“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.