Iron Buddhas 4

- 4 -

STEFFI'S LIFE has become a bruised but happy blur.
    Mornings, she wakes easily; she's always been her own alarm clock. She picks a time and -- bim! -- her eyes pop open. The crew discovers this and they award her the role of bellringer.
    In the darkness her arm snakes forth from her sleeping bag and she feels assorted pants and shirts in a pile on Rocinante's truckbed floor for dampness. The least damp or mud-stiffened pants and shirt are nominated as today's dress code.
    Staggering outside in unlaced tennis shoes, she picks up by feel a cold, rained-slick hammer from a stump and with her other hand she bats around at the air till she finds a seventeen-inch long forged-steel hoedad blade hanging from a tree on a strand of baling twine. This she pounds on for thirty seconds until lamps and flashlights pop on all over the still-benighted camp.
    "Okay, okay, Stef! Cheezis fuggin' cries arready!"
    Someone stumbles over bodies in the entryway of the crew yurt, dodges pairs of sweating caulk boots hanging from the low rafters, lights the white-gas lantern and begins the invariable breakfast of eggs with broccoli.
    Steffi likes ketchup on hers.
    The sky rolls slowly over into an alloy of lead and silver as boots, dags, bags, raingear, and lunches are stuffed into the crummy, followed by eleven groaning bodies.
    The engine, feeling all of its two-hundred-twenty-seven thousand miles plus a night of near-freezing rain, mumbles and hiccups as water in the gas line is cleared away by sheer starter-motor power, and ultimately catches. The headlights take a stab at the darkness, firs, cedars, alders, hemlocks, stumps and Forest Service road signs appear and disappear at regular intervals, punctuated by the occasional spooked deer or even bear, and after many turns on hairpin curves over black gulfs of wet wilderness, the crummy sighs onto the landing as the day turns to as much day as it's going to.
    The wind shoves dead grasses around on the landing in the rain, but the clouds, rippling through like a fast freight, never part.
    Shrug into wet raingear, lace up caulk boots, slap on hard hat, bag up, discuss the unit strategy, step over the edge. Muscles still sore from yesterday complain at first, then oil themselves with their own internal residues and fall into the routine.
    Lunch, standing up, shivering. It's whatever you bring. Steffi's is baked potatoes sliced in half, with strips of bacon as the filling. She needs all the calories she can get to just to be here.
    She's also acquired a tiny pipe, a cheap Dr. Grabow of gnarled briar with a nickel band round the stem, which she fills with Flying Dutchman in the mornings, and smokes, bowl upside-down in the rain, crouched in the lee of the crummy, till lunch is over. It makes her spit a lot, but it helps. Seems to keep guys from hitting on her, too.
    The days are long, almost dark-to-dark. She's carrying three or four hundred trees in the morning and the same in the afternoon. Her hips are permanently bruised. But a tree is a dime. She's making seventy to eighty dollars a day in the middle of a high-unemployment recession and she's proud of herself.
    Crummy up, drive home. Headlights, deer eyes and glowing joints.

:::

A sunny day after what seems like months of rain. The crew puts in an eleven-hour day to finish the contract on time. As the crummy reaches camp, it's still light. The rain has already soaked into the porous earth and the grass looks inviting.
    Chuck parks the crummy, and for a moment no one moves. All eyes are on the transformed campsite. The setting sun, dropping down into a notch in the westward-trending canyon, illuminates the beaten trucks, cars, and buses, the sagging, bewildered tents, and the yurt with its rusting cap and chimney. Dogs run to the crummy, wagging almost cheerily.
    Chuck opens the door and and simply slumps to the earth. Bill and Mike crawl out and lie down on top of Chuck. Willard, Burt, and Jerry-Down pile out of the passenger side, take three steps, kneel and collapse on top of Bill and Mike. Amy, Juneen, Murray, Steffi, and Jerry-Up simply add themselves to the pile-on. The  heap of treeplanters lies there, like a colony of seals, with the dogs' inquiring tongues on their faces, for a good twenty minutes.
    The Magruders, who have stayed home today, noticing that no one has come to dinner yet, leave the comfort of the yurt fire and amble out to inspect the dazed herd. They pull their red wool crushers low over their eyes and hook their thumbs in their suspenders.
    "Uhhh, y'all want any macaroni and hamburger? Or doncha?" they ask.
    "Got coffee, too," they add. They turn around, as one, and stroll back to the yurt. The pile untangles, limb by groaning limb.

:::

That night, the rains return with force. Rocinante's roof sounds like she's been parked under a waterfall.
    Steffi digs deeper into her sleeping bag, with just her nose sticking out. She puzzles over the treeplanter heap -- that felt nice, there were no barriers and no one seemed to mind being napped on top of by everyone else -- and tries to figure out how much she's made this week, and reminds herself to sharpen the scalping blade on the back of her hoe.
    With a sharp blade, you can quietly even up the dangly roots that run over ten inches on your seedling, prevent J-roots and loss of income to disgruntled inspection. Some let you trim, some don't. With the ones that don't, you might go to their superiors about the catch-22 of hoe-trimming versus J-roots and the boss tells them to bring scissors and do the pruning for you on request. So when you do that, they hate you and things just go from bad to worse.     Better you just look around, and as soon as they are preoccupied with something or someone else, schwick! splop! -- it's pruned and planted.
    There's an inspector standing by Steffi's bunk, which is strange because the roof is only three feet away.
    "So, Stef!" he says, smiling wickedly. "I have to ding you or you won't pay any attention!"
    "Uhh, 'scuze me? Tryna sleep here?"
    "I know you are; that's just the problem. Lookit your line!"
    With a sweep of his arm, Tatum clipboard in hand, the inspector's gesture takes in the soggy, slash-befouled hillside. All along Steffi's line the meticulously mineral-soil-scalped planting spots contain baked potato-and-bacon sandwiches, planted up to their waists and properly tamped.
    Steffi can't see what's wrong with her sandwiches, and turns to the inspector to say so. But the inspector is now standing, arms akimbo, with his mouth open impossibly wide. From it there comes the sound of branches slipping past other branches, slapping faster and faster through larger branches: crackings, smashings, roarings.
    Steffi's suddenly wide awake, and somehow she knows what the sound is. A tree is coming down, a fir, huge, old-growth. It's going to hit the truck and obliterate her little life from the earth.
    There's nowhere to go. No time to wriggle out of the sleeping bag. The forest hulk, shedding tons of moss, lichens, limbs, branches, twigs, and rudely wakened birds, brushing aside hemlocks and alders as it comes, is here -- here now -- surely here now, to crush the yellow truck and its sweat-bemired occupant, oh-too-young-to-die. Now it strikes, splintering millions of, five hundred years' worth of, fibers --
    -- and, umm, has missed the truck. The impact actually causes Rocinante to leap, perhaps a quarter of an inch, rocking on her axle springs. But there is, in here, no death.
    In the morning:
    "D'ja, uhhh, hear anything last night?"
    Amy, sleepy-eyed, regards the newbie, almost amused.
    "Blowdown, somewhere, maybe."
    Steffi's obsessed with the derailed freight train of broken timber that interrupted her strange dream. In two days is her day off. She reconnoiters upstream from camp, following the creek till the trail threads out, snaggling her way through viney maples and thimbleberry until she comes to it: a trunk seven feet thick, that has broken its neck among the boulders, leaving wracked hemlocks and cedars in a gap in the forest canopy just beneath the clouds.
    It's more than a quarter of a mile from camp.

:::

Burt and Chuck spend a good part of the next morning coaxing the crew-bus crummy to life. Chuck cranks the motor over while Burt fills a mayonnaise jar from the gas line, separates the gas from the water by slowly pouring gas off the top of the water into a battered fuel can, then pouring the gas back into the truck's fuel tank. Then Burt sprays lighter fluid on the air filter, Chuck cranks the engine over again with the twelve-volt's last gasp, and the engine catches.
    "Town. Gotta call in," says Burt to Steffi's raised eyebrow. Most of the crew, all the men anyway, pile in.
    "Beer run!"
    Oh, the joy.
    Steffi's not that into beer. She spends the day wandering around the mountainside, poking her nose into boomer holes and tree hollows.
    Amy and Juneen, also not very into beer, are packing the yurt's furnishings into a couple of galvanized trash cans.
    Amy is twenty-three, pretty except for a broken front tooth, is round like a muscular apple, always wears overalls. She speculates a lot without saying much of it aloud. Juneen is nineteen, taller than Amy, not nearly as strong but so focused she outproduces her. Juneen is, or was, a few years back, a runaway; ordinarily she would have wound up living under a bridge in Portland and dying of dirtied needles, but lucked into hard work in the woods instead. They both love being here.
    Amy spots a blue hole in the sky and brings all the caulk boots out to dry in the sun, arranged in semicircles on old growth fir stumps. She keeps pushing the boots back and forth on the stumps.
    "What are you doing?" asks Juneen, in the yurt doorway with a dented aluminum pitcher in one hand.
    "Porkypines." Amy dreamily rearranges the last pair, and chums it together with a gigantic pair of wet sneakers.
    "Come again?"
    "In th' winter th' porkypines got cold, see? So they, they got together and one of 'em said, 'Look, we're all freezin' our butts off out here, how about we circle up and we'll all be warm.'"
    "I can see a problem with that."
    "Hush, that's th' point of th' story. So they circled up and they went to stickin' each other, on accident, an', like, 'Ooh.' an' 'Owie.' an' such, so they they spread out some -- "
    "In the snow?"
    Amy looks crushed. "Sooo, y'know this one, huh?"
    "Not really, but you tell it so I can really see it."
    "Uh-huh, well, so there they was freezin' again, so they went back 'n forth till they got some body heat but not stickery. And that's called The Origin of Manners or somethin' like that."
    "Wow."
    "Yeah. This crew, it's like that, everybody gives a little 'n takes a little. Even the new girl. So -- I guess I like it here."
    "The new girl is nuts."
    "We're all nuts, Juneen; you think any girl with any sense would be happy in this much mud?"

:::

Steffi, meanwhile, deep in the shade of some big-leaf maples on the hillside, has knelt among the sword ferns, remembering a way of playing that she had in her childhood. She breaks fallen twigs so that each one is about the size of a new pencil, and sticks then in the ground side by side, until she's made a little pioneer stockade, complete with cabins and furniture inside the cabins --
    "Steff-f-f-f-f-f-f!"
    Woops. How long has she been out here?

:::

Juneen and Amy want help with the yurt poles.
    To dismantle a crew yurt, first remove the polyethylene walls, with their rips and burn holes all covered with duct tape, and roll them up. Take the shortest rafter, a ten-foot-long debarked and sun-dried lodgepole sapling, the one with no eyebolt holding it tensioned against the upper cable, and worry it till it comes loose in the interior of the yurt in your hands. It becomes a tool. With it, you can push up on the canvas roof from beneath, then walk the roof off to one side, exposing all the other poles to daylight. 
    Fold the roof so that its steel cap, which is also the flashing for the woodstove pipe, rests on top. Remove the other poles from the top of  the upper cable, all but the four that have the cable threaded through them. Stack the rafter poles on the roof rack of the crummy, hanging out beyond the headlights and the taillights. 
    Now loosen the turnbuckle on the upper cable, unthread it, take the remaining four poles that are still jammed in the plywood donut ring that held the cap and stovepipe, and walk them over to the side, dumping the donut ring on the ground. 
    Next you undo the bottom cable's turnbuckle, gather up both cables, unbolt the door frame from the wall lattice, walk the lattice up flat, and place the remaining rafters, the door and door frame, the rolled-up plastic, the lattice, and the folded canvas roof on the crummy's roof rack and tie down the load with scraps of rope. It's tempting to use the wall cables, but you don't want to kink the wire rope.
    Sounds complicated, but once you've done it you can get it down to twenty minutes with three women and two dogs.
    Now this sounds like a strikingly ugly vehicle, and it is, but this is the Seventies -- cops won't pull the crummy over unless it actually dumps something on the freeway. Live and let live, more or less -- that was then.
    Y'all don't know what I'm talking about, do ya?

:::
  
Steffi likes working with the women way better than working with the men, though she's not articulate about it. Amy and Juneen like the guys and feel safe with them, and they know she does too, but she seems not to know much difference between how you talk to a guy and how you talk to a girl. Everybody feels it. So, none of the guys have "asked her out" -- invited them over to their tent or camper.
    To Juneen, in private, Amy queries: "D'ya think she's lezzie?"
    "No, she's just in-between some way or other. She ain't gonna hit on the guys and she ain't gonna hit on you."
    "Oh."

:::

After the kitchen is packed away in and on and behind the crummy, the rain starts up again, and they gather all the boots that have been drying in the yurt and stash them under the owners' assorted vehicles.
    "Hey," says Amy. "Y'know that warm spring we heard about? I found it on the district map."
    "Yeah?" Juneen pushes her hair out of her eyes. She can feel it's stiff, gnarly, no shower for three weeks.
    "Whaddya think? Stef, you got gas in your truck?"
    Pay is by the job, and the jobs are three, six, eight weeks long. No one's been paid since the last time the crew went to Eugene, a hundred miles north. The next paycheck is probably a week away. Resources are slim. Gas for the trip to the next job will come into camp with Burt and Chuck in a fifty-five gallon drum.
    "Umm, got some sawgas. Maybe a half gallon."
    "Cool! Wanna go hot tubbin'?"
    Rocinante gets a drink of the dark gasoline mixture and they're off.

::: 

Amy navigates, shining a flashlight on the map in the gathering gloom, in Rocinante's cab. She sits in the middle, even though she's wide, because her legs are shorter than Juneen's.
    The headlights shine, through the windshield wipers, on one forest service sign, then another. The signs indicate intersections; the roads are numbered rather than named. Two or four digits means, roughly, paved trunk roads. Three digits is a gravel spur road. They find the spur road they want.
    "'Kay, Stef, slow down; we want to go one-and-a-half miles and there should be a wide spot and a trail off to the left."
    "How are we gonna see that? It's almost pitch black now."
    "Shhh! Look. There's a wideout on the left. See a trail?"
    "Not much. Looks like a piss-stop trail if anything."
    "That's gotta be it. Not a lot of people know this is here."
    Steffi pulls over and shuts off the engine. They push through the viney maples and ocean-spray at the roadside, getting wet through and cold, and, sure enough, it's a trail. Amy knows woods.
    A couple of hundred feet into the darkness, they come to a tiny clearing among second-growth firs. In the middle is a dark little hole, about five feet across, with water in it, surrounded by trampled grass.
    "This is a hot spring? It's not, umm, steaming or anything."
    "It's just a warm spring, silly, just hot enough for a good bath without cooking us. Touch the water."
    Steffi kneels down and, sure enough, just like a drawn bath. Warm, not scalding. In all this rain in the middle of nowhere.
    The fever for a washing up hits all three of them at once. Shoes, pants, overalls, shirts, and bras fall in a heap. Steffi can feel the cold pressure of the grass stems on her fanny and the heat of the water on her tired, scabbed shins. In moments, she's up to her neck, prone in the shallow and muddy water, lying with the back of her head pillowed on the bank.
    All any of them can think of is that their poor, long-suffering pores are opening to the heat of the water ... ah, paradise.
    Juneen sits up, washes her hair, lies down again, drawing the surface of the warm springs over her like a blanket.
    The rain falls on their closed eyelids. No one says anything for a very long time. They're so blissed out, they could die here and miss it completely.

:::

Back at camp, which would be around midnight, they discover that Burt and Chuck, along with the rest of Face Crew, have returned. There's a quick crew meeting by the light of the crummys' headlamps.
    "So," says Chuck. "Got word. We'll hit Eugene tomorrow, get groceries, and head up to the Olympics."
    "In ... in Washington?" asks Steffi, as if it were a long way away.
    Chuck looks at her in pity for a moment. Then he looks a bit closer, and at Juneen and Amy as well.
    "How'd you all get so clean?"


(To be continued)

 

Iron Buddhas 3

 - 3 -

"HI, I'M Chuck, this is Willard, Amy, Juneen, Bill, Mike, Murray, Jerry-Up, Jerry-Down, Burt, and Marie. We're gonna pick up the MaGruders and go on up the hill."
    "Uh, hi, I'm Steffi Smith." 
    "Pleased to meet ya. Kinda crawl on to the back there, put yer stuff under the seat, and take a nap if ya want, it's a dark commute."
    Steffi has never seen a set-up like this before. As it pulled up, one headlight bright, the other dim, it looked, in the dark, like some kind of over-extended station wagon, but it seats twelve, plus the driver. Five forwards, two reverse. An unholy aroma of abused bodies, mud, long-dead food, and of the ashes of some kind of burning weed. She settles in next to a large form hunkered in the darkness.
    "Hey, I'm Burt. Ya remember, ya puked on my porch."
    "Sorry about that."
    "Well, things happen. Sleep tight."
    "Uh, yeah."
    Burt shifts around a bit, winds up with his massive head on Steffi's shoulder.
    Steffi shifts away a bit, till Burt's chin finds a less obtrusive purchase, and watches the darkness through the vehicle's interior toward the front window. Occasionally the crummy passes one or two deer, their eyes shining briefly into the mystery of human passage. A lighter flares, and something glowing is handed from seat to seat. Steffi waves it off when a hand appears.
    Lots of country miles, like driving through a snake's guts, later, Chuck pulls the crummy off onto a wideout, just as some daylight has begun to seep over the horizon. Two bushy-beards with Lennon glasses throw their caulks, lunch sacks and hardhats in and climb into the last front seats. They're twins. Must be the MaGruders. The gears rattle and grind a bit, then the rig turns onto a gravel road and starts climbing, in second gear, then low, then low-low. Steffi's ears are popping. Then the noise stops.
    "Piss stop!" yells the driver.
    Moaning, the crew crawl over one another and line up alongside the road, the men standing in front of the crummy, the women squatting behind it. No one looks at anyone else. There's something in front of them worth seeing, anyway.
    At her feet Steffi sees the world drop away, a sea of stumps almost at right angles downwards, receding into a cloud bank that stretches to the horizon. The sun is rising over the clouds, setting all their faces on fire, bright orange with morning's promise. The air is already so clear, above the cloud banks, that Steffi can see individual fir trees on islands of mountaintop three ridges away. The horizon actually seems curved, like an ocean's rim. Steffi has seen a lot of beauty already, done some hiking, been above clouds before, been out of sight of land, has watched the Mississippi and the Rockies and stuff roll by Rocinante's windows, but somehow none of it has prepared her for this.
    Like, the sun comes up and that's your basic C major chord like in the movies, but then, on the clouds, there are all these pastels, modulating into one mysterious minor key after another. There's a worshiping silence, and then somebody whispers, "Holy Shit." As though they'd seen this maybe a hundred times, yet it gets to be new all over again every time, because it's that good. With all the city folks still in bed. And suddenly Steffi knows this is what she wants to do, be here with these people and do what they do, so she can be in places like this for as long as she can get away with it.
    When the crummy starts up again, things begin to happen all through its innards. Feet squeeze into tall caulk boots, coffee is poured, low conversations, coughs, noses blowing. The MaGruders are eating identical oatmeal from identical wooden bowls. Hard hats are fished out from under seats. A wisp of smoke drifts back from the front, and another small soggy hand-rolled cigarette travels from hand to hand. By the time it gets to Burt, it's small and even soggier. He produces a tiny surgical clamp, clips it onto the brown paper along what's left of one side, inhales from the smaller, non-smoldering end, and offers it to Steffi, saying, in a curiously high-pitched voice, "want a hit?"
    Steffi's thinking of the fits of coughing some where up front. "Uh, no, but thanks."
    "Suit yourself. This stuff helps keep the rain outta your bones." He sips at the remainder of the glowing coal, lips pursed.
    They're arriving at a Scene of Destruction: upended stumps, raw boulders, rusted jerry cans, a cleared flat gravel space big enough to turn around a tractor-trailer truck, oil-slicked puddles, sawdust, deep tire tracks. A green pickup is standing there tilted in the giant tire tracks, with a pile of brown paper sacks the size of trash bags in the truck bed. Two men in rain gear walk over to the crummy.
    "Hey, Chuck." 
    "Hey." 
    "Got a full crew?" 
    "Yeah, twelve an' a newbie."
    "'K, well this one's all slash down the right hand side, 'bout five acres, then a rockpile, good ground below the rockpile, steep but good coming up the left side, twelve acres overall."
    "Well, we could do it in a day if you'll let us wide it out a bit."
    "Well, I might woulda, it's northeast aspect and we think it'll survive good, but the C.O. says  stick to the contract, so we gotta hold you to the nine-by."
    Steffi suddenly realizes she's listening to Greek or Chinese or something. Arrh, every new trade, a new language.
    "Hey, Steffi!" Chuck's waving, in one hand, a large rubberized canvas bag sewn to a heavy web belt, and in the other a wicked-looking tool the size of a pickax.
    "This here's a dag and bag. Mostly we own our own here, this'n's a spare. Yuh want to stick about eight bundles of trees in here -- " He demonstrates with twist-tied handfuls of green-topped, brown-rooted seedlings -- "these are fifties, so that's four hundred, and keep track of yer totals. This job's 'by-the-tree.'" Now grab yer dag, follow me."
    The tool has an ash handle a bit over three feet long, curved like a single-bitted axe handle. Steffi sees that it has a long flat blade at the end, at right angles, for punching into the ground at the end of a swing. The other crew members have curved blades, and theirs look sharper, too. This spare must be an older model, the one no one else wants. 
    Par for the course.
    The trees are heavy around her waist. The unpadded belt is cutting off circulation, bruising something. With the unfamiliar caulk boots, rain gear, hard hat, gloves and tree bag, Steffi feels like a deep-sea diver. She's sweating already, and she's not even off the landing.      
    Everyone else is already gone.
    Chuck disappears into thorn-covered brush ahead of her. There are seedlings everywhere, protruding from freshly upturned earth, and from the fog below, Steffi can hear matter-of -fact conversations mixed with the thunk of the crew's hoedads into the ground.
Chuck leads the way, half crawling in mud and rotting vegetation, till they come out into open ground downslope from the brush.
    "We are on what's called a clear-cut. Fir trees don't like t' grow in th' shade, so the loggers take 'em all an' leave this field of stumps. We put in th' next crop of trees an' they all grow up together in th' light."
    He waves his arm across the vista expansively. "It's all black 'cuz they have burnt up th' branches 'n such -- slash -- helps us get at it t'plant, 'fertilizes it some. S'just slash-'n-burn agriculture, s'all."
    Chuck points to the nearest people, who are thunking holes in the earth, among the stumps, and whipping little dabs of green from their bags to the holes. They're spread across the hillside on a diagonal. "This here's the 'line,' see? Trees above yuh, no trees below yuh. On the other side of th' creek, it'll be just th' opposite. So yuh go nine feet -- that's three hoe handles till yuh get yer eye -- put a tree in, then nine feet to th' next one, like a checkerboard. 'Course, stumps and stuff will mess up yer grid, so yuh gotta adjust to it."
    "Th' 'suspectors' -- " he nods toward the green hats, who are standing on stumps, leaning on shovels, chatting -- "are not yer friends, and they are going to be inspecting tight here. Ninety per cent quality pays a hundred on contract price, eighty pays ninety, seventy pays eighty, sixty-nine pays not a gahdam thing." 
    He looks over at them again, to make sure his voice hasn't carried.
    "They're under pressure from above to pay ninety or less, so we gotta keep our numbers up. That means planting tight-by, go eight feet instead of ten, when the logs and stuff'll let yuh."
    One of the inspectors ambles over to watch the lesson.
    Chuck chops at the mountainside upslope from his boots, with a two-handed grip on his 
dag.. But the point of the blade doesn't enter the ground. He's turned the blade sideways, and is chopping out a foot-square section of turf. Then he throws his right arm behind him, letting the tool handle slide in his hand till it reaches the end, and brings the dag over his head in a wide arc, burying the point of the blade all the way to the handle's bracket in the soft earth.
    "Y'open the hole with the hoedad at the bottom by pulling up on the handle, see? Then the top by pulling down. Now yuh've got a hole twelve inches deep and four across all the way down. Right? Now take yer tree and dangle the roots down; give 'em a shake so they'll hang loose and won't get caught upside down, see? 'Cuz roots upside down don't work -- they'll die on yuh; if all the roots are upside down the whole tree'll die. They only work one way. When it's sunny, keep it in yer shade, too, and don't hold it out in the wind too long. All that sun and air'll kill yer tree. Now yuh pack the dirt around the tree with yer hoedad blade, once, twice, like this, so there's no air pocket -- that air will kill yer tree in the ground just like it will in yer hand. Now press down with yer foot, but not too close to the stem and not too hard. There's hair roots, yuh can't see 'em, on every root that yuh can see, and if yuh get rough you'll strip those off at the base, and they'll die, and there goes yer tree, 'k.? They are babies. You are their mummy. Yah? Now on to the next spot."

:::

Steffi spends the next half hour fumbling around with the awkwardly heavy tool, the dirt and the pencil-sized seedlings, trying not to fall off the mountain. Chuck sticks with her, correcting her moves, commenting. The inspector watches, amused. A bald eagle flies overhead, resplendent even in the rain, but no one's watching. The hillside rings with tools hitting stones and pebbles, with hard hats smacking into slashed limbs and boulders. Spiked boots chuff into slick logs and clatter on rocks. Across the hillside, in the mild, soporific rain, she hears a constant refrain of heavy breathing and muttered curses.
    It's hard, it's uncomfortable, it's cold, it's wet, it hurts to be here. But Steffi's feeling a rising excitement, like she's singing inside. This activity seems to have limitless potential of some kind, for measuring one's self against one's self, like track and field. She hefts the hoe over her shoulder and punches it deep into the earth.
    "That's th' spirit," says Chuck. "Y'gotta be hard out here, tough like iron, but aware of absolutely everythin' -- yer next spot, th' next person, th' suspector, th' tree total, th' specs, th' strategy, loose rocks n' logs. everythin'."
    "Like an iron Buddha."
    "Uhh, yeah, like that. "


(To be continued)

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)