This story is excerpted from the novel The Great Bay: Chronicles of the
Collapse recently released by North Atlantic Books.
Jake
Sierra Ridge, 2032
from Janet Conway’s Stories of Collapse
Archives of the Scholar’s Guild, Berkeley
The Old Poet died at ninety. The community he had
done so much to found and nurture came out for one of the largest circles in
the history of Sierra Ridge. They had a small battery-powered amplifier and
people read favorite poems, or their own poems, or told stories.
The Ridge had sent out the news by radio, both
citizens band and short wave. When the telephones and the cell phones had
stopped working, the Ridge had quickly reverted to its twice-daily CB breaks.
Except for a few Pelton wheels, almost everything was solar: they’d never been
on the grid. There was probably more electric light on the Sierra Ridge than
anywhere else in the state. They ran electric chainsaws.
They also had an international network of contacts
in the literary and intellectual communities, and probably knew more about what
was going on in the rest of the world than the CIA. If there still were any
CIA.
Short wave broadcasts were relayed from station to
station. They were called the “News Relays.” Mostly it was done in code. Morse
code transmissions could carry great distances if the D layer was behaving.
Voice contacts were common, but less reliable.
Brief eulogies arrived from all over the world. It
had seemed impossible that an American could win the Nobel Prize, so hated had
the country become in the international community, but a book of devastating
political poems and critiques in his late seventies had won the Old Poet the
prize one year before the Collapse. The book had virtually been prophecy, the
causes and progression of the Collapse uncannily sequestered in metaphors and
images scattered through the poems.
Greetings came from China and Japan and Korea, from
Sweden and Estonia, from Germany, France and Central Europe, from Russia, the
Middle East, and from Africa. The radio was manned twenty-four hours
transcribing code.
The Old Poet had been preparing himself and his
community for the collapse for fifty years. He even had a glass dump on his
land, in case it might be needed for flaking arrowheads or tools. People had
electric pumps for their wells, but there were always hand pumps in the barn
that could be reattached. Spring boxes with gravity feeds were common. In the
few flats and sinks that had any soil there were organic gardens. Apple trees
had been planted up and down the Ridge for a hundred and fifty years. Still,
the Ridge community had turned out to be far more dependent on the fossil fuel
economy than they had thought. The mills and woodshops ran on generators.
People were used to driving the five and ten mile distances from Maidu Hill to
the North Diggins, not to mention the twenty miles to town, or the fifty miles
to Sacramento or Yuba City.
For the most part, their forest cabins were
clustered in certain neighborhoods or watersheds. Ten families lived in the
drainage of icy French Creek. Fifty lived on a tiny spur above the river. There
were over a hundred scattered across Maidu Hill, and several hundred more in a
score of other tiny watersheds and benches.
When the Collapse hit they already had their own
schools, wineries, mills, gardens, power, and two generations of experience.
They had a machine shop, a small illegal distillery, and some of the state’s
more extensive private libraries. Impressive arrays of 12 volt appliances were
in operation. People knew how to use outhouses and how to conserve water. There
were deer, wild turkeys, and wild pig, in addition to domestic animals. There
were horses, people who knew how to use them, and a sizable herd of free
ranging cattle.
Nonetheless the Collapse was traumatic, if not on
the scale of the urban disasters.
Jake made a political speech. He talked about the
difference between personal property and the ownership of resources. He talked
about different forms of political organization and the opportunity for the
Ridge to encourage and support the other collectives emerging around the state.
He said that they should trade their surpluses, which were substantial, with
other collectives like their own.
He warned about the possible emergence of a new
feudalism. Some people were still claiming ownership of large tracts of land
and trying to collect rents in labor. He warned about mercenaries and gangs of
bandits. He talked about the possible forms of large scale confederations and
non-coercive action and regional gatherings.
He said they should try to form a network of
communities, each within a day’s journey of another, all in contact by radio,
and proposed a series of year-long cultural exchanges with like-minded
communities in the valley, on the coast, and around the San Francisco Bay. He
said that they should form a confederation without a capital, linked by
personal friendships and general meetings that would rotate from community to
community.
He said that if they could promulgate the principles
of voluntary cooperation through example, they might be able to isolate any
groups trying to form large militias or armies and contain them.
He said that the Collapse had given them a chance to
explain the intrinsic pathology of military oligarchic states, with their
insatiable material acquisitiveness, to everyone. And that they could avoid
making the same mistake. He said they needed stories to explain this, and that
they had to be taught to the children.
It
was a good speech. People hooted. None of Jake’s ideas were followed up on, in
any specific way, but it didn’t matter. Events followed their own momentum and
things worked out much as Jake had outlined.
The Old Poet was given a Buddhist funeral, somewhere
between that befitting a monk and a fox. They burned his body in Big Meadow on
a huge pyre of manzanita branches. The Shingyo
was chanted by the circle in Sino-Japanese and in English.
The Collapse had occurred fifty-four years after the
Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. On Sierra Ridge, the pecan and almond trees,
the small groves of black and English walnut trees that had been planted in the
early seventies were mature and still bearing.
The first General Rendezvous and Jubilee of the
Shasta-Tehachapi California Confederation was held on the spring equinox of
2034 in Davis. Hundreds attended but it was hardly representative of the state.
Petrolia and Humboldt Bay sent representatives on
bicycles. Santa Cruz sent a contingent on an all-electric flatbed with twenty
solar panels as a roof. Amanda and Ynez left their children with Fly and joined
Margo and Yellow Dog to make the long trip north to represent the Roadkill
Rangers. They sputtered in on ethanol-converted choppers. Some walked. Some
rode horses. Two wood-fired steam wagons arrived from Concord.
There were representatives from Chico and Paradise
and Red Bluff. A lone man arrived on foot from Helena, on the North Fork of the
Trinity. Dozens of communities in Humboldt, Mendocino, and Lake counties sent
contingents. There were groups from Napa and Sonoma and from coastal communities
north of Marin. Groups arrived from Berkeley and San Francisco and Modesto.
Groups arrived from places no one had heard of. Religious communes sent groups.
A Black Muslim group from the South Bay attended “as observers,” as did the
Karok nation from the Klamath. The Chinatown Tongs sent a group. In many
meetings there was simultaneous translation in English and Spanish.
A festival atmosphere prevailed but there were many
workshops on topics ranging from political matters, such as a possible charter,
to issues related to technology, to discussions on earth-based spirituality.
One group discussed founding regional moots as a kind of appeals court to solve
problems that could not be resolved at the local level.
Many had little experience with consensus decision
making and progress was slow. There were issues of collective defense and
discussions on what to do about the bandit gangs. Jake Matson, as part of the
Sierra Ridge Collective, again tried to encourage his idea of year-long
cultural exchange residencies.
Very little was decided in the meetings, but the
parties were great. Even if no agreements had been reached on the particulars
of the Confederation, its essential existence was already a reality. No
decision was even reached about where or when to hold the next General
Rendezvous and Jubilee, and four years passed until another gathering was
convened, again at Davis. The Second General was poorly attended. Regional
get-togethers, however, became common, and that was how it worked.
As the First General drew to a close, Jake decided
that he should take his own advice and left the Jubilee with the Santa Cruzans.
Two of the Santa Cruzans wanted to go to the Ridge, so there was plenty of room
on their truck. With the panels on top the flatbed looked like a safari tram.
Everyone cleaned up the grounds for a day, though there was very little loose
trash, and they pulled out on the 30th of March.
Jake talked a lot to an auburn-haired woman with
green eyes named Debbie, who had been a graduate student in mathematics before
the Collapse. She liked science fiction and politics and Jake was in love
before they reached the Carquinez Bridge at Benicia.
Jake did everything he could not to be obvious: he
talked to the other people, or he’d keep quiet, hanging off the back of the
truck. Then he’d catch her smile or their eyes would meet and Jake would beam.
They pulled off in Martinez and drove to the
reservoir to let their batteries recharge for the rest of the afternoon. They
were welcomed by a group calling themselves the Steamfitters Union. They’d
built the steam wagons and Jake had met some of them at the Rendezvous. Most of
the older men had worked at the refinery. Jake wanted to know if there was
still any oil in the hundreds of giant tanks covering the hills. One of the men
replied that there wasn’t much, but that “there might be some jet fuel at
Concord.” Debbie wanted to know if the refinery were still operable.
“Might be,” the man named Sam laughed, “if we’d stop
taking parts out of it. But what then, you see any oil tankers?”
“A little gasoline could go a long ways,” Jake put
in.
“A little gasoline is not what this place is about,”
Sam said. “Trust me.”
“What about a little kerosene?”
Sam
laughed. “Well, that could be useful. We’re thinking about that one. But we had
to give the steam engine higher priority. We have to run tools and we have to
move this stuff around. And this stuff is heavy. Like I say, we’re working on
it. But in the meantime we have to eat. It’s pretty much the fishermen keeping
us going now, and the gardens.”
No one could think of anything else to say. Sam
farted.
“We eat a lot of beans,” he added.
The Steamfitters all lived within walking distance
of the reservoir and said goodnight and went home. The Santa Cruzans laid bags
or blankets down where they could find flat ground and went to bed. Jake found
a spot on the grass behind a hedge. He was lying on his back with his hands
behind his head when Debbie walked over with a rolled blanket under her arm and
asked him if he were sleeping alone. Jake wasn’t sure whether to answer from
past tense or future tense, so he just sat up and said “Hey.”
“What is it about me and shy men?” Debbie asked no
one in particular. Then she laughed, put down her blanket roll, and sat on it,
facing Jake. “Maybe we should talk about it?”
Miraculously, Jake managed to say that he didn’t
think that was a good idea. They did much better not talking.
In
the morning Jake and Debbie hung together and found they had lots to talk
about. The batteries on the truck were charged and the truck pulled back onto
680. As they drove from Martinez, Debbie said that if Sam and his friends
didn’t get diesel in production before they died it wasn’t going to happen.
Jake agreed.
They stopped again in Los Gatos to let the batteries
come to full charge before heading over Highway 17. They were ready by late
afternoon. They’d just gotten started up the hill when they saw a man lying
face down on the pavement a little down the last exit before Lexington
Reservoir. There was another man crouched over him and he waved at them to
stop. They parked and went over to see how to help. The man lying down rolled
over and they both pulled guns and told everyone not to move. Three other men
and a woman crossed the highway from the other side of the truck. They all
brandished guns and ordered Albert out of the cab.
The man who had been lying down smacked Jake in the
head with his gun and knocked him down. Blood poured into his eyes. The
short-haired man who had been crouching put his arm around Debbie’s neck and
pulled her against him and put his pistol to her temple. He told everyone to
start walking. Jake was still sitting on the asphalt.
“You too!” the short-haired man said.
“I’m waiting for her,” Jake said without getting up.
The man looked at him awhile, deciding what to do.
Jake had his arms on his knees and looked back. The man pushed Debbie to the
ground and walked over to Jake and brought the pistol to the middle of Jake’s
forehead. Jake could see the bullets in the chambers of the cylinder. The man told
Jake to open his mouth. Jake did. The man pushed the gun against the roof of
Jake’s mouth and forced his head back.
“If I ever see you again I’ll kill you. You got it?”
Jake stared back into the man’s eyes. After a while
he nodded. The man pulled his gun back and kicked Jake in the ribs.
“Now get going.”
They did. They had a sixteen mile walk to Santa
Cruz.
The bandits all hopped onto the truck and turned it
around and headed back down toward Los Gatos. They fired four or five parting
shots that ricocheted off the pavement.
“That’s what we get for not carrying guns,” Jake
said.
Debbie said she wasn’t sure about that. They were
all alive.
Jake
went around armed for two months after that. From time to time they would get
news of the electric truck. It showed up in Gilroy and Jake wanted to mount an
expedition to get it back. He found men who were willing but Debbie talked him
out of it. Later he heard that the short-haired man had been shot in the head
and that the truck had changed hands. Someone said that the truck was being
used by farmers in Hollister. Jake stopped wearing his gun.
Debbie lived on the San Lorenzo River in a house
near the cemetery with two friends. The cemetery turned out to be excellent
gardening land that Debbie helped work with a hundred other people. They pumped
water from the river with solar. Jake settled in and was as happy as he’d ever
been in his life.
Debbie was a programmer and had a computer that
would still boot but she never turned it on anymore. What was there to do with
it? For a while she and Jake watched movies but more and more they found them
boring and slightly depressing, especially movies set in cities. Comedies
weren’t funny. Westerns were better but a little silly. Reading was more
satisfying or they would just go to bed and snuggle and enjoy each other.
When the earthquake hit Oakland in late fall it had
been raining for two weeks and slides covered Highway 17 at several places near
the summit, as well as most of the other roads in the mountains. Buildings downtown
collapsed, along with most of the houses in the flatlands. Highway One north
was washed out in numerous places. Debbie’s collective lost a water tank. A
mudslide took out half of the house of two friends up the canyon, along with
the two friends. Jake and Debbie adopted Sasha, their seven-year-old daughter,
who had been sleeping in the other room.
©
2010 by Dale Pendell. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
Photo by Jason Gulledge, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
