Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office Part 1

Post-Apocalypse.

Dead Letter Office.

by Nathan Poell.

Acknowledgements.

The following wonderful people are responsible for creating the handwritten versions of the letters herein and I thank them one and all: Hiram Lucke, Aubrey Vaughn, Ray Barker, Mary Ann Hudson-Vadnais, Max Yoder, David Sofranko, Howard and Emily Lubliner, annaramma, Marc Epard, Mike Popovic, Jon Hamlow, James Billingsley, Matt Weatherford, Liosliath Manner, Dan c.o.o.nfield, Jason Gordon, Melissa Stucky, Nathan Hugh Girard, Jen Messier, Baudouin Van Humbeeck, Joe Yoder, Tabitha Grace Alterman, w.i.l.l.y Lee, Deathalicious, Colin Thacher, Dale Wheeler, Matt Lord, J.M. Picagli, Ellen Jensen, and a" of course a" Megan E. Phelps.

To: The incoming "postmaster"

From: Randy McNally.

June 7, 20+8.

To whoever occupies this post nexta".

I can teach you nothing. Let me tell you why.

West to Hays and east to Columbia. North to Omaha (what's left of it), southwest to Wichita and southeast to Springfield. And all the chainkilling, chalky gravel roads and b.u.mf.u.c.k towns in between. Roughly. This is to be your range. Get to know it. The maps here are pretty good, but have been out of date for almost eight years now.

Mark the annotations and be sure to make new ones. Topography changes, roads wash out, bridges collapse, looters roam and settle, legs will drop routes and dead. Whatever happens in your range, make it explicit on your maps. Use grease pencil a" the maps are laminated for a reason.

f.u.c.k every chance you get, because you won't get many while you're working this job. Tell your boys and girls to stay selective or celibate, though a" *cause it's probably their a.s.s if they impregnate someone, get the clap or whatever a" and steer the h.e.l.l clear of stopping in Junction City. Everything and everyone there is almost biblically unclean.

Holidays blow, particularly the winter ones. For some reason, people still want to celebrate Christmas and do so by sending stupidly heavy things to loved ones. They pay well for it, but it's taxing. You've got several months to get ready, though. Use that time to your best advantage.

Running dope can be an exceptionally profitable sideline. Don't do it. Almost any town over 500 people has a dedicated pot farmer, and if he's not the same person they probably have an opium farmer too. Medicine's medicine, at least in this range. Their products are typically pretty good, and they are viciously protective of their local markets. Even given some of the recent events around here, the syndicates might try to lean on you a bit to get you to run the stuff. Don't budge. Don't do it. They'll back off.

Keep the pecking order as out of whack as possible. Everyone rides, including you. You can certainly get away with doing only in-town deliveries, but getting out of town regularly a" once a month, at least a" is the best way to keep tabs on your legs and encourages them to play it straight.

Trust your people as best you can. It's really and obviously critical, but there are problems. I'm sure you know something about this, but it is the most difficult part. You'll have chuckleheads and puzzlers by the dozens trying to get your ear, get you to a.s.sign them routes, then they take their first pack of parcels and disappear. Fat payoff for them, if they make it where they're headed, but they're sc.u.m, just sc.u.m. They're not all that hard to weed out. You'll also get a handful or two of tough-as-knots leggers from the far northeast, the southwest, the northern plains a" wherever everything utterly and truly went to s.h.i.+t. Here's the problem: those tough-as-knots leggers? They can be sc.u.m, just sc.u.m, too. Don't rely on looking folks in the eye. Ask your current legs a" word still gets around, and they'll know more than you expect. But, can you trust them? Maybe, probably, who knows. Like I said, this is the most difficult part.

Regardless, set some ground rules. I've left things different than I found them. Maybe not better, probably not worse. Anyway, here's a few of the most important things I can recall putting into place.

First and foremost: there is no such thing as a free delivery. My legs are taking risks by simply riding, I'm taking risks staying in one place a" more or less a" and not farming or ranching or chopping decrepit Hondas into buggies or whatever the h.e.l.l it is everyone else does now. I never set a minimum charge, but everyone pays something. Food, grease, rubber, whatever. (Booze is especially nice. There's still an outfit here in town, one in Springfield and one in Columbia that makes beer. Most everywhere else you'll get decent cider or some s.h.i.+tty fruit wine. I try to make sure my legs don't drink too much of it at one time. Pot is nice, of course a" especially the s.h.i.+t they grow down near Carthage, MO a" but I do my best to keep my legs off smoking it chronically. It'll rot their lungs and they'll want to quit and move to wherever it was farmed.) Bartering for services was fine with me, too, especially for doctor visits. But not for s.e.x. That can wipe out your workforce pretty d.a.m.ned quick. Trust me.

Related to the above: legs a.s.sume risk on their own. I'll help them out best I'm able, but that often isn't a whole h.e.l.l of a lot. Most of the roads are pretty safe, but there are still some bandits out there. Precious few of them might be decent bow shots, too, although I've never had a leg of mine die in that manner. But, if a leg of mine knocks up some s.k.a.n.k or gets knocked up by some hayseed, that's life. I can maybe keep the former idiot on, but pregnant women can't ride for s.h.i.+t and they're freaky loco.

No equipment loans. Ever. There's loads of beggars everywhere a" every single one of them with an excuse why they need a brake lever, a bottom bracket, even a whole d.a.m.n ride. They even make their kids beg. Well OK, beggars might be harsh; most of them are just farmers and farmers' kids. Regardless, you can't just give away components. Your legs' rides will wear out faster than you can really believe, and you can't ever be without an ample supply of spare parts.

No parcel dumps. Ever. Legs deliver for me or they don't come back. (Unfortunately, they occasionally don't come back. See several places above.) For every trick some moronic bandit has up his sleeve, my leg has three and a spiked baseball bat should things get really ugly. Also, some of the larger syndicates out west and east (Denver and Cleveland, particularly) are not forgiving when it comes to non-delivery. They have eyes in places you wouldn't expect, and a long reach. Bandits haven't been much of a problem around here, anyway, so there's really no reason for a leg to have to drop his parcels to effect a getaway.

OK, there is an exception to this last rule. Well, maybe a corollary or a" s.h.i.+t, I'm not an Englis.h.i.+an, all right? That rule kind of goes with this one. If one of my legs can't deliver, meaning "can't actually locate the person the letter/package/whatever is to be delivered to" (no dead drops in my operation, by the way), they're allowed to open the item, read it a" they still ought to be able to read a" to gather more information to complete the delivery, then try further. If they still can't deliver, they bring back the item to me and only me and I keep it here. (It just saves me a ton of trouble and anxiety when I can produce the letter immediately if a syndicate comes asking rather than sending my most rested up leg several hundred miles afield and waiting for days on end for he or she to retrieve it.) Then I kill the leg that failed to deliver it. Just kidding a" I only crush his or her kneecaps. Ha ha. Truth be told, I don't have this dead letter problem very often. It happens so rarely, in fact, that only a few have not been delivered to their intended recipients during my brief but still far too f.u.c.king long time here. They a" and the ones Biggs didn't get delivered a" are all sitting right under this note. I've tried to keep them in order timewise, but they might be a bit shuffled.

This should be enough information to get you hip deep in s.h.i.+t. You're in charge now a" HA! For how long, who knows. They ain't making components anymore, and the horse trade out of central Kentucky is so much now that they might be phasing us out in the next few years. Have a backup plan if and when your gig here goes to s.h.i.+t.

Speaking of which, I'm heading out to b.u.mble-humperton to work on a pot commune. If you ever want to ask me a question or drop by, don't. Unless this is Beebee; if so, quit and come join me. You know the way.

Keep your wheels trued and your chain greased.

Randy "Rand" McNally.

P.S. - Learn the maps already!

To: Dan Hoch, Elroy Fruit Farm, Wamego, KS.

From: Ron Greenbud, Greenbud Farm, Cape Girardeau, MO.

June 25, 20+7.

Dan-O,.

Hey, long time no talk, you know. Things have been busy here for a while, otherwise I'd have written you right back. Honest.

How's Tammy been? Little Dean and Hattie? How about old Tom? Last you wrote, he was on his last legs. Not that I'd wish death on him, and I know you've been the real motivating force behind the entire operation for over seven years now, but are you now the co-owner of Elroy Fruit (and not even thinly disguised pot) Farm?

So yeah, sorry for not writing, but things have been G.o.d d.a.m.n crazy here at chez Greenbud for the last four or five months.

Firstly, we had some syndicate courier douchebag come down here early this spring, trying to move in some s.h.i.+tty bud and opium. (OK, truth be told, his dope wasn't too awful bad, but come on, his fatcat bosses were trying to move in on the f.u.c.king Cape, man!) We figured it was the St. Louis branch of the Cleveland syndicate, as the boys in Memphis wouldn't be so dumb as to try and move s.h.i.+t upstream. Also, we heard that some folks up in Lincoln put a courier in his place and basically exposed an entire syndicate to ridicule last year. Figured it might be the same gang trying to move their product here on our turf.

Well, regardless of who sent him, we set him straight. Nice enough kid, I suppose. You should have seen him ride into town. He tried to be subtle as possible about it, rode in at dusk to what he thought was a safehouse... but Key-Righst you'd have laughed too if you'd seen the bale he was packing on his rack. He was seriously so weighted down on the back end that I was half-afraid his front tire would hit a rock and pop him into a perma-wheelie.

Of course, we captured him right away. He brandished this little b.u.t.terfly knife like he'd gut every one of us. He seemed serious about it, too, but the opium-dosed joint he smoked with his safehouse "buddy" proved too much for him to bear. I guess I would have felt bad if he'd died... but not as bad as if I'd let some syndicate take over our pharmacultural affairs. Regardless, he came out of his stupor about six hours later, just after daybreak. And then we started with the torture. The application of goose feathers under his armpits and nose, sight of some of the leatherier girls on loan from the pool hall prancing about buck naked, and simple promise of another laced joint simply in return for a bit of information... dude had told us all we needed to know before two hours had pa.s.sed. Of course, we weren't satisfied, so we gave him what he wanted, then asked him to stick around.

Lloyd's now one of our best fieldworkers. h.e.l.l of a nice guy, too. The stuff we took off his bike has been added to St. Francis's drug stock, as it should be. The Nebraskans might have gotten the same result as we had, but there's less violent ways of working, you know.

We've also been staving off this drought best we can. The farm itself is just a couple miles off the riverbanks, but we still play h.e.l.l getting water out here if it doesn't rain. The cannabis will do fine without irrigation, but the poppies need water, and so we had to implement a modified, bike-based bucket brigade. It's kept the few hands we can keep and even sometimes me and Lisa riding four or so hours a day every day for the last three months. It's worked out well, though. Good looking field of poppies.

Anyway, with regards to your previous letter, I think I know now what your basic cultivation problem is. You remember, how you mentioned that all the plants you been growing have all produced such s.h.i.+tty bud and gone all rangy-looking on you? Yeah, I figured it out. So, your farm is a mile or so south of town, right? Right down in the Kansas River floodplain? Well, I knew it before, but if you'd mentioned it to any friendlies in town they would have instantly and unmistakably pegged you as being a city boy. (You Lawrence kids never ever went down near the river, did you? Too many f.u.c.king junkie b.u.ms and cruisers down near the levee, huh? Made mommy too nervous to take you there, I bet.) That whole floodplain area along the Kansas a" especially just off the banks a" is just lousy with ditchweed and/or straight hemp. There's no use trying to tame that s.h.i.+t, either... within our lifetimes, anyway. That s.h.i.+t's always going to be just s.h.i.+t. Not good s.h.i.+t, not the s.h.i.+t, just s.h.i.+t. Trust me, an upstart farm in Cairo a" not connected to any syndicate that I was aware of, and I am aware of most everything that happens in my market, as previously mentioned a" just down the river, went through the same thing. They were sitting just off the river, and got terrible yields two years in a row. Got so bad that this year they switched to hemp and diversified to some other crops. I was personally glad to hear they didn't go out of business completely, but had to change their focus. Compet.i.tion is good, as long as it doesn't threaten me. You know?

On the upside, you have a couple options. First is to bag up all the bud on your good starts before you move them out of your greenhouse (You have been keeping them in a separate s.p.a.ce, haven't you?) and keep trying to cultivate as usual. That's a h.e.l.l of a lot of work for what will likely be very little return at all, and given that the upshot of a whole nother failed crop might be losing the entire orchard, it's a huge risk to be running.

Now, the second option, and the one I'd recommend has a couple steps. First, you get in touch with a couple other local farmers, preferably ones to the north of town. Not pot growers, of course, but folks who raise staples... OK, staples other than cannabis. Pitch this idea to them: you'll be willing to trade, acre for acre, the land that belongs to them for the land that belong(ed) to your stepdad. You may not know it, but they definitely will that all that land right next to the river is some of the best, most fertile ground in the country, maybe the world. Now, you don't need that land to grow your particular cash crop. It'll do better the warmer, more light and humid it is, but it'll grow just dandy in almost any kind of soil and as long as you can get it some water periodically. You know the old joke: that's why they call it cannabis sativa... wait, what? The upsides to this one are obvious: you get a spot off the river and out of ditchweed pollen range for your plants to grow in, you're less exposed to those few elements of the (almost entirely self-appointed) law who are not sympathetic to folks growing their own medicine, and last but not least is that your fellow farmers have way better land on which to raise grain, beans, squash and all other manner of edible vegetation. The only real downside is that you'll have to give up your fruit trees, as the old ones won't transplant at all and the young ones won't very well. But you could get cuttings and grow clones. Just read up on how to do it a" you still have a library there, right? a" because it's not that hard. h.e.l.l, the colonials used to do s.h.i.+t like that all the time, and in such a worse climate than we have. It'll be a piece of cake for you to do. You owe me half a barrel of cider, too, you chintzy f.u.c.ker. Don't think I've forgotten.

Oh, and you'll have to move. But whatever, you'll still be in greater Wamego, raising and smoking world-cla.s.s bud. Hahhah.

I guess you could try just heading down to the Kansas and chop down all the ditchweed you can locate, but you may as well try emptying the river a thimbleful at a time for all the good it'll do you.

So, yeah, just go ahead and use those plants you've got right now for fabric. I say again: they are no good. Just in case you haven't been following my advice and haven't kept the starts inside or someplace other than your main cultivation area, I've taken the precaution of sending a couple new cuttings with this letter. (Yeah, usually the couriers will b.i.t.c.h about hauling off anything that weighs more than a tenth of an ounce or some such s.h.i.+t, but you tuck a little Greenbudis greenbudis in their pocket and they're just docile as lambs.) They're both from a great cultivar, one that came over from the Netherlands a year or two before the all the s.h.i.+t went down. Can't remember the name off the top of my head. It was some offshoot of Lebanese Blonde, but the new cultivar's name wasn't even remotely catchy. Some d.a.m.ned arbitrarically a" maybe even capriciously, having known several cultivators from my time in Rotterdam a" alphanumerically encoded nomenclature. Typical Dutch nonsense.

Hey, call it MK420. Guess the numeric part doesn't really mean much to folks nowadays. Huh. Well, leave it on anyways, as a reminder of the bad old days long past, and the bad new days that aren't quite so bad as the bad old days... and to be capricious.

Wink at Tammy and then apologize for me. And say h.e.l.lo to the kids, or not.

Viva la revolucion verde or whatever!

Ron G.

To: Charles Yao, Kansas City, MO.

From: The Seattle Crew, Seattle, WA.

June 8, 20+7.

Hey, Chuck! it's Deanne, Nick and Nicole from Ballard!

We got your previous letter, dated March 10th, just two weeks ago. Those cogboys sure seem to take their time. There can only be, what, like two or three mountain ranges in between here and KC, right? Buncha lazybodies. Ha.

It was so wonderful to hear that you've finally found some work. None of us had any idea you'd done woodworking before. It's probably nowhere near doing IT work for Schwab but we're sure you're a real a.s.set to them and hope that you're happy there. What we mean is... we're sure you get what we mean.

Also great to hear that you're now engaged to Jean. She's a very lucky lady, indeed. Deanne says you're a very lucky son of a b.i.t.c.h. We REALLY did not imagine that we'd learn that you're expecting, too. Congratulations are in order (see enclosed bottle a" homemade, of course. Jean probably shouldn't have any for another six months... then again, it may take that long to get to you.)! Things are really on the upswing for you both.

We were all very sorry to learn about Snapdragon. Thirteen years is pretty d.a.m.n good for a tabby these days, though, and we know she led a full life a" for at least the five years we were around her, anyway. Still remember you bringing her home from the shelter, just a little tricolor fuzzball. When she chose one of Nick's Bean boots as her living room a" and the other as her litter box a" we knew you'd picked a winner. Such a sweetie. We're sure she's in a better place now. (Nick just made a disgusting joke that I will not repeat here, or ever for that matter. Yeesh.) To get you up to speed on our doings here. Deanne is still with the mayor's office, trying to find new ways to make life in town less s.h.i.+tty. I (Nicole) have been doing most of the housework, the gardening, mending, cooking and other day-to-day stuff. Never pegged me for a housewife, did you? Nick has been staying with us, happily, and working four fulltime jobs a" as a gardener and freelance fisherman by day, a minstrel at dusk and our love slave by night. ("Haw haw," says Nick.) The powers that be are trying to get the locks working again by retrofitting it to work manually, and recently got a kick in the a.s.s about it, as there's rumored to be a pod of orca just outside the bay. Most folks think the orca are OK, but would rather not have them near their boats or eating fish in the bay. Nick's been a.s.sured that if/when the locks come back online, he'll be brought back on full time. With it being manually operated, he'll get some exercise to boot (HA!).

He seems kind of ambivalent about going back to work after so many years, and for good reason. He has turned into quite the fisherman. No really. Keeps us pretty full up w/fish a" more than we can eat, most days. Living near the locks and (recently converted) botanical garden has quite a few advantages. Not only are we able to get down to the garden early to work and earn our share of the produce, but if we get there around first light, we can usually snare or shoot a coney. Fish is great, but it's nice to have a bit of red(ish) meat every now and then. Plus, I have figured out how to tan hides (Nick's really laughing, now) and have made us some seriously comfy slippers, vests and even a blanket. Deanne still wears whitefolk (read: cotton) clothing and Red Wings to her workplace at the mayor's, but Nick and I have almost completely switched over to all animal-based dress. Wool and leather, baby!

It was pretty fortunate that I'd been doing this, as Nick actually had a brush with death a month or so ago. Which is part of the reason we're writing you.

Deanne had left first thing to ride over to the mayor's. Nick and I slept in a bit that morning, shared a pot of coffee, a bowl of leftover potato and leek soup and a nice slice of salmon jerky and then rode down to the garden. I got to working and Nick strode off to fish. It couldn't have been an hour or two later when I heard yelling coming from the pier. (Everything's so wonderfully quiet these days, we can actually hear conversations coming from houseboats across the bay.) Well, after a minute finis.h.i.+ng weeding the squash patch, I headed down to towards the noise. Of all the things I expected to see, Nick doing the sidestroke towards the sh.o.r.eline towing what appeared to be a bag of laundry with him wasn't one of them. The tide was rolling out, and Nick was struggling to make it back with whatever he had stupidly gone in the water for. Finally, it seemed, he got to the shallows and started dragging the thing along with all his might. That's when I realized the thing was a pale wisp of a man.

Nick hauled the guy up to the sh.o.r.eline and then collapsed on top of him. I finally got up to them, and Nick rolled off and looked up to me. He coughed out a bit of water and said something like "Maybe more," and pointed west. I looked up and gasped. Through the mist I could see a barge drifting south through the sound.

One of my fellow community gardeners, Todd a" nice guy a" helped me wrap up Nick and the man overboard as best we could, then we hauled them back to the house. I stoked up the fire to a probably too-hot level, but it was all I could really think to do. Nick was cold to the touch, but the other guy simply felt like he was already dead. We tore the clothes off them both and threw them on the bed. Todd stripped down and jumped into the bed as I tossed blanket after blanket on top of all three of them. (The rabbit fur blanket went on first, as I thought it'd hold the heat in best.) I undressed quick as I could and then we both linked arms together and huddled around Nick and the sailor.

The worst part was, the sailor was no longer breathing. Todd and I looked at each other a" we both could just... tell. Nick seemed to be getting worse. We couldn't both try to resuscitate the sailor and keep Nick from freezing to death at the same time. So, G.o.d help us Charles, we lowered the sailor out of the bed and huddled around Nick.

It was a few hours later when Deanne came home. She let out a little yelp when she saw us all together in the bed, not to mention the body on the floor.

In spite of himself a" he's not the brightest guy a" Todd laughed and said, "Betcha wish she was in here with you instead of me, huh?" Nick turned his head just enough to catch Todd's eye, then purred and smiled at him. At that point, I knew he'd recover just fine.

We buried the sailor two days later at the botanical garden entrance. Nick was still weak at the time, but wanted us to give him a pencil and paper. When we got back from the burial, he showed us a shakily written note and said the sailor had been yelling something at him, then talking to him, then whispering, and that he was trying to listen to what he was saying after he'd dragged the guy onto the sh.o.r.e. Nick says he wrote down the words phonetically so they'd make sense to him. He says he remembered it perfectly. Well... I don't think Nick really knows what he's talking about when he says phonetically, but regardless, we think the language is Mandarin.

This is borne out by the evidence recovered from the vessel itself. A couple sailors decided to tail the barge, which kept drifting south through the sound. Eventually it washed ash.o.r.e on Bainbridge island. It was empty, except for some paperwork in the bridge.

We don't mean to pressure you into doing translation work for us, but we paid quite a bit to get this missive and its accompanying bottle of cheer into your hot little hands. Two whole smoked salmon and a pint jar of roe. Steep, but totally worth it all the same. We think the couriers are upset that folks are giving them more to deliver in the early spring and late fall, when it really sucks to ride cross country. (We're not saying that you shouldn't send us more mail whenever you want, though!) Anyway, we wouldn't have mailed this to you, but we can't get any Chinese folks to talk to us. A whole lot of people around here bought into the rumors that the Chinese were to blame for the lights going out, the cars stopping working, etc. Deanne said that she overheard a member of the mayor's staff pa.s.sing on the latest rumor a" that he knew for a fact that "The Yellows" had seeded the clouds and somehow caused this year's late hard frost (ruined the apple crop). Deanne apparently confronted him about it, asked how they could do that when no plane's flown here or anywhere else for almost a decade. She swears he mouthed the word "gliders".

Well, with idiotic ideas like that in abundance around here (even amongst some of the most progressive, decent folks in town), a bit of violence seemed very likely. And, sure enough, after word of the "saboteurs' barge" got out, a pretty nasty mob took it to the international district. Thankfully, n.o.body got killed or anything, but some eyes were blacked and a few storefronts a" previously abandoned, most of them a" got damaged. The end result was that lines were drawn and pretty much everyone of Asian descent has sealed theirself up in the international district. It really does suck. The mayor, at Deanne's urging, is making peaceful overtures to the leaders in the district. And, despite Nick's honest-to-Christ heroic efforts to save the barge's last survivor, it doesn't seem that they're coming around. There's some old adage that goes like, "A million attaboys don't equal one gotcha," and it has certainly rang true in this instance. But, we're not done trying. The pages attached are copies of Nick's a" we kept the originals, just in case the mayor's efforts pay off. Regardless, if you can figure it out we'd really love to know what it says, if only to honor the memory of the men who died on the barge. Given, of course, that you can actually decipher Nick's handwriting (you should have seen the original one he scribbled out when he was just coming out of his hypothermia). Hee!

All our love to you and Jean (and little Jean or Charlie).

Signed, The Ballard Posse.

Deanne Nicole Nick.

"Neh-eee, kay. Yinyongkey. Yooawn s.h.i.+ng meeawn bow. Keykey." a"Nick.

To: Fred Whitman, Kansas City, MO.

From: Olive Barnes, Eureka, CA.

May 14th, 20+7.

Dearest Fred, h.e.l.lo from me and all the Eureka Public Library crew. Well, what few of us there are still employed here.

Hope all has been well for you and your family down in KC. Haven't heard very much from our super-extended family lately. Have you and Lisa tied the knot? Any little Freds on the way?

We are simply so isolated up here, so far off the major roads that we rarely get any outside news. Our courier only comes three or four times a year, and he or she is almost always forced to stay several days. It always turns into a rather weird event, with the courier getting brought all kinds of really good food and treats and even booze, if the local trees produce any fruit. Last time he (our courier is usually a he) relayed to us some weird rumors from up north... after gorging himself on salmon and cheese and lackl.u.s.ter perry, that is. Something about a boat full of Korean or Chinese saboteurs getting found out near Olympia...? So strange a" what possible motive could there be? There's almost nothing mechanical to sabotage now. Well, it's doubtful that you've heard anything about that, you old flatlander. Bet you have some odd stories of your own.

We actually saw something extremely strange three weeks, maybe almost a month ago. Couple things, actually. It was mid-day on a Sat.u.r.day, and Gary and I were working in the garden. I raise the veggies and a few chickens, and Gary has a booming ganja garden. (I don't smoke it, and Gary smokes very little, but we get a great barter for it at the market.) Just both of us on our knees, toiling away when we heard an all-encompa.s.sing boom all of a sudden, then a roaring, rus.h.i.+ng sound. Well, you just don't hear those now, you know? So we both sprang up like a couple of meerkats and started looking up. Saw a huge ball of fire just streaking across the sky, trailing smoke and debris. It plunged out of our sight pretty quick and then we heard another gigantic boom. We had a town hall meeting that evening and discussed what it might have been. Most folks thought it was a meteorite. Others said they tracked it and saw it crash out in the bay. Well, most everyone is no longer very skittish about things around here, but I can say for us, anyway, that we didn't sleep too well the next one or two nights. It was our understanding that meteors were p.r.o.ne to running in packs, so to speak, and we weren't sure if the one that had buzzed Eureka was a loner or the alpha. Know what I mean? Well, four days went by, and neither we nor anyone else had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, until a young lady a" maybe 14 a" came up to the reference desk carrying something really weird looking. It took me a few minutes to recognize what it was, but finally I figured out that it was part of a small photovoltaic panel. She said she had found it down by the bay docks. We've all seen some odd things come out of the bay now and then, right? But the panel looked halfway melted. Things were a bit busy a" more on that later a" but I asked her to meet me down there around six. So I rode down there as the library was closing, but I couldn't get near the docks. There was a huge crowd of people there, and it was impossible to get through.

I finally saw the girl I'd met with earlier in the day. There was this sparkle in her eye, and she breathlessly told me all about the satellite was.h.i.+ng up to the sh.o.r.e. She seemed truly excited that what was basically a two-ton re-entry missile had missed razing and/or setting fire to of her hometown by the narrowest of margins and plunged into a nearby body of water.

Can you imagine the panic had we all had foreknowledge of this event? Ma.s.s media-type news reporting, I mean. I suppose the folks at NASA would have been able to guide the satellite elsewhere, further out to the Pacific, maybe, but who knows? Eureka would have been emptied out in half a day. n.o.body here would have eaten fish out of the bay for months, probably at least a year. It would have been a superfund site or some such affair. There would have been congressional investigations, hearings, etc etc. And rightly so. But now? Now it's a sideshow for kids and adults alike.

I guess that... things have s.h.i.+fted at such a basic level. For us, here, anyway a" guess I can't speak for you and yours. But I... but we a" I've discussed this with Gary, so I think I can speak for him, as well a" feel simultaneously empowered by our new relevance to everyone else in Eureka (and their reciprocally increased relevance to us) and diminished by both the disconnect we have with almost everyone else outside town (Except you, sweetheart! Well, and everyone else I write, of course. But it's not immediate the way it used to be, you understand?) and our newfound ambivalent att.i.tude towards nature. Again, maybe it is different for you and yours in Kansas City a" is it still pretty big, or has there been migration away from it? Couldn't be larger than it used to be, could it? (We had our fair share of deaths the first couple years here, but were spared the horrors of what happened in the metro areas. Especially Los Angeles a" so depressing to think about.) We still really love the fact that we're in such a beautiful area, but there are a couple things that lessen its general importance to us. First, I mean, it can't talk back. One of my most favorite patrons ever was this Nam vet named Tim. Hate using the word grizzled, but it fits him so well. Left arm amputated just below the elbow, had one of those crude, hook-like prosthetics but only wore it maybe once a month. It was always a shock when I saw it, because he came in almost every day before the lights went dark. Simply the nicest person you'd ever want to meet. Quiet guy, but not in a creepy way, just so low-key. First time I saw him was in 1999 or so. Seems like forever ago. Anyway, he'd come in an hour after opening and sit in one of the upright chairs at a table (not those cushy ones most of the others patrons prefer) and read the daily Times. The morning after the entire modern world went to h.e.l.l he was at the front door a little bit late. Well, everyone else was a little bit late, too a" had to walk! And he was at the periodical rack pretty quick but there was no paper for him. So he sat in his same chair for a minute, then came back and asked me what I thought was happening. Why it was so quiet. And I'd noticed that the lights were out a" hard to miss, despite having pretty good daylighting in the library a" but hadn't even taken a listen to anything all morning. I'd just been in such a rush, thinking it was an above-average pain in the a.s.s day with no alarm, no shower and a fritzing car. But then, I heard what he heard. In retrospect, there always seemed to be a rustle, a vibration that wasn't even part of the air when everything was still running. It was in everything you touched, it seemed. Maybe a constant baseline subsonic automotive hum? Regardless, at that moment that he mentioned it, I noticed. It was gone a" the surrounding air was so still, flat almost. I don't mind telling you that in that moment, I got profoundly weirded out and asked him when he had noticed it. He said it woke him up, and when he woke up, he couldn't see, and that he knew something was up at that point. And so we started talking, it seemed, to take the place of that lost noise.

He didn't come in all that often afterwards. I think he treasured his Times more than conversation with me a" and really, you can't blame him, can you? But, maybe four or five times a month he would show up at the reference desk early in the morning, and we'd just chat. Just half an hour or so, maybe 45 minutes, but never even an hour I'm sure. And virtually always simple day-to-day stuff that, back when the lights were on and I was somehow so engaged with other things, I would have been not even impatient but downright confrontationally brusque with him over. (I still have mixed feelings about this a" have I somehow plunged into welcoming full-on ba.n.a.lity into my life to simply shut out the fact that there is no more buzzing everything-elseness vying for my attention? I'd like to think not.) Well, so about a year and a half ago, he just faded out of existence, just disappeared. In the dead of winter, with no vehicle (bike I mean, of course), no extra food that we knew of a" it was a lean harvest for everyone that year a" no note left behind and no left arm. Only seeing him a few times a month, it took me at least a couple weeks to notice. And we never found him. He's gone, no telling where. I actually contacted the lazy-a.s.sed police and they wound up checking out his tiny apartment. And now. The mornings are a lot quieter. I got really used to no coffee machine spluttering, no semi-trucks rumbling by to shake the whole library, no instant messaging software beeping at me, a myriad of nothings to listen to. Still haven't gotten used to not hearing Tim's voice every now and then.

On the bright side, things have kept swinging here at EPL. We took such a hit the first few months after the lights went out that the director thought we may have to close down the library completely. I mean, we had such little traffic those months, n.o.body had any more use for DVDs or CDs or offline public use computers. It was a really desperate time for all of us here. But by late winter we were getting a steady trickle of community folks asking really practical questions. "It's getting cold a" how can I better insulate my place?" and "All this fish my husband caught the other day is going bad a" how can I preserve it?" and on and on. So we checked out quite a few of our home improvement and food preservation books those months. Unfortunately, the majority of them have not been returned. Hope springs eternal, but it's unlikely those will ever make it back to us. The non-return rate got so bad that we actually had to revise our circulation policies and how our collection was categorized. We went through every book in the library a" yeah, I know! a" and set aside those that were, at heart, do-it-yourself type books. Someone (Monica Perth, remember her? Jeez, what a bint.) wanted to toss out all the books that mention power tools or blenders or whatever, but that was stupid and we quashed it. I mean, honestly. There are manual tools that'll do what power tools do, just slower and with greater exertion required of their operators. Regardless, the DIY materials are all on the reference shelf, now, which is now located in the most convenient and well-lighted area of the library. (Right where the CD and DVD collections used to be, you remember?) We will, under extremely powerful persuasion, check out one of those books. For the most part, though, people are happy to come in and pore over whatever book describes what they want to do, make a few notes, and then scamper off to put whatever it is they learned into practice.

We've been getting tons more fiction checkouts, too, but the real still-in-the-circulating-collection gems have been the music books. All kinds of sheet music, and instructional stuff like "Piano for beginners", "Advanced piano", "The New Drum Circle Companion" and "Harmonica Made Easy" (good G.o.d, we love checking out that last one to kids), etc. have simply been flying off the shelves. Their popularity has made both me and the director a bit nervous about the return rate, but she thinks that the general regard of and respect for the library has shot up so much lately that folks will use its collections more appropriately. She still has not ventured to make the do-it-yourself section a part of the circulating collection again, but most of the staff figure it's only a matter of time. (We all want her to keep it as-is, though. It works so d.a.m.ned well, you know?) There's been a huge resurgence in the local politics scene, too. h.e.l.l of it is that it's not been so great for Gary and my particular political predilections.

The first winter we spent without any lights or heat or anything else was comparatively mild. Stroke of luck, as everything else was bad enough already. So, we don't have particularly bad winters here as a rule a" just a lot of rain, mainly a" and this one was even better than most. Still, most folks blew through what little wood and paper they had, if any, pretty quickly, and took to scavenging the nearby forests for easy limbs to break off or haulable logs. Few folks had any real idea how to cure wood or anything else, so there was a lot of smoky fires burning that winter. Several people who were unaware how to clean and operate their stoves succ.u.mbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Once word got out about that, we had a run on wood fire stove books. A couple that got returned were missing their t.i.tle pages (we think they were used for tinder... what are you gonna do?) Well, the next spring a whole bunch of rough-and-tumble types decided that cutting down a redwood would be a brilliant idea. So much wood, you'd be able to fuels dozens, hundreds of house stoves a year with just a tree or two. So they went out and did that, took them the better part of two days without any chainsaws. Then it fell and knocked over a smaller tree, which fell on one of the lumberjacks. Completely crushed his right leg, and he died a few hours later as they were hauling him back into town. So, though their idiocy and negligence they got a man with a wife and kid killed. But that got swept under the rug once everyone understood that there was a huge source of lumber and firewood out there for the taking. And, truth be told, it's worked out pretty well. We have very few horses in town, and their main use now is to haul the logs back down to town, where folks can get at them with smaller saws and take what they need. The wood is not outstanding for any particular purpose, but adequate for most. After that first year we all met and re-prioritized, so that lesser trees get taken first, as the redwood regrowth rate is so phenomenally slow. The town is now harvesting maybe one redwood every couple years, depending on our needs. It's been a compromise that most people are happy with. We're not so much, but we've been grossly outnumbered and so that's the way it is.

Well now we've got some "enterprising" folks a" former lumberyard owners, imagine that! a" saying we need to start harvesting more and sell it to other cities. You can probably infer Gary and my thoughts on that idea. They want to take out four or five a year! And who are they going to sell this lumber to? Can't s.h.i.+p them, and we can only use so much here. So they're just going to kill off almost half a dozen trees a year, chop them up and let them go to pot downtown. Gah!

We and most of the people we know well have dug in over this, and others are listening and weighing the options carefully. Not like before, when we couldn't get a word in edgewise against logging interests. So maybe that's it. We used to listen to the system, forced into taking a pa.s.sive part in that one-sided conversation only maybe to whisper a tiny "yes" or "but I think..." every now and then. Now we're talking to each other again to fill the silence that the system never should have filled in the first place. And they resonate loud and clear. And you'll never hear me say "Talk is cheap" ever again.

And now I see that I've almost completely run out of s.p.a.ce on this page, and this is the last page available to us in the entire house. (Well, next weeding I expect I'll be able to pick up more. And I can dig out the last few CDs we have in the collection a" the CD case booklets almost always have "Notes" sections. Perfectly lined, and their small size gets us a discount from the courier.) Your ever-chatty friend, Olive.

To: Rev. Peter Hodgson, Independence, MO.

From: Bobby c.o.x, Colorado Springs, CO.

April 24, 20+7.

Reverend Hodgson, This is Bobby c.o.x, from Colorado Springs. Not sure if you remember me, but my folks and me were members of your church there in Independence. I'm writing you today for a few different reasons, so I'd appreciate it if you could bear with me a bit while I work through them all.

First, I haven't heard from my parents for almost six months. It might be just that they didn't want to send me any mail in the winter time because that's when it costs so much more to send anything, but it's spring now and I had hoped to hear something from them, and they always used to send me a letter every couple months, at least. Have you heard from them, talked to them or their neighbors or friends at all or know where they might be right now? Neil and Nancy Wright are a couple people my parents are friends with, and they're in your church, too. And I think my folks know a Mr. Whitman who used to be in your church, but is now a Methodist or something. Not sure which church he's in now. I know this isn't your job at all, but can you ask around to see if you can find him or the Wrights, and if so ask them to contact my folks and/or me?