A Gift Upon the Shore (16 page)

“Does it sunburn your eyes?”

“Yes, you could say that. It burned the plants, too, and only the ones that grew in the deep forest thrived. Even some of the conifers on the edges of the forest died. We went scavenging for glass to build a sort of roof over the garden. It looked like a drunken architect's Crystal Palace. Glass filters out most of the UV, Stephen. We wore dark glasses, hats, and long sleeves to protect ourselves, but the worst of it was trying to protect our animals. We closed the hives and only let the bees out in the evening or on rainy days, but we still lost a lot of them. We covered the chicken coop and rabbit hutches, and kept the goats and horses inside the barn during the middle of the day. We fitted them with hats or cloth fringes to shade their eyes and covered the pigs with coats made of sheets. They sunburn so badly anyway. Still, we managed with most of our animals, but the saddest thing . . .” And for a moment, something in me balks. I don't want to relive all these memories. Once was enough.

Stephen leans forward, eyes shadowed with what he reads in my face. “What was the saddest thing, Mary?”

“The wild animals, Stephen, the innocent victims of our insanity. The birds—oh, it made me weep to see them. At first, they kept trying to fly, but finally they just went to ground and waited to die or be killed. The nocturnal animals—coons, bobcats, owls—and underground creatures, like moles and to some extent the gray-diggers, they survived. But the gulls, my beautiful gulls, they'd gather on the beach and just stand facing the wind until they died. The stronger ones cannibalized the weaker. But some of the youngest survived, the chicks that hatched latest and didn't have so much exposure to the UV. Still, by August, the beach was littered with dead again. The UV also eliminated most of the feral dogs. We found their starved bodies on our forays in August and September. We found dead coyotes, too. That was the first inkling we had that coyotes had moved into the coast forests.”

Stephen nods. “I've heard them singing.”

“Yes. They're far more adaptable than most predators. Not like the bears. I remember one day . . . Rachel had gone scavenging with Silver and Sparky, and I was cleaning the barn while the goats were out in the north pasture. I heard Shadow barking and ran out to the pasture with my rifle, and there was a brown bear blundering after one of the kids. I knew he could barely see. I fired the gun into the air to scare him off. I didn't want to kill him, but I suppose that was as close as he'd come to meat in weeks. Finally, he did knock the kid down and probably would've killed it. So I killed him. It took three bullets, and when the poor beast lay dead, I sat beside him and cried. I thought,
I've killed the last of his kind
. Maybe I did. At least, in this corner of the world. I've never seen a bear since.”

A silence grows out of that story. At length Stephen says, “But the bear probably would've died anyway.”

Stephen has never seen a bear, and I doubt he ever will. He knows them only as beasts pictured in books. “Yes, Stephen, I suppose he would've died anyway. And we made use of the carcass. It provided meat and oil and even a little fat for soap and bone-meal for the garden. We tanned the hide—our first attempt at tanning. Anyway, by the end of summer, the UV had let up, and some of the late crops weren't a total loss. We stored root vegetables both for us and the livestock for winter. We scythed grass and clover for hay. It wasn't enough, any of it.”

I stare at the pages of the diary and the erratic tracks of my writing. “But we survived, and I should've been grateful. I was. And yet . . . I remember thinking sometimes that we had no
right
to survive. Not when so many people had died. That was one of the things that weighed most on our minds then. Grief. Grief for people we'd loved; grief for people we hadn't known, but whose work we knew; even a vague sort of grief for the nameless billions who died in the initial blasts or of radiation poisoning, disease, cold, starvation. And there were other kinds of grief. We grieved a beautiful planet ravaged. We grieved the thousands of species of plants and animals destroyed. We grieved a civilization lost.”

My pain alarms Stephen, but I go on: “Rachel said civilization is the highest expression of the human mind. At least, it had the potential for that because it could free people of the drudgery of survival and provide the tools and knowledge that make comprehension and creativity possible. The trouble is, homo sapiens bring a lot of primitive genetic baggage into the world along with our wonderful new cerebral cortexes. We're social animals with instinctive needs to establish dominance hierarchies. We're territorial and xenophobic and, like any organism, programmed to reproduce, and we did it compulsively and irrationally. And that's what destroyed the golden age, and with it all the art and poetry, all the discoveries and insights accumulated over the last ten thousand years.”

Did Rachel really say that? Yes. Many times. But not in those words. The words are mine. Stephen's narrowed eyes tell me he's thinking about what I've said. He isn't sure what it means yet, and he silently waits for me to go on.

“Rachel knew even then that our civilization was lost. In this hemisphere, at least. But
I
still clung to the hope that remnants of it had survived. I was convinced that if we went east beyond the Coast Range, or north or south along Highway 101, we'd find people. Civilization. On the first anniversary of the End, we talked about a journey in search of survivors, but there was still too much to do to prepare for winter. Besides, we were exhausted, and I was afraid we'd end up sick. And at that time we couldn't have gone
south
. There were a lot of lightning storms that summer, and on September fifteenth we saw the smoke from a huge forest fire to the south. We watched it for days. The wind was from the north, so we weren't in its path, but the smoke covered half our sky. It rose in an immense cloud like a thunderhead, the color of opal where it was thickest. Strange, how many destructive things are so beautiful. Even the cloud of a nuclear bomb was beautiful.”

Startled, Stephen asks, “Did you see such a cloud?”

“No, I never actually saw one. I saw pictures of them. Anyway, we decided we couldn't go south or any direction that fall. We had the winter to think about.”

Stephen cups his chin in one hand. “Was the second winter as hard as the first?”

“No, or we wouldn't have survived it.” I skim more pages in the diary. “But it wasn't an easy winter, and we were on short rations. We both lost a lot of weight. In December Shadow gave birth to another litter of puppies. And every evening Rachel spent at least an hour sorting and reading the books she'd scavenged, and I . . . well, I was always too busy or too tired for that. I think I even resented it, really, although I never said anything to her. I closed my mind to the books.”

“You, Mary?” Stephen studies me dubiously. “But you love books so much. And you said—well, when you first saw Rachel's books, that's when you knew you'd found a kindred soul.”

“Yes.” I run my fingers over the cover of the Emily Dickinson. It was one of Rachel's books. “I had always loved books, Stephen. I learned that from my parents. But after the End . . . I didn't understand it till later, but it was as if the books didn't exist for me, and I didn't even wonder about that.” Then I turn again to the diary. “At any rate, we did have snow that second winter, but it melted by the middle of January, and it was almost a normal spring for the coast. There were more birds. More insects, too, and many more slugs. But the garden thrived in spite of them. So did the livestock, and in May Silver gave birth to a colt, a bay filly. We called her Epona. The rabbits and chickens did well, and the bees recovered enough so that by late summer we took a good harvest of honey and wax. That's when we learned to make candles, although we still had some kerosene and whale oil.” I close the diary and look out through the rain curtains at the gray sea.

“The most encouraging thing was to see the ocean rejuvenated. The tide pools filled with life again, and barnacles and mussels began colonizing the rocks. We saw a few salmon in the Coho and even whales spouting on their way north. Every sign of recovery was a miracle to us. Some of our crops and animals died, others lived. Two of Shadow's pups died, but two lived. And we lost another cat. That left only Mehitabel, a lone female.”

And I remember how I sympathized with her. I thought a great deal that year about being a female without a male. For all I knew, our species was near extinction, and I could do nothing to save it. I had no doubt I was capable of it; my menstrual cycles continued with frustrating regularity. Sometimes I saw Rachel and me as two Eves in a precarious Eden born of Armageddon.

I'm reminded that I've lapsed into silence when Stephen asks, “Did you and Rachel ever go to look for other people?”

“Yes, but not until late summer. By then we'd harvested the crops and put up the hay, and the animals born that year were old enough to fend for themselves. Still, we decided we couldn't leave any of the animals for more than three weeks. We fortified the rabbit hutches and the chicken house and pigpen, and rigged water tanks and food bins that would hold enough to last that long.” I leaf through the diary, seeking the entry marking the beginning of our trek, but pause before I reach it, distracted by another entry.

“I made a note on August twentieth, Stephen. We saw an odd, brown cloud in the east over the mountains. Actually, we'd seen similar clouds earlier, and at first we thought they were smoke from forest fires, except the color was wrong. We learned the answer to that puzzle on our trek—one of the many hard lessons we learned. Anyway, on . . . here it is. On the last day of August we set off on our odyssey: two women, two dogs, and two horses loaded with food and camping gear. I remember worrying about the animals we left behind, but once we turned east on the Portland highway, all I could think about was what lay beyond the Coast Range. Or what I hoped . . .” My throat closes on the words. Stephen watches me; he seems to be holding his breath.

Finally I say, “First, you have to understand what that land was like Before. The Willamette Valley. A huge trough running north and south, a hundred miles wide, bracketed by the Coast Range on the west and the Cascades on the east. Oh, Stephen, it was so beautiful. Gentle hills and dark earth, wheat and hay fields bright green in the spring, and in the summer dotted with bachelor's buttons, and at harvest time, they were like golden seas. Wild roses grew along the fences, and the orchards—some of them had thousands of fruit or filbert trees, and when they bloomed, they were glorious. You'd see hawks soaring over fields of strawberries and clover, and between the fields there were stands of firs and groves of oaks with their limbs frosted with moss. The rivers were wide and slow and deep green, and there'd be fishermen at almost any bend.”

Stephen is rapt, and I might as well be describing Oz. It is, in fact, a fantasy now.

“The biggest cities in the state were in the Willamette Valley, Stephen. Portland, which was a major seaport, even if it was so far inland. The ships came up the Columbia River. And Salem, which was the capital of the state. And they were targets for those reasons.”

He tilts his head, brows drawn. “Targets?”

“Targets for the bombs. I knew they would be, and I didn't expect anyone to have survived in the cities themselves. But I thought somewhere in the Valley we'd find . . . some remnant of civilization.”

“But you didn't.” It isn't a question.

“No. I hadn't counted on the firestorms from the bombs and the effects of the nuclear winter and the Blind Summer. What we found east of the divide of the Coast Range was a desert. A charred, dry wasteland. All the trees had burned. The river that flowed by the highway was brown. Every field was cracked and gouged with gullies. Only a few sprigs of grass and lupine tried to root there. It was a gray, silent place where no insects buzzed, and birds didn't live to sing, and the only thing that moved was whirlwinds of dust.”

“What did you do?” he asks in a whisper.

I shrug. “We kept going east. I knew we wouldn't find anything alive within thirty miles of Portland, but I convinced myself that the burns just east of the Coast Range were the result of forest fires that began in the mountains. And I convinced myself that between the forest-fire bum and the blast zones, there'd be a green corridor where people could survive. Rachel wasn't convinced, but she knew I'd have to see for myself. So, we went on, following the highway, although at times it was buried under dunes. We passed small towns and farms, most of them burned out. On the fourth night we camped at a farm where the bam and house were still standing. We slept in the bam. The house was . . . occupied by the remains of the family that had lived there. That night we were wakened by the timbers of the bam groaning. The windmill outside was creaking madly, and when we opened the bam door, we ran into a wall of windblown dust. That's when we understood the brown clouds we'd seen from Amarna, Stephen. They were dust storms. This one went on for two days, while we huddled in the barn with the wind battering at it, and the dust sifting through all the cracks until we could hardly breathe.”

Stephen laces his fingers tensely. “Weren't you afraid?”

“Terrified. And I had to face the fact that there'd be no green corridor in a place where dust storms of such magnitude could be generated, that the wasteland was a product of firestorms fanning out from the bombs that hit Portland and Salem. Of course, there might've been green corridors in the Cascades or in the south end of the Willamette Valley, but we weren't equipped for that long a trek—not through this new desert—and we couldn't stay away from Amarna that long. So the coast seemed our only hope. But we knew if we headed south on the coast, we'd hit that big forest-fire burn from the year before, so we decided to head north.”