“What’s a sandpiper?”
I try to explain it to him, my voice husky with memories of those doughty little birds flying over the surf like sparkling schools of fish, and when they fed in the sand, flurrying in and out with the waves like animate foam. I can only hope sandpipers survived on other beaches elsewhere in the world. What’s a world without sandpipers?
I clear my throat and go on. “One reason we were so glad to see the gulls and crows was because they’re such good scavengers. In January and February, we still had violent storms to sweep the beach clean, but by March, there weren’t as many storms, and the debris collected above the high-tide line: dead fish, crabs, jellyfish, kelp by the ton, sea lions, even gray whales. The stink of it—our noses never got used to it.”
He wrinkles his nose. “That must’ve been awful.”
“Yes, it was. The flotsam and jetsam of death. And not just dead animals and seaweed. The storms drove in wrecked boats, broken lumber from houses, even furniture. And sometimes… human remains.” I look down at the diary. “Anyway, the winter wasn’t over for us, but it gradually eased off. In March it warmed up enough to rain instead of snow. But at times the rains were freezing rains, and that cost us some of the trees in the orchard.” I turn more pages. “By late March we had an occasional almost clear day, but all that year the sky had an odd, opalescent cast, and there were always sundogs and halos. The light was reddish gold, the shadows blue green. The sunsets were spectacular. By the first of April, the frogs were singing, and some of the wild plants were showing signs of life, and our bees began foraging for pollen. The winter killed a lot of them, and Rachel consolidated the five hives into three and kept feeding them honey from the year before, but we thought it a miracle that any of them survived.”
I close the book, keeping my place with one finger. “But nothing really flourished. We planted a garden in early May. Outside, I mean. Rachel had seedlings growing in the greenhouse before that. But the outside garden was a continual disaster. There were frosts in May, and we had to start all over. We sowed clover and orchard grass for the livestock, but not much of it took hold. In April we started letting the goats out in the north pasture. It wasn’t fenced then, and we hobbled them so they wouldn’t wander off, and that was a mistake. One day we came home from a scavenging foray in time to see a pack of feral dogs kill one of the kids. We knew then we couldn’t leave them outside our fence without one of us on hand. We’d made our fence fairly dog-proof; added three lines of wire to make it higher. Power line. Makes good fencing, and there was plenty of it around. But we had to let the goats into the north pasture because there just wasn’t enough forage inside our fence. We began taking turns on the scavenging trips, so one of us could serve as shepherd. I don’t know whether it was worse going out alone into that ruined world, or staying home and waiting for Rachel to return, wondering if she would. We still found food in some of the houses, and we collected anything else that might be useful, even some furniture, but that was mostly for the hardwood. One of our projects was making soap—as a pesticide; we still had plenty of soap for our own use—and that took hardwood ashes.”
He asks, “Couldn’t you go up to the Coast Range for big leaf or vine maple like we do?”
“We did later when we had more time. Just keeping ourselves and the animals and the garden going took all our daylight hours then.”
“Did you still live in the basement?”
I skim a few entries in the diary. “No, we moved upstairs in April. We used the basement for storage. Mostly food, what there was of it. The dogs and cats had to learn to feed themselves, so they became good hunters. Except Shadow. I think she’d had her hunting instincts bred out of her. But she was a good shepherd. She picked that up with very little training. As long as one of us was nearby, we could leave the goats and pigs in the north pasture with her, and she’d keep them from wandering.”
Stephen’s eyebrows go up. “You let the pigs out in the pasture?”
“Only occasionally. We couldn’t have fed them otherwise. Most of the time they stayed in the pigpen. We built the pigpen ourselves, and that was quite a project. It was jerry-built from scavenged lumber, and we weren’t carpenters, but it lasted ten years.”
“Jerry built the pigpen?” he asks, obviously confused.
I laugh at that. “No, I don’t mean our Jerry. Our Jeremiah. It’s just an idiom, Stephen. It means… well, carelessly made.”
He nods, and I turn again to the diary. “The insects began swarming in April. There were so few birds to keep them in check, although the starlings helped. I’ll have to give them credit. And we saw a few finches and sparrows and swallows. But the garden—the bugs nearly ate it to the ground. We sprayed with soap solution and used companion planting, but it didn’t have a chance between the late frosts and the bugs and slugs and especially the UV, and if we’d had to depend on it for food for the next winter, we’d have starved. Still, we did have meat. At first, we had the animals that died in the cold, and later we had fresh rabbit. The chickens didn’t do as well as the rabbits, and we didn’t eat any of them, since we were trying to build up the flock. We shot deer occasionally. That wasn’t so difficult in late spring and summer. The problem with meat, of course, was preserving it. The only advantage of the cold in the winter was that we could preserve meat by freezing it. After the thaw, the only solution was to dry or smoke it. So, we had to build a smokehouse.”
“Didn’t you salt any of your meat?”
“Yes. Neither of us liked it, but we tried it. At least we had a ready source of salt here—the ocean—not only for the meat, but for the livestock. We had to boil and filter the water and put it out in shallow pans to evaporate—just like we do now.” I skim a few more pages. “In June… yes, I recorded that with exclamation marks. We caught one of Greenly’s horses. We’d seen the horses around his farm earlier, but we couldn’t get near them. This time we resorted to a subterfuge. We took Silver out to Greenly’s when she was in heat. That brought an older stallion, but Ceph was in his entourage, and he was easy to rope. He wasn’t even a yearling then.”
Stephen leans back, folds his arms. “Why did you call him Ceph?”
“That was short for Bucephalus. Alexander the Great’s horse. You remember reading about Alexander. Anyway, Ceph was beautiful, a roan with a blaze and white stockings. Of course, one reason we caught him so easily was that he was half-blind. That was what the Arkites called the Blind Summer.”
“I’ve heard Enid talk about that. She said even some people went blind. She didn’t know why.”
“It was because of the increased ultraviolet radiation. The ozone layer was disturbed by the nuclear explosions, and that let in more UV. That’s what gives you a sunburn.”
“Does it sunburn your eyes?”