Iron Buddhas 2

 - 2 -

ROCINANTE NOSES up the coast, stopping for a wine-tasting here and a view there, and hits the rains of Oregon in the middle of a socked-in, moonless night. Steffi nearly plows into a cliff on a mountain curve, which wakes her enough to find the turn-off, a right into a valley that has in it the smallest post office in Oregon, not much bigger than an outhouse, and about sixty houses, all scattered along about fourteen miles of noisy creek. 
    The road turns to gravel. The cut-banks, full of bedraggled last year's foxgloves, lean in to kiss the cab windows, and the dark turns almighty. Steffi realizes she's passed the last house and must have missed the commune she's heading for, so she begins a kay-turn on the road, jockeys back and forth about four times, and -- fa-doomp! -- sinks her rear wheels in the ditch. 
         Ah, well. Whaddya expect?
Can't just go to bed and deal with it in the ay em, we're athwart the road and a sign back there did say "Caution: Log Trucks" -- so this trip has gotta reorganize before dawn. Steffi digs out a flashlight and rain jacket, hikes back to where she saw the last window with light in it. 
    She gets her first whiff of wet Douglas fir, along with other smells she can't identify yet: western hemlock, western red cedar, red alder, bigleaf maple, sword fern, bracken, thimbleberry, and salal. She looks up into the canopy closing in far overhead of trees over a hundred and fifty feet tall, and on impulse switches off the light to let the rain fall on her face in silence, in darkness. 
    Delicious. Especially after Texas and its pavement of fried armadillo.
    The house she comes to is covered, roof and walls, with cedar shakes and sticks itself out at the woods at odd angles all over, as if it had been built by someone looking over their shoulder. Raw alder smoke, full of half-digested creosote, pours out the chimney and drifts down to the creek across the road. Steffi coughs, then knocks. She hears activity.
    "Whoa, hang on, somebody's out there."
    "Yeah, I bet they're in a ditch halfway to Six Rivers."
    The door opens, and Steffi looks up into the face of a really tall man, six-four or better, with long hair and a full beard and deep-set preacher's eyes.
    "Hi, I'm Steffi Smith, I'm looking for the commune."
    "Which one? This here's a commune, ma'am."
    "Uh, Omega Farm, friend of mine lives there, guy named Dan."
    "Oh, yeah, that's four miles down, you missed it. Four miles on the left."
    Big Guy waits, hoping to close the door.
    "Um, left my truck up the Forest Service road, it's uh, stuck, I'd leave it but...."
    "Told ya!" someone calls out.
    Big man chuckles. "Yeah, we'll help you out, actually we do that a lot, come on in."
Steffi enters the light from a kerosene lamp, which seems to her very bright after the mountain blackness. She knows lamps, and appreciates at once the skills of her hosts: no coloring dyes in the fuel, a clean chimney, trimmed wick. Real light, steady, easy on the eyes. 
    At once she takes in the interior scheme that she will see in all the homes of her friends for the next ten years: cedar paneling, a leaky skylight, spider plant in a macrame planter basket strategically hung to catch the drips from the skylight, shelves loaded with little brass incense burners and copies of Ram Dass's Be Here Now. An embossed iron stove sits on a brick pad in the midst, surrounded by six people and a yellow lab dog.
    Three small women, with the long straight hair, no makeup, long floral-print dresses, small noses and freckles of hippiedom, such as Steffi had known in Georgia in the Sixties, and three large men, patriarchs in beards and suspenders, with ruddy cheeks and rough hands, look back at her from deep within smoky-looking overstuffed chairs. Nice folks all, really -- but     Steffi feels she has interrupted something serious.
    The man who has answered the door takes it on: "We, ah, we're White Star, oldest commune in the valley, but, uh, we're breaking up. Yeah. Hmm, couldn't agree on how to divvy up, so, uh, we're going to have a coin toss."
    One of the young ladies looks up soulfully, tossing her blonde mane, and shows Steffi a  Walking Liberty silver dollar. "Me and Jeffrey -- " she nods at the giant who spoke before her -- "have called heads, and the others here have called tails, and title to the whole place will go to the winners." 
"We'll do that after I help Ms. Steffi here," says Jeffrey. "Lemme get my rain gear." 
    Jeffrey clumps out to the mudroom. Steffi stands steaming before the solemn contestants, wondering what one says on such an occasion.
The coin lady tosses her mane again, and wrinkles her freckles at the visitor. "Where 'bout did you come in from?"
    "Georgia." Steffi steps gingerly across to the stove, leaving little puddles as she goes, and spreads her hands to its warmth.
    "Oh, you're a friend of Dan's. Yeah. He's really nice, hard worker and smarts too ... how come you gave up on Georgia?" 
    A lot just got said right here. Coin-lady's eyes add, He's taken, you know. 
    And Steffi's eyes say, S'okay, we're just friends. 
    "Uh, well, I felt like I kinda wore out my welcome, thought I'd see what it's like out here." 
    "I know what you mean, nobody is from here. I'm from New Jersey myself"  
    She seems to need to explain further. "Too many cemeteries."  
    Yeah, that makes sense to Steffi. All over Atlanta, all over the great snorting East, cemeteries, including the one she'd seen so many times, with its big stone lion sleeping over the mass grave of Confederate dead. Huge smokestacks of  Cabbage Town's cotton mill for a backdrop. Generations sitting on top of each other, each doing things their forebears have already done, breathing used air, already know everybody they want to know, burying one another in long rows, right up to the stone walls along the sidewalks. Dilapidated gas station across the street, hollow-eyed old man leaning on the pump in the shade of a tin roof, sucking at a half-cold Nehi, too hot, too tired to curse a fate they 're only dimly aware of, outta there Steffi, Rocinante can go a pretty good ways in a straight line on a fill-up, look for a place to breathe. No wonder you turned up your face to the rain among those ancient fir trees. Even this room, with its friendly woodstove, seems too civilized for you right now.
    Jeffrey comes through, a heavy-duty tow chain draped over both shoulders. "Okay, let's go," he says.

:::

Omega Farm turns out to be a collection of some twenty-odd hippies of the anarcho-Catholic-Worker type that dates back to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The men all look like Gurdjieff and the center of attention is a larger-than life woman, called the Duchess when she's out of earshot, who sort of resembles Madame Blavatsky in a threadbare burgundy sweater. Steffi likes the setting: big white-and-brown farmhouse, a retired dairy farm amidst densely forested hills, smell of damp alder-wood smoke drifting through the omnipresent Douglas firs.
    The meals are good, too: vegetarian fare, homemade bread, homemade tofu, fresh eggs, real cream. She half entertains the idea of joining this commune, but there's a commotion in the entryway. A new member has taken a notion to sweep the area, out of the goodness of her long-haired, willowy heart, and she's immediately surrounded by three or four of the regulars.
    "No, no, you mustn't sweep the mudroom!"
    "Why not? I feel like it..." Lower lip trembles.
    "You're not the one scheduled to do it," says the first one.
    "We each have our responsibilities, we had meetings, we gotta do it like we said in the meetings,"  adds the second one. 
    "There's a list. If it says on the list, sweep the mudroom, and your name is on it, you sweep the mudroom." This third one is tall and warrior like, and says it with arms crossed.
The joy goes out of Spontaneous Sweeper's face right there, and she slumps and surrenders the broom.
    Before the broom hits the wall in its corner, Steffi is already planning her getaway.
She catches up to her old Georgia friend, Dan, out pulling up yellow flowers in the pasture.
"Uh, Dan."
     "Yo, Steph'nie."
      Dan, lanky, sandy-bearded, always wearing a cowboy Stetson and always smiling, is quite a few years younger than Steffi but has already seen much more of the world, and, having seen it, has settled in as the farm's gardener, the way medieval types used to join the monastery.
    "Dan, I got to pull up stakes here and go to work somewheres."
    "Tree planting."
    "Um?"
     "Yep. Pull up some of these with me. Bend your knees, lock your arms, then straighten your legs. They'll come right out."
    The flowers are pretty, but Steffi notices she doesn't like the smell of her hands after pulling one. "What are they?"
    "Tansy ragwort. Makes the cow's milk bad, and if she eats enough of it, she dies."
    Steffi starts pulling. "Tree planting?"
    "Yeah. I did that when I was first out here."
    Dan begins weaving tales: how, when he first reached Oregon, needing work, he discovered a cooperative, the Hoedags, full of earnest hippies, that made bids on government reforestation contracts and moved, en masse, to the work sites to live in tents, buses, yurts, and pickup campers, sitting around campfires at night singing, then working like demons the next day. How the work is done, the terminology, the small-scale economics, a cross between migrant work and tribalism. How his crew took over an abandoned one-room schoolhouse and lived in it all winter, chopping wood, carrying water.
    Steffi loves hearing that about the wood and water.
    Yes, it brings up her favorite Zen story. The nun. She had worked so hard, carrying the water even by moonlight. The steps were uneven and mossy, but she was determined not to spill even a drop; this was her sign of mindfulness. And the bucket had simply, from old age, sprung apart and dumped the water. Big kenshu! So she wrote a poem:

    I tried, really I did.
    I held up the hoop, then the strakes.
    Nope! Busted! Wet feet.
    No more moon water.
    No more water pail!
   
  
    Something like that.

    "Best thing," continues Dan, "the crews take women. Nobody else hires women for tree planting." 
    "So, uh, Dan, how do the camp chores get divvied up?"
    "Pile up the tansies; if you leave 'em all over the ground like that, they get any wet weather, they'll re-root. Oh, pretty much like in any family, y'know, them that are into it do it, and if they get tired of it, they stop, then if everybody else gets cold they'll get the hint and go pick up an ax, whatever."
    "Well, yeah, but ... "
    He knows what she's getting at. "The men do their share. And they're respectful."
    "Sounds good. Where do I go to join?"
    "Um, well, Lemmee see." Dan straightens up, grunts, puts his hands on his lower back, and swivels. "There are different crews in the co-op, about ten of 'em, and what you do is join a crew. I was in the Star Crew; most of the people from around here that are in this thing are on the Face Crew. I'll see if I can find out if there's a crew meeting any time soon."
    "Face?"
    "I dunno, that's what they called it. How about you pick up that pile over there, I'll pick up    this one, and we'll dump it over the pasture fence."

:::

Steffi gets to the meeting of Face crew at Slough Creek late on a Monday night. It doesn't look like a meeting, it looks like a party. People are handing around plates of big brownies, and one guy in John Lennon glasses with bushy grey hair and beard and a black felt crusher hat is belting out melodies on a gleaming soprano saxophone. His backup is a short, immensely muscular black man in a multicolored shirt and dreadlocks, working the head of a handmade conga drum. Steffi doesn't even know what that is, but it sounds good to her after a long diet of pages from a Baptist hymnal. 
    A bronzed greek-goddess type offers Steffi a brownie.
    "Have a little milk to wash it down. But not too much." She smiles conspiratorially.
    Steffi likes food, and especially likes chocolate, so she's back to the brownie plate at regular intervals, between snatches of conversation in which she apparently joins the crew and is introduced to various craggy, bearded men and broad-shouldered, weather-blonded women.  
Suddenly she's thirsty, and heads for the kitchen looking for a tumbler and tap water. The sink balloons up under her eyes, and she realizes she doesn't remember how to get water from a tap. Very alien thing, this silvery, snaking device extending from the kitchen counter.
Steffi navigates slowly through a tilting living room, filled with undulating people who all sound as though they are talking under water in a faraway place, and falls, in slow motion, like a leaf or a bit of goose down, into an overstuffed chair that seems to be vibrating and shimmying though the colors of the rainbow. She eyes her hands. She can feel that they're holding still, yet they look as if they're rotating at the wrists.
    "Cheezuz," says someone nearby. "The new girl ate six brownies."
    "Didn't she know what was in them?"  
    No, what?
   A bushy black beard, flecked with silver and gold lights, looms nearby. "You better stay put for awhile there, gal."
   "Help," says Steffi, weakly.
   "No, just stay there. Breathe deep and real slow." A blanket, woven of a thousand glittering stars, appears across her lap.
    Steffi feels her eyes widening and growing around to the sides of her head. She can see for miles, everything in focus: each tree, every leaf of salal and salmonberry, every fiddlehead glistening with the recent rains, every mouse scurrying along windthrown hemlock logs. 
    Uttering a croak of delight, she spreads her black wings and swoops from her favored perch, a dead branch near the top of a lightning-shattered old Douglas fir, seeking beetles, flying ants, or maybe an unsuspecting earwig. Beneath her, the shadows of small grey clouds, fresh from the Pacific, skitter across a patchwork landscape of old growth and clearcuts, yarder landings, gravel quarries, and beaver ponds. Slowly the light around her fades, as though she has flown gently into one of the small clouds.

:::

Next thing she knows, she's sitting in a cafe in a town she's never seen before. An empty cup is sitting before her on the counter, and her friend Dan is pouring, apparently, a second cup of coffee for her.
    "Uh, where am I?"
    "This is the Alderton Cafe, Omega Farm owns it. Today's my duty day. You were saying?" Dan's wearing some kind of long white apron with little stains of avocado on it. His farmer's fingernails are clean.
    "I guess I forget."
    "Something about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and how you understand it now."
    Dan looks her in the eye appraisingly. "It seemed really important to you."
    "What day is it?"
    "Thursday."
    What?
    A guy, all bushy-beardy, comes in the front door. Steffi thinks she hasn't seen him before. Comes right over to the counter. Puts his finger almost in Steffi's face.
    "Her! That's the one! Barfed all over my front steps and just drove off without cleaning up after herself!"
    Dan interposes himself between them.
    "What did you expect? I heard there was acid in those brownies, not just hash, and you expect a new girl, looking for work, is gonna know that? Did anybody bother to tell her? You start in on her and I will personally put you out on the sidewalk." Dan's not a big fella, but suddenly he looks like a pro wrestler. 
    "Well," says the dude, "whatever, I mean ya can't always look out for everybody, they gotta have some smarts on their own."
    Dan glowers some more. "And ya know, that wasn't completely safe."
    Lots of meaningful looks go all around. Steffi wants to say, "Well, hey, nobody would ... " but she doesn't say it because she doesn't know. She's led an unusual life but she's always patrolled her borders. Until the brownies.
    The dude's sorry. He knows the crew is honorable in that way, but he gets it that Steffi might not yet know that. Not that she's given it a thought until this moment! He sees that too, but he's still contrite and apologizes like a gentleman. Twice.
    "One thing at a time. So, has she joined your crew?" Dan picks up a glass and starts cleaning it with a dishrag, as a sign that The Crisis Is Over.
    "I think so, yeah. And we need bodies, even a greenhorn." The big bear rubs his chin though the deep beard, turns to Steffi. "You got gear?"
    "I've got my truck, clothes, food."
    "Hard hat? Rain gear? Caulk boots?"
    "What are 'cork' boots?"
    Dan leans across the counter, smiling. "We have some at the farm that will fit her." He doesn't mention they are his boots -- but he knows her feet are as big as his.
    The tall guy looks back and forth between them, settles his light blue eyes on Steffi. "Ok, meet the crummy at the Greenwood Creek bridge at four-thirty tomorrow morning. Bring your own lunch and water. We'll give yuh a dag and bag till the end of the contract. What do we call yuh?"
    "Steffi."
    "Right, I'm Burt." Shakes hands with a rough, supercalloused palm.
    Four-thirty?  
    And what's a "crummy?"


(To be continued)

Iron Buddhas 1

 

Iron Buddhas is a lightly fictionalized account of Shonin's life in woods work, 1975-82 or so. 

- 1 -

IT'S WINTER in Georgia, nineteen-seventy-five, and Steffi, who is twenty-four and a little lonesome and sad, builds herself a kind of a Conestoga wagon deal on the back of her pickup truck.  
    She bends conduit on a jig made of stakes in the ground in a semicircle, bolts three sheets of plywood on, overlapping. Paints the plywood. Now she's got a round white camper shell, with "Oregon or Bust" in black lettering over the door.
    The truck's a yellow '70 Chevy and she paints "Rocinante" across the front of the hood, also in black lettering. From the rear-view mirror she hangs an ojo de dios made of two twigs and some rainbow-dyed yarn.
    She builds a low bed frame inside the truck bed, wall to wall, with nine inches of storage space underneath. There she tucks her books, canned goods, bags of beans and rice, water, canteens, backpack, extra pants and shirts and sock hats and gloves and rain gear and boots, all of one dress, an axe, a shovel, a propane stove, a cranky yellow chain saw, a child-size twenty-two single shot rifle that she got when she was all of nine, fishing gear, compass, space blanket, firestarters, shoe grease, knife sharpener, first aid stuff.
    On top of the platform she lays out a foam rubber pad, a Hudson Bay blanket, a sleeping bag, a little pillow she's had for years with "Princess" stitched on it in needlepoint, a four-string Appalachian dulcimer, and an eighteen-chord Autoharp with finger picks. A small broom with its handle sawed off short will do for the the housework. Bolted to the wall she has a homemade lamp bracket holding a family heirloom kerosene lamp.
    In the cab, she's got food and water, maps, an eight-track player, a flashlight and a revolver. Also some cash. Not a lot. No credit cards.
   The truck's insured, for the time being. She's not. She's also unemployed. Does she care? She tosses her hair, puts her hands on her hips and looks west.

:::

She's halfway across the pines of Alabama when a full size U-Haul truck passes her doing what seems like about eighty miles an hour. 
    State trooper's right behind it. 
    Trooper, blue lights bawling, peels out to get around in front of the truck, and the trucker whips left, kicks the patrol car into the median. Car fishtails all over the deep South for a moment or two, then settles in for the chase, whooping. Out of sight they run. Then, one-two-three troopers and one-two county mounties, zoop-zoop-zoop, zoop-zoop and over the horizon. Get 'em, fellas!
    But what Steffi had seen as the truck went by was a guy grinning at her and her little prairie schooner.
    Having a good time.
    Bless you, sister. Bless you, too brother.

:::

Rocinante takes the wide wastes of Texas in stride with three pilgrims in her cab. Steffi's passengers, who are buying the gas, are a young-old lady with new-age self-assurance, freckles and huge hoop earrings, with a brand-new husband, a handsome Guatemalan she has met on a commune south of the border. They're hitching to Seattle so that Miguel, who knows almost no English and has never traveled, can meet his in-laws. 
    Hoop-ears teaches language and culture in the cab day and night, as freeway America rolls by underneath the wheels, concrete ribbon, gas station, concrete ribbon. Steffi enjoys the lectures at first, and so does Miguel, but by Arizona, they're both schooled out, and each begins to examine with morose attention the road-killed recaps and armadillos passing by.
    "Now, Miguel. This is a backpack, b-a-c-k-p-a-c-k, also called a ruck sack, it's not what backpackers call a backpack, 'cuz it hasn't got a frame. This is a zipper, z-i-p-p-e-r, like you have there on your jeans, and in here is a pocket, like a jeans pocket."
    Miguel asks her something in Spanish, she rattles off something back at him, they go on a while like that, but faster. Then Miguel summons immense dignity, jams his hands in his -- jeans pockets, pants pockets, whatever -- and enunciates, slowly and emphatically: "You know ... always ... everything." A tear forms in the corner of his eye, and he turns away to regard the sunset on the passing, wasted hills. Stranger in a strange land.
    Rocinante pulls up onto a bit of unfenced desert. The pilgrims gather dry mesquite branches and sit around a fire, close, under a wheel of stars turning earth-slow, brilliant as only desert stars can be when the night plans to drop to zero.
    Steffi has never known zero but as it doesn't seem to worry her passengers, she's game. She brings her sleeping bag to the fire.

:::

Steffi tells about Georgia nights. It's what she knows. Hoop-ears translates for Miguel from time to time.
    "My great-great grandfather, the one who married a Cherokee lady, raised cotton on top of Dugdown Mountain. Everything he did is gone now -- it's all red oaks, a hundred years' worth. The road along the ridge was through country without a single house, so it could get dark, I mean really dark. My mama told me this story as I'm telling it now.
    "Grandpa was coming home on the buggy, coming along with a lantern, he was just in this pool of yellow light, oh about twenty foot across. And the horse, which was a good horse, not one you would think of to get scared a lot, just pulled up short and wouldn't get, gee, nor haw. So Grandpa, who was real tired and not thinking to stay out all night, gets down to go around front and talk sense into the horse, when right then the horse up and hauls off the buggy toward home and Grandpa is in the road in pitch black.
    "Well, he can see just one thing and that's the light in the window of his house, across the cotton fields way around the ridge. It's two miles by the road and about a mile straight down and up through the fields. He's standing there thinking what in the hell has got into that horse and then he thinks maybe he hears something. Or, no, he thinks maybe he feels something, like there's eyes looking through his back. He turns, and he doesn't see nothin' but he feels like the front of his face sees something, you know what I mean? Like there's a kind of living headlights out there, and he's caught in the beam, and he is food.
    "So Grandpa, he starts running down the road, and he sorta hears something soft and heavy trotting in the dust of the wagon ruts behind him. So he throws off his hat to give that thing something to sniff at and jumps down into the cotton field and cuts across the rows toward that light in his kitchen window. Well, something thumps and swishes into the cotton behind him, and so he throws off his shirt and runs on down by the pond. He's running about as hard as he can go, goes by the pond, and through the willows, and right behind him something's rustling willow twigs. So he quick somehow shucks his pants and runs in nothing but his shoes up through the cotton on the other side of the draw to where he's about at the end of the farm yard. 
    "He can see Grandma is working at the table by the window, rolling dough with her big arms, and hollers: "Ma, open that door!" She runs over and pops the door with her floured hand and he comes through on the jump, slams it behind him and whap! something hits that door so hard it bends the hinges.
     "Next day they see where there was deep scratches all over that door, had to plane it down like it was new-sawn. The tracks they found in the farm yard was cougar tracks. He said he could put both his fists side by side like this" -- Steffi demonstrates -- "and stick them down in a track with room to spare."
    Miguel knows the same story, only it's about a jaguar.
    Looks like they have made up. Hoop-ears snuggles down deep in her sleeping bag, tucked under his arm, and Miguel gets out a long wooden flute.
    He plays, something startlingly complex, something Central American and ethereal, entirely suited to night in a wild place. If there were any breeze he couldn't do it; the night is the coldest one each of them has known. But the air is still as a black sea of glass, and his notes rise like owls to the mountainside close by.

:::

Rocinante carries Steffi and her passengers into Los Angeles, and she's not happy with the place. She's staying at some ashram full of people in turbans, which is cool, but the streets outside are unremittingly mean, full of men in long black coats and black glasses that walk into places and everybody gets quiet. Y'know?
    So she goes out to the curb to see if Rocinante is still there or has she got her tires slashed or anything, and there's goo all over the windshields. "What is this stuff?" she asks, sliming her thumb. "That's smog," says one of the turbans. If so, I'm gone from here, thinks Steffi, and says goodbye to her cross-country passengers. She goes about ten blocks toward Oregon, but something keeps catching her attention.
    There are all these little shops, with signs on them like House of Oral Love, in neon. Each has a storefront window with one or two bored-looking women in it. One of them waves to her.
    Business must be painfully slow. She pulls over to the curb. Two of the ladies lean out of a doorway framed in high-gloss enamel. One has a kind of Sixties page-boy hairdo, a string of fake pearls and those pointy-framed black glasses that women wear in sitcoms when you're not supposed to think they're pretty. But she is. The other has long, long hair and a fresh face, someone who gets enough sleep. Steffi can see the book she's been reading, upended on the broken-backed chair behind her. It's a college sociology textbook.
    So, is she doing her research here? No, just earning tuition. Work-study, ha-ha-hah. If she were less shy, Steffi'd like to sit and talk with them awhile, learn something about them, and about stereotyping, which she realizes she's been doing.
    Steffi, who's been raised really sheltered, is suffering cognitive dissonance.
    These are people.
    Just like, y'know anybody.
    "Y'want work? You're not bad lookin."
    Me? "Wow, thanks, but I'm off to Oregon."
    "Oh, gee, lucky you. I'd love to go there. Good luck, honey."

:::


In an hour Steffi rounds a bend, pulls off the pavement through a gap between two guardrails, bumps along to a stop on a high cliff, and steps out of the truck's cab to hear the waves collapsing among the rocks of the California coast. She's experiencing her first sunset on the Pacific Ocean; the smell of the strange nameless wind-sculpted vegetation all around brings her for the first time some awareness of just how far she is from Warren County, Georgia, or pretty much anywhere she's ever been.
    On the beach below, small energetic birds are running, running, running, matched by their reflections on the wet beach, running down to the restless water, running back with it as boils up the darkening strand. So much movement in these birds startles Steffi.
    She's only seen them in books.


(To be continued)

A society that has no public spirit is poor

The following was authored by my father, Thomas Eugene Smith, at age 86. He had suffered a stroke and, not yet having recovered his speech, wished to say one last thing to his country. But he had more years of vitality in him yet. He passed away at age 95 on October 6, 2012. He was a veteran, having served on the U.S.C.G.-manned AKA-17 Centaurus, in the Pacific Theater, WWII. A retired railroad lineman, Mr. Smith  devoted 63 years of his life to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, and lived an honest and hardworking man all his life.

His statement, laboriously penciled in block letters on note paper, reads as follows:

The following items are all on public record and can be verified in your local library.
President Roosevelt with a democratic congress were the beginning of the following legislation. Each and every one of these acts were voted against by the majority of the Republican members of Congress at the time of their presentation. Had they have been in the majority at the time, none of those acts would have been placed into law.
Some of the acts are:
Social Security and unemployment comp
Fair Employment Bureau
Medical Disaster Relief
AAA – Aging Adm. Act
Agriculture Adj. Adm.
RFC – Child labor laws
Civil Works Adm.
Economic Stabilization Act
Fair labor standards
F.T.C. Commission
Federal Emergency Relief Act
F.A.A. - Securities – Banking Laws
Federal Housing Act
Food & Drug act
Health Education and Welfare
Soil Conservation
Works Project Adm
Civil Conservation Corps
(CCC) (Needed now)
About as many omitted as listed here
The following are some of the things built by the WPA & CCC that helped the country as it gave people wages to keep from starving and to save their dignity and to build needed projects for the country. Most paid for themselves and made a profit above cost.
Ohio Valley flood control system
Roads and bridges to Key West, FL
Seaport for Brownsville, TX
Lincoln Tunnel NY to NJ
Triborough Bridge NY to Long Island
Electrified Penn RR
City of Denver Water Supply System
Built the DC Mall
Built DC Zoo
Federal Trade Comm Building
Built Calif Camarillo Mental Health Bldg
Built Fort Knox Gold Depository Bldg
San Francisco Fairgrounds
Dallas, TX Dealy Plaza
St. Louis Conservatory
Bonneville Dam
Tenn. Valley Authority dams
(Multiplied avg. income in valley and gave this section their first electricity)
Planted over 200 million trees
Completed Colorado Boulder Dam
(Started by Pres. Hoover and taken over by Democrats to finished. 200 WPA workers died here)
WPA and CCC in 1930s did all this AND MORE
Built Waterworks for many towns
Built many post offices
Built and repaired Bridges everywhere
Built Jails – Airports – Sewers – Culverts – Sidewalks – Public Swimming Pools – Athletic fields – Play Grounds – Civic Buildings – R. R. Stations – Repaired National parks – Many, many dams – 4H campgrounds – School houses – new roads – new hospitals – city halls.
Put unemployed teachers back to work.

ALL OF THE ABOVE DONE IN EVERY STATE.

All of the above listed acts were passed for all our conservative and liberal citizens alike.

Truman, Johnson, and Clinton guided like legislation.
Pres. Theo. Roosevelt was the only Pres. on the Rep. Side who ever did legislation of a like kind.

True, Pres. Eisenhower was the architect of our Hwy. System. He saw the potential from observing Hitler's system in Germany. He financed the project with a gas tax. Pres. Eisenhower in his last days issued to our country in somber language to beware of the military-industrial complex.

Republicans mindset is: If I have the intelligence, drive and talent to overcome obstacles to become a success then to hell with those who can't, let them do as I have done. Well, some folks need cooperation to make it sometimes, thank God Roosevelt knew this. A society that has no public spirit is poor no matter how rich it thinks it is.

Starvation Ridge: Bright in the Skies. Epilogue

KAREN SHOOK herself awake – literally. One cannot carry enough blankets in a wet winter to make up for near-starvation. The fat from the pig had been a help – though she had decided not to tell the others that wild pigs accumulate more radionuclides than other animals. We all have worries enough as it is.

    The clouds had broken for now, though. She could see that, beyond the edge of the tarp and the cedar branches. Leaving Allyn nesting in his cradleboard – a design that Errol had come up with that had but one shoulder strap – Karen slung her revolver and knife at her hip and crawled out to pee. At least now there were no mosquitoes.

    Griff, wrapped in an animal hide she hadn't seen before, stood up across the clearing and waggled the all-clear with his bow. His frosted breath hung in the air.

    Her morning business finished, Karen sought him out beneath his own cedar tree.

    She fondled the light gray fur. "What's that you're wearing?"

    "I dunno – dogskin? I found it lying on a log. It's really warm."

    "It's wolfskin. Where was it?" Alarm prickled at her neck and shoulder.

    "Next clearing over – the way we're going."

    "Show me. And draw your bow." Karen unholstered the Sentinel.

    Griff, wondering what he could have done wrong, led the way.

    The light in the next clearing was bright enough to hurt Karen's eyes. Snow had fallen in the night on the mountains to their east, and these glowed with unaccustomed sunrise. Griff, arrow at the ready, surveyed the clearing as they both listened for any non-forest sounds, then gingerly stepped forward and stood upright, scanning ahead. He quickly withdrew and settled beside Karen, who had thumbed her hammer.

    "There's meat on the log now – right where I found the coat."

    "Shhh."

    For several minutes more, they listened. Nothing but a winter wren disturbed the morning.

    Karen whispered. "What ... what kind of meat?"

    "Deer. – hind leg!"

    An offering of some kind? "Go back absolutely quietly and get everyone up and armed. Defensive perimeter. Hop!" Her own whisper sounded like thunder in Karen's ears. Or was it her heart beating?

    Griff slipped quietly away. Water dripped from bracken down the back of Karen's neck. She should, of course, have gone with the boy. But the thought of venison! She hadn't tasted venison in too many days.

    Could Wilson have done this? They were the next valley over, so far as she knew. Couldn't be Josep's group, traveling along the Great River on the other side of Wilson. No, any Creeker would have whistled. This was a stranger – or perhaps an army, such as from Port Land, of whom the Roundhousers had warned. So many ways this could be a trap or a provocation.

    "Hey."

    The voice – a man's – came from the mountain alder copse across the clearing! Whoever it was had not moved since she and Griff had come – had perhaps watched them – might have her in his sights. Damn it! She was at a disadvantage in all the ways she could think of.

    "S'okay," said the voice, in a conversational tone. "I know ya got yer hammer back, I hear pretty good. How's 'bout ya get behind better cover, if it suits ya, and when ya're ready, I'll stand up empty-handed?"

    "Let me see hands first, then just stand up already." She eased her indexed finger inside the trigger guard.

    A tall man, bald, bearded, and tattooed, wearing a horsehide cloak, arose perhaps twenty meters away, among the leafless alders. He looked familiar – where could Karen have seen this man before?

He was none of that sorry lot that had trooped south from Starvation Creek half a moon ago.

    "Five steps forward, then stop," Karen barked. If there were weapons at his feet, this would move him precious seconds away from them.

    The man complied, evidently quite relaxed. Karen held her front sight squarely in the groove of her rear sight, centered on the man's chest. Her finger rested lightly on the trigger. She drew a long, deep breath and exhaled, to slow the effect of her hammering heart on the sights. "Alone?"

    "Well, yeah, but don't take my word for it."

    "Wouldn't. What do you want here?" With an effort, she scanned all around for sounds and movement. Peripheral vision, her father had said, is almost everything. See without looking.

    Someone was moving through brush, but she could tell who it was. Armon came heavily up to the right of her, bow at the ready. Errol, more quietly, appeared to her left.

    The man smiled and nodded." A little parley. Got some thoughts about yer line of travel."

    "Are you armed?" Karen asked.

    "Now you ask me. Well, back a ways where I can't get to 'em quick an' you can't find 'em, there's a pistol, a carbine, a bow, a quiver with nine arrows, and a knife. I do hope you'll regard the haunch as a gift, but will not seek to relieve me of my toys."

    "What's your parley?"

    "Well, yer three lil' tribes now, all goin' north. A while back I had a good talk with a dyin' kid from Port Land. He indicated things was hell here, hell there, and extra-special-hell north of there. If yer goin' Pilgrim, I c'n tell ya, can't get to Canuck Land from here."

    "What's 'extra hell' about north of Port Land?" asked Karen.

    "There was stuff back in th' day, place called Hanford."

    "Heard of it."

    "Cooked off. Bad. Ruint ever'thin from th' sea half way to Chicago. And if you think Hanford was bad –"

    "Can this guy be on th' level?" whispered Armon.

    Still not taking her eyes off her sights, Karen replied, "Yes. I remember the maps."

    "... Chicago actually glows. Kinda like the top of yer old mountain."

    "What do you know about Ridge?"

    "Well, I'll tell ya. I'm th' one lit it off, with yer boy Mr. Avery Murchison, may he rest in 'ternal peace."

    "You were there?"

    "Yes'm, had business with Old Magee, may he rest in 'ternal hell."

    "How did he die?"

    "Magee? Three-fifty-seven to the face, actually, ma'am."

    "That's good to know."

    "Yes, ma'am, that it is."

    "And ... how did Avery die?"

    "Ma'am, Magee had messed him up and he chose to go down with th' ship, as it were."

    "Damn it!" Karen had known this in her stomach, but to hear it was another thing, she realized. At Roundhouse, she'd told of the demise of the last Elders; everyone had felt this same momentary despair.

    "Sorry, ma'am."

    "Wait! I know you!"

    The stranger seemed hesitant. "Where would we have met? You aren't th' ... I mean, don't look familiar to me."

    "You're the man who ran away – after your army was defeated." She twitched her left side toward him for emphasis. "I believe you did this."

    "Oh, were you in that fight? You're good. Well, yeah, they was all walkin' dead by then. I saw a way to live, so I had a go. But, uhh, yeah, it bothers me. Kinda why I'm here, maybe."

    "I don't see the connection."

    "Well, that's kinda my business. As I useta say, 'only th' livin' deserve ta live.' So, anyways, man said, put th' ray gun on home plate an' go; I offered t'bring him out, but he was set on stayin'. Said if I had anythin' ta say, say it to a one-armed girl."

    To me? "You ... why would Avery even talk to you? Did he know who you are?"

    The big man's rough features softened even more. "Well, enough to guess, but he c'd see I meant to, ahh, change my ways some."

    "We'll ... we'll take that into consideration. So, you've ..."

    The man's body relaxed.

    "Stand up straight! I might just shoot you yet."

    "Why, yes, ma'am."

    "Well ... so, you've, you've warned us off going Pilgrim; do you ... do you have a recommendation?"

    "Me, I'd go East. Cross over, head south. Ask around for th' Prinevilles. I think yer man here, th' big one, has got folks there."

    "They'd be alive, then?" asked Armon, incredulous.

    "Yeah, th' Prinevilles'r not big on eatin' captives any more, they're gettin' better at runnin' cows. Th' chief man, Mr. Lacey, he's a man of his word, so they are in service, an' good service as such things go." The man spread his hands. "Arms gettin' tired; answer y'other question holdin' onto a coupla trees?"

     Karen's arm was getting tired, too. The sights were wobbling again. "What other question? Umm, yes, you may."

    The long hands grasped two small alders. "Thanks. 'What's in it fer you?' Nothin's in it fer me fer th' time bein'. Y'all've had it rough, I've had it rough. Thought maybe I'd head East too."

    "Not with us."

    "Didn't ask, did I? So, I'd like go away from here fer now. I'll move real slow. Rest of that doe is hangin' by th' creek down behind me."

    "We'll leave and count to one hundred. Then we'll come back and clear the area. Take that leg. We'll leave the wolfskin here, too, when we pack up."

    "No, seriously, you need th' meat; skin too. Gonna snow at altitude, an' this is altitude. Oh! Uh, inside th' mountain, didya meet a suit?"

    "What?"

    "Sort of suit of old Army 'future warrior' armor, lotta Kevlar, big old shotgun."

    "The ... woman? Yes."

    "She get away?"

    "She's dead."

    "That so makes my day. I thank you from th' bottom of my heart."

    Karen did not know what to make of this. "We ... we're going now."

    "'K. I'll be gone when ya get back. Try th' meat on yer puppy, then you'll know it's okay." A disconcerting smile spread over his features.

    Karen retreated, lowering the twenty-two's hammer with her thumb. Her arm ached. Armon and Errol covered her, backing into the brown bracken slowly.

Griff met Karen at the edge of camp, bow drawn, watching the woods. "So, I'm sorry about the skin and all. Wasn't thinking."

    Karen holstered the revolver. What was that sound? At camp?

One of Griff's sisters sat under the tarp, holding little Allyn. Was he crying? A good sign was just what Karen needed just now. If only Billee, Juanita, and Marleena could share in this! But they were with Wilson and Josep, of course. Soon enough, if he proved to be up to it, she'd have to train the child to be silent on command, perhaps. And to be many other things: stealthy, resilient, resourceful, aware. She started in the direction of the cry.

    "So, can I keep it?" Griff spoke behind her, still wearing the wolfskin.

    She turned. "Yes. Yes, I think that will be fine. Errol and Armon will bring in the meat. In future, you find anything like that – and ... and I think you will – just report it right away, all right?"

    "Right!"

    The sky began to darken. They looked up.

    One snowflake, then another, and then another, drifted down from the featureless clouds and settled, infinitesimal diamonds, on the long green hands of the cedar.
 
 
 

§§§

Starvation Ridge: Bright in the Skies -- Chapter Sixteen

    Karen unhooked the baby from her nipple and tossed him gently onto her right shoulder, holding him in place with the palm of her hand and squeezing. A tiny burp issued forth. Mothering was for two-handed women, she'd long ago decided; she got more exercise moving Allyn from bag to breast to shoulder and back to the bag, after finding moss to line it with, than almost anything else she did these days. Except fighting that monster.

    Marleena, with a gurgling Arda in her arms, sat down beside Karen. "How is he doing?"
    "Hungry as ever, but never a peep out of him."

    In the late-night quarter-moonlight, with thickening clouds, Marleena's expression could not be fully read, but Karen could see that there was a question and a worry in the set of her shoulders. "That's never really changed; he seems happy and he has grown some but there's something not right. He could be deaf and mute, for all I know."

    "Does he blink at loud noises? There were a lot of them yesterday."

    "Oh! Yes, so maybe that's not it."

    "It 's not like you to go fuzzy on a problem."

    "Where he's concerned, I do. I must be shielding myself in some way."

    "Well give the two of you time. He was born so early; there must be a lot of catching up for him to do."

    "How is Juanita?"

    They both looked away toward the trees. Movement, in the moonshadow of one, had gone on for some time.

    Marleena's silhouetted face swiveled back to Karen. "She's been digging since we found him. She won't accept help."

    "He asked her to do it herself. I think his idea was that it would help her, having a hard task to do, so as not to go crazy with the grief."

    "It's not your way, here on the Creek, burial – is it?"

    "No, but in such times – so many bodies. And I don't think we'll be needing the composting any more."

    Guchi appeared from behind them carrying the heavy shotgun, with Errol, who was hobbling with a spear for an improvised crutch. "May we report?" asked Guchi.

    "Sit, guys," replied Karen, "But keep it low." She gestured with her head toward Juanita.
    "Oh – yeah." Errrol sat heavily on a log. Guchi set down the weapon and slowly settled himself down beside his friend, looking ill at ease.

    For a few moments no one spoke. Karen broke the spell by touching Guchi's knee with hers.

    "Oh," said Guchi again. "Well, I went up and had a look. Enough fire came out of Ridge that the trucks and the "tank" thing are just trashed. Nobody around. Up top, it was all flying rocks and smoke or steam, or both, and I couldn't get any closer, and then all of a sudden it stopped."

    "Stopped?"

    "Whatever was causing all the rocks burning, it was just ... over. I tried to get a look in the hole, but ... I started feeling not so good. So I came down."

    "What's 'not so good?'"

    "Uhh ... nausea? Ringing in my ears? Mouth tastes like metal. Um. Fingertips feel funny."

    "Can you stand up suddenly?"

    "Funny you should ask, I hid behind some stuff on the way down, checking out the terrain for unfriendlies, and when I got up I fainted."

    "I'm sorry; I realize now I shouldn't have let you go."

    "Well, I'm glad I did. I think I can say with confidence we're not leaving anybody behind that we could have helped."

    "I think you're right, Guchi. Won't you go lie down and rest a bit? There's some water and a few blankets we've got here."

    "I'll do that." Yamaguchi pointed to the supergun. "Too heavy – give it away." He stood up again, and wobbled. He caught himself by grasping Errol's spear, then shook his head and walked in the direction of the abandoned trucks.

    Errol watched him go, then turned his attention to Karen. "What's up?"

    "I think the containment of the nuke battery's been breached. The fuel's been aerosolized and the top of Ridge is dangerously radioactive now."

    Marleena held Arda closer. "What about here?"

    "There hasn't been much wind, but I think most of the plume – so far – will have gone down toward the Calapooia. That will change by mid-morning. And it's going to rain, which can't be good."

    "Can we get away?"

    "We'll have to. The Creek is finished." Karen looked at Errol. "How are you holding up?"

    "No new bleeding, thanks. We've been inventorying the trucks and the bulldozer. They're all damaged enough not to be useful for transport, not if we have to leave soon. I have the young people making Molotovs with some of the fuel, in case we meet the former owners."

    "I don't know, it's awfully quiet up the Road."

    "I was thinking the same. Meanwhile, there will be enough of that vacuum-packed food for everyone to have a stout breakfast."

    Young Griff came running from the trucks. "Someone's coming, and there's no password. What do we do?"

    "Say hello. If it's someone you know, call them over to your perimeter and do a visual by torchlight, but not out in the open. If it isn't, tell them to stay put, and keep listening for activity. If they don't stay put, shoot them and then keep listening for activity."

    "Gotcha!" He ran off, clearly delighted to be a warrior with a commission.

    Karen returned her attention to Errol. "Were there any weapons at the trucks? Any more people around?"

    "There was a substantial fight here. We've found four of our dead, besides Mr. Molinero alive – at first – and two of theirs. In the woods there was one of them, he'd been trying to get away and broke his leg in one of these weird ditches – someone caught up with him and finished the job, I think. No, they took all their stuff except a Bowie knife someone dropped and a few crossbow bolts."

    Griff returned, bringing Raoul and Ceel, who were laden with bows, quivers, and belt knives. They dumped their loads, winded, and smiled at Karen and Errol in the growing light.

    "Is that my axe on your belt?" Errol asked Raoul.

    "Yes; want it back?"

    "No, looks good on you. What brings you here?"

    "We're heading to Bridge to make a cache." Raoul reached for an unattended water bottle.
    "Whatever for?" asked Karen.

    "It's over. The bandits have surrendered. They're pretty sure the folks that brought them here are all dead, and they want to go home, which they say is as bad as here, but at least it's not here. Josep and Wilson gave them safe-conduct –"

    "Wilson is alive?" Karen's heart leaped for Billee's sake, as well as for what remained of the Creek.

    "Josep is alive?" shouted Marleena at the same time, standing up and almost spilling a wide-eyed Arda.

    "Yes – Armon, too – to go to Bridge and pick up this stuff for hunting purposes. Everything else, they've turned in and they are being escorted this way."

    Errol made an impatient gesture. "Right through us?"

    "We didn't know you were here. How did you get out, anyway?"

    "Never mind," said Karen. "We'll have to get off the Road right away and form a new perimeter, just in case. But you two, I think, should hand over your jobs to Griff – and one of his friends – and stay with us."

    "Why?"

    "Raoul, your mom is going to need you in a little bit."

    The smile faded. "What? No, wait, I think I know. Wilson acted kinda funny." Raoul, who had arrived full of vitality, seemed to shrink visibly.

    Ceel looked at Karen, then at Raoul, then at Karen again. "Me, too?" she asked, in a small voice.

    Karen felt upon herself the great weight of the terrible messenger. "Errol, everybody away from the trucks, perimeter in the woods. We'll join you. Griff, this stuff to Bridge, hop! Raoul, I'm deeply sorry, your mom's over there near the Creek, see that tree? Go to her.

"Ceel ... come with me."

:::

Jahn ambled along his short column, ostensibly checking the stretcher cases, but really looking for signs of rebellionion. One wrong move on this march, he knew, and they would all die quickly. In the lead at some distance, well out of reach on either hand, as well as bringing up the distant rear, angry and dangerous men and women watched and walked, rifles, shotguns and bows at the ready. Nerves were stretched taut in both parties. Fire in the mountain had reached some kind of ammunition, and the cooking-off brought a similitude of killing to all ears.

    "Sir?" a sullen youth whispered as he passed.

    "Don't y'even think it."

    "We could rush 'em, you'd give us a sign."

    "You in insub-ordy-nation right now, boy; want 'em ta see me kill ya bare-handed?"

    "Nossir."

    "Good, I'll overlook this f'now an' we'll discuss th' quality of yer trainin' if we ever get t'Roseburg. Look me up an' ask f'help wi'y' prroblem, then, hey?"

    "Yessir."

    Jahn finished his tour of the column and worked his way back to the head of the line. He could see, in the near distance, the old D-8 sitting in the middle of a blackened patch of earth. Behind it, a stricken MRAP still emitted smoke.

    "Spread out a little bit, please," ordered the man he'd overheard called Joseph, or some such. "Pass the machines on the left, hands on top of your heads, all eyes front."

    Jahn could see, as they neared, that all bodies had been cleared away somewhere, and the vehicles thoroughly canvassed. Foil wrappers had been gathered up and rolled into a ball that someone had not yet carried off. As he suspected, there were more fighters than just the ones that had followed his little army up the valley.

    A half-strangled cry, off to the left, drew everyone's attention. Jahn looked left, though careful not to turn his head by much. A small, black-haired woman, brandishing an axe, was running toward them as fast as her short legs could carry her. A revenge play, then; Jahn was familiar with such. So this was how it would all end; he'd have to try to disarm her to protect those under his command and care, then the Joseph guy or the Wilson fellow would have to kill him. In a few weeks the lady'd be over it; but he, Jahn, after his long travels in hope of a home, would be no more. He braced himself.

    Wilson, however, stepped between the woman and the hesitating column and raised his rifle, aiming it at her. Jahn was filled with admiration. Also, a young man, whom he'd seen in the fighting, was now close on the woman's heels and tackling her. They went down in a heap, and Wilson lowered his weapon and went to them.

    Jahn, sure that the immediate crisis was in hand, had better prevent another. "Eyes t'th'front!" he shouted at the wobbling line. "For'rard harch!" The lads pulled themselves together and walked on, hands still on their heads.

    As they cleared the vehicles, stepping over the detritus of war and the deep cracks all over the road, a new sight presented itself to Jahn's peripheral vision. A one-armed woman and a black child stood side by side, weapons in hand. There were others in the shadowy wood.

    Ahead, not far from the bridge that had led them here, a flock of geese swung by, yelping.

    Yeah, Jahn thought. Ol' Mr. Magee, y'bit off way more'n y'c'd chew. If we-all don't starve this winter, I'm gonna run things hella diff'rent down on th' Umpqua!

:::

 Quiet reigned along Starvation Creek.

    All day, smoke rose, as it had not in a long time, from the chimney at Tomlinson's. Billee brought Mr. Perkins a cup of hash tea, but he ignored it, staring at the wall. His son and daughter leaned on him from either side. No one asked them to come to the living room, and the same grace was extended to Juanita, her sons, and her new daughter-in-law, who'd stayed on the stoop together.

    Billee, with Krall dogging her heels, carried the steaming stock pot into the living room – one of the biggest rooms left on the Creek. Outside, a cold rain fell, rattling in the downspouts and off the porch roof. Chairs had been brought from throughout the building, along with assorted buckets turned over for seats. Ladling out cups of the mildly soporific tea, she picked up the thread of the conversation.

    "...the kale did better than expected; but we need it all now and there's no more seed. Too late to plant anyway," Tomma was saying.

    Karen, sitting in the deep chair that had belonged to old Mrs. Tomlinson, played with Allyn's fingers as he he lay in her lap. She looked up. "Won't matter. None of us can stay."
    All eyes turned to her.


    "Errol and Deela are techies and can confirm that Dr. Mary explained about this – and, and I used to read about it. Ridge, as we all know, was powered by a kind of small nuke. Most of what's been splashed is thorium-232. It emits alpha particles and turns into radium, and eventually stabilizes lead. Also there is some gamma."

    Vernie twirled the long Kentucky rifle by the edge of its brass buttplate on the floor before him. "So, what's that mean?"

    "You see how it is with Guchi; since he looked in the hole he's been throwing up, off and on, all day. He'll get better, but we won't know for how long. Already most of us don't live as long as in the old days. Dust, some of it too small to even see, is going to be coming down on our houses, the land, the Creek, and for many miles around, maybe for years. It will percolate into the soil, and get into the crops, the animals, the roots of trees: it will taint the very firewood. As we breathe, drink, and eat, it will become part of our teeth, our bones, and our flesh, and it will make the tiniest bits of our flesh grow awry."

    "You say it turns into lead." Wilson, sitting on a tall, upended bucket, put his feet out before him and put his hands behind his head. The Doctor's AA-12 lay at his feet. "How long does that take?"

    "Half the thorium will turn into lead in fourteen billion years."

Everyone sat still, shocked.

    Deela, sitting in the hall doorway with half an eye on Bolo, Guchi, and other wounded lying beyond, spoke up quietly. "The sun itself will go out before that."

    Josep, on the couch, tightened his arm around Marleena's shoulder. "How long have we before we must go?"

    "There's a lot of this kind of thing in the air and water and soil – and us – already, from the Great Undoing." Karen tipped Allyn up into a half-sitting position, cupping his back with her hand. "It's why we don't live so long as the Elders did. We all know it's been hard to bring babies to term, and raise children to adulthood. And cancer hunts us all, all the time. It will take many generations to adapt, even if this hadn't happened here. And then there's other stuff – it's too hot to our south, and I think that's coming our way. More summers like the one we just had, and worse storms. But now that Ridge has been cut open to its heart, yesterday would not be too soon for us to all leave."

    "If anyone is pregnant, especially, then?" said Raoul from the front door. He looked into Nine-Ah's face as she came and stood beside him.

    "And children, of which there are so few; but this is bad for all of us. Yes, the pregnancies most of all."

    Billee missed the cup she was pouring by several inches as she stared; Krall jumped back. "Well, then, what are we waiting for?" Her voice cracked.

    Wilson, across the room from her, raised his eyebrows. "Uhh ... Bee?"

    "Of course, silly!" She put down the ladle and reflexively covered her belly with her hands. "If this place is extra dangerous to babies, we gotta roll!"

    Several voices were raised at once. "Where?" asked Tomma over the din. "Where's going to be safer?"

    "We can head for Roundhouse for now," replied Josep. "Far enough? And there's no food there, any more than here."

    "We will need to go hundreds of kilometers at least," said Karen. "And we'll need to separate into smaller groups, so that we can more easily feed everyone on such game and forage as can be expected."

    "Yes," agreed Wilson, straightening up and rubbing his chin. "If any one group fails, there are still the others. But if we are all together, failure will be final for everyone."
    "Let's all go together to Roundhouse in the morning, then," offered Josep. "It will take about two days, maybe three with our wounded. You can be our guests there; hopefully no one else has found it yet."

    Scooping the half-sleeping Allyn to her shoulder, Karen stood up. "Be thinking of what to put in ponchos and blanket rolls. Some will be able to drag a travois – if anyone doesn't know what that is, we'll show you. We will bundle the kale and carry it on those till it runs out. . Winter is coming and with no certainty of food, it will be hard. Take what you will use, not what you'd like to have. Young Griff here knows what we brought from Ridge and can advise – right?"

    The boy grinned. "Right." 

    Karen looked round the room. "We can never return. But if we're careful how we travel, hopefully we can rendezvous. Perhaps – there will be a Creek again."

 

 
(To be continued)

Starvation Ridge: Bright in the Skies -- Chapter Fifteen

 

Wolf squatted on his haunches and rolled the legless man over. Lots of damage to his middle, as might be expected. The air, still blue with the smoke of combat – and execution – stank of the man's burnt tunic.     

    "You're a mess, fella," said Wolf softly.

    "Tell me what I don't know. Want to put me back in my chair?"

    Wolf looked over the chair. "Should I check it for surprises?"

    "There was a knife right by my hand. Did I reach for it when you came over?"

    "No."

    "Saw you kill that sunnavabitch ... thought we might have a thing or two in common."

    "Maybe." Wolf tested the wheels of the chair with his foot, figured out the brakes and set them, then lifted the man, into his seat. Blood began to soak into the shredded tunic, but the man didn't seem concerned. Shock and bravado served for anesthetic, apparently. Wolf had seen this many times.

    The two regarded each other in silence for a moment. Wolf busied himself reloading the Coonan, one ear cocked for activity from down the stairwell.

    His host spoke again. "Aren't those revolver rounds?"

    "Yeah. It's kind of a unusual gun."

    "All guns are getting unusual now."

    "And seems like every one of 'em came here today."

    "So ... are you one of them?"

    Wolf glanced at the lifeless suit of armor on the floor. "It's complicated." He looked Mr. Control Room in the eye. "It's kinda over out there, maybe. Th'two sides have fought each other to a standstill for now."

    "Got a name?"

    "Not one that matters."

    "Mine's Avery Murchison."

    "Are you the boss man up here?"

    "No, kind of a unit commander. Was."

    "Who would I talk to about stuff, then?"

    Avery cocked his head over. "Got a feeling I don't really know." A fleeting expression crossed his face. "There's a one-armed girl. If she's alive, talk to her."

     Wolf took in the damaged room, missing little. "What the eff was this all about, anyway?"

    Avery, beginning to grow pale, gestured vaguely at the armored corpse. "Was that Magee?"

    Wolf raised his eyebrows. "Yeah."

    "He  ... did you dirty?"

    "Yeah, actually. I kinda did him first, but he, ah, upped the ante."

    "Well, he was trying to to do the whole world dirty. Or would have, if he'd pulled this off."

    "I appreciate your confidence, but are you telling me too much?"

    Avery shifted in his seat. Pain was beginning to reach him.

    "I don't think so, somehow. Hoping to recruit you for something."

    Wolf tucked the Coonan in his belt and reached for his carbine to sling it over his shoulder. "What would that be?"

    "Help me destroy this facility." 

    Wolf smiled. "Yeah, it's potentially a liability, from some things I been told. There's a big bomb downstairs, but I've got no fuses and ain't inclined to cross any wires. Whatcha thinkin'?"

    "Got another way. Take you a few moments and plenty of time for you to clear out."

    Wolf considered. "You want me to deliver you to anybody? Could maybe do that."

    "Jeeah, no. I've been rearranged, I can tell. Been hurt before. And what use would I be, out there, after all this is gone?"

   "Got a point, 'm'afraid." Wolf strode over to the control panel and pointed at the dials. "'S'got anythin' to do with these?"

    "Yep. We have to knock out a little pin so's it will hit ground zero, then we're good to go."

:::

The remaining trucks had drawn themselves up in a fighting circle. Two were in flames, dissected by the strange weapon that had been digging all the trenches. Its whirlwind of burning debris had gone up to New Ames, set the house on fire, and swept back through the fight, macerating road, trees, fences and friend and foe alike. The Creekers, trying to set up a perimeter and come to grips with the invaders, spread round to the east, north and west of the trucks, but gave the geyser of rocks and burnt soil a wide berth.

    Then it moved off. 

    Everyone watched its path of destruction as it tore across the Creek and jumped up Ridge, crossing the ridgeline and turning west. The mountain began to shed glowing debris, some of which flew over the crest and rolled, hissing, down among the fire-killed trees.

    A few shots rang out, and battle was rejoined. 

    Night fell.

:::

"Hold still, Bolo, while I figure this out."

    "I am holding still, Mr. Josep, sir."

    Josep winced. Of course he was; Bolo had more resistance to pain than anyone else at Roundhouse. Or, not that exactly. Maybe it was that Bolo's body felt as much pain as did any other, but somehow the big man didn't understand pain. This somehow had affected everyone around him; through the years, Bolo's family (which was everyone who knew him) had gone to great lengths to spare him injury or sickness, as if he had always remained a child. 

    And now here he was with a crossbow bolt in his temple, and he was sitting up and talking and apparently not the worse for it. Across Bolo's lap from Josep squatted Mrs. Wilson. In the dim firelight, Josep could just make out that she was examining Bolo. Krall, the big dog, wrapped herself round Billee's feet and rested her head on Bolo's thigh, sighing.

    Billee frowned. "I'm not really good at this. We need Dr. Tom, or Mrs. Chaney, or at least Karen or Juanita." 

    "Me neither," assented Josep. "Bolo, you've been shot in the side of the head and the bolt twisted as it went in; I don't think we can draw it without some idea which way it turned."

    "It's in my ... where I think?" Bolo made a woebegone face.

    Josep's voice fell to a whisper."Yes." 

   "Why am I alive?"

    "We don't know. 'The Lord works in mysterious ways' is as good an answer as I've ever heard."

    Vernie Watkin, carrying a long old-fashioned flintlock, crawled over. "Jeeah," he said, looking at Bolo, then addressed himself to Josep and Billee. 'They want a parley."

    A momentary rage crossed Billee's face. "After all they've done?"

    Josep wasn't sure how to answer this. Billee had proved an outstanding tactical leader; but since Wilson's disappearance she seemed to be bent on annihilation. He settled for answering with a question. "Should we have more of our people go through what Bolo's going through, or worse?
"
   "I'm not too bad," said Bolo. Josep shushed him.

    "I know what you mean," replied Billee to Josep, "but I don't have to like it."

    "What have they got?" asked Josep of Vernie. "Spokesman? White flag?" 

    Vernie looked surprised. "Yes to both. Some did not understand the flag thing at first. He was almost shot."

    "All right, let us go and talk to the man."

    Billee did not like being left out of this, but she could see Josep's expectation that she would stay with Bolo. And Bolo certainly looked like he could use the company. So she kept to her crouch by his side, her knee lodged in Krall's ribs, patting Bolo's hand.

    Josep followed Vernie, stepping over the strange tilted ditches, taking advantage of what cover was available, toward the "front." This consisted of a small circle of armored trucks, two of them in shambles and emitting gouts of smoke, lit from in front by the strange fire on top of Ridge, and from behind by the last gutterings of the burnt-out shell of New Ames, on a slightly higher elevation. Creekers and Roundhousers occupied the nearest hedgerows, sporting twenty-twos, bows, spears, and swords. A faint smell of damp saltpetre, mixed with that of the wounded soil of the fields, hung in the air.

    They came to Tomma, who held the sights of the Hawken steadily on a figure sitting on the running board of one of the trucks. Even in the dim light one could see the man was tall, thin, world-weary, cagey, and authoritative. A cottonwood branch rested across his knees with a rosette of white plastic flagging tied to one end. He appeared to be unarmed.
    "Bring me up to speed?" asked Josep.

    "Nothing new," replied Tomma. "He asked for our leader, and, I guess, right now, right here, you're it." 

    "No sign of bad faith?" Josep peered into the dismal light ahead.

    "None, they've not fired anything since he started waving that stuff, and there's been no sign of anyone manning slits or any movement toward an attack or breakout, that we can see."

    "Good job. I guess there's nothing for it but to see what he wants." Josep laid down his weapons and stood halfway up. "Greetings."

    If the stranger was startled, he gave no sign. The stick stirred slightly on his knees, and he shifted his weight. "Hey. Yew'd be th' man in charge?"

    "Maybe. Some people, if they were to show up, I might defer to. Till then, you have me."

    "Y'be fair; I like that." He pronounced "like" as if it were "lack." Where was he from? "Y'see, I'm thinkin'." He pointed a bony finger at the rumbling mountain, behind Josep. 

"The shits't brought us here, they got to be dead, or that godawful thing'd be sweepin' us all up by now. If they's dead, that's all to th' good, 'cuz it were more their war than enny of us over here. Boys is tired 'a dyin' 'an I speck y'all feelin' 'bout th' same. Say?"

    "I won't pretend it hasn't been rough. We have some people that have lost husbands and wives. Children, even."

    "Yeah, figgered. I hate that; purely I do. 'Cuz if one of 'em was to knife me in th' back on my way outta here, I'd say I had it comin'."

    A faint rustling caused Josep to check behind him. Bolo, apparently completely ambulatory, was standing in the Road, supported on one side by Billee and on the other by none other than Wilson! And was that Armon with them? Josep gaped, but Wilson rolled his forefinger in the air, which Josep took to be a sign to keep the parley going. He returned his attention to the stranger. "What do you propose?" 

    "T'let us walk. We'll leave all our weapons an'y'c'n have these bloody machines, too."

    "Surety?"

    "Aw, fella, if ya kep' me, what'd stop these kids come back an' fight ya if they had a mind? I ain't nothin' t'them. None of us has much t' watch out for but our own skins. And, y'know – " he chuckled – "I 'speck yer in like case; y'farms look like fried shit t'me."

    "You may have a point. Where do you think to go?"

    "Back down th' road we made; try t'build a proper tribe down to th' Umpqua."

    Wilson stepped up. "Hi, my name's Wilson."

   "Oh," said the stranger, "seen you afore. Ain't you th' honcho, then?"

    "Yes and no. We're a mixed lot. I happen to know it's a long walk from here to the Umpqua, how do you propose to eat, unarmed?"

    "Well, thanky fer yer concern; we thought we'd take our wounded along, y'know." 

    Josep winced; he could feel the sly smile in that voice even from this distance.

    "If I understand you right, I recommend against what you have thought of," continued Wilson. "You have preserved food in the trucks?"

    "Waal, yeh, MREs. Some. Packaged stuff. It's not too bad. Got some smoked venison. No, venison, really."

    Wilson turned to Josep. "What say we have each of them, in the morning, take something of that, and a water container. We'll put a cache of hunting weapons – four bows, a couple of knives, and say eight arrows – by the Bridge for them to pick up on their way out. That work for you?"

    Josep nodded. "That works for me." He turned toward the seated stranger. "You catch all that?"

    "Oh, hail, yeah. I hear anythin' related to my skin."

    "We'll be watching."

    "Wouldn't expect no less. So, if nobody's trigger finger is any itchier than usual – " the thin man nodded toward Tomma – "None of my boys here will so much as blink, and I'll gather up our toys, real slow like, and y'all c'n watch me pile 'em up right here in th' open? An' I surely would hate to die of mistakin' y'all on this deal."

    Josep looked at Wilson, who nodded. "We're good here," replied the Roundhouse leader. "Our word as Christians, Jeeans, and human beings, which, may it still be true, we are. We will not break 'this deal,' though you must understand we cannot stand down while you proceed."

    "That was kinda complicated, but I gotcha; gonna get up real slow now and commence t'gatherin'."

    Wilson waved Emilio's little twenty-two vaguely toward the man, with the barrel pointed to the darkened sky. "Please do."

    An explosion shook the ground beneath their feet. All eyes turned to the mountain, from which a ball of fire emerged. The flame lit the valley and the hills all around as it rose, then vanished into the louring clouds.

:::

The band of refugees were washing themselves desperately in the cold waters of the Creek, by the light of the last flames of Hall, when the explosion startled them.

    "What was that?" asked one of the Roundhouse children. It was the one with the puppy, standing knee deep. 

    Karen held her hand protectively over little Allyn's hiding place in the sack at her side. Too damp out here for a baby. She turned back to look at the girl, who, like herself, was still half-covered with Ridge's offal.   

    "No idea. Ridge is ... gone, I should think."

    "Okay," the girl said, holding the squirming puppy at arm's length. "Never liked that place anyway. How come it's so quiet out here?"

    "I don't know that either. Your brother will be back soon, and maybe we'll have some better information. Keep washing that poor dog, and do your hair too. And do it twice. At this rate we'll never smell like humans again."

 

(To be continued)