Chapter Two
Nov. 1st, 2014 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljgeoffAuthor's note: Just let me know how this flows, how it works.
Chapter One
Chapter Two - 3347 words
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is that area in the far north Midwest between the northern border of Wisconsin and the southern shore of Lake Superior. It’s famous for it’s deep woods, the hunting and fishing, logging and for iron and copper mines. At over sixteen thousand square miles, it falls in between the size of Maryland and Vermont. But for all that space, the whole area has a population of just over three hundred thousand souls; less than the population of Toledo, Ohio.
It’s where Mike and I met, where we raised our family, where my folks live and where half our kids still live. We went for a visit in mid-October for our annual October Birthday Bash. This was actually our 2nd Annual OBB, our newly minted traditional family get together. Almost everyone came, we ate spaghetti, played, exchanged gifts, laughed, carved pumpkins and just spent a night loving and celebrating us.
A few of us went for a walk on a piece of property that I’d been watching. It looked promising for The Plan. The seller was offering it on a land contract deal, and it was something we might actually afford. It was north of Negaunee, near Dead River, and had most of the features on our checklist -- not too close to town but not too far away; near good water; a good mix of hills, wetland and flat stretches; decent site for a cabin; and room to grow.
We drove out on a paved county road for about half an hour, and another fifteen minutes after it went to dirt. There was an old logging road that went in to the property but there was no way the minivan was going to make it, so we hiked in.
“Borders the county road,” Sam complained. He carried his two year old daughter Torrin on his shoulders, and she grabbed his hair as he swung around, eyeing the road.
I continued on, not looking back. “The road actually cuts into the property,” I corrected, stabbing my thumb over my shoulder. “There’s a couple of acres on that side.”
Sam grunted and looked off to the south, “A wetland. That helps.”
I remember having a talk with Sam when he was seventeen or eighteen. Zombies, everything was zombies -- games, books, tv.
“You know how like, in world war two, they talked about the Yellow Horde?” I’d asked.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding, “it’s so they, what? Demonize the enemy, right? ‘Cause it’s hard to just kill people.”
“Yep. Well I think the zombies are reavers.” Sam’s eyes narrowed, thinking about it, and I went on. “So, if you've got a small settlement, and the people in the cities or people who don’t know how to feed themselves are starving…”
A light went on behind his eyes.
“I mean, there might be women, little kids, old folk -- and it wouldn't really be their fault, but if you let them, they’d eat everything you had. They might kill you and your family to get what you have.” I pictured the mindless zombie. Eating, always eating. I could tell from his face that Sam was seeing it too. “Reavers,” I said.
Ever since then, Sam has been very serious about security of the homestead.
The thing is, I did that on purpose. I knew how he’d take it, that he’d take it to heart, that it’d become his new nightmare. I did it because I thought that it might be true and sometimes we need nightmares.
We scuffed up the logging trail, noticing blueberry patches poking out from the bracken fern, and northern herbs like wintergreen and kinnikinnick, or uva ursi. The trees were mostly pines, spruce and cedar, with understory deciduous like saskatoon berry and mountain ash. Luke found a long stick and poked it at his dad, en guard, Mike found a stick of his own and they were off, chasing each other around the trees. The little boys shrieked and chased after them.
It had been raining on and off for two days, the slow steady drip of U.P. autumn, but now the wind had freshened and a bit of sun was poking through. I knelt by a small stand of paper bark birch and feathered my fingers across the ground. Under a thin layer of multi-year leaves was the sandy soil that lay across most of this area. I rubbed it between my thumb and fingers and sighed. This was even worse soil than my vacant lot garden. It would take years to build it into something that would grow decent crops.
About a mile into the property was a knoll that piled up some forty feet above the wetlands. The road wound around the knoll and we walked up and looked out across a shallow sea of evergreens. I took a deep breath in and out.
This will do, I thought.
That night, Mike and I stayed in a bargain hotel along the highway in Ishpeming, us in one bed and the little boys in the other. I was in high spirits from seeing the property, and I snuggled up against him in the dark after the boys were asleep.
“I love you,” I whispered, smoothed one arm around his waist and kissed his shoulder.
He laid a hand on my thigh and gave me a gentle pat. “I … really, really like you, Lisa.”
I went still. I think that I stopped breathing for a bit. After a while I noticed that he’d fallen asleep and I rolled away and curled up on the far side of the bed.
I’d had to work ten straight days before the trip and another five days after, so my greenhouse was languishing. But I’d found someone who was selling used 100 gallon plastic food grade tanks for just a hundred bucks, and I was hoping to get that in place by the end of the month. Yellow perch, here we come. But first, I had to talk to Mike.
On my last work day of the week, he picked me up and I felt that this was a good time to talk to him about how much he really, really liked me. Maybe I hadn't understood.
He shot a look at me and then his eyes went back to the road. His hands gripped the steering wheel and relaxed. “I haven’t been in love with you for a long time,” he said.
“How long?” My voice was soft, almost casual.
“I don’t know. Two years at least. Maybe three.”
We did all of our serious talking in the car, quiet and away from all the family. I was comforted by the way the scenery went by, the way it made me feel like I was going somewhere.
“Three years?” I was honestly amazed. “How can you not be in love with someone for three years and not … notice?”
“I knew something wasn't right.” He was sullen, like a boy being taken to task.
I looked out at the passing trees. We were driving through the outskirts of town, past small, trim houses with trees all autumn gold and red. Silver maple, I thought, black walnut, beech, honey locust, jack pine.
Last week, the day after we’d got home from the trip, we’d gone out, filled my big soup pot with wild frost grapes and I’d made jam. He was laughing at our purple fingers and I’d taken his fingertip in my mouth, sucking at it, teasing. He’d kissed me and the little boys had jumped in, demanding kisses too.
We drove past a boggy spot. Box elder, I thought, cedar, spruce. I couldn't think of it, couldn't hold his words in my mind. It was a pretty day, sunny, with a pale blue sky. It looked fragile, that blue, like it could break into pieces and the blackness of space would spill in like ink across tissue paper.
There are a lot of people who believe in miracles. I’m sometimes wistful over the whole idea -- it would be such a comfort.
When I first started talking to family and friends about the way the natural world was changing, I’d get bemused looks, eye-rolls and chuckles. A decade later, they conceded that things were changing, but that it would be a century before we really had to worry about anything. The earth’s systems were so huge, so ponderous, and climates changed, yes, but it took centuries. Millenia.
It’s different now. Now people nod but look away. Give an uncomfortable laugh. Right, climate change. End of the world, hey? Aren’t you a ray of sunshine.
It seems that everyone I know is in one of those two camps: either God or Science will pop up, deus ex machina and save our sorry asses, or there is no saving us and it’s Zombie-ville.
No one else who I personally know is making any real plans. I’d guess that I know, both in person and online, maybe one hundred or so people. I know fifty or so well. None of them, not one, has any concrete plan on how to get their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren through the next fifty years, let alone the fifty years after that.
On the blog Climate Code Red, David Spratt wrote, "If a risk-averse (pro-safety) approach is applied – say, of less than 10% probability of exceeding the 2 °C target – to carbon budgeting, there is simply no budget available, because it has already been used up....the idea of "burnable carbon" – that is, how much more coal, gas and oil we can burn and still keep under 2 °C – is a dangerous illusion, based on unrealistic, high-risk assumptions."
When I asked friends why they didn't think about how the world was changing, why they weren’t making any plans that included this reality, one said, “We can't. We literally CAN'T. We'd go crazy in a very short period of time. Some people go to extremes. They are so scared they deny it all completely because they CAN'T THINK ON IT. We can't. Depression and listlessness are killers as well - and thinking in such doomsday terms would lead to a lot of us...giving up. Which wouldn't help matters either. One day at a time is the most some of us can manage. To think beyond that point and with such bleakness is just not something we can do.”
I spent a lot of time in 2009 and 2010 reading the research on why there was no movement on climate change policy, why public opinion was so bland on an issue that had a fair potential of killing off our grandchildren, and I think my friend pretty much summed it up.
The whole month of October, I tried really hard to be friends with Mike. This is me, just friends with my ex of 25 years.
When he told me he wasn't in love with me anymore, it was like ... I couldn't really think on it. The breath would go out of me and my head would spin. Have you ever unexpectedly brushed your hand across stinging nettles, or sliced yourself deep with a knife you didn't know was in the dishwater?
I spent a lot of time weeping. Folding laundry, tears streaming; on the bus with my face to the window and a tissue in my fist; doing dishes.
I was doing dishes in the evening, not thinking about anything but tears dropping into the soapy water, and was surprised by a small hand patting me on the hip. “Grammy, why are you crying?” Trentyn’s face was drawn up in concern.
“Oh, baby, it’s okay.” I grabbed a towel, dried my face and then my hands. “I’m just sad about something and the tears just came out.”
His eyes searched mine and I could see the doubt playing in his eyes. I suppose I didn’t look okay. I picked him up and set him on my hip. “Remember when I ran over your Sponge Bob guy with the van and he was all smushed? You were sad for a while, but you got over it, hey?”
Trentyn nodded and snuggled his head into the crook of my neck. “Papa got me a new Spiderman guy.”
I chuckled under my breath, “Yeah. That’s not gonna happen.”
“No, look!” Trentyn slipped down my thigh, “I’ll show you my new Spiderman guy.”
In 2008, the reality of climate change really hit me. I just couldn't get past the idea that we were screwed. A whole planet of really screwed humans. So, so screwed.
I was taking classes at Northern Michigan University and I would look at all of the young, hopeful, lovely students and think you are so screwed. When friends my own age started talking retirement and 401K’s, I’d think you are so screwed. I would look sadly at new babies, I mourned our nascent space program and shook my head at things like wetland remediation.
Everything in my world was colored by the lens climate change.
“What good is it to enumerate the problems if you don’t have any solutions?” a friend asked. “Are you so completely without hope?”
I agonized over that question. What could I do? What could any single person do? What would it take, I thought, to live in Zombie-ville?
First, we’d need someplace remote where we could grow food under the radar. In this world, very little is under the radar, but some places are harder to get to than others. For years, I planned on the Northwest Territory of Canada or Alaska, but realized that there was no way we’d have the money to set something up so far away, and in another country besides.
But the UP was home; we were already there.
We’d need an area to grow crops -- vegetables, grains, fruits, berries, and nuts. We’d need to look at livestock. As amateurs, what could we handle? We’d need access to an unpolluted water table. We’d need to figure out how to provide off-grid power.
But as important as all of that, we’d need to increase our skill set. As a group, we are all pretty handy. I can grow things, sew things, nurse common ailments and manage a household. Mike can fix almost any small to mid-sized mechanical thing, is a gunsmith and sharpshooter, a fair hand at carpentry and has been trained by the military for twenty years on things like emergency readiness, first aid and the strategies of attack and defense. We both know our way around the woods.
My son Carl and his girlfriend Crystalynn got pregnant when they were still in high school. They decided to keep their baby and are now married with three kids. After high school, Carl got a certificate in waste water management and is now working for Rio Tinto’s Eagle Mine up in Big Bay.
Someone who can find out if we have clean water as well as manage the septic system; check.
Sam is interested in all things computers, as well as electronics. He’s also knows a bit about guns and ammo. I think of Sam as our security specialist in training, with Mike. Luke wants to train as a mechanical engineer or architect. We also have a lake biologist, a teacher, several musicians and singers, and a few of us have minor fiber work skills.
No potters, glass blowers or metal workers. No spinners or weavers. We’d need to work on learning these things.
“The way I see it,” Sam said, “there’d be a hell of a lot of scavenging.”
We were sitting around the dinner table, just finishing up. The little kids were whooping it up in the living room while the grownups were being boring.
“It depends on how fast things fall apart,” I said.
Sam lifted his hand, open. Continue.
I picked up my water glass and swirled the ice, thinking. “Okay, so first off, for the last twenty years, it’s been worse than predicted. It’s always worse. First they said the arctic ice cap was going to melt by 2100. Then 2070. Then 2050. Now it looks like it’ll melt out during the summer sometime between 2020 and 2025, and go completely ice free by 2050.
Early climate change models, back in ‘05 or so, looked at a worse case scenario of business-as-usual and said that we’d be having problems around 2050 and on. But a lot of folk back then said, well, we’re obviously going to do better than the worst case scenario, and that the climate guys were being alarmist and exaggerating how bad it would get.
In actuality, we’re pretty much on track for the worse case scenario, and we’re seeing a lot of effects that were being predicted for “toward the end of the century” right now -- loss of arctic ice, the tipping of the WAIS, the tipping of the Amazon.”
Mike tapped the table. “Lotsa tipping going on.”
I nodded and took a sip of water. “Soooo… Oceans rising, increased storms, less hurricanes but the ones that do hit us are much stronger, failing crops, increased social unrest around the world; we’re seeing it now, but we’re a rich nation and it doesn’t hit the average person too hard.
But, well, by 2025 double the cost of food, don’t increase wages much and cut back food stamps? Yeah, that’ll get everyone’s attention. Food’ll cost so much that nobody can afford a Big Mac -- hey, how many people do ya think depend on the fast food industry?”
Sam swallowed, “Christ. That’s just ten years.”
“Might be 2030, even 2035,” I said with a shrug.
“Everyone I know works in fast food,” Kayla said, leaning back in her chair. “What are people going to do?”
“A lot of ‘em will join the military,” Mike said. “Three squares, medical care, even clothes.”
We were quiet, looking down at the table, fiddling with a napkin or pleating the hem of a shirt with nervous fingers. I spoke into the silence, “Add to that thousands of people losing their homes to storms and rising seas, or to simply not having the money to pay the rent. And then more businesses closing because who can afford to buy a computer, a car, hell, a toaster?”
There was silence and slowly, one by one, we got up to mind children or clear the table.
The frame of the greenhouse had been pounded together, assessed, torn down, refigured a bit and put back up. It now stood solidly against the south wall of the house, ready for windows. I eyed the frame and then the windows that leaned untidily against the back of the house. Who knew that a pile of two-by-fours would be so contentious? How did that bode for the windows?
I opened the back door so that Mike could make his way back in with the ladder. I had stopped crying mostly and had started thinking. The Plan, the damned, stupid, help-me-Obi-Wan Plan. It colored everything.
Mike came back out to pick up his drill and the bits. I looked at him thinking he’s not in love with me. I poked at the thought, surprised. There was the weight to it, heavy on my chest, but it didn't steal my breath. I felt panicky-sad, though. I couldn't see the other side -- peering out I saw only sadness forever. Intellectually, I knew it wasn't true.
It was like the idea, this knowing that Mike wasn't in love with me, was an object in a box. I knew that I had to get it out of the box in order to deal with it, but whenever I reached in, it pricked me. I realized suddenly that now I've both better learned how to handle it and developed some calluses on my fingertips.
Besides, though I loved Mike, though I was in love with Mike, I needed Mike for The Plan.
Chapter Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two - 3347 words
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is that area in the far north Midwest between the northern border of Wisconsin and the southern shore of Lake Superior. It’s famous for it’s deep woods, the hunting and fishing, logging and for iron and copper mines. At over sixteen thousand square miles, it falls in between the size of Maryland and Vermont. But for all that space, the whole area has a population of just over three hundred thousand souls; less than the population of Toledo, Ohio.
It’s where Mike and I met, where we raised our family, where my folks live and where half our kids still live. We went for a visit in mid-October for our annual October Birthday Bash. This was actually our 2nd Annual OBB, our newly minted traditional family get together. Almost everyone came, we ate spaghetti, played, exchanged gifts, laughed, carved pumpkins and just spent a night loving and celebrating us.
A few of us went for a walk on a piece of property that I’d been watching. It looked promising for The Plan. The seller was offering it on a land contract deal, and it was something we might actually afford. It was north of Negaunee, near Dead River, and had most of the features on our checklist -- not too close to town but not too far away; near good water; a good mix of hills, wetland and flat stretches; decent site for a cabin; and room to grow.
We drove out on a paved county road for about half an hour, and another fifteen minutes after it went to dirt. There was an old logging road that went in to the property but there was no way the minivan was going to make it, so we hiked in.
“Borders the county road,” Sam complained. He carried his two year old daughter Torrin on his shoulders, and she grabbed his hair as he swung around, eyeing the road.
I continued on, not looking back. “The road actually cuts into the property,” I corrected, stabbing my thumb over my shoulder. “There’s a couple of acres on that side.”
Sam grunted and looked off to the south, “A wetland. That helps.”
I remember having a talk with Sam when he was seventeen or eighteen. Zombies, everything was zombies -- games, books, tv.
“You know how like, in world war two, they talked about the Yellow Horde?” I’d asked.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding, “it’s so they, what? Demonize the enemy, right? ‘Cause it’s hard to just kill people.”
“Yep. Well I think the zombies are reavers.” Sam’s eyes narrowed, thinking about it, and I went on. “So, if you've got a small settlement, and the people in the cities or people who don’t know how to feed themselves are starving…”
A light went on behind his eyes.
“I mean, there might be women, little kids, old folk -- and it wouldn't really be their fault, but if you let them, they’d eat everything you had. They might kill you and your family to get what you have.” I pictured the mindless zombie. Eating, always eating. I could tell from his face that Sam was seeing it too. “Reavers,” I said.
Ever since then, Sam has been very serious about security of the homestead.
The thing is, I did that on purpose. I knew how he’d take it, that he’d take it to heart, that it’d become his new nightmare. I did it because I thought that it might be true and sometimes we need nightmares.
We scuffed up the logging trail, noticing blueberry patches poking out from the bracken fern, and northern herbs like wintergreen and kinnikinnick, or uva ursi. The trees were mostly pines, spruce and cedar, with understory deciduous like saskatoon berry and mountain ash. Luke found a long stick and poked it at his dad, en guard, Mike found a stick of his own and they were off, chasing each other around the trees. The little boys shrieked and chased after them.
It had been raining on and off for two days, the slow steady drip of U.P. autumn, but now the wind had freshened and a bit of sun was poking through. I knelt by a small stand of paper bark birch and feathered my fingers across the ground. Under a thin layer of multi-year leaves was the sandy soil that lay across most of this area. I rubbed it between my thumb and fingers and sighed. This was even worse soil than my vacant lot garden. It would take years to build it into something that would grow decent crops.
About a mile into the property was a knoll that piled up some forty feet above the wetlands. The road wound around the knoll and we walked up and looked out across a shallow sea of evergreens. I took a deep breath in and out.
This will do, I thought.
That night, Mike and I stayed in a bargain hotel along the highway in Ishpeming, us in one bed and the little boys in the other. I was in high spirits from seeing the property, and I snuggled up against him in the dark after the boys were asleep.
“I love you,” I whispered, smoothed one arm around his waist and kissed his shoulder.
He laid a hand on my thigh and gave me a gentle pat. “I … really, really like you, Lisa.”
I went still. I think that I stopped breathing for a bit. After a while I noticed that he’d fallen asleep and I rolled away and curled up on the far side of the bed.
I’d had to work ten straight days before the trip and another five days after, so my greenhouse was languishing. But I’d found someone who was selling used 100 gallon plastic food grade tanks for just a hundred bucks, and I was hoping to get that in place by the end of the month. Yellow perch, here we come. But first, I had to talk to Mike.
On my last work day of the week, he picked me up and I felt that this was a good time to talk to him about how much he really, really liked me. Maybe I hadn't understood.
He shot a look at me and then his eyes went back to the road. His hands gripped the steering wheel and relaxed. “I haven’t been in love with you for a long time,” he said.
“How long?” My voice was soft, almost casual.
“I don’t know. Two years at least. Maybe three.”
We did all of our serious talking in the car, quiet and away from all the family. I was comforted by the way the scenery went by, the way it made me feel like I was going somewhere.
“Three years?” I was honestly amazed. “How can you not be in love with someone for three years and not … notice?”
“I knew something wasn't right.” He was sullen, like a boy being taken to task.
I looked out at the passing trees. We were driving through the outskirts of town, past small, trim houses with trees all autumn gold and red. Silver maple, I thought, black walnut, beech, honey locust, jack pine.
Last week, the day after we’d got home from the trip, we’d gone out, filled my big soup pot with wild frost grapes and I’d made jam. He was laughing at our purple fingers and I’d taken his fingertip in my mouth, sucking at it, teasing. He’d kissed me and the little boys had jumped in, demanding kisses too.
We drove past a boggy spot. Box elder, I thought, cedar, spruce. I couldn't think of it, couldn't hold his words in my mind. It was a pretty day, sunny, with a pale blue sky. It looked fragile, that blue, like it could break into pieces and the blackness of space would spill in like ink across tissue paper.
There are a lot of people who believe in miracles. I’m sometimes wistful over the whole idea -- it would be such a comfort.
When I first started talking to family and friends about the way the natural world was changing, I’d get bemused looks, eye-rolls and chuckles. A decade later, they conceded that things were changing, but that it would be a century before we really had to worry about anything. The earth’s systems were so huge, so ponderous, and climates changed, yes, but it took centuries. Millenia.
It’s different now. Now people nod but look away. Give an uncomfortable laugh. Right, climate change. End of the world, hey? Aren’t you a ray of sunshine.
It seems that everyone I know is in one of those two camps: either God or Science will pop up, deus ex machina and save our sorry asses, or there is no saving us and it’s Zombie-ville.
No one else who I personally know is making any real plans. I’d guess that I know, both in person and online, maybe one hundred or so people. I know fifty or so well. None of them, not one, has any concrete plan on how to get their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren through the next fifty years, let alone the fifty years after that.
On the blog Climate Code Red, David Spratt wrote, "If a risk-averse (pro-safety) approach is applied – say, of less than 10% probability of exceeding the 2 °C target – to carbon budgeting, there is simply no budget available, because it has already been used up....the idea of "burnable carbon" – that is, how much more coal, gas and oil we can burn and still keep under 2 °C – is a dangerous illusion, based on unrealistic, high-risk assumptions."
When I asked friends why they didn't think about how the world was changing, why they weren’t making any plans that included this reality, one said, “We can't. We literally CAN'T. We'd go crazy in a very short period of time. Some people go to extremes. They are so scared they deny it all completely because they CAN'T THINK ON IT. We can't. Depression and listlessness are killers as well - and thinking in such doomsday terms would lead to a lot of us...giving up. Which wouldn't help matters either. One day at a time is the most some of us can manage. To think beyond that point and with such bleakness is just not something we can do.”
I spent a lot of time in 2009 and 2010 reading the research on why there was no movement on climate change policy, why public opinion was so bland on an issue that had a fair potential of killing off our grandchildren, and I think my friend pretty much summed it up.
The whole month of October, I tried really hard to be friends with Mike. This is me, just friends with my ex of 25 years.
When he told me he wasn't in love with me anymore, it was like ... I couldn't really think on it. The breath would go out of me and my head would spin. Have you ever unexpectedly brushed your hand across stinging nettles, or sliced yourself deep with a knife you didn't know was in the dishwater?
I spent a lot of time weeping. Folding laundry, tears streaming; on the bus with my face to the window and a tissue in my fist; doing dishes.
I was doing dishes in the evening, not thinking about anything but tears dropping into the soapy water, and was surprised by a small hand patting me on the hip. “Grammy, why are you crying?” Trentyn’s face was drawn up in concern.
“Oh, baby, it’s okay.” I grabbed a towel, dried my face and then my hands. “I’m just sad about something and the tears just came out.”
His eyes searched mine and I could see the doubt playing in his eyes. I suppose I didn’t look okay. I picked him up and set him on my hip. “Remember when I ran over your Sponge Bob guy with the van and he was all smushed? You were sad for a while, but you got over it, hey?”
Trentyn nodded and snuggled his head into the crook of my neck. “Papa got me a new Spiderman guy.”
I chuckled under my breath, “Yeah. That’s not gonna happen.”
“No, look!” Trentyn slipped down my thigh, “I’ll show you my new Spiderman guy.”
In 2008, the reality of climate change really hit me. I just couldn't get past the idea that we were screwed. A whole planet of really screwed humans. So, so screwed.
I was taking classes at Northern Michigan University and I would look at all of the young, hopeful, lovely students and think you are so screwed. When friends my own age started talking retirement and 401K’s, I’d think you are so screwed. I would look sadly at new babies, I mourned our nascent space program and shook my head at things like wetland remediation.
Everything in my world was colored by the lens climate change.
“What good is it to enumerate the problems if you don’t have any solutions?” a friend asked. “Are you so completely without hope?”
I agonized over that question. What could I do? What could any single person do? What would it take, I thought, to live in Zombie-ville?
First, we’d need someplace remote where we could grow food under the radar. In this world, very little is under the radar, but some places are harder to get to than others. For years, I planned on the Northwest Territory of Canada or Alaska, but realized that there was no way we’d have the money to set something up so far away, and in another country besides.
But the UP was home; we were already there.
We’d need an area to grow crops -- vegetables, grains, fruits, berries, and nuts. We’d need to look at livestock. As amateurs, what could we handle? We’d need access to an unpolluted water table. We’d need to figure out how to provide off-grid power.
But as important as all of that, we’d need to increase our skill set. As a group, we are all pretty handy. I can grow things, sew things, nurse common ailments and manage a household. Mike can fix almost any small to mid-sized mechanical thing, is a gunsmith and sharpshooter, a fair hand at carpentry and has been trained by the military for twenty years on things like emergency readiness, first aid and the strategies of attack and defense. We both know our way around the woods.
My son Carl and his girlfriend Crystalynn got pregnant when they were still in high school. They decided to keep their baby and are now married with three kids. After high school, Carl got a certificate in waste water management and is now working for Rio Tinto’s Eagle Mine up in Big Bay.
Someone who can find out if we have clean water as well as manage the septic system; check.
Sam is interested in all things computers, as well as electronics. He’s also knows a bit about guns and ammo. I think of Sam as our security specialist in training, with Mike. Luke wants to train as a mechanical engineer or architect. We also have a lake biologist, a teacher, several musicians and singers, and a few of us have minor fiber work skills.
No potters, glass blowers or metal workers. No spinners or weavers. We’d need to work on learning these things.
“The way I see it,” Sam said, “there’d be a hell of a lot of scavenging.”
We were sitting around the dinner table, just finishing up. The little kids were whooping it up in the living room while the grownups were being boring.
“It depends on how fast things fall apart,” I said.
Sam lifted his hand, open. Continue.
I picked up my water glass and swirled the ice, thinking. “Okay, so first off, for the last twenty years, it’s been worse than predicted. It’s always worse. First they said the arctic ice cap was going to melt by 2100. Then 2070. Then 2050. Now it looks like it’ll melt out during the summer sometime between 2020 and 2025, and go completely ice free by 2050.
Early climate change models, back in ‘05 or so, looked at a worse case scenario of business-as-usual and said that we’d be having problems around 2050 and on. But a lot of folk back then said, well, we’re obviously going to do better than the worst case scenario, and that the climate guys were being alarmist and exaggerating how bad it would get.
In actuality, we’re pretty much on track for the worse case scenario, and we’re seeing a lot of effects that were being predicted for “toward the end of the century” right now -- loss of arctic ice, the tipping of the WAIS, the tipping of the Amazon.”
Mike tapped the table. “Lotsa tipping going on.”
I nodded and took a sip of water. “Soooo… Oceans rising, increased storms, less hurricanes but the ones that do hit us are much stronger, failing crops, increased social unrest around the world; we’re seeing it now, but we’re a rich nation and it doesn’t hit the average person too hard.
But, well, by 2025 double the cost of food, don’t increase wages much and cut back food stamps? Yeah, that’ll get everyone’s attention. Food’ll cost so much that nobody can afford a Big Mac -- hey, how many people do ya think depend on the fast food industry?”
Sam swallowed, “Christ. That’s just ten years.”
“Might be 2030, even 2035,” I said with a shrug.
“Everyone I know works in fast food,” Kayla said, leaning back in her chair. “What are people going to do?”
“A lot of ‘em will join the military,” Mike said. “Three squares, medical care, even clothes.”
We were quiet, looking down at the table, fiddling with a napkin or pleating the hem of a shirt with nervous fingers. I spoke into the silence, “Add to that thousands of people losing their homes to storms and rising seas, or to simply not having the money to pay the rent. And then more businesses closing because who can afford to buy a computer, a car, hell, a toaster?”
There was silence and slowly, one by one, we got up to mind children or clear the table.
The frame of the greenhouse had been pounded together, assessed, torn down, refigured a bit and put back up. It now stood solidly against the south wall of the house, ready for windows. I eyed the frame and then the windows that leaned untidily against the back of the house. Who knew that a pile of two-by-fours would be so contentious? How did that bode for the windows?
I opened the back door so that Mike could make his way back in with the ladder. I had stopped crying mostly and had started thinking. The Plan, the damned, stupid, help-me-Obi-Wan Plan. It colored everything.
Mike came back out to pick up his drill and the bits. I looked at him thinking he’s not in love with me. I poked at the thought, surprised. There was the weight to it, heavy on my chest, but it didn't steal my breath. I felt panicky-sad, though. I couldn't see the other side -- peering out I saw only sadness forever. Intellectually, I knew it wasn't true.
It was like the idea, this knowing that Mike wasn't in love with me, was an object in a box. I knew that I had to get it out of the box in order to deal with it, but whenever I reached in, it pricked me. I realized suddenly that now I've both better learned how to handle it and developed some calluses on my fingertips.
Besides, though I loved Mike, though I was in love with Mike, I needed Mike for The Plan.
Chapter Three