late each night to assist in keeping the central fire going, as the elders felt it their duty to be the first line of defense against the unknown terrors of the night, beyond the dancing flames’ shadows.  She never slept more than a few hours, though, and if Claire wasn’t quick in the mornings, Gran would be there to regale her with endless tales of a world gone by, one Claire had never known as an adult, and never would know.  It’s how Gran processed her grief over the loss of an entire civilization, and everything she had once believed in, more than a decade agone.

Elizabeth, the visiting elder, was from the nearby Lutshootseed tribe.  She was a master weaver descended from master weavers, and it was an honor to host her as a guest.  Claire had been told that Elizabeth had been instrumental in originally setting up this particular fortification, before she and her family had first arrived.  She had picked the plain it sat upon as a place that would not be swept away in flood, and which would provide fishing year round; so long as the residents of the fort applied themselves, they would never hunger.  Now things had very definitely reverted to the need for the Old Ways in daily living.  Elizabeth and others travelled around in this particular area, blessing the ethnically diverse but non-Native forts along the water with knowledge and spirit.  She would show them a thing or two about what they needed to get along in the places where she and her kin had lived thousands of years prior to the blip that was the European-derived civilization, and to which ways of living they had now returned.

Claire knew that this hedged their bets, too.  Not all would be sunshine and roses once various post-industrial people acclimated and achieved a modicum of ability to survive on their own and put up a winter’s worth of food stores.  If the local forts were united under the tribal nation’s leadership, and they had been taught how to maintain, it would make for efficient defense against the next time other groups of people got the bright idea to invade territory.  This sort of thing didn’t stop for that long at any point in history, no matter the year nor the climate condition.  For now, though, it was a distantly future concern.  

Weaving wasn’t all they would be doing during this visit, either.  A coastal tribe had harpooned a whale, which was cause for celebration up and down the rivers.  Simultaneously with greeting and escorting Elizabeth and her visiting convoy, her father and stepmother and two other senior members of the fort had gone down the river to the coast with several months’ worth of small animal furs to trade for blubber.  Even though there were still gasoline and diesel left in disused sealed tanks, it was too explosive for normal use around the fort.  Whale oil was a better option for human-sized needs.  Plus, the nutrition impact could not be overstated.  Whale blubber had high nutrition, period.  They’d be learning how to render, separate, store, and generally use it today and tomorrow, during Elizabeth’s visit.

The kids were done with breakfast, their smiling dirt-streaked faces and hands giving over the wood they’d eaten off of.  Gran was now fully awake, and came and collected them from Claire, wordlessly going to scrub off.  

=to be continued=